I was surprised that the picture of the glasses doesn't show any sort of strap to keep the things from falling off, and Croakies or equivalent are also helpful because they encourage you to keep the things around your neck instead of putting them down on whatever convenient flat surface is nearby.
But yeah, I lose sunglasses all the time, mainly because I forget and wear them in from my car and then leave them. On the other hand, I'm happy with el-cheapo sunglasses, so it's not annoying unless my car runs out of sunglasses.
/* You are not expected to understand this */ haiku
(The classic comment was from the 6th Edition Unix kernel source, in a section that was doing context switches.) (Remember to pronounce "*" as "star".)
There are some instruments that are really easy to play, at least for basics like chords or melodies (depending on instrument) - Drums, Mountain Dulcimer, Baritone Horn, Harmonica, Recorders and Tinwhistles, simple Piano styles. And Ukeleles are easier to play than guitars, because it's easier to chord four strings with four fingers than to chord six strings with four fingers.
But just because you can do the finger mechanics doesn't mean you've got *musical* skillz - it just gives you more versatile ways to display your lack of talent, so the wrong notes you were trying to play at the wrong time are the ones you actually got.
But you can still have fun with it, and often, especially in folk music, the guitar is really there as a backup for your lousy singing voice and lame lyrics, so you don't have to be all that skilled to play backup. Woodie Guthrie once said that if you're using more than three chords in a song, you're just showing off anyway, but he was so good at writing the right lyrics for his audiences that he could get away with it.
ICANN has done a bunch of stupid things over the years, but this is not one of them. They'll only get to sell.sex and.inc and.ltd once, and they needed to learn how to deal with selling new gTLDs on names that nobody's really all that worried about, like.coop or.aero. They did miss a lot of the market window by dithering about it for so long - they've had enough experience by now to figure out where the money is and shake down the customers for all they could get (ICANN's primary purpose is spreading WIPO-like Intellectual Property rules around, but their secondary goal in life is to find ways to fund themselves.)
But.Museum wasn't just another lame domain name - they're about the only one that actively experimented with naming structure beyond saying "We're only selling.foo domain names to genuine Foo customers." Go read about.museum/naming. They'll sell 2LDs for very specific names, like sanfrancisco-modern-art.museum, but they mainly have generic 2LDs maintained by the gTLD, and want to sell 3LDs like sfmoma.art.museum or moma.sanfrancisco.museum, so it's easy to find given types of museums.
There are technical innovations as well - if you look for a nonexistent name, like nonexistent.museum, you'll get an A record for the gTLD's web server. (It doesn't seem to be implemented consistently - there's an A record for nonexistent 2LDs, but nonexistent.art.museum doesn't get one, which is a bit strange.) This wildcarding does break a few assumptions about domain names - a common anti-spam technique is to make sure a domain name exists before accepting mail from it, to cut down on stuff like spammer@dffsdfdsafdsfdsafdsaf.com, but you forge send mail from spammer@spammer12345.museum and the spam-filter's DNS query will get a valid record for the domain. This isn't a big problem when it's only.museum and a few minor ccTLDs, but Verisign's Sitefinder scam did this for.com in ways that broke a lot of things (e.g. "telnet missspelled-example.com" is supposed to get a DNS failure, not get stuck trying to connect to the telnet port at sitefinder.verisign.com.)
So back in the Dark Ages, when the Internet hadn't really spread everywhere, and in many places it was still a volunteer-run system, the ccTLD server for the island of Anguilla actually resided in a friend's bedroom in Berkeley, which had a much more reliable connection than Anguilla did. There were a bunch of cryptographers who hung out down there, because US export laws made it difficult to do work or talk to foreigners inside the US, and it was a Caribbean island where they could have conferences in winter and hang out on the beach, and one of them ran one of the first ISPs down there as part of his computer consulting business.
Running a ccTLD lets you do cool things, like assign email addresses directly under the ccTLD, like " x@ai " or even " $@ai ". Can't get any shorter than that, unless you're running an alternate root server and can somehow get email addresses under the dot. It's syntactically correct, though some mail clients or non-pedantically-correctly configured mail servers didn't like those addresses and would reject them. Anguilla was a small enough country, with about 10,000 people, that they could have also done email forwarding for everybody in the country, e.g. JohnDoe@ai, though I don't think that ever happened. It looks like the TLD server no longer accepts email directly.
The cybercrime investigator's figure of $105 billion for illegal drugs sounds like it's part of the 43% of statistics that are made up, but suppose it's true. The War on Politically Incorrect Drugs costs far more than that - direct expenditures by US and EU governments probably exceed that, but the real costs of the drug war include all the violence and corruption in Latin America that's fueled by the black market, which includes right-wing and left-wing paramilitary forces in places like Colombia, all the terrorism that's funded by opium grown in Southwest Asia (especially now that the anti-drug Taliban are no longer in power in Afghanistan), and all the people's lives that are wasted in prisons or in dead-end jobs because of prison records or in drug-dealing jobs that could have been doing more productive things.
Yes, legalizing drugs would lead to some medical problems, because some people have trouble handling them, but the free-market price of opiate addiction is cheaper than a cigarette habit, so addicts wouldn't have to resort to crime to fund it, and they'd be able to get pure enough drugs that fewer people would be overdosing because of random quality or getting HIV and other drugs because of sharing needles. (And marijuana's cost is entirely because of the black market - the stuff's a weed that grows anywhere you can grow tomatoes, so it ought to cost about $1/pound when it's in season.)
The DNS hierarchy has the annoying problem that There Can Be Only One root and only one of any given name, but once you've gotten beyond that annoyance, most other problems can easily be solved by hanging subdomains onto the existing net. So if Yet Another Competing Root company, like DNS-bozos.com, comes along and wants to sell their own TLDs or their own TLD-less names, they can set things up so that you can reference their customers as "example.tld1.dns-bozos.com" instead of example.TLD1, and "www.example.dns-bozos.com" instead of just www.example. And as long as their customers set up their DNS resolvers properly, it'll work for them also, and they'll just have to remember to print business cards and web pages that look for www.example.dns-bozos.com so other people can find them.
The big difference with these DNS bozos' business model is that they're getting $1000 up front per sucker instead of $6 or $25, so they might make some money before their customers start hunting them down like a mob of villagers with pitchforks when they find out that it's not really useful.
Fortunately, these bozos have at _least_ decided not to sell TLDs that conflict with ICANN TLDs (and while the article didn't say they won't conflict with 2-letter Country-Code TLDs or not, they may have enough clue not to do that.) But if you did try to sell those names, the trademark police would probably be all over your case, at least if you were selling them to anybody other than the current whatever.com holders or selling any names with trademark conflicts. As the other reply to the parent posting said, you'd be better off just running ad banners and offering to redirect to the real whatever.com.
Last time I seriously thought about moving to Canada I drew a decent number in the draft lottery and stopped worrying about it, but it would have been a much easier decision if I'd seen Vancouver instead of just The Frozen North, which (as an East-Coaster) were the parts of Canada I'd seen. Montreal's nice in the summer, as is Toronto, and Sudbury's ugly year-round just like the US industrial cities on the other side of the lakes, but they're all Too Cold in the winter, and they start winter too early. (I went to college in upstate New York - it's pretty much the same thing. Winter's beautiful there, but too much hassle.)
Vancouver's great, and it's on my list of cities I'd move to if I really wanted to get out of San Francisco Bay Area or out of the US. Weather's like Seattle, culture's interesting, coffee's good, and you can get out of town easily. And as far as "would I move to a different country with similar culture", I moved from New Jersey to San Francisco; moving to Vancouver wouldn't be as big a change. Moving to Toronto would be, because it'd be moving back to a culture with winter.
... and I can drink the local Cabernets while I'm here.
Ok, I moved from New Jersey to California more for the culture than the weather, but I've gotten used to it. I see frost every couple of years in Silicon Valley. If I *want* snow, I can drive or fly to it, and the main problem with driving to it is that Californians don't know how to drive in snow...
Rural Americans, particularly Southerners, tend to talk slowly and politely also, so it's no win there. As a friend of mine who grew up in Kentucky said "In farm country, if you're goin' to visit somebody, you're goin' to spend all day there anyway, so no point in using up everything you've got to say in the first five minutes". He also said "Sure, we knew we had an accent - we could tell we didn't sound like the folks on TV"...
Nobody goes there any more - too crowded
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Requiem for Usenet
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Usenet was really cool back in the 80s; I forget which year it was that I could no longer read the whole thing, but probably ~1984-1985. By the mid-90s, there was a lot less of the interesting technical discussions that used to be the mainstay of Usenet, though there was a bit worth reading before The September That Never Ended. Once in a while I'll check Google's DejaNews to read some technical threads, but it's pretty much all drowned.
Re:Decaffeination solvents removing flavor
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Drink Decaf and Die
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CO2 and the various water and steam methods do have the benefit of not leaving annoying chemicals in the coffee, as opposed to some of the early solvents. The other side of the problem, though, is what components of coffee flavoring get washed out along with the caffeine. I haven't been able to make any really good comparisons - too much variation among beans, roasting, etc., and not enough information on which "natural" decaffeination method most decaf beans use, though a lot of the "Swiss Water Process" stuff seems bland to me.
Robusta vs. Arabica = Bad Experiment Design
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Drink Decaf and Die
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Hey, this *is* the science section of Slashdot, isn't it? If using a robusta-based decaf instead of arabica-based makes a difference, then it's not a very good control group. You could argue that it's bad experiment design. Alternatively, you can view it as "an unexpected result", and try re-running the experiment with decent coffee for the decaf drinkers. That's probably a more reasonable interpretation - I assume they thought they were just testing for caffeine, and expected the decaf drinkers to be more healthy than the caffeine drinkers except maybe for effects like ulcers where the acidity and oiliness of the coffee is more important than the caffeine.
I found the results surprising and annoying - I drink lots of (good arabica) decaf because I like coffee but don't like being caffeinated all the time, have high blood pressure, normal-to-low LDLs, and low HDLs. I didn't expect coffee to be affecting my cholesterol, but having them tell me I ought to start drinking lots of caffeine to improve my heart risks is really _not_ what I want to hear:-)
Turkish Coffee vs. Americanos
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Drink Decaf and Die
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· Score: 2, Interesting
20 years ago I was travelling around the Middle East. Any time the bus would stop, within 2 minutes the driver would be hanging out with people drinking a little cup of half-mud local-style coffee. Any time any of the _passengers_ wanted coffee, anywhere, we'd get handed powdered-Nescafe, because they know that's what Americans drink (and in fact, for most of the people in the group**, that was true.) Arrrgh. I want coffee strong enough the spoon doesn't fall over when you stir it, but just weak enough that the spoon doesn't actually dissolve. After a couple of tries I was able to convince some places to give me coffee the way the locals drink it - much better... And then there was the place out in the wadi where Moses or Lawrence of Arabia had done something (I forget which; somewhere in southern Jordan anyway), where I had coffee with the local historical-monument-guards, which was much more civilized in spite of being in a tent in the middle of nowhere.
Jordan's version of Turkish coffee is a bit different from the Greek or Turkish stuff, just as most of the common Middle Eastern cuisine varies a bit from place to place, but it's pretty similar. But you're wrong about "Americano" being a joke - to us, it's not "the stupid way stupid Americans like their coffee watered down from the way normal people drink it", it's "coffee made the strength Americans like it at home, with enough water in it that you can drink a whole cup of hot liquid, instead of drinking an octuple-espresso which is what you'd get if you asked the Italians/French to make you 250ml of coffee." Yeah, ok, it's watered down, but it's no more diluted than drinking a latte - it's just diluted with water instead of milk.
**Yes, I was with tourists; my wife knew the guy leading the group, who'd been travelling to the Middle East on various business for about 60 years, and we wanted to go there with him while he was still in reasonable health, so there was us, a 40-year-old guy, and a bunch of old people who prefered powdered nescafe. Got to see all kinds of cool places in Jordan and Egypt as well as the usual modern tourist traps and the usual 4th-century pilgramage tourist traps.
Anti-Starbucks Snobbery is a SanFranciscoism
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Drink Decaf and Die
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Here in the San Francisco Bay Area it's popular to sneer at Starbucks, who sells a mass-market coffeehouse experience as opposed to the small quirky independent coffeehouse experience, just as we sneer at Borders big-chain bookstores that moved in to compete with 50 different independent bookstores. We don't sneer at Peet's, who are a local coffee chain that's been around a long time, but Peet started it here and they make really good coffee. And they're from Seattle, even though they learned coffee roasting from Peet, so it's a rival town.
But we've always had good coffee here in SF, and back when I lived in New Jersey there were enough Italians around that you could find espresso in almost any town, though average coffee wasn't that good.
Out in the MidWest and most of Flyover Country, Starbucks saved the locals from drinking tasteless brown water. They were a wonderful thing. Sure, there are exceptional areas, like New Orleans, and you'd get better coffee up north than down south, partly because of the weather, and partly because of cultural differences (Lutheran churches generally have better coffee than Methodists, who make much better coffee than Baptists:-) But before Starbucks, MacDonalds was the standard for dependable coffee in most of the US - anywhere else was likely to be even worse.
Los Angeles was another special case, in the bad direction. Instead of Midwestern wimpy brown water, it was Mexican-style coffee made with LA's bad-tasting water, so it was really atrocious. I've had similar coffee in Mexico, where they use darker roasted coffee than average boring US coffee but make it weaker, so it's about the same strength, kind of like making Americano except a lot weaker, but there's something about the flavor of LA's not-very-drinkable tap water that interacts badly with that style coffee. Blah! Starbucks was a real improvement when they started taking over LA and the Valley.
Sacramento California is about 2 hours east of San Francisco, and I occasionally had projects there either with the state government or more often with companies that had data centers there (it's outside the earthquake zone). For a number of years there seemed to be a conspiracy never to sell any coffee strong enough to wake up a government bureaucrat. The weakest of all was at the cafeteria in the office building where the state telecom bureaucrats worked - I'd guess it had less than half as much coffee per cup of light brown water as MacDonalds. There was one Lebanese restaurant that made espresso, but that was about it. Eventually Starbucks moved in, and if you went to the suburbs where the computer companies were, it became possible to get coffee.
Re:Starbucks has lots of coffee varietals
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Drink Decaf and Die
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Eh? Go into a Starbucks and look at the beans-for-sale board, and you'll see lots of different varietals, and then look at the what's-brewed-today board. They normally have two caffeine flavors, one stronger and one milder, and one decaf. Too often the decaf is just "House Blend", which isn't that bad but I'd usually prefer Sumatra. Usually one of the caf versions is a blend and one is a varietal. They'll often have Kenya AA beans or a New Guinea Peaberry, but it's not that often what they're brewing.
I prefer Peet's, where the coffees are usually *more* bitter than Starbucks, but both of them do brew a fairly strong dark coffee for their main market. Unfortunately neither of them does an East African decaf - I've found one local coffee place that roasts an Ethiopian decaf, and does surprisingly well given the damage decaffeinating does to milder coffees.
Decaffeination works by soaking the coffee beans in some solvent to dissolve the caffeine, but that's always going to dissolve other flavor components as well - it's not just the caffeine flavor that's lost. There are a bunch of different methods for solvents, temperatures, length of time, filtration, etc. to try to minimize the flavor loss and/or cost and make it easy to recover the caffeine for putting in sodas.
Robusta coffees used to be popular for this, partly because they're cheap and used to be the main caffeine coffees sold as well, and partly because they have more caffeine that can be used for the soda market, and partly because the early methods took out more flavor than the current methods.
Decaf beans are really common, though - most of the places I buy cups of coffee either grind their own decaf and regular from beans or else get them both preground in big bags. Occasionally I'll be at a small espresso place that has one grinder for the regular and gets the decaf ground out of a can, but it's not that common.
At least most US airlines these days brew their decaf as well as regular. I remember the days of powdered Sanka all too well.
Decaf isn't significantly more expensive
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Drink Decaf and Die
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I like good coffee, and don't like lots of caffeine, so I buy good decaf coffee beans, which tend to cost at most about 10% more than regular good beans, and that's assuming I'm paying retail at Peet's or equivalent high quality roasters. And if you make the coffee properly, it tastes very good, though some varieties have a bit less flavor, and I've only found one place that'll decaffeinate milder East African beans like Ethiopian. But every good roaster has a decent decaf Sumatra.
If you're using $10/pound coffee, $11/pound decaf isn't going to increase the cost of a cup significantly, especially because the places that use it are typically charging $1.50-$2/cup for the atmosphere and the extra 2 cents cost of materials doesn't matter. If you're using $3/pound coffee, and making it weaker, the difference is under a penny, which doesn't matter unless you're dealing with McDonald's kinds of volume.
The reason decaf coffee at non-coffee-centric restaurants tastes so nasty is that the restaurant starts with cheap beans (which does seem to make more difference for decaf) and leaves the pot sitting on the burner for longer because there's usually not as much demand for decaf as regular, after leaving the preground decaf sitting unrefrigerated in the can for longer than the regular to make sure it went stale first. So the regular is fresh cheap boring weak coffee, while the decaf is old stale burned cheap boring weak coffee.
The correct term for him is "asshole", and while "spammer" implies that, he's expanding the range of activities for which he's an asshole.
Saying he's a thug implies he actually would carry out his threats; he may just be talking like a thug without actually intending to do anything, or he may be the type to hire thugs to go beat people up for him. From a criminal prosecution standpoint, making threats is probably enough, though obviously carrying them out is a lot more prosecutable.
Yak is a SIP client, which is the main newer VOIP standard, an Internet-style followon to the telco-protocol-style H.323 which is the previous main open VOIP standard, and they've included video with it, which the standards support but most clients don't implement. Skype uses a bunch of proprietary stuff, implemented fairly well. The Yak website doesn't appear to tell you how to rip the client apart, reverse engineer it, use it with other service providers, etc., but you should be able to. (Doesn't mean you can't find that out - it may be off in their member discussion boards somewhere.) The cool thing about SIP is that rather than servers being closed, the standard includes server-to-server communications, so you can use one server as a proxy to connect to another to implement stuff or connect providers together. That doesn't mean that Yak's clients or servers are designed to connect over to other SIP providers' systems (like Pulver's Free World Dialup, the well-known SIP community), but maybe htey can. They look like they plan to make money by selling outbound and inbound connections to old-technology telcos, but it'd be interesting to see if they get enough clue to interconnect with other SIP providers to cut down on settlements cost
Slashdot Mirror
But yeah, I lose sunglasses all the time, mainly because I forget and wear them in from my car and then leave them. On the other hand, I'm happy with el-cheapo sunglasses, so it's not annoying unless my car runs out of sunglasses.
expected to understand
this */ haiku
(The classic comment was from the 6th Edition Unix kernel source, in a section that was doing context switches.) (Remember to pronounce "*" as "star".)
But just because you can do the finger mechanics doesn't mean you've got *musical* skillz - it just gives you more versatile ways to display your lack of talent, so the wrong notes you were trying to play at the wrong time are the ones you actually got.
But you can still have fun with it, and often, especially in folk music, the guitar is really there as a backup for your lousy singing voice and lame lyrics, so you don't have to be all that skilled to play backup. Woodie Guthrie once said that if you're using more than three chords in a song, you're just showing off anyway, but he was so good at writing the right lyrics for his audiences that he could get away with it.
But .Museum wasn't just another lame domain name - they're about the only one that actively experimented with naming structure beyond saying "We're only selling .foo domain names to genuine Foo customers." Go read about.museum/naming. They'll sell 2LDs for very specific names, like sanfrancisco-modern-art.museum, but they mainly have generic 2LDs maintained by the gTLD, and want to sell 3LDs like sfmoma.art.museum or moma.sanfrancisco.museum, so it's easy to find given types of museums.
There are technical innovations as well - if you look for a nonexistent name, like nonexistent.museum, you'll get an A record for the gTLD's web server. (It doesn't seem to be implemented consistently - there's an A record for nonexistent 2LDs, but nonexistent.art.museum doesn't get one, which is a bit strange.) This wildcarding does break a few assumptions about domain names - a common anti-spam technique is to make sure a domain name exists before accepting mail from it, to cut down on stuff like spammer@dffsdfdsafdsfdsafdsaf.com, but you forge send mail from spammer@spammer12345.museum and the spam-filter's DNS query will get a valid record for the domain. This isn't a big problem when it's only .museum and a few minor ccTLDs, but Verisign's Sitefinder scam did this for .com in ways that broke a lot of things (e.g. "telnet missspelled-example.com" is supposed to get a DNS failure, not get stuck trying to connect to the telnet port at sitefinder.verisign.com.)
You could also do paypal.c.om, but this isn't about Oman, it's about ICANN.
Running a ccTLD lets you do cool things, like assign email addresses directly under the ccTLD, like " x@ai " or even " $@ai ". Can't get any shorter than that, unless you're running an alternate root server and can somehow get email addresses under the dot. It's syntactically correct, though some mail clients or non-pedantically-correctly configured mail servers didn't like those addresses and would reject them. Anguilla was a small enough country, with about 10,000 people, that they could have also done email forwarding for everybody in the country, e.g. JohnDoe@ai, though I don't think that ever happened. It looks like the TLD server no longer accepts email directly.
Yes, legalizing drugs would lead to some medical problems, because some people have trouble handling them, but the free-market price of opiate addiction is cheaper than a cigarette habit, so addicts wouldn't have to resort to crime to fund it, and they'd be able to get pure enough drugs that fewer people would be overdosing because of random quality or getting HIV and other drugs because of sharing needles. (And marijuana's cost is entirely because of the black market - the stuff's a weed that grows anywhere you can grow tomatoes, so it ought to cost about $1/pound when it's in season.)
You can run a 68000 or 80386 emulator in each of the SPUs, or just run lots of native processes in parallel.
The big difference with these DNS bozos' business model is that they're getting $1000 up front per sucker instead of $6 or $25, so they might make some money before their customers start hunting them down like a mob of villagers with pitchforks when they find out that it's not really useful.
Fortunately, these bozos have at _least_ decided not to sell TLDs that conflict with ICANN TLDs (and while the article didn't say they won't conflict with 2-letter Country-Code TLDs or not, they may have enough clue not to do that.) But if you did try to sell those names, the trademark police would probably be all over your case, at least if you were selling them to anybody other than the current whatever.com holders or selling any names with trademark conflicts. As the other reply to the parent posting said, you'd be better off just running ad banners and offering to redirect to the real whatever.com.
Vancouver's great, and it's on my list of cities I'd move to if I really wanted to get out of San Francisco Bay Area or out of the US. Weather's like Seattle, culture's interesting, coffee's good, and you can get out of town easily. And as far as "would I move to a different country with similar culture", I moved from New Jersey to San Francisco; moving to Vancouver wouldn't be as big a change. Moving to Toronto would be, because it'd be moving back to a culture with winter.
Ok, I moved from New Jersey to California more for the culture than the weather, but I've gotten used to it. I see frost every couple of years in Silicon Valley. If I *want* snow, I can drive or fly to it, and the main problem with driving to it is that Californians don't know how to drive in snow...
I'm sorry, but your network has crashed due to bird flu.
Rural Americans, particularly Southerners, tend to talk slowly and politely also, so it's no win there. As a friend of mine who grew up in Kentucky said "In farm country, if you're goin' to visit somebody, you're goin' to spend all day there anyway, so no point in using up everything you've got to say in the first five minutes". He also said "Sure, we knew we had an accent - we could tell we didn't sound like the folks on TV"...
Usenet was really cool back in the 80s; I forget which year it was that I could no longer read the whole thing, but probably ~1984-1985. By the mid-90s, there was a lot less of the interesting technical discussions that used to be the mainstay of Usenet, though there was a bit worth reading before The September That Never Ended. Once in a while I'll check Google's DejaNews to read some technical threads, but it's pretty much all drowned.
CO2 and the various water and steam methods do have the benefit of not leaving annoying chemicals in the coffee, as opposed to some of the early solvents. The other side of the problem, though, is what components of coffee flavoring get washed out along with the caffeine. I haven't been able to make any really good comparisons - too much variation among beans, roasting, etc., and not enough information on which "natural" decaffeination method most decaf beans use, though a lot of the "Swiss Water Process" stuff seems bland to me.
I found the results surprising and annoying - I drink lots of (good arabica) decaf because I like coffee but don't like being caffeinated all the time, have high blood pressure, normal-to-low LDLs, and low HDLs. I didn't expect coffee to be affecting my cholesterol, but having them tell me I ought to start drinking lots of caffeine to improve my heart risks is really _not_ what I want to hear :-)
Jordan's version of Turkish coffee is a bit different from the Greek or Turkish stuff, just as most of the common Middle Eastern cuisine varies a bit from place to place, but it's pretty similar. But you're wrong about "Americano" being a joke - to us, it's not "the stupid way stupid Americans like their coffee watered down from the way normal people drink it", it's "coffee made the strength Americans like it at home, with enough water in it that you can drink a whole cup of hot liquid, instead of drinking an octuple-espresso which is what you'd get if you asked the Italians/French to make you 250ml of coffee." Yeah, ok, it's watered down, but it's no more diluted than drinking a latte - it's just diluted with water instead of milk.
**Yes, I was with tourists; my wife knew the guy leading the group, who'd been travelling to the Middle East on various business for about 60 years, and we wanted to go there with him while he was still in reasonable health, so there was us, a 40-year-old guy, and a bunch of old people who prefered powdered nescafe. Got to see all kinds of cool places in Jordan and Egypt as well as the usual modern tourist traps and the usual 4th-century pilgramage tourist traps.
But we've always had good coffee here in SF, and back when I lived in New Jersey there were enough Italians around that you could find espresso in almost any town, though average coffee wasn't that good.
Out in the MidWest and most of Flyover Country, Starbucks saved the locals from drinking tasteless brown water. They were a wonderful thing. Sure, there are exceptional areas, like New Orleans, and you'd get better coffee up north than down south, partly because of the weather, and partly because of cultural differences (Lutheran churches generally have better coffee than Methodists, who make much better coffee than Baptists :-) But before Starbucks, MacDonalds was the standard for dependable coffee in most of the US - anywhere else was likely to be even worse.
Los Angeles was another special case, in the bad direction. Instead of Midwestern wimpy brown water, it was Mexican-style coffee made with LA's bad-tasting water, so it was really atrocious. I've had similar coffee in Mexico, where they use darker roasted coffee than average boring US coffee but make it weaker, so it's about the same strength, kind of like making Americano except a lot weaker, but there's something about the flavor of LA's not-very-drinkable tap water that interacts badly with that style coffee. Blah! Starbucks was a real improvement when they started taking over LA and the Valley.
Sacramento California is about 2 hours east of San Francisco, and I occasionally had projects there either with the state government or more often with companies that had data centers there (it's outside the earthquake zone). For a number of years there seemed to be a conspiracy never to sell any coffee strong enough to wake up a government bureaucrat. The weakest of all was at the cafeteria in the office building where the state telecom bureaucrats worked - I'd guess it had less than half as much coffee per cup of light brown water as MacDonalds. There was one Lebanese restaurant that made espresso, but that was about it. Eventually Starbucks moved in, and if you went to the suburbs where the computer companies were, it became possible to get coffee.
I prefer Peet's, where the coffees are usually *more* bitter than Starbucks, but both of them do brew a fairly strong dark coffee for their main market. Unfortunately neither of them does an East African decaf - I've found one local coffee place that roasts an Ethiopian decaf, and does surprisingly well given the damage decaffeinating does to milder coffees.
Robusta coffees used to be popular for this, partly because they're cheap and used to be the main caffeine coffees sold as well, and partly because they have more caffeine that can be used for the soda market, and partly because the early methods took out more flavor than the current methods.
Decaf beans are really common, though - most of the places I buy cups of coffee either grind their own decaf and regular from beans or else get them both preground in big bags. Occasionally I'll be at a small espresso place that has one grinder for the regular and gets the decaf ground out of a can, but it's not that common.
At least most US airlines these days brew their decaf as well as regular. I remember the days of powdered Sanka all too well.
If you're using $10/pound coffee, $11/pound decaf isn't going to increase the cost of a cup significantly, especially because the places that use it are typically charging $1.50-$2/cup for the atmosphere and the extra 2 cents cost of materials doesn't matter. If you're using $3/pound coffee, and making it weaker, the difference is under a penny, which doesn't matter unless you're dealing with McDonald's kinds of volume.
The reason decaf coffee at non-coffee-centric restaurants tastes so nasty is that the restaurant starts with cheap beans (which does seem to make more difference for decaf) and leaves the pot sitting on the burner for longer because there's usually not as much demand for decaf as regular, after leaving the preground decaf sitting unrefrigerated in the can for longer than the regular to make sure it went stale first. So the regular is fresh cheap boring weak coffee, while the decaf is old stale burned cheap boring weak coffee.
Saying he's a thug implies he actually would carry out his threats; he may just be talking like a thug without actually intending to do anything, or he may be the type to hire thugs to go beat people up for him. From a criminal prosecution standpoint, making threats is probably enough, though obviously carrying them out is a lot more prosecutable.
Yak is a SIP client, which is the main newer VOIP standard, an Internet-style followon to the telco-protocol-style H.323 which is the previous main open VOIP standard, and they've included video with it, which the standards support but most clients don't implement. Skype uses a bunch of proprietary stuff, implemented fairly well. The Yak website doesn't appear to tell you how to rip the client apart, reverse engineer it, use it with other service providers, etc., but you should be able to. (Doesn't mean you can't find that out - it may be off in their member discussion boards somewhere.) The cool thing about SIP is that rather than servers being closed, the standard includes server-to-server communications, so you can use one server as a proxy to connect to another to implement stuff or connect providers together. That doesn't mean that Yak's clients or servers are designed to connect over to other SIP providers' systems (like Pulver's Free World Dialup, the well-known SIP community), but maybe htey can. They look like they plan to make money by selling outbound and inbound connections to old-technology telcos, but it'd be interesting to see if they get enough clue to interconnect with other SIP providers to cut down on settlements cost