On the laptop or on the kid?

I would have to second the recommendation for Lenovo. The place I'm working used to be exclusively a Lenovo shop and I was very impressed with the engineering of the boxes. They originally gave me a very old Lenovo desktop that had been around the block a few too many times and was under-configured. The optical drive no longer worked. When the IT guy came to replace the CD and add more memory I couldn't believe how quickly he finished. Seriously, it couldn't have taken him more than 60 seconds to open the box, add the memory, pop out the old CD and pop in the new one.

That got me looking seriously at Lenovo. Shortly afterward I bought a Thinkpad W700 laptop that has seen near continual use for almost three years now. Last year I bought a Thinkpad X-series laptop so I had something a little easier to travel with than the behemoth W700. The W700 will soon be replaced with a W530. Nothing really wrong with it, but it's three years old and I'm dying to get one of those new Ivy Bridge i7 machines.

The Thinkpads aren't sexy. They're no-nonsense, well-engineered tools to get a job done. And equivalently equipped they cost a helluva lot less than a Mac.

The conclusion that BitTorrent traffic has "fallen" is not actually supported by the Sandvine report. They complicate things by reporting everything as percentages, but if you dig deep enough you find overall mean traffic is up 40% year-over-year. So, in reality, BitTorrent traffic has continued to GROW, it's just a smaller percentage of the overall traffic.

They actually make this point about Netflix in the report. Their share of peak traffic increased by only 0.2%, yet they point out that due to overall traffic increase this amounts to a 30% increase in absolute traffic associated with Netflix.

I would do that, but my TV doesn't have a channel changer on it. It's remote or nothing.

By excepting their in-house streaming service from the cap, they're saying the overage charges are for external access, not for the last mile to the house. $200/TB for external transport charges is beyond outrageous.

The $1.15/TB was a mistake. I read it as Euro and it was actually GBP. So it's more like $1.40/TB. And Comcast is only charging 142 times this rate. My bad.

kimsufi.co.uk has these rates on their cheap dedicated server boxes. They are an arm of OVH.

It's sane until you look at the charge for going over the cap. I can lease a dedicated server where bandwidth beyond the 5TB monthly cap is $1.15/TB. Comcast's marginal bandwidth rate is $200/TB. Admittedly, Comcast may be paying a bit more for bandwidth than the dedicated server hosting company, but 173 times more? They're just sticking it to people who use more while trying to make it sound like they're being fair.

I recently went through several boxes of old family photos and digitized them. I learned a number of things in the process.

There are/were vast differences in the quality and longevity of different photo printing methods. Most of the photos that were about 50 years old had faded and color shifted, each, it seems, in its own peculiar direction. Trying to bring them back to proper color was a nightmare, not made easier by my lack of skill with Gimp. But some of the photos from 50 years ago looked like they might have been printed last week. The colors were still vivid. I have no idea what process was used on any of these prints, but it was very clear the process makes a world of difference.

Whatever you decide to do with the prints, I strongly recommend getting some archival quality sleeves to individually store them. Even if you then put them in an album, put them first in archival sleeves. The prints will be protected and will never again be exposed to fingerprints. They won't get scratched. They'll be reasonably well protected against UV fading. Then lock it all in a light-proof vault. Light is the mortal enemy of photo prints and even good quality UV protection will still allow some small amount of UV to penetrate. Keep the prints in a tightly sealed box and you should have few problems with fading.

Honestly, though, if you really care about preserving these for posterity, just keep them digital and use some kind of offsite backup. Know going in that you'll probably have to move them around several times over the years as companies come and go and technology changes. You may well have to convert them to different formats at more than one point. But the digital copy is almost certainly going to be more flexible and of better quality than any print.

I was responding to a message that said everything will be fine when human error is removed from the system. My intent was to point out that as long as humans and vehicles are allowed to mingle, human error can never be removed. Pedestrians will do stupid things. They'll have their mind on something else entirely and stupidly step off the curb into traffic. Kids will dash out into the street from between parked cars.

Can the car be programmed to react to these situations? Sure. Will it be able to tell the difference between a child darting out from between parked cars and a beach ball rolling into the road? In the former case avoidance of the obstacle at virtually any cost is the recommended course, even if it means swerving into oncoming traffic. In the latter, collision with the obstacle is of no consequence.

Will the computer know the beach ball, which is not an obstacle to be concerned with, is likely to be followed by an obstacle that needs to be avoided? Will the computer be able to detect children playing in a front yard and slow down just in case one of them does something stupid? How will it tell the difference between children playing and normal pedestrians on the sidewalk who warrant no unusual concern? People, well, some people, make these judgments instantly and continually while driving. Perhaps computers will be able to do it some day. But not today. At least not at a cost that makes it practical for in-vehicle use.

Human error will be removed from the equation not long after humans are removed from the equation.

Not all roads are limited access super-highways. I do most of my driving on surface streets. There is sufficiently little pedestrian traffic that one tends not to think about them, and just enough pedestrian traffic that forgetting about them becomes a big problem. Until you make it illegal for pedestrians to enter the roadway, there will be humans and human errors as parts of the equation.

You're scratching at one of my pet peeves. Businesses hire (some) people for the express purpose of using their brains then put them in situations least conducive to that pursuit. A year ago the company I'm contracting at had a two-day conference where everyone in the department attended except me. I got more done in those two days on difficult tasks than I would have in several weeks' worth of normal days. No phones ringing. No copier beeping its head off. No hallway conversations. No co-workers dropping by to ask questions and interrupt my train of thought. I had no idea how disruptive to the thought process the normal cubicle work environment is until I spent those two days in what was effectively my own private office space.

If the home environment can be kept free of the distractions that are so common in the typical work place there is little doubt that those needing to make good use of their gray matter could easily be more productive at home.

There's an important point buried in here. You need to first ask yourself a question: Do I want to be the go-to guy in my department for presentations? If the answer is 'yes', then spend time trying to make it fun and exciting. If the answer is 'no', like the new husband asked to do the laundry for the first time, figure out a way to totally screw it up without making it seem like you did it on purpose. Make the presentation as dull and boring as you possibly can. Don't make eye contact. Don't look up to see if anyone has questions. Appear really nervous and uncomfortable (probably not difficult). Make it easy for your boss to say, "I guess public speaking isn't his thing." You'll likely never again be asked to do a big presentation.

You're making a distinction without a difference to the guy who lost his job and hasn't been able to drive for five years because a non-calibrated machine registered him at 0.08% when he was really at 0.06%. I'm sure it will come as great relief to him that it was the police who made the mistake, not the judge who didn't believe him when he said he'd only had two beers.