None of these points are completely true, but they are true enough to make me willing to invest in doing this:

* I don't like the caps, and Time Warner is more likely to stop implementing them if they are associated with people blocking ads.
* People who don't see commercial advertising tend to become slightly smarter, a bit more interesting to talk to, slightly less likely to engage in political extremism in either direction, and have marginally less debt and be more properous, thus helping the economy overall. It is like the effect of removing a television from the household, but smaller. Blocking ads betters society in general. If you are pro-advertising, you are anti-Civilization and pro-Barbarianism.

With regards to your comment about increasing Firefox's install base: while I am using Firefox right now and very greatful for what it is, it is also a horrible piece of bloated, memory-hogging software that is not a good posterchild for Free Software. I hesitate to inflict the current version of Firefox on a person unfamilar with computers, using an older computer with only 512 MB of RAM or less, with or without adblocker. If the Firefox people got rid of all javascript based config files, and fixed the memory fragmentation problem, and developed a real plugin system that involved writing fast plugins in C and loading signed .so files instead of that XUL travesty, I might get behind it.

As Windows is to computing in general, Firefox is to Free Software: big user base, big code base, slow, and not much else to recommend it.

Galeon also sucks. I haven't tried out the Google Chrome browser yet.

Ad-blocking software usually acheives the same effect as "blocking at a higher level", because the appearence of the advertisement on the page is dependent on the browser sending a request for that ad. If the browser does not send that request, a tiny amount of upstream and a large amount of downstream bandwidth is saved.

We should use this as an opportunity to convince as many TimeWarner customers as possible to install ad-blocking software, on the argument that if they don't they are more likely to exceed their cap. Perhaps we could develope a modified OpenWRT or similar type router that blocked as much of that as possible, and convince people to install it.

What could have been done instead in 64,000 man hours of focused attention ? I bet Slashdot has an even greater negative effect on our nation's productivity.

I second the recommendation of Request Tracker, or RT: http://bestpractical.com/rt/

However I have not used many other systems, although we tried to do this with GForge (GForge has come a long way since we were using it).

Also, I have found the people on #rt on irc.perl.org to be polite and helpful, even when my questions were stupid. Thanks guys !

Most of the comments here are negative. The criticisms about swappable drive bays being better and that ground should not be switched are all valid.

However, I think articles like this are good. More people should actually do stuff, even if they burn out a few harddrives or power supplies in the process.

I think this is an excellent suggestion. You should not allow import data of yours to not be backed up under your own controll. Keep in mind that if you have sensitive info in your email, there is one more way for it to leak out, of course.

If you need to preserve "labels" and other structure of the mailbox, look into the script "imapsync". You can set that to run once a night; for speed, you might have it just look at emails newer than 10 days or something. It is available at http://www.linux-france.org/prj/imapsync/

Imap access can also allow you to keep a local copy of all emails, in fact that's the way it is most often set up.

I prefer to set up imap, but that's because in my case I control the server, and keeping the mail on the server in one big spool file (which is how most pop servers do it) gets slow and clumsy. Keeping it in Maildir format is better. Of course you can provide pop access regardless of how the mail is stored, with courier or any other modern server. I would immagine that gmail uses custom code written by google to store and index and serve up everything.

That could be bandwidth intensive, though.

I might pay a small amount for a feed of the text-only news groups, you know like comp.*

Something like $20 / year, you are competeting with giganews of course.

In most states, their is already a perfectly good system for raising revenue for roads. An excise tax is charged on motor vehicle fuel. The more you use the roads, the more you pay. Since lighter vehicles are more fuel efficient but also wear the roads less, more efficient cars pay less and big trucks pay more. Fuel for airplanes is exempted from the road excise tax since it implies no use of the roads, and in some cases diesel for agricultural use can also be exempted. The system is fair, and revenue automatically increases and decreases according to the needs of the system.

Basically, this system has every property that would make the automated toll system appealing.

In most states, this system has been gradually destroyed. In times when the gas tax produced more revenue than needed, the "earmark" of the money was violated, and it was appropriated to other uses; sometimes they would promise to replace it later and call it "borrowing" from the road fund, but such promises are generally fogotten in the scramble to share out money among the lobbiests in the next session. In times of high gas prices, their is pressure for the gas tax to be relaxed, at least temporarily.

More importanly, the revenue from the excise tax is not accumulated to fund larger one-time projects. Instead keeping the money, perhaps even lending it conservatively by buying Federal bonds or bonds from other States, and then paying for the large projects, we borrow the money by issuing bonds. Thus we pay interest when a more disciplined management of the money should allow us to collect it.

Given what has happened with the gas excise tax, why should we expect any better from the automated, or non-automated, tolls ? These tolls are also further encumbered by the fact that the bureaucracy and private interests necessary to administer this less efficient system will act to preserve it against all attacks.

There are numerous instances in this country of roads that were built on bonds, and then a toll system installed to "pay off the bonds" after which the road was supposed to revert to free. How many roads paid off those bonds and never had the toll booths removed ?

I believe that between fertilizing the oceans with iron, painting all roofs white to increase the albido, and could seeding, we can make this planet just like our native home.

Why does the new site try to load trac_session cookies repeatedly ? Is it necessary to store data on my computer in order to run a web site advertising an open-source program ?

These types of tests have been used ever since professional management was invented as a skill separate from actually being able to do anything economically useful.

I suggest that anyone who has to work in an organization that uses these types of tests read "The Organization Man" by William H. Whyte. Some key chapters are online here: http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/whyte-main.html However, what is not online is the Appendix, titled "How To Cheat on Personality Tests". The book was published in 1956.

Whyte doesn't suggest that you cheat on personality tests just because you are greedy, or because corporations are evil and you have to survive, or anything radical like that. It is clear from the book that Whyte is the kind of guy who presumes that most people are well-intentioned, that managers probably want to hire the best, and they need these scores to cover their ass, so people should give the correct answers on tests so managers can then pick the good guys and promote them.

Meyer-Briggs and Minnesota Multi-Phasic whatchamacallits have never been shown to be of any practical use, and their pointlessness has been known for decades.

"The Organization Man" is one of the funniest books I have ever read, but I think it is only funny if you have been exposed to Organization Men enough to recogize the traits he points out, and it is a kind of dry, no-punch line humour that I associate with old men who are constantly laughing at you inside. For the enjoyment of Slashdot I will reproduce here a couple of paragraphs from the "How to Cheat on Personality Tests" chapter:

"The important thing to realize is that you don't win a good score: you avoid a bad one. (...) Sometimes it is perfectly all right for you to score in the 80th or 90th percentile; if you are being tested, for example, to see if you would make a good chemist, a score indicating that you are likely to be more reflective than ninety out of a hundred adults might not harm you and might even do you some good."

"By and large, however, your safety lies in getting a score somewhere between the 40th and 60th percentiles, which is to say, you should try to answer as if you were like everyone else is supposed to be. This is not always too easy to figure out, of course, and this is one of the reasons why I will go into some detail in the following paragraphs on the principal types of questions. When in doubt, however, there are two general rules you can follow: (1) When asked for word associations or comments about the world, give the most convential, run-of-the-mill, pedestrian answer possible. (2) To settle the most beneficial answer to any question, repeat to yourself:

a) I loved my father and my mother, but my father a little bit more
b) I like things pretty well the way they are
c) I never worry much about anything
d) I don't care for books or music much
e) I love my wife and children
f) I don't let them get in the way of company work"

You know what is the saddest about these personality tests ? This guide to cheating on them was written just a few years after the basic ones became popular (they were developed in the 20's and 30's, came into use and were standardized (and also statistically tested and proven worthless) in the bureaucracy of WWII, and The Organization Man was published in '56), but the cheat guide works perfectly well even for tests developed long after the cheat guide was written.

You can take a computer administered test developed in the last few years by the best minds in modern management theory, and cheat it with a guide written over 50 years ago.