I live in a metropolitan area with one cable provider and a dsl provider. A few years ago, short on cash, I discovered I could sign up for a six month special with the cable provider (1/2 price), then at the end of 6 months opt out before the full price kicked in. The telco offered a similar 1/2 price, 6 month deal with an opt out at the end of the 6 month period. The good part was both providers allowed me to sign up for another 1/2 price deal after I'd been off their service for 6 months. I played one off the other for about 18 months. It's a bit off topic in terms of bandwidth but if you're getting screwed by the big guys (and you are) you might see if you can play one provider off another in a similar fashion. just thought it might help anyone penny pinching.

Last Saturday I was really bored and got around to updating my acer Aspire One N270, netbook running 9.10. I was watching the upgrades when I noticed the Ubuntu 10.04 install button, so, bored, I did what my dad would do and clicked on it. It took 5 hours to complete and so far I've had only the one painful issue. Mauve, really mauvy purple with white shinny highlights. What's next? brightly coloured ponies and unicorns? I run a lot of stuff on my little netbook and so far so good. Maybe Ubuntu has become the, for now, ultimate net OS. just say'n.

Although it wasn't an 8.04 LTS to 10.04 LTS upgrade it went well and runs well. Long may it run.

This dance has been in full swing for a while now and seems not to be going anywhere but round and round, which is OK as far as dancing goes. There are informed people who have made informed posts from various countries but I keep coming back to two main points. One: if social sites, or, any person or company is profiting from your personal information then that information has value. If your personal information has value and you contract for it's use then it's up to you to limit the use the other contracting party can make of your personal information and the consideration you should receive for giving up your personal information. Capacity (old enough to contract), Consideration (value received) and Agency (legal right to contract for the goods and services) are fundamental. Basic contract law, like basic statistics, is fundamental to negotiating one's way in a modern world. It must be part of any grade school curriculum. Evidently most people are as woefully ignorant of the basics of contract law as they are of statistics and aren't able to competently navigate a modern market place. One option might be for everyone to incorporate and seed their Me corp. with their private information as an asset. I recognize this is in some ways an outlandish proposition but OTOH it may be a good way to instruct individuals from the age of majority in how to conduct their affairs in a market place where contracts have an air of sanctity and much legal weight. Secondly, (just as an aside I don't have a face book account, no myspace, no youtube) the whole social networking scene reminds me of ancient news reels from the 20s and 30s when people sat atop flagpoles and swallowed live goldfish just to get their mugs front and centre on a newsreel and make a splash in the shallow end of the new medium. Don't dismiss the possibility that all they big market cap social networking sites will just die off like personal web sites from the late 90s. As people realize they're being ripped off and as people become versed in technology the reliance on big social sites might fade as fast as they appeared and the content they hosted will be, for the most part, lost and forgotten.

I don't disagree and would add in CDex as another example, but Nero is one of the few for profit companies that seem to have made an effort to put out a good product at a fair price. There's always been a few companies whose PC products are reasonably priced and worth the cost. Norton Utilities was perhaps the most shining example. I almost always get a free light version of Nero software when I buy a high end optical drive or a TV card/ripper. I'll pick up their latest full suite when it pops up on my radar screen at half price because the lite version still measures up well against the free stuff. One of the biggest problems vendors like Nero face is that MS knows it has to keep adding brain candy apps for the point and click crowd and MS will drive niche vendors out of business to keep their OS/Office products afloat. It's just a temporary bother because an OS in 10 years time will come with a full suite of audio video scrapbook apps for mom and pop and the kids to play with.

just my loose change

I've little to no idea of the procedures and parts you wrote of but I think it speaks eloquently to the Scientific American article that points out BP is the only entity with what is seen as viable technology and the know how to implement it. Any forced change over from BP to U.S. government control of the spill catastrophe might interfere with technical management and solution deployment. I would like to see BP made to comply with total transparency and openness as regards all information requirements necessary to fully understand the entire incident.

Have you developed your own commonsense protocols for working in your home lab environment or do you follow established protocols from professional labs. I live in a high density metropolitan area and don't own anything other than a bbq that could create unpleasant externalities for my neighbours, and, I find working in a necessarily protocol heavy lab environment tiring YMMV. I prefer to maybe murder cats in gedenken gas chambers.

Lying a lot helps a lot. Try, say, cheating on your S.O. with a disastrous divorce as a consequence and just keep track of all the particulars of the lies you tell. It's as much or more conditioning and impetus as it is genes.

Much like the initial debate over the existence of black holes there seems to be lots of wiggle room when it comes to declaring whether the Universe is in a runaway state, whether it's just expanding, or, whether it will collapse. This Standford Uni link gives a quick overview and suggests in ~15bn years it'll collapse to the size of a proton. The Yale Astrophysics Course, IIRC, is strongly steeped in black hole theory and so speaks to the same issues.

Transcranial Magnetic Stmulation is used to ameliorate auditory hallucinations in schizophrenics.

Keys, plus a Swiss army knife and a couple of key cards. Invariably they eat a hole in a pants pocket. I tried wearing a photographers vest with rugged Velcro, lock down pockets but found it overly warm and bulky. I tried wearing the clutter around my neck, but again it was awkward, especially as a just so length to the necklace was never amenable to a Goldilocks' Solution. It even prompted me to look into the market for a type of light weight yoke with removable features like pockets and clips (ammo and otherwise :)). If you factor in all the wifi gear it's begs for a geeky, money making solution. I really think a pliable, extensible yoke with an extended capability for addons would be a good solution.

A handful of years ago I gave some thought to some business ideas that could make use of phone booths. I wondered if they could be viably transformed into secure, internet transaction booths, keeping the coin payment system as an option to CC payment. Phone booths have a high profile/key location thing going for them that's just waiting for the right entrepreneurial insight.

It's unlikely to do any good lobbying Harper. Harper's unfulfilled dream is to be President of the U.S.A. He's as much big business, especially big oil business, as any American President could be. Further Harper's modus operandi demands he serve the wishes of the copyright lobby. His use of the media to cast his opponents in the worst possible light is his guiding star as a politician. He's a consummate sophist, seemingly utterly without any philosophy, other than to win and hold onto power. He has done cameos in various popular TV shows in slick, self deprecating clips. A politician who relies as heavily on superficial, mass media self promotion as does Harper will cut a wink 'n nod, tacit deal with big media companies. I think it's critically important to note the heavy use politicians in all countries make of mass media to further their political agendas. In the U.S.A. a loop is closing around the American citizenry. Big government, the military industrial complex and big, mass media corporations comprise an unholy trinity. In Canada the military industrial complex is missing but the possible crippling of the rights of individual citizens remains as much of a threat as corporations are given greater entitlements while being able to shield themselves from just punishments for their wrong doings. Two main problems come from the need to create jobs and compete internationally. Politicians need job creation programmes to bring home the bacon to their constituents and big business can deliver massive job creation programmes as well as threaten massive job losses. Further the majority of advanced, industrialized countries seemed to have opted for promoting mega corporations as a new, privileged class akin to medieval knights whose resources better ensure successful international competition.

My reading of your post coupled to my understanding prompting my post suggests the issue could get very tricksy, very quickly, but be interesting nonetheless. IIRC the context in which Bacon made his remark, I'm unable to source it, addressed the idea that physical law trumped idle conjecture and placed constraints on the possible. When I commented on privacy in nature I wasn't referring to a sort of J-J Rousseau theory of social contract but rather to the state in the wild as it exists between all animals. In nature territory defended against competing life forms may be the closest analogy to privacy, but like I said this could all get very tricky. Mill (the younger?) and Locke spoke to government and private property. Private property and privacy are social constructs, as is government. I've a bad feeling I'm missing an obvious premise here but at least I'd like to point out my comment on privacy was directed to the much broader context of nature rather than human artifacts and artifice.

cheers

You can, if you're wreckless. :)

"While all things are possible, not all things are permitted."Francis Bacon (17th C)

Bacon made his remark in a different context but I think it's germane in that privacy is legislated and enforced, and not naturally occurring.

Britain, at least from my POV, has undertaken a huge, perhaps unprecedented social experiment in immigration and mosaic, cultural restructuring. Significant immigration is necessary to bolster a competitive country's domestic workforce and it's international competitiveness, but, as everyone knows, it almost always brings with it social problems. The hue and cry historical precedent, in a skewed way speaks to a more European openness to a community policing itself whether by a sort of neighbourhood watch or a ring of cameras monitoring the streets. It's possible that North Americans, especially in the U.S.A. and Canada, are more sensitive to privacy concerns because development of the new world permitted far greater degree of privacy.

The above aside, I'm deeply vested in the concerns of the article because I'm interested in statistical modeling of political decisions and ways of abstracting inferences from personal data. I was fairly well schooled in statistics and probability to an undergraduate level but don't pretend to as wide an understanding of the field as I once had. While my interest is keyed to the problems of the individual in relation to the group, the relationship between an individual to the social unit speaks directly to privacy concerns. If my fledgling hypotheses are in any way indicative of what might be on the horizon then it's likely that along with the milieu that has spawned our current privacy concerns there are new tools that will let data be abstracted from the new milieu in a way that not only safeguards the privacy of individuals but might enhance one's privacy. Without blurting out my tentative ideas, possibly lucrative, and getting bitch slapped by some stats prof, I still think it's fair to say there's lots of room and time for the data that is now available to spawn a new tool set that will correct any current incursions into personal privacy.