Is it just me, or did other people read that as The F*cking Software?

Are you talking about Google, or some other company? I don't remember anything like that going on at Google when I was there. The managers I observed were quite levelheaded and didn't assign too much work. The only real impatience I saw was when one product had too much latency visible to the end user. That resulted in a whole lot of impatience... and a new level of vigilence against latency creep. But that was a good thing.

The original report of "For many employees, it has become too difficult to take time off from their day jobs to work on independent projects." can be explained well like this: people who are below average productivity in their team can't spare the time to work on 20% projects.

I don't think this is a harsh thing; it's just a fact of life.

By the way, the Google version of stack ranking (if I recall correctly from my time there) is something like "If you're a manager, and there's a guy on the team who isn't being very productive, make sure he knows about the problem, so he can do something about it."

Also not a harsh thing.

Google doesn't want to become a Cisco, where all the good ideas come from buying up little companies. I suspect that people of above average productivity at Google still have plenty of freedom to try experiments 20% time.

What has changed a bit is that since the mantra of the company became "Features, not products", those 20% experiments are almost always going to involve adding features or other improvements to existing products, not wholly new products.

And that's ok, too. There is a whole lot of room to add features and make things better under the hood.

Congress, say.

And of course 'instantly' would be too gestapo for real life. We'd really want a grace period with escalating warnings, followed by fines, followed by pulling-the-plug.

And it'd be much better if industry came up with this on its own first. What's the state of the art?

Rackspace talks about security,
http://www.rackspace.com/managed_hosting/services/security/
but doesn't seem to offer proactive vulnerability scanning, and if they did, they would charge for it instead of just doing it.

Godaddy seems to offer this as an extra cost
service instead of just doing it:
http://www.godaddy.com/security/website-security.aspx

Here's one wordpress hosting provider that promises to install all security updates within one hour (wow):
https://wpengine.com/security/

So, industry guys, can we get our act together and offer security scans and upgrades as part of the basic service plan?

The solution is easy: hosting providers should be required to continuously run vulnerability scanners, and instantly take down any sites which have known vulnerabilities. As a bonus, it would clear out a lot of crap sites.

+1 to that. Don't try to customize so much. Just use Ubuntu 12.04 (or 12.10) the way it comes. Once you've used to that for a month, then maybe customize. But don't go fooling around with E17 or the like until you're quite sure you know what you're doing.

Look at the bottom Skyrim graph in
http://techreport.com/review/24022/does-the-radeon-hd-7950-stumble-in-windows-8/8

The slow frames always follow extra-fast ones. Looks like some work is being deferred past a frame boundary?!

I have a page with links to other examples of, and discussion about, bluetooth traffic monitoring; see http://kegel.com/bluetooth-roads/

See http://yro.slashdot.org/story/08/05/18/1838222/shopping-centers-track-customers-via-cell-phone-signals

I like this one. It has good range and is sufficiently configurable to let me run servers at home.

The very first spam I ever saw was an ad for a program to send spam. This was back in 1983, on Uunet.

Mono + wine, of late, were starting to be able to run some of the .net apps associated with games. For instance, if you ask it very nicely, mono + wine can run the Need For Speed World launcher/patcher (and was able to do so before .net + wine could). There are lots of bugs left to fix in mono before it can handle more .net 3-era apps, let alone WPF apps, which would be Really Hard.

Also, fwiw, it was posted on an fbi site in 2004 as well: http://waybackmachine.org/20041115000000*/http://foia.fbi.gov/hottel_guy/hottel_guy_part01.pdf