Thank everyone against which pipeline? Keystone? Phase 1 has been operational since 2010 - and oh, look, it runs right through North Dakota. If I recall, phase 2 is built now too (somewhere else in the country) and phase 3 (part of Keystone XL) is under construction to connect those phases to the gulf coast. Oh, did you mean phase 4 of Keystone XL? That wouldn't even run through North Dakota... but if they build it, apparently that'd be another 2% of US daily oil consumption in pipelines.

I'd be very interested in knowing where this train came from and was going to, 'cos it sounds like it must not have been going where the perfectly good existing pipeline goes, or where any of the proposed bits would go.

Had to do this with MySpace once - their signup process accepted email address containing a + and their deletion process didn't.

After falsifying all the profile information and adjusting the age, my account left several publicly-visible comments about "Tom" and Rupert Murdoch...

*poof*

Here at home we can't get any better here without shelling out 10k for a fiber run and 400/month or more for the link after, so we are stuck with crapy AT&T 3Mbps dsl. Netflix actually works fine surprisingly. Initial start on a video will be a bit blocky but it clears up quickly. Quality on other video sources varies wildly, so the service provider's technology clearly makes a big difference. Youtube is decent but has a long buffer time, videos from Aol's news or Fox news will hardly even play and take 10 minutes or more to buffer a 1 minute clip.

Among other questions. I have a friend/colleague at NASA JPL who has a Cayenne, takes it to Porsche Owners Club "track days" in the area, is actually a driving instructor for POC. He's had it almost a year, and so far the only troubles have been an engine fire on the track (some fluid overflow is positioned on top of the engine, whoops) and whatever has caused the car to currently be undergoing "open transmission surgery." I asked him about the crash, and he said he doesn't at all run in the same circles as Walker or Rodas, but that Rodas is enough of a professional that the idea of a car getting away from him is very surprising, and there will probably also have to be autopsies (gruesome, given the state of the bodies post-fire) to see whether someone had a medical emergency resulting in the loss of control.

So you've got a very highly tuned car, known for being a bit "finicky" and not immune to various parts failing, driven by a highly trained driver who's also not immune to various parts of him failing. I think I'll wait for the official report of the investigation.

Limit on that road is 45, yes? Strange kind of racing that doesn't go over the speed limit. ;)

Yeah, like googling "electrical interference" and "fire code".

Well with http/2 using ssl by default why not just deliver all video over an encrypted channel. If it all looks the same it makes traffic shaping much harder (especially if you use your own dns).

I dearly hope I'm not the only slashdotter who hangs around the UN, so that someone else can back me up on this.

Quite often, in the course of a meeting on something-or-other at the UN, subject-matter experts will be brought in for panel presentations.

Not terribly infrequently, one of the English-speaking experts, not knowing any better, will include a map of whatever (squid fisheries was the last one I personally recall) showing the Falkland Islands.

*ominous chord*

The delegate from Argentina will duck out of the room to call his capital.

The delegate from the UK will do likewise.

A short time later, the delegate from Argentina will ask for the floor, and read a statement to the effect that the Islas Malvinas rightfully belong to Argentina, and that the UK is bad and wrong and all that. The UK will then be asked if they wish to comment, and will read a statement to the effect that the Falklands have been under UK rule for some time, and that in keeping with its practice of divesting itself of various colonies and possessions around the world, and in keeping with the parts of the UN Charter about non-self-governing territories being helped toward independence, the UK would be delighted to be rid of them, squid and all - if the residents of the Falklands themselves were okay with it, and if the UK could be reasonably assured that granting the Falklands independence would not simply lead to Argentina immediately trying to take over them again.

And then, the delegates from the UK and Argentina will go back to being the best of friends, because they are after all diplomats and not the least bit personally interested in perpetuating this silly game.

If I'm parsing this all correctly, this is great news because it means I can port my graphical C++ (or whatever language, with hooks to C++) applications from Linux to Windows or OSX (or from Windows to Linux or OSX, or from OSX to Linux or Windows, whatever the case may be) without having to worry about UI widgetry.

Of course, unless my applications are already written in a language WxWidgets likes, and don't make any calls to other platform-dependent things (DirectX, I'm looking at you), this sounds like it makes my job a little easier, but not a whole lot. Admittedly, I haven't tried porting graphical apps across platforms before, so for all I know, getting the UI widgetry right could very well be 90% of the work.

I'm guessing I'm still going to need my platform-specific compilers/SDKs/IDEs on each platform for this all to feed into, as well. On the Mac side (the last place I built a graphical app, and that was several large cats ago) I'm a little unsure how using this with C++ or whatever is going to save me time over using Xcode with ObjC.

I welcome responses or thoughts on the pros and cons of all this, either from the WxWidgets folks themselves, or from other devs.

This may sound quaint, but back in the day, retailers and service providers knew their customers. In market segments where you can't just buy everything online, some still do. I'm on first-name basis with lots of people I buy things or services from in my small city. And honestly, I can get better service if they actually keep track of some info.

I have to get my car an annual safety check. If I forget, and the sticker is super out of date, I could get a ticket or something. Fortunately, I have a really great mechanic - so great that when I first started taking cars to him a decade or so ago, he was "just" a mechanic, and he now co-owns the service station. Great guy, seriously, and a good dad too; I run into him and his daughter sometimes around town. So I take the car to his station every year. Similarly, I have a dentist I go to. Years ago, we used to take turns driving each other's kids to school, so I've known his whole family for almost a decade now. Back then I didn't have dental insurance, but when I needed a dentist, he was the one I called, and when I got insurance, I stuck with him. He knows his stuff, and his support staff are all friendly too; his wife works the front office and his daughter that I used to drive to school does X-rays now. Of course, since I go there, my whole family goes there. So... real small-town Americana stuff, ya know?

Every time I see the dentist, we decide when my next appointment will be. Sometimes I have to change it due to work obligations. But about a week ahead of time, I get a postcard in the mail reminding me, and a couple days ahead of time, they give me a call to confirm. They're really good at this, and they apply it across their entire customer base, so they know ahead of time when somebody's cancelling/rescheduling an appointment and freeing up a slot that they can use for somebody who needs urgent work done.

On the other hand, the service station just puts a sticker on the inside of my windshield to remind me what month or mileage my next oil change should be at. They don't give me any kind of reminder about my safety check coming up for renewal - even though I consistently go to them, when I could go almost anywhere to get it done. On the rare occasions that my wife gets the car fueled (she isn't the do-it-herself kind), people at other stations will point out to her that it's coming up for renewal.

Scaling up a bit, you've probably heard the story about how Target knows us better than we know ourselves - guy notices that his regular ads from Target suddenly have a lot of baby-oriented things in them, wonders why, only later discovers that his daughter is preggers. Target knows what I buy and spits out coupons that are at least more relevant than Google ads. Safeway does likewise, and will even give me special offers above and beyond their "club card" prices on things they know I like (or think I might).

So if Apple collects that kind of data - customer records, usage records, behavioral stuff - for the purpose of providing better service to me, please forgive me if I don't immediately pick up a torch and a pitchfork and storm 1 Infinite Loop with the rest of the villagers.

Not to say that Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and the rest never do anything of the kind - right off the top of my head, "People you may know" features are actually fairly helpful - but the fact that Apple actually has a substantial "brick and mortar" retail presence that sells large amounts of physical, kickable things seems to help keep them from completely forgetting what "customer service" is about.

Chrome updates are quite easy to control by using their ADM templates and deploying their enterprise msi via your favorite method. Just think of the smaller version increments as hotfixes. Microsoft pushes them all the time. At least with chrome it is more obvious what they are changing and what it might break by looking at the release notes versus digging through a million kb articles because the microsoft patch say "fixes a problem with internet explorer on some systems" or similar useless crap.

Clearly you have never tried to add a trusted root certificate for your internal domain to firefox. As someone who has, let me tell you firefox is not enterprise ready. Chrome at least uses the windows certificate store and has started adding group policy templates. That said, this is just a powergrab at trying to increase market share by forcing xp users to chrome.

While I concur about the general pricepoint, there are cheaper alternatives that are still perfectly good:
Ubiquiti: https://store.ubnt.com/unifi.html (all under $500)

Only problem is where you shop. Not to plug newegg, there are many other cheap(er) venders you can probably find this at too, but just to prove a point:

$43 shipped: http://www.neweggbusiness.com/product/product.aspx?item=9b-33-993-021
$66 shipped: http://www.neweggbusiness.com/product/product.aspx?item=9b-33-978-030
$80 shipped: http://www.neweggbusiness.com/product/product.aspx?item=9b-33-993-022


I imagine if you are buying for a large institution you have a vendor that offers volume discounts as well, so they should in theory be paying even less than this.

If that 80% of shipments correlated to more than 10% of profits, perhaps. And unless your name is Samsung, your share of those profits is right about 0%.