Getting drunk and running amok is something you do when not home--at home you might exercise some moderation, or there'd be people who'd call you out on it whose authority you'd feel obligated to respect

I hate to say it, given that I'm British, but unfortunately the problem of a subset of Brits getting completely wasted and engaging in shitty, boorish behaviour isn't something restricted to holiday times. For some reason the UK just has a far more serious problem with drinking than other cultures and it happens at home as well. I normally don't go to the sort of European resort towns that the hooligan set like to frequent but on the occasions that I have done, it's always embarrassing as fuck to be a young male British tourist because you can sense the suspicion locals have that you might be about to do something stupid. The worst was when I visited Bratislava. Lovely city (well, town, by UK standards). The pub in the city centre had the phone number of the British embassy on the beer mats, for people to call in an emergency. The men's toilets had a poster warning Brits specifically not to hit on the local girls. When I was there, a group of Brits came in with some unbelievably grotesque, obese men being led by some extremely hot local girl. Very obviously a stag do. As one of the fattest guys walked past the table where me and my friend were sitting he said (very loudly) "I want to see some TITS".

I pretended to be Canadian. Luckily I don't have a strong British accent at all and I was travelling with an American, so it was somewhat plausible.

I think you're completely right that this behaviour is partly learned and transmitted, like some sort of mind virus. For some reason Brits seem far more likely than other people to feel they can't have fun or be socially relaxed until they've got drunk, and will happily admit it. It's not seen as something shameful, people just blurt it out, like saying it somehow makes them one of the group. Combine it with a culture that practically celebrates "laddishness" as being fundamental to being a man, and you've got a recipe for trouble.

I think I've run into a couple of dystopian stories which involve a resurgence of coal usage.

Some are kind of post-ecological failure, where the population lives in domed cities and is energy dependent to keep the domes functioning. I think one involved a crisis several years into a continent-wide drought that required a massive desalination and pumping project to prevent literally running out of water.

It's the preferred location for exiling troublesome political figures with French ties.

I kind of wanted it to go up in flames not because I think ACA was perhaps one of the worst economic giveaways since the Pacific Railroad Acts of the 1860s.

Basically we just ended up enshrining the for-profit healthcare industry, including the insurance companies, into law, forever. Sure, there were some goodies in there for people with pre-existing conditions and a handful of other things, but my sense is that it really didn't do anything to address the out-of-control costs of healthcare or the relentless profiteering WITHIN healthcare.

Unfortunately I don't think any of this can be fixed without going single payer and greatly stripping the profiteering out of healthcare by making most of it nonprofit.

ACA just says "well, we're just going to make more people buy healthcare and hope it makes it cheaper because a bunch of healthy people won't use it" without even beginning to address all the people who WILL use it more now (thanks to some of the goodies) at the current, high-profit, high-cost expense levels.

Did you ever check out Microsoft Research's Singularity OS, which implemented a new OS kernel from scratch in a dialect of C#. It has no traditional processes and relies on software/compiler enforced isolation instead of VMM/page tables. It has some other rather interesting ideas in it too, like contract based IPC channels. Relatedly, there was some work done a while ago to allow better integration between garbage collected heaps and the kernel swap system (bookmarking collectors), but the patches were never merged. Do you have any thoughts on how Linux could better support non-C/C++ based software in this way?

I wonder if that's a case of misleading by proportion.

It reduces the nonfunctional material in the battery by 80%, but what portion of the battery is nonfunctional material?

If a 100kg battery has 5kg nonfunctional material, losing 80% of it is nice, but you're only losing 4% of the total mass. The same kind of thing goes for volume. If the battery is 1000cc and the nonfunctional material is 50cc, losing 80% is great but its a much smaller part of the entire volume.

I'd guess that this is why the bigger claims are from process improvement. If it meaningfully shrunk mass and volume, they'd probably wave that flag, too.

Where did you buy it?

Also, I assume the battery has some kind of charge controller integrated into it so that it was a direct replacement for a regular lead acid battery.

Eventually being Amish is going to be a preferable (without the religion part) way to live. Low tech is future privacy tech.

They'll try to take that away, too, by polling other Amish who claim you aren't Amish.

Although generally it's an interesting idea, and I wonder if anyone has actually tried "becoming Amish" (without actually being Amish) as a way of going off the grid in a way that doesn't draw attention because it fits some "known" role of people living off the grid.

Probably would have prevented Satoshi being anonymous when he launched bitcoin.org, and thus might have led to Bitcoin never existing at all.

The p2p element seems reasonable but I suspect would be kind of thorny. Most people's broadband connections are asymmetric, with upload speeds only a fraction of download, so you'd have to limit total upload bandwidth to something small enough that it wouldn't prove obnoxious, either to performance or that would cause users to hit caps, especially the kind they didn't know they had.

And then there's the question of figuring out who has the content on my download list -- even though the streaming catalog is kind of finite, it may prove less efficient or reliable to grab content on my list from random sources whose connectivity to me is unreliable.

The other idea that I had that I thought might solve some of the content owner objections is a download that is a fractional download -- download only half the content, so that you still stream the other half but have the streamed content and the local content interwoven so you grab byte 1 from netflix, 2 from cache, 3 from netflix, etc, so that the local content was "incomplete" and thus didn't fit any strict definition of "local content".

Wow. Someone recommends my book (which is on-topic for the discussion). I thank them. And we're both marked trolls.

The critics are right. This site really has gone downhill.

Thank you, whoever you are! Free software and the threat of software patents and copyright law to our basic freedoms to create were very much on my mind when I wrote the novel. Very glad you enjoyed it!

Realtime streaming is a bandwidth pig, but if you had something with 128 GB of storage you could download content in the background at a much lower bandwidth rate. 128kbps, 12 hours a day for a week would give you 300 gigs of offline content.

Netflix could do this with your "My List" of titles and possibly interweave this with some predicted preference stuff and maybe catch a percentage of things you might watch while just browsing (er, vainly searching for something interesting).

At this point you could possibly be watching most of your stuff offline from cache without the need for real time streaming or bandwidth.

I think I've read Netflix say "we'll never do offline streaming" and its probably a licensing/rights issue, although maybe Netflix has some rationale for not doing it to, so that will keep it from happening.

Most STBs and smart TVs don't have storage, but it doesn't seem like adding some flash capability (internally at assembly, or via USB sticks by consumers) would be that expensive.

For this reason the sane way to implement IPv6 as to do DHCPv6-PD and assign either 0 or 1 IPv6 address on the link interface.

From reading the linked bug report/discussion, it seems the Android team are open to implementing DHCPv6-PD. Their objection is basically to the notion that a lazily run network might use DHCPv6 to try and ensure devices only get a single IP address, thus forcing app/OS developers and users to deal with the crappy flakyness of NAT all over again. They are worried about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, in other words.

So I think your position is not so incompatible with Google's. Though if/when they plan to support DHCPv6-PD I do not know.

DHCP v6 exists not to coddle or comfort admins used to a v4 world. DHCP v6 was added because v6 will /Never/ be adopted without it. Ever. Full stop. DHCP facilitates two-way communication prior to address assignment and lends flexibility to deployments that are now considered indispensable.

Having waded through the mega-thread with Lorenzo (who I've met by the way and he is a top class guy), this appears to be the nub of the dispute. It's some kind of immovable object/irresistible force situation.

The Android team build what is primarily a consumer product. When they make decisions, they think in terms of what is best for ordinary consumers. They also consider the needs of software developers. Therefore they highly prise qualities like "it just works" and "my apps don't break" and "I can tether without restriction". From this perspective as far as I can tell, Lorenzo's position is 100% correct. The founding vision of IPv6 was that you should always have as many addresses as you need for whatever purpose, and we should never need bizarre technical hacks to work around a lack of addresses ever again.

The network admins on that thread are building what they perceive as a 'take it or leave it' service, often, provided to a captive audience like a university campus or enterprise. Therefore they highly value qualities like "I can satisfy the legal department" and "I can use my existing hardware that only supports feature X" and "I can block tethering to my network to implement some security policy". They care relatively little about user or developer experience, as evidence by the number of comments on the thread of the form "If we can't get our way we'll just ban all Android devices" or "The device should tell the user that 464xlat is unavailable and let apps break" or "the device should tell the user that tethering is forbidden". They care little about application reliability or complexity as long as they can tick some boxes at the end of the day and satisfy various policies. From their perspective Android is just making their jobs harder and Lorenzo is therefore being mind-numbingly unreasonable.

This situation is somewhat confused and hard to distill because there seem to be multiple different things being discussed on the same thread, e.g. DHCPv6 PD which is apparently unrelated to address allocation.

Now, frankly, having read and understood many of these comments, I find myself siding (weakly) with Lorenzo, and not just because I know him. As an Android user and an app developer, my priorities are more closely aligned with that of the Android team. I do not wish to experience apps breaking or "tethering denied" messages in future due to some lawyer buttcovering that was translated into a network setup with the absolute minimum of effort by a monopolist IT department. If that means I fall back to IPv4 for a while instead, well, so be it. If that means my phone cannot reach the small number of IPv6 only networks when connected to some random university campus, OK, I'll use my LTE connection. And then I'll complain to the IT office and tell them "just buy an iPhone" is not an acceptable answer, so they had better get on it and allow my device to grab as many devices as it wants without having to go through a DHCPv6 server. Just like my home and mobile ISPs do. And if that means they have to do more work to satisfy the next BSA audit - well, that's why they get paid the big bucks.

Jean-Michel Smith's science fiction novel _Autonomy_ would be a good summer read. It's about a small group of open source revolutionaries who work to transcend through their own singularity. Unfortunately they are hounded by government agencies and the UN, who want to destroy them without ever understanding what they are and what they offer the world. It's a clever novel that promotes a lot of open source values. http://www.amazon.com/Autonomy...

Thank you, whoever you are! Free software and the threat of software patents and copyright law to our basic freedoms to create were very much on my mind when I wrote the novel. Very glad you enjoyed it!