From the sounds of his announcement he's been burning too much AzureGreen. Wait, Washington did legalize pot recently! That explains it!

And to the bottom of the ocean, all at the same time.

"we mean to increase the synergistic use of buzzwords to drive shareholder value and customer satisfaction."

Seriously, there's a company I saw one time that had "We strive for our customer's affection." as their mission statement on the building. Nobody really listens to this shit. Net Net, he's going to fire a few talking heads, move some departments around and if you don't like it you can leave.

But still vulnerable to a ton and a half of vulnerabilities. Sure you can cut your exposure down (like no IE) but that still doesn't mean that the OS can't be attacked in other ways. You also hit the nail on the head, obsolescence and driver support. A lot of companies want to get away from XP but that means upgrading other systems and in some cases processes because there aren't one for one analogs available. That's the bigger problem, when a company gets hemmed in by the tech they may have selected decades ago. I had to work with one customer a year ago to get rid of a couple of SCO boxes that had been running since the late 80s running inventory control. It wasn't just the OS that was the issue, it was also the inventory software that they'd been using for decades. Changing that wasn't as simple as an OS upgrade.

Newspeak.

Well most "country" wiring I've experienced has multiple problems. Mostly from old, unmaintained wiring and transformers but it sounds like you've got enough of that already. While most storms will cause havoc, just the utility not giving a shit will probably cause most of the failures inside a home.

Gotta love those LGA taxi rides, full of bumps, extras and routes to nowhere. Just like EWR. It's all a racket and Lyft along with Uber are going to erode the Taxi Commission revenues as well as those of the yellow cab consortia.

You're behind the times. In Texas we can get the mega 64oz drinks in about every gas station, 7-11 and liquor store. 40oz is so right coastal.

My data comes in on fiber optic cable, no worries there. Also I buy APC units, they're worth the investment.

That's next in the budget. I've had two neighbors with lightening strike damage and with our voltage problems, the Type 1 surge protector has done well for us.

If you haven't already bought them, buy surge protectors. After replacing the fourth dishwasher in our less than 8 year old house due to circuitry issues we installed a whole house surge protector. They work and it doesn't take a magnetic storm to cause issues, most of the grid delivery is +/- 15% on voltage just in my area normally.

Meet the new media control overlords. It used to be we had filters like News Editors, TV Anchors etc. who had a set of principles and presented the news based on those principles. Of course individuals like William Randolph Hurst realized how powerful this was and fashioned and tailored the news to their own agendas. This gave their already immense power even more capabilities to shape the dialog and issues of the day. Google, Huffington Post et al. are all in the same business and both actually don't generate actual news content but merely serve as spin doctors pushing the issues to their suited direction. We shouldn't be surprised that Google is trying to influence our opinions, it's been done for hundreds of years and although the media distribution may have changed controlling public opinion is an old game.

You know in his early days on SNL he wasn't all that funny. I never thought he'd be a Senator but you know he actually makes a lot of sense.

For most of us, no. Onboard sound is great and getting better all the time. If you're an audiophile or using your system to do professional mixing or music then it is worth it.

It's a big fat book full of useless entries with names and places you'll never deal with. They still occasionally drop them off at my front door where I obligingly use the pages for starting camp fires and to level my wonky kitchen table.