Batman's a scientist!

This is how an american responds to suggestions that work in other countries: "But we're like, so .. different man. You can't possibly understand the challenges we face."

It's horseshit.

Linux and the software available for it has finally reached the point for me that I can use it on my daily-use hardware. There is nothing I want to do that cannot be done under Linux now, GIMP be damned.

Mint with Cinnamon is a damn fine usable OS.

Windows 8 and it's tablet-wannabe interface will forever remain a distant nightmare of 'What might have been'.

I guess my warped way of thinking just can't embrace the notion of supporting a political party. I understand the need for governance of some kind to maintain social order, I understand being conservative in your views, or liberal, but I question the whole concept of being part of a political organization when so many members of that party are so manifestly corrupt, morally subversive or just plain vile. Why would you want to be part of anything that has even a little bit of rot in it?

from James Killough's excellent article 'Do Republicans Dream of Electric Elephants':

http://purefilmcreative.com/killough-chronicles/do-republicans-dream-of-electric-sheep.html

It also doesn't apply to things people can go without and things people cannot go without. That is a sliding scale. I wish people would get it through their skulls that free markets are not free when consumers are not free to not participate at all.

To say nothing that market sellers have every reason to try and make those markets as non-transparent as possible - people do not magically gravitate towards honest sellers any more than they magically gravitate towards some kind of mathematically pure value. You know why advertising, marketing, customer relationship management, etc exists? You are easily manipulated. We all are. Doesn't matter that much when it comes to luxuries. When it comes to what should be basic needs, you really don't want every market seller to realize that 20% of their customer base accounts for 80% of their profits.

Holy fuck, did you just equate the law of gravity with ... laws of economics? You mean the equation that hasn't changed since the dawn of the universe with .. what the fuck, a law of economics?

Since that's a lot of information, and welcome at that, why wouldn't you specify your country?

Good god, that is some stupid sauce. It's a good thing you don't always act in your own self-interest, no matter how hard you try.

I wouldn't disagree with what you say, in general, except for, "Profit motive is the most moral engine of economic progress."

It's false to suggest that we are forced to choose and follow only one motivation for economic progress. Also, the profit motive may not explicitly discriminate (I find that assertion pretty assailable in and of itself), but it's perfectly capable of implicitly discriminating.

I believe you are confusing the simple elegance of the profit motive for inherent moral value.

Apparently, I'll never understand Slashdot. The latest junk from Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Oracle, et al. make the front page, but one of the highest quality open source releases gets buried. (It's almost like people self-medicate their marketing these days, but separate issue.)

I got 6 years of uptime once off of NetBSD on sparc. This stuff is gold. It's platinum. It's so stable, you have to worry about making sure you get around to patching your apps because the OS just never dies... stick this on solid state storage with the new NAND support, and you don't even have to worry about spinning disk fails. As a network device OS, this will be an awesome high-uptime packet sensor or embedded packet router.

Bravo NetBSD! Keep up the good work. This is top headline stuff.

Man, I hope you don't buy bottled water.

Which out of the many countries with single payer health care has outright banned smoking other than from public indoor places (and reasonably close to the exits thereof)?

Ironically, which country without seems to have more and more examples of governments that are enacting rules that punish smoking in private time/places?

Should it be any surprise that since a single payer system can spread the risk more since neither insurer nor insuree gets to choose whether or not they are in the pool, it tends to be less aggressive about attempting to regular personal choices in lifestyle?

My cats have great skill at destroying keyboards. Whether it's lodging just the right amount of fur under the right Shift key, standing in just the right spot to crack the PCB under the membrane, or nudging the cup I'm drinking out of until it spills right onto the all-important WASD keys, they manage it about once every 6-7 months.

I'd love to get one of those mechanical switch jobbies for the nice tactile clickie feel, since I'm a fast touch-typist, but I can't help but think that they'd be even more cat-prone than membrane keyboards.

For the time being, Logitech makes a nice basic membrane-style keyboard, the k120 that retails for around $15. It's fairly spill resistant, can keep up with my typing, and is fairly easy to clean. Then, when it meets its end in the cruel feline paws of fate several months down the road, I don't feel so bad dropping another $15.

So back during the SOPA thing, I had a lot of real life matters going on that were somewhat more important than taking time to look for a new DNS and webhost. I contented myself with taking the ten minutes necessary for writing a nasty letter, got on with my pressing business, and SOPA died... for the time being.

Now, I happen to have a few spare moments to dedicate to looking for a new webhost, and Anonymous or AnonymousOwner or whoever has done me a favor by reminding me that Godaddy is not necessarily my friend.

Does anyone have any suggestions? I'd prefer somewhere that supports, or would let me install Ruby and Rails 3. Heroku seems to be the default Rails hangout, but frankly their pricing confuses the hell out of me.

My understanding is that, propagandist or no, Rasmussen leans heavily republican simply by their methodology.. ie, the way they do their polling means they skew their samples.

Electoral-Vote.com has a model that shows projection data with or without Rasmussen data included. According to their model, Obama will win in November either way, but a few more senate races will go Democrat rather than Republican if you exclude Rasmussen polling data.

http://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2012/Pres/Maps/Sep08-noras.html

Ironic captcha: Freeing. *sigh*. If only there was a candidate I could vote for who would really do that.