(Disclaimer: I've been a Speakeasy customer for ten years.)

I never got the advertised speed out of them for what I was paying. My business was close to the CO, but when I'd complain their answer would always be "Replace the wire going from the pole into your building"

Why should I have to do that? I'm old, I hurt when I fall. NO thanks.

Your responsibility for wiring ends at your NID; if there's a problem on the telco side of the NID, it's the telco's responsibility to deal with it (because they own all the wiring up to your NID). The Speakeasy rep probably shouldn't have recommended you haul out the ladder; he should have suggested you call your telco and have them check their line.

You don't mention what percentage of "advertised speed" you actually get, so I can't really comment on whether you have a valid complaint. ADSL circuits are almost always spec'ed as "best effort", and there is no guarantee at all that your circuit will perform at that speed. If your line is such that it comes nowhere near the advertised speed, the DSL provider will generally be willing to downgrade your package to match your observed speed. (Or you can nag the telco to fix your line.)

(My current circuit is spec'ed as a 6.0/1.5, which is pretty much what I observe, despite my being 9500' from my CO.)

That sent me through the "compilor" (their word, not mine)

IIRC, their word for the TUTOR compilation process was "condensing". (Or, if you wrote code like mine, "condemning".)

I heartily agree with your comments on the PLATO authoring environment -- for a line-oriented editor, the environment totally rocked for code development and testing... I wish Eclipse was that fast.

Isn't that clever. I saw the link target, clicked it anyway, and all I got was a Google search-results page.

Maybe it's me, maybe it's my browser config, but that "clever trick" is Fail City over here.

Here's your solution -- keep your keyrings, etc. in a sporran.

Also gives you a great excuse to wear a kilt and calf-length socks.

NASCAR permits right turns.

Geeky personality, check. Facial hair, check. Chest hair, check. Gray hair, check. Glasses, check. Soft and cuddly, big time. Not overly concerned with appearances, check. Doesn't watch weight, yep. Passionate sports fan, GO PACKERS. Cries at sappy films? More often than not. Reads a lot, check. A few flaws? Define "few".

According to this, in London, I'd be a total superconducting babe magnet!

(Thankfully, my blushing bride gives me many reasons to not test that theory out.)

On the minus side, you've only got 64K.

And right after gay marriage, we legalize and tax being a snoopy meddler and spend the revenue on a public STFU campaign.

Would leaky electrolytic capacitors count?

you know it's bad when a company that was founded in your city over 100 years ago packs up shop without even giving the host city/state a chance to appease them.

APPEASE THEM? Dayton and Ohio have probably given them tax incentives and other "appeasements" out the freaking ass over those 100 years, and NCR is looking for more "appeasement"? I think the situation is more like NCR giving that municipal neck one last squeeze and not getting any signs of life back.

I've seen that happen innumerable times with the Governmental Trifecta from Hell (City of Chicago, County of Cook, State of Illinois), all of which have a rich history of shoveling out tax dollars to private corporations who whine about it being too expensive to do business here and threaten to pull their jobs out of the area. What happens after that, of course (usually about a week after the last check clears), is that said private corporations load up the trucks and pull their jobs out of the area and let the government clean up their garbage.

Appeasement my ass.