Not just in California. In many major cities one is struggling at the $50k/year mark. When housing and basic transportation to/from work costs 2/3rds of your take-home that doesn't leave a lot of room for things like food, clothing, and basic utilities. Portland, Seattle, Denver, Minneapolis, Boston, NYC. You have to be making closer to $100k before things start getting "comfortable" in these cities.

Most VoIP providers charge a per-text fee for sending text messages via SIP. That's because the gateways to the major cell carriers charge for each text message (granted, it's usually fractions of a penny, but the end result is that the end user gets charged a penny-per-text). On top of that, many of the low-end VoIP end terminals (ie. phones) don't support anything other than SIP (or MGCP), and at that an even smaller subset handle texting.

My SIP provider literally just started handling text messages over SIP sometime early this year, and yes, it costs a couple of bucks more to get the plan. I personally don't care (I only have the SIP carrier in the first place for business reasons), but as I understand it this is common among the "dirt cheap" SIP providers like mine.

> Unless I happen to be disconnected from the blockchain-handling system, in which case I'd be stuck with the last-known state of property ownership.

That's highly unlikely, as that could be a hole to exploit. It's more likely the content won't play at all.

I have a $150 Dell Chromebook 15 and Crostini runs in dev mode just fine, so I suspect it's just a matter of time until that build makes it into beta.

It's more expensive. Do you have any idea HOW expensive? In some cases, burying costs 10x the cost of hanging on poles. Plus, you can't imagine the headaches involved when you have to cross a highway.

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Disclaimer: feedle works for one of the aformentioned bastards

Given that's about as many command line steps required to set up a mirror on AWS, what's the point?

At the point you are treating Dropbox as a hostile agent, why are you even bothering? There's quite literally hundreds of options for doing the same thing Dropbox does, from Google Drive to setting up your own instance of ownCloud.

See, I like Anchorage. Then, of course, most of my life has been spent in the big cities of the West Coast (from San Diego to Seattle)... so maybe I'm a poor judge of not-hell-holes.

All that said: find me a $50k a year job in Juneau and I'm on the next flight.

I've lived in a number of cities where most of these utilities are provided by the municipality. Not little places, either (although Anaheim, as an example, was one of them). Seattle provides electric, sewer, water, and garbage to residences, as a big-city example. Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, a municipal entity, is one of the largest electric grids in the West, their tendrils reaching all across the state of California and parts of Nevada/Arizona gathering water and power for the City of Los Angeles.

So, your argument is invalid.

I've been there. No competent IT person in their right mind would move up there. It's considerably north enough from Anchorage (about 50 miles) that your commute would suck (if you want to live somewhere real), and the wrong mix of "rural" to appease the people who want to live in the middle of nowhere, and .. Palmer is a shithole anyway.

There's always one asshole that can't help but ruin a decent joke.

Well, for starters, movie nerds are still "nerds". And in many ways, MoviePass is "stuff that matters" in the sense that it has caused disruption to the movie theater inudstry (see: AMC's grumblings about this).

It's a bit more than "just a way of buying tickets." If you've been paying attention, it's essentially started as an "unlimited" movie service like Netflix, but the difference is you watch movies in meatspace. It was a novel idea, it was ridiculous dot.com style business modeling, and it dealt with something a lot of nerds are passionate about (movies). So, yes, it fits on Slashdot.

> ORCL Mkt cap 189.87B
> GOOG Mkt cap 726.29B

Nah, I think Google is actually pretty happy they didn't buy Sun.

And the amount of client-side Java code being replaced by HTML5 is staggering. Java is considered obsolete, and is being replaced just about everywhere it exists.

I work in the cable industry. The amount of set-top box code that's being refactored away from Java is in, and of itself, mind blowing.

... for TSA luggage locks. I can pick up a set of luggage lock keys from Alibaba for $5. Sure feel like my luggage is secure knowing any joker can get the key to open my luggage, even if the TSA agent himself doesn't steal things from it.

"Trim bushes" sounds like a euphemism in this context...