We have 3 dogs and 1 cat. The two smaller dogs and the cat don't shed much, but the larger dog (a lab) sheds like crazy. We have 2 Roombas that we got about 3 years ago when the 500 series started coming out. We no longer use them regularly because it's too much of a hassle.

First, they need to be cleaned at least daily with this much pet hair. Cleaning takes at least 5 minutes; if I just spent that time vacuuming normally for 5 minutes a day, the floors would be cleaner.

Often they won't even complete a single run without stopping and saying "Please remove and clean Roomba's brushes." That kind of defeats the purpose of having cleanings scheduled during the day (when we're at work) if it only gets 15 minutes into the scheduled 45-minute cleaning before stopping.

The Roombas will leave "Roombarf" - tufts of pet hair - on the floor when moving from hardwood/tile to carpet. Apparently the vacuum isn't powerful enough to suck all that stuff into the dustbin, so it just drags the hair along until the terrain change knocks it loose.

Every few weeks, we'd need to take the thing apart and do a really deep cleaning, as pet hair got everywhere inside. This would be a 30-60 minute job. One nice thing is that iRobot designed the Roomba to be very modular, so taking it apart isn't too bad.

One of the Roombas is completely out of commission right now because it has a faulty bump sensor. It thinks it's constantly bumping something, so it just spins around in circles trying to get free. I found a great web page somewhere (sorry, don't have the link handy) about fixing this with just a few bucks in electronics parts. I'll probably do it just for the fun of it, but that won't fix all of the above issues.

iRobot has a pet version of the Roomba which came out after we got ours, but from what I can tell, all they did was include a second interchangeable dustbin without the vacuum module that therefore has larger capacity. The normal dustbin combines the vacuum into one integrated part. I can't imagine this larger sweeper dustbin would do anything to pull the pet hair in without the vacuum to help.

For a household like ours, I would like to see a Roomba that's about a full inch taller, giving it room for a larger battery, larger dustbin, and more powerful vacuum and brushes. An added bonus for us is that since a couple of our couches are just the right height for the current Roomba to get under and then get stuck, a larger one wouldn't even go there at all.

I wholeheartedly recommend Roomba for a household without pets (or with very little shedding), but can't really recommend it with pets that shed a lot. Unless you have all hard flooring - it seems to do a lot better with the pet hair there.

The key to using pyTiVo with DVD rips is to simply extract the original MPEG-2 stream from the DVD without transcoding at all. pyTiVo will then send it to the TiVo (at least TiVo HD, probably Series 3 as well) as-is, and the result is exactly what you'd see (and hear) if you had popped the DVD into a DVD player.

On the Mac, I use RipIt to rip the DVD, followed by DVDRemasterPro to extract the main title as a single vob. Often this is enough, and the vob will transfer and play directly on the TiVo. Sometimes a pass through MPEGStreamClip is also necessary to clean up timestamps.

MacTheRipper is sometimes good on old titles that don't have all the new fair-use prevention measures - it can extract a single title from a DVD in a single step instead of the multi-step process above. But it doesn't handle about 90% of newer DVDs.

This works on probably 95% of the DVDs I've tried. Of the remaining handful, a manual pass through ffmpeg (using the "copy" pseudo-codecs) fixed a couple, but a few still are problematic for the TiVo's MPEG-2 decoder.

You are intelligent!

I have no idea about the relative sunniness of the two countries, but (due to a law adopted in 2000), Germany is the world's top PV installer (according to Wikipedia).

A Washington Post article about Germany's solar installations is here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/04/AR2007050402466.html

I think I remembered this tidbit from a previous Slashdot discussion.

I'm pretty sure one bit can kill you... if your logic levels are 50,000V and -50,000V, anyway.

Find me a true transacted filesystem in Linux

/dev/mapper/philipjfry-home /home ext4 defaults,data=journal,noatime

And I don't even need to modify my applications so that my data is secure.

With really annoying (and recurring) issues, it would be so tempting to write filters for special situations (text that is 85% or more in caps gets a bounce back, certain words get filtered to another word...)

Or even better, special filters, for "special" people.

They've hired Bruce Willis and Kurt Russell? They need to bolster the team with Clint Eastwood and Gene Hackman (and throw in Robert Loggia to deal with the politicians...)

Lets have your grandma walk down the street, get mugged, break her hip and be traumatized. How many CCTVs would you be willing to put up to reduce the chances of that ever happening again? This privacy thing is getting incompetent, when you're in the public.. you're in the public. Unless someone has CCTVs pointing into your house. Appreciate the fact that if someone knifed you in the street, you have a better chance of catching that person

10.5 includes read-only zfs support (though it's hidden away...)

/System//Library/Extensions/zfs.readonly.kext
/System//Library/Extensions/zfs.readonly.kext/Contents/MacOS/zfs.readonly
/System//Library/Filesystems/zfs.fs
/System//Library/Filesystems/zfs.fs/zfs.util

+ how many false arrests have been prevented.

There's always been a government presence, even in the 1800s when it was "Bill the Copper" patrolling the streets. Upgrading that police presence from organic to electronic doesn't really change anything.

Our only long term practical energy source is fusion power. Nothing else comes even close, even fission. And fission was overhyped, the cost estimates were lowballed, they promised some magical way to deal with the waste starting in the 50s and are no closer now than then, and you can't have it all over because you can make bad boom boom stuff from it, even just having the tech is enough to threaten massive war. We are fracing that right now, big fat war in Iran over access to nuclear power. It sucks, wish it had never been developed meselfs, more problems than it is worth....anyway..

    Fission is a fool's game except for a few niche applications. Fusion is where it is at. I am as pro fusion power as anyone can get! Fusion rocks!

    The thing is, we are emphasizing basically what is in essence a "re inventing the wheel" methodology on a teeny scale here on Earth, in some insanely expensive and complex science fiction type containment bubble, with not much in the way of results for the last half century.

    Interesting, but more academic wanking than really solving the energy problem. I give it a 1.2 effort tops, out of a 10 possible, discordant beat, no melody, and difficult to dance to.. It keeps those particular eggheads occupied, that's what it is best for. Cool if they pull it off sometime within a few centuries..but right now we need to put the pedal to the metal on getting a LOT more energy, and it needs to be cheap, and scalable from one watt to tens of gigawatts. And cheap. And low maintenance. And cheap. And not cause wars. And be flexible from huge corporations running it to joe sixpack can own it himself and pay if off, and everywhere in between. And cheap.

Harvesting fusion power works for that.

Fusion power harvesting solves all of those problems and can fill every single need and variance for energy we have now. All of them..

    Relatively simple now harvesting nuclear fusion, from the sun, which will be there for billions of years pumping out the gigajoules, whether in the form of direct electricity from photovoltaics, concentrated heat from solar thermal to make electricity or to heat massive cities or factories or greenhouses, etc, or biomatter- bascially ANYTHING that can be grown with *free* solar fusion power and photosynthesis, to then be converted further into liquid transportation fuels that can go directly into our *already established and outrageously expensive to replicate transportation stack*, all of that, has been inching along quite nicely and can and *will* fill the gap as conventional petroleum fuels become too dear.

But the US and western europe are gonna be SOL when it comes to having it cheap.

    IF we had done a manhattan project/apollo moon landing project scale effort back during the first oil shock days, 30 years ago now, which is the one thing Carter got right and we should have acted on, we'd be sitting pretty now. Heck, we could have done that last year instead of throwing a trillion bucks at casino bankers!

    Alas, hat in hand, begging and groveling until the last few years, solar fusion power has been moderately successful but still chump change/ small scale efforts complete with "home owners associations" saying "no,those panels are just too icky", view freaks calling themselves alleged "stakeholders" demanding no wind power, etc, all sorts of people complaining about our first babysteps with biofuels, etc, whine, kvetch, bitch, etc... now it looks like once again, where they shipped real wealth production off to, the place that groks energy and wealth creation better and is willing to spend the cash in practical terms, will be the big winners.

We'll STILL be importing our "energy" even when all the oil runs out....well, I won't be, I have practical priorities and I dig energy and WILL walk my talk, but most everyone else will be...

      http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/6077374/China-powers-ahead-as-it-seizes-the-green-energy-crown-from-Europe.html

If china wasn't a dismal two class despotic regime, and had a society that held human life as a bit more valuable than they do, I would consider moving there, but I dig on personal freedom more than just accumulating wealth. If all I was considering is accumulating wealth, I'd go there though.

    They took, stole, bought, borrowed, got lended all the crown jewels of western tech, including solar fusion power harvesting, and are running with that now, and will trump the world while the west closes factories and emphasizes multicultural sensitivity training and pro sports and "reality" television, which is an oxymoron....

    I can't blame them, wall street handed it to them for pennies on the yuan, so they took it. They looked at each other and went "Lound eye devils crazy! Give us all the good stuff! Pay us to take it! We wook haad one genelation, then we win! Let's do it!" So they did. And now it's done.

    They would have been nuts to say no. Now, real soon now, they won't *need* the west for any more tech transfers or as a "market", they will be able to flip us the bird, say "oh, you want energy? You want manufactured goods? Ok! this is what it costs [some outrageous figure]..plus all your wimmins and all your farmlands and all your ports and all your toll roads and all your base, plus you agree to sixteen generations be in debt to us because we own bonds! You our bitch!".

    And they'll get it. Because we will have waited too long and gave them the edge. Not just the edge, the shaft, the blade, the scabbard, the whole dang sharp sword of bleeding edge success. Even if we could, we won't be able to afford it. Cheap for them, real expensive for us.

We coulda been a contendah...

"They CAN continue to sell MS Office - so long as they remove support for customized-XML based documents"

No they can't continue to sell MS Office, they CAN sell a new version of Office with that feature removed. That's quite a difference and will be very expensive to do since it involves brick-and-mortar stores, not just updating a download.

I'll wait to celebrate until I know how the election turns out.