It IS a delay, but as Netflix is the only place I use to check new releases, it's one I admittedly won't notice
If that's all you check, then you are probably already waiting a month or more for new movies already. Have a check and see if you can find "Terminator: Salvation" or "Inglorious Basterds". They are available but you have to know they are released and search for them manually, like almost any other new movie. They "hide" them initially to keep everyone from ordering them at the same time. That's why I always have some other site open like Amazon that lists all the popular new releases while browsing Netflix. I guess that won't work now.
From the article, the real injured party in all of this other than possibly consumers is RedBox. Unlike Netflix, the delays were foisted on them by WB and other studios without any favorable terms. I'd like to know more details about it but it seems like RB has a pot of gold waiting for them at the end of their lawsuit.
The big push is that IBM claims it will cost up to $2,000 for a business to move to Windows 7. They argue that moving to Linux is cheaper.
Only $2000 for the likes of Wal-mart, Exxon or Coca-cola to move to Windows 7 ? I doubt Linux can be done anywhere near that cheap.
... perhaps some of the minimum wage pigs and grunts they hire to pose in their security theatre are stupid enough to believe "checking" a laptop is going to prevent information getting into Mexico and help them create a rival utopia, but it seems like a bit of a waste of time to me. Still, I'm sure it all makes sense to someone.
Right or wrong, the law makes perfect sense. If an agent is suspicious, he can search whatever is in your possession. It's not likely they'll search your laptop looking for something incriminating but instead the search will be triggered by other events. While it may seem pointless because anyone with any computer skill at all would not put incriminating data on a laptop and try to carry it across the border, they probably would find lots of other useful information that would paint a picture of who is coming or going This is a warrant free pass that can't be so easily obtained once the border has been crossed.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against it. I just think the label "Digital Nomad" is a bit of a stretch.
I'd have to disagree. I have a friend From Quebec working here in The States doing various contract jobs, almost all telecommuting. He took one last year that required mostly evening work. What did he do ? He went to France so he could make it a morning job, and have his nights to go out and explore Paris like few non-natives will ever get the chance to do. When the gig ended, he came home to his house in Texas. He's out again right now still at work but staying with family in Canada for the summer to avoid the heat. I would say his work style is nomadic, and obviously he relies on the Internet to carry it out.
That said, I work from home too but I stay in one place. I know from experience it takes a quiet place to accomplish real work and I find being single, my home is even better than the office. Going to public wifi spots is not something you tend to do because it is to disruptive and even on the road, it's fairly easy to find cheap accommodations that are both quiet and have Internet access. Aside from that, the nice part about working from "home" wherever you make it is that breaks can entail useful tasks like starting a load of laundry or walking the dog instead of exchanging idle gossip over bitter coffee.
As an investor (which is the term the article is using--among whom are you and I), you had better not be trading like these traders.
There was an interesting article a a couple of weeks ago on The Motley Fool regarding the difference between an investor and a speculator and how institutional investors, who hold 80% of the stock traded today, had become the later, leading to an average stock holding time of 8 months today. According to the article, the fallout of this is that it has lead to the problem of short-sighted managements strategies concerned with maximizing immediate profits instead of insuring the long term success of a company. It also proposed a solution by eliminating the capitol gains tax for "investors" and having an extremely high tax for speculators along a sliding scale. Food for though.
BTW, if an officer spots something other than they are looking for, They can use that against you because of the changes they had put into the patriot act.
Would you please expound on this? As far as I am aware, the police have always been able to charge you with crimes related to any item found in plain view or while searching, so long as what they were searching could reasonably be expected to contain items named in the warrant.
It would be nice if there were some way for Google to make permanent a user's blacklist like "-stupidforum1.com -stupidforum2.com -stupidforum3.com" instead of having to type it in all the time. I blacklist a lot of these domains through DNS but what I really want is for them not to show up in the results at all. Hell, I'd even be willing to log in to get this, which would have an advantage over cookies since it would be transportable. Google could even use information from these "blacklists" to reduce the page rank of crap like this and return more relevant results.
I can only read the story, but I think calling the mayor and every police official about his wife's harassment charge was probably not only useless but detrimental to his cause, mainly because it makes him look like he was capable of doing exactly what he said he wasn't doing. Some people are driven less by a need for a justice and more by a need to prove themselves right, and I'm guessing this guy is one of those because he switched targets to the police even after his harassment charge was dropped. Of the people that I know like that, the asshole label definitely sticks but I concede you're right that I have no proof about this guy. It's just my hunch. I found thing about the name plates particularly obsessive.
Of course, I have to guess about police motives as well and they certainly look like they're trying to silence a critic and get at the source of his information as others here have already pointed out, but on that I have no proof either.
If like me your old enough to recall the movie "The China Syndrome", that was made an released just days before the Three Mile Accident occurred. At the time, that together with the accident was all people talked about. Yes, there were some people already protesting nuclear power but that managed to turn your everyday joe against it too. Never underestimate the power of a Hollywood melodrama to sway people.
accused him of harassing her. Angry, he went on to complain to the mayor, the police and anyone else who would listen. When he ultimately was charged (even though it was later dropped), he got mad at the police and went after them, going so far as to make and photograph duplicate name plates of various police officers. What do you want to bet his wife was right about the harassement to begin with ?
I am not saying that justifies the actions of the Phoenix PD, just that this guy apparently enjoys being an asshole. While there's no crime in that, it does make me wonder whether what he says is credible or spiteful.
No, this is not a legitimate concern. If you can take a photo of it from the public right of way, you can do so. If you don't want your stuff visible from a public right of way, don't keep it visible from a public right of way
Given that Street View definitely raises privacy concerns right or wrong, I don't understand why the average slashdotter supports Google Street View but takes offense on nearly every other privacy issue, be it deep packet inspection, electronic monitoring, facial recognition, rfid passports or whatever. Yes, I understand that the law so far is on Google's side, but it is to a degree on most of the other issues as well.
Google created Street View because they thought it could make them money and technology made it practical to do now. Since they provide no way to opt out, they really don't care what the average person thinks. As data gathering and mining techniques improve, we'll no doubt see more invasive examples but this tool puts us a little further down the road where every aspect of our private life is stored, indexed and searchable online.
The thing that concerns me most is that while at the same time we have a government actively trying to erode our personal rights, we have profit motivated conglomerates sliding into the newly created space. Add to that most of the current laws on the books as well as those on public right-of-way were never written to accommodate the use of modern technology and well see most of our "rights" gone before we ever even knew they went. Google's purpose is to gather information and sell it. That whole do no evil thing ? Yeah, I think it's bullshit.
That currently gets abused. I have heard that anybody trying to sell an animal, for example, gets flagged as abuse by PETA assholes
A more accurate example would be how some readers in rants&raves flag off posts to which they object even though they clearly do not violate craigslist's terms of service. Animal sales do violate their TOS, so your example would form a better argument that the parent poster's idea would work.
Granted this is off-topic, but I take exception to your characterization the anyone who would flag such posts are "PETA assholes". I support several humane organizations but PETA is not one of them, probably for the same reasons as you - their crass publicity stunts, far left-field belief people should not own or eat animals, and their numerous criminal activities. That said, I too would flag animal sales on craigslist and I am glad they don't support it. Providing an open forum for animal sales encourage ill prepared people into breeding for profit, most whom would sell to anyone who can pay. Down the road, that means more strays, more animal attacks, more tax dollars to fight animal overpopulation, and more shit to clean up on my front lawn.
Actions like this, taken by vast numbers of people, are a large part of the reason the traffic is backed up in the first place.
In some cases, it only takes one person to create a problem. There's also occasionally some catch-22 situations, where intersecting traffic keeps blocking on your green and you'd have to wait a dozen or more light cycles to get through. Not many can stand an angry line of motorists behind them for that long.
Better still, find a lawyer who specializes in traffic tickets and pay him what's probably less than the equivalent of your fine for a much stronger likelihood of getting off.
An experienced traffic lawyer should know all the loopholes, much of which have nothing to do with the speed detection device used. I personally have gotten out of three tickets where the radar was dead on accurate. This advice was courtesy of a friend who was 14/15 (and a 'Vette driver too). Anyway, that's my two cents.
IANAL, but we had an incident at my old employer where a highly privileged IT employee gave notice was let go immediately without severance despite the fact that several other recent employees had left the company under similar circumstances and were either allowed to work or paid out for their final notice. She sued and won, despite the fact this is Texas and a right to work state because my ex-employer had a policy in place for this situation and did not follow it in her case.
I made a typo in the Internet Explorer address bar just yesterday and was redirected to Live Search. Funny thing is I had explicitly set "do not search from address bar" but that mysteriously changed after a recent Microsoft update. I guess this was a needed (financial) security update (for Microsoft).
I know you're comment is meant to be funny and that Sears is often seem as a lower-tier store; However if you research their exclusive brands like Kenmore and Craftsmen and the products they offer, you'd find they are consistently rated among the best performers in their class by independent organizations like Consumer Reports. On the average, they are also cheaper than their counterparts and they are also only available at Sears.
As an example, I spent close to $800 on a Dyson Vacuum cleaner to remove dog hair left by my Labradors. It did not work. After reading some articles, I sold it and went with a $300 Kenmore that did work, phenomenally better than the former product. I am not trying to be a Sears advertisement and I don't like what they are doing here but it's worth pointing out you can't just shop elsewhere and get the same thing.
Unenforceable in what sense ? I doubt the purpose of this law is to keep sexual predators off the Internet but more to give DA's and cops leverage to lock people up when they are suspect in a possible crime, or even more simply that their neighbors don't like them. Not that I agree at all with this, but it seems to me the point.
From the cell phone jammers perspective: I have the right to not be forced to listen to your conversation.
Where do you get the right to decide what others do in public do because it suits you ? If you don't want to listen to someone's conversation, go home. If you think it violates the rules of some particular locale, call the appropriate authority and complain. If they won't do anything about it, choose for yourself if it's worth leaving and never coming back.
All this talk of "my rights", what ever happened to other people's rights ? Learn to live and let live. You don't control everything that happens in this world based on what you think is appropriate.
I have all three consoles and from my experience, I won't use my Wii unless there's some really good reason, namely a new Zelda, Super Mario, or Metroid Prime game and yes, I recently dusted it off for MP3 but that's about it. I for one do not like the idea of having to stand in front of a game system and do forced exercise when all I want to do is relax. Forget Wii sports, I haven't touched it and I made Zelda and MP3 work while I sat my fat arse down in a chair. I don't see the the Wii's new controller scheme brought anything to the table other than a lack of precise control needed to make games compelling and difficult. I beat every boss in MP3 on the first try.
Add to that, there's not much else you can do with the Wii that doesn't look downright fugly compared to the PS3 and the the XBox360, particularly if you have an HDTV like I do. Althought the PS3 has few worthwhile games, it's by far the best for Internet Browsing or utilizing your home media collection. Everything looks just like I would expect from a PC with high resolution and a giant screen. It looks horrible on the Wii and the browser might as well be IE3 on a CGA monitor.
As far as game graphics, Wii has got around that by having Zelda available at its debut, but the truth is most of the games are miserable compared to either the X360 or PS3. Even without true HD on most games yet, the other consoles still blow the Wii out of the water. Of course, graphics are not all what gameplay is about. I bought my Wii because of my past experience with Nintendo's marquee games and I probably always will by Nintendo as long as they keep making them, but for other games it's a no-brainer. I will never a Wii version if another is available.
I had more or less the same setup with AT&T and Time Warner Cable Houston, before the latter was bought out by Comcast. Because my employer uses Websense and blocks sites that I need access to at work, I had set up a squid proxy server at home and started an ssh server on port 443. I then set up my ssh client to do port redirection and Firefox to use my localhost as a proxy server. This worked great for browsing all the way up until the day Comcast took over. I could still connect (occasionally) but the connection was frustratingly slow. I called Comcrap and got nowhere with their support. I don't think they ever even understood what I was talking about.
Needless to say, I moved my set up to the AT&T connection, canceled Comcast and got DirectTV. I'll never go back to them. With my setup, i'd have had better luck with dial up.
Not to long ago when my employer moved an hour away from where I live, I requested to begin working from home on most days when I am not needed for meetings and other such stuff. My boss was willing but before he would do it, I had to come up with a quantifiable way for him to prove I was working. It wasn't really that hard. Everything I do can be broken down into tasks which require a certain amount of time. Trivial items can be grouped as one larger task. Larger projects can be subdivided into smaller tasks. Once I grouped them, I assigned a time limit.
For me If I complete at least 40 hours of tasks, I've been at least as productive as I should be and my boss can rest easy knowing that. What I've found though since being away from the office is that I can actually do a whole lot more in a whole lot less time because I don't have to deal with all the other "sysadmin" people coming by wasting my time with questions about their work, something for which the bean counters and managers never give you credit. A good unix admin always gets that (except for the really scruffy mean ones but guess how they got that way).
Slashdot Mirror
It IS a delay, but as Netflix is the only place I use to check new releases, it's one I admittedly won't notice
If that's all you check, then you are probably already waiting a month or more for new movies already. Have a check and see if you can find "Terminator: Salvation" or "Inglorious Basterds". They are available but you have to know they are released and search for them manually, like almost any other new movie. They "hide" them initially to keep everyone from ordering them at the same time. That's why I always have some other site open like Amazon that lists all the popular new releases while browsing Netflix. I guess that won't work now.
From the article, the real injured party in all of this other than possibly consumers is RedBox. Unlike Netflix, the delays were foisted on them by WB and other studios without any favorable terms. I'd like to know more details about it but it seems like RB has a pot of gold waiting for them at the end of their lawsuit.
The big push is that IBM claims it will cost up to $2,000 for a business to move to Windows 7. They argue that moving to Linux is cheaper. Only $2000 for the likes of Wal-mart, Exxon or Coca-cola to move to Windows 7 ? I doubt Linux can be done anywhere near that cheap.
... perhaps some of the minimum wage pigs and grunts they hire to pose in their security theatre are stupid enough to believe "checking" a laptop is going to prevent information getting into Mexico and help them create a rival utopia, but it seems like a bit of a waste of time to me. Still, I'm sure it all makes sense to someone.
Right or wrong, the law makes perfect sense. If an agent is suspicious, he can search whatever is in your possession. It's not likely they'll search your laptop looking for something incriminating but instead the search will be triggered by other events. While it may seem pointless because anyone with any computer skill at all would not put incriminating data on a laptop and try to carry it across the border, they probably would find lots of other useful information that would paint a picture of who is coming or going This is a warrant free pass that can't be so easily obtained once the border has been crossed.
They'd try WolframAlpha.
Then they'd be unable to tell their children without violating Alpha's copyright and terms of use.
Why, I'll bet we Americans could get stumped even easier!! take that, britian!
From links found on the sciencesowhat site:
Are you more science-savvy than the average American? Take the quiz and find out.
While we're at it, answers to why the sky is blue and other questions.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against it. I just think the label "Digital Nomad" is a bit of a stretch.
I'd have to disagree. I have a friend From Quebec working here in The States doing various contract jobs, almost all telecommuting. He took one last year that required mostly evening work. What did he do ? He went to France so he could make it a morning job, and have his nights to go out and explore Paris like few non-natives will ever get the chance to do. When the gig ended, he came home to his house in Texas. He's out again right now still at work but staying with family in Canada for the summer to avoid the heat. I would say his work style is nomadic, and obviously he relies on the Internet to carry it out.
That said, I work from home too but I stay in one place. I know from experience it takes a quiet place to accomplish real work and I find being single, my home is even better than the office. Going to public wifi spots is not something you tend to do because it is to disruptive and even on the road, it's fairly easy to find cheap accommodations that are both quiet and have Internet access. Aside from that, the nice part about working from "home" wherever you make it is that breaks can entail useful tasks like starting a load of laundry or walking the dog instead of exchanging idle gossip over bitter coffee.
As an investor (which is the term the article is using--among whom are you and I), you had better not be trading like these traders.
There was an interesting article a a couple of weeks ago on The Motley Fool regarding the difference between an investor and a speculator and how institutional investors, who hold 80% of the stock traded today, had become the later, leading to an average stock holding time of 8 months today. According to the article, the fallout of this is that it has lead to the problem of short-sighted managements strategies concerned with maximizing immediate profits instead of insuring the long term success of a company. It also proposed a solution by eliminating the capitol gains tax for "investors" and having an extremely high tax for speculators along a sliding scale. Food for though.
BTW, if an officer spots something other than they are looking for, They can use that against you because of the changes they had put into the patriot act.
Would you please expound on this? As far as I am aware, the police have always been able to charge you with crimes related to any item found in plain view or while searching, so long as what they were searching could reasonably be expected to contain items named in the warrant.
It would be nice if there were some way for Google to make permanent a user's blacklist like "-stupidforum1.com -stupidforum2.com -stupidforum3.com" instead of having to type it in all the time. I blacklist a lot of these domains through DNS but what I really want is for them not to show up in the results at all. Hell, I'd even be willing to log in to get this, which would have an advantage over cookies since it would be transportable. Google could even use information from these "blacklists" to reduce the page rank of crap like this and return more relevant results.
I can only read the story, but I think calling the mayor and every police official about his wife's harassment charge was probably not only useless but detrimental to his cause, mainly because it makes him look like he was capable of doing exactly what he said he wasn't doing. Some people are driven less by a need for a justice and more by a need to prove themselves right, and I'm guessing this guy is one of those because he switched targets to the police even after his harassment charge was dropped. Of the people that I know like that, the asshole label definitely sticks but I concede you're right that I have no proof about this guy. It's just my hunch. I found thing about the name plates particularly obsessive. Of course, I have to guess about police motives as well and they certainly look like they're trying to silence a critic and get at the source of his information as others here have already pointed out, but on that I have no proof either.
If like me your old enough to recall the movie "The China Syndrome", that was made an released just days before the Three Mile Accident occurred. At the time, that together with the accident was all people talked about. Yes, there were some people already protesting nuclear power but that managed to turn your everyday joe against it too. Never underestimate the power of a Hollywood melodrama to sway people.
accused him of harassing her. Angry, he went on to complain to the mayor, the police and anyone else who would listen. When he ultimately was charged (even though it was later dropped), he got mad at the police and went after them, going so far as to make and photograph duplicate name plates of various police officers. What do you want to bet his wife was right about the harassement to begin with ?
I am not saying that justifies the actions of the Phoenix PD, just that this guy apparently enjoys being an asshole. While there's no crime in that, it does make me wonder whether what he says is credible or spiteful.
No, this is not a legitimate concern. If you can take a photo of it from the public right of way, you can do so. If you don't want your stuff visible from a public right of way, don't keep it visible from a public right of way
Given that Street View definitely raises privacy concerns right or wrong, I don't understand why the average slashdotter supports Google Street View but takes offense on nearly every other privacy issue, be it deep packet inspection, electronic monitoring, facial recognition, rfid passports or whatever. Yes, I understand that the law so far is on Google's side, but it is to a degree on most of the other issues as well.
Google created Street View because they thought it could make them money and technology made it practical to do now. Since they provide no way to opt out, they really don't care what the average person thinks. As data gathering and mining techniques improve, we'll no doubt see more invasive examples but this tool puts us a little further down the road where every aspect of our private life is stored, indexed and searchable online.
The thing that concerns me most is that while at the same time we have a government actively trying to erode our personal rights, we have profit motivated conglomerates sliding into the newly created space. Add to that most of the current laws on the books as well as those on public right-of-way were never written to accommodate the use of modern technology and well see most of our "rights" gone before we ever even knew they went. Google's purpose is to gather information and sell it. That whole do no evil thing ? Yeah, I think it's bullshit.
That currently gets abused. I have heard that anybody trying to sell an animal, for example, gets flagged as abuse by PETA assholes
A more accurate example would be how some readers in rants&raves flag off posts to which they object even though they clearly do not violate craigslist's terms of service. Animal sales do violate their TOS, so your example would form a better argument that the parent poster's idea would work.
Granted this is off-topic, but I take exception to your characterization the anyone who would flag such posts are "PETA assholes". I support several humane organizations but PETA is not one of them, probably for the same reasons as you - their crass publicity stunts, far left-field belief people should not own or eat animals, and their numerous criminal activities. That said, I too would flag animal sales on craigslist and I am glad they don't support it. Providing an open forum for animal sales encourage ill prepared people into breeding for profit, most whom would sell to anyone who can pay. Down the road, that means more strays, more animal attacks, more tax dollars to fight animal overpopulation, and more shit to clean up on my front lawn.
Actions like this, taken by vast numbers of people, are a large part of the reason the traffic is backed up in the first place.
In some cases, it only takes one person to create a problem. There's also occasionally some catch-22 situations, where intersecting traffic keeps blocking on your green and you'd have to wait a dozen or more light cycles to get through. Not many can stand an angry line of motorists behind them for that long.
Better still, find a lawyer who specializes in traffic tickets and pay him what's probably less than the equivalent of your fine for a much stronger likelihood of getting off.
An experienced traffic lawyer should know all the loopholes, much of which have nothing to do with the speed detection device used. I personally have gotten out of three tickets where the radar was dead on accurate. This advice was courtesy of a friend who was 14/15 (and a 'Vette driver too). Anyway, that's my two cents.
IANAL, but we had an incident at my old employer where a highly privileged IT employee gave notice was let go immediately without severance despite the fact that several other recent employees had left the company under similar circumstances and were either allowed to work or paid out for their final notice. She sued and won, despite the fact this is Texas and a right to work state because my ex-employer had a policy in place for this situation and did not follow it in her case.
For more conspiracy fodder, are the Clintons really stupid enough to have a hand in this?
Did you consider the possibility somebody else would like you to think that ?
I made a typo in the Internet Explorer address bar just yesterday and was redirected to Live Search. Funny thing is I had explicitly set "do not search from address bar" but that mysteriously changed after a recent Microsoft update. I guess this was a needed (financial) security update (for Microsoft).
I know you're comment is meant to be funny and that Sears is often seem as a lower-tier store; However if you research their exclusive brands like Kenmore and Craftsmen and the products they offer, you'd find they are consistently rated among the best performers in their class by independent organizations like Consumer Reports. On the average, they are also cheaper than their counterparts and they are also only available at Sears.
As an example, I spent close to $800 on a Dyson Vacuum cleaner to remove dog hair left by my Labradors. It did not work. After reading some articles, I sold it and went with a $300 Kenmore that did work, phenomenally better than the former product. I am not trying to be a Sears advertisement and I don't like what they are doing here but it's worth pointing out you can't just shop elsewhere and get the same thing.
Unenforceable in what sense ? I doubt the purpose of this law is to keep sexual predators off the Internet but more to give DA's and cops leverage to lock people up when they are suspect in a possible crime, or even more simply that their neighbors don't like them. Not that I agree at all with this, but it seems to me the point.
From the cell phone jammers perspective: I have the right to not be forced to listen to your conversation.
Where do you get the right to decide what others do in public do because it suits you ? If you don't want to listen to someone's conversation, go home. If you think it violates the rules of some particular locale, call the appropriate authority and complain. If they won't do anything about it, choose for yourself if it's worth leaving and never coming back.
All this talk of "my rights", what ever happened to other people's rights ? Learn to live and let live. You don't control everything that happens in this world based on what you think is appropriate.
I have all three consoles and from my experience, I won't use my Wii unless there's some really good reason, namely a new Zelda, Super Mario, or Metroid Prime game and yes, I recently dusted it off for MP3 but that's about it. I for one do not like the idea of having to stand in front of a game system and do forced exercise when all I want to do is relax. Forget Wii sports, I haven't touched it and I made Zelda and MP3 work while I sat my fat arse down in a chair. I don't see the the Wii's new controller scheme brought anything to the table other than a lack of precise control needed to make games compelling and difficult. I beat every boss in MP3 on the first try.
Add to that, there's not much else you can do with the Wii that doesn't look downright fugly compared to the PS3 and the the XBox360, particularly if you have an HDTV like I do. Althought the PS3 has few worthwhile games, it's by far the best for Internet Browsing or utilizing your home media collection. Everything looks just like I would expect from a PC with high resolution and a giant screen. It looks horrible on the Wii and the browser might as well be IE3 on a CGA monitor.
As far as game graphics, Wii has got around that by having Zelda available at its debut, but the truth is most of the games are miserable compared to either the X360 or PS3. Even without true HD on most games yet, the other consoles still blow the Wii out of the water. Of course, graphics are not all what gameplay is about. I bought my Wii because of my past experience with Nintendo's marquee games and I probably always will by Nintendo as long as they keep making them, but for other games it's a no-brainer. I will never a Wii version if another is available.
I had more or less the same setup with AT&T and Time Warner Cable Houston, before the latter was bought out by Comcast. Because my employer uses Websense and blocks sites that I need access to at work, I had set up a squid proxy server at home and started an ssh server on port 443. I then set up my ssh client to do port redirection and Firefox to use my localhost as a proxy server. This worked great for browsing all the way up until the day Comcast took over. I could still connect (occasionally) but the connection was frustratingly slow. I called Comcrap and got nowhere with their support. I don't think they ever even understood what I was talking about.
Needless to say, I moved my set up to the AT&T connection, canceled Comcast and got DirectTV. I'll never go back to them. With my setup, i'd have had better luck with dial up.
Not to long ago when my employer moved an hour away from where I live, I requested to begin working from home on most days when I am not needed for meetings and other such stuff. My boss was willing but before he would do it, I had to come up with a quantifiable way for him to prove I was working. It wasn't really that hard. Everything I do can be broken down into tasks which require a certain amount of time. Trivial items can be grouped as one larger task. Larger projects can be subdivided into smaller tasks. Once I grouped them, I assigned a time limit.
For me If I complete at least 40 hours of tasks, I've been at least as productive as I should be and my boss can rest easy knowing that. What I've found though since being away from the office is that I can actually do a whole lot more in a whole lot less time because I don't have to deal with all the other "sysadmin" people coming by wasting my time with questions about their work, something for which the bean counters and managers never give you credit. A good unix admin always gets that (except for the really scruffy mean ones but guess how they got that way).