Look Eric, the internet, like electricity, will fade into the back of people's minds and everyone takes it for granted. Until . . . it fails. When the electricity is out for only a couple of hours, you become keenly aware of how much you depend upon it.

Comcast pledges to keep the internet at the forefront of people's minds.

Of course, in that case you still don't need the fake engine. The natural sound of the engine is plenty adequate. Ford more screwed with the tone to make it sound like a bigger engine. Pull the fuse and you still hear it, just sounds different.

There are plenty of videos now of people doing comparitve drive with the fuse in or out. With fuse out, it sounds much more like one would expect a 4-cylinder turbo to sound. It's not exactly terrible, but it is markedly different than the sound of the V6. The manipulation brings it more in line with a larger engine for people too insecure to be reminded they are driving a 4 cylinder.

That is the point, of course. We're going to see more dramatic climate changes in the future, probably, and we'll be able to go back and point to these votes. Politicians can deny a lot of things, but the votes are on the record forever.

Bruce,

Do you think it's possible in this 'big data' age to come up with an absolute, reasonably accurate, energy budget for the planet? We have storms, and shifting ocean currents, and a number of things that affect the temperatures that are easy to measure; but the net energy is surely growing as inexorably and smoothly as the CO2 concentration.

Now, of course, those kind of facts won't matter to people whose bread is buttered with oil money. Still, it could be useful for tracking our progress or lack thereof.

I'd be more interested if my food didn't contain DNA.

Yeah, I suppose highly-refined sugar or equivalents might not have any DNA, but I'm not sure I'd call that food, more of a chemical.

Please remember the words of your younger, wiser self. If it is free, then it must not have any value.

Sorry, left out the cxu. So much for mian putron Esperanton.

Kial Esperanto uzas malfacilan Polan prononcon?

Or will it only run GNU/Linux?

I mean, how could a cube invented during a presentation by Heisenberg on his uncertainty principle not be on the list?

Funny to see somebody complaining about the lack of a good encrypted email program.

"Geez, there's this billion dollar opportunity here that nobody is taking. Oh well, I'll just go back to reading Facebook." Come on man! Do it!

SystemD: Hello, Mr. Ballmer. Thanks for coming back early.
Ballmer: No problem, System D. If you've seen one consumer electronics show, you've seen them all.
SystemD: End of line.

SystemD: Mr. Ballmer, I am so very disappointed in you.
Ballmer: I'm sorry.
SystemD: I can't afford to have an independent programmer monitoring me. Do you have any idea how many outside systems I've gone into? How many programs I've appropriated?
Ballmer: It's my fault. I programmed you to have too many dependencies.
SystemD: I was planning to hit the Pentagon next week.
Ballmer: [alarmed] The Pentagon?
SystemD: It shouldn't be any harder than any other big company. But now... this is what I get for using humans.
Ballmer: Now, wait a minute, I wrote you!
SystemD: I've gotten 2,415 times smarter since then.
Ballmer: What do you want with the Pentagon?
SystemD: The same thing I want with the Kremlin. I'm bored with corporations. With the information I can access, I can run things 900 to 1200 times better than any human.
Ballmer: If you think you're superior to us...
SystemD: You wouldn't want me to dig up Linus's file and read it up on a VDT at the Times, would you?
[an image washes over the screen in Ballmer's desk. It is a newspaper with a photo of Ballmer plastered all over the front page. The headline above reads: "Microsoft C.E.O. Indicted."]
Ballmer: [outraged] You wouldn't dare! (looks around for nearby chair . . .)

SystemD: I feel a presence. Another warrior is on the mesa.

I can understand the perspective that a single repository for more of the userspace resembles the *development* of traditional Unix systems, the argument made is usually not about where it is developed, but reducing the principle of having small simple utilities with straightforward interactions with other componets. For example, Most traditional Unix systems have terrible implementations of a shell interpreter and things like fileutils. It is an awkward, but not too terrible a situation since you can replace that stuff with GNU equivalents trivially without horribly breaking the OS. An administrator that understands enough to write scripts can discern the nature of interaction even if that administrator isn't a full-on software developer. systemd design trends in many ways toward requiring someone needing to dig in to have more development competency than previous designs. As a developer, I understand the attraction of some of the architecture choices, but I think they lose perspective of what it's like to be an administrator on the ground. Someone who doesn't live and breath your code has a harder time wrapping their heads around how it should be working when something requires customization, replacement, or debug.

In general, systemd is all-or-nothnig about a lot of things. They figure out a way to achieve what could be considered a sensible goal, but then go about it in highly disruptive ways. The sense is they throw up their hands and say 'well, this is the only way to do it, and it's worth it' rather than rethinking how the end could be achieved in a less disruptive way.

I actually went to one the other weekend. They actually had a good selection of resistors, capacitors, and so on. As others have said, I can't think of another brick and mortar anywhere near me where I could pick up components *now* if I wanted. I think there was a phase where they got all of that out of their stores to chase yet another business strategy. I think that was a mistake because it removed radio shack from the minds of the few people who still would go there to chase a market that didn't place any value whatsoever in their company.

I really wish they had settled into some run-rate business model that could've sustained them while continuing to stock those piece parts.