Yeah.. THIS!! I'm an Independent voter in Nevada, up until the middle of BushyJr's second term I was a life-long Republican.. The Republican party has gotten so FAR from its roots, I couldn't remain a "member"... Since I am no longer a Republican, I'm prohibited from voting for ANY candidate in our primary yesterday other than the non-partisan races, like Judge, Sheriff, etc.. This is a crock of SHIT, so I now do not vote in primary elections.. There were several Republican candidates for state and national office that I'd loved to have voted for, but the State of Nevada has seen fit to prohibit me from voting for them, unless I attach a label to my name.. I'M NOT A REPUBLICAN NOR A DEMOCRAT, I'M AN AMERICAN....

Here's the weird part.. I have several Xen/Linux virtual servers thru a vps hosting company.. They include 2 ipv4 addresses and 6 ipv6 addresses with each vps.. On one of my vps, since I host two different sites on it, the two ipv4 addresses are kinda handy.. However, on several others, I have zero need/use for more than one ipv4 address.. I asked their support to take the unneeded addresses back, since ipv4 addresses are in short supply.. Their response? Don't worry, we have plenty... Huh???
I wonder how often this scenario plays out with other vendors? One often wonders just how bad the shortage is when vendors can do this with their address-blocks...

Do like I did, get a free 4to6 tunnel from tunnelbroker.com, a public service from Hurricane Electric (he.com). Since my edge router is able to run the Tomato firmware, it has the capability to act as the endpoint for one of these tunnels, plus it can update my dynamic address from Cox when it changes, to keep the tunnel working.. Very slick.. Its fun to watch my Debian machines doing an apt-get update, and seeing an ipv6 address listed.. The current version of Tomato also implementts ip6tables so you're protected from that end.. Even if you don't have an edge router that can do Tomato, its still pretty easy to configure an always-on Linux machine to handle the tunnel endpoint, just so long as your firewall can be configured to pass protocol 41 (6to4 protocol, as I recall).. They give you a /64 prefix, which is a multi-mega-bazillion number ipv6 addresses.. Big numbers like that give me a headache..

My wife and I visited her sister last Christmas. Sister lives on a street where they have posted no-parking-for-street-sweeping. The day in question was Wednesday, which coincidentally was Christmas Day.. I strongly suspected they wouldn't do street-sweeping on Christmas Day, but I parked in sisters driveway anyway, just in case. Since I suspected they would sweep the following day, I made sure to have the car either out on errands or in the driveway during the time listed on the signs.. About a month later, I get a letter from the city parking authority telling me I've been fined $58 for violating the no-parking law. Interesting thing about the notice.. It lists my Nevada license plate number correctly, but the date/time listed were from back in November 2013, when we were in Las Vegas, NOT Oceanside California (oops.. I let the "cat-out-of-the-bag" as to location)... The letter gave instructions on contesting the ticket, either by mail affidavit or in-person. I sent the form they gave requesting a written administrative hearing, about two weeks later, I get a letter saying my claim was rejected, but if I still want to pursue it, I can request a hearing from a uninterested party, again either by a written affidavit or in person, AFTER paying the $58.. So I pay the $58, and send the written affidavit showing the FACT that the citation was materially wrong.. Several weeks later, get another letter saying "claim denied"... Talk about being a money-making machine... Oceanside Calfornia CAN KISS MY ASS...

You *could* "pirate" it, then send the amount he's charging for the app to HIM directly.... FUCK APPLE!

Precisely the reason I still use Office2003.. I DETEST that flippin' ribbon, and flat will NOT use anything that has it.. Of course, since I spend most of
my time on Debian, I don't have this problem over there, what with LibreOffice... Don't care if Office 2003 is 11 years old, it still works and when I need
*real* MS Office, its the one...

In the "new" America, you don't even have to *have* a gun (let alone *pull* it) to get shot by *some* police forces.. You just have to move and you either get a a lead enema or at least a taser that may/may not put you 6 feet under like the lead... Having said that, if this bozo had a record of other robberies AND pulled a gun on a cop, the cop was well within his rights to blow the guy away.. end of story...

yup.. and I *strongly* suspect there will be a "leakage" of these patches, probably into a downloadable disk image that those who stay with XP will be able to obtain fairly easily.. of course, mom+pop XP user, likely not so much.. but for those in the know, who, for whatever reason, hasn't dumped MS for something better (hint: Linux)... They'll be able to find these patches fairly easily. Of course, MS will slap any site down that carries these "unauthorized" patches, but then the game of
"Whack-A-Mole" comes to mind...

My wife and I had been on Virginmobile since 2003, but her phone died about a year ago while she was visiting her sister out of town. Instead of calling me and asking what she should get to replace it, she signs up with Verizon on a 2 year contract and a fairly nice featurephone. They got her on a $40/mo 700min plan, which for her is a waste of about 600 minutes/month.. She's lucky to do 100 min/mo.. Just recently I discovered Ting.com, part of the old Tucows.com group. They run on Sprint's towers, and have a fantastic pricing structure.. I've moved over to it on my phone, had to sell my old Virginmobile smartphone and buy a Sprint-branded one, and have a eBay provided LG smartphone for her and will be dumping Verizon in the next few days. BTW: Ting has a deal where they will pay 25% of your ETF if you port your number over to them.. In the case of the wife's Verizon ETF its $130, so Ting will credit $31 to our next months bill. Based on her usage and mine, our Ting phone bill should be about what she was paying Verizon for that dumb featurephone..

hehe THAT has GOT to piss off the current US government..... Couldn't happen to a worse bunch of crooks...

Well if NASA can't keep a spacestation in orbit, there's a company here in Las Vegas that CAN! Bigelow Aerospace has had two structures in orbit since 2006-2007. Genesis I was launched in 2006 and Genesis II was launched in 2007, and they're both still up there sending back video to the Bigelow ops center in North Las Vegas.. Bigelow has a project called BEAM that will attach another module to the ISS, scheduled to launch on SpaceX's CRS Mission 8, in mid 2015.

www.bigelowaerospace.com

Gee.. I wonder if the (R)'s don't have a hard-on to bring on the police-state as much as the democrats? I *used* to be a Republican, after about 1/2 way thru BushJr's second term, I got fed up with the shitting that BOTH parties are doing on the Constitution and dumped the R's.. I held my nose in 2008 and voted for McCain and gleefully voted for Romney in 2012... BUT the vast majority of Republicans nowadays are simply "Democrat-Lite".. They want to shit on the Constitution as much as the D's do... I'm beginning to wonder even about the new R's that came in back in the landslide of 2010, some of them seem to be eying the Constitution as toilet paper also.... Woe unto us...

I believe you're talking about Mars-One (http://www.mars-one.com/mission/roadmap) . They have begun taking applications for colonists to go to Mars. They had over 200,000 applications for becoming one of these colonists. The plan is, starting in 2018, sending supply missions to Mars and a rover, and then in 2024, sending 3 colonists every 2 years.. Its ambitious, but if we wait for governments to do this, we'll be waiting a VERY VERY long time....

Excellent idea! I have a Dell Precision laptop, pulled out the DVD drive, bought one of the "2nd drive replacement sleds" for like $10, and now I have two drives in the system.. Just saving up my sheckles to be able to buy a 256GB SSD... Money is tight right now...

Yup... That bit me recently.. Wanted a Dell Precision laptop, new was WAAAY out of my price range, so I found a nice M4400 on the Dell Offlease website for $200, it came with 2GB of DDR2 ram, but supported up to 8GB. Forgot about the DDR2 price gotcha.. Had to pay over $100 for 2 4GB DDR2 sticks.. Then about a month after buying the M4400, I spot an M4500 on the website, for $225.. I wanted to cry.. The M4500 supports up to 16GB and uses DDR3 ram, which a bit of Googling told me I could buy 16GB of DDR3 for about what I paid for the 8GB DDR2.... Oh well... Live and learn...