And a whole lot more dependable too.

One squirrel got into an electrical substation just outside of Houston Hobby, there was hell to pay! The place was shutdown for several hours while the power company sorted things out.

The kicker was this was a handful of weeks after 9/11 and everyone was on edge. That damned tree rat didn't help matters any.

Seal off India, Pakistan, China and Russia at the TLD. Force their internal security to deal with the scammers.

I may be at fault for that. During the days of 33.6 and 56K was the geeks wet dream, IRC and their patrons were getting clobbered by DOS attacks. While this was getting fixed, me and few other geeks had a think-tank session regarding future threats, and I brought up the idea of a synced disctributed attack, where the attackers were clock-synced and would be cooperative in attacking a single target.

We were close to being prophets when DDOS started to hit the bricks a few years later.

R-11 or Freon-11 is used in low pressure, low temperature applications in refrigeration and large building chillers. The low pressures required to work the gas makes for a less demanding system compared to the high-pressure mixes used today, including R-290 (propane).

There are at least 2 major cities that are sharpening their axes to go after a certain Chinese company that sold them "long life" LED streetlights.

And I know of at least 5 others that are going from LED traffic lights back to regular ones because the new ones were burning out in a handful of months.

They agreed to replace the defective lighting in Berkeley Back in February, but they seemed to have clammed up on Detroit. I think they sense they are in deep doo-doo. Perhaps they are skimping on material or manufacturing QA to milk these contracts for what they are worth. Replacing the defective fixtures will cost the company tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.

https://www.dailycal.org/2019/...

Einstein was probably one of them aliens.

Don't you think?

That thing will not be used by any of my clients if IT has any say in the matter.

The onus for providing benefits and worker's comp is put on the contractor instead of the contractee. If you wind up having an accident, tough. You are on your own to heal thyself and get another gig. No workers comp, that is if you don't get a DBA and a federal tax ID, declaring yourself as a company. Then guess what? You are a businessman operating a company, paying state and federal taxes, like it or no.

Oh, and if you want to retire, you have to plan one out yourself with help from a financial advisor. And pray the money flow stays constant.

Vacation? Who needs them? You are working to feed you and your family now. So you have to stay at it, pretty much all the hours you want to or have to be scheduled for? Long days and/or nights doing gigs. Oh, loads o fun.

So much for the advantages of the gig economy.

You shut people off from the world, they'll find ways to get messages in and out.

Let them chat.

And here I thought the student admissions scandal in 2009-2010 was nasty.

This flat out blows it away. They don't say how long it's been going on, but I'll wager it's been for a LONG time...

The ups: great when you got service.

The downs; if the cell towers didn't blow down from the storm or simply got wiped off the map. Several key towers were toppled or ruined by Harvey when it hit, pretty much killing all service in the Rockport/Fulton/Holiday Beach area for at least 2 full months after. There was only one tower that stayed in service and it was way down the road from town by Aransas Pass. The poor thing was so inundated with traffic, that data was a slow dog, and more than a few calls were dropping like flies.

But AT&T was sporting in removing the caps and giving us grace periods on billing. Dunno about Sprint or Verizon tho...

We smoked the newsies by a good 45 minutes in reporting the Wells Fargo outage and did it with better details, wielding the TRUTH, instead of just saying "Internal issues". We helped a ton more folks with fewer trolls and jerks with their money and mental issues than Facebook could shake a stick at.

Devalue us again, and I'll see you characters in Shanghai at the shareholders conference.