Sorry, I have a copyright on Xtreme.. :p

Do none of your phones have an OFF button? You know, turn the phone off at night or must you be reachable 24/7/365?

As far as light-weight AV, I am running with MSE only because the others bog computers down too badly to be of any use. As another poster said, why haven't you switched them to some kind of Linux that looks like Win XP but isn't? That deadline of 8 April 2014 will be here soon and having a computer running XP on the internet on 9 April 2014 is a horrible idea.

My 3 cents:
1993, weather predictions are pretty much accurate, 1, 3, 7, 14 days, whatever, works.
2003, daily forecasts would help if people looked outside a window though generally accurate and long range forecasts are broken.
2013, same day forecasts are broken and long range, pfft.

A couple things I have observed, which seem fairly important.
#1) The Arctic Jet is missing. In years past, there was a physical circle of water vapor orbiting at 10 to 15 North Latitude and when a finger broke off, the area that finger went to would get REALLY cold. http://squall.sfsu.edu/scripts/nhemjetstream_model.html If you look at the images right now (build animation for 20 days, every 6 hours), you would see really strange things. Like a finger of the Northern Jet going up and through the arctic circle. Which brings me to
#2) The Tropical Jet, maybe it is also called the Gulf stream, is merging every so often with the Northern Jet. You can see it on the animation site I linked but if you also view the water vapor page, (which my site has had for quite some time: http://agrisea.net/weather/wv.html), you can see where all the stuff is going.

If you are in to agriculture, get your own monitoring equipment so you know what is happening for your locations. The rest of you, hold on, it is going to be bumpy.

The Titan Supercomputer showcases the power of AMD processors and for £97m it is a deal, but the power plant needed to run it is not included in that price...

It Expired 13.5 Billion Years Ago, Sorry. Guess the mice should have bought the extended warranty... ;)

Oregon has no State Sales Tax, which is why my corp is based here.

It is my opinion that if a retailer is based in a particular state that has a sales tax, even if they have no physical retail store but are selling online, they must collect whatever taxes are required from sales to people in their state - It is only fair. That is how mail order sales operated for decades so online sales should not be exempt from it.

I find this entire issue to be rather odd. I was under the impression that when Sun Microsystems was developing Java that its code was heavily looked at to make sure holes of the type found could not be there. Yet now that Oracle has it, "we should disable Java" because the Department of Homeland Security's US-CERT says so. If that is the case, then why isn't a warning issued so that people stop using Windows? After all, it too is full of holes that allows hackers to target it constantly. And Microsoft has been constantly fixing it and yet more holes appear.

Baryte, or barite, (BaSO4) is a mineral consisting of barium sulfate. Baryte itself is generally white or colorless, and is the main source of barium.

The major baryte producers (in thousand tonnes, data for 2010) are as follows: China (3,600), India (1,000), United States (670), Morocco (460), Iran (250), Turkey (150) and Kazakhstan (100). In just the USA, It is mined in Arkansas, Connecticut, Virginia, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Nevada & Missouri. [Source]

Now that you know where it comes from and where it is found in the USA, why aren't those mines increasing their production? Has everyone become so lazy that it makes sense to import everything?

Meanwhile, down under is burning. Could you all topic drift back to that huge problem?

As someone who has been to both a real four year college and a tech school, I personally think the tech school was worth the money spent. It introduced me to all the types of technology in use at the time and what the future might bring, plus gave me the history about the technology. I should point out that I was in college at the beginning of the PC era, where new technologies were popping out every year.

The thing is, though, that I have spoken with people who are recently graduated from a number of different tech schools, and their learning is not at all like mine. They were much more heavily instructed in the software aspect and don't really know much more about the hardware other than a general overview. Tech schools must have a balance in what is taught instead of this heavy leaning towards specific vendor products. Otherwise, they are graduating educated idiots.

I would rather hire new people who have hands-on experience with computers in the wild than any of the tech school graduates I have met over the past ten years. Those tech grads did not have the skills to troubleshoot hardware or even know what to look for unless they used a software program.

As far as online courses, I have taken a few over the years on things that I had an interest in. Personally, I would prefer to be at a live class instead of online because there is more social interaction available and it is a richer learning environment. However, some of my interests are simply not taught at a college any where close so online is the only option. However, colleges offering online classes might want to use some of this wonderful technology to make it more like a virtual classroom instead of what is in use right now.

Ignoring all the bad decisions HP has made over the past 20 years, HP simply doesn't want to pay too much in taxes. Other large corps, like Intel, have used the multi-billion dollar write-down to escape taxes, course the rest of us will end up paying more.

While it is a nice story about how the NOAA Satellites "predicted" Hurricane's Sandy's path, the truth is they had a 50-50 chance. In case you have missed it, no one is able to predict the weather any longer.

Predicting overnight temps is also broken. The other morning it was predicted to be 16F as the low, it was -5F, which broke the record set back in 1983. If you shuddered well so did I because I had to go relocate snow that was not predicted from the night before.

Look out a window to see what the weather is, many NOAA stations do not do this. Doppler Radar is a great tool except it does not cover my area so it really is a guessing game as to what will happen.

".As for "conflicts with her belief system" she can just fuck right off with that. You don't get to be excused from policies, laws, regulations, etc. just because they "offend your belief system"."

Maybe her belief is in the original U.S. Constitution & Bill of Rights, something the government is violating left, right, and center every single day in the name of "security."

"And lastly, sound in space." So two large objects colliding in space would make no noise? Has anyone bothered to blast music in space to see what would happen? I'll stick with EVE Online, at least it has noise.