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 :(

"There is also the question of how good a job they do with encrypting the data."

Most let you manage your own keys. So as long as you have a reasonable key management, it's up to YOU, not the provider.

"Are there regular security audits by an outside party who can affirm that the things the cloud company claims are in fact accurate?"

For the big players, yes. http://aws.amazon.com/complian.... Also "AWS has achieved ISO 27001 certification and has been validated as a Level 1 service provider under the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS). We undergo annual SOC 1 audits and have been successfully evaluated at the Moderate level for Federal government systems as well as DIACAP Level 2 for DoD systems."

Every one of those compliances requires auditing.

"What happens when an employee leaves the company? How is access controlled to prevent continued access?"

You federate your enterprise IAM with your cloud provider. Most support some form of SAML or OAuth. ADFS (an MS product) supports such things easily. You terminate the employee in your normal system and their IAM account is terminated. Also, you don't give deep credentials to most people but rather wrap them in services. You then stash those credentials in a secret/key server.

"To me, cloud is all smoke and mirrors."

That is because you haven't done the required reading.

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.

The hebrew for wife and woman are the same word (isha).

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.

Is it remotely possible you were kind of an asshole to him? Or are you without any flaws in personal confrontation?

What DOES God wants with a starship?

I have nothing meaningful to add other than I love the shoutout to Paladine.

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.