If you think your current POTS line is circuit-switched, or will work if your local exchange is disconnected from the network, think again.

A bigger concern is that while POTS isn't as robust as, say, cellular or VoIP against some sorts of damage it *will* work during a prolonged power outage (as long as the generator at the local exchange stays fuelled). VoIP won't, at all, unless there's power at the subscribers home. Cellular even if you can keep your cellphone battery topped off somehow, I wouldn't bet on power to the cell towers being as robust as to a local POTS exchange.

Moderately Mediocre is 12 major releases beyond Almost Awesome, so we'll see it in late 2019.

I'm pretty sure that you don't really know where the physical hardware using the intermediate IP addresses shown in the traceroute actually was. Reverse DNS tends to show who owns it, *not* which country it's in. And geoip services are doing well if they can identify the right country in Europe, let alone anything more accurate than that.

Even if you did see routing like that, and it really did go to the cities you claim, it still wouldn't be that odd - when routing is optimized at all it's optimized for cost, rather than distance. For long-haul the two tend to go together, but for relatively short distances in the well-connected first world they don't.

I think what you're looking for is a purse. Pick a design and a colour and own it.

A separate set of solar panels could be used to power / charge things other than a laptop, and a set of solar panels connected by a cable would let you sit in the cool shade while using the laptop during the day, rather than having to sit out in the sun (where it's hot and you can't see the screen).

Assuming it's real, which I have some doubts about - a couple of square feet of solar panels provides enough power to drive four or five laptops?

It's not malware. It's just a webpage.

Gullibility isn't OS-specific.

"Executive Summary: Any measure for stopping spam must ensure that all non-spam messages reach their intended recipients."

That's impossible to do, other than by delivering all messages to their intended recipients - whether that be spam, malware, or legitimate email.

The EFF want to ban your spam filters - they consider them to be "censorship", and unacceptable (unless there's never, ever a legitimate email accidentally blocked for any user - which isn't possibly, even theoretically).

http://w2.eff.org/spam/position_on_junk_email.php

(Old document, but still their current position).

http://www.pgpi.org/pgpi/project/scanning/

It's partly because they're big, but it's also because they're cheap.

If they used fraud or deception to install malware to take control of peoples machines to, say, send spam, that'd be solidly criminal.

Sending spam probably costs the owner of the compromised machine much less than bitmining does (in additional energy costs, cooling costs and possibly accelerated degradation of the GPU, possibly leading to failure). I'm not seeing how the same standards don't apply.

One that says much more about Bob Ferguson than it does T-Mobile.

... spreadsheets kill people.

Ban Excel!

Can't argue with any of that.

But you don't have to choose just one of those. Virtualization is easy. Pick the best of each OS.

I have an OS X laptop, and I'm quite happy with the UI and most of the basic desktop apps (other than Safari, which is the poster child for "QA gone to shit").

But I do a lot of my work in an ubuntu instance that's running in vmware - it has a partially shared filesystem so I can work in ubuntu while editing the files I'm working on in an OS X native editor like sublime text if I want to. Or I can run emacs/X11 on ubuntu, displaying on the OS X desktop.

I even have a Windows instance, for those rare times when I really need to use Word or IE or Minesweeper.

Google offers free services. People will attempt to abuse them. That's no great surprise, nor is it specific to Google.

When someone abuses Googles services in a way that's a threat to other users there are only two ways to mitigate the incident. The best, by *far*, is for Google to stop the abusive behaviour. The other is for the affected parties to block access to (some subset of) Google. Those are really your only options.

Google is (based on externally visible behaviour) worse at mitigating abuse up-front by discouraging attempts to abuse their service, and at responding to reports of abuse, than other companies - and this appears to be an intentional choice by Google, based on their corporate culture. The tradeoff there is that people are more likely to just block Google servers, in response to the never ending trickle of abusive behaviour.

That's Google's problem. Well, actually, Google don't generally appear to think any of this is a problem at all - and *that's* the real problem as far as the rest of the Internet is concerned.