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Comment Pay the man, Silent Bob... (Score 1) 94

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.

Comment Suckage confirmed (Score 1) 344

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 :(

Comment Mental health and SROs are the answer (Score 1) 894

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.

Comment Agreed on the activists (Score 2, Insightful) 380

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.

Comment Re:As opposed to actual Model Ms which are still m (Score 1) 298

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.

Comment Re:Things you can't do on Windows or Linux (Score 1) 584

"What we really need is for the legal department to slap a $2 billion fine on Apple over anti-competitive behaviors

Apple, Inc. could pay that out of their petty cash.

and forcing developers to use the App Store,

The only Mac App Store purchase (so far) was Angry Birds for the MacBook. Everything else on the Macs here is third party or non App Store Apple/Mac apps (Aperture, iWorks, for example).

  not to mention not making music purchased on iTunes work on other music players."

iTunes tracks have been DRM free for years. Oh, you have DRMed iTunes tracks? Burn a CD, rerip as MP3. No DRM. iTunes DRM was REQUIRED by the RIAA, not Apple.

FUD failure, there, Slappy.

Comment Leave us not forget that which came BEFORE iTunes (Score 1) 204

SoundJam MP.

SoundJam MP was, perhaps, the first genuinely useful MP3 application for the Macintosh. One could easily rip CDs to MP3, mix songs as one wished in playlists, and then burn them to CD.

Rip. Mix. Burn. Where have we heard that before?

It even had support built in for the few MP3 players of the time.

Review of an early incarnation of SoundJam.

Review of the final revision.

And, the ObWiki entry .

MacLife history of iTunes .

Without SoundJam MP. there would likely have been no iTunes, as Apple bought SoundJam MP, filed off the serial numbers, slapped a coat of paint on it and called it iTunes V1.0.

Well, yeah, there still would have been AN iTunes. Apple would have just bought Audion .

So, while the iPod was indeed a seachange for the portable music player (cassette/CD/digital) of the era, without the software to support it as easily and as elegantly as SoundJam, er, "iTunes", it was the software that made the iPod the success it was and remains to this day.

Comment Re:Why so much Apple crap here lately? (Score 2) 204

Haters gonna hate.

They hate that Apple doesn't suck up to their particular hardware/software/user interface fetish.

They hate Apple because Apple doesn't care a fat rat's ass what they think or say about Apple.

They hate Apple because when they got to the opening day of their local Apple Store, the Store had run out of free T-shirts, which meant that they HAD to do laundry and not put it off another few days.

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