I recently moved and had CC for the previous year I was in my last place. I used a vpn almost all the time and my line stayed up pretty much 100%.

this year when I moved, I transferred CC to my new place and I continue to run a vpn. I now notice, for some reason, that after a few hours, I get a loss of ping to anything. if I stop my vpn, the default router is still unpingable. what 'fixes' it is to reboot the cable modem (and my access pfsense router, which then gets a new dhcp primary addr) and then things are good again for a few hours.

not sure if this is related, but if I don't use a vpn, the line stays up for days and weeks at a time. when I use a vpn, I get a few hours at a time.

might not mean a thing, but then again, it might. I can't quite tell yet. what I am planning on doing is designing/building a reboot/test loop so that my line will stay up even if I'm not home to notice that it went down.

I had to do that kind of thing with pacbell dsl about 10+ yrs ago (their alcatel, aka crash-catel modem was at fault back then; but same thing happened - I'd lose connectivity and only a reboot of the modem would bring it back again).

its not convenient but if this keeps my line alive, sigh, well, this is what I will have to do.

The cameras like that already exist - all that's needed is adding an accelerometer to one to detect the shot being fired.

Actually it turns out that is generally true according to the recent CDC study. (I don't know about an actual cover-up, but clearly these stories are not being reported on.)
From the conservative angle:
http://www.gunsandammo.com/pol...
Same thing from a progressive angle:
http://www.slate.com/articles/...

Interesting how both sides were basically surprised when we all just sat down to really look at the problem. They both had a spin to it, but nothing really fit the dialog from either side.

Yeah, and when you personally see the TOS model it actually is very crude. ...they had no idea that the film prints would be scanned for high-def TV eventually.

When I saw it around 2008 I had two thoughts:
1) Why is something so iconic being given such outcast treatment in the basement of the gift shop? Yes it wasn't actually a spacecraft, but still deserving of attention compared to some random ejection seat or circuit board designed for a space probe.
2) It was really crude.. Basic hardware-store type materials were used. That weird screen-door protector perforated metal with the two different sized holes that was popular in the '60s and '70s... The body of it was mostly just plain surface, maybe wood or something easily workable.

Exactly, some people will adopt the latest style and interface. But most will not, and still have to get their normal jobs done. Computer literacy is something that shouldn't be taken for granted. Why should a company have to keep retraining people to do the same things they have been doing successfully? Not a good business proposition.

The interoperability is no longer an argument in favor of Microsoft. It was always a sham, but just happened to work because everyone was running Microsoft products i.e. Office 97 or similar for about 15 years. When docx et.al. got forced on us, then compatibility got more complicated but was fine as long as you got the plug-ins or whatever within the MS family. But never was this about interoperability, it was simply monopoly that happened to work well for most people. Now it isn't necessarily true anymore, people are expecting web-ready documents, or better ways to collaborate, control changes, etc. Office never really did that very well and there isn't a single dominant player on that front that I'm aware of.

Seems like some very rational long-term thinking to me to make the investment in Linux now. For an institution like a government organization or university, etc. 15 years is nothing, or rather that is exactly the point. Linux will be still be available in a familiar and stable form without a forced 'upgrade', but with reasonable security patches and hardware support. Microsoft, apparently, will not provide that anymore. It is a shame, because all fanaticism aside, that is why people chose Windows in the past; it was generally familiar and ran legacy stuff way past its prime. No longer is this the case, so screw 'em.

Thanks, that's a useful summary/contrast between the two models, especially the second page.

Its a pity that we have to rely on one guy changing out all of that hardware and can't scale the changeover with the population as we do the user base.

I mean, really?

That's missing the biggest piece of the ApplePay announcement; in-app purchase support at below-card-present rates for the merchant, without having Apple as a direct participant in the payment chain. That's absolutely massive and has far more potential to be a game changer.

Its the same reason that when you go to a shopping mall, even though presence in the mall lends an air of "respectability" to the stores within the mall, even if you bought and then used a mall-wide gift card, the property management company isn't under any responsibility to make sure that an individual store ships you your purchases.

If only the Gigafactory could figure out some way to store electrical energy until its needed. That'd be awesome! Not really something they're equipped for though, I guess...

Of course not. But you give the right answer immediately.

Exactly. Embargo is a convenient scapegoat - it lets the government to explain away harsh life and crackdowns by an ongoing conflict, "us vs them", "everything for the victory". Remove it, and it makes that much harder for them to maintain that. Long term, it will accelerate the inevitable collapse of the dictatorship and the transition to something saner. If Castros are smart, they will do what Chinese and Vietnamese elites did, and head the transition rather than trying to resist it, so as to reap the maximum benefits. If not, there will be another revolution.

Either way, all that embargo does is delay that process. So it hurts the people of Cuba, not its government.

The embargo started before the Cuban missile crisis (in fact, many historians believe that it was the extreme hostility of US towards Cuba after the revolution that pushed the latter towards Soviets). In any case, the notion that if the embargo is lifted, Cuba would rebuild the missile bases, just defies any common sense. It was not their bases to begin with, and if someone else would want to rebuild them today, the embargo makes it easier not harder (because it takes that much less to pay to Cuba for them).

If you seriously consider the Black Book of Communism to be the "best estimates for communist regimes killing people", you're either deluded or retarded. Heck, even if you take the book at its face value, even then it counts "victims of communism" - and by this they mean anyone who has died due to e.g. starvation during a famine, regardless of whether said famine was artificially induced or not (and Soviet Russia had plenty natural ones in the aftermath of its Civil War). For the actual killing estimates, they tend to take the highest figures from the sources that are basically pure guesswork, like Solzhenitsyn's books.

The embargo is by US on Cuba. If US truly wanted to lift it, it could just do that. The fact that it is not lifted because "Cuba does something" means that US doesn't really want to lift it, either.

Which is stupid, because Cuba is as communist as it is only because of that embargo. Hell, look at Vietnam: a country that US actually went to wage war in, with numerous civilian casualties, and now? They're rapidly catching up with China on that whole capitalism business, and you can actually talk to a Vietnamese guy on the Internet and ask him what he thinks (and tell him what you think).