The lease expired on my work laptop, and the new one has a 256GB SSD instead of the 320GB spinning disk the previous one had. It's not enough :-) Specifically, it's not enough to keep my ~60GB of music on, along with the actual work stuff, so that's temporarily off-loaded to an external drive, plus I had to off-load a lot more stuff for the "move almost all your stuff to the new machine" software to have working space.

And unfortunately, the IT department won't let me crack it open and add an extra spinning disk inside it. The state of the art in SD memory cards seems to be that 64GB cards are cheap, but 128GB cards are really expensive, so I'll probably wait six months for 128GB cards to get cheap and install one. 128GB USB3 flash sticks are getting to be cheap, but I can't leave one of them plugged in all the time.

Hey, it's those crazy Texas Republicans again, talking about wanting small government that doesn't regulate businesses, but if you actually want to compete with existing businesses, good luck to you.

The filters have usually been super-secret because letting the public know what was being censored would let "the children" get around them, and would promote the worst kinds of pornography by telling perverts where it was. But English libel law is surprisingly broad, from the perspective of those of us in other countries, and allows people not from England to sue other people not from England if there's some English hook in the publication somewhere, so maybe the CCC can demonstrate that they've been censored and argue that it's libel that's causing them actual damage (after all, the fact that they were censored by the pr0n filter says they were pornographers or Even Worse.)

Yes, the guy had a security clearance, so I suppose entrapping him can be considered part of the quality control process, but it's still ridiculous; Egypt would get much more effective military use from a dirt airstrip in the Sinai than an aircraft carrier. But hey, the FBI gets to put out a press release claiming they caught a spy! And it's less ridiculous than the time they entrapped half a dozen drunken bums in Chicago into a "plot to bomb the Sears tower", and less dangerous than the time they helped half a dozen Al-Qaeda plotters mix fertilizer explosive for the first World Trade Center bombing.

The auction process led to extremely high prices paid to the European and US governments by cellular companies, who turned them into high-priced mobile phone services to the public (nobody sat on them, except maybe a few companies who bought them for resale, and they quickly turned them around for a profit.)

But unlicensed use means that everybody gets to use them, like you with your wifi at home, at work, and at the coffee shop where you hang out, or your car radio talking to your phone over Bluetooth, or your wireless thermometer telling you what the temperature is outside, and lots of similar uses that are only constrained by the physics of sharing the spectrum and the Moore's Law driven decreases in costs of equipment to use them.

The biggest gains in wireless spectrum use for the public have been the open-access unlicensed uses like Wifi and Bluetooth at 2.4GHz, and to a lesser extent 5.8 GHz, plus 900 MHz (typically cordless phones), 433/etc. (telemetry stuff), and other low-power apps. Yes, mobile phones running on dedicated frequencies have also been important, but we'd get more public value by letting the public have access to the spectrum for shared access, even though the FCC wouldn't get a bunch of cash from selling it off.

Also, the high-priced spectrum auctions of the past result in high-priced services to the public because the carriers have to make back their money, while unlicensed use resulted in development of cheaper and cheaper hardware to take advantage of the free bandwidth.

Sure, your laptop battery may not hold enough charge to power your laptop any more, but an LED needs a lot less power than your laptop, depending on what it's being used for. Most of the lightbulb-replacement LED bulbs I've seen want 9-23 watts, but the flashlights are more like 3w, and nightlights are more like 0.5 watts.

Also, that laptop battery is a battery of cells, and they usually don't all die at once. They may not be in good enough shape to remanufacture into new laptop batteries, but still have enough of them good enough to disassemble at third-world labor costs to recover cells for off-grid LED lighting.

You can find a much better hamburger almost anywhere. But you can also find a much worse hamburger anywhere. What McD's delivered early on was a consistently adequate hamburger, fries, and drinks at a relatively low price and high convenience. It would never be as good as the burgers at Ralph's Exxon*, much less the Waldorf Astoria, but it would also never be as bad as the burgers at the Binghamton NY Greyhound station or the vending machine at college. And it would also always be better than White Castle.**

* Ralph's was originally a gas station in central NJ, added a lunch counter, and eventually the food was bringing in more business than the gas. 10-oz burgers on a good hard roll (if you're not from the NY-NJ-Philly area, you may never have had a good hard roll.) They went out of business shortly after I stopped eating meat.
** Unless you're Harold and Kumar that night they were high; if you're high your mileage may vary.

They're not cooked in tubs of beef fat, like the old days, or trans-fats like the less-old days, but the latter is because the public (correctly)perceives trans-fats as unhealthy. They still have beef fat in the pre-cooked frozen fries, for flavor purposes, so they're still not edible for us vegetarians, they're just less unhealthy for you carnivores.

Burger King doesn't use meat fat in their fries, and they also have veggie burgers, Five Guys probably makes the best fries, In-n-Out's are ok if you get the right out of the fryer (they're actually made by chopping potatoes, instead of heavily-processed frozen stuff, so they don't last as long, and if you're not vegan you can get animal-style fries, which are a sort of California poutine grease overdose (yay!))

We'll see how that works out for them.

Selfies taken with front-facing cameras let you aim the camera for exactly the angle you want, as opposed to setting the timer and guessing. The catch, of course, is that you're limited by the length of your arm, and by having your arm in the picture unless you want the camera really close, so selfie-sticks give you more compositional flexibility. They're still annoying, of course, but if you want your picture in front of Mt. Rushmore, you want it.

The paper isn't mis-using religious concepts or entities or terminology for secular and negative purposes, it's using vulgar terms instead of more polite ones. People keep f******* mistaking the two concepts.

I did some work with the publishing industry back in the 80s, and one of the projects had some portrait-mode 200dpi monitors for editing. Absolutely wonderful things; we're only now starting to get that kind of resolution again.

As it was, I found it annoying enough to go from 1152x900 in 1992 down to 640x400 in 1993, and didn't get as good a monitor on my main work machine until maybe 2009 or 2010. (There were laptops with 1280 or more pixels before then, but we didn't have them; our Corporate IT department always preferred to get hardware with more color depth instead of more pixels, thinking for instance that 640x480 with 16-bit color was better than 800x600 with 8-bit color. Nope.)

Yes, it's much nicer to read portrait-mode documents on a portrait-mode or at least square display, not on landscape. It's especially the case for PDF files in multi-column formats where you otherwise have to scroll up and down and up and down to read the things.

But that's not a friendly shape for a laptop, unfortunately. I'd probably be ok with a tiltable display to get 4x3 or 16x9-10 portrait mode, though it seems manufacturers assume you're going to be using displays to watch movies on so the default position is landscape.

I'm looking for a small desktop BSD, something that runs Xorg and fits in a GB or less of disk, so I can run multiples of them as virtual machines. I need some kind of browser that can run YouTube, plus ssh, and otherwise I don't much care what it does, but small disk is good.