It's nice to see a lot of people have rediscovered antenna TV. Since the digital changeover (and the recession), I've seen a good number of aerials sprout up in my neighborhood, something basically dead in the 90s.

The question is, how long can that last? The network affiliates are ever more addicted to their retransmission consent money from the pay-providers. Hell, Comcast owns NBC and the other main networks have heavy ties into the paid TV world. Several of the network executives have already threatened to go paid-only in light of the Aereo decision. There will be a lot more temptation to go dark when the FCC lets them reverse-auction 'their' spectrum to internet/mobile providers in a year or two. Besides that... people like me who watch antenna TV instead of paying for cable are either poor or cheapskates. In neither case, anyone's favorite target market demographic.

It will be a slow shutdown, with all the affiliate agreement model, NFL contracts, and the like. But I think that, in a decade, the free OTA world will pretty much be PBS and maybe a couple of infomercial channels.

Seriously... lacking PAE is really, really rare. The only chips released in the even semi-modern era that didn't have PAE it were a handful of Pentium M laptops (and why Intel did that, I'll never know). I do have one laptop that qualifies. It should probably be retired, but when the Ubuntus wouldn't support it, it was an excuse to play with BSD for old-times'-sake.

The problem with Fukushima was that "due to the earthquake/tsunami" is not some unforseeable 'force majure' matter.

The reactors were designed to survive a certain degree of earthquake and even a certain degree of tsunami. They were entirely incapable of surviving the 2011 tsunami (gensets barely above sea level).

But, the 2011 tsunami was *not*, and I repeat *not* unforseeable. It was a smaller tsunami than that exact same coastline experienced in June of 1896. Well within recorded modern history.

If you engineer something to survive everything that's happened in recorded history and stretch your imagination some to encompass possible events marginally greater than that, I'll give you credit for trying. If you engineer something that will fail, in a catastrophic mode, in case of a natural disaster that has actually happened within the last 70 years (from when Fukushima was designed)? You've engineered failure.

The advanced Asian countries have faster and cheaper mostly-fiber networks than the Europeans, deal with more natural disasters than they do, and once you get more than a kilometer out of central-business-district Seoul/Tokyo/Osaka, the air is thick with wires everywhichaway.

'That's what they do in Europe' isn't necessarily perfection, either.

As others from the area point out, these guys have a track record of big dream-can't implement. "Lawrence Freenet", "Community Wireless Corp", "Wicked", etc. Spotty customer service record at best. Several different schemes to try to beg money out of city hall.

The reason this rinky-dink stuff keeps working? The town is desperate. Highly educated, highly tech-savvy. But, the local cable provider was owned for years by the local newspaper. They had bandwidth caps in place 15 years ago! And not a 'throttle' if you went over. A 'holy crap $300 bill' if you went over. The cable company got sold a few years back, but it's historically been bad enough to make you wish TWC/Cox/Comcast would take over. AT&T is the incumbent telco, but only pulled U-Verse to a couple neighborhoods before stopping.

I put in my $10, expecting that it's a scam and I won't see anything as a result. Consider it my sign of complaint. But, I used a one-time credit card number to send the $10... that's how little I trust these guys.

Hint... the college curriculum was *always terrible* in that sense. Do you think your typical 1967 ME/EE grad from Oklahoma State was designing or producing something practical or profitable in school? 'Project-based learning' wasn't even a thing.

He got hired anyway by Honeywell or General Dynamics or Bendix or TI or whoever. And, not uncommonly, retired from them (or their successor firms) a few years ago.

This was an inevitable step once we went down the path of allowing OTA broadcasters to start demanding payments for retransmission on cable (originally "Community Antenna TV"). That was a stupid step to begin with... you're sending an unencrypted signal into my house... why do you care how I get it or if I let a middleman bring it to me? It is also inevitable once the broadcasters started getting bought by pay-TV companies (Disney, Comcast, etc).

For FOX, though, I don't think their #1 TV property (a little thing called the NFL) is going to be real happy at all with them becoming 'yet another cable station'.

Any of us with a /. UID under 15,000 or so were here before logins (since there were that many of us who signed up the first few days).

What makes me feel old is that I'm working on the same floor of the same building I was in 1998, back when I first saw Slashdot and happiness was a warm DEC Alphastation.

I'll believe the "10 hour battery life and 1 month of standby" line once real independent reviewers have had them in their hands for a couple of weeks/months. I've lived through enough decades of oversold battery promises, from Apple and everyone else, to buy it from the press release.

Among other things, 14th Amendment, Equal protection clause.

It's called free-ridership.

The US Constitution says that California can't keep out any American, and has to treat them the same as people who were already there. Basically immediately.

If California implements non-deny universal coverage, healthy people will choose to work in states without health care mandates. Then, when they get a cancer or other diagnosis, they hop the first plane to California and establish residence.

Virtually all countries have a medical exam as a part of immigration. Unless you want to amend the US Constitution so that California can deny access to incomers who already have medical conditions, it's an intractable problem. Home insurance can work on a state-by-state basis (the house doesn't move). Even car insurance can (the car moves, but accidents are discrete events that happen in one location or another). Medical insurance doesn't.

Cursive writing, as we know it, is an artifact of now mostly gone writing technologies. The fountain pen, dip pen, and even split-nib quill, had certain technical limitations. For an even line, you needed to avoid unnecessary starts and stops. These pens also wrote almost entirely with downstrokes.

If you have cursive training deep in your subconscious, take out a fountain pen and start writing for a few minutes. Cursive is almost inevitable. And, it's a lot of fun. But, without the technical restriction, it's not necessarily a natural development.

If it had been possible to find a broadband adapter for less than I paid for the console (on closeout), I'd probably still have it hooked up as a hacktoy.

I'm certainly a smaller town person at heart. Any smaller town of decent size has some IT jobs (hospital, school district, governments, whatever the major employers are).

The problem is that there isn't some vast pool of IT jobs available. You can't necessarily get exactly what you want, and if you do go unemployed for a while, there may not be an IT job at all for a while. Oh, yeah, and the pay is crap compared to big city wages.

On the flip side, houses in some smaller towns are coastal-jaw-droppingly cheap (quite functional houses go for $50k, sometimes less, in my part of Kansas).

With the low cost of living, if you save up well in the good years, you can live on near-minimum-wage jobs for a year or two looking for the next rare opportunity.

People certainly had the idea by the end of that generation. Apple's ADB standard for mice, keyboards, and supposedly other I/O was rolling by the late 80s. Texas Instruments, one of the worst offenders on the list (although most TI-99s either had no expansions or the expansion box) had a remarkably USB-like bus called HexBus lined up for the next generation of desktops they were working on when they pulled the plug on the home computer line in '84.