Mine was down this morning, but I can ping my home box and SSH to it now from work. Looks like it's fixed in my area (Tallahassee, Florida). My past experience is that CenturyLink is reliable - at least, more so than Comcast, which is my only other broadband option that doesn't involve satellite or the like.

So... you agree that no one can use an iPad for document creation, because it doesn't work for you?

Way to over-generalize. For me, I bought an Apple Wireless Keyboard (http://www.apple.com/keyboard/) to use with mine. Since my home computer is an Imac, it's quite literally the exact same keyboard I use on my desktop. It's a bit longer than the iPad, but it's light and tough - I've dropped it in parking lots several times, and never had a problem from it.

I use it for emails, and for writing stories, using an editor that saves RTF and can use Google Drive or Dropbox (and some others as well, but those are the two I use with it). There are also ones that will save Word format.

Basically, Bill's complaint boils down to "Nobody should be using an iPad for document creation, because we haven't created a version of Word for it yet!"

Quibble: the state doesn't 'allow' gambling on Indian reservations. It has no power to stop it. The Supreme Court has held that states do not have power to regulate activities performed by Indians on Indian reservations.

Sure, I can look up directions before I start driving. However, then, if the directions are more than moderately complex, I need to write them down or print them out... which means having one or more pieces of paper that I will need to consult while driving. That leaves me a choice of either finding somewhere to pull over every time I need to glance at the directions to see what I need to look for next, or pick up and look at a piece of paper while operating a moving vehicle.

With a GPS, on the other hand, I can let it essentially act as navigator for me, telling me when I'm getting close to somewhere that I need to turn, which way to turn, what street name I'm looking for, etc. With a GPS that does that decently, I never actually have to look at the GPS at all while driving, nor take a hand off the wheel.

Further, using a GPS is superior to pre-looked-up directions in several ways: 1. Detours happen. There might be road work being done, an accident, or heavy traffic that I have to find a route around.

(Indeed, one of my brothers uses a GPS to get around Atlanta, in spite of having lived there for more than twenty years now. When I was up visiting him, I kidded him about it, saying, 'Don't you know your way around here yet?' His reply was: 'Sure, I know all the roads. But the GPS knows where all the traffic backups are right now.' I have another brother who also lives in Atlanta, who uses his own knowledge of the roads to get around. After riding around with him a while, I quickly saw the wisdom of the first brother's statement.)

2. Related to detours, if I miss a turn or need to go off-route to get food, gas, or something else, the GPS can smoothly handle the change, giving me a different route. A good one won't just say 'make a u-turn now' - it'll find a new route that won't require me to do something quite so drastic. And speaking of food and gas...

3. A good GPS will also have a database of points of interest, including gas stations, restaurants, etc. This is very useful information on a long trip through unfamiliar territory. And yes, some maps have that information as well... but you're the one who insisted that directions need to be looked up beforehand. If I look at a map while on the trip, that's not looking up directions beforehand. And speaking of that....

4. Plans change. I get a call while on the way up to Atlanta telling me that the brother I was going to stay with has had an emergency, and need to go to my other brother's house instead. Only he's in a new house, in a new neighborhood, so I don't already know how to get there. Or my wife gets sick on our five-day trip, and I need to find a clinic she can go to. Or I find out that an old friend I haven't seen in a decade or so is in the city, and need to get somewhere to meet him. Not everyone has the luxury of always planning out their itinerary ahead of time... and sometimes it even changes while you're in the car driving.

So the upshot is... yeah, I can do that. I did do it for many years, since I was driving long before consumer-level GPSes. But why would I go back to doing that, when using a GPS is so much better?

... which is not what you said before. But, now that you've decided to change your tune, we can now extend this back:

A democracy in which the majority do not obey the laws, but require a minority to obey them, is a tyranny. A democracy in which the majority make harsh laws that they are not subjected to is a tyranny.

See? The same rules that apply to a king apply to the majority in a democracy. Thus, a democracy can be a tyranny, just as an absolute monarch can be a tyrant, even though there is no legal restraint on his power.

Look carefully at your argument. You start with "by the (sic) definition the rightful rulers of a democracy are the people, the majority. A tyranny is a regimen where the power has been taken from its rightfully (sic) rulers and its ruler is not subjected to any law or constitution."

Let's examine where this logically leads us: By definition, the rightful rulers of a hereditary monarchy are those of a certain bloodline. By your argument, a hereditary monarch can't be a tyrant - after all, he or she is the rightful ruler, and your argument states that tyranny only exists when power has been taken away from the rightful rulers. By definition, the rightful rulers of a theocracy are the priestly class. So, by your argument, a theocracy can't be a tyranny.

Quite simply, your definition of what it takes to be a tyranny makes no sense.

So... I take it you don't know what "redact" means? Because nothing you said there contradicts what the poster you're replying to said.

And that's just the thing. They would have picked through to identify what they thought was newsworthy. And since human labor is expensive, they probably would have done it by a bunch of keyword searches, then reading the ones that the searches caught on - or, more likely, getting some interns to read those.

By publishing all the cables, Wikileaks allowed the public to determine for themselves what is and isn't important, and allowed a "many eyeballs see all things" approach.

Don't know anything about that, so can't comment on it.

Until someone starts one, though, Wikileaks is what we have. Anyone who wants to make a leak site with another slant is free to - having multiple ones would be a good thing!

The article explains that the application works like this: you have to start off by IDing your friend to it. It then analyzes the clothing they're wearing and their dimensions. When you want to look for them, it scans for a match, and picks out the person (or what could potentially be the person) for you.

The article goes on to mention a couple of reasons that they chose to do it this way: one is to protect privacy! By not using facial recognition, they make sure that the app can't easily be pre-loaded with a database of people and look for them all the time. For another, humans are already good at facial recognition. If you can see your friend's face, there's a good chance that you'll recognize them. This, however, helps when you're scanning the crowd and their back might be to you.

Honestly, it sounds like a good idea to me. Sure, it's going to have problems if you're surrounded by identically-dressed people, but you're not left any worse off by that than you were without it. Since it uses their bodily dimensions as well, it may still be of some use. And I know from times that I've been shopping with my wife and was looking for her that I, personally, have a horrible memory for what people are wearing. If I see her face, sure, I'll recognize her - but I often find myself remembering not the outfit she was wearing today, but the one she was wearing yesterday, or the one she was wearing when I met her for lunch.....

Okay, so... thanks for demonstrating that you're a moron.

First off, your association of "mailing lists" with illegal activities. The mailing lists that the poster is referring to aren't the ones spammers use - they're the ones that people use to communicate with others with similar interests. Generally, the mailing list software runs on a server, and people can sign up for the list. When someone sends an email to the list, everyone who has signed up for the list gets it. The members can choose to leave the list at any time.

Historically, most mailing list software worked via email commands - you would send a message to the list to ask to subscribe to it, and the list software would automatically add you. When you wished to leave, you sent a message asking to unsubscribe. These days, a lot of software also offers a web interface.

Conceptually, this is similar to web forums; the difference is that the message comes to your email, instead of you having to go to a web site to read it, and you can reply by email, instead of replying through a web site. There are many non-profit organizations that also still use these to communicate with people, because right now it's very inexpensive, and it doesn't require that their supporters regularly visit a web site. If you have announcements to send out, but only have a dozen or so a year, it makes a lot more sense than putting them out through a web forum.

The existence of mailing lists raises a question, though - who's responsible for paying the tax? The person who sent the original email sends one email; the mailing list server sends hundreds or thousands.

But wait, there's more! What about mailboxes that go to multiple people? For example, if you send mail to "tech@(the company I work for)", your email actually goes to about half a dozen people. Should you be charged for each of those? If you answer 'yes', then every time anyone sends an email, they're taking an unknown risk - they don't know how many copies of that email will actually be generated, so they don't know what it will cost.

How about internal email? The vast majority of email doesn't go across the Internet at all - most companies send much, much more internal email than they do external email. Will that be taxed? If so, how, and how will it be enforced?

Which brings up the whole problem of enforcement. You say to have a code number in each email, and have email software reject email without the code. First off, where are the code numbers going to be issued from? If there's a single web site to get the code numbers from, then congratulations - you've just created a single point of failure for all email on the Internet. Second, how are these numbers going to be verified? If it's a simple checksum sort of check, ways will be found to generate fake 'valid' codes. If the mail software has to contact someplace to find out whether the code is valid, you're opening up the possibility of man-in-the-middle attacks (someone faking either a 'valid' or 'invalid' response), and, again, adding a point of failure to the email system.

Further, where is this software going to come from? Someone has to write it, and has to write versions that will work with every suite of mail server software that exists - unless you're also going to mandate restrictions on what mail server software people can run, in which case be prepared for a huge second tax there, as software companies lobby to have their software be the only approved mail server software.

Going to this specific case, though - this isn't the US government proposing this. It's a city council. They have no legal power to enforce their laws on anyone outside the city, and their police have no authority outside the city limits. There's no reasonable way for them to actually enforce this.

Lastly, your message seems to be written under the assumption that this is about spam. It's not. It's about getting funding to prop up the local post office. We have ways to eliminate spam and its problems without charging a tax on all emails.

You mention the costs to ISPs of sending email - what you ignore, though, is that in the current email system, a large portion of the cost of sending an email is actually borne by the recipient. It's the recipient or their ISP who has to allocate storage to hold the email until the recipient can look and decide whether they want to read it. It's the receiving ISP who has to deal with the additional system overhead created by spammers who try random email addresses, hoping for a hit. Thanks to botnets, it's the receiving ISP who has to deal with the additional bandwidth overhead created by spam, while the spammers themselves don't.

If the problem is spam, there's a solution that's been proposed for many years: changing the Internet email paradigm to a pull-based one instead of push-based. This shifts the storage costs of keeping email until someone reads it to the sender or their ISP, rather than the recipient. It helps shift the bandwidth cost back to the sending end as well. It makes botnets harder to implement, since the mail sender has more responsibilities, and needs to be able to accept remote connections as well as initiate them.

Most importantly, the costs it creates are natural costs; a part of how the system works. They are not artificial costs, like the tax being proposed.

Oh, and by the way - I spent several years creating and running the spam filtering system at my previous employer. I know very, very well the costs of spam, both monetary and in terms of personnel time spent dealing with it. I also know the lengths that spammers will go to in order to get their crap through. I also ran their legitimate mailing list system, which had mailing lists that served literally tens of thousands of people who wanted to get messages from us, and had signed themselves up to, and were free to leave the list at any time. As a spam-stopping solution, this idea sucks. It will put a large additional burden on legitimate email, while spammers will make other unfortunate victims bear their costs.

Actually, the packet mail delivery industry isn't suffering. FedEx, UPS, and DHL are all doing fine - it's only the US Postal Service that's having problems. A big part of their problems are caused by government regulation, which many see as being designed to try to get rid of the USPS. See http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/03/04/how-the-postal-service-is-being-gutted.aspx for fuller explanations.

A sword was much easier to carry around all day, for one thing. Just as modern combatants still carry pistols even though they have rifles, many medieval combatants still carried a one-handed sword even when they had a polearm or a two-handed sword as their primary weapon. If your primary breaks, you've got a secondary - and also, when you're on the march and have your primary weapon in a wagon or on your horse, having that sword that's actually on you is a great help in an ambush.

They weren't necessarily 'favored', any more than most soldiers today would rather use a pistol than a rifle - but it was still considered important to have one and know how to use it.

Actual historical documents and archaeological finds disagree with you on swords not being used in battle. Remember, the vast majority of people involved in any battle were not knights - and for killing off unarmored or lightly armored opponents, a sword was quite good. And, of course, plate armor didn't develop until very late, so even the knights didn't have it for much of the medieval period. Even then, techniques were developed for fighting against people in plate with swords - check out, for example, Sigmund Ringeck's instructions on how to do it.

Don't forget, though, that close in, you can use that six-foot spear as a staff. There's nothing that says you can't choke up on it, nor that you have to limit yourself to hitting people with only the spear tip.

... because you want a weapon that actually works in real-world combat, rather than one that was designed simply to look cool?