I thought being functionally useless was a feature of Twitter.

That's the core issue for telecom competition. For physical net neutrality. This is for logical net neutrality. To keep Comcast from charging you extra for access to NetFlix, and to then turn around and charge NetFlix extra for access to you. It's a first step. Politics is a slow process.

Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking. Local loop unbundling is what enables competition between telecom companies.

I mean, ok, this is a step in the right direction, but without the requirement that local carriers must lease lines I'm not so sure this does a whole lot. I imagine if this goes through then some carrier will bring them to court over Title I of Telecommunications Act of 1996, wouldn't they? It's clear to me the competition the chairmen is talking about is new online sites like NetFlix or Twitch. They'll be free to start new services and not need to pay ISPs to carry their traffic, which is the big problem without net neutrality. It's competition of companies using the network, not competition of companies selling access to the network.

I suppose that will the next thing we'll have to do if this sticks.

"Terrorism" is the new word for "sedition". It turns out "treason" is really difficult to prosecute, but if you change the crime of "acts of war" into a generic and malleable term like "terrorism", you can throw all kinds of nonsense in there that the government considers subversive. Now you don't actually have to do anything wrong to be guilty. You just have to make people afraid that you are!

I keep telling people I'm waiting for systemd-emacs. I feel like someone should make it even if it's a joke at this point.

Nah, it's a GoPro, an arduino board, and an iPhone 3.

I'm hoping to pick up an Acropolis during the next holiday or summer sale.

It's not at all clear to me what "Replacing the Charms bar is the Action center which has many of the same shortcuts as the Charms bar but also has a plethora of other information too." actually means.

If it means you still have to point your mouse to a corner and wait for a hidden window to magically appear, then it doesn't fix the major problem with the Charms bar.

If it means you have a bunch of options and settings that are only accessible from this hidden menu which you have no indication on the screen whether or not it exists, then it doesn't fix the major problem with the Charms bar.

If it means you only get a bunch of random icons with no label for what those icons mean, then it doesn't fix the second problem with the Charms bar.

Having a secondary OS Settings menu to complement the Start menu for programs isn't necessarily a poor design choice, but I am really concerned that they're not going to correct the fact that the theme of Windows 8 was to remove the user interface from the screen and magically expect the user to know what to do.

No, you just use the Application Compatibility Toolkit which allows you to run an application with the exact level of permissions it requires to get things done regardless of the permissions assigned to the current user. Does your application need to be able to write to it's own program folder, but you want to prevent everything else from doing that, too? Application Compatibility Toolkit.

Is it easy to use? No, but it does work very well. The tools exist to get what you need done regardless of your environment. Granting users admin rights when they don't need them is just lazy.

And even more irrelevant, nobody noticed the significance of the discovery until Columbus came back talking about all the gold he found. That's why we remember Columbus. Not because he found the place, but because he gave people a reason to remember that it's there.

I suppose the trains run on time, too.

As someone who runs a school district whose lunch time cash registers use wireless to communicate with the central server (against IT's express and repeated objections), you can take my 5 GHz bandwidth when you claw it from my cold, dead hands.

800 students all with smart phones and iPads connecting to the wireless network mean the 2.4 GHz spectrum is, at best, rather crowded. It's not uncommon to see 70 or 80 devices associated with a given AP during lunch. Combine that with the fact that half dozen the 1980s era industrial microwaves the cafeterias have sport shielding somewhat less effective than a wet paper sack and you can begin to understand the problem. Add to it register software that is so antiquated that it doesn't understand DNS (it was originally written for OS/2!) and communicates with sockets, FTP, file shares, and HTTP (yes, this is a single register application) and is significantly more susceptible to network traffic interruptions than VNC (which, of course, the vendor uses for end point support) and you have a nice little nightmare that I make every effort to ignore.

Well, clearly the answer is to hurl vague insults instead of looking for a solution.

When httpd runs a CGI script, it passes data to the script with bash environment variables. That means the code would be executed by httpd in whatever context it runs CGI scripts. The CGI script itself hasn't even been executed yet.

While that's true, it's still not a simple issue. If you look at the whole it looks like a big, pervasive problem, but having worked in several jobs in financial positions I can tell you that none of them used gender as criteria for salary. If you were in position X, you made $Y regardless of your gender. So it's largely not the case that men make more than women who are equally qualified and employed.

So what's going on?

First, many women stop work to have children. This interrupts their career progress, resets their salary, and prevents them from ascending as high as men. This is the reason that women who stop work to raise children and later divorce still get alimony. There is also a perception that women will do this, of course, and that is a problem.

Second, the careers that men choose tend to pay more. A carpenter, an electrician, a plumber, an engineer, a doctor, a tool and die machinist, a computer programmer or administrator, etc. The careers that women choose tend to pay less. A teacher, an administrative assistant, a nurse, a librarian, medical data entry, child care. Now the reason for this is actually pretty complicated. Professions that men worked were paid a salary to support an entire family wife and kids. That amount of money was simply what a man cost, since any job he took necessarily had to support his family due to cultural standards of the day. If he wasn't getting paid that amount, then he could neither support his existing family, nor could he marry a woman and start a family. Professions that women worked were paid a salary to support a single person or possibly a single person with one child. Today, those salaries remain affected by those historic amounts due to market forces. That's why professional jobs designed to attract men have reasonably good salaries even if they largely didn't exist when the workplace was divided on gender lines (i.e., computer programmers).

The key to take away here is: women and men are voluntarily choosing their own professions and we still see a salary discrepancy. The professions they choose have salaries determined by market forces, which includes how people were paid in the past. Programs exist which encourage women to take college paths that lead to better paying careers, but in spite of the fact that women now consistently and significantly outnumber men in annual college enrollment numbers, men still outnumber women in technical and professional degrees and women are still not choosing degrees which result in better paying careers.

So who is to blame? On the one hand you have people saying that women don't make as much and that's a problem for society as a whole. Women are also not taken as authoritatively as men are, so men tend to get hired into positions of higher authority which, of course, pay more. On the other, you have people saying that women made voluntary choices that resulted in them earning less so they should bear the responsibility for the consequences of their own choices rather than expecting society to fix it for them.

Fundamentally, none these problems can be easily solved through government policy or regulation. Are we expecting the government to step in an force salaries for jobs to be increased or decreased? That you have to pay a teacher and an engineer the same? That's not equality. That's parity. Are we going to say that the woman who worked 5 years, quit 10 to raise kids, and then returns deserves the same salary and opportunities as a man who has worked for 15 years? How is that fair to devalue 10 years of relevant experience? What about the increasingly common situation where the man quits his job to raise the kids? Does he deserve the same considerations?