Outside the scope of Slashdot--that is, the real world--what are you possibly talking about, please? Held your argument the slightest shred of validity, Ron would not have penned "End the Fed". Are you saying that there is some secret, hidden, inner plot unbeknownst to much of anyone?
Imma guessin' you've saddled your troll pony for a little ride.

So I had an OEM version of Win7 on my gaming PC until the C: OS drive died. Couldn't reinstall, so I just broke down and reinstalled a pirated version onto the replacement disk and plugged my game disk back in.

It's great, absolutely no nags for anything ever, all it does is run Steam, which auto-updates stuff as painlessly as apt or yum.

Well, almost no nags... Steam still wants Adobe Flash.

And since the kids occasionally want to play Minecraft, I get the silly Oracle Java nags too.

That the people still holding onto their floppy drives probably aren't their target market for upgrading past Win98SE ?

Wonder if ZipDrives still work... I'm not sure if my current PC even has a parallel port anymore...

Here in Arizona, gambling is illegal*.

*unless is meets one of a dozen criteria, many of which are easily obtainable.

Ownership of automatic weapons is the same.

Yeah, I hear you. But there's some charm in older houses, and some value that can be wrought from bringing a 'fixer' into a new age while repurposing some of the quirks into features (like the milk delivery door from 50s houses).

But even with a new house, you probably need some plan for maintenance and upgrades over the 30 years it'll take you to pay off the mortgage. I got suckered into reading about the current sorry state of home automation systems a few weekends ago simply because I had to decide which smoke detector to buy... There are no less than 6 big competing standards with big industry backers at the moment! All I wanted was to make sure I could (eventually) get a little notification on my phone if the smoke detector goes off, but that meant wading through that mess and trying to choose a "winnar" now.

Anyway, I went with the FirstAlert detectors, since they could eventually link up to the Lutron Smartbridge hub that talks the ClearConnect protocol. By all accounts, it's the least fully-featured hub, really just talks to lights and window shades, oh, and the smoke detectors. And yet it appears to be the most responsive and reliable.

Microsoft is behind the Insteon line of stuff, that talks through your electrical system like the old X-10 devices.

Zigbee is already dead

Z-wave appears to be what everyone else uses. But all of the products seem to be featureful but unreliable. Hopefully that will improve someday.

Apple has its own thing, but I stopped reading there.

And Google has Nest and stuff, which seems interesting, but maybe not hackable enough for me.

Plus a bunch of open source stuff, a lot of which uses the Raspberry Pi, which I find intriguing. But I don't want to spend too much time rolling my own either.

But.... if you want a machine with reasonable gaming performance without the expense of a separate graphics chip, AMD is the only game in town. I don't want the best. I just want something reasonable.

You can get an HP Envy with an AMD FX processor right now. If they throw a Carrizo FX in there (likely to happen) and add a DisplayPort interface (rather less likely), I would be quite happy. I am just bothered that DisplayPort is relegated to the expensive machines only. 30" monitors are downright cheap today compared to what they were three years ago. 4K monitors are well under $1000 now. Why are mainstream laptops limited to HDMI?

And 12 or 13 will also think this is a good idea. The rest won't. Like New Coke.

Right now, my dream laptop is a Carrizo with a 1080 panel and a DisplayPort output for around $600 or so. That would let me do some casual gaming, as well as drive a 30" monitor for productivity stuff. I am not holding my breath, however. Just about the only machines with DisplayPort are gaming machine (at least $1000), or business-class machines sporting Intel (with integrated Intel graphics which suck for gaming).

Come on, HP or Asus. Make my dream come true.

Does it make sense to do all of that energy efficiency stuff upfront? Or spread it out the installation over the years to maximize, uh, tax incentives?

It's hard to find a good resource... need updated versions of http://www.irs.gov/uac/Newsroo... that include the plug-in electric vehicle chargers and solar cells.

There are lots of weird restrictions... for example, you can get some energy efficiency credit for installing sunroofs in the ceiling only if they are attached to a home HVAC automation system so it adjusts the blinds and/or vents in concert with the air conditioning. Installing a manually-operated sunroof/blinds doesn't qualify!

We just bought a duplex built in the early 70s with mostly original (high quality but not high efficiency) appliances, and we're trying to budget out home improvements for the next 10 years. The roof needs to be replaced in the next 3 years, so we'd like to have enough saved to do a modest solar panel / sunroof install by then, but they'd probably wouldn't make much of a dent in our electric bill until we replace the appliances :P . Maybe an electric vehicle charger is in our future too, not for the next car but perhaps the one after that, but it's hard to plan for taking advantage of tax incentives that far into the future :/

Also have to improve our water efficiency somehow... we also live in a water rich region, but the water bill is easily the most expensive utility because the sewage / runoff water treatment is astronomical. It is nice to have urban lakes that are safe for swimming, though, so it's worth it.

/sigh... and as I do in every single thread this comes up in: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/previe...

Further data: 7 of the 8 most vaccinated states went to Romney in '12.

I didn't know there WAS a Bible Belt in Europe, especially the Netherlands. Here in the US, non-abortion-related medicine is usually without any religious controversy, save for the Christian Scientists (who are, depending on what angle you view them from, neither Christian nor scientific), a relatively small, fringe sect that believes that all medical care represents faithlessness.

Here in the deep-south, there's a modern-day parable that goes around Christian circles that demonstrates the general philosophy in this regard: A man goes over a cliff overlooking treacherous waters and manages to grab hold of a thin root half-way down. In desperation he cries out to God, "Save me! Send me deliverence!" Having thus prayed, he resolves to place his trust in God. A man walks by the cliff and lowers a rope. "Grab the rope!" he says. The hanging man replies, "I cannot! I have placed my trust in the Lord, and I will await His deliverance." Next a boat drives by under the cliff. The man in the boat says, "Jump! I'll catch you!" The hanging man replies as he did to the first. Next, a rescue helicopter hovers nearby, and a man lowers a ladder. "Grab the ladder!" he says. Again the hanging man replies as he did to the previous two. Slowly, the hanging man loses his grip, falls into the swirling waters, and drowns. He arrives at heaven, meets God, and cries, "Why did you never answer my prayer?" To which God replies, "What are you talking about? I sent you a man with a rope, a boat, a helicopter..."

No. Vaccination rates are highest in the Bible belt, while they are lowest on the west coast. I think it has less to do with political affiliation and more to do with who reads idiot granola mommy and food blogs.

This isn't so bad as you make out; there is no telling how long this bug has been there, but did not appear until now, and with limited impact, and a fix was released in a matter of hours.

As for sanity checking, there is no guarantee that would have caught this bug; the malformed URL has a deceptive proximity to correctness, to wit, that all the characters belong in a URL and are presented in the correct order. The essential missing piece, the hostname, is explicitly defined as ambiguous in RFC 3986 because it can take multiple forms. The port number is, in fact, optional entirely (though the RFC says you "should" omit the ":" in such cases ["should" is significantly more ambiguous in RFC parlance than "must"]).

Trying to write sanity checks for all such cases would be exhaustive. How many different kinds of almost-correct URL's do you need to check? The combinations could run into the thousands, and each one parsed differently than the other.