I liked it as well, until the last update. Little things started killing my productivity. Like when I would get a new chat message in Pidgin. I would go up to the indicator area, click on the envelope, then see a list of several chats I had, many that were quite old, I would click on hte newest one, and it woudl blink, and the indicator would go off.. But that was it. It wouldn't actually load up the pidgin window to the chat. If I went directly to pidgin, it wouldn't turn off the indicator envelope. Thunderbird had some similar bugs, which is even more disappointing than the Pidgin one, since thunderbird is the default mail client. There are actually quite a few other things, but they are all just little things that have added to to being a waste of time.

I hate to tell you, but the incumbent providers can cherry pick too, and have for quite some time. My neighborhood has no cable as an option, but its a mile in any direction. And good luck even trying to figure out who at ATT you can talk to about getting a remote DSLAM in your neighborhood so you can get decent internet speeds.

In my state, they "supported" a lot of legislators, and franchising of telecom is now handled by the state. Less candidates to "support" that way, I guess.

Thats not just a federal thing.. How often do hear about the state police cutting back on managers and desk jockeys? its always patrol officers. (the ones that are most visible, and that respond if you need help). How often do schools lay off the coordinators, directors, etc? Its always the teachers, so that the parents scream to the politicians.

Its just kind of annoying now.. I guess I'm numb to it.

There is some ways to recompile ssh to lookup using ldap, but I really wish that it would be baked in. I would love to just put a list of authorized keys, which host and user they go to, like we can with sudo in ldap.

Remember that, when your farmers all move. Or lumberjacks, or fisherman. Its kind of easy to live in the city, since everyone out in the country ships stuff to you. Moving is not a choice for many people, especially in rural areas, where you might have to move dozens (or even hundreds) of miles to get somewhere with internet. HUGE swaths of the US have no real internet. Its kind of like electricity and roads before WW1.

Hell, I live 5 miles from a major city, and have only rural wireless ISP. I was lucky to find them, and their 1Mb/s for $65/month. ATT can't even tell me who to talk to about what it would take to get my 100 house subdivision hooked up with DSL. There are DSLAM's 1 mile in either direction, and their call centers can't tell me anything, because they are all clueless.

In most states, the sales tax is not paid by the company. The state is taxing YOU. It just mandates that companies that want to sell to you have to collect the tax and submit it.

I'm actually kind of surprised the states haven't started issuing subpoena to the large online retailers, to get names and addresses of people that have ordered over a certain amount. and then go after them. (In pretty much every state with sales tax, you are required by law to include those purchase totals on your taxes, but nobody enforces it)

Two high school kids just got 1 year each for raping a drunk 16 year old at a party (where people actually filmed and took pictures of it happening).. http://www.sheboyganpress.com/viewart/20130318/SHE0101/130317029/Two-Ohio-high-school-football-players-convicted-raping-girl-16

and this guy gets more than 3 times that for mentioning that a web site will give out people's private email address after AT&T did nothing about it?

And Oregon, Washington, Idaho, both the Dakota's, Minnesota, Wisconsin, etc. (45th parallel runs right through Salem, OR, used to be a sign about it a few blocks from my house) or did you mean the 54th parallel?

They probably hijack your DNS, or do deep packet inspection, and return their page as the answer. Not sure if NoScript will help you with that.

nobody criticizes gnome anymore, because of Unity, everyone things of Gnome as the Holy Grail of user interface and communication :)

It is true that you cannot trace back a number based on its caller ID, that it is easy to spoof (and with good reason, you want your 800 number for support on the call, rather than 'bob's' DID at his desk for megacorp).

But most calls also contain the "other" number, I believe they call it the ANI number, the one that 911 uses. the one that cannot be spoofed.

It should be trivial for the phone companies to log and or trace these. When I worked at a school, there was a special number (started with *) you dialed in case of a bomb threat, and it automatically logged your last couple minutes of calls to a file. Then, the police could get a warrant, and go see them. It would not take long to do the same thing for these "untraceable" scammers.

The problem is, you can tell at a glance that if someone knows C++, Java, C, Lisp, Perl, Ruby, and javascript on their resume, it would take them a very, very short time to learn python. (syntax differences, some methodology).

However, the HR person doesn't see Python on the list, and forwards to you; someone less qualified, who has Python written down. The only way to get close, is to start listing a crapton of languages as requirements, and then tell HR, "they have to have at least 4 of these 15 listed", but that almost never happens.

Funny that before the 2009 budget year, the wars in Iraq and Afganistan were not part of the federal budget. Every year since 2001, they were part of a separate "emergency" spending bill. The current president thought that was not proper, and put them into the actual defense budget.