Linksys did not precisely compete on price value. In the realm of stores like Office Dept, Linksys was top end. After Cisco, the packaging and casing got more extreme, comparative prices went up, all the while bargain basement brands went from unreliable to fine. Didn't help that Linksys alienated the tech-savvy segment of the mass market by killing the routers that could easily be converted to open source community firmware.

And in fact:

It looks like Busboys and Poets are having tech difficulties. We are looking for an alternative feed that we can pick up.

Sorry for the connectivity problems, we are currently working on the broadband issues. The full sound and video will be available on YouTube tomorrow. Stay tuned.

http://nader.org/2012/11/03/to-view-third-party-debate-at-busboys-and-poets-nov-4/

The debate is supposed to have started at 7:30pm Eastern. The sites are not working.

Docked in port is often more dangerous, to the ship at least. This storm came in on a wide hook so it would have been hard to pick a time to leave, assuming they were ready to go when the first warnings came.

The U.S. National Weather Service seems careful not to overstate. Then again, few people seem to even understand the difference between a Watch and a Warning. For this storm there is an oddball bureaucratic classification thing keeping the NWS's Hurricane Center from posting tropical warnings north of North Carolina. Kinda amusing... it's a PDF at the top of the Hurricane page... http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/ They are handing off to local offices and two more obscure divisions mid-storm: http://www.hpc.ncep.noaa.gov/ and http://www.opc.ncep.noaa.gov/

Agree there's too much crying wolf but the actual numbers are pretty bad. Here is an analysis of why the predicted 11 foot tide at the Battery in lower Manhattan is bad news for the subway: http://kottke.org/12/10/hurricane-sandy-comin The alarms have been indiscriminate though, so there is a lot of noise in the signal. The recent eagerness to close the subway is particularly irksome. The "officials" would never close a large road system because in 24 hours it would be covered in seawater. The people making these decisions see things from the tinted windows of limousines. The first time the subway was closed for weather was only in 2011: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Subway#Subway_flooding

Extreme combo of crying wolf and actual superlatives. The reliably sober NOAA is cited by Reuters, "It could be the largest storm to hit the United States." Its official NWS prediction is for a "major to historic" NYC flood. On the other hand, NYC has stranded million of subway riders 24 hrs. ahead of the predicted surge. Here on the edge of the storm in Virginia, the university that used to pride itself on never cancelling classes has indeed cancelled because parents can't work because the grade schools are closed because...

Rain. High near 51. Breezy, with a northwest wind 18 to 24 mph, with gusts as high as 36 mph. Chance of precipitation is 100%. New precipitation amounts between a quarter and half of an inch possible.

Seamonkey is also convenient is you want to run another Mozilla browser alongside Firefox and not have to take any measures to keep the profiles separate. So it adds one to the number of browsers you can just install and run with no special setup and thereby split some of the advertiser & Facebook tracking that is so annoying.

Seamonkey and Thunderbird also keep the Mozilla team somewhat coherent in developing the common codebase, though increasingly build issues are wasting a lot of time for those two now unpaid projects. Mozilla has three projects it supports with paid developers: Firefox, the Firefox OS and Firefox Mobile. It dropped Thunderbird recently from that group and it's not clear how the TB team is going to handle rapid release vs. extended service release. Lots of tricky work for unpaid developers to keep up with an intricate codebase continually special cased for the three paid products, and to match Chrome innovations.

Seems to me Seamonkey developers are the ones most concerned with making current features work predictably for users.

Don't know if it's the best, but it's the one the WSJ recommended a year or so ago. Yet for the last few months a pretty bad bug, failure to update, has affected many users: http://community.webroot.com/t5/Webroot-Mobile-for-Android/Definition-Update-Failed/td-p/9404 A fix is finally due this week, they say.

The problem is that many phones have very little volatile memory available. On my phone, apps like Facebook and Youtube and Twitter and Poynt cannot be deleted, nor the detested music content app of my provider. These are among the apps constantly demanding updates, and probably memory.

Otherwise it's a pretty good deal at $35/month for phone service & data, no contract (Sprint reseller), so it's a tradeoff

Useless apps clogging up the ability to scan for current viruses
vs.
reasonable cost
vs.
rooting the phone.

The latter is confusing enough from what I can tell, but might allow tethering.

In response, the original was slashdotted. I just took the first Google result. It did have interesting comments, but I suppose Reddit had more.

The fact that he blanked out their faces shows photography is a different matter legally than in the U.S. Hard to believe they are allowed to rip something off your head or even out of your hands though.

Here's another link, with a picture of the perps. The comments suggest "The French hate paparazzi" as well. http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/16/augmented-reality-explorer-steve-mann-assaulted-at-parisian-mcdonalds/

(Not all 35,000 are out, but two substations are getting no power.)

Guessing more large transmission lines were hit by this storm than usual. Our electric co-op has lines and substations repaired and ready which still cannot get power from the two big utilities. The co-op has 35,000 customers but does not generate its own power. It fills in nooks and crannies on the map out in rural areas, and may still get some kind of subsidy from the old REA, now part of the Agriculture Dept.

Similarly, phone went out even though lines are generally underground here. DSL was more vulnerable, and the word is the lost power from the big utilities.

Salesperson the phone told me the slower service is more expensive. That's how they work, milking the legacy customers. Beyond Comcast, web hosting works the same way. You can't even find the expensive plans people are still on when you go to the host's websites.