My answer to these conspiracy idiots, aside from ignoring them, is to look at the numbers. The moon landings required INTERNATIONAL cooperation of thousands of people, if not tens of thousands, from around the world. So what you're saying is that all of these people agreed to tell the same story for five decades, and no documentary evidence has been uncovered in that time that shows this conspiracy being set up. Look at Snowden, the Pentagon Papers, Manning, etc.: governments CANNOT KEEP SECRETS.

Obligatory plug: my wife was the final segment of the 2008 Mythbusters episode that explored that myth, she bounces a laser off the moon shot through a 3.5 meter telescope at Apache Point Observatory. There are five retroreflectors on the moon, three from Apollo and two on Russian Lunokhod rovers, and there's a clear signal difference between hitting a reflector and bouncing off the bare lunar surface. I also did a ten minute video on this program at waynewestphotography dot com.

Of course, this just means that some incredible hackers were able to fool the software that my wife uses to show different results while the laser is shining, depending upon where the laser is pointed. The Apollo laser reflectors were aimed specifically at the Earth, the Russian ones are quasi-random as there was no way to know where the rovers' batteries would fail, so their final orientation is not known and produces a noticeably weaker signal.

I've been in the habit of putting my phone in silent mode when I go to bed, the vibrate mode doesn't disturb me as I have an air filter giving me a goodly amount of white noise.

Unfortunately the information doesn't look reasonable. I shut down all apps, we'll see what it says in the AM. Tomorrow night I might do the airplane mode test.

Sadly, no. I've downloaded several podcast apps and even bought a couple, to no avail. I live in an area where once I'm 5 miles from home I have no signal, thus I have zero interest in streaming. So I'm dusting off my programming skills and intend to write my own with no support for streaming. A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do.

I don't own an Android device, I tried using it on my Nook HD+ and didn't like it, but I have friends who own Android phones. They like them, good for them. It seems to me that Apple watches Android to see what shakes out as a good improvement and then implements it. For me, I don't like the security problems with Android malware (not that iPhone is impregnable) and there were some usability things that I just didn't like. I switched to an Apple ecosystem in 2008 when I just got sick and tired of updating Windows machines every week or more, I like the ease of use.

The one thing that I really wish Apple had added in iOS 8 was the ability to turn on the hotspot on the swipe-up screen. To me, that would have been an awesome feature.

I wonder if you upgraded on your phone or via iTunes? I have about 4 gig free on my 64 gig 4S and it upgraded fine and doesn't bog down too much, seems to be mainly when I'm hitting the home button and it's zooming back to the icon display. I probably don't have more than 100 or so pictures.

I upgraded my iPad Mini Retina on Friday and it was kinda weird. After it was done updating and rebooted, it went into recovery mode. I did a restore from iTunes and it came up as an uninitialized iPad under 8, another restore took care of putting my apps back in place. I was afraid it was bricked and that I'd have to drive to El Paso to get it serviced, fortunately I didn't have to make the trip. The thing that I found very curious was that my iPhone 4S updated seamlessly.

Performance seems the same. I love the one swipe delete for email and the ability to receive iMessages on both it and my phone at the same time. And I ordered an iPhone 6 yesterday, my 4S is out of warranty and my wife wants it.

I updated my 64 gig 4S on Friday, and it's been stable and crash-free. I especially liked the Health app as it's accessible from the lock screen, assuming emergency responders know that it's there and how to get to it. I have an immune disorder so this is of interest to me, obviously not to everyone. I really like the one motion swipe delete for mail, and the Siri voice dictation in real-time is pretty cool. The funny thing is that I had more trouble upgrading my new iPad Mini Retina than I did my 4S. One other thing that was interesting, and I need to verify this: I was listening to some podcasts yesterday and when I got home, before syncing, they were already marked as played on my iMac. I'm not sure what's up with that as I try to have my phone to only sync music and podcasts via cable.

Issues: first and biggest, battery life. I noticed this yesterday when I got up and last night when I went to bed, I logged that my battery was at 66%. Eight hours later, 54%ish. I already turned off most of the background stuff that eats juice that was posted when iOS 7 came out, so I'm not sure what's up. I'm going to try putting it in airplane mode when I go to bed tonight to see if that stops whatever is eating it. Also, I'm still pissed at the way they screwed up the podcast app when 7 came out last year. I need to get back to studying Objective C/Swift and write my own.

That's about what I was considering. When I was working I'd store my off-site backups at work and rotate them every month. Now that I'm not, rotating them at my wife's office works just fine. If I ever get to the point that I can afford two enclosures, I have a friend in Colorado who pays for outrageous bandwidth that I could probably host the second unit with.

That has not been my observation over many years of observation, and we started watching closely after the news of this came out months ago. Including when our dog is off the leash in the back yard.

I wonder if the study was peer reviewed.

The advantage of tape is capacity, the advantage of Bluray is cost. I used to use tapes extensively for my home systems, but hard drive growth just blew past affordable tape capacity, so I abandoned it. Even at its theoretical max density of 128 gig, it'd take 16 discs to back up my system. Not worth it for me.

I use an iMac with 2TB internal, I keep a 3TB external for Time Machine backups, and every couple of months or before we go out of town for any length of time I swap it with its companion at my wife's work place. The problem is that I'd like to go to 3-4TB internal, at which point my process breaks down. I freed up some space recently and now have about 40 gig free, but there were times when I had less than 10.

I think I'm going to get 3x1 TB USBs and move my photo archive to it, my pix take up almost 400 gig, then just do full copies when I plan to rotate my backups. I don't think I'm ready for NAS yet, though I am looking in to it.

I have the original trilogy on Laserdisc from before Lucas starting mucking with it.

I saw a bumpersticker in Colorado a few day ago that said "Buy a gun, piss off a liberal." I immediately thought of "I'm not a conservative and I own guns. Questions?" My friend came up with "Pro-gun, anti-NRA".

Except Kickstarter is a division of Amazon. If you run a Kickstarter and it funds, KS takes a percentage of your pledges, as does Amazon for being the funding source.

It'll never die.

I wonder if the people who crafted the statement knew that their own IT department probably/hopefully uses VPN regularly?