Why You Shouldn’t Share Your Internet Connection With Neighbors
Thursday, December 29th, 2011
In the linked article, Kim Komando gives several good reasons for not sharing your wireless internet connection with neighbors. An important one being that if the neighbor does anything illegal, the police arrest you and confiscate your computer equipment. (On the other hand, if you’re the one doing illegal stuff over the internet, I’ve actually heard people suggest that it’s a good idea to leave your wireless router unsecured—so there’s reasonable doubt concerning who performed the crime.)
Link: http://www.komando.com/…
The linked article gives a (slightly) technical history of the Ethernet protocol, which these days is almost ubiquitous for wired LANs. It also explains how Ethernet works compared to other networking strategies. Somehow, fast transfer speeds arise out of seemingly total chaos. If you’re technically inclined, I think you’ll enjoy reading this article.
Cephalopods (squid, octopuses, and cuttlefish) are very, very good at camouflaging themselves—it’s their primary method of protection from predators. But just how good is shown in the linked video, where an octopus is hiding. The word “unbelievable” is appropriate.
Some time ago, I had a computer program that would occasionally glitch and set its location to be somewhere off the screen. The program would run fine and would show up on the taskbar, but I couldn’t access it with my mouse because it was outside the visible area of the Windows desktop. Eventually I discovered the technique described in the linked article. This is a command that’s been around for a long time but isn’t obvious to the casual user, especially the part about using the arrow keys to perform the movement.
One of the problems with alternative energy sources such as wind and solar is their intermittent nature. Sometimes the wind is blowing and sometimes it isn’t. And the sun goes down every night. This is one of the reasons why fossil fuel plants are still a mainstay for any major power utility.
There’s just something magical about buying a product for 99¢. And in the digital world, where the cost of producing another copy is essentially zero, you can make serious money from a quality item that’s priced at 99¢. Steve Jobs figured this out, and it’s part of what made the iTunes Store so popular. Later, when the music labels wanted to raise the price slightly on newer songs, he fought them tooth and nail, saying that even a small price increase would ruin things. The labels won that battle, but that doesn’t have to be the case with self-published books on Amazon. The profit on a 99¢ book is 35¢, and it really adds up if you sell a few hundred thousand copies. The linked article is a bit old, but it reinforces the benefits of this sales model where you sell many, many digital copies of an item for a low price. The author of the article, for instance, saw his sales of 
It’s a common belief: if you raise prices then income will also increase. But this isn’t always true. Earlier this year, 
Here at the Chad’s News network command center, we were the surprised recipient of an Amazon Kindle Fire—Amazon’s entry into the tablet market. After using it for a few weeks and reading some of the reviews, here are some comments:
October 31st, 2011 was the official day that the human population reached 7 billion. The last 2 billion of that happened in less than 25 years, and we’re on track to hit 8 billion in the next 15 years or so.
Here’s a list of tech gadgets that you probably should NOT purchase during the Christmas season, many of them because smartphones and tablets already have the gadget’s functionality. The linked article does allow for exceptions, but generally recommends against purchasing these types of items:
