The smarter towns do what many other (often private) utilities do - have a line item for "fixed costs" and another for "usage". You get a fixed charge of $10-20 for access to the utility, and then a per watt-liter-whatever charge for usage. Even if you use NOTHING, that flat cost comes in every month.

Water billing is largely done on a city/village/town basis. Often, the water comes from a common-source (county 'water agency') which passes on costs to the smaller towns feeding off of it.

Now: if someone along the way mismanages it, that's a different problem.

Someone PLEASE mod this up some more. I screwed around with ftp, Google+, and a few other options, but BT Sync beat everything. I installed it on the PC, installed it on the phone, and in the space of a few hours I had 9GB of pictures and videos copied across Wifi from my phone to the PC. Whenever I add a picture on the phone, it appears on the computer. You choose the type of sync (read-write or read-only) and let it fly.

The Android App defaults to only operate when on Wifi, so data charges stay low (but you can override). There's a nice GUI on the Windows/Mac side, but also configuration files that are pretty well-documented online; you could, for example, share your local Windows profile directory, but choose to exclude the Local Settings directory and any file that begins with a ~. My next step is to work with some friends and family to operate as each others' "Crashplan". You can even share to multiple locations, for redundancy.

They have a pretty thorough FAQ and forum. It also works directly off a LAN, so no data necessarily leaves the house. Closed source, but I suppose you could run a Wireshark if you're suspicious. Everything is transmitted with encryption, but is decrypted at the target. If you don't trust the target machine, I suppose you could store a TrueCrypt drive and just share that.

Last week someone was asking for a good DR solution for their home machine. This works for the phone, too.

and the senate (by filibuster proof majority).

This idea that the Democrats had a filibuster-proof majority from 2008-2010 is a myth.

I believe that the problem is that Al Franken wasn't sworn in until well after that session was well under way, Senator Ted Kennedy was missing for many votes due to his brain cancer, and Arlen Specter didn't switch sides until much much later. There were a few other Democratic Senators who were either out or "Blue Dog" and "DINOs". The Democrats had the seats, perhaps, but nothing more, for a total of 72 days.

Add in the wrinkle that the Republican definition of "compromise" (as a sibling post notes) became "my way or the highway" - candidate Richard Mourdock of Indiana as a vocal, but failed, example of that. Republicans who followed him went on the record unwilling to take even $1 of new taxes for $10 of cuts, and the Speaker of the House is generally unwilling to bring a bill forward until he has a majority of his party behind it - aka "The Hastert Rule", which Dennis Hastert himself disavowed.

It varies with the jurisdiction (state) and who specifically is being recorded. For example, in Illinois it was recently illegal to record police, even in public. The courts eventually found the law to be invalid. There are also distinctions for whether recording contains video AND audio, or just one part. The "premises" thing may come into play here, as he was likely onsite at the theater during questioning.

Down-the-line, this is going to cause further havoc when dealing with medical and legal issues such as schooling. The non-biological mother will be unable to visit the child in the emergency room without the biological mother there first, nor will she be able to make any necessary decisions in care. Doctors will be restricted from telling this "roommate" mother any medical information without pre-approval, although giving her medical power-of-attorney may help.

I remember during one of the Bush 2 nationally televised debates; All of the Republican hopefuls were on stage and the question was asked “do you believe in evolution” – not a single one on stage raised their hand.

I don't remember the question coming up in Bush 2, but I know it's been asked and answered more recently than that. Article here. Video here

TLDR: In May 2007, the GOP hopefuls were asked "How many of you don’t believe in evolution?". Even McCain, who had just a month before said that he liked evolution, changed his mind.

I'd like to see someone come up with a steganographic RAID-ish storage volume.

Sounds like a variation on a "PAR" archive. It may be that a combination of PAR with a TrueCrypt volume way to go. If someone could do PAR as a FUSE project, then you'd be partway there. This would still be missing the steganography angle, and I don't see anything to help that along.

In November, some guy at the local mall went to several shops and asked the young women on staff to help him find stuff on lower racks. He then took some "upskirt" pictures with his camera phone. When he got noticed, he ran out of the mall.

Police reports in December give the follow up. Mall security went back to the cameras and found the guy. They tracked him outside the mall running to his car. The parking lot camera got his license plate number. License plate number was sent to the local police, who picked him up at home.

I have mixed feelings about the 'all cameras, all the time' thing. On the one hand: "good - they got the creepy guy." On the other hand, I'm also now REALLY aware that if I decide to leave a passive-aggressive note on the windshield of a guy who parks right up against my door, I could likely expect a visit from his friend-of-a-friend who works in a local police department.

There are some reports that while it was finished in that last invasion, the library was already pretty much dead from budget cuts and infighting long before then. http://io9.com/the-great-library-at-alexandria-was-destroyed-by-budget-1442659066

Sounds similar to some of the struggles in the US.

Arggh - qualification - The "Lawyers, politicians and lobbyists" have no souls.

They have no souls - we'll have to select the clergy to send based on their own merits.

When someone comes and says we want to take everything you have and enslave you then just say "okay."

I know this was somewhat in jest, but I'd like to point out the next step. After they've enslaved you and they decide to expand their operations, they hand you a gun and say "you're in the army now". Disagree and be subjected to things worse than dying. At least, that's how it's worked for thousands of young boys in Africa.

It seems like the phrase "government money" is dropped in here just to bait arguments. Was there any doubt it was government money? If it were private money, would that be a problem? Wouldn't it be a different problem? Wouldn't "public funds" or "a state/federal grant" have been the same or more accurate?

From TFA: "The program is being funded primarily through a $540,000 federal grant, with a small match from the local governments." TFA actually has a lot of other good 'geeky' detail, like "3-5% of traffic [is already] broadcasting in discoverable mode".

I feel like someone is trying to raise the "oh, the waste!" card.

c) were guaranteed backpay

Actually, the only "guarantee" on the backpay was that they got it the LAST time we had a shutdown. It could just have easily been written to not include it. Add onto that the fact that many people live check-to-check (or near enough) and things could have gotten REALLY BAD for your friends if this had gone on more than a month or two.

Nothing sucks like eating into your savings, putting as much as you can on credit, and then trying to pull money out of your retirement fund. Even with backpay, you're down quite a bit.

No to USB storage, it defeats part of the point of having a RAID.

Unless you're supporting a fairly large local user base, software RAID over USB should be fine with a decent CPU and RAM behind it. That would also give you portability to another machine if the existing one dies (being tied to a specific chipset for hardware RAID can be a dead-end.)

There are a fair number of older Atom-based laptop/netbooks that would fall into this category; you probably can get a used one for nearly free, and just stick more RAM in it. Some of the older benchmarking I've seen (about ten years ago) showed software RAID only using 5-10% CPU. And unless you're using SSD, I'm pretty sure that processors have improved faster than disks have.

Since it's planned for a NAS , you're likely to be network-constrained anyway, so the speed aspect of RAID may be lost. I've got a single Atom netbook hooked to a couple of external USB enclosures, and I spend MUCH more time waiting for network than anything else.