True enough. I have +-40k air miles this year. That number will *drastically* decrease next year if this crap keeps up. I'm tired of being treated like a criminal in the name of safety.

THIS is what I was wondering about -- just exactly what does he think he can do about a foreign web site, other than inveigh mightily against it? Demagogue....

I want to be paid extra for having to carry a crackberry. Evil geniuses turned a portable, always-on office/leash into a status symbol that actually makes people want them. I am in awe of this bit of corporate cat-belling.

That was our issue in both South Carolina and DC -- SC = Time-Warner, like it or not. When I got to Washington, your choice was Verizon. Before I left, Comcast was also available in my neighborhood. Gotta say, Verizon service was excellent, though "high speed", not so much....

Mmmm. Nope, not offended. I *am* an IT guy. Since my boss refers to himself as "head geek", I'd have a tough time getting upset by it. I'm the "virus geek" in our shop. What I resent is Best Buy stealin' our titles....

It's improved already -- in the two years we've been stationed here, we went from 512 to 1mb to 2mbps -- all for nearly the same price. I'm sure that won't happen in the US!

I'm in India. "High speed" is a shared 2mbps line.

Exactly. I thought it was gonna be about fat chicks.

Thanks for this link -- I'd never heard of the Hacker's Diet. I have a friend *COUGHbrother* who needs this information!

Head for Slackware. That's where all my friends hang their geek cred these days.

I moved my EEE 901 to 9.10 about three weeks before the final release. I was bored one day, and that just happened. I've never been happier with an OS. After the official release, I moved my desktop and my work laptop to 9.10. Zero issues. I mean, none, not "fewer than usual", none. The EEE was a clean install, the desktop was a fresh partition, and the work laptop was an upgrade over 9.04. Everything works -- more stuff on the EEE than worked in 9.04. Guess your mileage may vary.

Are you suggesting that Framingham, MA, /= Earth? Heretic!

Mmm. Backups. Now that I have FEBE for Firefox, I not only trust my backups, I can restore what's important quickly, too. You are correct, good backups are everything -- this data set has been across three computers and three OS this year, and is about to move to another on Tuesday. This machine will get my daughter's data set (much to her delight) because she has good backups. Good backups that are EASY TO RESTORE and require no special hardware other than a cheap external drive. In summary, I like having good backups. It makes my data portable. Especially if I can restore them easily. Have I said "backups" enough? OK, let's toss in a "test your backup solution" and one more "easy to restore".

Yeah, it won't happen. Neither will non-Windows computers. Or 6 hour batteries. That's science fiction. --written from a 2.2 lb netbook running Ubuntu 9.10 on a 20gb SSD. --who pays people to write that crap?

TOTALLY what I was thinking. Next think you know, the Looneys will be chunking rocks at Cheyenne Mountain...