Alan Grayson's a loudmouth Democrat from Florida, and if either the Obama or Bush administrations had anything on him, they'd have used it long ago. I think he's wrong about a lot of things, but it's sure fun to watch him.

Grayson was the Congresscritter who proposed a "War Makes You Poor" Act, which would have required the Bush Administration to do an actual accounting of the costs for the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, and pay for them either by raising taxes or naming specific programs they were going to cut, not just silently running up debt while pretending to be fiscally responsible. Yeah, sure, it got about as far as you'd expect (:-), but it was entirely appropriate. I'm surprised he's been able to stay in Congress, since part of his mission there has been to piss off people who richly deserve it.

It could be Mr. Tesla who's having problems charging in the cold, probably because he's dead.

It could be Tesla the company which is having problems charging in the cold. (Tesla's an American company, and American English treats a company name as a singular noun, unlike British English which treats it as a plural noun.)

It could be that the author meant that Tesla Cars are having issues charging in the cold, and mistakenly pluralized them as "Tesla's" instead of "Teslas".

It could be that the author meant that the Tesla S is having issues charging in the cold, or that Tesla S Cars are, and really mistakenly punctuated it.

I'm guessing the third was most likely.

That's an especially good time to deploy some old router that it can connect to so you can use it at home, on a different channel than your main wifi, though for roaming use you might need a USB hub.

My HP Laser Printer is running just fine after a decade. It doesn't have wifi, just ethernet and USB, though I think there was a wifi printer of the same generation. It usually sits in the same room as the wifi router. But Wifi uses channels, so if you've got an old 802.11b-only printer and want to keep it on the air instead of hanging it on an ethernet, you've probably got an old wifi router sitting around by now, so put it and the printer on one channel and your fast gear on another channel (or on 5 GHz, where fast stuff belongs.) If you can get your printer and router to use Channel 14, that's probably best, because it's not officially supported in the US so there's usually nothing else on it.

And there's nothing wrong with 802.11g, though yeah, any 802.11b is worth retiring.

I can see a dozen or so of my neighbors' wifi networks. About 2/3 are running N, 1/3 running G, no B. I have a couple of 802.11b devices in my "old electronic junk" bin, but it's not like they're powered up. And unless you're somewhere that has smart-meters running 802.11b, or some other antique or retro gear, you probably won't have 802.11b running either.

But all of the devices know how to fall back to that protocol, and maybe some of them will, at least with weak signals over long distances.

I can typically see a dozen or so neighbors' wifi networks at 2.4GHz. Probably 2/3 are 802.11n, the rest g, no b. I used to run on g, and it worked ok except for the far edges of my house, but when my neighbors started upgrading from g to n (or maybe b to n:-), the airwaves were getting too crowded and I kept getting knocked off the network when I was in the room I usually used my laptop in. Eventually I bit the bullet and got an 802.11n router to get a bit more power and range, as well as switching channels, though there were almost as many people on 6 and 11 as on 1. Now my connections are pretty reliable, except for one tablet that has a wimpy radio.

The one other thing that's changed is that almost all the nearby wifi want authentication (even if it's only WEP.) Almost none of the b access points used it, many of the g versions did, and all of the n access points have authentication enabled on them. It's kind of frustrating, because every couple of years my DSL has a problem, and in the past I could borrow a neighbor's wifi until I got it fixed.

Matter of fact, it's all dark......

Matter of fact, it's all dark...

If the school's going to make a commitment to Linux, Open Office is usually compatible enough. Yes, you can probably build a spreadsheet or word doc that doesn't render correctly on OpenOffice, but you don't need to do that if you have people doing most of their new documents in open software.

Yes, I'm only using 3 Mbps at home. It's slightly better than 1.5 Mbps, and for video it's way better than 384 kbps. I've got a T3 at work (45Mbps), shared with a couple of coworkers, and for downloading large software images it rocks, but I don't download a lot of Linux ISOs at home. (And most of the video I watch at work is training or equivalent, with talking heads and slides; 384kbps was plenty for that back in the day.)

As it is, when I'm doing Ubuntu updates, it usually takes longer to install them than to download on the 1.5Mbps T1, for the virtual machines that live over in the testing side.

Yes, Feinstein likes a big-spending government, and prefers more of that spending to go to social programs than Bush did, but that doesn't make her a "leftist" any more than it made him one. She's pretty consistent in her opposition to most of the Bill of Rights - doesn't like free speech on the Internet, doesn't like search warrants, didn't stop torture at Gitmo. Yeah, she's occasionally come out to support the liberal side of issues like gay marriage or abortion, but it's not like she really broke through a lot of boundaries on those in the Senate.

Basically, the only thing leftist about her is that she counts as +1 in the "D" column instead of the "R" column when you're counting the Senate majority party, which does make a huge difference. But she's got enough seniority that California's Democrats haven't run a serious primary challenger against her in years, and California's Republicans know they're going to lose so they've only run token candidates who are doing their "take one for the team" job in return for future party favors. It's too bad Carly Fiorina decided to run against Barbara Boxer instead of DiFi - I dislike her immensely, but it would have been a fun race to watch.

Are you serious? The rich do write most of the regulations, so it's not like that's going to keep them in check. Look how well it worked for the 2008 banking collapse, or the persistence of the military-industrial complex.