In the late nineties when I joined /. I was a sysadmin. I had both a pager and a cell phone it was pretty hard for even both of them to wake me when I was on call :p Fortunately, I stopped being a sysadmin just about the time I got married, and that made the problem go away. My wife would not be amused to be awoken in the middle of the night by my pager while I slept on, oblivious.

Since the early 2000s, I've been in email (more recently, web) security and never have to be on call. I did love being an SA and sometimes still miss it, but sure don't miss the pager.

That wouldn't work on my wife. She's an extremely light sleeper and once woken, finds in difficult to wake up. I on the other hand, could sleep right through just about anything intended to wake me (good thing my job doesn't require on-call hours). The best way to wake me up would be to page my wife and tell her to wake me up, but that wouldn't go over too well with her

What a load of crap.

The Tea Party (which is nothing you say it is, and I'm calling you out as a liar) has had nothing but crap from the mainstream left-tilted media that stands up and lies through its teeth about being objective.

The Occupy movement - which seems to have no agenda other than "People shouldn't be allowed to be rich, no matter how hard-working, smart, and successful they are" - and is definitely the 1% of extreme leftists and totally out of step with the 99% of normal people - has had mostly favorable coverage from that same media.

The Tea Party is about maximum liberty and minimum government. The Occupy fringe is the exact opposite - they are about maximum government and minimum liberty.

Since when do you have a First Amendment right to camp in a public park?

I'd love to be able to do that, too. Beats the heck out of the cost, hassle, and driving involved to go to a campground, and if it rains or the kids get scared, I could be home in 5 minutes, but guess what? Camping in city parks is illegal and I'd get ticketed for it, or arrested if I failed to leave.

Those 1% Occupy types (1% because that's about how many Americans are communist like them) can protest as much as they want, and screw over local businesses to the point of bankruptcy (Hi from the SF Bay area!) but they have to go home at night like everybody else.

They might want to consider, I dunno, actually working for a living instead of having "Confiscate the wealth and give it to us!" as a business model.

They sure screwed the (immediately) local economy here in Oakland, and they seemed to have the crime part covered, too, including a murder last week.

I'm glad they're finally gone. May they never return.

Electric commuter cars are not cheaper than gasoline-powered alternatives and the cost of a rental car on a long trip is really high because of the mileage charges. That's no solution for him.

In my case, I have a few 500-miles-in-a-day trips every year, in a mini-van that is also used as a daily driver, so I need an Odyssey that can go 500 freeway miles on a charge, or at worst, with a single 30-minute recharge stop along the may (but single-charge is preferable). I love the idea of having an electric vehicle, and this new breakthrough gives me hope that by the time my Odyssey is ready for replacement in 10 years or so that there will be an EV minivan available that meets my requirements.

I've driven that far in a day once. It didn't take me anywhere near 15 hours but it was a long haul, and I only stopped when I needed gas. Get some food, fill the car's tank, empty mine, and back on the road.

Totally with you that an EV needs to be able to make that journey before I can buy one. This new breakthrough may make that possible: my bar for purchase is an electric (or EV + generator) Honda Odyssey that can go from Silicon Valley to San Diego on a single charge, and quickly recharge at least enough to go a couple hundred miles more if necessary.

The one thing in that model that I don't like is that I would have to lease the battery. I'd be more open to a model in which I pay only for the charge. After all, in my current vehicle, I don't lease the gas tank from a gas station. With an electric vehicle, most of the time I would be charging it at home or at work (if my workplace had charging stations, anyway), which would make leasing a battery a large and pointless expense. It is this fact that also makes me think that business model is doomed.

This new technology discussed in the original article makes me think it's even more doomed, because it will make possible the target that can get me into an electric vehicle: a Honda Odyssey (or other similar-sized mini-van, but I really like Odysseys) that can go 500 freeway miles or more on a charge and re-charge in an hour; if not fully, at least enough to go another 200 or 300 miles. A 500 mile range will get me as much as I typically ever drive in a day on vacation. If said vehicle also had a small fuel engine that drove a generator sufficient to keep the vehicle going at highway speeds and maybe even charge the battery simultaneously, the range would be practically limitless.

Today's hybrids don't strike me as a solution. They offer minimal mileage increases over the best gasoline-only cars in their size class, at a substantial cost increase. There may never be a cost payoff for most hybrid owners. Even if I could get a hybrid Odyssey, I wouldn't buy one. The cost/benefit analysis doesn't stack up. It would have to be all electric or all electric + backup generator, with the kind of range this new battery breakthrough makes possible.

Fine, treat it as a public park. You're not allowed - generally - to camp in public parks. While they were doing so, they were not only breaking the law, they were preventing other people's use of the park. I don't know what the lay of the land is at OWS, but out here in California, Occupy Oakland was also screwing over every small business owner in the area because no one wanted to go anywhere near the place. It was filthy, it was attracting vermin (both two- and four-legged), there was crime and drug dealing, and the capper was when one of the protestors was murdered last week, possibly by other protestors who then fled.

They can protest all day long if it's what floats their boat, but then they have to go home at night like everybody else.

This is the only place I've heard the claim that the police are/were doing that, and even here no source is cited for that claim. I'll be reaching for my salt shaker now...

I know. Anyone with any background in linguistics or education, or even just anyone with kids who have reached school age, knows this is true. Unless there is something novel that they've done and TFA doesn't go into, it sounds like they're really late to the party.

However, military salaries are really low compared to the civil "servant" civilian government employees and their fatter pensions and very fat salaries. Base pay for an O6 with 25 years of service appears to be in the low six figures, and how many of those are there? Not a lot, really.

Compare that to civilian government employees. In San Jose, California, the public list of employees and salaries has about 6,000 names on it. I went through about 1/3 of the list without finding anyone who made less than $100,000 last year. THAT is where we have a problem; not with paying for military pensions.

Unity isn't just unusable for someone coming from a Windows background. It's unusable for someone coming from a Linux background (I've been using Linux for over 10 years; started on Red Hat, then TurboLinux, then back to Red Hat, then to Debian, currently on Ubuntu). Unity has me casting around for where to go next. Back to Debian is the most likely direction. Mint is a possibility, so long as it remains Unity-free.

Since '07 I've also been using Macs a lot and in a nod to that I make my Linux machines somewhat Mac-like (Avant Window Navigator, move the window buttons to the left side and put them in Mac order, single-click to do things where possible) and I think Ubuntu is utterly missing the target if they want to be Mac-like. Apple has a really great UI for most people (even most highly experienced/professional users). Sure, forcing a one-size-fits-all on everyone is not optimal for some people, but at least that one size fits pretty well. Unity is a one-size-fits-none piece of crap, and it's fugly, too.

Beyond that, releases of Ubuntu have become so flaky that I only use LTS releases on bare metal. I can only trust regular releases in a VM and never put anything important in them. It seems that Ubuntu has become perpetually not ready for prime time. You nailed it when you said they've lost touch with their user base and Ubuntu has became an experiment to find out how much change people will tolerate. It's now more than I will tolerate. Even my kids, who are in 3rd and 4th grades and have Linux and Mac experience, tried out Unity and said it was horrible. I had to replace it with AWN and Gnome on their netbooks.

Odds of being struck by lightning in an 80 year lifetime: 1 in 10,000
Odds of being struck by lightning in a given year: 1 in 775,000
(http://www.lightningsafety.noaa.gov/medical.htm)

Odds of dying in a terrorist attack on an aircraft: 1 in 25,000,000
(http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703481004574646963713065116.html)

So, even if the terrorist number is too big and we lower it all the way down to 1 in 1,000,000 arbitrarily, I guess it's still safe to disband the TSA now, or at least drastically alter it.

Come on, we all (well, most of us) get in a car and drive to work or school every day. About 30,000 Americans die every year in traffic accidents, yet we buckle up and off we go without a thought. Every day in the United States, road rage incidents (some involving shooting) take place, yet off we go in our cars. And yet we want ever more scrutiny by the TSA and ever more invasive approaches. They seem to have forgotten (as all the government has) that this is a democracy, and We, The People, call the shots.

So Obama is working to reign in the TSA, then?

What's that? He isn't?

Oh. That's what I thought. The Democrats are just as much about government control of every aspect of your life as (some) Republicans are, and then some.

If you don't like big government/corporatist Republicans and big government Democrats (the only kind there are, pretty much), vote Tea Party. What we're about is simple: small government, fiscal responsibility, personal liberty. Neither the RINOs nor the Democrats support any of those things, most especially liberty.