In addition to which in Europe the last mile is owned by one company while the backbones are owned by multiples. Plus regulation is pretty heavy too.

Until they come with Windows 10 installed. I hate Windows 8.

Even though I've not been a dell employee for a few years I still have the employee purchase plan. I wonder how much I could get one for.

The media echo chamber. They salivate over any snow storm event as a snowpocalypse.

Where I live in RI they had forecast 24 to 30 inches of the shit. We got maybe 5 or 6 inches of snow which is pretty much a non-event. But everything is shut down, the stores are closed, transit systems are shut down and the Governor appears on TV in bed hair. It's sort of amusing.

And I have the day off work. But then I couldn't get to work if I tried as they ban all car travel and public transit is all shut down and a 53 mile walk to Cambridge, MA is out of the question.

I wonder which new 'feature' will make O2K16 WORSE than it's predecessors thereby necessitating a mass flee to LibreOffice. As someone who develops on occasion in VBA I was pissed when they switch from dot notation to bang notation. Nice going guys.

Reason being the tax code is so complex that to code that takes an enormous effort.

That I went in the direction of the Linux world and got the hell away from Windows in general.

Between licensing costs, patches that break key functionality, etc. who the hell wants to stay on Windoze?

I like the Linux update mechanisms between apt-get on Debian and Ubuntu to yum on RedHat and CentOS. And it's fairly easy to roll back an update too. As opposed to windows where even some of your config data gets hosed in the process.

And if you're worried about things like AD, Domains etc. just install SAMBA on a Linux box and couple auth to LDAP. Life gets lots easier.

Yeah but with oil price per barrel hovering around $50 right now that might not be the case. However as many have warned, there's only so much oil in the ground. The smart money is on renewables.

The frackers aren't going to stop - the technology is at the point where it actually makes sense to extract horizontally.

That said I've often maintained if we want to cripple the jihadist strains of Islam we need to dump money into R&D for advanced electric storage and charging infrastructure and tell the middle east to go get fucked.

Deny them revenue and all of a sudden they don't have the money to do anything, look at Russia for example.

You have my condolences. I left the Windows world when they dropped support of XP. Went with Ubuntu instead - don't get me wrong Ubuntu has it's warts but nowhere near the level of say WIndows 7 or Windows 8.

My work machine is in fact a Windows 7 box - this is for a major defense contractor and in speaking with their I.T. folks we pretty much all pan Windows 8.

The whole thing about fraud against a corporate entity makes me a little bit angry. Who the fuck do those corporations think they are anyhow?

I've had the exact same thought. Only the way I thought of it - find the safest driver you know and just plug the device into their car. A low tech solution for a high tech problem.

Well - my Android phone came standard with a call block app that says only allow calls and texts from contacts. So that solves that problem.

Yeah by the time I was 12 I had a ten speed bike - I'd take that thing all over creation sans helmet. Nobody said a fucking thing.

Between the Stranger Danger and NIMBY and Snoops in the neighborhood a kid can't develop outside infantilism.

Which explains society today. Me - I was a latch key kid. Both parents worked so daily I'd do a sixth of a mile trek to and from school. Or school to my grandparents house which was also a sixth of a mile from the school. By age 7 I had my own key to the house.