If a US power facility does not have policy covering portable storage media, then yes they would be as vulnerable to attack as the Iranian nuclear refinement facilities.

None of the things being discussed with this security in particular involves cyber surveillance powers; they're all about ensuring that the workers' goings on within a facility itself are in line with security, and that quick workarounds to get things done are not allowed to breach security protocol.

(6) Nobody wants to commit to responsibility to cybersecurity policy & procedure, in case it doesn't work.

Stuxnet spread via USB sticks, and successfully 'cyber' attacked nuclear refinement systems that were not on the net.

These regulations (at least from what I'm familiar with from the nuclear end of things) cover a lot of human & portable equipment policy, and destroy I/O ports in non-connected equipment to try to eliminate potential attack vectors or non-policy human activity that might compromise security. It does go beyond simply unplugging CAT5 cables.

The preppers always seem to try to be preparing for society-destroying Armageddon or a zombie apocalypse.

In reality, major natural disasters cause outages for a couple of weeks, and economic upheaval (like hyperinflation) in 1st world countries max out at around 18 months. Having up to 30 days of stuff around for local disasters makes a good amount of sense, as does ensuring the capability of moving out of the country if the economics get that dire. Creating an "I'm going to live out my days in here" bunker does not.

Candles can put out enough heat to take the bitter edge off the cold, especially if you can get them inside a metal container to buffer the heat.

My mom had a purely decorative iron pot-belly stove that we stuffed full of candles during a severe snowstorm when the power went out. It did surprisingly well.

If you want to get dangerous, you can attempt to rig up a candle-heated pot of cooking oil or something, too.

This is a little disingenuous, because this response is exactly what the terrorists plan on. Their goal isn't to blow up a country and kill all the people themselves, but to turn the country in on itself.

Every single politician who goes along with this crap is perpetuating the goals of terrorism and is a traitor.

Building a bomb doesn't mean you're a terrorist. Plenty of redneck ideas for doing things like removing tree stumps or being bored out in the middle of nowhere involve explosives. That's not terrorism.

I use Chromium instead of Chrome to avoid all the Google phone-home tracking. I just want a browser, not corporate nuptials.

I would rather they not offer requisite undergraduate classes, and simply allow anybody to enroll. If you're already good enough to be post-BS in CS, you'll keep up. If you aren't prepared or can't keep up otherwise, you fail.

Enforced prerequisites are simply a cash draw; ostensibly they should only be recommendations to guide student decisions.

The only problems I've had are using too much memory, not any other instability. I'm using Chromium, and it does slowly leak (either the browser itself, or javascript on whatever pages I'm on). When the size gets problematic, I go into the task manager and blow away large-footprint subprocesses which error-pages some number of tabs. F5 restores a page from that state. Since the pages which get killed in such situations vary, I'm more suspect of the browser itself being the leak source then any particular page.

The reason I do this as opposed to using bookmarks is that visiting a set of N favorite pages is easiest with Ctrl-Tab F5 rather than running through a bookmark list or remembering which URLs to visit. It's also easier to see what changed on a page from a refresh rather than viewing a page from a new blank tab.

Real answer: More than 100. Screw bookmarks.

The problem is that it isn't a free market. There are too few competitors, and they all work to eliminate more newcomers to the field.

I agree that if laws were changed and startups who want to pursue becoming cable providers could do so, that competition would work. I don't think that's going to happen, so the 2nd option is to regulate what these few gatekeepers are allowed to do to try to keep from screwing everybody over.

The reason why it won't work is that you haven't made the decision to cut your television watching, just thought about changing the means. If you decide you're going to be a no-TV family, then do that. Sure, watch your occasional movies, read your news articles online, buy a sports feed, buy or download some programs for the kids if you want, but the "flip on the tube and watch whatever's on for a while" is something that's worth looking at eliminating for its own benefit.

I hope that you actually vote 3rd party instead of just sigh during elections.