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.

Sounds like all the Thinkpads and most of the Apple lappies I've had over the years. The stickers are a bit different...mostly either political, Anime/Manga or F/OSS related. But yeah, not a business look, more "geek in the house" look. My new Lenovo Ideapad is still virgin...for now. But it will look like "Ms. Geek's current lappie" soon enough. X60T was a really nice machine.

And now Meg Whitman is finishing the job.

They also collect uber-fail CEOs.

Must not forget, then, "Stand On Zanzibar" which posits what life would be like on a crowded, '60s-inflected world in 2010. Brunner did get one thing right: a worldwide, 24/7 news network called Engrelay Satelserv, English-language Relay Satellite Service. Say it with me in your best imitation of James Earl Jones: THIS IS CNN. From the perspective of two years after 2010 it reads more like a dip into an alternate Earth which zagged where ours zigged sometime in the '70s. Brunner was a genius.

James Hong is also still around. And I met both Hong and Joseph Turkel at San Diego Comic-Con in 2007. Hong was getting a lot of love not just for Dr. Chew, but also for that immortal dude he played in "Big Trouble In Little China." But Turkel was barely visited, so we got to talk. Politics, Blade Runner, Old Hollywood, and other cool subjects. He signed an 8 x 10. I paid for it, because he was donating his share of the money to Doctors Without Borders, a truly deserving cause. He asked me "OK, what Tyrell quote do you want on it?" Since it was a picture of Tyrell with Batty before Batty sent Tyrell to his deserved demise, and since it was one of the best lines in the movie, I had him write "Revel in your time!" He appreciated the choice too. "Yeah, you never quite have enough time to do everything you want to do. We really are all replicants...not willing to accept just the years we have." It was poignant, because even though he seemed really vital and mentally active, Turkel was getting on in years.

I really am not happy with this. Although having Ridley Scott on board gives me wan hope this isn't going to totally suck, the prospect of a huge tentpole movie with a CGI retrofitted Los Angeles and everything in 3 FRIGGIN D just hurts when I think of it. I would prefer to see them completely strip it down, make it an almost indie movie which puts the action in the Los Angeles that exists RIGHT NOW, because there have been enough things added to the Downtown LA skyline that look like Blade Runner since the movie came out, and more is coming. If you don't believe me, google LA Live and The Library Tower. The Wilshire Grand Hotel is going to be torn down and replaced with a skyscraper that will have video walls.

Blade Runner was too special to remake. I hope this doesn't happen, like Keanu Reeves as Spike Spiegel in a live-action Cowboy Bebop won't happen, or Leonardo diCaprio in a white-washed version of Akira. But if it does, Ridley Scott will probably not allow the quality level to go too far down.

And this particular political party also has a vested interest in denying anthropogenic climate disruption. So they defund weather satellites. How utterly convenient!

BTW, this comment:
for example, if there were a heavily Democrat-leaning city on a gulf coast protected only by an out-of-date levee
should be fixed thusly:
for example, if there were a heavily Democratic Party-leaning city on a gulf coast protected only by an out-of-date levee

The same political party in question likes to call their opposite number the DemocRAT party. They spit it out like weeks-old leftovers. They want people to associate the Democratic Party of the United States of America with Rattus rattus norvegicus. Sort of like how Radio Rwanda associated the Tutsi tribe with cockroaches.