I voted in a municipal election in Toronto, Canada earlier this week. Not on the voter's list? No problem--you can register at one of the city clerk's offices. There's five of them, serving a population of 2.6 million people. Oh, and they're open from 8:30am to 4:30pm, Monday to Friday. So that should be a snap to get to, as long as you don't have a full-time job, or a child to care for, or mobility issues. (You don't mind choosing between a couple of extra bus fares and eating lunch, do you?)

I followed the campaign closely, I was aware of the major issues of the day (as well as the minor issues that didn't get nearly enough coverage), I had strongly-held opinions based in thorough, extended research--and I registered to vote on the day of the election.

The notion that all people who didn't register in advance are somehow lazy, unworthy, and incompetent is canard that punishes the working poor, the single parents, the handicapped. Looking in from the outside, it's apparent that it's one piece of a larger Republican campaign to disenfranchise as many Democratic-leaning voters as possible. It's a story that is propagated by Fox News, the viewers of which are exemplars of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

'Approved' isn't the right word.

OneGet has the notion of 'trusted' repositories. We're likely to expand this concept a bit in the future, but for now, that's what it is.

Built-in package sources from reputable sources may be marked as 'trusted' by default, but the majority of sources should be 'untrusted' until the user makes that change.

The real trick is getting package provider plugins to tell OneGet the truth if a repository is trusted or not.

I suspect that we're going to have to introduce a level of trust with the package providers too, and expose this to the user ... somehow.

You've got a really good point.

We're tossing around some notions about different factors that make a 'package' or 'repository' trustworthy.

I'm sure we can do some stuff with signed repositories and signed packages to detect when things 'change' and/or keep unsigned repositories 'untrusted'.

Really, our first target for this stuff is developers and admins, not my mom...

Well, considering that the chocolatey provider for OneGet points to the community-controlled repository, I'll have to take that as a win :)

The concept of curated repositories is one that we're really trying to come up without screwing it up.

Regardless, with OneGet, the *user* maintains control. Which repositories they connect to, what software they install.

Actually, to be perfectly clear, OneGet isn't really a package manager.

It's a package-manager-manager -- It's a unified way of installing packages of software regardless of the how-it's-implemented-on-the-back-end.

The first real package provider plugin is a Chocolatey one. Why re-invent the wheel when the wheel already works?

The purpose here is to leverage all these different sources of software using a common set of commands and APIs.

Anything that can be represented as a 'source' of software can be plugged in on the back end. I'm aiming for plugins for NPM, Ruby Gems, Python, on top of the expected MSI, Chocolatey, NuGet, etc...

Plugins can be written by anyone, and I'm going to great lengths to make it as simple as possible -- it's about ~15 or so functions to implement and we can plug in virtually any package format or service into OneGet.

[FYI -- I'm @FearTheCowboy everywhere else, my /. id is so old that my name got trimmed from "His Name Cannot Be Spoken" 15ish years ago when they did a database adjustment... ]

I have had thoughts on how to do this; I suspect that while we may not set up a repo to do that, I may hack out the instructions on how that could be done easily if one wanted to maintain their own.

It really boils down to how much time I can throw at that.

Of course, we also want it to plug into WU and WSUS, but that'll be a bit more down the road.

You know, I just put together now that "SJW" is intended to be an acronym for "Social Justice Warrior" (which is in turn intended to be a derogatory phrase meaning, as far as I can tell, "uppity feminist"). For some weeks now, I have been pondering what the internet has against straight (or single) Jewish women. Now it makes a lot more sense.

That the "reasonable" faction of the male IT world - that the parent poster would like to think he represents - seems to believe that the SJW caricature represents a non-trivial force that is conspiring against him is troubling. That the acronym SJW exists and is presumably widely understood in his circles is rather more revealing about (his part of) "IT culture" than he probably thinks.

Don't get me wrong, the parent poster is better than the grandparent asshole who believes all rapes are imaginary--but just being better than the anonymous trolling asshole isn't setting a high bar.

When it's an infraction that is easy to avoid? Yeah, sign me up. (And what's this "permanent unemployment" nonsense?)

No one accidentally has a beer, and no one accidentally gets behind the wheel of a car. If there were a way to ensure that selfish assholes only put their own lives at risk, that would be one thing--but this situation isn't that. Incidentally, I feel the same way about the people who think they're still good drivers when they're on their cell phones. (To be clear, that's everyone who is driving while using a portable electronic device. No, you aren't special.)

Not quite true. You have to be white, and preferably wealthy or a member of a police force, and preferably directing that violence toward a person of color. Being from a red state helps, too.

To give the devil his due, the best locations for solar installs tend to be sites that aren't very valuable for agriculture, residential, commercial, or manufacturing use. They're out in the desert. This isn't to say that desert land is valueless (economically or environmentally) but generally it is a type of land that - until now - we have had very little incentive to exploit, and there is an awful lot of it.

There's a limit to how good things can get on the solar panel side. The best multi-junction photovoltaic cells, at the cost of great complexity, are able to reach about 45% efficiency in the laboratory. The absolute maximum theoretical efficiency is about 85% (requiring materials and manufacturing processes that haven't been discovered and probably don't exist). One server per square meter is still pitifully low density. On the bright side, the cooling problems get to be much easier to deal with, I guess.

As for the per-server power draw decreasing--that's true, though it's happening slowly. And the trend has certainly been to increase the number of servers in a data center (or the number of blades in a rack) much, much faster than the per-server energy consumption has gone down.

This isn't to say that I'm opposed to rooftop solar. The balance between rooftop area and demand is much more favorable if you look at, for instance, suburban homes (which are admittedly otherwise environmentally disastrous). And rooftops are 'dead' space otherwise, that might as well be doing something useful like producing electricity. My point was only that the suggestion that all would be solved if the data centers put solar panels on their rooftops (or even their parking lots and windows) was nonsense. And, incidentally, that the most efficient places to put solar generating facilities are actually a long way from where the majority of people are living.

Above the atmosphere, at the equator, the average insolation (that is, the amount of incoming solar energy, averaged over the course of a day) is about 400 watts per square meter. At the bottom of the atmosphere in an ideal location (like the Sahara) it's closer to 300 W/sq. m. In most places where people want to have data centers, the number is closer to 200 W/sq. m...or worse. And the efficiency of commercial solar panels runs about 20%, so you're down to 40 watts per square meter.

200 watts is (optimistically) about the draw of a single server, so you're looking at powering one server for every five square meters of rooftop. If you want to run on rooftop solar, then you're going to have to design a data center with very short racks and very wide aisles.

Indeed. One wonders what remarkable scientific discoveries and conclusions will result from creative analysis of today's data, forty years hence.

...At least, as long as we actually do continue to fund new instruments and research, and don't insist that all data collection is now 'done', and that all the work that remains is winnowing smaller and smaller pieces of useful information from the last century's scientific output.

No ,they don't need a minimum level of proof to carry out the seizure. They need a minimum level of proof to defend the seizure in court--which is a totally different ball game. Attorneys cost money, even if fees are eventually awarded many potential plaintiffs can't afford to be out of pocket for the time (months or years) required for a case to make its way through the courts. Seizures made against out-of-town and out-of-state victims are even harder to challenge--it can be quite costly to repeatedly travel to a distant jurisdiction's courts, even if you can afford to take the time off work. And to challenge even a blatantly illegal seizure is to invite additional scrutiny and future harrassment.

If crooked cops can hit the 'sweet spot' of around a few thousand dollars, in most cases it's going to be too much of a hassle and expense for a victim to fight.

The reason is because the Icelandic alphabet has two different letters that produce a sound that could be written "th" in English. The letter eth (Ð or ð) is a voiced "th", like in "they" or "this"; whereas the letter thorn (Wikipedia link, since Slashdot won't render it) is unvoiced, like in "thistle" or "theater". By convention, eth is transliterated as "d", whereas thorn is transliterated as "th". It does make some sense, as "d" is a voiced consonant, so that in addition to the look being similar, the naive pronunciation isn't horribly wrong. (And it means that someone seeing a "th" in an English transliteration of Icelandic text knows that it's unvoiced, so they'll get the pronunciation right.) And for better or for worse, it's the accepted transliteration, so if you want to fight it you're fighting against convention.

The gross transliteration error that kills me is when someone substitutes P or p for the thorn and turns something like Thingvellir into Pingvellir. That's just horribly wrong.