And certainly mixing it with anything other than a bit of water or maybe ice would constitute "abuse", and ought to be prevented. (Some friends of mine are even happy to drink theirs cask strength, but that's a bit much for me.)
Other than the time spent in the cask, any aging that happens in the bottle matters mainly because the ingredients/process were a bit different N years earlier, and because of its rarity as a collector's item, somewhat like better-tasting Beanie Babies:-) Unlike wine, where there's a lot of chemical change as it ages even in the bottle, most of what happens to aging liquors is absorbing flavors from the wood cask and having alcohol slowly evaporate through the wood. There's probably still some change in the bottle, but the compounds are much more stable and the alcohol prevents anything bacterial from happening.
Back when my father was alive, I got him a bottle of Macallan 18 for some occasion, and I at least was disappointed with it - the Macallan 25 is absolute magic, and the Macallan 12 is good solid stuff, but the 18 was, well, just Scotch. It was as good as the 12, and a little different, but I didn't think it tasted significantly better.
A few years ago we updated laptops at work, and my T41 not only doesn't have IR, it also doesn't have a serial port. I wasn't using my old serial-port-based Palm VII much by then, and it didn't seem worth buying a USB-to-serial adapter for it. (I could still use the Palm on my home desktop, but the point was to sync it with my work laptop, and the older software didn't seem to work right on XP. Eventually I got a Nokia phone with Bluetooth, which doesn't seem to work reliably either...)
You can always use X Windows for video output (unless you're a gamer), and almost all laptops have VGA or DVI connectors that will let you drive a monitor that's at least as good as the screen in the laptop.
I've occasionally run into limitations with external monitors that have much better resolution than my laptop, because at least with VGA they don't seem to be able to do the right thing about resolution. For instance, my 1680x1050 monitor decides to stretch 1280x1024 wider instead of displaying it in native resolution with black space - not only does it make images and video look wrong, but what it does to fonts is really appalling. (That laptop has a 1024x768 screen and supports external displays up to 1280x1024; the other laptop that does 1440x900 mode also gets stretched, but at least it's not as ugly.) The monitor documentation looks like it would probably be able to make better choices if I were using DVI, but the laptop doesn't support it.
On a desktop, you can fix this problem by adding a newer graphics card (so if I buy a cheap high-res display for my older desktop, I need to buy a medium-priced graphics card to get better than the 1280x1024 motherboard graphics or else buy a new motherboard), but that option's typically not there for laptops.
My Windows wallpaper for the last few years has been a MacOS startup screen. People who see it do occasionally ask me when Apple made a thin black laptop (it's an IBM T41) or if I'm running a hacked MacOS.
It does seem to have some security implications, though - something seems to have locked it into place, so even if I update the wallpaper using the normal mechanisms, the MacOS image gets restored whenever I mess with screen resolutions (e.g. plug into the LCD at work...) It happened around the time my corporate IT department locked in the screensavers with an unchangeable 10-minute timeout and password prompt.
Yes, I also thought of the Aegis system crash of a decade or so ago before realizing that WHOOOOOOOOSH was the sound of water coming in a porthole that somebody forgot to close....
Back during the Bush\\\\Avian Flu PanicPandemic, some pundit who clearly must have had a liberal arts degree was being interviewed on the radio talking about "H S N I", and it took me a minute to realize that she didn't know it was "H 5 N 1"... I think it was probably the local leftwing radio station's call-in show, but it may have been the conservative station (National Public Radio:-) or right-wing wingnut radio.
Sorry, I just don't get that one. If you don't want to say "swine" because your culture thinks that pigs are icky, well, then go wash your hands with alcohol after you meet anybody who might have it, and be happy that you'll only get it from unclean foreign infidels and not from your neighbor's pig farm.
You're already +5 Insightful, but yeah, putting the wireless AP outside the protected network is absolutely the right choice, and in general you want it inside at least a simple DMZ so that users can get out to the internet (and their own corporate VPNs if they're visiting customers/vendors) but aren't harassed by too much noise.
If you have a corporate HR or legal department, you can make them happy by having guests get intercepted by an "Authorized users and guests only; I promise to behave myself" page or whatever, and maybe you also do some malware blocking or install an outbound-spam filter, but that's getting into the fine points.
You obviously haven't tried to get a network connection in a random conference room in an older office building. There are typically *lots* of jacks sitting around, and especially if it's your own company's building (as opposed to a customer or vendor, where there's somebody to ask), you can go through multiple cycles of
Plug in
Ethernet link light doesn't go on
Try again
No DHCP here
Try again
192.168.1.101!
No DNS - traceroute -d some-IP-address-you-memorized anyway
192.168.1.1
* * *
* * *
* * *
* * *
^C FAIL!
Or did you mean getting people to plug into false network jacks on *purpose*?
There are two reasons you don't want strangers on your Wireless LAN - they can leach bandwidth, and they can crack or eavesdrop into your servers and users.
If you actually hang a wireless network on your core network, that security stuff becomes really critical, but if you put it on a DMZ where it belongs, then you don't have to panic about how strong the authentication is as long as people aren't leaching all your bandwidth, and you can be relatively friendly about having guests/vendors/customers etc. using your wireless without worrying about them cracking into your servers.
Similarly, if your wireless users get to your secure network over a VPN, which they're going to need when they're working from home or Starbucks anyway, then you don't have to worry (much) about haxx0rz eavesdropping on them even if you're not using the latest WPA2xyz.
If the extra overhead of a firewall and a VPN makes your network too slow for your users, in addition to having N people sharing your microcell's spectrum, then they want real wires anyway.
That doesn't mean that you don't get some free peace of mind by using wireless authentication if you want, but if you've designed things adequately it's less than critical. (Maybe you can have an "Authorized users and guests only, sign your name in red pixels here" page to keep your HR department's pet lawyers happy, but other than that your wireless should be set up for insecure use.)
The big drivers I've seen for new wired deployment (other than just expansion/rearrangement of offices) have been Gigabit Ethernet for people who want faster bandwidth (so even Wireless-N isn't a replacement), or Power over Ethernet for VOIP phones (either for people who want to make Cisco/Avaya/etc. happy by selling two boxes or who think it's cheaper/easier to manage PoE than wall-warts.)
But generally the people installing those things aren't going to be disposing of old equipment that you actually want to install at home - they're replacing big clunky 24-48-more-port equipment, and you can get 8-port GigE switches for $50 (if they don't come free with your breakfast serial these days). Throw in a UPS and it's still cheaper than paying the shipping for that used commercial-quality switch you bought on eBay. If you need more ports than that they're probably in different rooms so it's easier to wire small switches than multiple home-runs anyway. If you really need VLANs you could spend $100 instead of stacking cheap switches.
That was a proposed cable back then; I'm not sure about its current status, since the main reach.com website doesn't seem to have been updated in a while and most of the articles I could find on the web about AAG were a couple of years old and in the future tense, though at least some segment of it was deployed in the Philippines in May 2008. Most new submarine cables talk about having huge bandwidth, though in most cases that's potential bandwidth if you light up all the possible wavelengths at the highest speeds they'll support, and what's actually deployed at first is a fraction of that.
On the other hand, many cable systems are being deployed with some redundancy, either in the cable system itself or redundant with other cables owned by the same company. India seems to have been a special case - at least as of a couple of years ago, the big bottlenecks weren't the undersea cables themselves, but the landing facilities and the land connections from them to the big cities, where you had to deal with the not-dead-yet ex-monopoly telcos, either to get landline bandwidth or to pay through the nose for using it. Competition may have forced them to finish liberalizing by now; it's been a while since I checked.
Yes, it was intended as an IRA joke, and thanks for the correction and additional information.
If I wanted to find IRA supporters these days, they're still around; here in San Francisco, I've occasionally seen pro-IRA literature in the Irish bars on Geary St., and I suspect there'd be no problem finding them in appropriate parts of Boston (the US Massachusetts Boston, as opposed to the UK one..)
No, the Republicans aren't all evil businessmen (though some certainly are), and greed and incompetence have a lot to do with it - but they've also been very big on protecting their friends, even when their friends are greedy and incompetent. And a number of the people who did the auditing and investigation into the voting machine designs are my friends or friends-of-friends, and they found a *lot* of incompetence in the design and implementation, and a lack of concern for making sure it was all done correctly and above-board.
The abuses in Ohio in 2004 were really well documented, and yeah, the rural towns are the last to get new voting equipment because they don't need help voting Republican. The 2000 Florida problems were largely caused by incompetence at first - even leaving aside the butterfly ballot making it easy to vote for Buchanan instead of Gore and the whole hanging chad thing - but while it appears they couldn't reliably produce a count that was more within a couple of percent accurate or reproducible on a race that was close to dead even, once the numbers were slightly in favor of the Republicans there was no way they were going to allow a recount or an audit, or they might risk a result like the Coleman/Franken election that's still going on now. (I also had friends who were part of a statistical analysis project about the Florida elections, and it appears that if there was ballot-stuffing going on, it wasn't in the disputed districts in Miami, it was in the heavily-Republican districts where it was less suspicious, plus there were all those black people who got kicked off the ballot incorrectly for allegedly being "felons" and not allowed to vote, which is a much more effective form of fraud.)
Legitimate distribution can either mean that you have a license from the owner, or that you don't need one. There's a lot of support for Fair Use in US copyright law, and there have been a lot of cases where copyright owners, mainly record labels, have done DMCA takedown requests to ISPs for material that is legitimate fair use, especially in the case of parodies and sampled material. Sometimes the uploader can reply to the ISP and get the material put back up, sometimes not.
I'm not talking about your people uploading ripped-off-not-yet-in-theatrical-release movies strawman; those are pretty clear cases, and they aren't the kind of thing where the uploader even tries to get to court, which is also mostly a strawman. For the most part, fair use cases don't get to court either, because usually the fair-use user doesn't have a commercial interest in fighting it past a DMCA-takedown-response to the ISP, and record labels are usually satisfied with getting the takedown (legitimate or not), unless they think they can get a lot of money by suing the defendant. There are exceptions where fair use cases go to court, but usually everybody has an incentive to settle first instead.
Actual cases about disputes over ownership are another strawman, and they're less likely to be alleged-owner-sues-uploader cases; there's a lot of sloppiness in record label deals, even aside from the generally established practice of labels ripping off artists in return for occasionally rewarding some of them well, and a lot of older material where copyright renewal wasn't handled correctly so copyright has been lost. (By the way, the EFF checked into the Happy Birthday people, and if I understand correctly, not only was the copyright not renewed properly at some point, the "owners" will cave in and license it for next to nothing to preserve their undefeated record, so it's always cheaper to pay them to go away than to fight them.)
The vector that propagated the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic was soldiers returning from The World War, and people who were exposed to them, so young people with healthy immune systems were the primary people exposed to the flu, especially since they tended to be crowded together in barracks, ships, and trains where it could easily spread. So the fact that most of the deaths were younger people doesn't tell you as much as it might.
On the other hand, the world population is much more mobile than it was in 1918 - travel's radically cheaper, and most people aren't farmers who stay home or occasionally go from their villages to small towns; everybody's on the move all the time, so it's easier for infected people to spread disease around than it was for most people in 1918.
If you look at that CDC search, one article that jumps out is this one, which says that based on later research, it looks like the big killer wasn't actually the influenza itself or related cytokine storms, but secondary bacterial infections causing pneumonia among people weakened by the influenza. That's actually fairly good news, because it's much more likely that we can treat those in a hurry with existing antibiotics (as opposed to waiting 6 months to get a newly-tuned H1N1 vaccine or using the increasingly-ineffective antivirals like Tamiflu), and because quarantine also reduces the spread of bacterial infections so people who do get the flu are less likely to get the secondaries.
The Bush Administration's stock in trade was to keep Americans, and if possible the rest of the world, as afraid as possible of all the horrible things that could be about to happen to them, so we'd give all our rights over to Big Daddy Government to protect us. That's why the National Threat Level kept bouncing from Yellow to Orange any time any terrorist chatter said "booga booga" or any Democrat said anything critical of the Bush League, or there was a holiday coming up when Terrorists might attack [Your Local Landmark Here]. And the press bought into it, because telling us to be scared gets people watching your local channel's news shows, and it's much easier for them to pass on and amplify government press releases than send real reporters out to find out real news
Having said that, they didn't mind too much if they thing they were telling us to be afraid of was legitimately scary, like the Avian Flu had the potential to be. Yeah, they blew it all out of proportion, but there was some underlying reality there. It was funny to watch the Bush League, which rabidly opposed teaching Darwinian Evolution in schools, telling us that we had to be really afraid of the bird flu, because it might Evolve, in some Neo-Lamarckian fashion, into a mean nasty killer pandemic, because those mean nasty hostile flu bugs really really wanted to kill us and were sure to figure out a way to do it real soon! And while evolution doesn't work that way, it does happen, and after how nasty SARS really was, the potential for Something Bad happening was there.
So now, when there's another new flu, which may just be another few percent on top of the tens of thousands of regular-flu deaths that happen every year without much reporting coverage or might actually be bad, the press knows how to tell the story of Scary Flu Pandemic Threats, and the Obama Administration hasn't decided to tell people not to be afraid all the time, because maybe they're kind of liking the power a bit, and because it's a lot harder to tell people not to panic when they're in the habit of panicking and when any time you tell people not to panic, some wingnut will start accusing you of covering up (especially if you _are_ covering up...)
Most of the deaths reported in the press have been non-elderly adults, as opposed to the regular flu where 90% of the deaths are already-sick old people and the rest are mostly kids who are too young for flu shots. Until the latest news articles (which said that "150 deaths" was "maybe actually only 7-8 confirmed to be swine flu"), the number of deaths from swine flu was about 1% of the total number of regular-seasonal-flu deaths during the past week.
Half the time if I'm in a random city and need a wifi connection, I can find a Linksys or similar open port and not have to go find a coffee shop.
I can usually see 3-4 unencrypted wifi connections from home, depending on where I've got my laptop, so on the rare occasions my DSL has gone down, I've got backup connectivity. In practice it's probably more trouble than it's worth, because one neighbor's firewall kills my VPN connection, and another neighbor's ISP doesn't let me upload email, and every could of days the beams cross and my laptop gloms onto a neighbor's wireless connection overnight and gets confused (especially if the DHCP doesn't renew the lease and it's the neighbor who uses 198.168.2.x instead of 198.168.1.x...)
Slashdot Mirror
And certainly mixing it with anything other than a bit of water or maybe ice would constitute "abuse", and ought to be prevented. (Some friends of mine are even happy to drink theirs cask strength, but that's a bit much for me.)
Other than the time spent in the cask, any aging that happens in the bottle matters mainly because the ingredients/process were a bit different N years earlier, and because of its rarity as a collector's item, somewhat like better-tasting Beanie Babies :-) Unlike wine, where there's a lot of chemical change as it ages even in the bottle, most of what happens to aging liquors is absorbing flavors from the wood cask and having alcohol slowly evaporate through the wood. There's probably still some change in the bottle, but the compounds are much more stable and the alcohol prevents anything bacterial from happening.
Back when my father was alive, I got him a bottle of Macallan 18 for some occasion, and I at least was disappointed with it - the Macallan 25 is absolute magic, and the Macallan 12 is good solid stuff, but the 18 was, well, just Scotch. It was as good as the 12, and a little different, but I didn't think it tasted significantly better.
No serial port, no IRDA, just USB and parallel.
A few years ago we updated laptops at work, and my T41 not only doesn't have IR, it also doesn't have a serial port. I wasn't using my old serial-port-based Palm VII much by then, and it didn't seem worth buying a USB-to-serial adapter for it. (I could still use the Palm on my home desktop, but the point was to sync it with my work laptop, and the older software didn't seem to work right on XP. Eventually I got a Nokia phone with Bluetooth, which doesn't seem to work reliably either...)
You can always use X Windows for video output (unless you're a gamer), and almost all laptops have VGA or DVI connectors that will let you drive a monitor that's at least as good as the screen in the laptop.
I've occasionally run into limitations with external monitors that have much better resolution than my laptop, because at least with VGA they don't seem to be able to do the right thing about resolution. For instance, my 1680x1050 monitor decides to stretch 1280x1024 wider instead of displaying it in native resolution with black space - not only does it make images and video look wrong, but what it does to fonts is really appalling. (That laptop has a 1024x768 screen and supports external displays up to 1280x1024; the other laptop that does 1440x900 mode also gets stretched, but at least it's not as ugly.) The monitor documentation looks like it would probably be able to make better choices if I were using DVI, but the laptop doesn't support it.
On a desktop, you can fix this problem by adding a newer graphics card (so if I buy a cheap high-res display for my older desktop, I need to buy a medium-priced graphics card to get better than the 1280x1024 motherboard graphics or else buy a new motherboard), but that option's typically not there for laptops.
so they needed an upgrade?
My Windows wallpaper for the last few years has been a MacOS startup screen. People who see it do occasionally ask me when Apple made a thin black laptop (it's an IBM T41) or if I'm running a hacked MacOS.
It does seem to have some security implications, though - something seems to have locked it into place, so even if I update the wallpaper using the normal mechanisms, the MacOS image gets restored whenever I mess with screen resolutions (e.g. plug into the LCD at work...) It happened around the time my corporate IT department locked in the screensavers with an unchangeable 10-minute timeout and password prompt.
Yes, I also thought of the Aegis system crash of a decade or so ago before realizing that WHOOOOOOOOSH was the sound of water coming in a porthole that somebody forgot to close....
How many Tivos are out there? Have they caught up with Macs yet?
Sure, some may invite it more than others...
Back during the Bush\\\\Avian Flu PanicPandemic, some pundit who clearly must have had a liberal arts degree was being interviewed on the radio talking about "H S N I", and it took me a minute to realize that she didn't know it was "H 5 N 1"... I think it was probably the local leftwing radio station's call-in show, but it may have been the conservative station (National Public Radio :-) or right-wing wingnut radio.
Sorry, I just don't get that one. If you don't want to say "swine" because your culture thinks that pigs are icky, well, then go wash your hands with alcohol after you meet anybody who might have it, and be happy that you'll only get it from unclean foreign infidels and not from your neighbor's pig farm.
Wikipedia says that one was an H3N2 flu...
You're already +5 Insightful, but yeah, putting the wireless AP outside the protected network is absolutely the right choice, and in general you want it inside at least a simple DMZ so that users can get out to the internet (and their own corporate VPNs if they're visiting customers/vendors) but aren't harassed by too much noise.
If you have a corporate HR or legal department, you can make them happy by having guests get intercepted by an "Authorized users and guests only; I promise to behave myself" page or whatever, and maybe you also do some malware blocking or install an outbound-spam filter, but that's getting into the fine points.
You obviously haven't tried to get a network connection in a random conference room in an older office building. There are typically *lots* of jacks sitting around, and especially if it's your own company's building (as opposed to a customer or vendor, where there's somebody to ask), you can go through multiple cycles of
Or did you mean getting people to plug into false network jacks on *purpose*?
There are two reasons you don't want strangers on your Wireless LAN - they can leach bandwidth, and they can crack or eavesdrop into your servers and users.
That doesn't mean that you don't get some free peace of mind by using wireless authentication if you want, but if you've designed things adequately it's less than critical. (Maybe you can have an "Authorized users and guests only, sign your name in red pixels here" page to keep your HR department's pet lawyers happy, but other than that your wireless should be set up for insecure use.)
The big drivers I've seen for new wired deployment (other than just expansion/rearrangement of offices) have been Gigabit Ethernet for people who want faster bandwidth (so even Wireless-N isn't a replacement), or Power over Ethernet for VOIP phones (either for people who want to make Cisco/Avaya/etc. happy by selling two boxes or who think it's cheaper/easier to manage PoE than wall-warts.)
But generally the people installing those things aren't going to be disposing of old equipment that you actually want to install at home - they're replacing big clunky 24-48-more-port equipment, and you can get 8-port GigE switches for $50 (if they don't come free with your breakfast serial these days). Throw in a UPS and it's still cheaper than paying the shipping for that used commercial-quality switch you bought on eBay. If you need more ports than that they're probably in different rooms so it's easier to wire small switches than multiple home-runs anyway. If you really need VLANs you could spend $100 instead of stacking cheap switches.
That was a proposed cable back then; I'm not sure about its current status, since the main reach.com website doesn't seem to have been updated in a while and most of the articles I could find on the web about AAG were a couple of years old and in the future tense, though at least some segment of it was deployed in the Philippines in May 2008. Most new submarine cables talk about having huge bandwidth, though in most cases that's potential bandwidth if you light up all the possible wavelengths at the highest speeds they'll support, and what's actually deployed at first is a fraction of that.
On the other hand, many cable systems are being deployed with some redundancy, either in the cable system itself or redundant with other cables owned by the same company. India seems to have been a special case - at least as of a couple of years ago, the big bottlenecks weren't the undersea cables themselves, but the landing facilities and the land connections from them to the big cities, where you had to deal with the not-dead-yet ex-monopoly telcos, either to get landline bandwidth or to pay through the nose for using it. Competition may have forced them to finish liberalizing by now; it's been a while since I checked.
Yes, it was intended as an IRA joke, and thanks for the correction and additional information.
If I wanted to find IRA supporters these days, they're still around; here in San Francisco, I've occasionally seen pro-IRA literature in the Irish bars on Geary St., and I suspect there'd be no problem finding them in appropriate parts of Boston (the US Massachusetts Boston, as opposed to the UK one..)
No, the Republicans aren't all evil businessmen (though some certainly are), and greed and incompetence have a lot to do with it - but they've also been very big on protecting their friends, even when their friends are greedy and incompetent. And a number of the people who did the auditing and investigation into the voting machine designs are my friends or friends-of-friends, and they found a *lot* of incompetence in the design and implementation, and a lack of concern for making sure it was all done correctly and above-board.
The abuses in Ohio in 2004 were really well documented, and yeah, the rural towns are the last to get new voting equipment because they don't need help voting Republican. The 2000 Florida problems were largely caused by incompetence at first - even leaving aside the butterfly ballot making it easy to vote for Buchanan instead of Gore and the whole hanging chad thing - but while it appears they couldn't reliably produce a count that was more within a couple of percent accurate or reproducible on a race that was close to dead even, once the numbers were slightly in favor of the Republicans there was no way they were going to allow a recount or an audit, or they might risk a result like the Coleman/Franken election that's still going on now. (I also had friends who were part of a statistical analysis project about the Florida elections, and it appears that if there was ballot-stuffing going on, it wasn't in the disputed districts in Miami, it was in the heavily-Republican districts where it was less suspicious, plus there were all those black people who got kicked off the ballot incorrectly for allegedly being "felons" and not allowed to vote, which is a much more effective form of fraud.)
Legitimate distribution can either mean that you have a license from the owner, or that you don't need one. There's a lot of support for Fair Use in US copyright law, and there have been a lot of cases where copyright owners, mainly record labels, have done DMCA takedown requests to ISPs for material that is legitimate fair use, especially in the case of parodies and sampled material. Sometimes the uploader can reply to the ISP and get the material put back up, sometimes not.
I'm not talking about your people uploading ripped-off-not-yet-in-theatrical-release movies strawman; those are pretty clear cases, and they aren't the kind of thing where the uploader even tries to get to court, which is also mostly a strawman. For the most part, fair use cases don't get to court either, because usually the fair-use user doesn't have a commercial interest in fighting it past a DMCA-takedown-response to the ISP, and record labels are usually satisfied with getting the takedown (legitimate or not), unless they think they can get a lot of money by suing the defendant. There are exceptions where fair use cases go to court, but usually everybody has an incentive to settle first instead.
Actual cases about disputes over ownership are another strawman, and they're less likely to be alleged-owner-sues-uploader cases; there's a lot of sloppiness in record label deals, even aside from the generally established practice of labels ripping off artists in return for occasionally rewarding some of them well, and a lot of older material where copyright renewal wasn't handled correctly so copyright has been lost. (By the way, the EFF checked into the Happy Birthday people, and if I understand correctly, not only was the copyright not renewed properly at some point, the "owners" will cave in and license it for next to nothing to preserve their undefeated record, so it's always cheaper to pay them to go away than to fight them.)
The vector that propagated the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic was soldiers returning from The World War, and people who were exposed to them, so young people with healthy immune systems were the primary people exposed to the flu, especially since they tended to be crowded together in barracks, ships, and trains where it could easily spread. So the fact that most of the deaths were younger people doesn't tell you as much as it might.
On the other hand, the world population is much more mobile than it was in 1918 - travel's radically cheaper, and most people aren't farmers who stay home or occasionally go from their villages to small towns; everybody's on the move all the time, so it's easier for infected people to spread disease around than it was for most people in 1918.
If you look at that CDC search, one article that jumps out is this one, which says that based on later research, it looks like the big killer wasn't actually the influenza itself or related cytokine storms, but secondary bacterial infections causing pneumonia among people weakened by the influenza. That's actually fairly good news, because it's much more likely that we can treat those in a hurry with existing antibiotics (as opposed to waiting 6 months to get a newly-tuned H1N1 vaccine or using the increasingly-ineffective antivirals like Tamiflu), and because quarantine also reduces the spread of bacterial infections so people who do get the flu are less likely to get the secondaries.
The Bush Administration's stock in trade was to keep Americans, and if possible the rest of the world, as afraid as possible of all the horrible things that could be about to happen to them, so we'd give all our rights over to Big Daddy Government to protect us. That's why the National Threat Level kept bouncing from Yellow to Orange any time any terrorist chatter said "booga booga" or any Democrat said anything critical of the Bush League, or there was a holiday coming up when Terrorists might attack [Your Local Landmark Here]. And the press bought into it, because telling us to be scared gets people watching your local channel's news shows, and it's much easier for them to pass on and amplify government press releases than send real reporters out to find out real news
Having said that, they didn't mind too much if they thing they were telling us to be afraid of was legitimately scary, like the Avian Flu had the potential to be. Yeah, they blew it all out of proportion, but there was some underlying reality there. It was funny to watch the Bush League, which rabidly opposed teaching Darwinian Evolution in schools, telling us that we had to be really afraid of the bird flu, because it might Evolve, in some Neo-Lamarckian fashion, into a mean nasty killer pandemic, because those mean nasty hostile flu bugs really really wanted to kill us and were sure to figure out a way to do it real soon! And while evolution doesn't work that way, it does happen, and after how nasty SARS really was, the potential for Something Bad happening was there.
So now, when there's another new flu, which may just be another few percent on top of the tens of thousands of regular-flu deaths that happen every year without much reporting coverage or might actually be bad, the press knows how to tell the story of Scary Flu Pandemic Threats, and the Obama Administration hasn't decided to tell people not to be afraid all the time, because maybe they're kind of liking the power a bit, and because it's a lot harder to tell people not to panic when they're in the habit of panicking and when any time you tell people not to panic, some wingnut will start accusing you of covering up (especially if you _are_ covering up...)
Most of the deaths reported in the press have been non-elderly adults, as opposed to the regular flu where 90% of the deaths are already-sick old people and the rest are mostly kids who are too young for flu shots. Until the latest news articles (which said that "150 deaths" was "maybe actually only 7-8 confirmed to be swine flu"), the number of deaths from swine flu was about 1% of the total number of regular-seasonal-flu deaths during the past week.
Half the time if I'm in a random city and need a wifi connection, I can find a Linksys or similar open port and not have to go find a coffee shop.
I can usually see 3-4 unencrypted wifi connections from home, depending on where I've got my laptop, so on the rare occasions my DSL has gone down, I've got backup connectivity. In practice it's probably more trouble than it's worth, because one neighbor's firewall kills my VPN connection, and another neighbor's ISP doesn't let me upload email, and every could of days the beams cross and my laptop gloms onto a neighbor's wireless connection overnight and gets confused (especially if the DHCP doesn't renew the lease and it's the neighbor who uses 198.168.2.x instead of 198.168.1.x...)