You have to admit though that allowing IT to decide 'the best time to upgrade' is what gave us IE6 "Forever Edition".

That said, I agree that FF is the suck when it comes to upgrade whining. For the love of god, implement some Active Directory / Group Policy support! It will increase FF adoption *IN THE HOME* as well. And will help kill off IE6 in the business world.

Actually, the grandma reference likely comes up from all of us skilled in the arts who provide computer and tech support to our grandmothers (and grandfathers, etc). The irony here is that I would absolutely LOVE to switch my grandparents to a command line interface by default.

Phone call:
"What do you see on the screen grandma? Oh, really? Well, open a command prompt. Type (XYZ) for me? Ok, what does it say? Ah! Type( ABC) for me please.... " etc

versus:
"What do you see on the screen grandma? Oh, really? Is there a little icon in the upper right corner that......." (20 minutes go by). "Ok, now open the start menu. No, that's the one on the bottom, towards the left. What? Jason moved your menus to the right side of the screen? Fuck. No, grandma, I don't mind trying to help you at all. Yes grandma, I'm sorry about the swearing....."

And all of these conversations are with grandma, because grandpa hates talking on the phone.

If you want to really feel the burn, compare:
- Current state of the project
- Total (expected) funding from now until (expected) commercial availability.
- Who is providing the funding.
- Expected transit times from, say, London to San Francisco
- Available transit corridors (hypersonic shock waves have somewhat more energy than supersonic versions. And flying a passenger liner into the ground at mach 5 could take out many, many city blocks.)
- Susceptibility to fatal mid-air collisions. The wing hitting anything more substantial than a butterfly at Mach 5+ isn't likely to be survivable. Not sure how fast the craft goes while below 18km (~60K feet), so maybe not an issue.
- System complexity.

Compare all of that to Virgin Galactic. http://www.virgingalactic.com/

Yea. Sure. Today the plan is to visit orbit. But once you can get a craft 60 miles up, going halfway around the planet just isn't that much more difficult.

I don't know about your data, but my private data is certainly encrypted using its own keyfile. It is, after all, *MY* responsibility to secure my own data.

TrueCrypt. Free. Easy to use. It is even recommended by the DropBox FAQ, IIRC. Or something like it. Relying on a third party to keep your private data private is a fools game. While I'd like *some* standards (i.e. this epic fail is not excusable), I can't lay the task of keeping my stuff safe on someone else.

Alas, no. It is far cheaper to sue those farmers who don't license the "technology" (seeds), than it is to produce vast quantities of a plant that is incapable of producing viable seeds.

I beg you to investigate the issue of outdoor, uncontrolled tests of GMO. In particular, please note that very few of these GM crops are sterile, and thus can cross-pollinate at will.

This article is relatively balanced on the issue, but manages to highlight some of the costs:
http://oregonmag.com/GMGrass.htm

"So far, their strongest conclusion has been that ginger has a slight positive effect on upset stomachs"

No, they have produced many other equally strong conclusions: many alternative medicines actually show no benefit.

Billions of dollars... wasted by consumers every year on alternative medicines that do nothing.

Or maybe it's the fact that nighttime is 16 fucking hours long some of us, this time of year. Ever tried going to bed at 4pm and getting up getting up at 8:00am? And that's just the 45th parallel.

I'd go with survival mechanism for the bladder, but hey, opinions differ. Walking around may have scared the bears off, too. /end sarcasm

Cheers :~)

Irony. We has it.

"Laws shouldn't HAVE to be interpreted, EVER."

Either you failed high school civics, or high school civics failed you.

My grandparents bought a wireless router. They put it between their PC and the comcast connection. My grandparents then ran XP for MONTHS without getting a virus.

NAT and NAT alone prevented the infection of their PC. It sure as hell wasn't patch Tuesday.

Now, I despise NAT. And Linksys could EASILY have provided and/or enabled real security features on their routers by default (like, say, passwords). But to claim that NAT provides no benefit to security is just plain false. It's like claiming that wearing camouflage is pointless in battle, because it won't protect you when you get shot.

I have a crazy idea: MULTIPLE MONITORS!!

Suddenly, your idea has gone horribly, horribly wrong.

but you know marketing would include cymbals in the name if they could.

A digital memory is unforgiving; the video of a laugh you remember as a shining moment won't blur the ever-present fatigue. Where you remember a beautiful smile the camera will remind you of the pain she suppressed for that moment, the blackness under her eyes.

I would suggest not video taping anything other than the occasional interview; perhaps discretely video record your wife reminiscing with your daughters about their early childhood, and hers.

Instead of focusing on digital memories, spend that time with your wife and daughters forming memories of real events. Frisbee in the yard, swings, running through sprinklers, hiking in the forest. Learning to cook new things together, card games, board games, sewing.

We remember 'firsts' the best, usually. Do new things. Let your memories blur the edges of your wife's condition; your daughters lives will turn out the better for it, their memories of Mom that much fonder.

"When a person, being without fault, is in a place where he has a right to be, is violently assaulted, he may, without retreating, repel by force, and if, in the reasonable exercise of his right of self defense, his assailant is killed, he is justified." Runyan v. State, 57 Ind. 80; Miller v. State, 74 Ind. 1.

"These principles apply as well to an officer attempting to make an arrest, who abuses his authority and transcends the bounds thereof by the use of unnecessary force and violence, as they do to a private individual who unlawfully uses such force and violence." Jones v. State, 26 Tex. App. I; Beaverts v. State, 4 Tex. App. 1 75; Skidmore v. State, 43 Tex. 93, 903.

"An illegal arrest is an assault and battery. The person so attempted to be restrained of his liberty has the same right to use force in defending himself as he would in repelling any other assault and battery." (State v. Robinson, 145 ME. 77, 72 ATL. 260).