There are pretty clearly defined rules if you look at the UDRP process. If you register the name immediately after some event occurs that would make the name valuable and you don't do anything with it and then immediately try to sell it, then that doesn't pass the test. As far as registering a name 5 years ago and then trying to sell it, if you haven't done anything with it in the interim then that hurts your credibility (just let it expire if you don't have a need for it).
A friend of mine had a domain that he used to use for a local BBS (going back almost 20 years here), and he kept the domain and website up even though the BBS has been defunct for quite a long time. He ended up selling that domain to a company with the same name for about $5k as I recall and I think that was a fair deal. On the other hand, some guy registered the name of the company I work for about 5 years ago, he wasn't doing anything with it and had a "for sale" message on it, so we contacted him and offered to buy it for what he had spent in domain registration fees plus 10%. He refused so we went to ICANN and did a UDRP and took the domain from him. It cost us $800 and some lawyer time, but he ended up getting nothing for it instead of a couple hundred bucks.
Cybersquatting implies that they hope to profit by selling the domains...more likely the Vatican will just take the names they want via the UDRP process as that's the defined way to get a domain name from someone that registered it with the intent to sell it. In that case cybersquatter gets $0 and loses the money he spent registering the domain.
Unless you're specifically undertaking this project to learn more about building a cluster, don't build a cluster. Over time it would be cheaper in terms of power, cooling, manpower and space to toss the old equipment and replace it with something more powerful, or better yet just toss everything and spin up cluster resources on a cloud platform as needed. AWS, for example has very good support for cluster computing and can put you in or very near supercomputer territory for $1,000/hr.
I had to Google to find out that it only gets 16-17 MPG. At that stage I'd have to ask "what's the point"? At any rate, MPG is probably pretty low on the priority list of someone seeking to buy a Ferrari.
I recently bought a Prius and was very concerned about battery life before I purchased it so I did a fair amount of research. You're absolutely correct in your figures stating battery replacement from Toyota is about $4k, but on Priichat I've seen folks talking up aftermarket / refurb battery places where you can replace the traction battery for closer to $2k, so you're definitely on track with battery replacement being a low concern.
If most of your income is from investments, you're paying 15% federal income tax while I'm probably paying close to 35%
First...if you're paying a 35% tax rate, then you're bringing in close to $400k and are not what I would consider a good representative sample of the "middle class", so I think your response is kind of unbalanced there. I would consider middle class averages to be someone making $40-50k or a family making $100k, which puts them at a 15-25% tax rate.
Second, capital gains were taxed at 15% and are now taxed at 20%, but you throw that out there like it's some kind of insult that folks are taxed at that rate. There's nothing stopping EVERY SINGLE PERSON IN THE USA from using the exact same capital gains tax, it's just that most people don't earn the majority of their income from investments. So let's back up and take a look at what makes up a huge portion of our economy...investors. Do we really want to disincentivize investing and hurt the economy by raising effective tax rates? If you take away the investor's incentive, then maybe he'll just go somewhere else and take all of those jobs he creates with him.
At the end of the day, you can argue both ways, and both views can make valid points, but MY point is that we've empowered people to be lazy. If you can get food stamps, free healthcare, free cell phones, subsidized housing, etc, etc then if you're one of those people that's going to get a job making $30k, then WHY NOT just sit on your butt instead and take the free handout? It's people like this that consume resources while contributing nothing that I have a problem with. They're the reason liberals advocate higher taxes on the rich. It's specifically because under the current tax code, with all these folks not paying any taxes at all, it's an unsustainable system. And the other problem I have is that while they see that there's a deficit, their solution is to raise taxes on a specific group of people to benefit another group of people. That's redistribution and I don't like it. It makes it OK for person A to contribute nothing and while person B has to contribute more than everyone else.
But I mean, it's cool and all if you just want to call me an idiot. I guess that works too.
Just stick with XP and make an image of the system in a good state. It's easy to do with Ghost. You can either partition the hard drive and create a recovery partition that contains the ghost image, and give her a mechanism to boot into ghost and effect a restore. You could do that with a batch file, or a bootable USB drive, CD-ROM, etc. You could even put the image on a USB drive if that's easier.
As far as data, just set her up with Dropbox so all her data is online and she won't have to worry about backing things up. Or better yet, just set her up with Gmail / Google Docs and all her stuff is in Google.
Ideally you would want to refresh the image with software updates every now and then, but this is probably the easiest way for you to handle the system being easily recoverable from a totally screwed state.
Keep in mind that you'll eventually have to get rid of all of the parts you don't keep (which is likely to be 95% of it). Getting rid of that much tech is likely to have some associated costs. Many municipalities charge you excess disposal fees after you put out 2 or 3 TVs, let alone 80 of them. There are also various hazardous waste items you may have to contend with, such as batteries.
There are two solutions I can think of, depending on what you need and how much work you're willing to put in.
First, you could use something like LogMeIn or GoToMyPC. You leave the agent running on a PC on your network then you can login to that PC remotely and access the network resources from there.
The second solution, and what I do, is use VPN. In my case, I have a dynamic IP address from my ISP and I don't care to remember it. I also want to be able to directly address hosts on my LAN rather than play port forwarding games. I have a VPN tunnel built from my home network to a firewall I have colo'ed. That firewall has a static IP and when I'm working remotely, I just fire up Cisco VPN client and establish a remote access VPN session to that firewall, which then tunnels my traffic through the colo'ed firewall back to my home network so I can address my hosts at home via their internal IP addresses.
I happen to have the ability to colo a personal firewall at work and give it a static IP address at no cost, but you may not. If that's the case, I would look into something like a micro instance in Amazon EC2 that could perform the same function. Free for a year, then probably $20/mo.
The test drive TFA is referring to was in a car owned by Tesla which was loaned to the reported for the purpose of writing the article. Tesla acquired the logs after he returned the car to them. So to summarize, the reporter drove Tesla's car, and TFA wants us to be upset that Tesla analyzed the logs from the test drive that was taken in THEIR car.
How is this ANY different than virtually every other car that's been sold in the past 5 years? Cars have the equivalent of airplane "black boxes" that record speed, whether your seat belt was fastened, etc. This data can be used in court if someone claims that their car caused them serious injury. Many times the automaker will bring out logs that shows the owner was speeding and/or not wearing their safety belt.
Automakers also routinely pull these logs when you take your car in for service. They track how long you've been driving between oil changes, so for example if your engine breaks down prematurely, they can show that you routinely miss the recommended scheduled maintenance intervals. I don't see how this is any different from a web administrator using website logs to diagnose a problem when a user reports it.
Now if we're talking about detailed location data, then I think there ought to be a justifiable reason for the manufacturer to be able to look at that. Perhaps we could extend that to the traditional right to privacy and require a search warrant to obtain that information.
The article (and libs in general) like to point out all the scary stuff that will lose funding in the hope that they can scare the public. What they don't tell you is that the liberals in congress have rejected virtually all of the proposals to cut spending from anywhere. Even if we're just talking about limiting the growth of programs - i.e. keep spending at the current level instead of increasing it, they start going batshit crazy.
It's time to face reality - spending more than you bring in isn't sustainable. No matter how you skin that cat, it just isn't going to work. That's why we've got a 16 TRILLION plus dollar deficit.
The liberal's answer to this is to raise taxes on the rich. I don't fall into that category, but I can tell you if I did, I wouldn't be too happy about paying a larger share of taxes on my income to pull the weight of everyone else. There are a great many folks in America that basically pay no federal income tax because they are low income. So what Obama and the liberals in congress are really saying is it's ok not to go to college and get a decent job because they won't tax you if you can't afford to be taxed, or if you have kids even though you can't afford to take care of them. They've basically removed a reason for people to aspire to educate themselves and get a good job, because if you're poor they're not going to tax you, and if you do get a good job, say you start a company and grow it, they've removed the inventive for you to make more money because they're just going to take more money away from you as you bring more money in.
Walk in to any cell phone store in the US with a phone you already own and tell them you want phone service without signing a contract. Not to mention all the prepaid options out there.
Just curious as to why you thought a DVR would prevent you from getting robbed. Sure, it could be a deterrant, but if someone breaks in to steal your stuff, all the DVR is going to do is give you footage of your stuff being stolen. A proper monitored alarm may be a better solution as it'll actually sound an alarm and contact you and/or the police so someone can be notified and respond.
"unlocking a cell phone that is under contract became illegal in the U.S."
"It reduces consumer choice, and decreases the resale value of devices that consumers have paid for in full. "
These are in direct conflict with each other. If you've paid for a device in full, you're not under contract.
Really, all the cell phone companies need to do to swing things in their favor is to state that if you buy a subsidized phone, it remains the property of the telco until you've satisfied your contractual commitment. They can certainly prevent you from unlocking a phone that doesn't belong to you.
Don't try to invent a solution when there are lots of good ones out there already.
First, if you really care about figuring out who the guy is, why not just set up another open AP and monitor the traffic going through it. Given enough traffic, you'll probably be able to deduce his identity because there are still a lot of web services out there that don't encrypt everything, and there are even a lot that don't encrypt anything (including logins).
Next, if security is what you're concerned about, don't bother with MAC filtering or DHCP tricks. Both are very easily circumvented. The MAC addresses of allowed clients are easily sniffable, so he can duplicate those easily. And once he cracks your WPA2 he can see the traffic on the WLAN so he'll be able to deduce the IP info and assign an address to himself.
If you want good security, set up WPA2 enterprise. All you need is a radius server. Many APs these days support it (even most recent consumer models seem to). You can run the radius server on a tiny VM or an old PC. Then just set your keys to rotate often enough that it becomes impractical for him to crack them before they're expired.
Of course, if you did that to someone like me, i'd be inspired to go spin up a massive GPU cluster compute instance in EC2 so I could crack the password faster:-P
As the article indicated, we've had the TI-82/83/84 for the better part of two decades. Educational institutions and teachers know how to make it work for what they want it to do in a classroom. I personally don't know anyone that's purchased a graphing calculator for something other than a math class, so I have to assume education is a very large segment of the graphing calculator market share. Personally, I don't see anyone being exceptionally compelled to change their curriculum away from the TI-8X, and since many courses require that you have a TI calculator, the review is probably moot for a percentage of the market numbering in the high nineties.
Most definitely it is. Many of the people I work with lack the ability to even READ effectively. I send them e-mails and they seem to scan for keywords rather than reading the entire message, and they end up with the idea that the message says something it does not. The same people send e-mails that contain questions ending with periods and statements ending with question marks.
So, yes. A large portion of the US population is seemingly bordering on illiteracy.
I see similar things all the time at work. Business folks will fail to perform some action and when questioned about it they'll come up with some excuse about the application wouldn't work, or I didn't get the e-mail. Then we do some investigation and find that the logs tell a different story. Namely that they never even tried to open the application, or that they e-mail they supposedly didn't receive is marked as read and sitting in their deleted items folder in Outlook. People naturally take the path of least resistance, and the path of least resistance is often to blame technology. What they don't realize is that the technology is keeping track of what they're doing and can replay the actual events that took place. In our case, it would be bad form to publicly embarrass an employee by throwing logs on the table and saying they're full of it, but in this case Tesla had nothing to lose by doing so.
A violation of their civil rights? Come on! It's a violation of their civil rights if someone holds a gun to their head and forces them to take their clothes off while taking pictures of them. That is not how most porn works. Someone gives the girl a couple hundred bucks to take their clothes off or have sex with someone in exchange for the ability to record it and sell the recording. That's part of what we in the US call free enterprise. It does not indicate a violation of your civil rights if you agree to do it.
You made some vague comment about not liking VBA, but really what's wrong with it? Excel has great support for interoperability with the rest of the MS stack, and most 3rd party software can export to Excel format. VBA is also quite powerful. It sounds like perhaps you're saying you don't know VBA and want someone to create an Excel with perl instead of VBA so you don't have to learn VBA.
If I couldn't shift to neutral, my first thought would be to turn the car off. Surely there's a key or a button that can be pressed to kill power. Granted that's not the safest thing to do at 125 MPH, but I would have done so before having reached 125 MPH, it's safe enough to do so on a straight stretch of road where you don't need to rely so much on power steering, and it's safer than continuing to drive 125 miles at 125 MPH.
Perhaps, but they're basing their numbers on 12 months, and even on that smaller timeline the same sentiment is valid. Most folks I knew that ran a server in high school kept it for several years and many still have them (after 14 years).
As one already pointed out, the big flaw in the calculation is there is no hardware cost. That's fine for right now, but run this analysis out for 5 years and you're probably going to have to replace or upgrade some hardware. Those costs are builtin to the VPS costs, with your home server they are not.
Also, if your home server completely dies, you've then got an immediate cost to replace it. With the VPS you don't have to worry about that, so you're definitely getting more redundancy from the VPS provider.
Also, I don't know what the bandwidth requirements of minecraft are, but I'm suspecting if you need such a powerful server to run it then they aren't trivial. The average home connection has only a fraction of the bandwidth available at your typical VPS. Say you've got 1 or 2 Mbps upstream at home, the VPS probably has 100 Mbps - big difference there.
Last point, running servers may be against your service provider's TOS, in which case if they ban you then this is a moot exercise anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
There are pretty clearly defined rules if you look at the UDRP process. If you register the name immediately after some event occurs that would make the name valuable and you don't do anything with it and then immediately try to sell it, then that doesn't pass the test. As far as registering a name 5 years ago and then trying to sell it, if you haven't done anything with it in the interim then that hurts your credibility (just let it expire if you don't have a need for it).
A friend of mine had a domain that he used to use for a local BBS (going back almost 20 years here), and he kept the domain and website up even though the BBS has been defunct for quite a long time. He ended up selling that domain to a company with the same name for about $5k as I recall and I think that was a fair deal. On the other hand, some guy registered the name of the company I work for about 5 years ago, he wasn't doing anything with it and had a "for sale" message on it, so we contacted him and offered to buy it for what he had spent in domain registration fees plus 10%. He refused so we went to ICANN and did a UDRP and took the domain from him. It cost us $800 and some lawyer time, but he ended up getting nothing for it instead of a couple hundred bucks.
Cybersquatting implies that they hope to profit by selling the domains...more likely the Vatican will just take the names they want via the UDRP process as that's the defined way to get a domain name from someone that registered it with the intent to sell it. In that case cybersquatter gets $0 and loses the money he spent registering the domain.
Talk to someone in your local chamber of commerce, or a non-profit like United Way. They can probably put you in touch with the right people.
Unless you're specifically undertaking this project to learn more about building a cluster, don't build a cluster. Over time it would be cheaper in terms of power, cooling, manpower and space to toss the old equipment and replace it with something more powerful, or better yet just toss everything and spin up cluster resources on a cloud platform as needed. AWS, for example has very good support for cluster computing and can put you in or very near supercomputer territory for $1,000/hr.
I had to Google to find out that it only gets 16-17 MPG. At that stage I'd have to ask "what's the point"? At any rate, MPG is probably pretty low on the priority list of someone seeking to buy a Ferrari.
I recently bought a Prius and was very concerned about battery life before I purchased it so I did a fair amount of research. You're absolutely correct in your figures stating battery replacement from Toyota is about $4k, but on Priichat I've seen folks talking up aftermarket / refurb battery places where you can replace the traction battery for closer to $2k, so you're definitely on track with battery replacement being a low concern.
If most of your income is from investments, you're paying 15% federal income tax while I'm probably paying close to 35%
First...if you're paying a 35% tax rate, then you're bringing in close to $400k and are not what I would consider a good representative sample of the "middle class", so I think your response is kind of unbalanced there. I would consider middle class averages to be someone making $40-50k or a family making $100k, which puts them at a 15-25% tax rate.
Second, capital gains were taxed at 15% and are now taxed at 20%, but you throw that out there like it's some kind of insult that folks are taxed at that rate. There's nothing stopping EVERY SINGLE PERSON IN THE USA from using the exact same capital gains tax, it's just that most people don't earn the majority of their income from investments. So let's back up and take a look at what makes up a huge portion of our economy...investors. Do we really want to disincentivize investing and hurt the economy by raising effective tax rates? If you take away the investor's incentive, then maybe he'll just go somewhere else and take all of those jobs he creates with him.
At the end of the day, you can argue both ways, and both views can make valid points, but MY point is that we've empowered people to be lazy. If you can get food stamps, free healthcare, free cell phones, subsidized housing, etc, etc then if you're one of those people that's going to get a job making $30k, then WHY NOT just sit on your butt instead and take the free handout? It's people like this that consume resources while contributing nothing that I have a problem with. They're the reason liberals advocate higher taxes on the rich. It's specifically because under the current tax code, with all these folks not paying any taxes at all, it's an unsustainable system. And the other problem I have is that while they see that there's a deficit, their solution is to raise taxes on a specific group of people to benefit another group of people. That's redistribution and I don't like it. It makes it OK for person A to contribute nothing and while person B has to contribute more than everyone else.
But I mean, it's cool and all if you just want to call me an idiot. I guess that works too.
Just stick with XP and make an image of the system in a good state. It's easy to do with Ghost. You can either partition the hard drive and create a recovery partition that contains the ghost image, and give her a mechanism to boot into ghost and effect a restore. You could do that with a batch file, or a bootable USB drive, CD-ROM, etc. You could even put the image on a USB drive if that's easier.
As far as data, just set her up with Dropbox so all her data is online and she won't have to worry about backing things up. Or better yet, just set her up with Gmail / Google Docs and all her stuff is in Google.
Ideally you would want to refresh the image with software updates every now and then, but this is probably the easiest way for you to handle the system being easily recoverable from a totally screwed state.
Keep in mind that you'll eventually have to get rid of all of the parts you don't keep (which is likely to be 95% of it). Getting rid of that much tech is likely to have some associated costs. Many municipalities charge you excess disposal fees after you put out 2 or 3 TVs, let alone 80 of them. There are also various hazardous waste items you may have to contend with, such as batteries.
Stop doing business with them, and make sure they know why.
There are two solutions I can think of, depending on what you need and how much work you're willing to put in.
First, you could use something like LogMeIn or GoToMyPC. You leave the agent running on a PC on your network then you can login to that PC remotely and access the network resources from there.
The second solution, and what I do, is use VPN. In my case, I have a dynamic IP address from my ISP and I don't care to remember it. I also want to be able to directly address hosts on my LAN rather than play port forwarding games. I have a VPN tunnel built from my home network to a firewall I have colo'ed. That firewall has a static IP and when I'm working remotely, I just fire up Cisco VPN client and establish a remote access VPN session to that firewall, which then tunnels my traffic through the colo'ed firewall back to my home network so I can address my hosts at home via their internal IP addresses.
I happen to have the ability to colo a personal firewall at work and give it a static IP address at no cost, but you may not. If that's the case, I would look into something like a micro instance in Amazon EC2 that could perform the same function. Free for a year, then probably $20/mo.
The test drive TFA is referring to was in a car owned by Tesla which was loaned to the reported for the purpose of writing the article. Tesla acquired the logs after he returned the car to them. So to summarize, the reporter drove Tesla's car, and TFA wants us to be upset that Tesla analyzed the logs from the test drive that was taken in THEIR car.
How is this ANY different than virtually every other car that's been sold in the past 5 years? Cars have the equivalent of airplane "black boxes" that record speed, whether your seat belt was fastened, etc. This data can be used in court if someone claims that their car caused them serious injury. Many times the automaker will bring out logs that shows the owner was speeding and/or not wearing their safety belt.
Automakers also routinely pull these logs when you take your car in for service. They track how long you've been driving between oil changes, so for example if your engine breaks down prematurely, they can show that you routinely miss the recommended scheduled maintenance intervals. I don't see how this is any different from a web administrator using website logs to diagnose a problem when a user reports it.
Now if we're talking about detailed location data, then I think there ought to be a justifiable reason for the manufacturer to be able to look at that. Perhaps we could extend that to the traditional right to privacy and require a search warrant to obtain that information.
The article (and libs in general) like to point out all the scary stuff that will lose funding in the hope that they can scare the public. What they don't tell you is that the liberals in congress have rejected virtually all of the proposals to cut spending from anywhere. Even if we're just talking about limiting the growth of programs - i.e. keep spending at the current level instead of increasing it, they start going batshit crazy.
It's time to face reality - spending more than you bring in isn't sustainable. No matter how you skin that cat, it just isn't going to work. That's why we've got a 16 TRILLION plus dollar deficit.
The liberal's answer to this is to raise taxes on the rich. I don't fall into that category, but I can tell you if I did, I wouldn't be too happy about paying a larger share of taxes on my income to pull the weight of everyone else. There are a great many folks in America that basically pay no federal income tax because they are low income. So what Obama and the liberals in congress are really saying is it's ok not to go to college and get a decent job because they won't tax you if you can't afford to be taxed, or if you have kids even though you can't afford to take care of them. They've basically removed a reason for people to aspire to educate themselves and get a good job, because if you're poor they're not going to tax you, and if you do get a good job, say you start a company and grow it, they've removed the inventive for you to make more money because they're just going to take more money away from you as you bring more money in.
Walk in to any cell phone store in the US with a phone you already own and tell them you want phone service without signing a contract. Not to mention all the prepaid options out there.
Just curious as to why you thought a DVR would prevent you from getting robbed. Sure, it could be a deterrant, but if someone breaks in to steal your stuff, all the DVR is going to do is give you footage of your stuff being stolen. A proper monitored alarm may be a better solution as it'll actually sound an alarm and contact you and/or the police so someone can be notified and respond.
"unlocking a cell phone that is under contract became illegal in the U.S."
"It reduces consumer choice, and decreases the resale value of devices that consumers have paid for in full. "
These are in direct conflict with each other. If you've paid for a device in full, you're not under contract.
Really, all the cell phone companies need to do to swing things in their favor is to state that if you buy a subsidized phone, it remains the property of the telco until you've satisfied your contractual commitment. They can certainly prevent you from unlocking a phone that doesn't belong to you.
Don't try to invent a solution when there are lots of good ones out there already.
:-P
First, if you really care about figuring out who the guy is, why not just set up another open AP and monitor the traffic going through it. Given enough traffic, you'll probably be able to deduce his identity because there are still a lot of web services out there that don't encrypt everything, and there are even a lot that don't encrypt anything (including logins).
Next, if security is what you're concerned about, don't bother with MAC filtering or DHCP tricks. Both are very easily circumvented. The MAC addresses of allowed clients are easily sniffable, so he can duplicate those easily. And once he cracks your WPA2 he can see the traffic on the WLAN so he'll be able to deduce the IP info and assign an address to himself.
If you want good security, set up WPA2 enterprise. All you need is a radius server. Many APs these days support it (even most recent consumer models seem to). You can run the radius server on a tiny VM or an old PC. Then just set your keys to rotate often enough that it becomes impractical for him to crack them before they're expired.
Of course, if you did that to someone like me, i'd be inspired to go spin up a massive GPU cluster compute instance in EC2 so I could crack the password faster
As the article indicated, we've had the TI-82/83/84 for the better part of two decades. Educational institutions and teachers know how to make it work for what they want it to do in a classroom. I personally don't know anyone that's purchased a graphing calculator for something other than a math class, so I have to assume education is a very large segment of the graphing calculator market share. Personally, I don't see anyone being exceptionally compelled to change their curriculum away from the TI-8X, and since many courses require that you have a TI calculator, the review is probably moot for a percentage of the market numbering in the high nineties.
Most definitely it is. Many of the people I work with lack the ability to even READ effectively. I send them e-mails and they seem to scan for keywords rather than reading the entire message, and they end up with the idea that the message says something it does not. The same people send e-mails that contain questions ending with periods and statements ending with question marks.
So, yes. A large portion of the US population is seemingly bordering on illiteracy.
I see similar things all the time at work. Business folks will fail to perform some action and when questioned about it they'll come up with some excuse about the application wouldn't work, or I didn't get the e-mail. Then we do some investigation and find that the logs tell a different story. Namely that they never even tried to open the application, or that they e-mail they supposedly didn't receive is marked as read and sitting in their deleted items folder in Outlook. People naturally take the path of least resistance, and the path of least resistance is often to blame technology. What they don't realize is that the technology is keeping track of what they're doing and can replay the actual events that took place. In our case, it would be bad form to publicly embarrass an employee by throwing logs on the table and saying they're full of it, but in this case Tesla had nothing to lose by doing so.
A violation of their civil rights? Come on! It's a violation of their civil rights if someone holds a gun to their head and forces them to take their clothes off while taking pictures of them. That is not how most porn works. Someone gives the girl a couple hundred bucks to take their clothes off or have sex with someone in exchange for the ability to record it and sell the recording. That's part of what we in the US call free enterprise. It does not indicate a violation of your civil rights if you agree to do it.
You made some vague comment about not liking VBA, but really what's wrong with it? Excel has great support for interoperability with the rest of the MS stack, and most 3rd party software can export to Excel format. VBA is also quite powerful. It sounds like perhaps you're saying you don't know VBA and want someone to create an Excel with perl instead of VBA so you don't have to learn VBA.
If I couldn't shift to neutral, my first thought would be to turn the car off. Surely there's a key or a button that can be pressed to kill power. Granted that's not the safest thing to do at 125 MPH, but I would have done so before having reached 125 MPH, it's safe enough to do so on a straight stretch of road where you don't need to rely so much on power steering, and it's safer than continuing to drive 125 miles at 125 MPH.
Perhaps, but they're basing their numbers on 12 months, and even on that smaller timeline the same sentiment is valid. Most folks I knew that ran a server in high school kept it for several years and many still have them (after 14 years).
As one already pointed out, the big flaw in the calculation is there is no hardware cost. That's fine for right now, but run this analysis out for 5 years and you're probably going to have to replace or upgrade some hardware. Those costs are builtin to the VPS costs, with your home server they are not.
Also, if your home server completely dies, you've then got an immediate cost to replace it. With the VPS you don't have to worry about that, so you're definitely getting more redundancy from the VPS provider.
Also, I don't know what the bandwidth requirements of minecraft are, but I'm suspecting if you need such a powerful server to run it then they aren't trivial. The average home connection has only a fraction of the bandwidth available at your typical VPS. Say you've got 1 or 2 Mbps upstream at home, the VPS probably has 100 Mbps - big difference there.
Last point, running servers may be against your service provider's TOS, in which case if they ban you then this is a moot exercise anyway.