I only logged in, since I live in a state that doesn't use the Federal system, so I didn't want to fake my address (beyond saying I lived in a different state, which was good enough to get past the account creation process).

Just how broken is it? Let's find out.

I tried creating an account early Sunday morning and failed.
I tried again Sunday evening, and it worked... on Firefox, anyway. On Chrome, logging in took me to a blank screen.
( See https://plus.google.com/u/0/113779301404424240904/posts/2mxh2wPTein )

If you try creating an account on healthcare.gov, reply here with what happened. Let's see how broken it is.

Is it just me, or did other people read that as The F*cking Software?

Are you talking about Google, or some other company? I don't remember anything like that going on at Google when I was there. The managers I observed were quite levelheaded and didn't assign too much work. The only real impatience I saw was when one product had too much latency visible to the end user. That resulted in a whole lot of impatience... and a new level of vigilence against latency creep. But that was a good thing.

The original report of "For many employees, it has become too difficult to take time off from their day jobs to work on independent projects." can be explained well like this: people who are below average productivity in their team can't spare the time to work on 20% projects.

I don't think this is a harsh thing; it's just a fact of life.

By the way, the Google version of stack ranking (if I recall correctly from my time there) is something like "If you're a manager, and there's a guy on the team who isn't being very productive, make sure he knows about the problem, so he can do something about it."

Also not a harsh thing.

Google doesn't want to become a Cisco, where all the good ideas come from buying up little companies. I suspect that people of above average productivity at Google still have plenty of freedom to try experiments 20% time.

What has changed a bit is that since the mantra of the company became "Features, not products", those 20% experiments are almost always going to involve adding features or other improvements to existing products, not wholly new products.

And that's ok, too. There is a whole lot of room to add features and make things better under the hood.

Congress, say.

And of course 'instantly' would be too gestapo for real life. We'd really want a grace period with escalating warnings, followed by fines, followed by pulling-the-plug.

And it'd be much better if industry came up with this on its own first. What's the state of the art?

Rackspace talks about security,
http://www.rackspace.com/managed_hosting/services/security/
but doesn't seem to offer proactive vulnerability scanning, and if they did, they would charge for it instead of just doing it.

Godaddy seems to offer this as an extra cost
service instead of just doing it:
http://www.godaddy.com/security/website-security.aspx

Here's one wordpress hosting provider that promises to install all security updates within one hour (wow):
https://wpengine.com/security/

So, industry guys, can we get our act together and offer security scans and upgrades as part of the basic service plan?

The solution is easy: hosting providers should be required to continuously run vulnerability scanners, and instantly take down any sites which have known vulnerabilities. As a bonus, it would clear out a lot of crap sites.

+1 to that. Don't try to customize so much. Just use Ubuntu 12.04 (or 12.10) the way it comes. Once you've used to that for a month, then maybe customize. But don't go fooling around with E17 or the like until you're quite sure you know what you're doing.

Look at the bottom Skyrim graph in
http://techreport.com/review/24022/does-the-radeon-hd-7950-stumble-in-windows-8/8

The slow frames always follow extra-fast ones. Looks like some work is being deferred past a frame boundary?!

I have a page with links to other examples of, and discussion about, bluetooth traffic monitoring; see http://kegel.com/bluetooth-roads/

Yes, Wine really is coming along nicely. It's been a very long hard fight, but an amazing range of things work, and it's just going to keep getting better.

Note that Wine has a sponsor - CodeWeavers - and we have collectively dumped at least $20 Million on Wine through the years. Wine is hard.

We do all of that that $59.95 at a time, with the support of people who understand what we do and who choose to support us. I think this is amazing and powerful and wonderful, and I am deeply grateful to everyone who does support us.

I just wish more people knew the details and understood why PlayOnLinux and stock Wine work so well these days. My ducky demise will not be in vain if just one more person discovers CrossOver goodness :-).

Cheers,
Jeremy

See http://yro.slashdot.org/story/08/05/18/1838222/shopping-centers-track-customers-via-cell-phone-signals

I like this one. It has good range and is sufficiently configurable to let me run servers at home.