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Comment Re:Only if they've been offline for a while (Score 1) 149

My Voyage has been in airplane mode since I've owned it, and I left the wifi off for years on my old Keyboard. It increases the battery life tremendously. Plus, I transfer and manage all my books via USB with Calibre anyway, and I've always got a backlog of dozens of books loaded on the Kindle, so I really have no use for the wifi connectivity.

Comment Re:I thought this was fairly standard (Score 1) 338

Back when I was with T-Mobile (on an old plan long out of contract), my bill went up twenty or thirty cents every couple of months like clockwork, despite the base price never changing. By the time I left them, I was paying well over $50 a month for my $35 plan (which, being an old plan, was 300 minutes a month and no data service). Now I pay $25 a month plus sales tax for a Virgin Mobile plan with 300 minutes and unlimited data, and the price never changes.

Comment Re:One word: Lawsuits (Score 1) 253

I'll usually give someone a honk if they do something stupid and dangerous that nearly causes an accident. Most bad drivers will be too oblivious to know (or care) why you honked at them anyway, but there's always a small chance the offender will hear it and think "oh hey, I must have done something dumb there..." and then be more careful in the future. Getting all angry and laying on the horn and cussing at 'em incessantly doesn't do anything useful, though, and just makes you more likely to do something stupid yourself.

Comment Re:Sigh... (Score 1) 192

I used to work for a web hosting company, and it was amazing how many of our clients would submit support tickets demanding that we make their $15/mo shared web hosting accounts PCI compliant. We even had some actual *banks* hosting their web sites on our cheap shared accounts. I suspect a lot of the problem was that these customers had no IT staff or knowledge and didn't understand that their requests were ridiculous or what a terrible idea it was to store unencrypted financial data on a third party shared hosting platform. (Unfortunately, since we'd gotten out of the dedicated server business and only sold shared hosting, we weren't even supposed to tell these poor folks that it was a terrible idea and they really needed a dedicated self-managed system of some sort at a minimum, since that would mean we'd lose their account.)

Comment Re:Good (Score 1) 313

There is little or no profit in selling sub-$10 hosting accounts. Your cheap hosting is subsidized by upselling other high-margin services, especially advertising services, to hosting customers, and often by monetizing your site itself. (Have you checked your site's default HTTP error pages lately? Odds are good that they're full of targeted ads based on your domain name.) If those revenue sources become less profitable, your hosting costs will eventually go up (or your hosting company will go out of business).

Comment Re:Straight out of Redmond - Conspiracy Theory (Score 1) 592

I had reservations about Vista myself, but honestly I've had no complaints about it so far. It took me an hour or so to figure out how to disable the annoying shit, eye candy, and resource-hogging unneccesary services, and now it runs fine and pretty much looks and acts much like my old Win2K installation from a UI standpoint.

That said, however, that I got Vista with a new (and significantly better) system, rather than trying to install it on the older box I had Windows 2000 on. I suspect that it is a bigger resource hog than 2K/XP, but on my new system (E6850/2GB/8800GTS) it still runs much faster than 2K on my old system (XP2500+/512MB/GF6100). I can now play DX10 games and use other software that doesn't work on 2K, and I have had no problems with any of my existing software so far. Granted, there doesn't seem to be any compelling reason to buy it beyond the whole "new software won't work in 2K/XP in the near future" aspect. Compatibility with new stuff was pretty much the only reason I went with Vista instead of XP.

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