Because AOL was never a captive portal site. AOL was a portal site and used/sold "Keywords" on the portal page as a type of search engine to direct users to prefered endpoints. But there is/was nothing that prevented users from using Yahoo, AltaVista, Jeeves, or any other search engine, or typing destinations URLs in directly.

Facebook's India initiative is a captive portal. Useers can only use select Facebook services, or services approved/advertised by Facebook. Users can not go to any service/website or transmit any data to anything not approved by Facebook. Facebook's system is more analagous to the dial-up vendor/insular BBSes of the 80's which could only be accessed from terminals locked to particullar dial-up numbers and only allowed information within the same network. Yet Facebook claims to call their servicce "the internet".

Actually it is quite easy. Finely shredded paper is commonly used as a high-R value blown-in insulation for attics and wall cavities. The paper is treated with boric acid which acts as a flame retardant.

The submitter has submitted 24 stories over the course of the last year. Every single one of the stories links to atleast one of the same two domains, on the same subject... It is pretty obviously an affiliated/sock puppet account for an employee or marketing department.

I have had a couple Motorola v19x series for the better part of the last decade (v190, v195, v197). A fantastic dump phone if you want great battery life, great reception, and durability.

I have carried as many as 3 different phones at the same time... with a single exception, the v19x has always had signal where the others do not. Battery life is 10-14 days standby, 6-8 hours talk time. Actual numbers, not marketing baloney, I've been stuck inside a client building on a continuous 7 hour call before, debugging failed routers while talking to remote techs, while on a v195 with wired headset... the phone was still had battery life to go.

The only complaints are:
1) Battery replacements - after about 3-4 years of use the LiIon batteries swell and lose significant capacity. Most of the replacement batteries offered out there are actually 3-6 year old NOS which the seller won't tell you.
2) Several of the T-Mobile firmware versions suck, focused far more on trying to get you to buy ringtones/songs/crappy web access than concentrating on being a phone. The one I have currently is significantly less obnoxious.
3) Its now considered a long obsolete model and close to impossible to find new... Yet you can not find a single current phone that comes close in terms of battery life and signal quality.

As a former Californian, the magnitude scale goes something like this:
3.5 - Huh, what? When did that happen?
4.0 - Ehh, something moved slightly...
4.5 - Oh, I actually felt that one there.
5.0 - Heh, that actually qualifies as an earthquake.
5.5 - Oh boy, we are starting to shake pretty good. Stay away from the glass, this one might be a little rough.
6.0 - Find a doorway quick and hang on! This one will be rough.
6.5 - Oh crap, duck and cover! 20sec of destruction, 2 weeks of "The Big One is coming! Are you prepared? Will you die?!" news stories.
7.0 - Oh $h17!!! This one is going to hurt.
8.0 - Wait, what? You mean the Big One is real?

Scale +/-0.5 depending on where you are located in California (i.e. Bay area vs. Inland empire). A 4.0 ranks as barely noticable ...

While the parent may be off a bit, the quoted article times are ridiculous unless you are counting "man hours" including transport to/from the railcar and stacking on a shelf. It is absurb to think that a single boxcar would be staged on a busy warehouse spur for 3 days of loading or that a modern palletised boxcar takes 3-4 hours to unload with a forklift/pallet jack (it takes about 30min or so).

Long ago I worked a Target dock unloading trucks by hand. Depending on the store volume and the season, that would mean unloading between 3000 and 10,000 cases from 53' trailers each night, 5 to 6 nights a week. Unlike Walmart and some other stores, Target merchandise all came stacked in the truck except for a few bulk items (kitty litter/etc.), it is individually bulk-broke from the warehouse to restock each item depending on the previous days sales. (A large case count on an incoming truck always made us groan as it probably meant lots of deodorant/hair products which come in small 6 count cases.)

A typical 6000 case trailer, including setup and teardown time, would take approximately 2 hours to unload. 2 people in the trailer placing boxes on a conveyor, 4 to 6 people pulling/sorting boxes off the conveyor and on to pallets for storarge or delivery to the floor. If you extrapolate that to a 13,000 piece count you get roughly 24 man-hours, or "3 days" assuming a single 8-hour shift.

Likewise, I also worked a different warehouse job forklift loading 53' trailers. If all of your stock is pre-staged on the dock it takes about 15min to load a trailer. If you are pulling every pallet from the racks and transporting it to the trailer individually it will take 1 to 1-1/2 hours plus. Again, extrapolating that to an 85' boxcar you get roughly 3-4 hours.

So.... the only way you get the articles quoted loading/unloading times is you are counting man-hours including transport/, not literal time as is implied.

Well... I just got FreeCAD running last night. Been using QCad for several years and recently started OpenSCAD for some 3D modeling. So you want a new FreeCAD user's prospective?

I have spent the last 4 nights, 3-4 hours each night, trying to build and install all the dependancies for FreeCAD v0.14 on a CentOS 6.5 box. It was an absolute nightmare. The build documentation is crap and lists multiple things as requirements that have changed to something else (i.e. PyQt4 -> PySide), dependancies claimed to be optional but are infact manditory (i.e. GtWebkit [or, as I did, get fed up and rip out the code... why in the hell do I need a download models option in the open menu? Why is git/svn/etc. demanded in an end-user executable?]), hardcoded -python2.7 version dependancies. This comes after all the mess of compiling half-a-dozen different 3D libriaries each with their own compiling problems.

The first thing after finally getting it open.... the interface is a mish-mash of a dozen different modules with no indications of what to really use... The user has to go and learn every single one, then try to figure out what to use. Examples were installed... but who the hell knows where, there are no example libraries in the menu structure. And python? Why would a end-user want to learn Python just to create an object?

So I try to open a pretty basic STL I made earlier in OpenSCAD (disc with some bolt holes and a flange).... it takes 60+sec to import the STL object, but atleast it looks right. Kind of have the construction tree for the object in panel, but no obvious way to edit the code. I move it a bit, rotate the object around... and then suddenly its gone with a stream of "array[-1]" errors in console... Not a good way to start.

I think that is the real crux... I was stunned to recently see that, in a completely clean browser, just going to the Slashdot root page loads 45 third-party domain cookies. That is excluding slashdot.org and dice.com properties....

The summary is a BS deceptive description of what happened and your analogy is a BS comparison. Google never "open[ed] your door and read the documents". Google drove around mapping streets AND had a wireless sniffer running to capture/correlate access point beacons with location data. Access point beacons are publicly broadcast, not encypted. Google saved this captured data to a file...

Oh, and by the way, it turns out countless morons are running unsecured public access points and transmitting their sensitive information over these public access points (user names/passwords/email/etc). Google inadvertently captured this very public data in the same stream as the public access point beacons.

A more fitting analogy would be:
    Thousands of morons walk down the street repeatedly shouting out their user names and passwords for anyone to hear. Google happened to be driving by at the time, dictating notes into a recorder about what features are on the street, which also captured these people shouting in the background. Morons now want Google to be held liable for "wiretapping their private communications".

Beta sucks... and completely screwed the above quoting and formating....

And here is a counterpoint: I was evaluating a piece of robust hardware for installation at remote sites (~$5k). The hardware has a built in micro that monitors all the functions and provides configuration, it is programmed via DIP switches and a serial port, and output status on LEDs and relays (good). The company offers a $700 "TCP/IP" option that provides SNMP monitoring and configuration over IP, as well as uploads all the site info "to the cloud"... because that is all the rage these days.

... The $700 option is a rebadged BeagleBoard connected to the serial port. Do you really think this is going to be supported more than a year or two?