All the government needs to do to stop these financial leeches is to tax Really Short Term Capital Gains at a higher rate than normal gains.

I'm waiting for Wikileaks to release Mitt Romney's tax returns from the last 20 years.

The comments about dirty power are interesting. My son has smart meter paranoia, and has invested in a half dozen "Stetzerizers" . Google that. I found the patent on "Stetzerizer" and it consists of a ten microfarad capacitor across the ac line. For this they charge $30, you can buy them on Amazon. They also sell, for a hundred bucks, a dirty power meter which you can also find the patent for, it consists of a high pass RC filter an op amp and a rectifier. It reads in stetzer units which are nowhere defined and no information on how the meters are calibrated. Really. Google it.

Zigbee here in Naperville. The data is encrypted, there is currently no way for a user to get real time data from the meter. They offer (soon) a web site where you can look up yesterdays data. They will at some point sell you a device which will display the meter readings in the house but it does not have any network connectivity. I was hoping to include the meter readings in an Arduino based home monitoring network display but doesn't look likely.

I run Ubuntu 10.04 LTE on a Thinkpad 770Z. It has 390 Megs of ram, 350 Mhz Pii. The automatic upgrades changed Firefox 3.6 up to Firefox 10 a month or so ago and I see 10 using more memory and is a bit slower. It is not swapping and is still usable. I have thought about upgrading this laptop but most of the machines on sale now for less than $1000 do not have as good a display as this 1999 model. Or a better keyboard. Or a serial port.

On my computers, Chrome is slower than Firefox 10.

I haven't been there in 15 years but the Detroit Historical Museam had one on display.