I grew up there and moved away. There is zero difference in talent. The difference is one of leadership and money. The money is already there, so there is where people go. The difference in leadership is, that's where they choose to live. My current company is based out of Boise Idaho. All the top execs I can think of have homes in the San Jose area because they like the weather. So naturally, they've opened a few more offices over there to justify their move to San Jose away from Boise. This costs the company a great deal of money as the techs they hire are paid twice as much as here due to cost of living. They don't care though.

retard
verb
ritärd/
1.
delay or hold back in terms of progress, development, or accomplishment.
"his progress was retarded by his limp"

Just because you're a whiny bitch that doesn't understand the English language doesn't mean the rest of us can't use words for what they were inteded for. Now go fuck yourself.

Considering their lovefest for Gnome3 and Mac OSX and the way they strip usable features out left and right, their OS is definitely "elementary"

It's basically an OS for Mac OSX envious retards that get confused by minimize buttons and usable menu bars.

Um, you know you can just compile or download the packages for these other interfaces and run them on red hat 7 don't you? This isn't exactly hard to do.

All this is saying is that in three years when the law expires ...

Ahem. Laws don't "expire", but that's why I suppose you chose to post that comment under AC, instead of a proper username.

SIM-lock issue is no biggie, you can always simply buy the phone without telco as middleman.

...except in the United States of America.

You might be outside the US, but you literally cannot purchase a phone in the US without specifying which carrier you're going to bind that phone to, contractually. Not Samsung/HTC/LG/Motorola/Google, not Microsoft, not Nokia, not iPhone and not BlackBerry.

So you're luck to be outside the US. For the rest of us, we're stuck paying full price for phones off-contract, and still being held to carrier restrictions.

...and even if he doesn't sign it, it becomes law anyway, as long as Congress is in session.

I use this on my Android device with AdAway with tremendous success. I also use Android Firewall with some custom rules to block annoying apps from trying to send my data through servers in China, Romania, etc.

Here's my AdAway custom lists:

http://adaway.org/hosts.txt
  http://hosts-file.net/ad_serve...
  http://pgl.yoyo.org/adservers/...
  http://someonewhocares.org/hos...
  http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/ho...

Use these, and you'll have a nice, clean, tight setup. I also use Squid on my LAN, and my router is configured to send every packet through Squid (custom iptables rules on the router; a Buffalo Wireless running dd-wrt), and on the Squid side, I block about 12,000 separate ad URLs, domains and sites, so again, the experience for anyone on my segment, is nice and clean and fast.

The side benefit of Squid, is that I can see every single request, phone home, ping, malicious or otherwise, that my devices try to do, and I can permit, prohibit, redirect or block entirely based on schedule, as I wish.

You'd be surprised how chatty a standard iPhone and Android device are, without "training" on the Squid/AdAway side.

It sounds like this transformer had its center tap grounded and was the path to ground on one side of a ground loop as the geomagnetic field moved under pressure from a CME, inducing a common-mode current in the long-distance power line. A gas pipeline in an area of poor ground conductivity in Russia was also destroyed, it is said, resulting in 500 deaths.

One can protect against this phenomenon by use of common-mode breakers and perhaps even overheat breakers. The system will not stay up but nor will it be destroyed. This is a high-current rather than high-voltage phenomenon and thus the various methods used to dissipate lightning currents might not be effective.

In March 1989 much of Quebec lost power for the same thing.

They lost power because the common-mode breakers tripped, not because their system was actually damaged.

Can I set my own key? Set and maintain my own hash? No?

Not interested.

We want true, user-controlled security, not vendor provided.

We've learned our lessons already. The trust is gone.

(posting from my uber-low ID)

They were probably doing it anyway, and now want everyone to opt-in, so they can cover their arses before they got caught for tracking everyone without their consent.