Meanwhile, other providers are testing 10_G_bps FTTD (fibre to the desktop) for deployment, because they see the future isn't in cable TV but in providing TCP/IP (Internet, basically) connectivity. That is 10x the bandwidth any one PC you can buy off the shelf can handle without adding in a 10GbE server network card. Yes, ten GIGABITS PER SECOND over epon/dpon.

AT&T and Comcrap are just whining and clawing because they know the future is here (streaming video on demand from providers that are NOT THEM) and they don't want it. They should do what my employer is doing and embrace the ISP side of the business as their meat and potatoes and treat cable video as gravy. Cable TV is not only a zero-growth industry, but a dying industry.

Trees being uprooted by sinkholes tend to be falling into the hole, not away from it. It's hard to see in the photo, but that tree looks like it's had most, but not all leaves blown off it. As for where the ejecta vanished to, it looks like where it vanished to is the area immediately around the crater. We don't have any sort of before and after picture or a picture of another part of the same wooded area, but the part that we can see seems to be all dirt except for where there are taller trees. It might be the case that there's normally nothing but bare dirt visible, or it might be the case that all the ground covering vegetation is covered in the thick layer of ejected dirt. There also seem to some loose, recently deposited, rocks outside the crater.

The part where you said "If the Soviet Union had managed LEO or the moon, do you think they would not have used it?" is the confusing part. It's confusing because you seem to have written it from a parallel universe where the Soviet Union never "managed LEO". If by "managed" you meant using taking command of LEO militarily, then the sentence in question is a tautology and one wonders why you even wrote it.

". If somebody is using GPL code and refuses to issue source, it's cut and dried, guilty."

Wrong.

If you implement a web server, an e-commerce service, or anything involving = GPLv2-based projects but you do not distribute the binaries then you are under NO obligation to release the source code. That requirement only arises if you DISTRIBUTE binaries derived from the = GPLv2-licensed source code.

GPLv3 changes things a bit but that doesn't seem to be the issue here.

Firefox is becoming a real pain in the ass when it comes to certs. I can see displaying a "ZOMG!!! WARNING!!!" when trying to load a low-bit cert, but it fails completely, which makes it unusable for managing more and more enterprise appliances, some of them being brand new. One could go to each and every appliance and LOM module and generate a new high-bit cert but if you've got enough of them in your data center it's a royal pain in the ass to do so.

The solution? Use any browser other than firefox.

"Straight physics," prior art, obviousness, all have never prevented a patent from being issues.

(sigh)
This is the comment I was responding to:
Think of it this way: Imagine the entire planet heated up by 20C, we wouldn't expect to see any permanent ice outside of Antarctica. (The North Pole might get some seasonal ice, but the much warmer oceans would melt it fairly quickly.) Now, with all of the oceans that much warmer, think how much additional water vapor would make it into the atmosphere. When the additional water vapor ends up over the South Pole, it will be cold enough for it to freeze and fall as snow. As the snow accumulates, it compacts into ice and we end up with a LOT more ice at the South Pole.

So: Less ice everywhere but Antarctica due to global warming, but a lot more ice in Antarctica due to global warming.

But the point is, when there was LESS ice, it was because of global warming. Now that there is MORE ice, it's because of global warming, per the original comment I replied to.

Yes. There is less ice in some areas due to global warming and more ice in other areas due to global warming.

OK. Maybe you should tell all the scientist this. Be sure to copy Algore as well.
See, they seem to think that the first thing to go is the polar ice. That's why they keep measuring it. See, a few years ago, a lot of the ice melted, and we were told that it was because of global warming. Now the ice is back and growing, and we are told it's because of global warming.

And that is my entire point. No matter what the symptoms are, it's always a symptom of global warming.

Also, if it's colder in Antarctica and warmer in Hawaii, that's not really a sign of global warming. That's a sign of global nothing because the average temperature remains constant.

That would be comment I was responding to:
So much freshwater from melting glaciers that sea level isn't even level anymore, and some people still don't want to believe there might be a climate problem.

The article you linked to didn't say that Tesla drive units fail after a year. It said that the warranty used to be 8 years or 125,000 miles and that they've just extended it. There were a few anecdotes provided, but the article itself admitted that the source was inherently biased. So, basically, car parts wear out and some cars are defective from the factory. True for cars whether they're gasoline, diesel, LPG, electric, etc.

So if there's less ice, it's because of global warming. But if there's more ice, it's because of global warming.

Just curious, if global warming were not a thing, what would the ice caps be doing?

I'm sorry, you're attacking Musk because car parts wear out eventually? And he's extending the warranty for some of those parts?

This is sort of a confusing sentence. The Soviet Union _did_ manage LEO in just about every way you can "manage" LEO. They also got probes, but not people, to the moon.

Cloud backup is great for a one-man show when all you back up is a handful of files.

If you have more than a few employees and have to back up terabytes of data and have custom applications which require a day or two minimum to install and configure and data in multiple places, and downtime costs you hundreds, thousands, or more per hour, cloud backup services quickly become an epic fail - plus you need to worry about bandwidth caps with crappy ISPs.

Other backup solutions become more important - for low-budget IT a handful of large external hard drives swapped out daily and taken off-site is a workable (if not ideal) solution, but the best solution is still a tape drive - and replace the tapes after a few rotations. Remember when downtime costs you significant money, having full backups with a rapid restore times becomes critical.