It's possible to buy for near the spot price, but then you have 2 contracts: one with the supplier and one with the grid owner. So it's about double these rates effectively.

http://wwwdynamic.nordpoolspot.com/marketinfo/elspot/oslo/elspot.cgi?interval=last8&ccurrency=eur&type=html

Yeah that was nice, I lived in Phoenix until this summer; but have now moved to Oslo, so I had to change the clock for the first time ever. The result is that the sun goes down even earlier, like 3:30 or something, and it's quite dark by 4:00 PM. But it will still get worse.

Funny how Russia decided to just do DST all year.

Yeah it's been a while hasn't it... I think I've read at least 80% or so of the days since sometime in the 90's, it might've been 97; it's like smoking must be (not that I've tried), addictive and fills the awkward moments. You guys threw a cool party "get sloshed with slashdot" at a silicon valley Linux conference in 1999 I think (celebrating the Andover money I suppose); I and a friend from the local LUG rented a minivan and drove from Phoenix for that (well, for the conference, not only the party ;-). I hope the site is not going downhill in any way after your leaving. But I can appreciate the need to find some other meaning to life after such a long time in one gig. ;-) So good luck with whatever you end up doing next, and thanks for all the news and entertainment for all those years. As they say, time flies like arrows...

On capital punishment... the trouble is what to replace it with. Prisons are also barbaric and uncivilized and a waste of life. Plus they cost more. Plus there is the tendency in the US to privatize them, which leads to perverse financial incentives to put more people in prison. So we have the highest incarceration rate in the world.

Yet no-one has figured out how to get rehab right. And if rehab were successful, it would be too much an invasion of a person's privacy; it must be, in order to be successful: to change the person's way of thinking (which led to the undesirable behavior), permanently. If it were successful then the application might be broadened, until a pretty large fraction of the population is in some kind of rehab/reprogramming, even more than to the extent that we have too many in prison now. As now, society could just continue to say that when you commit a felony you lose your rights, sorry about that. Then continue lowering the bar, until there are a lot more felons available for the service of the state (or the privatized institution).

So whatcha gonna do? I think first of all we should quit putting people in prison for not-so-serious reasons (number one being drug offenses) and find quicker, more effective punishments for all the fraud/theft type stuff (e.g. some sort of multiplicative restitution when possible, or a better education and a chance to start over in cases where that might work better). What good does it do for taxpayers to pay Madoff's room and board for life, even as badly as he screwed up? He still has a useful brain, and after being so thoroughly discredited as a financial guy, maybe could go on to do something completely different, if we let him. He could be put back in square one with only the most basic possessions, and allowed to start over in a different field.

In cases where murder 1 is 100% certain (which as you point out, is never) I don't in theory have a problem with capital punishment. It's no worse than the murder, and there are people with such twisted ways of thinking that they cannot live normal lives without doing things like that. But yeah, there are all the incorrect convictions to worry about. But I'm not sure that life in prison is better. Maybe if prison were more like a constrained but semi-normal life, were there aren't opportunities for further murder, and no opportunities to get raped by the other prisoners, but there are opportunities to do something good. I don't care about the perception of "justice" from outside as much as whether we have a solution which works in the best way, what to do with this human capital which has gone awry. We haven't been going towards that kind of goal at all. I think all the efforts we have made are bad enough, that you can't just say capital punishment is the one thing which is so barbaric that it ought to be banned.

Seriously I remember hearing it back in the 70's. Enough already. Transistors are so small that human hair isn't even a reasonable comparison to make.

I recently recovered my very first data files (on 5 1/4" floppies from my high school days - programs I wrote myself plus software from that time) using an Apple IIe from a thrift store, a serial cable, and ADTPro on my Linux box. Now I can in theory run stuff on an emulator, although I didn't get around to it yet. The IIe is now for sale if anybody wants it (only reason being the impending move... otherwise I'd just keep it). tinyurl.com/2f684um

This is just an attention-whoring headline, nothing more. Yeah so other devices sell more than PCs... doesn't mean people will stop using PCs. I can't imagine doing everything I need to do on such small screens. For the kind of light reading / heavy video watching that passes for web surfing with most people, it's understandable, but not for some kinds of work.

Oh and for those who say "finally, good riddance to MS" well we just have new overlords on the other devices. Thank goodness Android and Meego offer some alternatives to the Apple app lock-in. It's the same story all over again with Apple replacing MS this time around, except that this time the playing field is somewhat less tilted at the beginning.

As long as the TSA is allowed to flaut the 4th amendment like that, our standing as a "free society" has been greatly reduced. There is no way that "fixing" the actual images or safeguarding the privacy of them makes up for making you stand there submissively with your arms up inside a scanner which risks your health. You as a citizen should be considered innocent until proven guilty, not the other way around; and that's all there is to it.

I use a personal wiki for stuff I don't mind sharing, and usually plain text files in ~/ideas or ~/notes or ~/journal for stuff I don't want to share (backed up occasionally to another system of course). Very rarely I need to use inkscape or dia or gimp to make an illustration of something, although I plan on doing a bit more of that now that I got a Cintiq (it was cheap at a computer swap meet, couldn't resist). It's far from ideal, but we don't have good enough software for that yet... at least, not software which I consider will have a long enough lifetime to be worth using (MS OneNote doesn't count because I don't run Windows often, and can't control what will happen to OneNote or any data that I might store in it. But the UI is slick.) Also I have been using toodledo on the iphone for really terse notes about random ideas that come up while I'm out and about (when I go hiking and get the endorphins going I come up with the most far-out ideas), and also for shopping lists. Again, not ideal, but at least it syncs to their site... I have been planning to write a better tool for that eventually, so I can control where the data is stored.

It's cool that Apple will help indie startups to do the marketing of their apps. What I'm worried most about is whether they will start to impose their idea of "quality" control as they have for the iPhone app store: nothing off-color, no scripting languages (or outright requirement to use Objective C and Cocoa rather than say Qt and C++), must follow their UI design guidelines, etc. Of course it's going to be difficult for them to rein stuff like that in since MacOS is not a new platform. But I think they really shouldn't try as hard as they have on the iPhone, and it's going to suck even harder if they do try.

An "open" app store is a good idea. But it's too bad (and ironic) it will have taken an event like this to prod developers to try to make it slick and popular and to make everything worth having available there. At least fink and macports have already existed for quite a while now. But a unified store for both closed-source and open-source software, and friendly enough for non-geeks to use, is another step beyond. What we will probably get instead will be several open app stores, all of them incomplete.

I've been thinking it would be nice if any operating system could treat the whole universe of available software as if it was readily available: e.g. you could right-click a document and "open with" an application you don't have yet, transparently. Sometimes it would be fulfilled by installing free software, sometimes by prompting you to buy the app, sometimes by using a free cloud app and sometimes by renting a non-free cloud app (filtered according to your preferences of course). Same deal with spotlight, perhaps (although it could get cluttered, showing more stuff that you don't have than stuff that you do). VMs can enable using non-native apps too, so those could also be made available if there is no other choice.

With most commercial software you end up being on your own in the end, and the end comes sooner than you think. They are greedy after all. I have tried switching to MacOS for some tasks, and now I'm reminded again why I hate proprietary software. One of my latest disappointments there has been GarageSale... a few months after buying it, there's a new version for which I'd have to pay to upgrade. And ebay changes their APIs too much, so I'm afraid pretty soon there will be a change which they will not "support". Being closed-source software it would then become useless. I bought it though because there aren't any good free software alternatives these days, and it saves time when creating auctions compared to using the ebay site... just stuff like drag-and-drop of images, and easy formatting (even though I've got lots of experience writing HTML by hand, it's a boring time-wasting thing to do). Another is Parallels. TWO MONTHS after I bought it, I'm already ineligible for a free upgrade to the next version, in which they supposedly made it much more efficient. So my impression of that company is even worse, but OTOH I do have free alternatives (just not as nicely integrated, I suspect).

Several times I've worked at companies which insist on using expensive software because it has "support", e.g. ClearCase and ClearQuest. Again, they suck in some ways, you can't fix it, and you can get better results with svn or git by just investing a little sweat equity in setting it up and getting use to the workflow. So to me the word "support" is always a weasel word: As soon as someone utters it, watch out... here comes a snow job.