I guess those are YMMV problems. Though I agree about the screen brightness one.

Just today on the news some Canadian luge folks were lamenting coming in 4th. Some were suggesting the Russians slowed the track down for them by raising the track temperature. No proof, of course.

It was embarsssing to hear my countrymen spewing such sour grapes without any evidence. You lost, deal with it. Don't blame your suits, the weather, Russian subterfuge, cosmic rays, whatever...

...perhaps other countries just have better made and tested suits.

The music industry just doesn't get the 21st century. Their business model worked well enough (they get most of the cash, the artists got peanuts) in the day when the only way to get music was on physical media manufactured and distributed by them.

My empathy is 100% with the artists, not a thing for the non-musical side of the business.

... as beta continues to spread its AIDS among the geek population.

Funny, I've been just getting more back into /. as of late. Even if just to say how horrible Beta is.

Based on some of the obfuscated code I've seen? Hungarian.

That is a great point. I have been a subscriber for ages (and browse at "-1, raw and uncut" because I must suffer from some rare form of masochism). The static snapshot you get with the "old" comments is oddly peaceful when compared to dynamically updating poo and "click to read more" links.

I don't need no stinking unicode to post goatse links.

Interesting. I just checked: the Flash bundled with my Chrome is the older version (but it's sandboxed to some extent). So then I opened up Firefox and checked the plugin version, and discovered it was already at the newest patched version. I don't recall any update, so I guess the Flash Player plugin updated itself in the background without me noticing, and actually managed to do that faster than Chrome did. Impressive!

They won't let you renounce citizenship if the embassy official thinks you are doing it for tax reasons. Even if they don't think that, they charge a giant "exit tax" and can levy fines for previous non-filings (even if you were, e.g. born to a US parent but never actually lived there).

Basically US citizenship is a modern form of slavery. The scary thing, from my perspective as a non-US citizen, is that once FATCA infrastructure is in place, there's really nothing to stop them extending the list of criteria for people who are considered "US persons" for tax purposes. The US has vast debt and a crippled, dysfunctional politics that can't agree on tax rises or spending cuts. The obvious solution for them is to tax foreigners, which is exactly what FATCA is designed to achieve. However FATCA doesn't fully activate until 2017 according to the current schedule so there's time left yet.

My alarm system is wireless. There is a small box in an upstairs closet with a SIM in it which does the data transfer. Costs $15/month on top of my existing alarm plan (could get it cheaper these days most likely) My point is that even that small wireless surcharge is much cheaper than the cost of a POTS line. And this can't have the wires cut outside.

This was on an Air Canada flight heading south. I don't recall the type of plane, sorry. Heading back on WestJet had no USB port.

"free" airport wifi is a vacuum operation. Interesting note: we were heading out on a vacation a couple of weeks ago. I plugged my iPad into the USB charger in the plane and got a nice popup (typing this from the screen shot I took):

Trust This Computer?
Your settings and data will be
accessible from this computer when
connected.

[Trust] [Don't Trust]

So charging on planes is another thing to avoid for me.

I was really wanting to get more Linux ISOs for my collection!