A true scotsman wouldn't make such a fuss about it...

I'll give you laggy, but locked down? For the mobile space, the Kindle Fire is mostly an ordinary Android device, except that it's got a better eReader app. You can side-load third-party apps without rooting, or you can root it and install the Google Marketplace, or so I've heard.

Of course, the general lock-downedness of the mobile space is irritating to me, but that's a separate topic.

That's a surprising answer, since I assumed you were opposed to regulation -- sorry if I misjudged your intent. Obviously, one direction one could go is to increase the oversight and penalties, which would serve to encourage maintenance. It would also let them off the hook with their shareholders -- "we wanted to skimp on maintenance to pay your dividends, but were unable to, due to regulatory constraints."

It's certainly true that the government enforces Pepco's regional monopoly, but I think there are serious technical issues associated with relaxing this -- either Pepco has to be forced to allow other utilities' revenue power to flow over their lines (more, or at least different, legislation and regulation required for that), or somebody has to pay for duplicate or triplicate infrastructure. It's largely because of these constraints that electric power generation and distribution was consolidated and regulated in the first place, of course.

I'll leave it to you to explain how the communistic socialistic regulations created incentives for Pepco (regional utility in Montgomery County, MD, site of massive outages right now) to neglect maintenance.

Remember to include the part where the regulators fined Pepco a million bucks last year, as punishment for his neglect of maintenance.

Also make sure you talk about how the regulatory regime encourages the large dividends they paid to their shareholders.

So the comments are confusing to me as to whether Debian "squeeze" is supposed to have a problem or not, but I have about fifty of these systems running, and as far as I can tell, they're all fine.

I got a whole bunch of these in the logs:
> Jun 30 19:59:59 kernel: [timestamp] Clock: inserting leap second 23:59:60 UTC

I have three of the machines configured as NTP peers to each other, and looking at a few tier-1 time servers. The rest of the machines all use the three local peers as time servers.

My Debian desktop systems at home also seem to be fine.

> I recall Voyager...

Viking, and it wasn't looking for carbon, specifically, it was looking for long-chain hydrocarbons. Good link here.

One thing we have learned is that, in nuclear power, "not making mistakes" can cost a lot of money and take a lot of time. One of the mistakes we heard about when the Fukushima Daiichi event happened was continuing to operate these poorly-designed older-generation reactors for so long.

From the sounds of it, this new report has come out strongly in favor of not repeating that mistake, which sounds pretty logical to me.

Bias can sneak in because of changes in terminology, presumably in both directions, although I've noticed it more on the right these days. As Robert Anton Wilson famously observed, you can go from liberal to conservative without changing a single idea if you wait long enough -- the reverse is also true, depending on the domain in which you have your ideas.

For instance, an article about taxation written in the 1990s might be considered neutral in its time, and talk about the "inheritance tax" a lot. Fast forward ten years, during which the term "death tax" has come into prominence, and the old term "inheritance tax" is only used by fogies and liberals. The textual analysis of the unchanged article will now score it as "liberal", because the terms of the debate have shifted.

This can happen with policies, too -- I remember when a carbon tax was considered a compromise position between liberals, who wanted to directly regulate carbon dioxide emissions, and conservatives, who felt that some kind of market mechanism would provide useful flexibility. Carbon taxes were a technocratic, ideologically neutral solution when they were proposed, but now they're seen as liberal social engineering.

It doesn't always go rightward, of course, some debates have been successfully re-framed by the left, as well, I think -- "global warming" used to be a neutral descriptive term, but the warming isn't uniform, so "climate change" is the preferred term, and I think it's mostly conservatives who use the term "global warming".

That ought to blow up my karma for a solid year...

This is slightly off the mark, and worth an OT reply, I think. (I am motivated in part by also having a Canadian background; I am now a naturalized US citizen.)

The electoral college is made up of "electors", with one elector being in the college for each congressman and senator, plus three additional electors for the District of Columbia (represent!). The electors are nominally free to vote for any eligible presidential candidate, but in practice vote for the candidate who wins a majority of the votes in their state, and have done so in every modern election.

The reason a president can win the electoral college without winning the popular vote is that the electors in the electoral college are not apportioned according to population. Each state gets two senators, irrespective of population, and various states' congressional districts are different sizes in practice. This means that low-population states are over-represented in the college relative to their proportion of the population, so it's possible to put together a majority of electoral college votes corresponding to a minority of US voters.

The possibility that a member of the electoral college might vote for a different candidate than the popular vote in their state has a name, it's called the "faithless elector". This does happen, but has never changed the outcome of a US election.

Where I work, we call this "the much-faster 'wrong' algorithm". It's frequently a side-effect of overly-enthusiastic attempts at optimization, sometimes by people, and sometimes by compilers.

All will be forgiven if this standard is better than the current scheme. The *only* thing that's consistent about it is the width.

The current scheme has a lot of problems with rail-kits fitting into some racks and not others, because they're too deep, or not deep enough, or because one rack has small threaded holes on the inside of the posts, and another has the big square ones. In my set-up, we only have five racks, and already we're running into problems placing equipment because of differences in the mounting geometry.

Actually, I don't even really need standard mounts, I'd settle for consistent nomenclature -- then at least I could buy adapters, and finally be able to put any piece of equipment in any rack.

In the US at least, wireless services are also exempt from the neutrality requirements that the telcos negotiated with content providers.

So, switching to wireless-only for your home internet may, depending on your provider, mean opening yourself up to all that non-neutral stuff -- deep-packet inspections, throttled torrenting, blocked or throttled access to non-ISP-provided streaming video, and so forth. As far as I know, none of the LTE carriers are doing any of this now, but Verizon fought pretty hard for the exemption, they must have had a reason.

If you search for "net neutrality wireless exemption", you'll get lots of good hits, like this one.

> Given the amount that I've personally spent on legal immigration, this pisses me off a little bit.

You must have a nice, even temper. I'm also a legal immigrant to the US, and this stuff pisses me off a lot.

I was an academic H1-B for a while, and got a pretty good view of the hoops that my host university had to go through to do it, so I understand about the hassle and expense referred to in the article. The consensus where I did this was that the regulatory burden was mostly due to the corporate history of cheating, and they resented it a fair amount, but they were also pretty much terrified of screwing it up, even accidentally, because this might jeopardize their numerous federal grants. They were very, very careful to comply with all the regs.

If we could find a way to put that kind of fear into the corporate types, this problem would go away.

Missiles can be magic. But a magic rocket is just stupid.

You're assuming that the fault lies entirely with the "stupid" consumer if they don't get what they want, even in the face of deliberate attempts to deceive them.

I think this neglects a rather obvious imbalance of power between a fraudulent seller, who (presumably) stands to gain a lot from the (again, presumably) numerous known fraudulent transactions he will make, versus the consumer, for whom this is only one transaction out of many of different types, and who faces the task of proving a negative in order to ensure that he is not being swindled (and gets called "stupid" on web forums if he fails).

In this particular case, it seems very clear to me that requiring vendors to be held accountable to a third party for the basic honesty of their claims is both reasonable and economically efficient -- if customers have confidence that they can believe reasonable claims in advertisements, the time costs of product selection and consumption are greatly reduced, and customers and vendors both benefit from the correspondingly greater rate of transactions. In principle, there is no particular reason why the third party in question has to be the government, it could be a private reporting bureau of some kind. There are advantages to having a government role, they have better access to commercial data, and a pre-existing enforcement mechanism, and it's not obviously a crime against liberty for them to play this role. When benefits of actions are societal, as is often the case for confidence-increasing measures, it seems reasonable for society to act through governmental mechanisms to secure these benefits.

Or so it seems to me, anyways. We don't have to make laws to protect people from their own stupidity, but at least in the case of truth-in-advertising, it's economically beneficial and compassionate to do so.