They quoted me $48/month to add internet to the basic cable we already have. I guess they know people want cable over DSL. (No FiOS to compete here.)

The salesperson really made a fuss of trying to walk me through a script, and I'm not confident he even tried to give me the best price.

The Guardian took the lead, quite alone, and has nothing like the "transgressions" of the tabloid press to answer. Obviously this is not where you're going with your comment, but what is more interesting to me is the difference in press freedom between the US and the UK. The Leveson hearings I could not imagine happening in the US Congress. A whole line of questions to Brooks were about the political influence of newspapers. The transgressions of the print media in the UK are worse than in the US, but so is the threat of regulation. I'm sure the Guardian and it supporters are indeed worried about suicidal danger. The Independent does not sound to happy about all this, from what little I have read. But the Murdoch press in the UK is a lot more powerful and vindictive than Fox/WSJ in the US. They really did meet and threaten top party leaders.

Non-UK sources provide additional details not allowed in the UK media, due to pre-trial laws. The Guardian broke this story, but now scrupulously points out it is limited in what it can report. Comparing to the NYT, the omitted facts seem to be the strange episode of the discarded briefcase in the parking garage. Brooks's husband was caught red-handed when he tried to reclaim it after someone found it in a dumpster.

Anyone know what else the UK press must omit?

In the U.S., providing news is no longer required to maintain an FCC TV license, and neither is providing unbiased news. There is still a minimal educational requirement, but it's nothing compared to the 1970s, when outside business groups would try to capture station's FCC licenses by citing strict FCC public service requirements. Those were also the days of the Fairness Doctrine.

Some low-rent broadcast stations claim to fulfill the current minimal Educational/Instructional standards by showing Edgemont, a teen drama imported from Canada! You can read about it here, the requirement is called E/I: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgemont_(TV_series) In fact, Fox Family used to use Edgemont for this!

The station here that shows Edgemont (at noon, when its intended audience is not even home), fills much of the rest of its daytime schedule with infomercials, which would have been impossible under 1970s rules. An FCC license has gone from a license to print money to a license to shill trinkets.

The WSJ is covering this pretty well, but Fox TV news is not, from what I've read and read about.

Any reason to use 48v instead of 12v? Seems to be a lot of 48v and 24v equipment available for the solar market.

s/roads/rods

I lost a laptop to lightning and it was a week after the storm! I came out to troubleshoot a modem & router setup that went dead after an electrical storm. I plugged into the ethernet to test the router and over the course of the next week my laptop died. Will never do that again. The modem ran a satellite internet service - DirecWay/HughesNet.

Less pathologically, always check the grounding of your telephone or cable box. Sometimes they do a cheap job, just strap something to a nearby pipe, or run a wire to a spike, but the wire later deteriorates.

Lightning roads can be expensive - lots of copper - but I have seen historic properties with one on every large tree near the house.

Any decent upload script like Wordpress limits the types of files uploaded (not as much as it should in my opinion). Then apache (or other web server) restricts what type of files are publicly accessible. In case that isn't clear.

No 777 should be exposed to the web. Seems to be confusion here over how small site web hosting works. The tmp is not used to host images. Also, note both the admin and public side of a CMS (how Wordpress is often used) are typically coded in PHP and the admin side must be able to manipulate content, including image files. There may be a better way, but this is how it's done.

Wordpress. Or any upload system that stores images as files not database blobs! Maybe blobs are a better way, don't know, just talking practically, basic web hosting stuff.

My web host pushed this patch into user htaccess for those users clueful enough to be running php as cgi:
    RewriteEngine on
    RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^[^=]*$
    RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} %2d|- [NC]
    RewriteRule .? - [F,L]

Shared hosting at this ISP, a well-regarded one, disables normal PHP's ability to write files unless you open up directory permissions (777). Last time I checked, other users could also read files unless you used 600. Two problems, hence, they support php-cgiwrap if you know enough to want it.

Running PHP as cgi is the only reasonable choice at shared hosts like this, with a robust, but essentially legacy, Linux structure.

Seems crazy. CloudLinux does segregate users (nothing to do with a cloud, by the way), and other Linuxes can be protected various ways (FutureQuest has done shared hosting right for a long time.)

Also, themes are difficult to update. Compared to plugins and the Wordpress core, theme updates have these problems:

1. First, themes do not notify you when they have updates available.

2. It takes an expert to merge a theme update with the existing customization of the theme. (Plugins and core updates are one click.)

3. Theme vendors limit their support. I dealt with a well-known theme vendor which charges some small amount for a subscription to all its themes. It refuses to provide archive versions or changelogs. So the expert is left guessing what customizations have been made, unless some previous person working on the site has keep a copy. (Plugins are more commonly from the WP site, with changelogs and archives.)

4. Users keep unused themes lying around online and see no reason to update them. (This can also be a problem with inactive plugins.)

5. Wordpress core can do nothing to protect against bad code. A theme can run arbitrary PHP, as can any admin user from the admin interface, as mentioned by parent. (Plugins are similar, though runtime the active theme has priority over plugins.)

Maybe something similar is going on with autism. What would be a hygiene hypothesis for autism? Probably the amount of time we spend alone or plugged into video games, the usual suspects. But the alone thing is interesting. Such as: kids who have their own bedrooms vs. kids who share.

A quick google on "autism own bedroom" shows a bunch of parents complaining the child wants to sleep in their bed, and parents in subsidized housing demanding an extra bedroom so the child can have his own room. Who knows.

How many case of allergy were there 200 years ago? None. Hay fever was only known among the wealthy, and only since the early 1800s. Supposedly. It's similar the the autism phenomenon. Either over-diagnosis, environmental conditions, or some kind of hygiene hypothesis, who knows.