You don't? Well, OK, they aren't made by Tesla but electric buses have been running in San Francsico for decades. Neat thing about buses: they run a set route so you can power them from overhead wires and not even have to carry batteries. Hybrid buses are common in the South Bay, where densities do not support the infrastructure for electric buses.

Buses are generally way ahead of private cars in terms of propulsive technology. A lot of buses around here run on compressed natural gas. A decade ago there were buses (in Toronto, I think) that used fly wheels as a form of regenerative braking.

If I'm going to use precious vacation time to get away, I'm going to use it to fly some place nice when the weather is cold and ugly at home. If it's nice here, why leave?

The relevant question would be what be what percentage beyond that required for a comfortable existence have you committed to give to charity. The saints give over 100%. They live in poverty so that others may live better. Bill Gates is able to give a large percentage of his total income to charity because his has far far more than he needs. What remains after his charitable donations is still much more than most of us here can hope to earn.

Where they can use their authority to force everyone else to use obsolete and "considered harmful" methods as policy because it needs to be done that way so they can still understand it.

No that I've ever had to deal with this situation.....

When is recently? Keep in mind that when a locally owned bookstore closes, it doesn't usually make the national news. Palo Alto has lost two. Stanford Books Store doesn't operate Downtown any more either so maybe that is three. Adjacent Menlo Park has only managed to save Kepler's through extraordinary measures. Now, I don't think any of these events occurred within the last two years but there weren't that many book stores to start with.

In many areas the chains were all they had.

From what I see of how local government works around here, I find it hard to agree with you. About the only reason "local" seems more competent than federal is that there is only one federal but many locals to chose from. At any given time for any given function, you can usually find at least one local government doing the right thing. The rest, though, and the rest of the time, it is not so pretty.

Because dead or alive isn't nearly as much fun as dead and alive!

No, it didn't. Spam was a big issue for a while but server side spam filters like cleanfeed and distributed systems like nocem became very sophisticated and effective. Unlike email filters, Usenet filters have the advantage in being able to see *all* the destinations. If an article that appeared in more than a handful of groups was quickly squashed. Spam never entirely went away but it well under control long before the decline of Usenet.

There were also efforts like Usenet2 that created a network of trusted servers who would keep spam out. It worked fairly well but interest waned initially because the spam problem was effectively controlled in regular Usenet but even more so as total volume declined and the Usenet2 corner became too thinly populated to be of much use.

Now there is still the problem of idiots posting things in inappropriate places but that's a problem of moderation, something Usenet never did well. (Usenet *did* have moderated groups but it drastically slowed conversation and did not scale well)

I still run a small news server. Spam is only a "problem" is groups where the posting volume has dropped near zero and spam is all that is left. A bigger problem is that I keep losing peers as people give up and shutdown thier servers.

But doesn't call. Maybe she knows better. Maybe it's the two hour time difference. Maybe it is because she comes from a generation where long distance calls were expensive.

I live in Silicon Valley so most of my friends are either technically savvy themselves or have others they prefer to call on.

I think he's right. Have you noticed that phones are getting bigger and tablets are getting smaller? I think phones are about to eat tablets in the same way they ate other stand along devices. People don't want two devices. They want one.

Personally, I hate the idea.

Probably the kind where the parents can not entirely dismiss the notion that their child may be doing something quite serious that they don't know about. In other words: virtually every parent of a teenager who is honest with themselves.

I guess it's for fickle people. My path is essentially: DOS -> AmigaOS -> Solaris -> Linux, with the qualification that the old systems never entirely went away, it is just a change of focus for my desktop usage. I've never gone backwards or done the same migration twice.

Now if it was about data migration between OS's that would make a lot more sense. I move data between Solaris, Windows, and Linux all the time.

Have their been any updates at all since you submitted your patch? If not and the time period is long enough to believe there never will be, then your best course of action is to fork. As one with enough vested in the project to pay for further development, you are probably in a better position to steward the project than the original developers, who likely have no more use for the program.

If there have been updates, then you have a more sticky position. Most likely, the maintainers considered your patches to be too narrowly applicable at least relative the difficulty required to integrate and maintain them. At that point, you are pretty much stuck re-integrating your patches with each release.

Windows COTS wouldn't necessarily solve your problem either. It just takes away the option to patch your own. If the company is not interested in making the changes you request, there isn't much you can do about it. The exception would be of the commercial software is more popular and better maintained but that's true in the open source world too. If you have a choice between two projects, both of which an do the job with adjustments, you are most likely better off contributing the one that is actively maintained than the one that isn't, even if the required changes are more extensive.

Unfortunately, making an estimate to half-day granularity takes a great deal of time. So much, in fact, that you will likely need to give an estimate for the time to complete the estimate because it will be significant part of the total project time.

And you will still likely be wrong because what you are really doing is a sketch implementation without the feedback that prevents small errors from exploding into total nonsense. A course estimate may actually be better since it forces you to factor in unknowns rather than assuming unknowns don't exist because "look at all the detail!"

I've worked for several startups. Four years is long enough to expect some turnover if the headcount is non-trivial. The pointed questions to ask are:

1) How many employees?
2) What kind of roles to they serve?
3) Is the company obscuring turnover by keeping traditionally high-turnover roles like sales as contractor?