Wiring in a solar array to your household wiring is the work of professionals the same way wiring in a kettle is. Once it's common we will solve it the same way, you create a standard plug in a suitable location and just plug it in. The same thing is happening with roof lighting circuits. You used to have to get an electrician to wire each light in, now he puts a standard appliance socket near the hole in the roof and the light plugs in like any other appliance, now anyone can fit or change it.

5000 watts in a complete non-issue. In my country standard household circuits are 20 amps or 4800 watts. Often a 20 amp three phase circuit can be found in a house, that's 7200 watts. All these come with standard plugs that anyone can connect without qualifications.

He does have a problem with a bad password, there are some fairly clever javascript attacks that target exactly this situation, remote admin disabled and all.

The web browser is tricked to connect to a default router address (like 10.0.0.1) with a default login (admin/password1) and changes whatever settings it wants, perhaps just opening remote administration. Because the connection to the router comes from the local PC this isn't "remote" administration. There are few enough possible combinations that you can brute force the default login really easily and enough people with default set ups to make it very worth while.

If Verizon has all of their customers with the same router, the same network setup and the same password... it would be negligent not to do everything they could to help protect their customers.

Yes. When times are good you don't need welfare.

Now imagine you badly break your hand sailing. Your medical insurer points out a clause you didn't see before exempting claims from non-standard sports activities or some such. The initial medical costs take your savings and force you to sell your car. No longer able to work you sell the awesome condo and move into a small house in the suburbs, you are trying to rebuild your career but become really depressed. Due to your moodiness and the negative change in lifestyle your fiancée leaves you. No longer able drive and living so far out your social life takes a nose dive, you end up cut off from most of your friends and support network. You are now one of life's losers.

The above scenario is just a general pattern and there are lots of outs, most require someone external to inject a large amount of funds. The central concept though is that when something bad happens you are relying on a medical insurer to fix it all for you, an insurer who's company model requires them where possible to avoid doing just that. Having a government based safety net that doesn't have that motivation means you get fixed, it may take a few months but it doesn't end your life.

Also note that living in a condo with a good career means you and everyone around you is in this lucky situation. Someone who is failed by the system will fall out of that circle. Just because you and your friends haven't needed welfare doesn't mean you won't in the future.

The list of requirements sounds really fancy and uses big words but it's actually very simple.

* Agreement (Offer and Acceptance)
One party offers and the other party accepts. As they both signed this one is simple.

* Consideration
This is code word for money. Both parties must get something out of the deal, if only one party benefits it's a gift not a contract. In this instance Zuckerberg got paid and the other guy got ownership.

* Legal purpose
* Legality of form
* Intention to create legal relations
All of these are broadly the same thing, both parties must have intended it to be a contract. In this example the document has contract written across the top, check.

* Capacity to contract
* Consent to contract
* Vitiating factors: Mistates, undue influence, misrepresentation, duress
This are all unusual circumstance clauses. If you are mentally disabled, five years old or currently have a blowtorch being applied to your testicles you can't sign a valid contract. It doesn't seem like any of these apply or are being cited.

In general common sense goes a long way with contracts. If you intend to make a contract, both agree and both benefit you have a contract.

I am not a lawyer but have studied some law at a university level, primarily contracts. If you take legal advice from people on slashdot even if they claim to be a lawyer you are an idiot.

The discussion isn't about discarding the data, rather pushing it back to slower and cheaper storage with less frequent backup.

You could implement this like a cache. The front server interacts with the clients and holds 1TB of data, the back server(s) hold 10TB of data. You interact with the front server. When you read a file if the server has it you receive it quickly. If the server doesn't you get a 'cache miss', the server pulls it from the back store, caches it and provides it but takes 30 seconds to do so. Modified data is routinely pushed back to the back server with dirty flags etc. like most other caches.

From a users perspective the 30 second delay is annoying but they wouldn't notice if it only happened once a week. Keeping the incident rate of that down is where stats like the 90% come in handy.

Back to looking at your probability statistics. We don't have equal interest, that's what the entire article is about. Having 35% of this data needed again is fine, a quick reflection on standard work practices would suggest that these would be spread through time.

That very recent United States policy is very pretty, but it only holds true until they change their mind. If someone invaded the continental United States, destroyed critical infrastructure and occupied US lands it would change very very quickly.

The simple fact is that there has never been a war between two nuclear states. There has never been an invasion of a nuclear state.

If your country was being routinely threatened with invasion and bombing why wouldn't you try and build a nuclear deterrence.

But the twist is you don't have to have the toolbar installed in Firefox.

Having the toolbar installed in IE (even disabled) will result in it miraculously appearing in Firefox.

It's a little bit like an old school virus. Once you let it into one of your executables it takes it as permission to jump into them all.

Sadly no.

It turns out even botnetters haven't yet figured out a good use for Mozilla's Ubiquity extension.

A bigger number on the same device probably means you have a better signal. A 'two' on one device could be equivalent to a 'five' on another or a 'one' on a third. There is no standard that is used across the industry, or even across all devices from a given manufacturer.

When a device manufacturer gets customer reviews that say "I only get one bar with your phone but two from company X" the device manufacturer can either try and explain repeatedly that their one bar is better than X's two bars and that unlike X you can still make phone calls on our device on one bar. Or they can just double the number of bars reported on the next model so they don't look worse than X.

Which do you think they do?

To do a real test you need to use a constant antenna and location, attenuating the signal gradually until each device stops functioning. The amount of attenuation it can take is a crude indicator of the quality of the radio.

I understand their desire to reuse the prime real estate they have for their phone boxes and convert it into a new profitable market.

However in this case I'm not sure it will actually be so useful. Typically you position phone boxes in pedestrian heavy areas where people can see them and use them. Normally you would want recharging stations in car parks, where cars like to hang out for extended periods of time. Do you really want to base your business model over having cars parked beside the road in busy streets for 6.5 hours at a time? Looking at the phone booth in the picture there doesn't even seem space for a single car to stop.

Yes and No I'm not joking.

Personally I believe documents on racial hatred reinforce existing racial hatred, it's ludicrous to suggest that they create it from scratch. I also don't feel that suppressing the relevant documents is effective, the history of religous persecution is ample evidence of this. Restricting access to the materials does make it difficult for those who oppose them to read it and address their grievances or develop counter tactics.

The argument for censorship in this matter is an argument for thought crime and I'm not sure it can be dismissed lightly. I don't give two hoots if someone wants to sit at home beating off to drawings of children. Having sex with a minor is a crime and anyone who does so should be charged. I haven't seen any solid evidence that the first leads to the second, there are reasonable arguments that porn provides an outlet which helps prevent the sexual act.

Actually it's more in line with current practice than you realise. If you manufacture a banned book in Australia, they will stop you from manufacturing it. If you import a banned book from overseas they will stop you from importing it.

This is directly analagous to the proposed filtering. If you host banned material in Australia they will take it down, this already is the case. The proposal is that if you import the banned material they will stop your from importing it. This is a block imposed on the importer, your ISP.

This isn't to say that I support the proposal or even current practice. Just that in this point you are wrong.

People addicted to telephone's are showing increasing signs of not coping well without them. A receptionist said, "My whole day revolves around the telephone, I don't know what I'd do without one."

This addiction isn't just limited to the classic call center stereotype. Formally normal people like businessmen have gone to extraordinary lengths to satisfy their cravings, "I have a phone I carry everywhere with me, I just find it so hard to be out of touch with the office. I even have the car wired so that I can talk while driving between meetings."

A guy who provides alarmist quotes for a living told me, "This telephone craze is destroying the very fabric of society, it's a completely abnormal form of communication. People have no idea of your facial expression is or how your gesticulating with your hands. Eventually we will all evolve to just talking with our hands in our pockets, then how will you know who the Italians are!"

It's vital that we develop treatement plans to assist people in transitioning to a phone free lifestyle, fortunately some profiteering fearmongers have stepped up to the plate. Initial treatement involves lying in a hospital bed with the comfort of the occasional ringing phone in the nurses station, eventually patients progress to walks in a phone free park. The problem is so bad and phones so addicting however that family and friends are smuggling specially designed "mobile" phones into patients, despite clear signs preventing phone use in the area.

Most of the time I don't bother.

Seriously scripts (be they Bash, Perl or Python) are designed to get something done. Occasionally if the script will be rerun frequently I accept command line parameters, if the script takes a long time (> 10 mins) I'll output some form of progress measure and if the script is being run by non-techies I'll even strap on a basic GTK gui for them. The vast majority of the time though I just hard code the parameters into the top of the file, use the script a few times and archive it for later reference. If you are spending any more time than absolutely necessary to get the job done then you don't get the scripting ethos.