This is an old house ( 100 years ) where I simply can't lay ethernet cables everywhere. So my girlfriend, with her laptop, is on WiFi, over a NetGear repeater in a 220V socket in... the bathroom. The rest of the devices which need internet access are on ethernet: the WiFi router is hooked to a 16-port switch ( got it as a gift from the friendly sysadmin when I was kicked out of my last job ), and from there ethernet to my 2 laptops, NAS, workstation and server, all on the patio which is my working place. SSID is actually RunterVonMeinemRasen ( "get off my lawn" in German ) :-)

jan@saturnus ~$ man popcorn

No manual entry for popcorn

I do, in some way. I think of Apollo and, especially, of Pallas Athena as of certain virtues / skills in human shape.

I have a Seiko watch that runs on solar power. It features day of the week, date, a stopwatch, an alarm, and a second time zone. Oh, and yes, I almost forgot: it looks good, too. So - thanks, but no, thanks.

Land of the free, home of the brave. Fuck, yeah.

......can't wait to pollute this, too.

How about you take a grammar and spelling course ?

Mod parent up. Insightful. The USA suffer from thinking that everything and anything will be solved by "the markets", and hence are an übercapitalist type of hell. One with the infrastructure of a 3rd world country. There clearly is a role for government and local collectivities here.

When I was a very young boy, about 5, my parents had been using an old-fashioned mechanical alarm clock for years, complete with two bells on top of it. As they replaced it, I got it - and felt the irresistible urge to take it apart. Just driven by sheer hunger to see the insides, and understand. Same thing with my father's watch.

It is still the same urge that drives me: using a machine whose workings I don't understand drives me mad.

...is that Germany is much closer to being a true and functioning democracy. I don't see how this would come through the Bundestag, the German parliament, without being at least watered down, viz. being quietly forced into starvation as soon as a left-leaning government comes into power.

Welcome back into the Middle Age.

And I mean "my", "fucking", "dead" and "body" literally. I already imagine telling one of my customers that I host their data on Amazon AWS. I will never have had that good an opportunity to study people's backs.

Reading the actual paper I thought: "Wow. Should have been dead by now".

Well-done article. Read it top to bottom. Congrats.

and pull the plugs. Really. This is no way to live.