The box my router came in has a table on the back that implies that if I want to watch HD movies, I should have purchased the model with "300 + 300 Mbps" wireless. This is, of course, despite the fact that most of my devices are wired and my actual internet connection can only provide 2% of that.

Well, how else are you to let your thousands of "friends" know that you checked your watch?

I tend to agree for the most part. I recently went back to college to start an electronics engineering degree program. While there is a lot of work, none of it particularly difficult. I'm doing quite well, but I can't help noticing that 95% of my fellow students are struggling immensely. What I really don't understand is why they chose to enter a program like this while claiming to hate math and logic.

I often stay after class to help out those who are willing to accept it, but there's only so much I can do. The biggest problem, in my opinion, is that because so many of the students are having a difficult time, the entire class gets behind as we continually rehash the same material far after what was allotted in the syllabus. I'm almost hoping that many of them will drop out so that future semesters can go more smoothly.

I've had the exact opposite experience. I use the start menu far more often when I'm using a windows 7 system than I did with any of the XP or below systems in the past. It's much, much faster to hit the windows key and type a few letters of the program I want to launch than it is to hunt through a desktop full of icons.

I'm an american, and I think you're all fucking crazy, too. The strongest drug I take on any sort of regular basis is ibuprofen. I've been diagnosed with clinical depression, but I'm not taking anything for it. I was originally prescribed a couple of different things, but they had no positive effect whatsoever.

I personally find beer (every kind I've ever had the displeasure of encountering throughout my life) to be absolutely repulsive. I can't even come up with a witty way to adequately describe the terrible way it tastes to me. I have that problem with a lot of things, though. Coffee is probably the next worst after beer. Give me a good vodka or rum any day, but keep that nasty stuff away.

I recall one night while my girlfriend and I were watching something on Hulu shortly after I had gone through their Ad Tailor survey. We saw the exact same commercial at least 6 or 7 times in a row, once playing back to back in a 2-commercial break. After that, I went back and lied on their survey to make it less tedious.

Don't worry. It's probably just over at the Ministry of Truth being "cleaned up" before being put online.

Its most anyone that isn't tech-savvy.

What ever happened to interfaces deigned for a *user*, not a techie ( like we had with the newton for example )?

I'm in my (late) 20s, so not even elderly yet, and I've been writing code for computers since I was 6. The example in the summary of a plus icon for setting an alarm is just plain unintuitive. It's been a while since I've had to write anything with a GUI, but I'm pretty sure that was a relatively important aspect of interface design.

Has it really gotten that bad? Luckily for me, NoScript blocks all of the javascript on here, so any page, regardless of its size, loads just as quick as anywhere else. They also have an option under the preferences to switch to the classic discussion system that might help as well.

Unfortunately, I'm a subscriber to Mediacom with no other alternatives in the area. What has most annoyed me about all of this is that their "service" appears to periodically forget that I've opted out of it and will re-enable itself periodically.

I actually ran this before when I first noticed their redirection a few months ago, but I've rerun it now to relay the results. Here's the interesting bits:

Major Abnormalities

• Your DNS resolver returns results even when no such server exists

Minor Aberrations

• Certain TCP protocols are blocked in outbound traffic
• Network packet buffering may be excessive
• Not all DNS types were correctly processed

DNS results wildcarding (?): Warning
Your ISP's DNS server returns IP addresses even for domain names which should not resolve. Instead of an error, the DNS server returns an address of 67.63.55.33, which resolves to mediacomassist.infospace.com. You can inspect the resulting HTML content here.

There are several possible explanations for this behavior. The most likely cause is that the ISP is attempting to profit from customer's typos by presenting advertisements in response to bad requests, but it could also be due to an error or misconfiguration in the DNS server.

The big problem with this behavior is that it can potentially break any network application which relies on DNS properly returning an error when a name does not exist.

The following lists your DNS server's behavior in more detail.

• www.{random}.com is mapped to 67.63.55.33.
• www.{random}.org is mapped to 67.63.55.33.
• fubar.{random}.com is correctly reported as an error.
• www.yahoo.cmo [sic] is mapped to 67.63.55.33.
• nxdomain.{random}.netalyzr.icsi.berkeley.edu is correctly reported as an error.

I couldn't agree more. I recall my freshman year in a similar situation of sorts. They had gone the Java route as well, though I had never cared much for the language. I followed the traditional assembly, C, C++ path many years prior to attending.

The class was incredibly easy for myself, but I couldn't help but notice how much the other students struggled to grasp the most basic aspects. As far as I could tell, these kids had no clue how a computer actually worked. Memory layouts, binary math, logical operations, all of these were completely foreign to them.

One interesting in-class problem in particular stands out in my memory. We were posed the problem of taking a numerical grade in as input and printing out the correct letter grade. My solution involved a simple integer division and a switch block. Even the professor seemed a bit mystified. It was a sad day for me.

I kind of felt bad for them, but at the same time, the professor slowed the class down to accommodate them, leaving me to get virtually nothing out of the class except learning a couple of minor differences between java and C++ syntax.

Eh. I don't own a cell phone either, but for a much different reason. People tended to call me when I used to have one, and I didn't like that at all.

No kidding. The song in the video is actually quite pleasant to listen to. I don't think "good" means what the summary writer thinks it means.

I didn't even need to turn it off, as apparently it doesn't work for me for whatever reason. However, if it did, I would turn it off from what I've heard about it. I type relatively fast and generally know exactly what I intend to type before the page even loads, so it's a fairly useless feature. Let me know when they allow verbatim searches. I'm really tired of it mangling my quoted strings to offer more results that have nothing to do with what I searched for.