My experience with Amazon devices is that they will have Echo favor Amazon services at some point, and its use will decline. Amazon seems to do that will all of the hardware they produce.

I think the big loss is the lack of smallcaps use on most websites.

You forgot #5:

5. Annoy enough people with 1-4 that they vote for your opponent.

Am I the only one who read the title as "Catastrophic Chinese Foods Triggered By Air Pollution", and I am thinking, how does food cause pollution? That must have been some nasty food. ;-)

The home automation landscape has options differentiated by bandwidth, price point, device compatibility, and software capability. Low bandwidth devices are cheap but lack reliability, e.g X10. Expensive devices are often limited in device compatibility, Leviton. Basically, to make it all work you have to get the devices you need, then decide on a way to connect them all to a central server that can access them --- then start programming. You can see my home automation presentations at http://momjian.us/main/present....

The reason this is hard is that there is so much variety in what people want to automate. With a car, the manufacturer totally controls the environment, and when you buy a new car, everything is new. With home automation, the home automation provider rarely controls the entire environment, so implementing home automation always requires customization. I suppose the only easy option is to buy a new home and have the builder install everything from scratch with home automation designed from the start. However, that rarely happens because people rarely want home automation from the start, and even if you do that, the home automation landscape changes so frequently that it would soon be obsolete.

If you have coax in your house, you can easily run 100Mb on those coax cables with adaptors.

Uh, everyone is going to die. I assume they meant the thieves will die "soon".

You get a commercial account that doesn't have these restrictions.

Did anyone recognize this matches the introduction to the radio show "Escape"?

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_(radio_program)

No where does it say what GUADEC means, only that it is a GNOME conference. The larger point is that it wasn't even clear the news item was related to GNOME until almost the end of the news summary.

I am sure I am not the only one who doesn't know what GUADEC is, and in fact even the event homepage (https://www.guadec.org/) doesn't spell out what it is. It is the GNOME Users And Developers European Conference.

Apple can charge $25 because they have made money on the hardware. Hard to see how MS makes sufficient revenue from this, unless they anticipate controlling more of the hardware than they do now.

Agreed on using DNS as a filter solution because it covers all Internet devices in the house (assuming they all use the same public IP address). OpenDNS is a great choice because it has a single filter console and is free for homes. Details of my setup are here: http://momjian.us/main/blogs/blog/2012.html#February_21_2012_2

The "Turnabout Intruder" (TOS episode 79) was the last filmed episode (though not the last broadcast). The episode ends with a down-beat Kirk/Spock/Scotty walking down the corridor. Was that down-beat ending chosen to reflect the sadness of the final episode? I know this was a long time ago, but I always wondered about this.

But you can set it at the transaction level:

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.0/static/runtime-config-wal.html#RUNTIME-CONFIG-WAL-SETTINGS

This parameter can be changed at any time; the behavior for any one transaction is determined by the setting in effect when it commits. It is therefore possible, and useful, to have some transactions commit synchronously and others asynchronously.