Yes, nobody wants downtime. It has been about 2 years since I've migrated everything to Azure. In that time, I've experience a handful of outages. All of them were under an hour in duration. Last night's outage was about 3 hours, and the longest I've experienced with Azure. If that's the way the service performs, I'll accept that. Why, you may ask. Prior to Azure I had been using Amazon EC2. In that time there were only 2 outages of note. The big problem there is that those EC2 outages were measure in DAYS not hours. I would much rather have 5 1 hour outages in a year that 2 multi-day outages every two years. Small outages can sometimes fly under the radar for me if they happen during off peak times, but outages measured in days mean you're in for some hurt.

Ya, is anything functional in that city?

You are absolutely correct. I don't see much difference, fundamentally, between whats happening here and if protesters showed up at my house after they found out I took a mortgage interest deduction, put a portion of my income into a tax deferred account, and leased a car through my business in order to lower my taxable income.

I recently traveled to France, England, and Ireland. I have a Sprint HTC One which Sprint unlocked for me in order to use a foreign SIM card while on my trip.

You will not need 4G, so do not concern yourself with that. I quickly discovered that their 3G speeds throughout the region easily and quite regularly surpassed 4G speeds I have measured here in the US on several providers.

My memory may be off on this a bit but I could swear, while running a speed test, that I was pulling down 20Mb/sec. I've yet to get that result on Sprint's 4G network. I recognize that Sprint is not the standard by which all others should be compared, but still... I was impressed and surprised.

If we're sure everything started as 50% matter and 50% anti-matter, and now we are nearly a pure matter universe, my uneducated guess would be that there is something in the nature of matter-antimatter collision that, in addition to creating energy, would also leave behind a small amount of residual matter. That could explain how over these billions of years, we are left with a mostly matter universe. If this has been proven impossible, please someone yell at me and tell me otherwise. I recall reading that they often generate antimatter in particle accelerators... have they ever done specific research on the results of matter-antimatter collisions?

I recently returned from the UK, with nothing but my mere magnetic strip AMEX card. I had no problem using it at hotels, restaurants, theaters. Perhaps they are a bit more accepting of the old school card within city centers.

Whats the point point in censoring something that clearly labelled as 18+?

Hopefully the South Park guys will replace those scenes with obvious 'censored' graphics and text that lampoon the government/entity that caused said scenes to be removed from the game. They are good for doing things like that.

I agree with you on the public transit experience, specifically with the nature of people they tend to employ. It seems as if these jobs are given away to people as some last ditch effort to try to keep them out of the legal system and/or our jails.

Imagine my shock the first day I arrived in London and had to interact with one of the service men behind the glass in one of the tube stations. He was helpful, well spoken, detailed, and treated me as well a maitre d' of a 5 star restaurant would. The difference in competency was stupefying. This may be just an isolated incident, but I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

I'm in Connecticut. I don't see what all the fuss is about. Ya, I've had to take out the snow blower a few more times this year than last year, but nothing happening here could be consider atypical. I understand the news it makes down south, as it has been lately in the Atlanta area, but this shouldn't be big news for New England. Up here, I think its just an opportunity for the local news broadcasters to drive up their rating, and for our governor to get some face time in front of the TV cameras to assure us that he's in charge of the situation.

Cutting out the middle man is not a crime, its an achievement.

What would be the problem if Ford or Honda sold directly to the consumer? Are you suggesting that it's anti-competitive to set the price of your own product? In a scenario without dealerships, there would still be competition... not between dealerships, but between manufactures instead. If you could only buy a Ford from Ford, and the only cars on the market were Ford, then there could be a problem, but there is no shortage of auto manufactures to keep the market competitive.

Fascinating

For all the things that it couldn't do (or neglected to do) properly, Internet Explorer has deserved all the negative criticisms it has amassed over its lifespan. The software was slow to adapt to a rapidly changing environment and in some cases it seemed as if it was stubbornly resistant to such adaptation. With that said, recent versions of IE are good browsers, much improved, just not enough to give people a reason to switch back. The brand had taken such a beating that using IE evokes an immediate negative response for most of us. All hands have abandoned that ship, and we've all grown comfortable with our Chrome/Firefox/etc. browsers that swooped in to save us.

Plenty of people out there are already using Google Search, Chrome, GMail, Hangouts, Google+, YouTube, Google DNS, Android and more. I can't imagine what additional information you'd risk exposing by using their Internet service as well. I suspect maybe they would be collecting data regarding your TV viewing habits as a result of this. After some thought, I think that I would welcome that collection of data if it were put to use. I have a hard time believing the accuracy of Nielsen ratings based on their results, or has taste in this country declined that precipitously? At the end of the day, I think its in Google's own interest that more people have fast as possible internet. The more bandwidth available, the more its users consume its products. In this case, its a win-win scenario.

And no one has shown one shred of evidence that Star Wars did not actually happen a long time ago in a galaxy far away.

Can't play Astro Chicken without them.