A house of cards has to be carefully thought out and assembled. Your comparison is invalid.

There are different types of devices but what shops use are usually just reading maintenance message logs. Some devices can make some adjustment or even schedule changes. It takes another type of device to load an entirely new software into NVM provided someone has the know how and tools to generate the software. I'm not saying you are wrong in anything you've stated at all. I'm just trying to point out to people that doing the things that many people here are talking about isn't as trivial as the description makes it seem.

I have a sprint blackberry and can tether it via bluetooth and use it as a modem. It is neat but using a usb cable is definitely preferred because you kill the battery in no time otherwise.

What is odd is that Sprint is currently pretty happy with people using their smart phones as modems. I can tether my blackberry (via bluetooth or usb) to a laptop and get online easily. Some companies charge extra for this and sometimes it requires setting up a special connection and such. Sprint actually has an application that makes it as simple as tethering and clicking an icon. So I'm a little surprised they're going to charge so much extra when currently I can tether my phone to a device. I wonder if I'll still be able to do that without paying for the 8 device deal.

Glad to know I didn't imagine using this throughout college to access my dorm computer from any computer on campus. Normally the viewer is small enough and requires no install so you can just use that anyway. The web interface was/is only really needed when it is a machine you can't or don't want to put the viewer on.

Not really. Texas, like MA, just happens to have a situations that allows wind farm companies to get land, buy and build turbines, and then sell their power at rates unhinged from the market. The Cape Wind project isn't going to do much besides cost the public a lot of money and make Cape Wind very wealthy.

I've been to conferences at Mathworks. They're actually very responsive to their customers. They have market dominance and they actively work to maintain that by making their product the way their customers want it to be. They practically beg their users to give them ideas.

I AM a Matlab user and I do not care... Not even a little bit.

Typical argument from people who have never been to the cape or have no clue concerning Cape Wind. Here's some knowledge for you. The majority of the people on the cape and in fact the majority of people against Cape Wind are not rich. They do not have ocean views. They are working class people who are going to see their energy costs go up for no appreciable reason other than a private company exploited state and federal laws to get public land/water and public money to build a private power plant that the public will be forced to buy overpriced power from.

Sounds like you don't know anyone in the area. The biggest objections are from the working class people on the cape who live there year round and will see their energy costs go up for no good reason. The wind farm will be a money pit and the energy it eventually produces will be overpriced. Energy companies in MA are required to purchase renewable energy if available though. So many of us in MA will see our power bills go up all so "environmentalists" can have their proof of concept. The majority of people complaining just realize that the money could be better spent.

"who made a career out of demagoguery and debauchery" Yeah that's not a slanted way of characterizing his entire career or anything.

"This country is losing money fast and illegal immigration costs more each year than the war effort overseas." I can't even begin to think of reasonable justification for this.

In my experience the speeds I get via tethering a smartphone are about an order of magnitude lower than a wired connection and the latency is super high.

Reading that article it sounds like the technical mistake wasn't really a mistake but the reality of the Germans hitting the most well defended spot with a creative attack that effectively countered the defense design. That's more of a lack of guessing what the future would bring. The line was effective against what it was built for.

I wasn't even using the last Ubuntu install I had for 3D games. Just watching typical video files or streaming video was horrendously buggy on a laptop I had it installed on for a while. That along with my wife's frustration at doing things as simple as updating her blog got me to install XP on the machine again pretty quickly. I've played around with and worked seriously in Linux and Unix environments for only a little over ten years now. Ten years ago I found Linux to be buggy and inconsistent as a daily typical use OS. While today it has some improvements it is still buggy and inconsistent for doing typical personal computer stuff. I use a couple different Unix setups at work all the time and even use Cygwin in Windows at work. At home I have absolutely no desire to install Linux to replace Windows on any of my machines because it would only require massive amounts of additional maintenance and headache.