Like many slashdotters, I have an old box under my desk which grabs mail from several external accounts via pop and serves it up via imap. No smtp though. And having home DSL with no static IP, I use No-IP to provide a stable domain for that machine. So this morning I wake up and discover that the domain has disappeared and my mail client can't connect. And I'm out of town, so have no physical access to the box, which is still happily grabbing my mail from external accounts.. Fortunately the no-ip website is still displaying the dynamic ip address the domain was last pointing at, and my ISP hasn't changed it (and probably won't until I next reboot) so I've been able to log in just using the ip address, but now I need to waste a morning switching it to another domain. Seriously, wtf microsoft!

A watch is easier to look at when you're driving than a smartphone. Work out something that's useful to have when you only have a split second to look at it, and you have a market. Otherwise you're just talking about a fashion accessory which happens to tell the time.

Yeah. I figure I may as well enjoy it while it lasts, because I don't expect to manage to keep 100% coverage in this economic climate for all that much longer.

"People that get selected for studying towards higher degrees often are set in their ways, and are bewildered at any deviation"

Ahh, you've met my department I see!

I'm an academic. 97% soft money research. So my average start time is 11am, but the range is 8am to 1pm. And the work week is anything from 5 to 80 hours depending on where I am in the grant writing / actually doing shit cycle.

We need a Megan's law for the unvaccinated. So you can look up which of your neighbors you need to avoid and keep your kids aways from, just as you would keep them away from sex offenders. Or at the very least childcares, kindergartens, and schools should be required to publicly document how many unvaccinated kids are attending so people can make informed decisions about whether to send their own kids there.

Facebook has ads? Or rather, there are people out there who still don't have adblock installed?

It would be competition if taxi drivers were allowed to ignore the regulations that govern their activities too. All regulation has compliance costs; uber is 'competetive' largely because it dodges the compliance costs borne by existing services.

Now what would be really interesting is to see what happens when some city decides 'sure, uber can operate here, but we're dropping all the regulations we've built up over the years which currently apply to cabs too'.

Or living in a light-polluted environment is correlated with poverty, and poverty is a predictor of obesity due to the kids of food you access when poor.

Let's just take it a step further. We need a Megan's law style 'refused to vaccinate' registry, which shows where unvaccinated children and adults go to kingergarten/school/work. Or at very least require schools and kindergartens to make public what percentage of their students have not been vaccinated, so I can make intelligent decisions about where to send or not send my kid.

When the US govt starts dictating who is allowed to come to your conferences you need to move the conference. Same as the AIDS research conferences have been held anywhere except the US since the 80s because from 1987 to 2009 the US govt banned people with AIDS from traveling to the US.

"Our third gen iPad is about two years old, and already we have problems with app upgrades breaking things"

This. Same with iphones. Perfectly good hardware, continuing to do a decent job doing the stuff you bought it for, being slowly forced into obselecense by iOS and app upgrades. Which makes short term sense for a company whose core business is selling hardware - forcing people to buy a new device every couple of years regardless of whether the last device has died or not does in fact make you money. In the short term. But sooner or later your customers get tired of periodically having to replace working hardware just so they can continue to have essentially the same functionality they had with the previous device, and will switch to one of the many other manufacturers who have (by now) duplicated your functionality. The *only* reason to buy Apple hardware is when Apple does something genuinely new and their latest gadget does something genuinely useful that no-one else does yet (first gen iPhones, for example). After that it's all incremental upgrades and forced obselecense and you may as well switch to the competition until the next time Apple does something genuinely new. Assuming they continue to do so - not a guarantee for any company.

"Another person that doesn't understand Libertarian ideals."

I don't need to understand Libertarian ideals. Everyone I've ever met or read professing 'libertarian ideals' has been a whiny self-centered asshole who appeared to want to live in a society which has been restructured around their desires and fuck everyone else. 'Libertarian ideals' don't need "understanding", they need to be mocked and ridiculed.

I did it for years with a wide range of random supermarket flyers and coupon books and other mailbox-clogging guff, but like you had a more recent attempt rebuffed. But the thing is, the law (or rather, both the law and the Code of Federal Regulations enacting the law) haven't changed. 39 CFR 3008 hasn't changed. My suspicion is some lower-level apparatchik has instructed the people who actually implement it to not do so except for obvious porn, in violation of the law. The last time I tried, I didn't follow up because I found a (well hidden) 'unsubscribe' option on that coupon company's website which actually had the desired effect, so problem solved.

But now that I know other people are being bounced by the classification office, next time I move or just get a persistent junk mailer I'll try again, and this time persist and see how far I get..