If the computer is shocking you, it's time to throw it away. If voltage is leaking to the chassis there's a serious fault somewhere that creates a risk of fire and a risk of bodily harm. You'll know this is the case because it will keep on shocking you, not just once and done.

If you are shocking the computer, it's because you aren't grounded and are building up a static charge. Three things help with this:

1) Wear a grounding wrist strap when you work on the computer.
2) Avoid clothing that encourages static build up, e.g. wool.
3) Increase the relative humidity in the room with a humidifier. The TIA 942 data center standard recommends 40%-55%.

Picking a nit:

1. Installing a new CA certificate does not modify the network stack. Adding and removing CA certificates is an ordinary operation.

2. All root certificates are self-signed. If your certificate is signed by something else, it's not a root certificate.

This is a long con where the end result is going to be a reality TV show.

Firefox abandoned its roots. It started as a "light weight" version of netscape. It is now by far the most bloated application living on my PC.

Don't get discouraged. The telcos have a habit of outsmarting themselves.

When the FCC first mandated CLECs, the telcos bellyached about how unfair it was that a CLEC could wire up an office building cherry-picking the high-margin clients while the LEC was stuck serving all the low-margin customers it was required to serve by law. This could surely be fixed by requiring the originating carrier to pay the terminating carrier a cent a minute for the call. After all, if the LEC wasn't cherry-picking then it'd all balance out and nobody would pay anybody anything.

Thought themselves right clever. Then the Internet came along and ISPs bought phone lines that did nothing but terminate calls 24 hours a day. Some clever CLECs realized they could provide phone lines to ISPs for free and milk the phone company. Those cents per minute really add up.

Point is, when the rulemaking is done and the tariffs are filed, there will be opportunity. It's impossible to know where it'll be today, but it'll be there.

Until you actually -can- lease last mile L1 or L2 infrastructure at a sane rate there's little point considering the question.

If you're looking for some meat, read about DSL competition back at the turn of the century. To compete you realistically had to lease space in the telco's facility and then buy expensive SONET service for backhaul, also from the telco who was the only vendor in the telco's facility. And you had to be in every telco facility that served at least one of your customers which except for the smallest towns meant dozens or even more. Small ISP's could not directly compete.

Instead, middlemen like Covad stepped up and built an infrastructure. Small ISPs could buy lines through Covad that came back as virtual circuits on a frame relay or ATM circuit at a convenient location for the ISP.

Your products started at 2 to 3 times the cost of the telco's product, but you could build niche products (IP addresses, routing, etc.) that the telco couldn't or wouldn't replicate.

That article isn't slanted at all. Not at all. It goes on to complain that traitor Bradley Manning's wikipedia page wasn't promptly moved to reflect her (sic) new name. Because obviously Wikipedia should reference folks by their current names not the ones under which they gained sufficient notoriety to be referenced on Wikipedia in the first place.

Clearly the article presents a fair and balanced view of the arbcom's horrible terrible no good very bad decision.

I 'spose if the Sun is going to explode next year we should probably act faster but in general that's right: we shouldn't enact policy whose cost has a dozen zeros behind it until the science has been generating reliable predictions for decades.

Hear hear!

When the theory accounts for the evidence from all repeatable experiments and sufficient time has passed (typically a couple of decades) during which new experiments aggressively attempting to disprove the theory fail to turn up evidence which either contradicts the theory or requires the theory to be modified.

We had no public policy on CO2 emissions for most of recorded history. The world has not ended.

Proposed policy on global warming is expensive. Too expensive to get a second chance if we get it wrong the first time. The smart money says: wait until the computer models become reliable enough to simulate exactly what will and won't work. God help us if we regulate CO2 and it turns out that global warming was real but carbon soot was the main problem.

None. When science hasn't fully resolved a question based on the evidence, none of the competing theories should be used as a basis for public policy.

Yes, it's called consensus and no, it isn't science. Not when politicians do it. Not when scientists do it.

Scientists have as much (or as little) integrity as the next guy. Fortunately the scientific method yields tools for outing the ones who acted with little integrity. Unfortunately, scientists with little integrity tend to move the discussion into into politics before the integrity problem can catch up with them, after which science kinda goes out the window.

Manning stands accused of the latter. Some of his emails focused on how to discredit folks who dispute his findings suggest those accusations have some merit. If you want to keep politics out of science, you simply can't engage on a political level.

No. Just no. Finding a new way to confirm an old theory is just as successful science as testing a new theory. Finding a way to refute an established theory is highly successful science which rarely happens, and finding the new theory that fits all the data -and- whose predictions survive the test of time is rare genius.

Test of time is important. If you have to incrementally revise the theory as new data comes in, it's not a very solid theory.

A theory which, sadly, has been discredited in the past decade or so.

http://science.slashdot.org/st...

http://science.slashdot.org/st...

Well, if it's goal was improved reliability or making the sysadmin's life easier it missed by quite a bit. If it's goal was something else, then it's moving in a direction other than the reason I wanted Debian for.

Red Hat uses upstart. It's as nasty if not nastier than systemd.