"Window's dominance of the PC market has been good in many ways, reduced hardware costs, increased IT literacy and a standard development platform to name a few, and perhaps Android will bring similar benefits, but unless Google are very careful it is likely to bring some of the same problems too..."

sure MS Word grammar check would put a green underline below this whopper of a run-on!

When they did well in 2009, it seemed like part of the reason was the unusual name. It made people curious to find out more about them. Certainly it didn't seem to be holding them back, they did way better than expected for a minor party. Now that the haven't done so well, people are saying "drop the name." Maybe the change is due to actual political factors, not merely a branding problem.

This is incorrect on several levels. For one thing, ownership is actually defined by the government. Without a government, the piece of paper that says you own something would be worthless. Not only does the government have a concept of ownership, it actually creates all ownership.

Of course that is quite correct, but it does nothing to negate the grandparent's point. We the people paid for the property on which streets are built. Therefore in order to use that property for their networks, ISPs need permission from the elected representatives of the people, a.k.a. the government.

If these providers are not going to give all of us unfettered access to their networks, what incentive do we have to allow them to use our property to build those networks? They should buy their own damn land and put their networks there if they want to have total control over the signal. As long as they're putting the network on our land, we should have unfettered access to it.

It goes beyond the problem of having different groups of friends. The problem is that in real life most people have many different personae. You would say and do things with your friends from college that you would never say or do in front of your boss, as the most obvious example.

IRL we put a lot of work into constructing and maintaining these different personae, and we do a lot of work to keep them separate.

With social networking as it is, that's all over. Even if you never participate in Facebook, you are probably tagged in dozens or even hundreds of photos, and the odds are pretty good that some of them show you doing things you wouldn't do in front of your boss.

So the question is, will we adapt the technology to allow the creation and maintenance of a variety of different personae, or will we adapt our own behavior so as to present one consistent, universally acceptable persona to the world?

I think many of us, particuarly the younger generation, are already doing the latter. In order to adapt to this, we have to adjust our expectations of people. Maybe as an employer, you just have to get used to being able to see pictures of your employees smoking weed at parties and so forth, and not let it bother you. However, until we adapt, it creates the problem that suddenly everything you say and do is potentially public (whether you participate in social media or not).

Actually, solar thermal can maintain baseload by using molten salt to store heat energey during the night. Besides being incredibly useful, the idea of a huge tower of molten salt is just dang cool.

This is a rediculously over-simplified misunderstanding of how society works. How do you propose "making" a job doing basic research? Research has to be funded, that's how it's done in our society. I'm afraid you're living in a fantasy world. This has nothing to do with anyone being "owed" a job. It has to do with setting priorities as a society. We've set up a system in which the priority is short term quarterly gains, and that's what we get. If you want a viable society in the long term, you have to invest in basic research.

Exactly. That's why I left. I didn't care so much about the pay, doing science is in itself worth it as long as you're being paid enough to survive. Yeah, for some people it's that much fun.

But my advisor in grad school worked for ten hours a day in the lab, and then he went home and worked another six on his computer from home. His wife made jokes about being a "physics widow." He had a daughter, but he obviously wasn't participating in raising her.

That's no kind of life for a reasonable person. You have to have a monomaniacal disorder to want to live like that. So I left.

The problem is that there is way too much work to do and way too little funding to hire enough people to do it. The result is an attitude that if you're not willing to work 80-100 hours per week, we'll find someone else who is. There are plenty of smart people in the world.

This problem will persist until we make basic research the financial priority that it should be in order to advance as a society.

Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet. Nuclear power won't meet the world's energy needs either, not in any realistic scenario.

To replace enough fossil fuel use to resolve the climate change problem, we would have to build 3 nuclear plants per week for 50 years. The expense involved would be incomprehensible.

http://climateprogress.org/2007/06/18/nuclear-power-no-climate-cure-all/

http://keystone.org/files/file/SPP/energy/NJFF-Exec-Summ-6_2007.pdf

Even under extremely agressive but realistic growth scenarios, nuclear could only cover about a tenth of our projected requirements.

Wind, by comparison, does surprisingly well, as does solar thermal, but they won't be able to cover it all either.

http://climateprogress.org/2009/03/26/full-global-warming-solution-350-450-ppm-technologies-efficiency-renewables/

In fact, not only is there no silver bullet, there are no silver b-bs either. Any realistic scenario requires significan efficiency gains -- in other words, we're going to have to consume less!

That's the bit that people really have trouble coming to grips with, at which point they tend to retreat into a fantasy world of some kind.

infrastructures.org looks interesting, but then I see they mention things like 'NetSaint' which was renamed to be Nagios about 7 years ago, and references to "LISA '98".

Some of this information looks old. Am I right? These days, shouldn't we be thinking more about virtualization and cloud infrastructure?

That said, they do touch upon many good ideas. It seems that many mid-sized shops do follow some similar ideas.

Did you mean 32.5TB, not GB?

Well... I wouldn't exactly call it "asking."

Awesome timing on that Richie! Should be modded funny as well as informative. Everyone go and donate -- the Pirate Party is uber-cool for many other reasons in addition to this latest move.