Household gas is mostly methane or propane (for those without pipeline gas), and nowhere near enough pure for use in a fuel cell.

I've had pressed CDs fail - a long while ago now - with a kind of mottled effect that the word "bronzing" could describe. I get the sense they were pressed on a cheap process.

New CDs are more prone to physical damage - the data layer is right under the label laquer. Older ones sandwiched the data layer between multiple layers of plastic and I think it's these ones I've had fail.

Indeed.

While there are ways to make electronic voting more secure, the systems as a whole are too complex for one person to audit. The more fancy crypto you add, the fewer people understand the components. The fewer potential auditors you have, the cheaper it is to buy them off / lock them up for political crimes.

It's easy to audit a ballot box. Virtually everyone of average intelligence understands the technology.

3 - The Chinese probably do clone the American router operating systems - and just replace the secret keys in the backdoors with their own, blocking the way for American security agencies and opening it for their own in one fell swoop.

I heard the Chinese were just using the backdoors that the OEM puts in (possibly for the government) by simply replacing the secret keys in the firmware.

I heard rumours that the Chinese firms who clone routers were just replacing the secret keys in the backdoors with their own and shipping them as-is. That kind of thing got Phil Zimmerman in hot water.. why isn't Cisco in hot water?

In related news, the network efficiency at Chinese airbases has increased by 80% after they replaced the MCSEs with a very small shell script.

I came in to post exactly this ; is he going to be like the guy who invented blue LEDs and sue to get some tiny fraction of reasonable compensation for his discovery?

Even if it's a long month, you're going to have to talk out of your ass a bit too.

I so, so, wish it was a mere matter of $100

The sheer amount of money that has been pissed away on upgrading from XP to Windows 7 is thoroughly, utterly, disgusting.

For a slightly more server-based example (because we're getting a jump ahead of the Win2k3 Server retirement) ; my infrastructure support team have spent 2 weeks trying (and alas, failing) to replace the Windows Indexing Service, which is no longer supported, for an web app that of course, requires search. The replacement is "Windows Search Server" (worlds worst name for something you'd want to find by using a search engine...) ; and the "Express" edition is a 700MB download, that installs MS SQL Server AND SharePoint, which then sit there hogging half the CPU and RAM on the server you installed it on. They tried for 2 weeks to get it configured and working. Even I couldn't figure it out.

So I've installed Nutch and Solr instead. They require far less in the way of resources and I got a working search server in around 2 hours. But I've still had to spend about a week of work on it, porting the search pages to send nice neat URL based queries and parse the XML return documents, rather than the horrible ADODB stuff it used before, mostly tuning the crawler and index weighting, etc.

The upside is that now I have a search platform I don't need to run on a Windows server. Given that the site is mostly static pages, I could farm the whole thing off to a Linux server with relatively little effort, I'd just have to port the search pages from VBScript to some other kind of sensible server-side language.

And this is just one example, involving one website and a couple of ASP pages written in VBScript. (Just configuring IIS on the newer versions of Windows is a complete culture shock - they changed almost everything about the GUI for the worse, and of course, there is no fallback to using config files.)

On the desktop it's been a nightmare, although we've also been shooting ourselves in the foot as much as possible. Every app we use (and we have a lot of apps) has had to be assessed for compatibility with Windows 7. Yes, this is overkill - MS really do backward compatibility very well. But corporate risk paranoia demands it. So we've had all the overhead of providing test laptops to people, provisioning them, configuring them, having people test their applications, etc. The cost per user is way, way, way above $100 a head - as a large organization, our licensing agreements covered upgrading to Windows 7 for no extra fees anyway. The cost has all been about the process (which as I say, was probably total overkill and should probably have just been done by phased migration of users to Windows 7).

On top of this (foot shooting time), ICT decided that the time was ripe to go into Full Lockdown Mode. While this is partly just corporate paranoia, you really have to blame extended experience with the gajillion or so security holes (many of them human) associated with Windows for that. Developing even simple shell scripts is a total nightmare because the whitelisting client they installed ... prompts... you.. every.. time.. you.. change.. one.. character... and... try... to... run... the... new.... version... The firewall they've installed completely blocks almost everything useful the instant you leave the office network.

Honestly, I'd really very much prefer that people were running a desktop Linux distribution, and that we were running Linux on our servers. Most of the upgrade compatibility worries would have gone away. Most of the security worries would not be a concern, and we'd not have corporate paranoia-ware consuming at least half the resources of our computers.. We wouldn't be forced to port software to new dependencies just because MS decided to deprecate components. While backward-compatibility is Microsoft's thing, keeping obsolescent software around for as long as you need it is something that the FOSS community does better.

Mum has been running on Linux for as long as I can remember now ; she had to remind me that it was well before 2012 that I first installed Ubuntu for her. For her needs, it's ideal, and I don't have to worry about her getting horrible malware, or falling prey to the scammers who ring up and claim to be "from Windows Support" - you tell them you're running Linux and they hang up pretty quickly.

Whereas America has an average of 18 minutes of commercials per hour, whereas (the UK, at least) has an average of 12.

Also in the case of the UK, it's been a long while since we only had 4 channels on the dial. We've had 5 since 1997, we've had subscription satellite TV since 1990, we now have digital TV (in terrestrial radio broadcast, satellite, and cable formats).

Just the BBC, our "TV License" payee, has 9 television channels (most of them in HD), 10 national radio stations, a multitude of local stations, and the enormously popular BBC website, including the renowned BBC News.

The license is £145.50 or just under $250, per year.

Quite aside from the quality of the programming the BBC produces itself, the availability of a high quality, commercial-free national broadcaster forces all the commercial stations to raise their game - shorter commercials, better content (yes, including imports from other countries).

While in recent years I have had some doubts about the impartiality of their news coverage, I wouldn't be without the BBC. I've seen American broadcast television. I don't want us to go the same way.

Since the production of content is a fixed cost.. imagine the volume of quality content the USA could produce, given it has a population 5x the size of ours, if they had a similar license structure in place. Of course, the existing networks have imagined this, and quake in their boots....

I think the development of the law should be tracked using Git. Amendments are pull requests, and only permissible with a commit signed by the creator.

Instead of tacking amendments to the end of bills as they do now, just patch them directly - make the law simpler. And keep a full audit trail of the whole thing. No more sneaky little amendments by congressional aides like Mitch Glazier (search for "pisher" in the text..)

Our new whitelisting software slows down one of our export processes from 2 minutes to around 14, because it hashes all the files it reads and outputs and eats CPU doing it.

So it goes from something people will run multiple times an hour, to something that people will seriously think twice about doing. All the productivity gains of rewriting the software and taking some pains to make it multithreaded erased because it has got to the point where the IT department won't trust your computer to do anything other than what they sign off on. A guaranteed job for them maintaining the whitelist, everyone else's job slowed down.

If software patents were taken to their literal full extent, I'd lose my job anyway, because it's impossible to create any substantial piece of software without infringing multiple patents.

Developing new software would become so expensive - what with the cost of having a patent lawyer stand over your shoulder demanding explanations of everything you implemented, and the cost of licensing anything I infringed, or re-implementing things to infringe something else cheaper to license - that the market for my skills would shrink considerably.

Happily I live in a country that is so far in the grey area as to whether it recognises the validity of software patents, and I work for a government agency that has decided to license it's output with a BSD-style license (presumably so the corporate chums of the political bosses can make as much money as they'd like from our taxpayer-funded work...)