Depends on the age of the infrastructure, and where it is. Certain telecoms providers [british telecom] often feel rural broadband and phones is not important and so leave places with iffy phone services. You know its crap as the whole village says there phones and broadband are unreliable. I know this as we have printed airline e-tickets for people flying.

The electricity distribution underground network cables in our street are beginning to expire and it takes a good day for a replacement to be dug out and replaced. The contents of the freezer become a concern in the summer months.

The amazon staff where unsure of that and the geolocation issues. I got a 'forget it'. when i enquired

Buying a drm and limited e-reader to one shop is not my idea of progress.

Mind you perhaps with amazon recruiting people who define that windows or mac the only platforms is an issue

Actually trying to give amazon money is hard as a linux person.

Short version of the story is about a book reviewed here on slashdot.

Only available in kindle, physical copies non existant unless you import it - i asked did the kindle reader 'app' work in linux Answer back was no as i was in the wrong region. A kindle was also more than it would cost to import the book from a foriegn land.

Six months later i find a physical book in a charity shop in my region. I dont plan on buying a kindle now.

Libraries can also be brilliant places and are worth supporting.

The average user does not seem to know that the gateway of the vpn directs all traffic to it. I run virtual os'es with one routes to a vpn and the other on my network.

Remind you of the film the running man ?

There always was some hardware switches and routers made before somebody at corporate decided that cisco was um was not something they would be fired for buying bit like ibm was.

Gandalf whom made hardware bridges got a bit secretive and probably lost support being that even looking at there web pages required that you be a reseller.

  I'm sure those with the clout can buy direct from china to there specs opposed to brand names.

Automate it i run failtoban which can be nicely configured, kiddies probing the websites for php_my_admin thing get mod_spamhaus checks who if reported get no site. Html form scanners get botscout checks and also a humorous email address in the html to send drugs deals to us which does not work. Occasionally we change that just for a laugh when we see it in use.

We still report spam to spamcop.
Yes i will cancel your air travel arrangements if you put the wrong address in the airline booking system. Airlines are very happy to oblige.

That leaves just the determined idiots who well after that deserve a personal mention to their isp using a failtoban report or two the computer just happened to generate.

So perhaps when then fb think im a bit dumb since i dont use there site (four years) they will tell me how to rejoin on there email thing (that i dont have access to) rather than to the email i use. I'm good with that foolery.

Speaking as a consumer the last time i bothered to contact hp the person on im (built into help) wanted to know if i was american, saying european got me disconnected [some years ago]. We did not buy a great deal of hp stuff after that

It might explain why i never even bothered to look at hp for a recent replacement thing (plus issues with the windows tax), and we also thinking of dumping our hp printers when they die due to annoyances with consumables and there blow up chips in toner cartridges.

The funniest thing i saw recently was a printer supplies promotion that offered an ipad to the winner.

I just chucked an old 2004 motherboard, and metal case. The 32mb graphics card, an 80gb ide disk, dvd rw, power unit, memory, and network cards where saved. Most of this is being used in an even older pc, or as replacement items

However the pci spec of the network cards means i have spares, and the memory (of the 1gb size) looks a lost cause.

We have a uk house earthed with a modernish electrical trip box of ten year - anything internal like a light-bulb going can trip the local circuit and not the house. The item is not up to date with modern building rules and regs,

Poe devices (ethernet over electrical wiring) are ok with this

UK electrics items are also fused, although having lived in Germany i have bought a large flat fuse when the power died,

The underground power mains from the power supplier most summers terminates though old age and the three phase box is replaced, when this happens the surge is not tripped.

Natural lighting strikes is something i have no experience of and if it has happened being earthed seems to dealt with it

Groklaw's view is the one i am waiting to read. Lets hope b&n's management are a lot more smarter than Novell management where when dealing with Microsoft.

A big problem in my humble opinion is how google categorize things by the mba's in google's ad sales - motorbikes in x, is that only one customer for x location for google? The rare baseball/sports cards example seems also to assume that people are trying to search for specific cards for shopping sites. We are not retail, and our thing is not specific to one location.

Another is that term 'something' has a quality end and an junk end. We get envelopes with codes from google that go straight to the recycle bin. Google probably do list way down it but the low quality end stuff gets top rating. It looks crap and it appears to be an problem not just for us - Not sure if google in its categories decided to ignore products and sevices the mba's found hard to sell or don't understand.

People do find us but google it appears does not help them and thats why paying google is not a priority or is seo (seo'ers also have no clue about our custom sector of the industry)

Gawker sites seem to 'suffer' from the same ten approved people (who appear to know the site editor) who comment again and again.

Or bought email lists of out of date whois data, and use thisisfake.email@something.tld and then try and use that list via hotmail of top billionaire business contacts.

You thought logwatch was boring ?