I agree. For an inkjet all-in-one, I'd recommend the Canon MX882 or its follow-on models. The printer is fast and high-quality, and has a bypass input slot and a duplexer. The scanner is as good as any standalone consumer-grade photo scanner you can find nowadays—which is not a given in the multifunction machines—and it has an automatic document feeder with duplexer. It has wired and WiFi networking, and it generally just works.

My place of work insists that I have a Brother MFC-J5910DW as a home-office printer. Next to the Canon, it's a piece of crap. The print quality is atrocious. The paper tray was designed by a sadist. It jams far too often—I don't think I've ever had a paper jam in the Canon. While it can duplex print, the ADF cannot duplex scan. Scans are washed out with poor color fidelity. The front-panel interface has a strong affinity for fax mode, even when there's no phone line connected: if the thing's been idle for any period of time, it's in fax mode the next time you try to use it... and if you push a different mode button to wake it up, it give you error beeps until it finishes waking up and starting fax mode. At least once every 48 hours, it startles you by entering a loud self-cleaning cycle that purges a little more ink from the system.

My first laser printer had the AppleTalk name "%%PostScript Error" for much the same reason.

Given that Thunderbolt carries not only the equivalent of a PCIe x4 connection, but also a DisplayPort connection... and that the new Mac Pro has six Thunderbolt 2 connections... it's obvious that the HDMI port is there as a convenience for those who would otherwise bitch about having to buy a Mini DisplayPort to DisplayPort/DVI/HDMI/VGA cable. Since Apple has advertised the unit as supporting three 4K displays out of the box, obviously at least three of those Thunderbolt 2 ports can be used for DisplayPort video.

Yes, Time Warner's top-tier 50Mbps is priced beyond the reach of most customers. At $100/month, it's a luxury.

But there's another issue. Right now, the biggest reason to get big bandwidth at home is to support multiple users with diverse interests. There are a lot of potential uses where the upstream bandwidth just isn't there to justify a fatter pipe. Netflix may have a content-delivery network to support higher speeds... but TWC hasn't signed on for it. For most people who work from home, their employer doesn't have enough bandwidth to make a bigger pipe useful. If your employer has only a 45Mbps connection shared by all business needs, you're going to saturate any remaining bandwidth with a 50Mbps connection at home; why would you need gigabit to work from home? In that scenario, 50Mbps is only useful so the kids can Netflix without crimping your VPN speeds... And to get the higher return-path speeds that come with it.

Netflix and its rivals don't come close to using 50Mbps bandwidth per stream. They usually stream closer to 3Mbps. If they offered hire quality streams, or if there was a lot of 4K-resolution content out there, there'd be more demand.

The uses for ultra wideband bandwidth will come, but they're not here yet for most people... And especially not at those prices.

I had a better solution for long-distance sales calls for a while before Do Not Call. I worked for a telecom company. When the marketer would call and assure me that he could save me money and beat my current rates, I could truthfully reply "Well, I work for XYZ Telecom, and so I get free long distance. So how much are you willing to pay me to use your service?" This would reliably end the call...

Oh, and unless you have a minimum of three able-bodied people on site at all times, some sort of server lift is a must. Preferably one that is electric, has no fluids to leak, and has a shelf that slides to ease insertion and removal of servers. They are expensive, but they turn three-man jobs into one-man jobs... And prevent worker's-comp cases.

A label maker designed to make cable labels. That means it's designed to use wide tape and print on it sideways, and it will take flexible vinyl tape. The best ones print on "self-laminating" labels that are opaque where the label is printed, but clear at the end, so the overlap protects the printing.

At least one, and preferably two, USB 2.0 to IDE/SATA converters. There are plenty of ways in which you can find yourself with a bare drive you need data from, and no good way to plug it in. Also, in a pinch, a bare CD-ROM can become an external drive for a server with no drive. These things are cheap, and when you need one, you REALLY need one right now.

You must be trolling; surely you're not so thick as to not grasp the meaning of "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States"?

The First Amendment guarantees your right of freedom of speech. The Fourteenth Amendment, as quoted above, says no state can pass a law that takes away rights granted by the United States Constitution. Being part of the United States, New York, like the other 49 states, is bound by the United States Constitution, including the Fourteenth Amendment... and thus, by extension, the First Amendment. QED.

So there was a tiny 3kg uranium pile at Kodak Park... that'd be south and a bit west of the nuclear power plant, and more or less due north from the University's massive laser-pumped fusion reactor that generates temperatures of 200,000,000K. Somehow, I think those of us living in Rochester were already aware of the possibility of an atomic disaster. ;)

And you have to realize that Kodak Park, back then, was big enough to have its own fire department. Not a fire engine. Not a fire house. A fire department with multiple stations throughout the Park, all trained to handle utterly massive hazmat incidents and fires. Kodak Park was the biggest chemical-processing facility this side of the Mississippi... which, of course, includes all of New Jersey. When local fire departments needed hazmat training, they went to Kodak. I worked there; trust me, three kilograms of uranium was probably one of the smallest disaster risks inherent in the operation. Miles of pipelines carrying acids and solvents, massive steam works from a power plant big enough to run a small city... Every day I drove past this gleaming stainless steel tank, think a milk tanker stood on end, labelled "LIQUID NITROGEN—NOT COMPATIBLE WITH LIFE". That was fun on windy days when it would sway, and images from Terminator 2 unavoidably came to mind.

Kodak has its problems and warts, but anyone accusing Kodak of disdain for Rochester is exhibiting an utter ignorance of the histories of Rochester, Kodak, and George Eastman. I'd frankly be hard-pressed to come up with an example of a company that's done more for their community. (Recent run-into-the-ground years excepted...)

Not effectively, as they cannot arrest someone claiming self-defense without provable probable cause that it wasn't self-defense. Since there's often no other living witness than the shooter, and you can't compel the shooter to provide evidence without an arrest, there's damned little investigation possible. See, e.g., http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2012/03/trayvon-martin-and-floridas-stand-your-ground-law.html

Except that's not true.

In "duty to flee" states, you must run from a conflict if you are sure it is safe to do so. In most cases where you would need to use force in self-defense legitimately, it is not clearly safe to run away. In duty-to-flee states, if you're cornered, you're free to use as much force as necessary in self-defense.

The problem with Florida's law is that it takes self-defense from being a defense against a charge of homicide, and turns it into utter immunity from arrest or prosecution for anyone with even a barely-plausible claim of self-defense. The police can't investigate, because it could lead to violating that immunity. The previous law, which still protected you from legitimately shooting first in self-defense, at least let the police detain you to make sure your story was legit and collect evidence to back it up. Not so with the new law.

Plus, there IS a direct link to Google's core businesses. Google pays people to drive cars around the world taking photographs for Street View, and collecting WiFi data for geolocation services. To keep that information up-to-date, they have to keep driving those cars around. If they can figure out how to automate those cars, they can reduce the cost of acquiring that data: no driver to pay, no human limits on the hours driven... Yes, the whole program will cost a lot, and it would take forever to recoup the costs from the savings... but if you look at it from a "what will we spend this year" standpoint, you could see a potential benefit in a reasonable time.

In the meantime, they're learning how to make high-powered servers run in a low-power environment that doesn't have the ability to support super-exotic cooling infrastructure. Want to bet that pays off in future generations of custom-built server farms that have DC power from solar panels?

I have no idea if these things are true, but they're plausible. The folks who wrote this article didn't try too hard to figure out the synergies.

I agree, and I've been there and done that.

I had a Philips Pronto remote control, one of the early ones. The great thing was that you could program its touchscreen with anything you wanted, down to a pixel level if you wanted to take the time. So, it could emulate any remote. Sounds great... but in practice, it sucked. The thing had hard buttons for channel up/down, volume up/down, and mute. There were two additional programmable hard buttons. For anything else, you'd have to hit the button on the side to turn on the backlight (if it was dark in the room at all), look down at the screen, possibly scroll through a number of pages, find the button, and press it. Trying to use a TiVo was an exercise in frustration; you simply cannot target taps on a touchscreen accurately without looking.

The Pronto quickly became the device we used to turn the A/V system on and off, and change modes... a macro device. For actually watching TV, we used the TiVo peanut, because it could be operated by touch while you were looking elsewhere.

I tried using various iPad apps to control the TiVo. They suffer from the same problem. The official TiVo app is a little better; it offers gesture-based control as an option, but it's not compelling. Besides, I want to be doing other things on my iPad while I'm watching TV, not using it as an outrageously expensive yet awkward remote. The few things the apps are good for are text entry and browsing the program guide without interrupting the current program.

I've since upgraded from the Pronto to a Logitech Harmony One. It's not perfect, and it's not as customizable as the old Pronto, but it's pretty good. It has enough hard buttons to control everything without looking. It supports macros to turn stuff on and off and change settings. It has a touchscreen to accommodate those few functions that don't have hard buttons. Of course, any time you have to use the touchscreen, it's the same problem: you have to look down and find the button.

The solution isn't making the tablet a remote, or making the tablet the TV and the TV a remote display. I'm not sure what the solution is, but part of it would be some way to simply "flick" what I'm watching from tablet to TV and back again, without locking the tablet into feeding the TV or vice-versa.