What's a horse, I hear you ask? I called my local representative and asked the same question.
It turns out that a horse is a self-replicating semi-autonomous rover optimized for negotiating tough terrain, and it was developed without DARPA assistance. It is powered by biofuels that can be produced using COTS technologies, but which for which no DOE research is required. Its waste stream is biodegradeable, and in the quantities generated by a single horse, facilities for the storage and processing of the waste pending biodegradation do not require EPA approval.
But seriously, why a plus sign inside a square? Why not an oblong marked ALARM?
Because if you replace all the words (and menu options) with pictures, you don't have to pay a team of translators any money to localize the product for non-English-speaking markets.
You make a claim like "menus confuse people", take the menus off, and claim that you're saving screen real estate. It sounds trendy, because desktop monitors are now down to 1080 vertical pixels, and all the sexy gadgets are tablets and phones with even less resolution. Scrap the status bar, nobody needs to know what their web browser is doing. Scrap the URL bar, nobody needs to know where their web browser is. Scrap the menu bar itself, nobody needs more options. Options just confuse people and take up real estate that could be better filled with more pretty pictures!
Disagree. I'm happy with "No exploding unless you've got enough insurance to clean up whatever the exploded bits land on", and would have no problem compromising on "No exploding over populated areas."
But as for the appropriate level of safety the FAA should target with its regulations, all I want as a prospective passenger is the same level of safety you get when you do your first tandem skydive. Everyone signs a waiver that says they realize they might not come back alive, but the company has a pretty strong incentive to make sure everybody comes back safely, and the experienced jumper, to whom the n00bs are strapped, has a very strong incentive to bring both of you back safely.
If the spacecraft's pilot thinks it's safe enough to fly, then I'll fly with him.
So long as we don't damage anything or anyone in their path, it's nobody's business but ours whether we come back high-fiving each other saying "that was awesome!", or as the first snowflake of the season.
The history of every major tech startup tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phases.
For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question "How can we make payroll?", the second by the question "Why do we need VC?", and the third by the question "Where shall we have lunch?"
It should be the goal of every startup company to reach the third stage.
Laughter and derision swept through our world today as the
Council of Elders confirmed the rumors that an orbiting mechanized
invader from the sinister blue planet third from our star had
been spending an inordinate amount of time examining one of our world's most commonly-available resources.
K'Breel, Speaker for the Council, stressed yet again that there was no
cause for alarm:
"This invader last located the remains of the northern invader which
stands frozen to the spot, its flailing futilely in the wind. If these beings seek to attempt a second invasion from the south, it shall meet the same fate as their last attempt
three years ago. The fools! The resources they study are so common that they compose 95% of our air!"
When a junior climatologist pointed out that the atmosphere of the blue world, holding a mere 0.04% carbox, was sadly lacking in this vital atmospheric component, and that the blue world's inhabitants had not only spent centuries trying to generate much as possible of it to supplant their meager atmospheric supply, but had even murdered millions of their own kind in struggles for control of their world's vital carboxogenic hydrocarbounds, K'breel (in his infinite mercy) had the contents of the junior climatologist's
gelsacs extracted, gasified with pure compressed carbox, and consumed it as a refreshing drink.
And thus the gullible managers who ignored IT... and only heard, "Cloud, cloud, cloud! It's new and shiny and cheaper than those annoying internal IT guys so I get a bonus!" learn to pay the stupidity tax.
C'mon. All managers love cloud!
What rolls down stairs, fails over in pairs,
Leaks data when it's allowed?
A stupidity tax, it replaces your racks,
It's cloud, cloud, cloud!
It's cloud! It's cloud! It's new, it's shiny, it's cheap!
It's cloud! It's cloud! It's down, and now you'll weep.
Everything's in the cloud! You're gonna love it, cloud!
Outsource it to the cloud! Everyone needs a cloud!
GVCS? Sounds like a planetwide distributed version control system. Ah, open source product naming.
Might I suggest it be renamed the GECK? It's just in time for Fallout 5:Fukushima. This trailer shows off great graphics, a easily-monitored PIPboy, friendly canine companions, and the Brahmin are so mutated that they only have one head!
'm just glad to hear that all of the crimes against victims have been solved and the perpetrators brought to justice, giving the DOJ time to focus on victimless "crimes" like online poker.
At least I assume that's what happened.
I was under the same impression when they started cracking down on medical marijuana dispensaries and performing legwork for the RIAA and MPAA...
GE? I can Trump that!
I was under the same impression when found out about Tim Geithner not paying his taxes. The Senate dispensed rapid justice, confirming him as Secretary of the Treasury.
Which reminds me, it's April 15th! Better hurry up and get your taxes filed, because we can't all get to run the IRS when we fuck up our taxes.
So, the team comprised of the hero, his hot chick, and his sidekicks learn of a relic they have to retrieve or destroy before the bad people get to it first, and on the way they learn of the original "mother tongue" and have to figure out What This Means and How It Works to save all of us from the relic...
Been there, done that.
Spoiler: It was a 1:4:9:16 black monolith. (What, you think it stops at three dimensions?)
Not necessarily. Even without Flash support, those things are huge vectors for earworms.
7 am, waking up in the morning
Zero-day fresh, gotta get my warez,
Gotta sign my key, gotta have serials
Crackin' everything, the time is goin'
Tickin' on and on, everybody's codin'
Gotta log on to the Slash - dot
Gotta slash my dot, I click Refresh...
PDF for printouts,
Flash is for online,
Gotta make my mind up,
Which code did they break?
It's Friday, Friday
Zero-day on Friday,
Sysadmin's lookin' forward to the weekend, weekend,
Friday, Friday,
Patch it up by Friday,
Sysadmin's lookin' forward to the week-end.
Take it easy on the State Administration for Radio, Film & Television, xMrFishx; everybody kills Hong Xiuquan on their first trip. I did. It always gets fixed within a few minutes, what's the harm?
The Center for Applied Technology, as it's been named, will serve 'as a focal point for bringing entrepreneurial-minded staff, emerging technologies, and pressing business problems facing the Census together'
Well, one manager folk told me and my manager in a call, when we asked about some features: "We are currently implementing plans to size the effort."
Hey. That's not even thinking out of the box, let alone thinking creatively at the enterprise level. Your organization should redesign the physical space; through the utilization of an oasis, it could better leverage its human capital.
They started as Pure Digital, a company that made a solid-state battery-operated "disposable" camera (20 minutes, 128 MB flash), and camcorder, both of which were eventually hacked. The business model was that you'd pay CVS $20-30 for the camera, fill it with 20 minutes of video, and return it for "processing", where CVS would use a device with a proprietary USB connector and software that knew what key to use to handshake to the device to extract the video, burn it to CD for you, wipe the camera, and put it back on the shelf. (much like a "disposable" film camera.)
The company was understandably miffed about having people going into their local drugstore and buying what would have been a $50-100 gadget for $30. Pretty neat devices. Very lightweight, and rugged as hell. At $30, perfect for strapping onto balloons, kites, and model rockets.
Miffed as they were about the disruption of the business model, they actually didn't get overly litigious about it. They didn't have much of a legal leg to stand on, so they basically asked really really nicely for people to stop, while updating their single-use devices to be a little harder to hack. (It took the community a couple of years to crack the newer firmware, and by that time, the devices, even at $30, were obsolescent.)
The "reusable video camcorder that offers 2-3 times the quality, a zoom lens, and 30 minutes of storage" version of the single-use device became the series known as the Flip. The Flip was an unencumbered version of the grocery store disposable units, featuring more storage and higher resolution, and even at retail prices, if you needed something rugged, lightweight, cheap to power, and still cheap enough that it's not the end of the world if the rocket gets stuck in a tree or your RC aircraft faceplants into the dirt, it was still pretty good value for the money.
Don't get me wrong, I love my streaming media, but ISPs seem to really hate it.
Don't worry, your ISP will start loving it once again when it's "forced" to pay the rightsholder $0.25/GB - while charging you $1/GB - for overages. Don't want MTV^WThe Music Streaming Service or ESPN^WThe Sports Streaming Service with your cable TV^WInternet? Fine, you can have throttled-to-dialup-speeds^WBasic Cable!
From TFA: "The parent whose child wants to watch "Dora the Explorer: Big Sister Dora" over and over and over again doesn't have to own the DVD or even the digital file. Cloud-based ownership and access means that their child can see Dora play big sister at home, on the iPad, in the car, and on mommy's smartphone. They own the movie or, more likely, have an all-you-can eat subscription service, so each viewing costs nothing except the price of Internet access."
Indeed, your ISP is counting on it. Cloud-based ownership and access means that their child can be charged for each viewing, tracked for each viewing, and have customized banner ads sent to each device.
From TFA: "For the majority of consumers, however, they will come to fully trust the cloud and believe in subscription pricing for everything. Ownership will become an anathema as consumers realize they don't want to risk losing content as they switch services, and they tire of finding requisite space on their own local storage for all those digital files. "
The Right To Read is also relevant here. Unless the bits are stored on a device that you control, the content provider can flush them down the memory hole and there isn't going to be a damn thing you can do about it.
(Seriously? "Tire of finding requisite space on their own local storage for all those digital files?" A 1TB drive costs less than $100 today, never mind in 10-15 years. Or is the business model going to be that since everything is "streamed" to dickless workstations, that 640GB oughta be enough for everybody?)
"'We knew going into it that they would have other obvious benefits,'"
Whenever a controversial law is proposed, and its supporters,
when confronted with an egregious abuse it would permit, use a
phrase along the lines of 'Perhaps in theory, but the law would
never be applied in that way' - they're *lying*. They intend to
use the law that way as early and as often as possible.
Firefox 6: In order to play games on the latest incarnation of its web browser, the UI requires that you must think in Russian, not merely think in English and then translate into Russian. Sure, it's a PITA, but the graphics are pretty sweet.
(That last demand makes for an even more ironic post, precisely because the demand doesn't quite fit with having to link the Hacekians' Librareome in order for the joke to make any sense. But that's totally Scoochi. Scoochi is large; it contains multitudes; gotta catch 'em all!)
The Princess? She had a crush on Trent Reznor, couldn't get enough of that Nine Inch Goombas action in her never-ending quest to get
Closer to Mario...
Pu240 is actually not the active isotope in weapons-grade plutonium, but an impurity that hinders its use. The less Pu240 in the Pu239 (the actual useful isotope), the better the bomb.
Yeah, but this guy wants neutron beam beer. The device on the label of the bomb is Little Boy, (from yesterday's Slashdot), and wouldn't work as a plutonium-based device no matter how pure it was. The less effective it is as a bomb, the more neutrons he can fire into his beer without vaporizing it in the process.
(Homebrewing is legal, but if he vaporizes the beer, he'd be halfway towards making whisky, and that would be illegal!)
"I have been breeding [thorium] at home using lots of old smoke detectors with a view toward generating my own [electricity] and getting off the grid. The only thing stopping me is a reliable neutron beam. Given that all the equipment I'm using is re-purposed kitchen equipment, concerns about safety mean I'm [hesitant] to build a uranium reactor to supply neutrons to the thorium one. So I'm putting the question out there: do any Slashdotters know of a [safe] way to make a powerful neutron beam out of things I might find around the house?"
You don't need a uranium reactor to generate neutrons (although if you use the thorium from some lantern mantles, you could probably create one). You also don't need to be messing about with nasty americium to breed plutonium as a neutron source.
Just build a Farnsworth Fusor like that guy on Slashdot did last week. There's your neutron source. Should be pretty safe, compared to the alternatives.
It would be helpful to include images and diagrams of your own personal neutron beam [beer].
Right, that doesn't solve the problem of your neutron beam beer.
Put a bottle of Pu240 Weapons Grade Ale in front of your Something in there'll get activated for just long enough to technically call it neutron beam beer.
At 8% ABV and 100 IBUs, it's a hop bomb that'll getcha bombed even without neutron activation!
It's so hard to moderate on April Fool's Day. "Case closed on Jerusalem UFO"? "World Backup Day"? Are the jokes just getting more subtle, or is the world getting ridiculous? Maybe everything should get "+1 Funny" - could be funny 'cause it was a joke and the poster didn't get it, or got it but played it straight for fun, or it could be a true story, and all the serious postings show that the posters can keep a cool head in the midst of a mad day, and the non-serious ones, such as the funnies, trolls, and the flame-baiters are trying to lighten up a serious story on a fun day.
This is too hard, I'll just go back to hitting refresh in my gmail.
(Call it whatever you like, Ceiling Cat has been watching you do it for years.)
But seriously, I'd just like to say thanks, because I've been trying to get gmail to refresh all morning, but never thought to use that that as the gesture to refresh the screen. It works now!
The article uses scientific notation to give the radiation release in becquerels.
It is impossible to be sensationalist when using scientific notation!
Yeah, yeah, your fancy exponents, but try using percentages!
From TFA:
"Similarly, says Wotawa, caesium-137 emissions are on the same order of magnitude as at Chernobyl. The Sacramento readings suggest it has emitted 5 Ã-- 10^15 becquerels of caesium-137 per day; Chernobyl put out 8.5 Ã-- 10^16 in total -- around 70 per cent more per day."
Yeah, seventy percent. The same 70% by which 85 is 70% more than 5.
WTF, NewScientist? The error's in the original article too, but this is the sort of mistake I expect from the mainstream media. A pop scientist publication should be smarter than this.
(Backstory: Her parents paid $2000 to a couple of guys at the music industry's equivalent of a vanity publisher to pipe their kid's vocals through autotune and spend an hour doing a couple of video shoots with her and her friends. Pretty good testament to what can be done with modern technology on a shoestring budget, but also a pretty good testament to "just because you can, doesn't mean you should".)
But don't be surprised if some other people copy it.
Nothing wrong with copying. That's what remix culture is all about. The song itself may be execrable, but the explosion of creativity it's inspired is nothing short of awesome.
... dropping calls in mid-sentence is simply known as "using AT&T wireless service". Zing!
Remember our morning shortage of Ts on/.? People have had to replace 'em with plus signs. Wireless is a poor fix, because even someone using an old modem on a landline operated by A+++ NO CARRIER
Creepier than being inappropriately touched by your priest, pastor or doctor? Presumably robots have not yet evolved sexual desires and fantasies.
Dear Janet,
I had an adequate time with you last night. I feel a million-dollar HomeSec contract coming on, and I know you do too, Janet. If I still don't get that TSA robogroper contract, you can bite my shiny metal ass.
Slashdot Mirror
It turns out that a horse is a self-replicating semi-autonomous rover optimized for negotiating tough terrain, and it was developed without DARPA assistance. It is powered by biofuels that can be produced using COTS technologies, but which for which no DOE research is required. Its waste stream is biodegradeable, and in the quantities generated by a single horse, facilities for the storage and processing of the waste pending biodegradation do not require EPA approval.
No wonder nobody uses the damn things anymore!
Because if you replace all the words (and menu options) with pictures, you don't have to pay a team of translators any money to localize the product for non-English-speaking markets.
You make a claim like "menus confuse people", take the menus off, and claim that you're saving screen real estate. It sounds trendy, because desktop monitors are now down to 1080 vertical pixels, and all the sexy gadgets are tablets and phones with even less resolution. Scrap the status bar, nobody needs to know what their web browser is doing. Scrap the URL bar, nobody needs to know where their web browser is. Scrap the menu bar itself, nobody needs more options. Options just confuse people and take up real estate that could be better filled with more pretty pictures!
But what it's really about is saving money.
Disagree. I'm happy with "No exploding unless you've got enough insurance to clean up whatever the exploded bits land on", and would have no problem compromising on "No exploding over populated areas."
But as for the appropriate level of safety the FAA should target with its regulations, all I want as a prospective passenger is the same level of safety you get when you do your first tandem skydive. Everyone signs a waiver that says they realize they might not come back alive, but the company has a pretty strong incentive to make sure everybody comes back safely, and the experienced jumper, to whom the n00bs are strapped, has a very strong incentive to bring both of you back safely.
If the spacecraft's pilot thinks it's safe enough to fly, then I'll fly with him.
So long as we don't damage anything or anyone in their path, it's nobody's business but ours whether we come back high-fiving each other saying "that was awesome!", or as the first snowflake of the season.
For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question "How can we make payroll?", the second by the question "Why do we need VC?", and the third by the question "Where shall we have lunch?"
It should be the goal of every startup company to reach the third stage.
K'Breel, Speaker for the Council, stressed yet again that there was no cause for alarm:
"This invader last located the remains of the northern invader which stands frozen to the spot, its flailing futilely in the wind. If these beings seek to attempt a second invasion from the south, it shall meet the same fate as their last attempt three years ago. The fools! The resources they study are so common that they compose 95% of our air!"
When a junior climatologist pointed out that the atmosphere of the blue world, holding a mere 0.04% carbox, was sadly lacking in this vital atmospheric component, and that the blue world's inhabitants had not only spent centuries trying to generate much as possible of it to supplant their meager atmospheric supply, but had even murdered millions of their own kind in struggles for control of their world's vital carboxogenic hydrocarbounds, K'breel (in his infinite mercy) had the contents of the junior climatologist's gelsacs extracted, gasified with pure compressed carbox, and consumed it as a refreshing drink.
C'mon. All managers love cloud!
What rolls down stairs, fails over in pairs,
Leaks data when it's allowed?
A stupidity tax, it replaces your racks,
It's cloud, cloud, cloud!
It's cloud! It's cloud! It's new, it's shiny, it's cheap!
It's cloud! It's cloud! It's down, and now you'll weep.
Everything's in the cloud! You're gonna love it, cloud!
Outsource it to the cloud! Everyone needs a cloud!
Cloud! It goes blammo!
Might I suggest it be renamed the GECK? It's just in time for Fallout 5:Fukushima. This trailer shows off great graphics, a easily-monitored PIPboy, friendly canine companions, and the Brahmin are so mutated that they only have one head!
GE? I can Trump that!
I was under the same impression when found out about Tim Geithner not paying his taxes. The Senate dispensed rapid justice, confirming him as Secretary of the Treasury.
Which reminds me, it's April 15th! Better hurry up and get your taxes filed, because we can't all get to run the IRS when we fuck up our taxes.
Been there, done that.
Spoiler: It was a 1:4:9:16 black monolith. (What, you think it stops at three dimensions?)
Not necessarily. Even without Flash support, those things are huge vectors for earworms.
7 am, waking up in the morning
Zero-day fresh, gotta get my warez,
Gotta sign my key, gotta have serials
Crackin' everything, the time is goin'
Tickin' on and on, everybody's codin'
Gotta log on to the Slash - dot
Gotta slash my dot, I click Refresh...
PDF for printouts,
Flash is for online,
Gotta make my mind up,
Which code did they break?
It's Friday, Friday
Zero-day on Friday,
Sysadmin's lookin' forward to the weekend, weekend,
Friday, Friday,
Patch it up by Friday,
Sysadmin's lookin' forward to the week-end.
Updatin', updatin' (Huh?)
Integration testin' (Damn!)
Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,
Adobe's blown another weekend...
(We-we-we so excited...)
Take it easy on the State Administration for Radio, Film & Television, xMrFishx; everybody kills Hong Xiuquan on their first trip. I did. It always gets fixed within a few minutes, what's the harm?
Hey. That's not even thinking out of the box, let alone thinking creatively at the enterprise level. Your organization should redesign the physical space; through the utilization of an oasis, it could better leverage its human capital.
The company was understandably miffed about having people going into their local drugstore and buying what would have been a $50-100 gadget for $30. Pretty neat devices. Very lightweight, and rugged as hell. At $30, perfect for strapping onto balloons, kites, and model rockets.
Miffed as they were about the disruption of the business model, they actually didn't get overly litigious about it. They didn't have much of a legal leg to stand on, so they basically asked really really nicely for people to stop, while updating their single-use devices to be a little harder to hack. (It took the community a couple of years to crack the newer firmware, and by that time, the devices, even at $30, were obsolescent.)
The "reusable video camcorder that offers 2-3 times the quality, a zoom lens, and 30 minutes of storage" version of the single-use device became the series known as the Flip. The Flip was an unencumbered version of the grocery store disposable units, featuring more storage and higher resolution, and even at retail prices, if you needed something rugged, lightweight, cheap to power, and still cheap enough that it's not the end of the world if the rocket gets stuck in a tree or your RC aircraft faceplants into the dirt, it was still pretty good value for the money.
Don't worry, your ISP will start loving it once again when it's "forced" to pay the rightsholder $0.25/GB - while charging you $1/GB - for overages. Don't want MTV^WThe Music Streaming Service or ESPN^WThe Sports Streaming Service with your cable TV^WInternet? Fine, you can have throttled-to-dialup-speeds^WBasic Cable!
From TFA: "The parent whose child wants to watch "Dora the Explorer: Big Sister Dora" over and over and over again doesn't have to own the DVD or even the digital file. Cloud-based ownership and access means that their child can see Dora play big sister at home, on the iPad, in the car, and on mommy's smartphone. They own the movie or, more likely, have an all-you-can eat subscription service, so each viewing costs nothing except the price of Internet access."
Indeed, your ISP is counting on it. Cloud-based ownership and access means that their child can be charged for each viewing, tracked for each viewing, and have customized banner ads sent to each device.
From TFA: "For the majority of consumers, however, they will come to fully trust the cloud and believe in subscription pricing for everything. Ownership will become an anathema as consumers realize they don't want to risk losing content as they switch services, and they tire of finding requisite space on their own local storage for all those digital files. "
The Right To Read is also relevant here. Unless the bits are stored on a device that you control, the content provider can flush them down the memory hole and there isn't going to be a damn thing you can do about it.
(Seriously? "Tire of finding requisite space on their own local storage for all those digital files?" A 1TB drive costs less than $100 today, never mind in 10-15 years. Or is the business model going to be that since everything is "streamed" to dickless workstations, that 640GB oughta be enough for everybody?)
- Meringuinoid, on Slashdot, ca. 2005.
Can you do that, Dr. Leuthardt? :)
We want our floor space!
We want our library!
And most of all, we want our REAL books!
(That last demand makes for an even more ironic post, precisely because the demand doesn't quite fit with having to link the Hacekians' Librareome in order for the joke to make any sense. But that's totally Scoochi. Scoochi is large; it contains multitudes; gotta catch 'em all!)
The Princess? She had a crush on Trent Reznor, couldn't get enough of that Nine Inch Goombas action in her never-ending quest to get Closer to Mario...
Yeah, but this guy wants neutron beam beer. The device on the label of the bomb is Little Boy, (from yesterday's Slashdot), and wouldn't work as a plutonium-based device no matter how pure it was. The less effective it is as a bomb, the more neutrons he can fire into his beer without vaporizing it in the process.
(Homebrewing is legal, but if he vaporizes the beer, he'd be halfway towards making whisky, and that would be illegal!)
You don't need a uranium reactor to generate neutrons (although if you use the thorium from some lantern mantles, you could probably create one). You also don't need to be messing about with nasty americium to breed plutonium as a neutron source.
Just build a Farnsworth Fusor like that guy on Slashdot did last week. There's your neutron source. Should be pretty safe, compared to the alternatives.
Right, that doesn't solve the problem of your neutron beam beer.
Put a bottle of Pu240 Weapons Grade Ale in front of your Something in there'll get activated for just long enough to technically call it neutron beam beer.
At 8% ABV and 100 IBUs, it's a hop bomb that'll getcha bombed even without neutron activation!
(Call it whatever you like, Ceiling Cat has been watching you do it for years.)
But seriously, I'd just like to say thanks, because I've been trying to get gmail to refresh all morning, but never thought to use that that as the gesture to refresh the screen. It works now!
Yeah, yeah, your fancy exponents, but try using percentages!
From TFA:
"Similarly, says Wotawa, caesium-137 emissions are on the same order of magnitude as at Chernobyl. The Sacramento readings suggest it has emitted 5 Ã-- 10^15 becquerels of caesium-137 per day; Chernobyl put out 8.5 Ã-- 10^16 in total -- around 70 per cent more per day."
Yeah, seventy percent. The same 70% by which 85 is 70% more than 5.
WTF, NewScientist? The error's in the original article too, but this is the sort of mistake I expect from the mainstream media. A pop scientist publication should be smarter than this.
So this is all your fault!
(Backstory: Her parents paid $2000 to a couple of guys at the music industry's equivalent of a vanity publisher to pipe their kid's vocals through autotune and spend an hour doing a couple of video shoots with her and her friends. Pretty good testament to what can be done with modern technology on a shoestring budget, but also a pretty good testament to "just because you can, doesn't mean you should".)
Nothing wrong with copying. That's what remix culture is all about. The song itself may be execrable, but the explosion of creativity it's inspired is nothing short of awesome.
Remember our morning shortage of Ts on /.? People have had to replace 'em with plus signs. Wireless is a poor fix, because even someone using an old modem on a landline operated by A+++
NO CARRIER
Dear Janet,
I had an adequate time with you last night. I feel a million-dollar HomeSec contract coming on, and I know you do too, Janet. If I still don't get that TSA robogroper contract, you can bite my shiny metal ass.
Yours truly,
Bender!