When you're getting capital at below the rate of inflation you'd be stupid not to take the money so long as you have something useful to do with it.

I get a choice between Comcast (who works decently enough, as much as I detest their policies) at 50Mbps, or AT&T U-verse at 3Mbps (that's all they could get the modem to train up at). One is more bandwidth than I actually need, but the other isn't enough to handle my telecommuting needs.

Comcast is literally the only ISP available to me with greater than 3Mbps of bandwidth. Given that even the FCC thinks maybe broadband starts at 10Mbps, and that I work in tech and legitimately need decent transfer speeds to do my job, I'm stuck.

That's right. They don't say "we might be recording this conversation". They say "this call is allowed to be recorded". Well, thanks!

Perhaps not; I just write this stuff for a living.

As I said: "What you're seeing is a combination of client- and server-side timers that have nothing whatsoever to do with the transport you'll be using to upload your information."

It has zero to do with HTTPS and everything to do with the webapp having a line of code somewhere like if((current_time()-last_posted_time)>900){logout();}.

You realize that normal forms only open a connection to the HTTP{,S} server when you click the "Submit" button, right? You can sit there for infinite time because there's no open connection to time out until such time as you request it. What you're seeing is a combination of client- and server-side timers that have nothing whatsoever to do with the transport you'll be using to upload your information. And yeah, I'd mildly prefer my HR information to be encrypted en route, TYVM.

I sailed past Peleliu in 1994, the 50th anniversary of the battle. It was horrible to see that insignificant hunk of rock where so many young men died for... what, exactly? It was dubiously important in the first place and looked an awful lot like other rocky islands I'd seen, which drove home the utter futility and waste that it represents. It was a very emotional experience and I'm getting choked up now remembering it.

I'd be perfectly happy never seeing another battlefield in my life.

My thoughts exactly. I'd love to do the 8,000m peaks but unfortunately I don't do well above ~12,000ft so I have to keep to smaller mountains (just got done with Mt Washington and a few surrounding mountains last week).

Nope. Our customers have experienced all of the bad things you've heard about with Wipro and their ilk.

And yes, there are plenty of stereotypical brogrammer worker bees as well. I was just highlighting the fact that putting these types in charge just breeds more of them over time as they try to act like the boss.

So?

Hmm, let's put thousands and thousands of socially maladjusted techies together in one region, appoint a bunch of hypersocialized "brogrammer" types as their bosses, and see what happens. What could possibly go wrong???

I work in the "tech industry" but I work for a specialized IT services firm, which is almost the polar opposite of a bubble-fueled Internet startup. I watched the dotcom bubble inflate and pop, and now this one's on the way out too. By contrast, the people I work with are totally normal. Some have their quirks, but we have very few jerks. Steve Jobs may be the poster child for "tech visionary" but people conveniently forget that he was an absolute jerk and people hated to work for him. In my mind, anyone who emulates that is someone I definitely don't want to work with.

The "techie asshole" personality really does feed on itself. Take a bunch of recent grads with no real world experience and put them under someone trying to channel Jobs, Zuckerberg or similar. Pretty soon, everyone starts acting like that. I'm not surprised at how much sexual harassment goes on in these environments given this fact. It doesn't help that the press is falling all over itself to pump these guys up and give them superhuman status. Yes, smartphones are cool. Yes, people are walking around with $800 touchscreen computers in their pockets that let them do more than they used to. But in my mind, all these late-bubble-stage startups are doing is creating one-off websites competing for everyone's attention. No one's really inventing much new -- it's all about advertising, page views and the sale of your personal data. Some stuff that has come out in the last few years is extremely cool, but a lot of it seems a lot like the very late 90s when the bubble was the frothiest it had been and everyone is piling on hoping to cash out before the big pop.

I use HDMI from my tablet to TVs in hotel rooms when traveling.

Oh, please. How many people are paying to run Skype on a system that can't or won't be upgraded to Snow Leopard? Supporting Leopard means that Microsoft can't use APIs released in the last 5 years. They probably have to support x86-32 or PPC processors (which is the reason most people on Leopard are still on Leopard). They have to use relatively ancient tools to compile the packages.

All that, or they can just decide to never, ever upgrade the underlying protocol to handle new security requirements or additional features.

I can't for the life of me figure why MS would want to bother to keep supporting that old code. What's the return on investment for keeping someone's PPC Mac limping along? Or perhaps that's it: they want to make it easy for people to stay on stone age hardware to try and compel Apple to have to support it. Sounds conspiratorial, but I'm hard pressed to think on a non-conspiracy explanation that satisfies Occam's Razor.

Also, Microsoft is killing support for their own WP7, whose last release came out less than a year and a half ago. So much for your assertion, huh? Maybe they've just decided that supporting a 5 year old OS X version has a better business case than Windows Phone 7, which is very likely true.

Late 1970's tech vs 1960's SAM.

Sure, though somewhere on the net I've read a better technical explanation of how the modification was performed and how he Dani kept his equipment running despite intense NATO HARM coverage (basically he observed flight corridors, used short pulses of radar when he knew craft were along those corridors, and kept the main radar on the launcher off until the last second only using remote antennas that were positioned far enough from the launcher that a missile strike would not take out the crew or SAM)