Sure, having to test yourself several times a day and shoot yourself at least daily isn't technically normal but people whose diabetes is under control with insulin and who are otherwise healthy can lead productive lives just like the rest of us.

If you want to talk about a medical treatment that " just allowed patients to survive but not really to have a normal life" talk about the iron lung or something along those lines.

Seriously, find a handful of known-high-bandwidth places to download stuff from and download some large files from each of them and use your PC's network-monitoring tools to gauge your bandwidth.

As for as upstream, get some email account from various providers, compose a message, and attach a large-ish file.

Note - if your ISP gives you "burst speed" you will have to "burn through that" before you start getting "real" numbers.

Suppose, just suppose, that the tapes do show something like the ex-employee clearly violating work rules.

Now it becomes a question of free speech - are the work rules enforceable or not? If not, he's got a legitimate gripe with his employer.

On the other hand, if he didn't say anything in the conversation that violates work rules, he definitely has a legitimate gripe with his employer.

In either case, he probably has a case against Comcast and/or the specific Comcast employee for violating his privacy/tortuous interference, etc.

My guess is Comcast's lawyers will try to make the Comcast employee who called the customer's employer out to be a "rogue" and try to pass legal responsibility on to him.

If your typical non-flying-car-driver can't upgrade to a "flying car" license without a bunch of hassle and cost, this will be a niche market at best and likely an economic failure.

I'll give up some safety for some freedom.

Oh wait, you mean the other way around? I think subjects of The Crown fought this war once already.

Kids in the back seat begging for attention.

I don't know how I made it through childhood without my parents having a wreck every day.

Shh, don't tell anyone but part of what makes this joke so funny (IMHO) is that 1) the truth about geek sex lives is far closer to the "average person" than it is to the "can't get a date - ever" stereotype 2) we (geeks) know it, and 3) we are comfortable enough in our own skin to tell this joke about ourselves.

I find it ironic that with a 9+ year old account, I'm still "newer" than either the very-long-time 5-digit-userid Slashdotter Hedrick who criticized my humor or the somewhat-senior-to-me (by userid) editor gurps_npc who made the original sex comment.

I wish I'd realized gurps_nps's lower userid before making my first reply - I might have included a few more "old-timer in-jokes."

Cue "get off my lawn" in 3...2...1...

Self-deprecating humor can be funny even if it's outdated or for that matter was never completely true in the first place.

Texas A&M University is one of Texas's two flagship universities, and it is highly-ranked in some academic areas not related to agriculture or mechanics. Yet "Aggie Jokes" are common and most Aggies (present tense - there's no such thing as an "ex-Aggie") understand and even partake in the humor value.

The time to stop telling jokes like this is when either 1) a significant percentage of Slashdot regulars no longer think they are funny or 2) the telling of such jokes is causing a non-negligible amount of real-world harm. I'm not seeing either of these happening this year. I would say "or this decade" but technology and life move too fast to predict "Slashdot culture" 5-6 years down the road.

This is Slashdot. You must be new here.

Denial Of Service, not DeNial of Service. My bad.

To put things into perspective, if I wanted to kill someone by mucking with their pacemaker, would it be easier to "hack" the pacemaker or just point a tight-beam lethal-to-the-pacemaker microwave at their chest for a few seconds?

The same goes for other implants: If it's electronic or for that matter even just electrical I can probably disable it at a distance of several yards with a high-power narrow-beam microwave or other purpose-selected radio frequency burst that isn't powerful enough to kill or even hurt flesh but which can zap the wires. Even if it's non-powered, if it's metal I can heat up the metal enough to sear the adjoining flesh with a shorter burst than if there was no metal.

If I wasn't out to do serious harm but just wanted to annoy someone or make them waste time and money talking to their doctor, I could turn the power down low enough so it doesn't fry the device but just degrades it or heats it up just enough to cause momentary pain then repeat the burst every few days until he goes to the doctor.

Heck, I can even go one better and a lot cheaper: Go to a populated area and spray an areosol of something that very-slightly damages the coatings found on modern eyeglasses. Everyone around you who wears glasses will go home wondering why their anti-glare or anti-UV or other coating on their glasses isn't as good as it was the day before.

No, I'm not suggesting anyone try this (if you do and get caught, you'll almost certainly face criminal assault or destruction-of-property charges and rightfully so)! My point is that the risk of people using your own medical devices to cause you grief has been around long before they went digital, but it's very rare that you hear about someone maliciously tampering with someone's medical device.

If the FCC doesn't have the authority under current law, what agency should regulate situations like this (assuming for the sake of argument that Congress intended for such situations to be regulated)? The Federal Trade Commission perhaps?

What you were doing was arguably more ethical since you weren't making money off of people using the service, but if it happened today you would be denying other companies (namely, cell phone carriers who sell wifi hotspots and who charge by the byte) the right to conduct business.

While your points about desktops and the web are spot-on, not all Linux or for that matter Windows computers are used as desktops, not all desktops are used for browsing the web, and not all desktops that are used for web browsing are used for general-purpose web browsing.

A server, a desktop computer that isn't used for browsing the web, or a desktop computer that is only used to browse the web for certain web sites that work okay with ancient browsers can work fine with "ancient" video drivers, provided of course that the machine doesn't have a bad security profile (e.g. closed-source non-maintained video drivers, sigh). Ancient "vga" or other generic-video drivers should be fine under such scenarios, and some of these drivers are open-source and likely still maintained.

Here are some examples of special-purpose PCs you may actually touch in everyday life:
* ATM machines
* Library card catalog or on-site-only-access library database computers
* Touch-screen kiosks in stores or hotels that by design only let you do certain tasks
* Media players running a general-purpose OS like Linux, BSD, or MS-Windows under the hood
* The list goes on

The list above doesn't even count your home media server, the servers at your workplace, your home router, etc. etc., any one of which may run Windows, Linux, or a similar general-purpose operating system behind the scenes.

So all any 17-year-old - or 12-year-old - can get any his bank in trouble by walking up an ATM machine and *fill-in-the-blank*??? NOT.

I seriously doubt the bank would be prosecuted unless they didn't call the police as soon as they were aware that they had under-aged porn on their security cameras.

Oh, and if your reply is "the cops would arrest the 17 year old" yes, they probably would, so substitute "kid still in single digits living in a state where kids that young can't be prosecuted even in juvenile court" (I'm pretty sure the feds don't charge kids in single digits).