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.

When you screen huge masses of people needlessly, almost all to all of your hits are going to be incorrect. Additional testing of these false positives are harmful. Biopsies, radiation, no-fly lists -- harmful.

Nobody is saying that we should never wiretap if we have evidence. That's testing a small population. The problem here is that we are wiretapping everybody to attempt to find evidence.

If only I had mod points to give... thanks.

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.

Have you ever put a slingshot in a blender or, conversely, created a blender that could be fired by slingshot?

The news of the earlier hack got me thinking about the unique risk/reward of ubiquitous communication and the challenge of computer security to keep pace. Certainly some say the pace of technological innovation is no longer in step with yesterday's, but that almost begs the question. It's truly ironic that modern computing becomes physically smaller as its footprint on our lives looms ever larger with each new year, yet no one disputes that, lately, electronic progress rests solely within the social stratum these days.

We should ask ourselves, however, the rather basic question of whether this seismic shift in the nature of the changes in technology brings with it an impedimentary effect on our lives, or indeed to wonder to the degree technology has ever been pedimentary when it comes right down to it. Yes, it's certainly got its foot in the door, but as with feet and doors it's not always possible to know at the moment of impact whether said foot represents opportunity, doom, or a casualty of a society overeager to shut the door to change.

Certainly the last thing anyone wants is a race to the bottom. Ah, but that's not entirely accurate when one considers the vested interest shoemakers have in most modern day footraces. It suggests that, moving forward, the most important thing to do when evaluating new technology in 2013 may very well be to first identify the shoemakers for that technology. Ask yourself: if I'm already wearing five pairs of socks, do I even need shoes at this point? Odds are, you don't.