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.

> Flash isn't an archival medium.

Anything can be an archival medium, it's just a question of if it's good at it. Fash has been in large-scale use for 20 years now. It became the primary way computers stored their BIOS back in 95 so I think we have a fairly good understanding of it's long-term storage characteristics. Optical won't die today, and I expect the market to stay strong for 5 or 10 years, but in 20, it will be all but gone.

Optical has had a good run, but I'm betting that in 2037, optical will be dying or dead.

There's a lot of theoretical improvements left in optical disk technology, but they're unlikely to become common or cheap. I see possibly one generation after Blu-ray before the consumer standards stop and the access to cheap technology to drive advancements in optical storage disappears. Spinning disk is largely thought of as the primary competitor, but what's going to give optical the biggest headache is flash.

Flash storage's non-existent power requirements, extremely high density, naturally long read-only lifespan, re-usability, and flexible expansion options make it poised to take over the world of archival storage if it can come anywhere near cost-parity. My bet is that it will make it.

Nuclear is the most dangerous way to generate power.. except all the other ways.

People get all freaked out about how dangerous nuclear power generation can be, and ignore how dangerous all the other forms of power generation *actually are*. They get upset at the potential for long-term damage to the environment but ignore the massive ecological devastation that coal and oil and natural gas are constantly doing to the world. Look at Deepwater Horizon for example. Oil will be fouling and poisoning the gulf for an extremely long time, and the chemicals used in the cleanup will likely reduce the lifespan of the people who helped in the cleanup dramatically. When you look at the damage caused to people and to the environment of power generation objectively, nuclear is by far the safest and least damaging option, even factoring Fukishima and Chernobyl which represent risks that are unlikely to cause problems in the future.

Compared to every other way I have of watching movies like:
Netflix
Amazon prime
The Pirate Bay

DVD quality is terrible. I don't have a blu-ray player. I may never.

I find it hard to believe that anti-competitive collusion between competitors is ever "perfectly legal". There's a lot of laws out there dealing with this type of thing, there must be at least one that makes this illegal. Of course, laws that aren't enforced effectively don't exist.

I can't believe there wouldn't be a law somewhere on the books that would make it illegal for all your competitors to gang up together and buy patents to try and lock you out of the market. I'm assuming the laws exist, but they figure they've got enough legal mojo to fend off weak government anti-trust regulators.

I think World of Warcraft is probably the most couple friendly online game. You can group together and level, run instances, figure out gear, fight other people. I played with my wife for a while, and I ran into a lot of couples in WoW who played together. It lets you be brave, and protective and helpful and accomplish goals together. There's stories and fantastical places which make it interesting to just about anyone.

IMO, wherever hard links aren't, inodes should be inlined into the directory entries and read and stored in cache whenever the directory entry is read. Hard links make up a small percentage of files, especially in typical large-scale storage systems. Inlining inodes should solve a lot of unixy performance issues, but retrofitting arbitrary placement of inodes into filesystem code is prohibitively difficult because unix expects inodes to be accessible independant from a directory entry. A nice middle ground might be making inlining inodes a filesystem creation option which disables hardlinking on that filesystem. This is obviously doable since NTFS can be mounted on Linux.

Another nice option might be to add a separate piece of metadata which would be changed whenever an inode or the file it's attached to change that's attached to the directory entry. This way, a scan of a filesystem for changes could be quickly thorough. Essentially a directory stored mtime.

Stating the files on filesystems that require that is usually orders of magnitude more time consuming than the actual directory reading. IMO, filesystems should store mtime in the directory entry and readdir calls should return it.