Less traffic in the suburbs? In what country? In US suburbs, nobody can take public transportation anywhere, so the streets and highways are choked with single-occupancy cars. The transit infrastructure is all about getting from the inner suburbs to the city center. Suburb-to-suburb commuting by public transit means turning a 30-minute drive into a three hour trip downtown and back.

Back when the transit systems were designed, they never anticipated the commuting patterns we have today.

Also, reverse commuting isn't just for hipsters. Outer-ring suburbs are too expensive for low-wage workers.

I did that too, at the last startup I worked for. After months of 100-hour weeks, a 60-hour week *did* feel like a breeze. And that's how I knew how messed up I'd become and that it was time to get out. That was ten years ago. No more startups (or pretend startups) again, ever.

I work 40 hours a week unless *I* feel like putting in extra time on a particularly fun assignment, and I'm happily pissing away all those extra hours by having a life instead of killing myself to make other people richer.

We had to fight HARD to keep our critical servers from being moved to Atlanta. There's plenty of bandwidth, but the latency would kill us. But every time we need anything, it's like Oliver Twist asking for more gruel.

No, this is what happens when you underTHINK the IT budget. HP and other services organizations want you to believe that all you have to do is write them a check, and all your IT troubles will magically disappear. Instead, what really happens is that all your problems are still there, with one more layer of bureaucratic delays and miscommunications thrown in. The company I work for outsourced their IT to HP, going so far as to sell a lot of their server infrastructure (the actual hardware) to HP, and it's been a disaster, only part of which is HP's fault.

I see they haven't reversed the horrible misfeature of the "awesome" bar being restricted to whatever's specified in the search bar (e.g., Wikipedia) instead of using your default search engine regardless.

Or is there an about:config setting for that which I don't know about?

Who was it who said, "Most scientific discoveries aren't hailed with 'Eureka!', but rather with, 'Hmmm, that's weird.'"?

There once was a babe born in space
The first of the whole human race
But the kid's DNA
Looked like bad macrame
Cos nobody shielded that place

Don't give me none of your aggravation, YIC!

Wouldn't a few humans amount to a small hill of beans pretty well?

Who would fight whom?

That's a serious question. What two (or more) large groups of Americans would organize themselves into armies of any respectable amount of strength?

Anyone trying to fight a loyal US military would get squashed faster than you can say "daisy cutter", I don't care how many M-16s and RPGs you have in your basement bunker. Maybe mutiny, turning the US Army into God's Army? Or how about Walmart and Monsanto *really* putting the competition out of business?

The states that keep threatening secession: Would we go to war to keep them, or just tell them not to let the door hit 'em where the Lord split 'em?

What's most likely is that the next civil war will be manufactured by the people selling arms to both sides.

We're in a similar situation in our build/release group. The problem is that they want senior level talent at junior level wages, and until they can find such a sucker^Wcandidate, we continue to do without.

But does a Cue:Cat count?

This is why for a long time, 50% of your phone bill was the cost of the bill.

CO-supplied POE sounds like a tall order. One of the reasons CO-powered POTS works is because the CO supplies 48VDC (90VAC@20Hz ring), but the telephone equipment has to be able to work with much less voltage than that, and serious noise on the line. I suspect most POE devices expect much cleaner power.

Also, large chunks of the switch can go down, but as long as power stays up, existing calls through that switch stay up. New calls may not happen (no dial tone), though. This was true even in the days of mechanical step-switches. The calls always stayed connected until and unless something proactively broke the connection. When they went to electronic switching in the 1970s and 1980s, much effort was spent making sure this was still true. This was one of the weapons on the circuit side of the packet-switching versus circuit-switching wars.

The present issue is the last skirmish in that war. IMO packet-switching won that war the first time a telco installed a VOIP trunk from one CO to another. Everything since has been nuts-and-bolts buildout.

(Claimer: I wrote call processing software for telephone switches in the mid-1980s.)