you were programming at EA and you got to sleep ? don't know your born....

So you're doing 34-80 meg **DSL* service over 12000-foot copper pairs? No, didn't think so. You don't get to that kind of speed without deploying DSLAMs a lot closer to the customer's house, and feeding them with fiber. Deciding to do that or not is a business decision, but it's not just DSL at that point.

Back in the 70s we used to use loud music to agitate the water in our bongs - it made them much more effective and, like, cosmic!

California makes a lot of really great cheeses, so maybe you're just not going to the right stores. Whole Foods is a good start, or (if you're in the Bay Area), your local foodie or hippie place (Berkeley Bowl, Cheese Board, Piazza's, etc.) Cowgirl Creamery if you get there.

On the other hand, Japan has all kinds of amazing over-packaged overly-instant foods, some of which are available here, to balance out the delicate nutritious real stuff.

The problem with Dropbox isn't just that it exposes Windows insecurities, it's also that it makes it easy to export lots of stuff out of your company, potentially with wimpy passwords, to a storage system which your company doesn't have any control over - Dropbox doesn't even have to tell your company if they've gotten a subpoena or "friendly" FBI request for the material, and with no contract, there's no way to specify data retention limits.

At $DAYJOB, we've got a Dropbox-like service (at least the "upload/download from browser" part of it, not the "glom onto everything" part), because it's useful to have something like that. It goes to our own storage, and has encryption we've got control over, and it keeps the employees from needing to find other ways around the firewall's block on Dropbox uploads.

The reason BitTorrent traffic is falling is that everybody's downloaded all the old movies already. So now we're just getting the new ones, not catching up on backlog.

If the client were a correctional facility, they wouldn't be home-brewing a cheap system out of baling wire, they'd be buying a commercial firewall with URL filtering capabilities and virus checkers, marked up to rip-off prices as a favor to some politically connected contractor, and the prisoners themselves wouldn't have access to it.

Comcast actually has done things this egregious - maybe you remember the "Get a Cable Modem, Go To Jail" event from the late 90s. But it's pretty rare.

The ISP is the town government's water monopoly. Are you sure you want municipal Internet service?

You're missing the point completely (and have a lot of angry-sounding posts on this article!).

Pros and cons / price and utility.

The utility of a platter disk is a lot of space. The cost is low.

The utility of a SSD is a lot of speed (heat/noise/droppability also in the list). The cost is high.

For me, it sounds like the GP, and many others, the pros and cons are solidly on the side of the SSD. I too ended up deleting some stored videos and images on my laptop. Like the GP, I sometimes miss some of the extra data that is now on a different computer, but it's totally worth it. Getting an SSD was the best upgrade I've done in the past 10 years. I would make the same decision again any time.