Understood. It's all relative. I could have quantified my last statement better.

With all of the looting that went on by my house, you'd better keep the shotguns. There are some real opportunistic bastards out there with no conscience. Had loads of people driving through the neighborhood to see how bad we (East Rockaway) got hit. Problem was that you couldn't tell them apart from the savages that were looking for where they were going to "visit" later on that night. Generators stolen, aluminum siding, anything resembling a fuel can, just to name a few.

We as a society are doomed if we get hit with a disaster worse than Sandy.

what I was thinking. Relatively powerful Linux tablet on the cheap. I would be in for at least three of them.

Irene dropped approximately 10 inches of rain in less than 24 hours. Sandy dropped approximately 2 inches of rain in less than 24 hours. The full moon, high tide and meeting up with another storm system in the northeast is what killed us. A lot oif things went "right" for it to become a super storm

Wrong.

It was a Category 1 Hurricane with Category 2 damage. It hit at high tide with a full moon and it met up with another storm system that was already over the northeast. Take a ride around NJ or the south shore of Long Island or Staten Island and tell me again that it was weak. Also remember that most of the people affected JUST got their homes/lives straigthened out from Irene 13 months prior.

Easy.

I have a MAC.

I needed a decent freely available anti-virus scanner and Sophos came highly recommended. On a side note, On my Win7 machine at home I do use MSE and recommend to to anyone using Windows. I'm kinda paranoid so I also keep MalwareBytes and CCCleaner on my machines.

You'd almost certainly sow the seeds of a Black Market for tobacco products. Making it illegal is definitely not the answer. (full disclosure, I'm an ex-smoker since 11/10/10)

Better phone? That's definitely subjective.

Precisely! Wish I had a mod point for you.

Brilliant explanation. Thank you for taking the time to write that up.

Where's my mod points when I need them............

As the saying goes, "You can't fix stupid..." but maybe you can throw money at it. How would this tax be levied?. I don't run Windows on any PC I own, just my laptop for work.....

Don't know if you're using Linux and if so, which distro you're using......I was a diehard Kubuntu user and recently switched to OpenSuse 11.2 with KDE desktop. They have done a brilliant job integrating the look and feel of OO.org with the whole desktop. I haven't seen it devour more memory than usual but I don't use OO.org on any machine with less than 2 GB RAM which is basically a minimum on any PC you Get today. Take a look here:

http://images.google.com/images?q=opensuse%2011.2%20OpenOffice&oe=utf-8&rls=com.ubuntu:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wi

It's not as simple as assigning a static IP......The VoIP phone is fed off of a gateway, router or cable modem etc that may have a static IP but.....the phone itself can be moved anywhere with a broadband connection and still register to the serving VoIP switch. I can take my Cisco phone in NY and bring it to California and have it register to the serving soft switch in NY without issue. Problem is that if I make a 911 call, emergency services will respond to where I originally had my phone registered in NY.

It's up to the customer to update their geographical/ PSAP location to have emergency services respond to the correct location. VoIp providers only have to provide the customers with the ability to update their geographic location for 911 purposes. There are 3rd party providers who handle that.

Google Dash911 or VIXXI

with kde-desktop and Kubuntu on another computer and I don't think that the desktop is that bad. I know this is offtopic, but I really wish they'd (Ubuntu) chuck pulse-audio. Have nothing but problems having an on-board sound component and a SBLive 5,1 PCI card. I didn't have any of these issue with ALSA.....sorry for the rant.