I bought a Synology NAS and set it up with appropriate file sharing (and the Cloud Station Dropbox-alike). I now have my own personal cloud with several TB of storage, and it's all under my control. Tell me again why I'd want a teensy little OneDrive?

BTW, I like my Synology but almost any other modern NAS will give you the same features. Pick one you like and free yourself from relying on Microsoft/Google/Dropbox's good graces and government backups.

That's not quite the same though, as the tests weren't in overclocked or otherwise out-of-spec scenarios. The reviewers unboxed the drives, plugged them in, and ran some benchmarks. There's not a legitimate reason why an off the shelf unit in a stock operating environment shouldn't have similar benchmarks to the one the reviewer got.

I bought a Leaf Plus powered antenna, and its max power draw is .75 watts. My Apple TV has a 6W power supply, so it can't draw more than that even when it's turned on. For the price of a DVR, I can buy a metric buttload of Netflix, Hulu Plus, and iTunes content.

You seem to think that everyone cutting the cord is turning to your own unusual setup. Most of us are getting (in our opinion better) replacements that happen to use far less power, which is what this whole conversation is about.

It's a scam and they're liars. It's really as clear and un-subtle as that. When they deliver a review unit, the expectation is that it will be representative of the products that end users will by buying. They'll have gone over it with a fine toothed comb, sure, to make sure it doesn't have any obvious defects. But the nature of a review is that the reviewer will be getting the same product that you and I will. Without that implicit contract, the whole concept of a review is utterly worthless.

In fact, Kingston and friends burned their reviewers' reputations, not just their own. If I buy something because Joe Smith says he liked it and it turns out to be a piece of junk, I'll never trust Joe Smith's opinion again. If I'd written about one of these units - particularly for a major review site - I'd be raising holy hell, warning all of my readers, and distancing myself from it as far as possible. It'd be along the lines of "Kingston lied to me and I passed it along to you. For that, I am very sorry, and I will never review another of their products." and updating the original review to add a giant red disclaimer and explanation at the top.

This isn't subtle. It's a flat-out lie to customers and can only reasonably be seen as such.

As opposed to the Comcast service I'm stuck with, which had a $150 setup fee (that I eventually got them to waive, after a month) and a $150 a month recurring charge, and data caps, and anti-net-neutrality lobbying, and I can't run a home server (so something like a Synology disk station directory sync daemon is technically against their TOS), and you can bet they're devouring my data like it was coke off a hooker's ass.

If I could pay Google $150 extra to not deal with Comcast and their attendant misery, I'd click the "buy it now" button so fast that I'd break my trackpad. Maybe they meant "free, as in liberated from Comcast bullshit"?

Nope. It's under the CDDL, which isn't GPL-compatible and prevents ZFS from being distributed as part of the Linux kernel. If it could, it probably would've been adopted by the masses years ago.

My last DSL modem was a bridge and so didn't really care about higher level stuff like IP. Googling for "dsl modem ipv6" turned up quite a few hits, though.

Major leadership shakeups in one of the major American political parties isn't "news for nerds"? It's not "stuff that matters"?

Windows XP can support IPv6 - probably configured when their ISP adds its setup to the installer CD they mail to new customers. Every modern OS supports it natively and decently.

The migration will suck for dumb embedded devices that can't be upgraded, but most of those are probably reaching EOL anyway. I'd absolutely, 100%, not buy any new devices that don't support native IPv6 today.

Where "almost completely out" means, from the article, that:

Technically, the naysayers are right: they're not "out". They're just at the "you can buy two gallons of gas per month" stage. Realistically, no one can get it and certainly not enough at a time to do anything meaningful with it, but there's technically still supply left.

...he posts on a written-text-only bulletin board.

OK, you're right about "know" and bring up good points. I think we can reasonably say that it was exceedingly unlikely that there was advanced life in the pre-Earth solar system, though, because of the state things were in at the time. It's taken us approximately 4.5 gigayears to get from barren to our current ecosystem, and that's a much longer span than from when the sun ignited and the planets began coalescing to the hypothesized impact. Not only was that early time period much shorter, but it was also much more violent. Collisions were everyday occurrences as the inner planets were bombarded from rock and comets, which is how they gained their mass (and oceans and atmospheres) in the first place.

Life finds a way, sure! But the early solar system was a pretty deadly place with planet-sterilizing events happening regularly. I'd suspect it would've been hard for life to get a toehold long enough to claw its way up to something recognizable as living, i.e. not just self-replicating chemical reactions but actual growth, reproduction, adaptation, etc. It very well might have happened. It just probably didn't.

Which still doesn't stop me from looking up at the night sky and wondering "what if".

If the theory is correct, then Earth was created by a collision of two hunks of rock, neither of which was the Earth in any meaningful sense. I'd imagine that everything we have is substantially different from either of the original masses: different surface (because the old ones were utterly scrambled), different orbits (because it seems unlikely that orbit.a + orbit.b == orbit.either_one), different compositions (because TFA says they were made out of slightly different stuff).

It's not like the Earth was chugging along happily until something came along to disturb it. The Earth as we know it was created from other things at the moment of impact. Both young worlds were alien, and so neither one really is.

On a marginally related note, I know the solar system was way too young at the time for there to have been anything you could reasonable call "life". Still, I think about what if there was life on either or both of those bodies, and it was intelligent enough to look up into the early, hostile sky and wonder what that brightly glowing, daily growing circle in the sky was. Were little animals awakened in terror at the sound of their world ending? Did an ancient family hug each other one last time and close their eyes as the tidal earthquakes began?

That works, too. OpenSSL took the route of using the macro names everywhere (calling them BIO_*), which kind of makes sense because printf wouldn't necessarily have the behavior documented in a contributor's printf(3) man page. That could be a whole 'nother world of hurt.

No, you don't. If you have a broken printf on a platform, you write code like:

#ifdef BROKEN_PRINTF
int GOOD_printf(...) {
/* Work around the breakage */
}
#else
#define GOOD_printf printf
#endif

GOOD_printf("Hello, world!\n");

so that you've encapsulated the damage to one place in your codebase. You don't sprinkle #ifdef BROKEN_PRINTF a thousand different places in 20 modules if you don't want to go insane trying to keep track of it.

The OpenSSL devs aren't getting grief for writing complex code. They're getting grief for writing unnecessarily complex code by an order of magnitude, and they've earned every bit of it.