You're right about startup. But that can be mitigated with block heaters in cold climates, which are already widely used. Especially on little tiny engines. As well it's not nearly so hard to turn over a tiny engine, so I think the cold start problem is no worse than gasoline. A small engine will warm up fairly quickly.

I stood next to a big rig the other day when it was -40C (I was loading it), and it had no smell of diesel at all. Just a vague ammonia steam whiff occasionally. This is of course after it's warmed up. In my mind diesel is the only alternative in the future as it's the only engine capable of running without modifications on a myriad of biologically-derived oils. Heavier oil biofuels made by algae and waste digestion seem to be better bets than ethanol.

I think it's ironic that US government bonds are still considered a safe investment. A bank takes money you deposit with them and invests it at a profit, using a portion of that profit (near zero, let's be honest) to pay you back for giving them money. The government seems to *not* be in the business of doing that. Any money you lend them gets spent straight away. Yet I guess it's safe because if you want to get your money back from the US government they just sell a bunch more bonds to some other hapless person to pay you. This works as long as we have a national appetite and tolerance for debt.

And this is really the whole reason a default on the national debt would really hurt the country. Yes it would affect the Chinese, but since most of the debt consists of Americans' own retirement money, a default would instantly wipe out the retirement savings of a generation or two. The economic impact of that would be staggering indeed. So in the meantime, even though the right-wing hawks bluster, even they know they have to keep the thing going. At least until they are dead.

Also Afresco offers web-based collaboration and edition of ODF documents. How it compares feature-wise I don't know.

I think I know what you were trying to say, but you messed up with the roundup part. Please get your facts straight. Roundup is a herbicide, not an insecticide. An overused and ultimately problem-causing herbicide, but not related to bees in any way that I know of. At least in this context.

The suspected class of insecticide is neonicotinoids, which is actually a naturally-occurring pesticide secreted by some plants. Two companies that I know of, Bayer and Syngenta, produce an insecticide based on this chemical that coats the seeds of certain crops (pulses, corn, etc) when planted. The idea is the plant will take the chemical in systemically, and become unappealing for insects like weevils when they chomp into the leaf. And of course we don't know if when bees come along to the flowers if the chemical is still in the plant enough to kill or hurt them.

Happened over two billion years ago and we're just hearing about it now!? Typical.

Purely anecdotal here, but I know of more than a few holocaust survivors who lived (and some who continue to live) healthy lives well into their 90s. These are folks who were walking skeletons when the war ended. Starving to death.

I understand what you're saying, but the pedant in me wants to point out that there's no such thing as "pure gasoline." Gasoline(tm) is a cocktail of many different hydrocarbon molecules, usually consisting of between 4 and 12 carbon atoms in their chains. And different companies' products contain differing ratios of the common components of petrol.

Guess you aren't aware that the EPA has incredibly strict pollution regs on diesel engines these days. If a big rig sold this year pulled up beside you at a light, if you couldn't hear its engine you'd never know it was diesel. The smell is completely gone. A faint ammonia and steam smell is all you get to identify these new diesels now.

In the past a diesel engine could either be smoke-free and efficient, or NOx free, but not both. Higher temperatures mean no smoke but lots of NOx. Then in europe they discovered that Urea in liquid form can be sprayed into the exhaust stream and that will react with the NOx to form CO2 and N2. That technology has now caught on in the US, in part as a result of EPA regulation.

Now, none of this does anything to solve the CO2 problem of course. But you can't argue that diesels are as bad as wood smoke. While some people moan about the hassle of urea (DEF as it's called), from my experience it's not that big of a deal. And I can run my machine into my shop roof and it doesn't fill the place up with noxious smoke.

By far the easiest and cheapest would be to have them be running Google Chrome and install the remote desktop app. They need to just fire it up, have it generate a code, and give you that code that you plunk in your end. It's fairly fast, secure (one-time codes), and works on mac, linux, and windows.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chrome-remote-desktop/gbchcmhmhahfdphkhkmpfmihenigjmpp?hl=en

I have used IMAP and thunderbird exclusively to access my Gmail e-mail for many years. There are certainly issues. It does mostly work, but the mapping between folders and labels on Google's end is not perfect.

Another issue is that IMAP is just dog slow on gmail. I've tried disabling IDLE, but that does not help. Tried all kinds of other tweaks too.

Also IMAP and Gmail for mailing lists has a horrible, long-standing bug that Google refuses to fix. That is if you post to a mailing list from Thunderbird, your own messages to the list are silently discarded by Gmail when they come in. When using their proprietary web interface that's not a big deal since Gmail places messages from the Sent folder into the conversation. But on IMAP this does not occur. So you'll never see anything you post to a list when using any real e-mail client and Gmail.

Don't even get me started about Google's 1-dimensional conversation view... No it's not threaded; it's merely chronological. Please google, give me threaded messages. Google Wave once did it, so I know you know what threaded means! Conversation view only works with two people in a conversation. Some of the threads I've followed on mailing lists lately would be a hopeless jumble in Google's conversation view, with many twists and turns and dozens of people involved.

Would be nice to have html5 video as well as flash. Sadly I could not download the ooyala video stream either.

JPL is not a government-run organization. It's run by CalTech. However sites like The FCC and NASA were down.

Honestly it probably cost way more to take the sites down and put up a "we're not home" page than it would have to leave them running with no updates. It's a political thing. It's the government's way of trying to influence public opinion on the shutdown.

That's true. gtk-list is still gtk-list@gnome.org, but my e-mail client shows "Gnome list" as the long name.

Yes Qt will make it a non-X11, more native application on OS X (carbon, though if I recall correctly).

Gtk used to stand for the gimp toolkit, but more and more it's the gnome toolkit. I wouldn't be surprised to see it merged into the gnome framework entirely at and future date. Even the mailing list is now renamed to gnome-list.

It's still a great toolkit, and still somewhat cross-platform. It's still being actively worked on on Windows and Mac osx. But with the focus mainly on gnome and Linux (gnome 3 has little support for other platforms now) they are not as advanced or stable ports.

I think wireshark's move to qt is a good one. Will definitely lead to better apps on Windows and Mac.