I keep hearing this from people ad nauseum but I’ve been using Firefox since Phoenix and there are exactly zero add-ones I use that are “broken”. What exactly is “broken” for you?
My Sharp BluRay player actually has a setting that allows me to block discs from accessing the network. All I see is a brief pop up that says “disc trying to access network, blocked” or some such, and then it finishes loading. Turning this option on took disc load times down dramatically because they no longer download some crappy new trailer before going to the menu.
Now if only the menu options allowed me to override the built-in ads and skip straight to menu, I’d be happy... why consumers can’t do this on media we f’n ALREADY PAID FOR is beyond me. The only people who don’t see the FBI warning and the preloaded ads are the pirates.
Just realized this myself, and now am having to force iPad to load desktop site every time I log in. Never quite understand why a system that is touted as faster than most laptops is treated as if it were a low-end phone when using some websites. (/., Google app pages, etc. - it’s maddening)
What are you talking about? I have data on my iPhone 8 that came from games I originally installed on my first iPhone, which was a 3GS. I have never had an OS update wipe the phone and delete everything (and I generally choose to push new OS versions on day of release). I have had media on my phone that was from all over the damned place - only 4% of my music is purchased from Apple. The only lawsuit I see regarding "wiped" data is a British suit initiated after a Genius Bar employee erased a phone. The only OS I have seen that did something like this was Windows - in the 32/64 bit transition. iOS and macOS converted to 64 bit seamlessly without a wipe.
Perhaps you have been clicking "Restore" rather than "Update". Those words mean different things. Perhaps you jailbroke your phone. The company is under no obligation to support your device after you deliberately circumvented the software. They certainly are under no obligation to provide software updates that preserve the bug or hack used to circumvent the OS in the first place. You can be indignant, but you can only blame yourself for loss of data.
Speaking as a federal employee - it’s incredibly difficult to just buy what you need. In business you find a provider and initiate a contract. In government, there are a ridiculous number of steps that make this impossible, all in the name of ensuring we cannot send a sweetheart deal to a relative or etc. This means it is not possible to just buy, say, a Dell computer, we have to propose a computer buy and specify what we need and let a reseller bid. We “save money” by buying the exact same Dell from a reseller who bought it from Dell to sell it to us. I am still 100% unclear how that can possibly be cheaper, but the reseller meets the requirement to be minority owned or Veteran owned or what have you, so hooray.
What happens in many cases when you have a very specific need is that multiple resellers will jump in and insist that they can provide what you want, when in fact they cannot. We spent about a year researching software for a very specific need and settled on one service that did what we wanted; during the bidding, several other providers (which we had specifically rejected during our fact-finding) popped up and insisted they could do things that their software clearly was not capable of doing. The contracting agents don’t have the background to know this. They just see a vendor saying “we can do this for way cheaper” without realizing that “way cheaper” is only possible because the service lacks 50% of what we need it to do.
Writing an “open bid” contract in such a way that only one vendor really can match the need is the simplest, fastest way around this mess, and unless/until the federal contracting and acquisition system is fixed, this will continue to happen. Everyone on the inside knows it happens, and honestly every once in a while some other vendor actually CAN meet the requirements, so it is as fair as we can make it without wasting everyone’s time and your tax dollars.
Tl;dr: if it looks suspiciously specific it’s intentional, and likely so for a damn good reason. We’d save a lot more cash if we just accepted some level of graft once in a while.
(Don’t get me started on the “approved” vendor site we have to use for most smaller buys; imagine Amazon if coded by Microsoft in 1996, where everything you buy that claims to be “new” is actually remanufactured, “name brand genuine” shows up as a knock-off, and once we actually got a device show up with European voltage requirements even though it stated repeatedly that it took 115v. Damn thing wouldn’t turn on with our puny American voltage and we had to fight to return it.)
1Password is actually fine as far as 3rd party concerns go. You can use their internal cloud to store your password archive, or one of many other cloud services, or even keep the archive in local storage and NOT in the cloud. The password archive is a file. You can put it anywhere you put any other file. The trust for this location is entirely up to you. If you trust Apple, put the archive into iCloud and you're solid.
I've been using the program for several years. I'm quite happy to see Apple using it. They could choose from any password tool on the market. I'm sure they extensively vetted the alternatives before picking 1Password. If it's secure enough for Apple, I feel safe trusting it as well.
Mistrust of the companies is not contagious. Abuse of user privacy by big companies IS contagious, apparently. If they don't want us to distrust them, they should start acting like trustworthy companies. You can't blame users when the root problem is shitty corporate policy.
Pro tip: If you use the mouse long enough, it gets smooth instead of rough. Also, hard surface sanitizing cloths do wonders for cleaning the hardware.
I have 3 Intellimouse 1.1A models, keep one at home and the other 2 at work. All are wearing smooth at this point. The weight, size, shape, and function hits all the sweet spots for me. The only complaint I have now is that the Intellimouse software doesn't work on macOS Sierra. I mean, sure, it runs, but the software fails to recognize a USB 2.0 mouse plugged into a USB-C dongle. The Mac sees the mouse but the Microsoft software isn't finding whatever signal it needs from the USB bus to recognize it.
It's funny, my house is full of Mac laptops, a Mac desktop, Mac keyboards, and Microsoft mice. Glad to see this old warhorse make a comeback. If any of my current 3 ever dies, maybe I'll be able to finally get a solid replacement...
Having port 9100 open doesn't make my printer part of a botnet. It just allows me to print from anywhere. I often set the printer as the DMZ address on my network, because I'd rather have people sending crap at a printer than at my actual computers. This kind is crap is really annoying, not helpful. We COULD turn off external printer ports, but in some cases they are needed or desired. Wasting paper tellling me the port is open? Stupid. Pressuring printer companies to implement a way to only allow authenticated users to print to external ports? Knock yourself out.
(If your printer has the web configuration/admin page unsecured, or telnet config open - that's a different story.)
...because opening in browser (and saving to a temp directory, automatically cleared after I close the browser) is better than having the PDF saved to my downloads folder and then launch an entirely separate program before I can even see if the file is worth keeping. I have colleagues who pull PDFs of journal articles, glance, and then decide they didn't need it after all... and end up with hard drives that are full because of the hundreds of gigabytes of PDFs in the downloads folder.
A simple PDF viewer like PDF.js is fast and does not enable a lot of the "enhanced" settings Adobe PDF products do, like internal scripting, which cuts down my vulnerability footprint too.
You have a few inaccuracies there. Last I checked, every Mac was capable of running the server extensions (no need to buy a special server-only version - there's 1 OS that does it all). And they all come with file server/web server functionality baked in (SSH/SFTP is baked in; Apache runs a huge percentage of the web, and every Mac has Apache preinstalled - along with a perfectly serviceable development environment, no additional installations needed unless you want to run non-stock versions of the most common programming languages). CUPS - the common Unix printing server - was purchased by Apple and is part of every Mac since OS X 10.2. XCode is free. Swift development language is free. I don't know what your issue is with user access controls, but UNIX permissions are a lot simpler to handle than the mess that is Windows (for example, why should I have to open an email client to make changes to a secure distribution group to manage folder access permissions?)
I'm a government employee in a large federal department. My federally-supplied work computer is a Mac. Yes, not all of us use them, but enough of us use them that there's a clear argument against the insistence that Macs can't ever fit into an enterprise environment.
To be fair, the Mona Lisa (a) isn't all that big to begin with, and (b) good luck getting within 10 yards of it thanks to the barrier, the crowds, and the thick yellowish bulletproof glass over the front... but yeah, I agree that cutting out a lot of the "irrelevant" stuff does take away from the purpose of watching the movie. If there's truly tons of useless filler, there are also tons of other (better) movies to watch instead.
My work air gaps the government-owned computers from the university-owned ones. Different networks, same building, often same room. We have approved, encrypted drives to transfer files. USB ports ARE locked down, but that doesn't mean no USB devices are allowed.
I am an Administrative Official for a large organization. Uploading grants is literally a major part of my job. (As a research scientist, I also write my own grants - so I understand this from several angles.)
The argument that open standards should be used is a fair one, but it is missing the bigger picture here. The vast majority of grants (NIH, NSF, Veterans Affairs, DoD, etc.) are SF-424 NIH standard packages obtained through Grants.gov and submitted by an AO such as myself, not by the applicant. Very few grants require the person authoring them to be the signing official who agrees on behalf of the organization to administer funds if the grant is successful. The vast majority of the applicants therefore route grants through a corporate or University network, where Windows (and to a lesser degree OS X - I'm a Mac user myself) predominate. In all of these cases, the organization will be providing the tools necessary - Acrobat is handed out like candy in my organization. It's part of the corporate image for all computers. Using Acrobat forms streamlines and simplifies submission for 99% of the applicants. The government is not going to change this to address a few edge cases.
The suggested alternative - web forms - is laughable. It might be good for one person, but in an average submission cycle I am sending 10-15 grants with widely varying requirements including esoteric formatting issues, hard-coded naming conventions, and etc. - not to mention that the typical grant includes dozens of required components and attachments, each with set formatting restrictions. It is hard enough to comb through an assembly SF-424 package to check for errors prior to submission as it is. If I had to manually upload each of these grants, one at a time, one piece at a time, into a web forms system, I would not be able to do my job. Period.
Post-submission, forms are processed by a clunky system in eRA Commons, then get referred to Grants.gov for eventual routing to the reviewing agency. The system has a series of automated checks built in to verify that the package is complete before it is assembled. This requires the various bits and pieces to be separate documents, as they are in an Acrobat package (and it is a package, with embedded attachments, not a flat PDF). This process is flaky and fragile enough as it is. Web forms are not going to improve the process, but they certainly would increase the workload for the AO by about 1000% and would definitely increase the error rate. This is also ignoring the fact that the forms are modular, in that some sections (like the budget) are only inserted as needed, and the necessity of being able to assemble and pre-check these things offline precludes any kind of web form system. The article writer is being intentionally obtuse and a bit naive here to make a shallow argument in favor of open standards. Heart is in the right place but reality is being ignored here.
Tl;dr version: it's hard. We do the best we have with the tools provided. Just be glad Grants.gov didn't decide to use InfoPath instead of Acrobat.
Skip made up names and look to mythology. Greek guardians (Kerberos obviously already taken), Norse guardians (Fafnir?), etc. The best made-up names will be taken, but the mythological names might still be open for use. Especially if you get away from Western mythology.
Connectivity issues and network lag for streaming, plus, modem wasn't getting any response from upstream servers, and was logging errors because of it. Tech wanted to send someone to the house to "do an update". I had to tell her that DOCSIS modem updates cannot be applied by end users and must be pushed down the network, from their end, so I wasn't going to take a day off work and pay a tech for a home visit when it wouldn't help the issue. Plus, it's my damn modem, not theirs. Tech was (a) shocked that I owned the modem - she didn't think we could do that - and (b) was unfamiliar with Roku, Netflix, and at least three other very common streaming devices/services. Plus she's telling me that network congestion was the problem with my streaming, as I was looking at the bandwidth test telling me the connection was wide open. This was just before Netflix blinked and paid Comcast for better speed. The company was flat denying any traffic shaping was occurring. Gee weird it works better all of a sudden.
Last time I had to talk to anyone in the company I had to explain to the tech how DOCSIS modems worked. You will never get an individual from that company on the phone who knows enough to give you a real answer. Turnover is too high in call centers, and people who know the answer are not on support phone detail.
My WRT54G is a Rev. 1 model. Tomato, running strong. I use it as a secondary these days, with an Asus RT-N16 as primary (for gigabit throughput on the LAN). Also have a Rev. 4 set up, currently using it as an emergency backup should either of the others crap out on me.
The Rev 1 was picked up for $1 at a yard sale, the Rev 4 was a freebie from a friend. Never underestimate the possibilities older hardware can offer if you know how to dump the stock firmware.
Yeah, it would be great if there was an entire website, with a video, explaining why you would want this and what it does, perhaps even linked in the article posted above?
They do make these sets. They come in big tubs. I just bought one for my son for Christmas, about $30 on Amazon for a big tub of generic parts. I'm having a hard time understanding why you can't find them yourself.
The only possible way to survive is to develop a niche. Streaming services are usually pretty good for recent movies, but a lot of back catalogue stuff is hard to find. Specialize in the stuff that's out of print, rare, etc. But really, I'm hard-pressed to see how that business model would be sustainable as a primary income source in most communities. There simply isn't enough demand for the content, especially given the huge amount of material available through Netflix's mail catalogue.
Yep. My 4M+ is still going strong, 90k+ page count. And I have a 5M at home, even with the extra paper tray add-on (so it holds a ream and a half) was a steal from university surplus at $50 - have been using it for like 6 years now...
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I keep hearing this from people ad nauseum but I’ve been using Firefox since Phoenix and there are exactly zero add-ones I use that are “broken”. What exactly is “broken” for you?
My Sharp BluRay player actually has a setting that allows me to block discs from accessing the network. All I see is a brief pop up that says “disc trying to access network, blocked” or some such, and then it finishes loading. Turning this option on took disc load times down dramatically because they no longer download some crappy new trailer before going to the menu.
Now if only the menu options allowed me to override the built-in ads and skip straight to menu, I’d be happy... why consumers can’t do this on media we f’n ALREADY PAID FOR is beyond me. The only people who don’t see the FBI warning and the preloaded ads are the pirates.
Just realized this myself, and now am having to force iPad to load desktop site every time I log in. Never quite understand why a system that is touted as faster than most laptops is treated as if it were a low-end phone when using some websites. (/., Google app pages, etc. - it’s maddening)
Bought a Samsung last year. Haven’t seen any ads. Of course I also don’t use any of the built-in apps, so YMMV.
Yes, but have you seen any 60-80â computer monitors lately? If you want a big screen you have to buy a TV.
What are you talking about? I have data on my iPhone 8 that came from games I originally installed on my first iPhone, which was a 3GS. I have never had an OS update wipe the phone and delete everything (and I generally choose to push new OS versions on day of release). I have had media on my phone that was from all over the damned place - only 4% of my music is purchased from Apple. The only lawsuit I see regarding "wiped" data is a British suit initiated after a Genius Bar employee erased a phone. The only OS I have seen that did something like this was Windows - in the 32/64 bit transition. iOS and macOS converted to 64 bit seamlessly without a wipe.
Perhaps you have been clicking "Restore" rather than "Update". Those words mean different things. Perhaps you jailbroke your phone. The company is under no obligation to support your device after you deliberately circumvented the software. They certainly are under no obligation to provide software updates that preserve the bug or hack used to circumvent the OS in the first place. You can be indignant, but you can only blame yourself for loss of data.
Speaking as a federal employee - it’s incredibly difficult to just buy what you need. In business you find a provider and initiate a contract. In government, there are a ridiculous number of steps that make this impossible, all in the name of ensuring we cannot send a sweetheart deal to a relative or etc. This means it is not possible to just buy, say, a Dell computer, we have to propose a computer buy and specify what we need and let a reseller bid. We “save money” by buying the exact same Dell from a reseller who bought it from Dell to sell it to us. I am still 100% unclear how that can possibly be cheaper, but the reseller meets the requirement to be minority owned or Veteran owned or what have you, so hooray.
What happens in many cases when you have a very specific need is that multiple resellers will jump in and insist that they can provide what you want, when in fact they cannot. We spent about a year researching software for a very specific need and settled on one service that did what we wanted; during the bidding, several other providers (which we had specifically rejected during our fact-finding) popped up and insisted they could do things that their software clearly was not capable of doing. The contracting agents don’t have the background to know this. They just see a vendor saying “we can do this for way cheaper” without realizing that “way cheaper” is only possible because the service lacks 50% of what we need it to do.
Writing an “open bid” contract in such a way that only one vendor really can match the need is the simplest, fastest way around this mess, and unless/until the federal contracting and acquisition system is fixed, this will continue to happen. Everyone on the inside knows it happens, and honestly every once in a while some other vendor actually CAN meet the requirements, so it is as fair as we can make it without wasting everyone’s time and your tax dollars.
Tl;dr: if it looks suspiciously specific it’s intentional, and likely so for a damn good reason. We’d save a lot more cash if we just accepted some level of graft once in a while.
(Don’t get me started on the “approved” vendor site we have to use for most smaller buys; imagine Amazon if coded by Microsoft in 1996, where everything you buy that claims to be “new” is actually remanufactured, “name brand genuine” shows up as a knock-off, and once we actually got a device show up with European voltage requirements even though it stated repeatedly that it took 115v. Damn thing wouldn’t turn on with our puny American voltage and we had to fight to return it.)
1Password is actually fine as far as 3rd party concerns go. You can use their internal cloud to store your password archive, or one of many other cloud services, or even keep the archive in local storage and NOT in the cloud. The password archive is a file. You can put it anywhere you put any other file. The trust for this location is entirely up to you. If you trust Apple, put the archive into iCloud and you're solid.
I've been using the program for several years. I'm quite happy to see Apple using it. They could choose from any password tool on the market. I'm sure they extensively vetted the alternatives before picking 1Password. If it's secure enough for Apple, I feel safe trusting it as well.
Mistrust of the companies is not contagious. Abuse of user privacy by big companies IS contagious, apparently. If they don't want us to distrust them, they should start acting like trustworthy companies. You can't blame users when the root problem is shitty corporate policy.
Pro tip: If you use the mouse long enough, it gets smooth instead of rough. Also, hard surface sanitizing cloths do wonders for cleaning the hardware.
I have 3 Intellimouse 1.1A models, keep one at home and the other 2 at work. All are wearing smooth at this point. The weight, size, shape, and function hits all the sweet spots for me. The only complaint I have now is that the Intellimouse software doesn't work on macOS Sierra. I mean, sure, it runs, but the software fails to recognize a USB 2.0 mouse plugged into a USB-C dongle. The Mac sees the mouse but the Microsoft software isn't finding whatever signal it needs from the USB bus to recognize it.
It's funny, my house is full of Mac laptops, a Mac desktop, Mac keyboards, and Microsoft mice. Glad to see this old warhorse make a comeback. If any of my current 3 ever dies, maybe I'll be able to finally get a solid replacement...
Having port 9100 open doesn't make my printer part of a botnet. It just allows me to print from anywhere. I often set the printer as the DMZ address on my network, because I'd rather have people sending crap at a printer than at my actual computers. This kind is crap is really annoying, not helpful. We COULD turn off external printer ports, but in some cases they are needed or desired. Wasting paper tellling me the port is open? Stupid. Pressuring printer companies to implement a way to only allow authenticated users to print to external ports? Knock yourself out.
(If your printer has the web configuration/admin page unsecured, or telnet config open - that's a different story.)
...because opening in browser (and saving to a temp directory, automatically cleared after I close the browser) is better than having the PDF saved to my downloads folder and then launch an entirely separate program before I can even see if the file is worth keeping. I have colleagues who pull PDFs of journal articles, glance, and then decide they didn't need it after all ... and end up with hard drives that are full because of the hundreds of gigabytes of PDFs in the downloads folder.
A simple PDF viewer like PDF.js is fast and does not enable a lot of the "enhanced" settings Adobe PDF products do, like internal scripting, which cuts down my vulnerability footprint too.
You have a few inaccuracies there. Last I checked, every Mac was capable of running the server extensions (no need to buy a special server-only version - there's 1 OS that does it all). And they all come with file server/web server functionality baked in (SSH/SFTP is baked in; Apache runs a huge percentage of the web, and every Mac has Apache preinstalled - along with a perfectly serviceable development environment, no additional installations needed unless you want to run non-stock versions of the most common programming languages). CUPS - the common Unix printing server - was purchased by Apple and is part of every Mac since OS X 10.2. XCode is free. Swift development language is free. I don't know what your issue is with user access controls, but UNIX permissions are a lot simpler to handle than the mess that is Windows (for example, why should I have to open an email client to make changes to a secure distribution group to manage folder access permissions?)
I'm a government employee in a large federal department. My federally-supplied work computer is a Mac. Yes, not all of us use them, but enough of us use them that there's a clear argument against the insistence that Macs can't ever fit into an enterprise environment.
To be fair, the Mona Lisa (a) isn't all that big to begin with, and (b) good luck getting within 10 yards of it thanks to the barrier, the crowds, and the thick yellowish bulletproof glass over the front... but yeah, I agree that cutting out a lot of the "irrelevant" stuff does take away from the purpose of watching the movie. If there's truly tons of useless filler, there are also tons of other (better) movies to watch instead.
My work air gaps the government-owned computers from the university-owned ones. Different networks, same building, often same room. We have approved, encrypted drives to transfer files. USB ports ARE locked down, but that doesn't mean no USB devices are allowed.
I am an Administrative Official for a large organization. Uploading grants is literally a major part of my job. (As a research scientist, I also write my own grants - so I understand this from several angles.)
The argument that open standards should be used is a fair one, but it is missing the bigger picture here. The vast majority of grants (NIH, NSF, Veterans Affairs, DoD, etc.) are SF-424 NIH standard packages obtained through Grants.gov and submitted by an AO such as myself, not by the applicant. Very few grants require the person authoring them to be the signing official who agrees on behalf of the organization to administer funds if the grant is successful. The vast majority of the applicants therefore route grants through a corporate or University network, where Windows (and to a lesser degree OS X - I'm a Mac user myself) predominate. In all of these cases, the organization will be providing the tools necessary - Acrobat is handed out like candy in my organization. It's part of the corporate image for all computers. Using Acrobat forms streamlines and simplifies submission for 99% of the applicants. The government is not going to change this to address a few edge cases.
The suggested alternative - web forms - is laughable. It might be good for one person, but in an average submission cycle I am sending 10-15 grants with widely varying requirements including esoteric formatting issues, hard-coded naming conventions, and etc. - not to mention that the typical grant includes dozens of required components and attachments, each with set formatting restrictions. It is hard enough to comb through an assembly SF-424 package to check for errors prior to submission as it is. If I had to manually upload each of these grants, one at a time, one piece at a time, into a web forms system, I would not be able to do my job. Period.
Post-submission, forms are processed by a clunky system in eRA Commons, then get referred to Grants.gov for eventual routing to the reviewing agency. The system has a series of automated checks built in to verify that the package is complete before it is assembled. This requires the various bits and pieces to be separate documents, as they are in an Acrobat package (and it is a package, with embedded attachments, not a flat PDF). This process is flaky and fragile enough as it is. Web forms are not going to improve the process, but they certainly would increase the workload for the AO by about 1000% and would definitely increase the error rate. This is also ignoring the fact that the forms are modular, in that some sections (like the budget) are only inserted as needed, and the necessity of being able to assemble and pre-check these things offline precludes any kind of web form system. The article writer is being intentionally obtuse and a bit naive here to make a shallow argument in favor of open standards. Heart is in the right place but reality is being ignored here.
Tl;dr version: it's hard. We do the best we have with the tools provided. Just be glad Grants.gov didn't decide to use InfoPath instead of Acrobat.
Skip made up names and look to mythology. Greek guardians (Kerberos obviously already taken), Norse guardians (Fafnir?), etc. The best made-up names will be taken, but the mythological names might still be open for use. Especially if you get away from Western mythology.
Connectivity issues and network lag for streaming, plus, modem wasn't getting any response from upstream servers, and was logging errors because of it. Tech wanted to send someone to the house to "do an update". I had to tell her that DOCSIS modem updates cannot be applied by end users and must be pushed down the network, from their end, so I wasn't going to take a day off work and pay a tech for a home visit when it wouldn't help the issue. Plus, it's my damn modem, not theirs. Tech was (a) shocked that I owned the modem - she didn't think we could do that - and (b) was unfamiliar with Roku, Netflix, and at least three other very common streaming devices/services. Plus she's telling me that network congestion was the problem with my streaming, as I was looking at the bandwidth test telling me the connection was wide open. This was just before Netflix blinked and paid Comcast for better speed. The company was flat denying any traffic shaping was occurring. Gee weird it works better all of a sudden.
Last time I had to talk to anyone in the company I had to explain to the tech how DOCSIS modems worked. You will never get an individual from that company on the phone who knows enough to give you a real answer. Turnover is too high in call centers, and people who know the answer are not on support phone detail.
My WRT54G is a Rev. 1 model. Tomato, running strong. I use it as a secondary these days, with an Asus RT-N16 as primary (for gigabit throughput on the LAN). Also have a Rev. 4 set up, currently using it as an emergency backup should either of the others crap out on me.
The Rev 1 was picked up for $1 at a yard sale, the Rev 4 was a freebie from a friend. Never underestimate the possibilities older hardware can offer if you know how to dump the stock firmware.
Yeah, it would be great if there was an entire website, with a video, explaining why you would want this and what it does, perhaps even linked in the article posted above?
They do make these sets. They come in big tubs. I just bought one for my son for Christmas, about $30 on Amazon for a big tub of generic parts. I'm having a hard time understanding why you can't find them yourself.
The only possible way to survive is to develop a niche. Streaming services are usually pretty good for recent movies, but a lot of back catalogue stuff is hard to find. Specialize in the stuff that's out of print, rare, etc. But really, I'm hard-pressed to see how that business model would be sustainable as a primary income source in most communities. There simply isn't enough demand for the content, especially given the huge amount of material available through Netflix's mail catalogue.
...doesn't that presuppose that carbon-based life is all that matters? We assume so since we're carbon based. But life needn't be, really.
Yep. My 4M+ is still going strong, 90k+ page count. And I have a 5M at home, even with the extra paper tray add-on (so it holds a ream and a half) was a steal from university surplus at $50 - have been using it for like 6 years now...