Erik

Resolved.

You guys are confused it seems like to me. I know it's a difficult topic to handle in one sitting but if you don't think a "class" of service ever existed you never read anything about the Netflix shake down by Comcast. It doesn't matter how big of a package you buy from your ISP to download movies from Netflix if Netflix is throttled on the upstream your download speeds go in the toilet. Personally I'm going to wait until I can read the reclassification by the FCC to draw any conclusions. The two safety valves we now have are congress and the courts where before we had none because it was in private business hands. From what's said this is just a reclassification of the service not the providers.

There's links to outside journalism reporting on the case starting with Dave's post on February 4, 2015. There's plenty of information on this you should read. Secondly whatever the FCC does will be challenged in a court of law by the cable companies. So by the time this is done it will be combed through with a fine toothed comb. Seems like good steps in the right direction.

I certainly have never blocked your content or anyone else's (that wasn't being a troll) for that matter. However this is typical politician rhetoric from a position that is unfounded without fact or references. The real story is nobody will know what the FCC rules will look until they are written and reviewed. The FCC does have legal standing under Title II and the expansion to include the internet based on the regulations they wish to adopt seem a reasonable solution. Everything like this is flawed to some extent but this appears at face value to be a win for the people not big business. Whatever the case it's certainly better than letting congress get a hold of it and attaching tons of pork to it for things like bridges from Florida to Africa. Thanks for your "last words" though. PS next time you take personal shots at me don't be so vague, it's annoying.

Sounds a lot like touch-buddy.com which is a free application on a site we run. I'd suggest contacting Snacko over there via the boards or PM and see if he can help. If nothing else Touch-Buddy could do what you're looking for maybe. Good luck.

Can you pass me your IP at home in PM and let me know if it's static or not? Thank you.

LEMONS At a local bar in downtown Bemidji, MN, the owner was so sure that his bartender was the strongest man around, that he offered a standing $1000 bet. The bartender would squeeze a lemon until all the juice ran into a glass, and then hand the lemon to the patron. Anyone who could squeeze two more drops of juice out of it would win the money. Many people had tried over the years: weightlifters, longshoremen, etc., but nobody had ever been able to do it. One day, this scrawny little fellow came into the bar, wearing thick glasses and a polyester suit. He sat down, ordered a glass of draft, & started looking around the bar. After reading the sign on the wall about the lemon challenge, he said in a small voice: "I was just reading your sign, and I'd like to try the bet." After the laughter had died down, the bartender said: "Ok..." He grabbed a lemon and squeezed the heck out of it. Then he handed the wrinkled remains of the rind to the little fellow. But the Crowd's laughter turned to total silence… as the man clenched his little fist around the lemon, and six drops fell into the glass. As the crowd cheered, the bartender paid the guy his $1000, and then asked the little man: "Do you mind if I ask what you do for a living? Are you a lumberjack, a weight-lifter, or what?" The little fellow quietly replied: "I work for the IRS." ~ Everyone knows this is so painfully true. You know we left a country for being over taxed what the heck happened to us? Government is big business and we're feeding the machine. If this sounds like the Matrix you might think about taking the blue pill. Enjoy.

For the next 24 days we will be running a count down timer on all our pages to show you when the most important vote the FCC will ever make is made. If you haven't heard yet, the cable giants want to charge customers who stream movies, videos, play games, video chat, (basically everything the internet is great at) for faster speeds thereby undermining everything the internet stands for. This means not only do you pay for the speed of service you want at home but you will then have the choice of class of service which will cost more money. We need you to get involved. Click the link on the clock and fill out simple information like your name and the app will automatically send your elected officials an email on your behalf. You can read the letter or decide to contact them on your own, but this is something that we can't lose. If we do lose what we know as the open and free internet today will be forever changed. Don't let big business win! Fight with us to defend net neutrality and all it stands for. If you need to know more watch this video and then click the link in the clock above. Do it today we're counting on each of you.

Reconstruction is never easy. If I can help I'll be happy to.

First there was this gun... It was developed by General Electric, the "We bring good things to life" people. It's one of the modern-day Gatling guns. It shoots very big bullets... It shoots them very quickly... Someone said, "Let's put it in an airplane." Someone else said, "Better still, let's build an airplane around it." So they did. And "they" were the Fairchild Republic airplane people. And they had done such a good job with an airplane they developed back in WWII .....called the P-47 Thunderbolt! They decided to call it the A10 Thunderbolt. They made it so it was very good at flying low and slow and shooting things with that fabulous gun. But since it did fly low and slow, they made it bulletproof, or almost so. A lot of bad guys have found you can shoot an A10 with anything from a pistol to a 23mm Soviet cannon and it just keeps on flying and shooting. When they got through, it looked like this. It's not sleek and sexy like an F18 or the stealthy Raptors and such, but I think it's such a great airplane because it does what it does better than any other plane in the world. It kills tanks. Not only tanks, as Sadam Hussein's boys found out to their horror, but armored personnel carriers, radar stations, locomotives, bunkers, fuel depots... just about anything the bad guys thought was bulletproof turned out to be easy pickings for this beast. See those engines. One of them alone will fly this plane. The pilot sits in a very thick titanium alloy "bathtub." That's typical of the design. They were smart enough to make every part the same whether mounted on the left side or right side of the plane, like landing gear, for instance. Because the engines are mounted so high (away from ground debris) and the landing gear uses such low pressure tires, it can operate from a damaged airport, interstate highway, plowed field, or dirt road. Everything is redundant. They have two of almost everything. Sometimes they have three of something. Like flight controls, there's triple redundancy of those, and even if there is a total failure of the double hydraulic system, there is a set of manual flying controls. Capt. Kim Campbell sustained this damage over Bagdad and flew for another hour before returning to base. But, back to that gun. It's so hard to grasp just how powerful it is. This is the closest I could find to showing you just what this cartridge is all about. What the guy is holding is NOT the 30mm round, but a"little" 50 Browning machine gun roundand the 20mm cannon round which has been around for a long time. The 30mm is MUCH bigger. Down at the bottom are the .50 BMG and 20x102 Vulcan the fellow was holding. At the bottom right is the bad boy we're discussing. Let's get some perspective here: The .223 Rem (M16 rifle round) is fast. It shoots a 55 or so grain bullet at about 3300 feet/sec, give or take. It's the fastest of all those rounds shown (except one). When you move up to the ..30 caliber rounds, the bullets jump up in weight to 160-200 grains. Speeds run from about 2600 to 3000 fps or so. The .338 Lapua is the king of the sniper rifles these days and shoots a 350 grain bullet at 2800 fps or so. They kill bad guys at over a mile with that one. The 50 BMG is really big. Mike Beasley has one on his desk. Everyone who picks it up thinks it's some sort of fake, unless they know big ammo. It's really huge with a bullet that weighs 750 grains and goes as fast the Lapua. I don't have data on the Vulcan, but hang on to your hat. The bullet for the 30x173 Avenger has an aluminum jacket around a spent uranium core and weighs 6560 grains (yes, over 100 times as heavy as the M16 bullet, and flies through the air at 3500 fps (which is faster than the M16 as well). The gun shoots at a rate of 4200 rounds per minute, Yes, four thousand. Pilots typically shoot either one- or two-second burst which set loose 70 to 150 rounds. The system is optimized for shooting at 4,000 feet. OK, the best for last. You've got a pretty good idea of how big that cartridge is, but I'll bet you're like me and you don't fully appreciate how big the GA GAU-8 Avenger really is. Take a look. Each of those seven barrels is 112" long. That's almost ten feet. The entire gun is 19-1/2 feet long. Think how impressive it would look set up in your living room. Oh, by the way, it doesn't eject the empty shells but runs them back into the storage drum. There's just so dang many flying out, they felt it might damage the aircraft. Oh yeah, I forgot, they can hang those bomb and rocket things on 'em too, just in case. After all, it is an "airplane"! Like I said, this is a beautiful design. I'm glad it's ours.

All maintenance complete. Thank you.

All of our machines will be going down for a reboot sometime soon. The downtime should be minimal. The reboot is necessary to update a core component in our operating systems. Thanks.

This is a known issue which I'm hoping will be resolved in the newest software release. When you bounce between the desktop and mobile access the OS system thinks it's a security breach and automatically blocks your IP. To avoid this log out of your account before changing to your mobile and visa versa. I have cleared your IP and it should be resolved. If you have any other problems let me know. I apologize for this it's annoying and I thought removing the mobile skin would help but apparently it doesn't. You can always email directly should this happen again my name at combatace dot com.

Thanks for your input. I'll make the appropriate adjustments. Cheers!

Is there anyone in support of keeping these forums and files here?

A nice look back at the first aircraft with the callsign Air Force One, its history, and its final home. I hope you enjoy this as much as I did.

99.9% of the time it's not going to be about this site or the bandwidth. We're connected to some of the best upstream available. Granted we don't have servers in every region of the globe like facebook or twitter but we could if the funds were there to do it. Back to the issue at hand downloading from us usually won't be how well we can upload the data and on which route but more usually how well you can receive the data. The end point (ISP customers) are far more likely to have issues than our single point of origination, if that makes sense. So steps you can do to help me before anyone makes a blanket your site is slow (which I take personally) is to do the very basics of diagnosing the issue before posting. Provide me with the following. 1) A ping test with at least 40 constant pings. 2) A traceroute to our server from your machine. 3) A speedtest from your machine showing your speeds. I'm happy to work with anyone to resolve an issue and especially if it's on our end because if it's us everyone is being affected not just single members (which is why it's usually not us). Also keep in mind if you're not on a subscription plan your speeds from us will be slower, that's just one of the perks. Thanks for keeping me posted. Erik

JANUARY 7, 2015 --UPDATE-- Congress is counting on us "the general public" to be uninformed and ignorant to what's going on so they can slide this by us just like everything they do. Congress believes ruling a nation is NOT for the "common people" and we're too stupid to know what's happening or even care. This has to stop and we need to all rally behind our belief of free and unhindered access to the internet. This may well be the biggest battle of our generation and they are trying to sweep it under the rug with procedure and laws to regulate something that's not theirs so they can fill their pockets with our money. End this now. Congress is trying to kill all our hard to keep net neutrality! We need to speak up the time is now. Every second counts. Click here to tell Congress not to kill net neutrality. We made this happen: We got word that the FCC is planning THE vote on new net neutrality rules on February 23rd. This is the one we’ve been waiting for. We’ve got less than two months before the decision. Congress wants to negate everything we did: Just when we have victory in sight, Congress is trying to pass a shady law called “Title X” that would undermine all the amazing work we’ve done. Basically it would pre-empt the FCC’s rule and prevent us from getting real net neutrality. Instead, we’d have a weak law in Congress that leaves the door wide open for monopolies like Comcast to abuse their power. We need to act fast to show Congress that we see through the lies. We know they’re taking huge campaign contributions from companies like Comcast and we won’t be fooled. Your signature is needed! Click here to sign our urgent petition to Congress demanding they drop “Title X” and keep the Internet free. There’s such overwhelming public support for the free and open Internet it shouldn’t be hard to defeat this, but we need to move fast. Please sign and share the petition widely. I encourage everyone to read up on this. Don't take my word for any of this but it is happening, it is real, and it affects the entire free thinking world. We can't stand by and let these ancient thinkers who were around when Morse code was still being used and a German UBoat with an Enigma Machine was high tech tell the world how the biggest thing in the 21st century needs to be ran. Buried somewhere in your news is how they plan to win. You'll find out about it when it's too late.

Nothing yet. I had to pull the mobile version because the signup process on mobile was being exploited. The new stuff is in beta 4 so they should have a release candidate soon. Wish I had better news. I'll keep you posted.

Only a few things wrong with that story; facts, images, and sources. Beyond that believe what you want. IMHO

This is the best time of year where we each spend time with our families and loved ones to remember a year gone bye. Our holiday wish for each of you is that in the joy of the festive lights and wonderful food you take the time to remember the people that mean so much to you. Fill your heart and the hearts of other's with the joy of the season and remember the true meaning of the holiday. Give thanks to those who have fought for and defend our freedoms today. Remember what has been given so we may enjoy our loved ones and never take our great blessings for granted. Be nice to each other out there and we hope for each a warm, safe, and memorable holiday. Season's Blessings.

You shouldn't even have to do that. Just post the URL.

I think it's a tremendous review opportunity. *just thinking outloud*

The preliminary reports all point to the North Korea's newest weapon the high stealth two man submarine which was located in Lake Michigan about an hour ago. The Whitehouse is scheduled to brief the nation in about 20 minutes.

Data center operations reported a total loss of connectivity affecting all their customers which has been restored. Downtime just over 2 hours. Our apologies for the loss of service it was beyond our control.