The inadequately-configurable trackpads, in positions where they detect the palm resting on the laptop (or brushing them) and randomly jump the cursor or highlight whole paragraphs so the next keystroke replaces them, are no help, either.

What do you mean by inadequately configurable? There's usually an option to disable while typing somewhere.

It's there. It's on. Didn't help. Don't know if it's that Ubuntu 14.04 doesn't support it properly on these two machines or if it doesn't do the job I want done.

What I'm looking for is NOT there: A threshold level for touch sensitivity. If you're going to put a BIG touchpad on a laptop's palm rest, you need to either put it where the palms won't brush it, or you need to make it possible to turn down the sensitivity so that a feather-light brushing of the pad doesn't register as a mouse motion or button click.

Two different manufacturers (Lenovo and Toshiba) have used exactly the same layout, and exactly the same hair trigger, non-adjustable, touchpad sensitivity. (Also exactly the same sort of wafer-thin flat tile keys, which is how we got into this digression.)

The problem I have with current keyboards is not just the short travel and lack of clickyness, but the tiny height of the keys.

Instead of the tall keys with space between them for fingernail clearance, there are these thin squares maybe an eighth of an inch above a solid surface. If I don't keep all my fingernails cut short, when they go past the side of the key they hit the panel and the key doesn't "strike". Letters get dropped. (So I get to pick between typing well and playing the guitar. I pity those who must keyboard for a living but want long nails to maintain their social life.) The short travel means there's little margin for finger variation, so some letters, where my fingers don't depress the keys as far, normally, don't strike, while others, where I support the weight of my hands, do strike when they shouldn't, or strike multiply.

After over a year I haven't been able to adjust. You may have noticed that my spelling has gone to hell as a result: I have to do a lot more correction and sometimes miss fixing things up.

(The inadequately-configurable trackpads, in positions where they detect the palm resting on the laptop (or brushing them) and randomly jump the cursor or highlight whole paragraphs so the next keystroke replaces them, are no help, either.)

On the other hand, when the nails do hit the key, they quickly wear through the top level of black plastic, exposing the backlit transparent light below it. I replaced a laptop about a year ago and after about six months about a half-dozen heavily-used keys had their pretty letters obscured by the giant glow of the scoured away region.

I had been running on older thinkpads and toshibas, with classic keyboard-shaped keys, or at least the little fingertip cup and substantial fingernail clearance. Switching (in a two-dead-laptops-in-two-weeks emergency) to a lenovo z710, then to a company-supplied toshiba s75, both with the stupid "I'm so thin", square, low-travel, no-finger-cup keys has been a disaster.

Of course, none of those things are among the criteria for what causes something to be classified as a religion, ...

That depends on what set of criteria one is using to classify something as religion, doesn't it? B-)

A solar offgrid (or grid-tied with standalone capabilities) would provide power locally until too much stuff failed.

Lead acid batteries last for several years, recent lithium probably for a couple decades. Nickel-Iron batteries are more lossy, but last for centuries, if provided with water to replace evaporation, potentially decades if they have catalytic fill caps to recombine lost hydrox or, say, a reservoir-based automatic watering system. (If their chemistry has a long-term unavoidable failure mode I'm not aware of it.)

Even with the batteries dead (NiFe or otherwise) the system will have power when the sun is out until at least one panel in every series substring is too degraded, shaded, or smashed to provide adequate power.

Semiconductor controllers might go for a decade to centuries, depending mainly on whether the conductive interconnects of the semiconductors are sized to avoid electromigration at the current levels used and what they're using for large capacitors.

Wind generaors have several moving parts to screw up - how many depends on the design. For a simple homebrew one you have the main bearings, yaw bearing, and tail furling-system bearing. Any one of them failing will take it out. (Even the furling bearing: Once that screws up it doesn't furl right and tears apart in the next storm.) There's also the get-the-power-past-the-yawing mechanism (typically a long cable being twisted and manually "unwound" every few years, or a brush mechanism.) Call it a decade without maintenance at the outside.

So some of 'em may run until a nearby lightning strike fries something.

I wonder what the numbers would be if "Progressivism" were also counted as a religion, rather than JUST a philosophy or political affilication? B-)

Think about it: It claims to prescribe what behavior is good or bad, generally expects its adherents to take its pronouncements on faith, and has a lot to say against various religions - just like ("other") competing religions do to their opponents.

I could go on with the similarities. But since they include suppression of competing ideas by pretty much any available mechanism (including arbitrary down-moderation, personal attacks, and flame wars), I'd prefer to keep the discussion light.

They're not alone in this, either. (c.f. any of several political philosophies, right, left, libertarian, authoritarian, moderate, ...) But they're my current candidate for the largest not-advertised-as-religion-religion at the moment. B-)

My ISP uses an AQM and I can maintain about 10ms of additional latency even when my connection is flooded beyond 100%. ... When I manage my own AQMs on my network, I can maintain 0ms of additional latency, no QoS needed.

Latency is a problem, and as you mention, AQM can deal with it without packet-type distinctions. But it's not the BIG problem when TCP and streams are trying to divide a channel's bandwidth.

That problem is packet loss. TCP imposes it on streams. TCP is HAPPY to accept a little packet loss. Streams get into trouble quickly - and all the workarounds short of QoS packet-class distinctions on the pathway just push the problem around into other aspects (such as delay).

With QoS you can put the drops selectively into, first the TCP flows (which then throttle back), then already-delayed stream packets (which streams no longer need - when TCP could use the equivalent just fine.) In fact you could even give streams strict priority over TCP - provided they're within their bandwidth limit - and avoid dropouts and most of the jitter completely. Streams get the cream and TCP gets the whey, other stuff gets something in between.

ISP should be limited to purchasing more bandwidth and using anti-bufferbloat AQMs, but no throttling or QoS.

QoS may be hard. But it's necessary, because streaming and TCP don't play well together.

Streaming requires low latency, low jitter, low packet loss, and has a moderate and limited (in absence of compression, typically constant) bandwidth. TCP, when being used for things like large file transfers, increases speed to consume ALL available bandwidth at the tightest choke point, and divide it fairly among all TCP connections using the choke point. It discovers the size of the choke point by expanding until packets are dropped, and signals other TCP connections by making their packets drop. The result that TCP forces poor QoS onto streams unless the infrastructure is massively oversized.

This can be fixed by a number of traffic management schemes. But they all have this in common:
  - They treat different packets differently.
  - The infrastructure can be misused for competitive advantage and other unfair business practices.

The PROBLEM is not the differing treatment of different packages (which can help consumers), but the misuse of the capability (to hurt consumers).

So IMHO an "appropriate legal remedy", under current legal theories, is not to try to force ISPs to treat all packets the same (and break QoS), but to limit the ISPs ability and incentives to misuse the capability.

So the appropriate regulation is not communications technical regulation, but consumer protection and antitrust law:
  - Consumer fraud law should already cover misbehavior that penalizes certain traffic flows improperly. (What is "internet service" if it doesn't handle whatever end-to-end traffic is thrown at it, just for starters) Ditto charging extra for better packet treatment rather than just fatter pipes, charging anyone other than their base customers for the service, or heavily penalizing packets of customers (or the customers themselves) whose usage is problematic for the ISP but within the advertised service. If current law needs a tweak, the enforcement infrastructure is already there should Congress choose to commit the tweak and use it.
  - Penalizing packets of competitors for its own services, or giving appropriate handling to its own packets of a type and not to that of others, is anticompetitive behavior. Indeed, having such services in the same company AT ALL, let alone forming conglomerates that include both "content" creation and Internet service distributing it, is a glaring conflict-of-interest, of the sort that led to the historic breakups of AT&T and Standard Oil. Antitrust law is up to the problem: Just use it.

(I put quotes around "appropriate legal remedy" above, because I think that a free market solution would be even better. Unfortunately, we don't have a free market in ISP services, due to massive, government-created or government-ignored barriers to entry. And we aren't likely to see one in the near future - or EVER, unless the government power-wielders get it through their skulls that "competition" and its free-market betnefits don't kick in until there are at least three, and usually until there are four or more, competitors for each customer. (This "Two-is-competition, Hey! Where's the market benefits?" error has been built into communication law ever since the allocation of bandwidth for the early, analog, AMPS cellphone service.) With only two "competitors", market forces drive them to cartel-like behavior and all-the-market-will-bear pricing, without any collusion at all.)

"...after music streaming service Grooveshark was shutdown"
Why in hell are you using a noun when a verb is required?

This is how language evolves.

Sometimes you can convince people to drop a useful construct or misspelling - like by telling them it makes their arguments less convincing. Other times it's like trying to sweep back the tied.

Are you going to host it in Antigua?

Come on. This misinformation is 30 years old already. Why can't we let it die already?

Contrary to popular belief, Haimes never claimed that a CAT scan had caused her to lose her psychic powers. In fact, the often alluded-to CAT scan never took place. Haimes only claimed that the headaches resulting from her allergic reaction prevented her from earning a living as a psychic.

On the other hand, I could see an MRI actually destroying a hypothetical human magnetic navigation sense.

  - A number of animals, including birds, are documented to have a magnetic sense they use in navigation.
  - Bacteria are known to migrate vertically using the earth's field to align them as "dipping needles" so their cilia drive them downward to lower-oxygen water.
  - The bacteria obtain their magnetic alignment by depositing crystals of magnetitie of a size that will hold no more than a single magnetic domain, and thus be automatically magetized. New crystals are deposited next to old, making them align in the same direction. The row of crystals is a strong enough magnet to align the bug like a compass needle. The row is normally split when the bug reproduces, so the two new bugs are both magnetized the same way, rather than one getting a 50/50 chance of swimming the wrong way. (No doubt the occasional offspring gets none and has to take the chance - which let the species survive magnetic reversal events.)
  -Some nerve cells in a number of animals contain such magnetite particles, leading to the speculation that these may be the basis for a magnetic sense.
  - Among such nerve types is on in the human nose, leading to the speculation that some humans may be able to "smell" magnetic fields (or have some magnetic sense in some OTHER group of neurons that ALSO produces the particles and that those in the nose are vestigial mis-triggering of the mechanism, or that an organism in their ancestry may once have had a magnetic sense, of which this is a vestigial remanent.)
  - (I have a small number of personal, anaecdotal, experiences that lead me to believe that I once had a magnetic sense that was input to my brain's location processing, but at a priority far below visual observation. These all occurred before I ever had an MRI.)
  - If some nerves do detect ambient magnetism by monitoring mechanical forces originating in magnetitie particles, the strong magnetic field of an MRI machine might be expected to disrupt this by modifying the magnetization of the particles, or by yanking on then so strongly they disrupt, or even kill, the nerves in question.

So if humans DO have a magnetic sense of this form, it might actually be destroyed by exposure to, and especially testing in, an MRI machine.

TFA said: "Otherwise, it risks having users (slowly but surely) switch to more secure platforms that do give them updates in a timely manner."

I'm curious what platforms those might be.

The only one I'm (slightly) familiar with at the moment is Replicant, which is an all-open port of Android - with support for a limitied - and (thus?) somewhat pricey (when even available)- handful of platforms.

("All-Open" being defined as "Functionality dependent on binary blobs we don't have open source replacements for is left out of the distribution. You might get it working by installing proprietary modules. But we think that's a bad idea / counterproductive / reduces incentive for people to MAKE open source replacements, so we don't recommend it or provide instructions." i.e. do a web search for somebody who figured out how to do it if you want, say, the front camera, WiFI, or Bluetooth to work and forget about GPS for now. (v4.2 on Samsung s3))

Now I think that's the right approach. And I'd love to see more support or help for the project.

But are there others? If so, what are they?

Good. Now we've gone from "they're all scum" to "some of them (possibly including Rand Paul") are good and trying but the Repubican machine and its operators will block them."

At this point we're mostly on the same page.

Ron Paul is clearly one of those good guys. And the Neocons controlling the R party machine (one of the four major factions) steamrollered him and his supporters (sometimes violently), and changed the rules to make it even harder for a grass roots uprising to displace them.

Two debates are going on right now. One is between working through the R party (is it salvagable?) or coming in with a "third" party - either an existing one or a new one (is that doable or do the big two have too much of a lock?)

The other is whether Rand is a sellout to the Neocons or if he's just more savvy than his dad and trying to look non-threatening to them in order to get the nomination. Andrew Napolitano, who knows him personally, says he knows him to be a genuine liberty advocate, and I trust A. N. on this subject.

If nobody knows how it works, how did the guy invent it?

LOTS of stuff gets invented without the inventor knowing HOW it works, underlying physics wise. All that's necessary is to notice THAT it works, work out some details of "if you do this much of this you get that much of that", and engineer a practical gadget.

As they say, most fundamental discoveries don't go "Eureka!", they go "That's odd ..."

this gem ... hidden in the article:

"... whether it is possible for a spacecraft traveling at conventional speeds to achieve effective superluminal speed by contracting space in front of it and expanding space behind it. ..."

They've been playing at that for a while. It would allegedly work by creating a condition of cosmic expansion behind the craft and its converse in front of it, so the spacecraft is in a bubble where it's running slower than lightspeed (i.e. stopped) but the cosmic expansion and contraction regions behind and ahead of it each total to the opposite sides retreating or advancing faster than light (which is allowable).

I'm not holding my breath waiting for that to fall out of this - or anything. Effective superluminal translates to "Sending messaages into the past." and "Violating causality." if you pick your reference frames correctly. So I expect flies to appear in this ointment at some point: Like something broken about what happens at the sides, needing big-bang energy levels (and not being able to transfer them between the front and back so they're free), or not being able to set up the condition in front because the agency making it happen must involve actual superluminal signal propagation.

Nevertheless, an "electric motor" that works by pushing against virtual particle-antiparticle pairs (or the total mass of the matter in the universe, or of an inverse-square weighting-by-distance of it so it's mostly the local stuff, or dark matter, or the neutrino background, or whatever), instead of ejected exhaust, is just DANDY! Let's see if they can make it work for real at human-palpable, nontrivial, efficiencies and power levels.

When the rubber meets the road, people like Rand Paul are not actually in favor of downsizing the government. They just want to eliminate restrictions on business and aid to the poor.

You have the liberty movement confused with their arch enimies the neocons.