I'm an actual Starlink user at my farm. It's head-and-shoulders better than any competing service.

I previously has used a cellular uplink... and even with a yagi mounted 30' up on a mast, I barely had 1-2Mb/s of bandwidth. It was truly miserable.

Starlink is a game-changer... give 'em the freakin' money. They've done something truly miraculous for rural internet users, who had previously only terrible/expensive options. As a taxpayer, I'm actually glad to see the money I contribute going to something useful.

Agreed. The last 20 years have not been kind to this place.

Hollywood has long been a wretched hive of scum of villainy. Toads like Weinstein should have been burned down long ago.

But throwing Kavanaugh in with Weinstein? C'mon.

Hallelujah, brother... preach it.

I too remember the Old Days (TM). Slashdotting was an actual thing. We fearlessly rode the waves of the ether, and many a site trembled at the sound of our clicks.

I rarely post any more... but the passing of Rob is sobering reminder than none of us are getting any younger... RIP Roblimo :(

I work with mentally ill patients, and I was an active SWAT officer when Columbine happened. It changed how we did everything.

After Columbine, we got our floor-plans on ALL of our local schools, and spent hours and hours during the nights assaulting those locations, and gaming-out active shooter scenarios. We had other officers play the OPFOR, and hunted them through the hallways. What we discovered was that as fast as we were, we weren't fast enough. By the time a police response arrives at a school, the gunman can have already killed several dozen (as happened at Virginia Tech).

The answer to a "man with a gun" is another man with a gun, and the School Resource Officer is critical against a homicidal maniac. The faster you can get that man on-scene and putting rounds on-target, the better.

And our mental health system is badly broken. Look into the eyes of Lanza, Holmes, Loughner... it doesn't take a board-certified psychiatrist to tell you they've lost touch with reality. Unfortunately, there are very few resources out there to address people like that. Until that changes, people like that (though they throw up red flags to every person who knows them) are going to continue to fall through the cracks.

They killed the goose that layed the golden eggs.

The uber-green and anti-nuke activists likely don't live there, and probably consider these folks collateral damage in their larger fight. Ideally, such activists would be up-front about the economic costs of some of their stands. Even beyond this now-impoverished small town, growing economies need affordable energy; that's just an economic fact. High energy costs reverberate through the entire supply chain, and raise the costs of virtually every good-and-service that normal people use.

Everybody wants clean air and water, but some green initiatives come with a serious price-tag.

Thank God for the UN's beneficence and adherence-to-principle.

Good thing none of those votes were bought through corruption... or through funds skimmed from the Oil-for-Food program.

I own two Das's... they rock.

I recommend the blank-keyed "stealth" model. It not only keeps those without any computer skills away from your terminal (some people look at a blank keyboard, and literally don't know what to do), but they're also ideal for home. Mine keeps my non-touch-typist kids away from my computer.

This explains why there are no arrogant people over the age of 30, yes?

Stack Overflow reputation is cumulative. This means that if two people are providing answers of the same quality and at the same rate over time, the folks who have been there longest will have higher reputations, and that the higher reputation will reflect only tenure. Not any kind of quality.

If you want to look at quality, you should be looking at a metric that is something like (total reputation / number of months active). Even this is imperfect of course, since if people take a hiatus or something that will present the appearance of worse quality using this metric.

I was going to say that this fatal flaw invalidated the conclusions because the correlation between reputation and age just reflected the older people being around longer. The problem with that is that Stack Overflow opened in 2008. That's not enough time to explain a linear trend that tracks from age 16 to nearly age 50, but the final conclusion "So, senior coders earn their higher reputation by providing more answers, not by having answers of (significantly) higher quality." should still be re-examined with tenure-controlled analysis to try and see whether older aged members have been members longer.

You and the OP are both being unnecessarily vague and inaccurate.

The question is whether the US federal government has the authority to tell one person to purchase something from another private entity.

The local government isn't forcing you to buy something. It's forcing you to pay taxes (which it can do) and then it's providing a service (which it also can do). Even though it looks similar, paying taxes + receiving a public benefit != purchasing a consumer good.

You don't need special glasses to see a 3d-movie in 2d. The 3d glasses work fine. They did for me anyway.

I've got various eye-problems related to a severe infection I had as an infant. I've had surgery twice to try and correct my lazy-eye. And I'm totally immune to all kinds of 3d (3d movies, magic eye, etc.). Last time I went to the optometrist she explained that during the years where my eyes were crossed I developed a pyschological "blind spot". Since the eyes weren't pointing the same direction, I could either see double or just shut off the signal from one eye at a time. My brain opted for the latter.

Since my eyes are straight now the problem is theoretically something I could train my brain to stop doing, but I've never had any luck with the eye-exercises they gave me.

I went to see Avatar in 2d. Then I went to see it in 3d. The only difference at all for me was that in the 3d version if I took off the 3d glasses the whole screen looked fuzzy. If I kept them on nothing was in 3d, but the polarization meant that at least I could see the 2d images clearly.

Dead-on right. It's not the back-end, it's not what brand of software, it's not the brand of tablet... it's the interface.

I'll say it again... most physicians are NOT geeks, with the occasional exception (confession: I actually have a server rack in my house). People may not realize this, but plenty of physicians can't even type, particularly the older ones.

I have a colleague... I'll call him Dr. Smith. He's a GP, and he's literally been practicing for nearly 50 years. That's not a typo... he started in 1960. He's old-school, and anybody (including me) would be happy to have him take care of them... because he takes all his own calls... comes into the ER to see his patients, even in the middle of the night and on weekends. He's also a hell of a nice guy, and a good doc... a real dying breed.

He's computer-illiterate. Completely. You threaten him with "learn this crappy new system or else," and he's going to balk. He'll retire, or drop his privileges and move to the hospital across town like a bunch of his younger colleagues given the same ultimatum.

You think you can force physicians to simply eat sh*t? Who do you think you are... Medicare? You MUST have physician buy-in, and physicians balk at being told "use this crap or else" by some suit who doesn't take care of patients, ESPECIALLY when the UI slows them down, cuts into their productivity, and interferes with their care of patients. I've worked in environments where that was done as a top-down forced implementation (I'm an ex-military doc), and it sucks out loud (it was also reverted to paper in less than 24 hours after the entire facility literally ground to a halt).

How do you like it when some admin weenie comes down to your server room and says "we're implementing this brand-new system. It sucks, it's slow, it crashes, it's full of security holes... but you're going to use it or else." Somehow, I think a similar industry-wide fiat like that directed against IT, posted on Slashdot, would easily generate a 1000-comment thread... in the first 15 mintues.

Doctor Dugan, is it? I have to ask what specialty you practice, and what sort of practice environment you inhabit.

You sound like you're one of those who wants to throw open the health care licensing gates to anybody who wants to take care of a patient. Having seen some of the stunts pulled by my fully-educated colleagues over the years, I'm a bit leery of turning over those keys to just anybody, particularly those with even LESS training and knowledge.

What, exactly, are you proposing as an alternative to the current system?

And spare me the thinly-veiled "profit-driven whores" implication in why physicians didn't adopt EMRs 30 years ago. That isn't why, and you know it. The truth is that the technology sucked even more then than it does now.