I had one critical advantage. Our HOA board members were being complete dicks about the clause in question(*) - so much so that the management company (a third party paid by the HOA to run things in accordance with state law) was sympathetic to me, a new home owner, and advised me on the exact process for changing the covenant.

With their advice, my wife and I created a one-page proxy form which we took door-to-door and got our neighbors to sign, one at a time. It took a month, but we eventually got proxies from just over 75% of the owners.

(*) I have since learned that this is pretty much the natural state of all HOA board members.

James Albus wrote a book in 1976 called Peoples' Capitalism. He proposed that the government create a mutual fund that invests in automated industries and pays dividends to every US citizen.

Eventually the fund's dividends would be enough to live on, so nobody would be required to work, and everyone would get a minimal share of the proceeds of automating everything.

Imagine that we had started doing this in, say, 1980.

I have a MBP provided to me by a contractor to a Large Government Agency.

It has mandated anti-virus (which kills the battery), mandated third-party whole-disk-encryption (instead of File Vault), mandated third-party remote backup (instead of Time Machine), mandated third-party remote access...

The contractor support team routinely takes a year or more to certify the mandated suite for new OS releases.

I will probably be on 10.8 on this MBP in 2015, considering we leaped forward from 10.6 last year.

The internet now makes it possible to blow up industries faster than ever before - so fast we don't have time to retrain and reabsorb the people displaced by the changes.

Any one change is good for the consumer and bad/disruptive for the producers, because the particular good or service is now cheaper.

The problem comes in when everything changes at once, and all the changes make people less necessary.

He's objecting to the Government asking Google for the bulk data they collect. They can do it three ways:

* Just ask for it, and say "due to the third-party doctrine you have no legal reason to refuse"

* Show up with a National Security Letter, take the data, and say "this is OK due to FISA oversight. BTW, you can't tell anyone about this."

* Copy the data as it passes through the thoroughly suborned telecom infrastructure, without even asking.

Bulk data collection by Google is potentially bad. Bulk data collection by the Government is worse - Google can't arrest me.

US: Patent trolling is legal, but it ought to be harder and less profitable. runs off to legislate

EU: Patent trolling is legal, but we urge companies not to do anything we might interpret as anti-trustish. wags finger at Nokia

I'd say that the US is trying to do something about trolls, and the EU is just talking, judging from the article.

Could you please send a note to the company in question, specifically telling them why you cancelled your service?

If this happens enough times, eventually US companies will start to poke the government about it.

Obama, like all high-level politicians in the US, gave up his personal privacy as the entry fee for his chosen profession.

The difference between him and the rest of us is:

* He chose his privacy level. We can't.

* He has the power to make the government back off when they find something questionable. We don't.

They could sell the Chinese XP rights to a company in cahoots with the government (and once you get above a minimum size in China, you're with the government or out of business).

The government company would have the incentive and the government backing to get everyone in China on "legit" XP.

MS gets money now. They get to transfer blame for XP support to someone else. They could encourage the Chinese to essentially fork XP, so the supported Chinese version wouldn't compete with recent Windows.

Sounds win-win to me.

seems to be the most generic statement of it. From Wikipedia.

US phone plans typically have no roaming charges over the 48 states - it's easy to spend six hours in the air with no cost increase for cell phone use, and thus no deterrent to yacking.

In Europe, it's hard to take a flight over an hour without crossing an international border.

Casual web search just turns up articles about the new stations in the US.

If we don't already have equivalent stations in Russia, we could offer them a trade. They get theirs when we get ours.

If Dylan isn't good enough for you, your problem isn't non-S-expression syntax.

1. Wolfram is a notorious Lisp disser, and Mathematica is arguably a shining example of Greenspun's tenth rule.

2. Lisp has a long history of trying to help programmers, with mixed results. The term DWIM was coined by Warren Teitelman in 1966 as part of a project based on BBN Lisp, the main predecessor of Interlisp; this project of his sounds like DWIM writ large.

... they're doing it on everything.

It is arguably more dangerous to cut corners on, say, a natural gas pipeline than anything at a nuclear plant, because nuclear facilities have a lot more redundancy in their safety systems.

Consider that it is debatable whether the events at Fukushima nuclear plants killed anyone at all, whereas natural gas explosions kill and injure people on a regular basis - Google-searching for "natural gas explosion" turns up three distinct events in the US on the first page, one of which killed an 11-year old girl in West Virginia.