I've long thought the government should buy out/launch their own free-to-use satellite tv service and treat broadcasting on it like OTA broadcasts. Disallow any two channels to be owned by the same company and poof: the era of crappy tv funded by annoying commercials returns.

This is, and has long been, a huge ripoff. I'm rather sure that Walmart doesn't pay the full 3% that Visa/MasterCard like to charge for transactions, but when you look at the overhead of transactions in the cryptocurrency markets, you can see how ridiculously overpriced the credit card transactions are. The costs here are near 0, and so should the charges be, but the system is carefully crafted to avoid competition, and that's illegal.

XBox has long been known as the most potent example of the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. Adding a bit of accountability for being a horrible person is overdue.

Nothing qualifies for your definition.

> some central bankers could agree to create ex nihilo enough money to give a billion USD to every bank account in the world.

This shows that you don't understand how our banking or money system works. This is possible with fiat currency, but not ours.

My backup strategy is to keep the old drives from my previous array and put them into a second server, then back up to it weekly. I use a linux software raid 5 setup for backup, with the drives powered off unless the backup is running. I have a script that spins them up, starts up the raid, mounts the filesystem, performs the backup using rsync, then unmounts and powers down the drives. I only can back up about 1/3rd of my main array, so I have to be choosy, but a large amount of what I have stored is replaceable non-original content that I'm content to simply have one raided copy of, so I just exclude the right folders and I'm good.

The servers are currently in the same room, which makes me uncomfortable, so I've long considered creating a mini-server for a relative and setting it up in their home as an offline backup. Using a commercial service would probably make more sense, but I'm not sure I'm comfortable with that yet.

Another thing I'm considering for my next setup is using ZFS for the backup filesystem and keeping snapshots as long as I can for a combination backup/version control. I'm interested in how efficient that would be with vm disk images where the file changes every time, but only small parts of it. Would it detect the unchanging portions, even if rsync re-writes parts that didn't change, or would that cause duplicated space usage? Does anyone have experience with this?

This was probably just a negative cache entry. Someone on Comcast (possibly you) probably tried to look up helpmatt.org before it was propogated to all the root servers, and 75.75.75.75 got a lookup failure and cached it. Negative caching is part of proper DNS operation and it can last a while. DNS is full of delays like this.

FYI... It's working just fine now.

root@atomrouter:~# host helpmatt.org 75.75.75.75
Using domain server:
Name: 75.75.75.75
Address: 75.75.75.75#53
Aliases:

helpmatt.org has address 192.155.89.14
helpmatt.org mail is handled by 20 alt1.aspmx.l.google.com.
helpmatt.org mail is handled by 30 aspmx3.googlemail.com.
helpmatt.org mail is handled by 30 aspmx2.googlemail.com.
helpmatt.org mail is handled by 20 alt2.aspmx.l.google.com.
helpmatt.org mail is handled by 10 aspmx.l.google.com.

That technology doesn't sound very promising.

People who claim modern currency is baseless don't understand economics. Modern currency is backed by *everything*. Gold, Real Estate, Cars, Businesses. Everything that is used for collateral against a loan becomes backing for our currency. Crypto-currency is based on scarcity like gold was, and thus makes a terrible general purpose currency because it's vulnerable to manipulations, and rigidity that make it easy for bankers and insiders rob everyone. The modern form of debt backed currency is the most flexible and least vulnerable to manipulation there has ever been. Our advanced modern currency has weathered the pressures of the current economic stresses extremely well, and dramatically lessened the impact of the current problems with our economy. If you want to look at what things where like with a scarcity backed currency, look at the economics of the US pre 1913. It's full of horror stories like the panic of 1893 and 1873, and even some events where bankers conspired to not give out loans to anyone to buy up houses cheap and re-sell them for a profit once they all agreed to give out mortgages again.

> transparent intercept on port 80. And no, the proxy doesn't accept CONNECT. We even block ICMP, so no ping-tunnels

Bypassing a school firewall for dummies:

    1. Pull out your smartphone

My previous company did this and I was never comfortable with it. I did not have their certificates loaded, so it prevented me from talking through their proxy when they tried to intercept my traffic. The only connections I saw it attack this way were to google. I did try both of my bank's web sites and the certificates used there were original so the traffic there was not intercepted. That made me feel a bit better, but I'm not all that comfortable with my employer having access to the passwords I use outside the company.

This company was extremely security paranoid after a widely publicised hack hurt their reputation badly, so I understand the actions, and they're probably on legally solid ground, but a piece of me still considers this hacking and unlawful, and another part of me considers the fact that you can silently hack SSL this way a HUGE hole in security.

The fact that I have to trust that my employer isn't sniffing my banking passwords tells me SSL isn't doing it's job.

The weather doesn't pay to inform people as to what it will be like in the next few days. Why should we expect political candidates to pay to inform us? I can't imagine a system less likely to get the right person into the job.

Money in politics isn't the problem, it's that money is what determines who wins. If someone spends a fortune running for office, but a broke, mild mannered person who does no fundraising, but happens to be a great choice for the job happens to win instead, then we've fixed the system.

I expect the fix would require a lot of trust-based information gathering and distribution, where people put a lot of thought and effort into objectively determining candidates suitability for the job, and then those results are disseminated to people who seek it out and can then make better informed decisions. Political journalism used to fill this need, but it has devolved into parroting press releases full of spin, and is worse than useless now. I think we need a new system of evaluating candidates, and there's a ton of ways it can be done, but at it's core there should be the goal of counteracting the corrupting force of money and allowing the best person for the job to get it.

Microsoft's keyboards last 1-2 years for me before I start having to press a bit harder on the keys to make them trigger, and that's not good for you. I did them for years, but I've decided I'm switching to mechanical switch keyboards (Cherry MX Brown based) since the prices are coming down and they have become popular as "gaming" keyboards which makes them a lot easier to find in different configurations. I have a few CM Storm ones I like, but I'm eyeing a Logitech backlit one too. It should end up cheaper in the long-run, since I was replacing the old ones so often, and these are much nicer to type on.

Messing with keyboard layouts is not something to be taken lightly. Just like you wouldn't reverse the break and gas pedals on a car, moving keys around on the keyboard should not be done trivially. That said, the caps lock key is in one of the most easily accessible locations on the keyboard, and its one of the keys we use the least. It should be moved, and replaced with one we use more often. Personally, I'd like to see a new modifier key here. One thing I have done in the past, is to re-map my caps lock key to alt, which can be done with a Windows registry setting. This makes using key combinations much easier, which is nice when you're playing WoW and need as many keyboard shortcuts as you can get.

This is a problem, but this isn't unemployment, it's not shrinking real wages, it's not long term recession, and it's a problem that has existed since technology began. Job elimination has a temporary downside and a permanent upside. This is well known. The entire unemployment benefits system is designed to mitigate the downsides of this because that downside is well understood. So should we all become luddites? Of course not. The problem here isn't that the job was eliminated, but that high paying replacement jobs aren't available. This economy is what needs to be fixed, not progress that leads to job elimination.

This definitely *is* the goal, and people who imagine automation destroying lives and healthy job prospects don't understand economics. This is a symptom, not a cause. You don't blame the firemen for the fire, and you don't blame automation for unemployment, despite the obvious correlation between the two.

This should be obvious, since if you take away technology's elimination of jobs from human development, we're all living like cavemen, all working hard, but all working on food, shelter and clothing, and still starving to death and dying from exposure and all the jobs and lives we have now wouldn't be possible. Technology eliminating jobs is as old as technology itself, and it's part of the most important good an economy can bring to our lives. The mistake that's being made here is equating unemployment with job elimination. They're not the same thing, and they have vastly different causes and effects. Job elimination is progress, is good for economies and people, and is caused by technological advancement. Unemployment, is bad for economies and people, and it's causes are economic and political. Technological advancement aids by providing the constant elimination of jobs, but under a properly functioning economy jobs that are eliminated inevitably result in others being created. Technology can no more cause unemployment than bringing water home from the beach and flushing it down the toilet can lower sea level. To think it can is to not understand the whole picture of how things are connected.

Our current problem is that our economy is being operated extractively, allowing people to make money from owning things instead of working. This is breaks economies and destroys jobs, and is bad for people who have to work for a living. Our problem is an economic one, not a technological one, and it's relatively easily fixable, but the fix requires the political will to take wealth and power from the wealthy and powerful, and that's not something that comes about easily.