Google never argued in favor of letting folks run servers on residential access connections. That is and always was a harmful distortion of what network neutrality is about. Network neutrality means that if I buy a product with which it's reasonable for me to watch video then I can watch video from the supplier of my choice using the network protocol of my choice without any preference or suppression by you as an ISP.

Had Google said, "You may only run Google product or Google-approved servers," they would be violating network neutrality. They didn't. They said, "No servers on this product. Period."

Another guy caves because some generic dude on the Internet sent him some baseless but threatening letters. I'll play a sad song on my tiny violin.

At least let the guy get sued before reporting it as actual news.

You can find | sort | diff ahead of time (maybe in the background) and then constrain the rsync to only the files recorded to have changed.

Floppy disks go bad pretty quickly. Few of yours disks from 1993 still work. Tough to find any working disks from 1983. Unless there's something inherent to the disk itself (the "original" software with the artwork and sleeve) there's not a whole lot of point in keeping it after securing the data.

And God help you with tapes.

Hard disks have better longevity. If you can find a working PC-AT with a working MFM controller you can probably still boot that 40 meg drive from 1988. But... why? You can fit thousands of those on a modern thumb drive. Physical storage costs money. You can spend it better places than storing obsolete hard drives.

Check out what they do in Hawaii County, Hawaii (the Big Island). They have street lights but must control light pollution for the sake of the telescopes on Mauna Kea.

Watermark the documents for each subscriber. Then, see which ones show up pirated and handle it privately with the few subscribers who were the source.

DRM that tries to prevent piracy through preventative technical measures...

a) doesn't work.
b) pisses off your customers.

BTW, you may as well offer an online copy with the paper subscription. If you don't and your magazine is worth anything, it'll just be scanned and PDFed anyway. Most of your customers want to pay you, but they expect you to deliver the magazine in an unencumbered format that they find convenient.

Have a look at BAEN books. They have a winning formula.

Also, that's not how new major parties form in the US. New parties form when one of the two major parties splits. For example, the Republican party could conceivably split between the Tea Partiers and the Compassionate Conservatives. They're the two major factions in the party and they have little in common.

If such a split were to occur, it would leave the incumbents of both halves in a weak position. Constituents that consider themselves to be part of the other half of the party might not vote for them again. So, one of two things happens:

1. One half of the split party is successful at pirating part of the other major party's base. For example, the social justice democrats are relatively close in belief to the compassionate conservatives. If a Compassionate Conservative party, having calved from the Republican Party, could make a solid call to the social justice voters they could punk the democrats and come out ahead by leaving the tea partiers behind.

It happened before when the Democrats captured the black vote from the Republican Party. Remember, the Republicans are Lincoln's party, the man who freed the slaves. They had the black vote for a long, long time.

2. With a party fractured, someone in the wings that better captures the voters' interest steps up and pulls the rug from under both hales of the fractured party. This becomes the new second party in American politics. This is more or less what happened after the Civil War when the modern Democratic party was born on a Southern Defiance platform.

Occupy was a movement by a few thousand folks with the nominal support of perhaps a few hundred thousand spread out through a country of more than 300 million. Had there been one outstanding charismatic leader, he might have been able to parlay the exposure into local elective office somewhere. There wasn't.

Tea Party is a better example. They weren't getting anywhere as Libertarians so they became a faction of the Republican party instead.

The correct agile answer is:

1. The developers select how many of the priority features make it into the next sprint.
2. Once selected, the feature requirements don't change. They can be dropped or implemented, but new requests go in the priority queue for the *next* sprint.

Everything beyond that is political. You either follow the process or you jump the process. If you follow the process it's the developer's fault. If you jump the process it's not.

The one thing you can definitely do is this: process jumping must be done in writing and signed by whoever makes the decision. When it blows up, you pull out the paper and say, "Here. This guy jumped the process. That broke our quality controls."

In the U.S. the election generally goes to the guy with >50% of the vote. The laws are usually set up so that if no one gets 50%, the top two candidates have a run-off. One of those candidates is usually the incumbent, so that tends to discourage more than one serious challenger. Elections are expensive to run in, after all.

Now, you get elected. Beyond the local level, you're one of scores or hundreds of legislators. Your vote on the floor doesn't mean a lot. What does mean a lot is your committee assignments. As the eventual chair of a committee, you'll have very strong influence over what bills make it to the floor for a vote. But chairmanships are appointed by a party-line vote on the floor, so whichever party has power, they control the chairmanships.

And oh by the way, the parties have these handy fundraising organizations in place for the benefit of whoever runs on their ticket.

Practical upshot: unless you're ridiculously popular or filthy rich, the path to successfully serving your constituents lies through joining one of the two major parties.

In some other systems, candidates run "at large," and the top votegetting 5 or however many candidates are the ones elected. This means you don't need 50% of the vote to get elected, so minor-party candidates can actually succeed. And it means that no single part holds a majority in the legislature , so things like the committee appointment rules can't be done party-line.

Anyway, in the U.S., what happens is you have a two party system for a while, then one party fractures over some issue or another and a third party appears. The third party takes over the role of one of the two major parties and the displaced party fades away.

I have a firefox running on a Debian box that serves as my network monitoring station. It's been running since May 20, reloading a plain html 2.0 web page every 5 minutes. No tabs, no javascript, no images, just plain jane html on a single web page. It has leaked its way from the 200 megs it started at up to 1.2 gigabytes today.

(And don't get me started about how Firefox for Linux doesn't honor the standard X primitives for positioning the window on the screen. Not that its competitors are any better.)

Maybe this would be a good time to mention that I put my console computer into -sleep- mode rather than leave it running. It returns from sleep mode in about 5 seconds with the day's work on screen and all ready to go.

Firefox wasn't running overnight, but it's still running from yesterday. Get it?

Because my time is too valuable to spend it waiting for windows to boot? Because I like having my work ready to continue when I sit down at the desk?

If daily reboots float your boat, you're welcome to them. I expect my software to work for longer than an 8-hour work day.

Some of us don't reboot windows every day.

IE and Firefox allow you to disable it without a whole lot of hassle.