How about a new law explicitly insisting that ALL government data, except for personal data covered by privacy laws, must be made public within (e.g.) 24 hours. Exceptions only on a similar basis to the way warrants are done now: apply before a judge and get an x-month publication ban (x not to exceed say 72 months, except for real state secrets, where it could be longer).

The usual tariff is based on a concept called "weight-measure", which works like this:

- For cargo less dense than water, a given tariff is per cubic meter.
- For cargo denser than water, the tariff is per metric ton (one cubic meter of water weighs one metric ton).

If you think about it, this makes perfect sense, because anything heavier than denser than water has to be accompanied by enough air (i.e. empty space inside or outside the container) to make the average density of the shipment equal one, and anything lighter than water takes up just as much space in the ship as heavier cargo would. The result is that if you have e.g. a 2000 TEU ship, and each TEU is 35 cubic meters, a full ship will always generate 70,000 tariff units, whether it be laden with cotton candy or iron pellets.

Of course, shipping companies play both ends against the middle and can, with optimization, get better than 100% billing (e.g. by using fluffy stuff like household goods to provide the airspace needed to compensate for containers full of car engines).

In a previous incarnation I was a Systems Designer at a major container shipping company.

Consider the possibility that only the British and their colonies feel English hard cheeses worth celebrating. The rest of Europe seem to get their hard cheeses from the Netherlands or Switzerland.

Reading some of the comments at Gizmodo ( http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2013/06/bbc-home-page-clock-to-be-pulled-after-one-complaint/ ) I begin to see the BBC's point. Apart from (possibly) being part of the template code and therefore requiring extensive site-wide testing, it might well probably break their (reportedly extensive) page caching.

Some there speculate that the old technique uses a client-side function call that is happily cached, while the new version either has to include client-side code that maintains and corrects for the local error offset (= extensive testing requirements due to multiple client platforms), or needs to include a server-generated time specifically customized for that client (= impossible to cache).

I have to wonder if this is deliberate -- or at least if it's a very low priority at M$ -- as they know this behaviour (occasionally changing a VM's MAC address) won't break any Windows systems -- only some Linux distros and network infrastructure.

That's like saying that it's okay to pollute the atmosphere with some poisonous gas (say, for example, chlorine gas) because we can always use technology to re-purify it.

I second this. I've migrated several business services (e.g. svn, flyspray, etc.) from physical boxes running various OSes (W2K8, Ubuntu) to CentOS virtual hosts on HyperV. Apart from one issue*, which is a stupidity using Minimal CentOS unrelated to Hyper-V, I have yet to see a single problem running CentOS on Hyper-V.

* CentOS Minimal requires manual network setup, which is fine, but there is no plug-and-play support. So whenever the VM is moved to a new Hyper-V server, the CentOS networking breaks (the solution is to manually assign a MAC address for the virtual NIC, rather than using the default "automatic" setting).

But even though the CBC gave good coverage to the leak story, Canada has been left out of this new group of governments agreeing to dig deeper into it. Baffling....

'nuff said

36 from Montreal -- and 20 of it is in the hop from ...newyork.savvis.net to ...chicago.savvis.net

Well, I used to do that. But then I bought a house with a huge park across the street, and that solved many of the issues. The dog's been hit twice by cars -- why it's still alive, I don't know -- and the parties in the park sometimes get out of hand...

http://spacing.ca/montreal/2007/09/10/joining-the-medieval-battle-on-mount-royal/

Or if it's Tuesday

Yes, not to mention decreasing pollution, and diminishing the ubiquitous delusion that it is a good idea for all the space around our houses to be paved in asphalt and filled with large metal boxes, some parked, some moving, but all getting in the way of what I want outside my front door. I, for one, would prefer a park.