I don't want a "desktop environment." I just want a window manager. I still use twm because it does everything that I need and then gets out of the way.

I have found a few minor things I don't like about it, but I've written patches to correct them. (And I submitted them, but I doubt that much of anything will be accepted at this point.)

Yes. I made a point of writing my original post without including a value judgement on that point.

There's a big difference between a cop deciding that someone looks suspicious because he's driving in a neighborhood where the residents don't match his skin color and a police officer deciding someone is suspicious because it looked like they were doing a drug deal in a parking lot but he didn't see exactly what was exchanged. I expect if you were doing a civilian ride-along at the time, there's a wide range of possibilities, some of which you would agree with, and some of which you wouldn't.

My point is that a traffic stop is a tool that is widely used in law enforcement. Tools can be used for good or bad, but aren't necessarily good or bad themselves. Driverless cars remove that tool. In some cases this is good. In others, police will need to find new ways of dealing with old problems.

It's not just about the money. Traffic stops are a major tool that police use in law enforcement. If they think someone is suspicious, they look for a traffic violation as an excuse to pull them over and investigate. Likewise, normal traffic stops give officers a chance to notice suspicious activity.

Someone should dig up the numbers for the percentage of arrests that begin with a traffic stop.

I'll Google that for me:

http://www.nhtsa.gov/About+NHT...

While there may not be solid data nationally, at least in this one area, traffic stops account for about a third of all arrests.

I think the big surprise here is that this doesn't happen more often.

Consider how many corporations, universities, and such have huge PC deployments with automated updates. I've seen updates that drop all the PCs off the network, but I've never seen one where everything is wiped.

I'm also surprised that I haven't heard of malware that accidentally wiped a network of 100K or more machines when someone sent the wrong command.

Or maybe the news here is that it was in a more open environment where people hear about it. If a publicly traded company wiped a thousand PCs at its headquarters, you bet they would try to keep it quiet.

That doesn't quite do it. FLAC is great for the individual tracks, but there is also information about inter-track gaps. If you lose that, playing the album won't sound right if any of the tracks are supposed to flow into the next one. This isn't an issue for probably 90% of the CDs out there, but for the remaining ones, it's important to get them to play correctly.

I've noticed the same problem when ripping old vinyl albums and playing them on an MP3 player. When the tracks used to flow, there's now a gap, and it can be really annoying.

If you look around, there has been a fantastic fan effort to create the Despecialized Editions that are as close to the original theatrical runs as possible for the original trilogy. They've mixed in the HD sources for the current releases with older footage to undo all the changes. It's pretty amazing.

Thanks! I see there's also one for Chrome:

https://chrome.google.com/webs...

I just hope these plugins are trustworthy.

How about a browser plug-in that will stop me from using https if the site is vulnerable? The last thing I want to do is expose my information by passing it through a vulnerable web server. It should be rather easy for a plugin to send a mal-formed heartbeat ping before sending any data to find out if the server is vulnerable, and then block the connection if it is.

Thanks for OpenRC. I *love* how it works on my Gentoo system. The ability to load custom variables for any script with /etc/conf.d files is wonderful.

I've gone a bit crazy with my /etc/conf.d/net, automatically setting up a ssh tunnel home if it sees that it's on an outside network (and trying several methods to get the tunnel working). If it's on ethernet, it switches the WiFi to being an access point. Lots of fun. I just wish the preup()/postup() functions were part of all the init scripts, not just the net script.

I also make use of /lib/dhcpcd-hooks to clean things up if the local network is unfriendly. If the provided DNS server mangles entries for non-existent domains, and if it doesn't block Google, it switches over transparently in my local script.

The paradigm of letting the user modify the behavior through regular shell scripts is extremely powerful. Thanks for keeping it alive.

I looked up the talk in question, and here's the video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

If you're really interested in urban planning and parking regulations, watch the whole thing, but otherwise the link should go right to where he talks about San Francisco's parking program.

I thought San Francisco already had dynamic parking prices to try to use market forces to keep parking available. They have devices to monitor parking utilization. The goal is to typically have one on-street parking spot open per block; somewhere around 85% utilization. If the block is consistently above that, the price increases. If it's below, the price lowers. They adjust the prices by $.25 every month.

From the talk on this that I saw, they generally improved the availability of parking though the dynamic pricing. Employees who park every day would find the cheaper blocks to park on, leaving the busier blocks open for customers.

Maybe the program isn't working as well as they claimed. Maybe the program isn't covering enough of the city, and the approach in the article is of more use in other parts.

This monitors the behavior of web sites, not the function. So if there's a non-advertising site that just puts out tracking bugs, it will get blocked. If there's an advertising site that doesn't send tracking cookies, it won't be blocked. There's no blacklist--it's all based on observed behavior.

My Atari 800 died a few years back. Something died in the power system. I thought it was a bad power supply (all the peripherals used the same supplies), so I swapped some around. It turns out it blew some internal fuse in each supply that I attached to it. I ended up buying a replacement on eBay, but I've since given up on it (too many other things taking up my time for the old games). I'll use an emulator the next time I want to use it.

For my state taxes in Massachusetts, it's trivial to do web file through the state's web site. Once my federal taxes are done, it takes just a few minutes to enter all the numbers and I'm all set. At least my state allows me to file electronically for free.

Yup, that's what I've used for the past three or four years. I just print directly from the spreadsheet, and it always works fine. I usually have to file a few extra forms, and I can download the PDFs from the IRS site. The PDFs are nice in that they let you fill in the data and then print them.

I considered buying software this year because it was getting complicated with figuring out accounting for rental property, but I had fun figuring it out myself.

I've set up a separate spreadsheet where I track all my expenses. One is for charitable giving, with a pivot table that gives a total by year. I have one for miles driven for charity, and the pivot table then gets added as an entry on the giving sheet, so I just have one number to copy to Schedule A.

I did the same for all my rental property expenses, adding a column for which line on Schedule E the expense goes on. The pivot table gives me the exact numbers to copy to the schedule.

Now for future years, it's all easy as long as I keep filling in the data every time we save a receipt. (I've considered scanning all the receipts and adding the images to cells in the spreadsheet, but that's too much work.)

Why in the world they don't let you submit PDFs online to them instead of mailing them on paper (only to be scanned back to electronic form), I have no idea other than lobbying from the tax preparation industry.