We have a similar setup blocks from the Capitol Building in DC - not rural or poor, but you can get slow-as-molasses DSL, or comcast cable+Internet that goes out weekly to the extent you need to call their /wonderful/ support services and have technicians dick around and do nothing.

Not that I'm bitter. A local family has cobbled together enough "business-class" connections and shares it over point-to-point wireless: http://www.dcaccess.net/ They're very friendly, and might be willing to help you out on some of the aspects (though your state's regulations are probably much, much different than the District's).

I presume you're mainly doing this for the geek cred of having crazy access to bandwidth. I'd advise you, this being the case, to be willing and financially able to be your only paying customer unless you're going to make this a real full or part time job.

Having just spent two weeks in Italy, drinking grappa after nearly every meal ... I approve this message.

#WorksForMe

I'm going to posit this won't be a problem.

Or, perhaps, the bar to work-from-home is so high, that once your employees cross it, they feel entitled to chill out? Mayhaps you should instead just /give/ them a day off?

I get my best, most-strategic work done when I'm not in the office and responding to the fire of the minute, and I earn 1:1 overtime, so if I need to chill out on a random friday, the door is open.

Hey, now, some folks live in DC; as opposed to the politicians who camp here for the nicer parts of the year, muck up local politics (so easy when the folks you're issuing policy for have no congressional vote, http://dcist.com/2012/05/on_constituent_day_rep_trent_franks.php ), and give the whole place a bad name. If you're going to brand us as the district of corruption, at least take a jab at our mayoral snafus.

The underlying question is why, for the love of all that is good in this world, would you eat at a McDonald's in France?

Mod parent up; from the page itself: "W3Schools is a website for people with an interest for web technologies. These people are more interested in using alternative browsers than the average user. [...] These facts indicate that the browser figures above are not 100% realistic. Other web sites have statistics showing that Internet Explorer is a more popular browser. Anyway, our data, collected from W3Schools' log-files, over many years, clearly shows the long and medium-term trends."

So, w3schools showed IE at ~34% in 2010, so perhaps in a few more years, it will be down to 17% more broadly.

I'm not sure that Stuxnet and Flame getting revealed means that we've gotten to the bottom of this particular rabbit hole.

I think I'm supposed to come back all frothing-at-the-mouth, but you make a solid point; we're not quite there yet. However, we are increasingly willingly allowing absolutely insane levels of our personal information to be tracked, collated, and traded around. It gets to be a slippery slope if the advertising data ever connects with the credit industry (Gee, Tommy, your credit score is pretty good right now. Here's an ad for a huge package-deal vacation you can finance with your very own credit card!).

The government may have some horribly annoying and privacy-ignoring programs (Yes, TSA, we're talking about you), but by and large is too bureaucratic and full of a mix of People Who Believe in Democracy and People Who Believe in Paperwork to get to 1984. The corporate world, however, is getting too creepy and untethered to civil-society controls (regulation, whistle-blowing) for my liking. Sure, someone abusing the system would cause an uproar; but every ad-buyer abusing our privacy - but within the terms of service we clicked through at some point - won't cause a stir at all.

So what does a hand with the middle finger only pointed straight up do, remote wise?

A) Skip to the next ad
B) Vote the ad down to improve ratings
C) Report you to the nearest business plan and marketing compliance association of america? (BPMCAA, formed by a merger of RIAA and MPAA?)
D) All of the above.

"The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely. [...] The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard.[...] It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live--did live, from habit that became instinct--in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer; though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing. "

Via http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021.txt

Does it close the doors on the way out and patch the various exploits it used to get in to the system in the first place, or does it just leave the system ripe for future re-exploitation by the same or similar tools?

In other news, over in Oz - the man who was behind the curtain is not only unimportant, but not there now, so please stop looking.

I wouldn't count it out yet. Ubuntu+Unity is one damned slick OS. Now, will it overtake windows? Not in the near future, to be sure, but I definitely see the role for Linux on tablets and netbooks as primed and ready. Unity is clearly structured for a touch+voice interface.

As a Texan, I somewhat resent this statement. Some of us were lucky enough to have parents who valued education, despite the State's constant de-funding of it.

Also, there are dumbasses everywhere in "amercia" it would seem.