Yesterday I commented on the negative effects of banning lobbying and was promptly modded down for it.

This is different I take it?

There is a term for a government that bans lobbying. Its called a dictatorship.

I know we're supposed to hate corporations, lobbyists, etc, but I wish that people would stop and think about what they're saying.

I was responsible for maintaining a Xen environment for about a year and a half and had much the same experience. We compile our own kernels and in this regard Xen was a nightmare. Do I stick with a 2.6.18 kernel which is the latest supported? If we do that we have to make sure to get backported security fixes. Or do we use forward-ported Xen patchsets which weren't all that reliable and were a pain in the ass to apply?

We finally switched to KVM and suddenly life got a lot easier.

(Going slightly off topic here)For a while we used libvirt and the associated tools, then we discovered Ganeti, a project at Google which has made cluster management a breeze. Libvirt has a "network" driver, but really isn't designed to manage redundant virtualization clusters. Ganeti, on the other hand, is designed specifically for managing clusters, and takes care of all the dirty work like setting up and managing LVM and DRBD. You can build out a new virtual machine, complete with an operating system in just one command, or even do it over the HTTP API. You can use Ganeti with KVM or Xen, but until/unless Xen is in mainline I won't be touching it.

I own two brother laser printers (one at school one at home) and would recommend them to anyone looking for a cheap laser printer. The older, an HL 2070N has done a little over 10,000 pages in the 5 or so years since I got it. The newer one, an HL 2170W I've had for about a year and printed around 1600 pages on. They come with a toner cartridge good for around a thousand pages, after which I recommend buying the "high yield" ones which are around $40 and good for around 2600 pages. You'll also need a new drum unit ever 13,000 pages or so, but that hasn't happened yet.

One thing to look out for though, neither of these models seems to have postscript support that I can tell. Brother does have Linux drivers, but I've had occasional issues with them (actually nothing in the last 6 months or so). The few times that I've tried them, the Windows and OSX drivers seemed ok.

I think you're missing the GPs point. Although many around here might well hold the beliefs you allude to (I don't think its a significant population on Slashdot, as victimized as you might feel by them), the GPs point is that the cost of betrayal by the Government far exceeds the cost of betrayal by a Corporation. In fact, the worst a Corporation can do do you is really limited by what the Government will allow it to do - if you are really so afraid of what a Corporation can do to you, you are implicitly afraid of what the Government will let it do.

I keep hearing about a thing called Node.js, some sort of V8 (the Chrome javascript engine) powered Javascript web framework. I've never used it, but my impression is its not something you would want to use in production.

How is that the worst of both worlds, or a hack? This uses Java and Javascript both in the environments in which they work best. And I'm not even sure why you would call this a hack. Do you have a problem with working with XML in a Java server? Java is far from my language of choice, but thats hardly a hack. Or is it the drawing in an HTML5 canvas that you consider a hack? Because thats exactly what its for.

Unless you're suggesting your browser would otherwise not support HTML5/Javascript, then you aren't replacing anything. Just dropping a third party plugin that is known to be buggy, non-standard and poorly maintained.

The motherboards you are thinking of actually do the RAID in software through a driver. I've been running 4 drives in RAID 5 with Linux's software RAID for a a few years now, and never had an issue. Even the parity calculations are trivial for a modern CPU, and if you're just doing RAID 0/1 the overhead is even lower. I even see software RAID being used in a lot of servers these days, although hardware RAID often has some benefits in terms of hot-swap, etc.

I'm not sure how easy RAID is to configure from a GUI in Ubuntu, but I believe the Fedora installer can do it, and probably others. Or if you know your way around a Linux system its fairly trivial from the command line.

Is that an attempt to argue that none of it should be in the public domain?

It seems reasonable to suggest that information produced with any level of public funding should belong to the public. Don't like the terms? Don't take public funding.

You actually mean less than one trillion right? Less than two percent of our total national debt?

I'm not saying it was a good use of our money, and I could spend all day naming things I would rather see it spent on (or, you know, I wouldn't mind keeping a little more of what I earn), but I'm tired of seeing people perpetuating this idea that the wars are directly responsible for a large portion of our debt.

Have you tried Wave? Its nothing like a chat room, mainly because it has threads and an editable history. Think 10 people editing a google docs document specifically designed for communication between participants.

Its far closer to a wiki than a chat room. Imagine a wikipedia discussion page (click 'discussion' at the top of any article for an example) in real time.

Right, but the person who wrote the check is claiming the image is faked. They can intentionally not keep a carbon copy, or better yet just make sure the last 0 doesn't go on the carbon copy. The only evidence the bank has of a check for $1,000 is an easily faked image submitted by the customer. Everything else says it was a check for $100.

Of course the same thing applies to a real check...

I could be wrong, but isn't it likely to be really windy at the site of the wind farm? Couldn't that make airships impractical?

Oops, I just actually looked at my phone and I guess its only 1 "bar". Somehow I had in mind that there were 4 total.