Not entirely. CPUs running hot are enduring more wear and tear and (with modern CPUs) drawing more power than CPUs that are merely on, but idle.

I think the Google apology link was a good idea, since it explained to the uninitiated how Google works, rather than making Google responsible for everything on the Internet.

Further, I agree with this statement: "Racism won't be truly a thing of the past until we can make fun of black and white politicians alike."

However, this is not "alike". We make fun of white politicians--and their wives, at times--without reference to their race. That's not the same as dehumanizing Michelle Obama for being black.

Google isn't going to force carriers to do things a particular way. They've created an operating system that's fairly easy to root and take over, so even the most stringent anti-customer policies will be broken pretty easily, just because of the OS. I pity the companies that waste development budget on trying to lock their phones down from now on, it's only going to get easier and easier to break out. My phone already has a completely automated, well-maintained 3rd-party OS distribution called CyanogenMod, and it has a completely free updater; I get upgraded at the same time everyone else does, and keep my root and my free tethering and other free root-only apps.

Basically it's a tiny computer with a cell radio and an open source OS. This is win, no matter what the carriers try to do.

Why do you think iPhone is the only other option? Verizon is advertising like they invented Android and tethering, but there are several other phones running the OS. I'd recommend a mytouch or magic. Root it and get tethering for free (you don't even need to root it if you want web-only tethering). T-mobile is actually a pretty damn decent company and the data plan isn't capped.

Ohh. Then you're right, it's just another false verification scheme.

I don't see a single thing in this system that would prevent vote buying. You get a receipt with your choices on it, encoded in some form, yes? You can then go to a website, and enter codes, to see who you voted for, yes? True, only the individual voter (or someone possessing the receipt) can do this.. but that doesn't matter a damn to a vote buyer. Why? Because, as this system's designers seem to have forgotten, the voter is complicit in vote buying. The voter gets money for turning over his receipt and secret knowledge, whatever that may be, to the person who wants a verified vote for his candidate.

Skype is a huge source of pain when people discuss Linux audio. It's possible to get it working (mainly by pretending pulseaudio doesn't exist), but so many people have so many problems with it that there's still a widespread belief that it's completely broken. If only the client-facing parts get open sourced, the audio interface ought to be part of that. The protocol, as far as I can tell, works pretty damn good (despite it occasionally telling me someone's offline when I know they're not). I'm fine with not having access to that. But I really want someone to put in decent audio compatibility.

Figure out how to trace a significant percentage of those IPs to their IP blocks to their ISPs. Notify the ISPs. Start a coalition among them to shut off infected customers with a message explaining why and how to fix. Start an advertising campaign to get public support for this and help pressure ISPs to join even though it is not in their short-term self-interest; sell it to them as good PR at this point. Ask them to send a coupon to customers who disinfect, with prorated hours to reimburse the customer for time spent disconnected due to the infection; 90% will never collect on it anyway. Again, pitch this as good PR. Ask them to do this again for the next major infection, again for good PR. (As far as I'm concerned, big companies can crow to the rafters about all their good deeds, as long as they actually do them.)

It's pretty hard to kill this off with tech, but policy might work.

From my easy chair, and sitting in front of my uninfectable Linux computer, I say go for it and clean those suckers up. (Once you figure out how, that is.) We're all rooting for you!

Oh, but you might want to do it anonymously.

You did manage to save them a bunch of money, though. Now that your users aren't fucking up their machines any more, there's little reason to keep paying you to do nothing. Cost of your services, and all that.

> Speaking of iphones does the Android phones have a "Big Red Kill" switch too?

Not sure what "Big Red Kill" does, but it's either one of the following two things:

1) force power off. Yep, either hold down power for a long time, or take out the battery. (Whoops, you can't do that with an iphone. :)

2) force all wireless radios off. Yep, hold down power for a couple of seconds until you get a menu, then select "airplane mode".

How about my hope that anti-GM zealots won't behave like alarmist idiots? Nope, that hope has been dashed.

Look, almost everything you eat has been genetically modified. The fact that some of it was modified by altering DNA is pretty much irrelevant to the discussion; the supposed dangers of GM come from unbalancing the environment by introducing a foreign organism, something that we've done and then dealt with many times throughout human history. (Note, I'm ignoring the supposed health risks in consumption. They have no relevance to an enviromental impact study.)

> There must be a notion of a common good

Don't we also need to treat workers in India as if they were part of our society, and elevate them as well, and be responsible for their training and their education? Society is global now. What benefits them will, in the long term, benefit us too. It is already the case that wages in India are rising sharply because of the American demand for their labor; the money flowing into that country will educate them, but IBM can take care of its own as well.

There's also an assumption that hiring outsourced workers means "letting middle-aged workers go". This need not be the case. Companies will retain workers that are valuable, regardless of where they're from.

> Sometimes the carrot works better than the stick.

Isn't this exactly an example of the stick working better than the carrot? What he actually used was a stick, and it worked. You're hypothesizing that he could have used a carrot, but it would not have worked any better than immediate success.

The test vehicle was located at 34D 10M 15.21S North, 119D 7M West.