I'd say at least half of them have some kind of scene where panicked/ignorant locals ignore the medical experts and raid the quarantine centers. And usually it's one of those turning point moments in the narrative with disastrous consequences.

Which is kind of the problem, because it is trouble free so it's kind of easy to get complacent about them.

I kind of wish they would create cumulative update bundles that could be installed the old way or to machines with limited online capability. It's just not practical to track individual updates and I've found third party software that creates offline repositories to be kind of hit and miss.

I have a small client that hasn't run anything more than Microsoft Security Essentials for three years, mainly because they don't want to spend the money.

So far, I've only had to rebuild about 3 PCs in that time frame due to infection. They also got hit by crytolocker but at a weird time where it just made sense to reload the share directories from a recent backup because there hadn't been any changes to worry about between infection and last backup.

The controller feels that this is more or less an acceptable trade-off over time -- my labor cost to rebuild the PCs vs. the ongoing cost of AV.

All the stories I've read about this emphasize the borderline irrational decisions to send stuff like MRAPs to some small town whose biggest problems seem to be parking on the wrong side of the street and overdue library books. I think some of the real high-end hardware has gone to places like New York City where some kind of claim can be made for being an actual terrorism target.

What I'm curious about, though, is whether you could do any kind of analysis of hardware distribution vs. demographics to see if there was any large-scale logic to who got what or how much equipment.

Was equipment concentrated in areas of high concentrations of minorities? Areas considered at risk of significant rioting or civil insurrection? Any ties between equipment distribution and crime rate (which may be considered an indicator of civil insurrection)?

My guess is no to all of it, like most government free stuff programs it went with bureaucratic logic -- political considerations, places who were fast/good at filling out request forms, etc.

Tetris is so unrealistic.

The cheap 5 watt panels barely maintain an unloaded battery charge. In most common angles and lighting you're gonna get maybe 2w.

I use an only slight more expensive 15w panel and over a week it will bring my boat battery up from a mildly discharged state to fully charged. Worth the extra $75.

And is it the preferred brand of, well, drivers or passengers?

I don't know if it's a cause or an effect of our politically divided culture, but the bigger problem seems to be people's hyper-sensitive reactions to everything.

You can't disagree with someone spouting the conventional wisdom on many topics without screaming about race, gender, class, political orientation, etc.

Pretty much everything gets immediately turned into a "kill topic" where you're judged to be racist, homophobic, a Nazi, or some other person whose opinion and reasoned disagreement is to be suppressed, not debated.

I agree. I think they had a good thing going for quite a long time and HP's management just failed to see the value of this division and its now dying on the vine.

Dell N series is better than Procurve now and that's sad.

HP has made a business model around this with their Procurve networking equipment, offering for-life software updates and I think even in some cases advanced replacement of failed gear.

I've worked at a couple of places that were Cisco oriented that would buy two of everything instead of a support contract. It doesn't do anything for software updates, but their attitude was it was in some ways cheaper than SmartNet over time and for devices where they didn't use advanced functionality (like switches) their experience was that they didn't need them anyway, and if they did it made sense to buy a new after 3 years anyway.

Back ~15 years ago if you wanted Internet access in a business you pretty much had to get a T1 and almost always this connection was terminated with a Cisco router.

Nowadays nearly a lot of business Internet is delivered via DSL or Cable via Ethernet hand-off from some cheap device provided by the ISP. Even at places still using T1s its often a vendor-supplied Adtran.

Did this change cost Cisco much business, or did they just make it up and then some on larger routers at providers, large customers and places willing to pay a premium for Cisco LAN equipment?

I think there are some seriously cheap geeks out there with good T-mobile signal who have decided that unlimited data via cellular is both a better value and maybe even better throughput than whatever's available via a wall jack where they live.

So they tether, maybe even bridging it to their home LANs as their only internet access.

Sounds like a pain in the ass and unreliable as hell, but maybe they've got dedicated hardware which eliminates some of the unreliable part (external antenna, device dedicated to tethering to a dedicated wifi bridge, etc).

...if you've got a cheap head, buy a cheap helmet.

Given the time between IPv6 design and the eventual global adoption of it and abandonment of IPv4, will the broader adoption of IPv6 reveal problems addressed in a future revision?

I'll admit to being willfully ignorant of IPv6 other than seeing it as enormously more complicated than IPv4, trying to solve too many problems at once. I sometimes wonder if maybe IPv6 didn't appear so complicated and different that adoption might have been increased.

Couldn't they just have added a couple of extra bytes to IPv4 to come up with something that worked like IPv4? I also wonder about an addressing scheme like IPX, where a single network address covers an entire broadcast domain and node addresses are MAC addresses plus the network address. IPX network addresses were only 8 bytes, maybe that wouldn't be future proof enough (4.2 billion networks). I'm not talking about IPX as a protocol, just the system for addressing.

The advantage is relative simplicity (no need for DHCP, network addresses are discovered and the rest is built-in), broadcast domains can scale arbitrarily large without needing to renumber -- sure you can start out every network with a /16, but often they don't and there are complications in organizations just arbitrarily shifting masks past /24, such as running into other networks in the local routing domain.

Since node addresses are locally determined, ISPs would need to only assign a network address which would allow for basically unlimited public network addresses to each subscriber.

Are vacuum packages that tight?

I would have always thought yes -- I have a Food Saver and it works miracles for food storage, especially meat in the freezer. But I could swear I've read that drug dogs smell right through them, even double-bagged, which seems to be kind of weird. I would assume that holding a decent vacuum would prevent anything from escaping.