Diesel-electric hybrids (like how a locomotive works) are actually just starting to show up in heavy equipment like articulated wheel loaders. There are some huge advantages. The electric motors are quieter which means the operators can work closer to existing population and work more hours of the day. The combustion engine only ever runs at peak efficiency to generate electricity. Fuel savings is around 30% compared to mechanical drive. Packaging is much easier due to flexibility of routing cables instead of moving shafts.

An all electric beast is probably a ways off, but a diesel electric hybrid with even a trivial all-electric low speed cruising range before firing up the diesel is probably an interesting possibility.

But a few X fanbois think they know better 'cuz hmm erh.... network transparency!

One way or the other, networked Wayland will get figured out - I don't need X primitives across the wire, I just need to run an app. This can be figured achieved.

I'm more concerned that security is an afterthought in Wayland, and it'll get bolted on at some point. X's security is enough to make an auditor's skin crawl and Wayland isn't (yet) any better.

Maybe Wayland will forever be a development idea and somebody will fork it to address practical concerns. It might not even be too early for a fork - for as long as large numbers of people have been expressing concerns about both issues, we (meaning I, casually) haven't heard any recognition from the project that those are important issues and design work is taking those needs into consideration.

I'm not bummed about the $20, but I am bummed about the letter.

I get that costs are going up. But the letter cited three things:

1) cost of fuel
2) prime video
3) prime kindle books

The cost of fuel has not gone up year-over-year. If anything, motor vehicle fuel costs are down a little bit, and anything that's fungible for natural gas has gone down.

So, Prime Video. It's a "free perk" but now you've got to pay for it.

3) Kindle books. I use the Kindle app, but I don't own an Amazon device so I don't even get this. Amazon even knows there's not a hardware kindle linked to my account - they could have tailored the letter.

So, that leaves me with the apparent idea that I need to pay $20 a year for Prime Video, which ain't much to write home about. If I had the imaginary choice, I'd gladly lose access to it for the $20.

But, since I'm smart enough to realize that Prime only appears to be paid for by unicorn farts, I would have appreciated an more forthright letter. I'm not gonna cancel, but the operation seems like it's getting a few cracks.

I suppose a would-be assassin would take a random pot shot at the guy, but that speaks more to how that motorcade shouldn't be so obvious when it is passing through either.

Perhaps it speaks more to being the head of an organization that is so reviled. Jefferson made note of the huge lines of people who would come to his office to complain about this or that. He only detested the ones who came seeking political appointments. I never read about anybody taking so much as a swing at him in his office.

I've yet to see anything that eliminates either possibility.

Not 'eliminates' per se, but local Malaysian media was reporting that one of the pilots' homes was searched by officials. Officials denied that it happened, of course.

Assuming that's true, this may turn out to be a heist more than a hijacking. I'm just not sure who it would be worth it for. Most States can buy an airliner easily enough (and the ones that can't aren't in the immediate vicinity of the Indian Ocean). Most non-state-actors would have trouble hiding an aircraft of that size given the runway requirements.

Put together a large team that targets Android phones, particularly lower end phones with no support, and make Windows Phone perpetually free along the same lines as the good custom Android distributions. If they made a serious effort to get Windows Phone working as a solid, stable, fast OS on such phones and made really slick installers, they'd probably see a sharp increase in marketshare within a year. Not even 10%, but enough to cause concern at Google. The best part is that if they were to just stick to Nokia as their "official" handset manufacturer and make it clear that they'll happily support Windows Phone on other companies' platforms it'd probably evade antitrust scrutiny. What would the regulators say? It's illegal for them to make Windows Phone freely available with regular support for phones from vendors that don't even buy Windows Phone licenses? If they were to do that, then they might as well make Windows on Arm illegal, tell Linux vendors to stick to no more than 2 CPU architectures, etc.

Sick citizens cost a state, not in on-the-book expenditures, but in lost productivity and higher hospitalization costs -- especially because of the large number of very sick people covered by hospitals' indigent care pools. This directly translates into higher dollar costs in health care and insurance.

The same insurance that would cost my family $8811/year in Massachusetts would cost an unbelievable $12576 in Mississippi, even though everything else is much more expensive here. Mississippi has the lowest cost of living in the country; Massachusetts is among the highest. Yet they pay 40% more for the same health insurance, when all things being equal you'd expect them to pay 30% less. Why? Is medical care cheaper here? Absolutely not. We're chock full of very expensive, high tech teaching hospitals where the cost of an aspirin would give you a stroke. We have the most expensive cost for medical procedures in the country of any state but Alaska.

So why is health insurance such a relative bargain here? Because we have by far the lowest rate of uninsured people in the country (4.0%) thanks to Mitt Romney's implementation of what later came to be called "Obamacare". Yes, our medical care is more expensive here but because we get preventive care and screening we use less of it.

Mississippi's uninsured rate is 15%, and consequently it's full of poor, unnecessarily sick people. the number of unnecessarily sick people. Here in Massachusetts when you hit 65 you can expect to enjoy 15 years of *healthy* life before your health fails. In Mississippi it's 10.8 years. Mississippi has a shocking infant mortality rate -- a total of 1% of live births. And all those unnecessarily sick babies who didn't get prenatal care cost people living in Mississippi a fortune.

So while Mississippi saves immediate cash outlay by not expanding Medicaid, that's penny wise and pound foolish. People carrying insurance end up spending so much more they could expand Medicaid for a fraction of the costs, and if you're a Mississippian you can expect to get more sick and die younger than any other state in the country. Some deal.

Mississippi has one of the highest rates of infant mortality in the country -- a shocking 1% (10 per 1000 live births) of newborns in Mississippi don't make it. Sick, uninsured babies are very expensive.

I have a family with kids. Under ACA my cost for a silver level plan, after my tax credit, works out to $712/month. That's a lot: almost as much as we pay for food. But considering how much we use the doctor and even the hospital, it doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

How high is "insanely high"?

For a family with two 40 year-old non-smokers and two children under 21, making the median household income of $50,054/year, the average annual silver plan premium, nation-wide would be $9700/year. That's a lot, but not unreasonable given what a silver plan covers. But here's the kicker: Uncle Sam cuts your taxes to the tune 65% of your premium, so effectively you only pay $3373/year. If you were getting anything close to silver plan coverage for much less than $281/month, I'd be very surprised. You can do this calculation for yourself at http://kff.org/interactive/sub... if you like. If you have a reasonably profitable consultancy, the prospect of paying $9/day to insure four people shouldn't be that daunting.

But some small businesses don't generate much income at first, and the tax breaks in Obamacare don't help you because you aren't paying much federal income tax yet. That's what the Obamacare Medcaid expansion is for. It covers *all* your health care expenses if you make 138% of the poverty line or less. Unfortunately about half of the states have opted not to expand Medicaid, even though the expansion woulds be entirely funded by the federal government. If you live and work in one of these states and make less than 138% of the poverty line, you need to get coverage at work or you're screwed. Even a bronze plan, at $249/month, is more than people who are supposed to be covered by Medicaid expansion can pay. Blocking Medicaid expansion at the state level is a key tactic in ensuring that working people experience Obamacare as ruinously expensive.

Finally, it's important to remember that Obamacare doesn't set insurance premiums. What you pay *for* is regulated, but the *amount* you pay for it is determined by the market. Increases in premiums, or too-good-to-be-true plans that are dropped, result from outlawing practices like dropping you from your insurance when you get sick, or raising the premiums so much when you get sick that you're forced to drop your coverage. So the increased premiums under ACA are simply the market price for insurance that actually works the way people expect it to (i.e., when you get sick, it pays for care until you are no longer sick).

If you are one of those people who pre-ACA had awesome health insurance for your entire family below $100/month, your old insurance was almost certainly too good to be true. Insurance companies dropped those policies when the ACA outlawed the deceptive practices that made them profitable.

So, government creates a problem (employer involvement in health insurance), makes it worse (subsidizes employer involvement with health insurance) and then tries to fix it by making it illegal for employers to provide insurance that is too good, and illegal to provide insurance that is too bad, and too expensive to provide any insurance at all, with the predictable effect that lots of employers are simply dropping insurance.

So, it is a fantastic outcome that some peoples insurance situation is being divorced from their employer / employment situation -- this is goodness -- but it is costing people more money, in many cases.

In my case, if I tried to buy health insurance on the BCBS ND exchange, it would be hugely expensive compared to the reduced, employer subsidized coverage I have, and, it would be much worse coverage.

In my state, many more people have lost their existing coverage than have gained coverage due to ACA.

Basically, if the feds hadn't gotten involved in this mess in the first damn place, back during WW2, I think a lot of teeth gnashing could have been avoided.

Instead, the feds are trying to claim a great achievement for maybe partially a little bit addressing a problem that is their own damn fault.

Tools -> Internet Options -> Programs Tab -> Make default

Tools <next page>
Internet Options <next page>
Programs Tab <next page>
Make default <next page>

Well how is a documented protocol for communication different from a backdoor?

On a house, how is the back door different than the front door, other than being on the back side of the house?

No. The hardware never met expectations and it never really got to the kids. Most were confiscated by the local dictators and sold off.

Not just that. I thought the buy-1-give-1 program was awesome and my daughter was four at the time, so I thought it would be perfect. Christmas came and went and I never got a box in the mail. The office was clearly a mess.

I month or two later, I gave up after getting nowhere with those people, bought her a pink eeePC and all was well with the world. Especially ASUS's profit, since they dared to earn it.

I've heard Sugar is the reason many of the kids learned to hack their first machine. That's a feature, not a bug.