How does the Tor Project get safe harbor? They're not an ISP.

In that case, it gets thrown out one step sooner, since they're even less involved than an ISP would be.

Ah, thanks.

[cryptic response]

Hooray! Congrats!

I've never had a CFL fail. I've been replacing incandescents with CFLs whenever a bulb burns out. My oldest CFL is 7 years old and my newest is a little under 1 year old.

Many of us are still living! Just a bit dispersed here and there.

IMHO all this tech is basically good, but I should point out that I also consider a large wooden horses to be basically good things, too. (They can be neat works of art, or convenient sources of fire wood.) That doesn't mean I'm saying you should wheel all the ones you find, through your city gates! There are other issues besides the utility value of wooden horses. It's the tech that should be celebrated, not necessarily all the products that use it. Tech and products are two very different things, even if related.

There's a pretty easy way to judge the ads for this stuff: what protocols does the product speak? Do you already have software in your repo that speaks that protocol?

And of course, you don't necessarily have to use someone else's service to get the device to work, right? (I'm not even saying you necessarily shouldn't use their service, but if you have to then the product is almost certainly garbage.)

Nice. "Darn it, this amusingly tiny-capacity obsolete tape drive isn't powering up. I must have forgotten to bring its .. uh .. [glance around suspiciously] battery. But I paid $800 for it in 1996! *sigh* Ok, TSA agent, you can have my tape drive.. and .. oh no! My ink jet printer isn't working either! You mean I forgot both batteries!? Dammit! So much for printing those colored pie charts on the plane for my .. uh .. presentation. Boy are your kids going to be happy Xmas morning. [glare slightly unconvincingly at TSA agent]"

[Later, on Xmas morning] "Here you go, Billy. You were a bad boy. I never loved you."

[But Billy turns out to be cool] "Whoa! I can salvage the head servo and reel motor from this tape drive, and build something nifty with my Arduino! OMG, does this printer have a stepper motor?"

I think this idea is getting up into the "three birds, one stone" territory.

Tried to read the first book. Barely literate drivel.

Sometimes people need a little help. Often (but not always!) they'll half-suspect the problem, and will prefix their remark with "is it just me, or..."

You didn't do that, but I'm going to be a pal and pretend you did, and then answer the question for you:

Yes, it's just you.

I say try because in a battle between a jet engine with the power to push 400 tons of steel into the sky VS a drone I'm going to put my money on the jet engine lasting long enough for them to turn around and land again.

You might want to rethink that after being reminded of jet airliners being brought down by birds - not an ounce of metallic content, just a few pounds of meat and soft lightweight bones - or the 747 which almost crashed after all four engines failed from ingesting some ash. (Fortunately, they happened to be relatively near an airport and were high enough to glide for over a hundred miles, which bought them just enough time to restart an engine while they had been preparing to ditch in the ocean, buying them enough time to limp to the nearest runway - although all four engines were damaged beyond repair.)

For that matter, the French Concorde which crashed in 2000 was destroyed by a single thin strip of metal, 17 inches long and just over an inch wide, less than four ounces: essentially, a slightly larger than average metal ruler. It didn't even go into an engine, it just burst a tire - violently enough that the ten pound lump of rubber ruptured the wing and number 5 fuel tank, causing the crash which killed everyone on board.

That was a single 4 oz strip of metal hitting a tire. A pound of bolts or nails will destroy the engine - or a metal drone engine that size.

Why do we still have these antiquated data caps?

To help find antiquated caching bugs!

Some of the stupid interviewing criteria that my colleagues and me [sic] had to deal with boggles my mind.

Ahh, reminds me of the Angry Aussie and his response to pointless interview questions:

For instance, there was the putz I had to see this week who thought he was being really clever. It seems as though someone gave him the book of Microsoft interview questions and he was eager to show off his new "knowledge". This style of interviewing gives you abstract questions that have no relationship whatsoever to the work you'll be doing. Or to the real world.

Proponents say they're trying to see how creatively you can think. Normal humans say it's a waste of time.

For the random people that use Orkut like others use Facebook, it really is not a lot of time to figure out what to do with potentially gigabytes of information. That holds particularly true for anyone that is not technically savvy.

How long does it take to slide over to Google Takeout and download all of your data?

A few minutes? An hour?

When Goog crushed Wave, I downloaded all my stuff in a matter of minutes. Couldn't really do much with it, but it lowered my White Hot Rage down to Red.