You know who I voted for? I'm no fan of the Democrats. Nadar said it best, the only difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is the speed at which their knees hit the ground when the corporations come calling.

The Democrats tend to be dumb/compassionate, the Republicans, dumb/cruel but both tend to have some connection with reality. The Libertarians are the worst, they are intelligent/out-of-touch. Clueless about the reality around them and pawns of corporate power whilst totally unaware of it. There is no greater destructive force at play in the US today, well, except maybe for the religions ...

Why, prey tell, should the President negotiate with the Republicans right now? There is no win scenario in that for him. Given that you responded to my obnoxious and trollish post I can only assume you are of a Libertarian bent. Since Libertarians are unable to see past their moronic goddess Ann Fucking Rand I am painfully aware of how pointless dialog with you all is and know that I just wasted five minutes of my life responding. However I take some pleasure in being a total jerk about it. Hmmmm... time for another snifter of Hennessy

Motorcycles, sports cars and large pickup trucks are jerk magnets (apologies to genuinely respectful decent people who drive such vehicles, you seem to be the exception). Given that fact don't expect kindness towards speeders, tailgaters, or aggressive drivers built into the programing of robotic vehicles.

(still bitter and bitchy, explanation elsewhere in this story).

Robotically controlled cars are just an expensive, inefficient and dumb way to do public transportation. Everyone will use either public transportation or an automated car so you pay one way or the other, only thing is the robo-cars will be 10x the cost of public transportation so only egotistical dumbasses will buy 'em.

Think elevators but horizontal and branched.

(I'm still bitter after spending $$ to visit Washington DC and being locked out of the Smithsonian, did that leak into this post? Moron libertarian tea party nutters fsking up the country. Rand was a moron fraud, wake up damnit. Mutter, grumble, snarl ... )

Instead of a forced single entity how about something a little more wacky? For example I'd like to see all the cellular radio providers put hidden bids in for the *sell price* of their bandwidth. The market price is set at the average of the two lowest bids and *all* carriers must honor that price. Can't make money at that price? Off to the auction block with you. The price setting process would be carried out every six months. At best it would lead to convergence on two or three "best" carriers providing cell bandwidth around the country. At worst it would provide some entertainment value watching the carriers do battle.

The "two-party system" is a symptom of single choice voting. Multi-choice (approval) voting is a supremely simple fix but few enough people are willing to study it to the point of getting it so I guess we'll be stuck with "one man, 1/n vote" for the foreseeable future. Given all that the only response likely to make a difference is to choose the party least loathsome to your values and try and make a difference *inside* that party.

WHS sounds interesting but a bit complicated. Also, obviously not available on Linux. After many years of trying (in no particular order) rsync, unison, bup, ugarit, btrfs raid, afs (that was the worst install ever) and probably a few others I found Moosefs and for my situation it seems to work pretty well. My requirement is that I can slap a few components together for a new system, boot from USB stick and be up and running in under 15 minutes of my time (the install process may well run much longer but I can get other things done). I have a script to install Moosefs and install all the packages I normally require. Moosefs replicates my data across multiple machines keeping N copies of each file where N is: /home = 3, /mythtv = 1, photos = 3 and so forth. Machines and drives seem to break every year or so and it is annoying but easy to build the new machine and install everything needed. This has been a low stress solution because the machines are very minimally configured. No LVM, no volumes etc. Just two partitions and a default install. Oh, and because I use fossil every time I commit my changes are auto synced off site which lowers my stress/fear from losing data even more. I use bup (will switch to ugarit when I get time since I'm a scheme fanboy) to keep offsite backups as I don't feel comfortable with my data in the cloud (adjusts tin hat carefully). Oh, and mythtv seems to be just fine writing/reading shows to moosefs. If I have simultaneous recording, watching and commercial flagging I do get stuttering but I can live with that. Moosefs has a feature where you can use a remote server for storing a copy of your data without slowing down access but I haven't tried it yet.

I dunno, I've eaten dog before (tends to taste a bit like what it was eating, coconut and scraps, yech). I also had a dog that got hit by a car and the neighbors got to it before we did. Apparently they ate well that night. Shit happens. Things are born, die, sometimes get eaten by other things. That said I could never eat my own dog (extreme starvation situation excepted). Your emotional attachment is just that, an emotional attachment and personally I'm fine with offending your sensibilities if it yields a cure for some nasty disease.

All that said however, I'm a firm believer that *all* animals should be treated with compassion and respect. I consider brutal treatment of cows destined for a grease burger just as despicable as torturing lab monkeys with toxic cosmetics. Why single out dogs for special treatment?

Seems like a great solution for feral dogs and helping breeders get rich. To all your pure-bred (assuming genetically modified is still "pure-bred") dogs, cats whatever add a gene that causes them to die if not fed a special additive to their food.

No more strays ...

I'm just kidding of course but whats the bet that the Monsanto equivalent in the pet world does just exactly this?

Whilst a captive user of Lotus Notes at IBM I frequently grumbled about it. In retrospect I really didn't appreciate how good it was and how much easier it made my life. I regularly synced my mail to Linux and to Windows and was able to seamlessly work offline. If it was an easy install on Linux I'd seriously consider dropping the $100 or so for a copy and I don't own *any* commercial software.

The "slosh data around model" has a strong appeal and Notes seemed to mostly do it pretty well. In a similar way the ideas behind freenet appeal to me also. Well, except the lossy bit.

I've thought I'd seen a problem with our Netflix queue. I just assumed my wife had messed it up somehow :)

"and since you can't do anything else besides driving"

Books on tape. We love them so much we measure our trips in books. It's a one book drive to San Diego and back ....

It is the 80/20 rule. 20% of the effort (switching to approval) gets 80% of the results.

plurality voting: absolutely broken and unstable for single winner elections
approval: not perfect but good enough to break the two party stalemate
range: better than approval, harder for people to get
Condorcet, Schulze etc: better than range (although still debated), mysterious stuff happens behind the scenes, can you trust it? Difficult to explain to the ordinary bloke or blokess.

Approval can have some pathological broken corner cases, or so it is claimed, but the gain is so dramatic and the implementation cost (just count those misvotes and hanging chads) is almost zero.

I sense confirmation bias. Doesn't make it true or not true.

Hard to know what is true: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/8269

Personally my health noticeably deteriorates when I don't include some dead animal in my diet. It might be possible to substitute insects but is raising and killing a bunch of insects less morally objectionable to raising and killing chickens, rabbits or cows? If so, why?

Either way your "general consensus" is debatable at best and delusional at worst.

No no!! You have it all wrong. As I've posted before every person sequesters almost a kilo of carbon in their body. In fact (and this works in favor of the American propensity to obesity) the fatter you are the more carbon you are sequestering.

So the right plan is:

1. Have lots of babies
2. Feed them really well
3. When people die bury them in a desert where they will dry out without rotting so the water can be recycled leaving the carbon still sequestered.
4. Enjoy your newly created global cooling.

  BTW I made up the "about one kilo" part and I'm too lazy to google for a better estimate.

"Fear the Libertarians! If they get their way, the government will leave you alone! Oh, the Horror!"

I'm all for you and me being left alone, it is the leaving alone of companies such as BP that worries me. Any ideology looks good until you bring in all the dirty details of reality.