And feel free to use your freedom of speech to argue against a policy you don't agree with, that you don't want to catch on more widely, and that you hope will be changed if enough outcry is raised.

While it's not statistically valid evidence, all 4 people in my office who owned an Xbox had to have theirs replaced. One of them had to do it twice. That's hard to reconcile with a 5% error rate.

Presumably the last Xbox people get actually works correctly. By that measure, my office had 5 occurences of the problem and ended up with 4 working consoles out of the 9 total. That's starting to sound like the 50% failure rate.

You could argue the failure rate of the console isn't the best measure for the situation; maybe a better measure would be how many times customers ran into the issue. My office averages 1.25 failures per Xbox owner, and 100% of the owners had the problem at least once. That's not good.

Sometimes you can make things much easier in a new language. Clojure uses STM for concurrency control, which is much easier due to Clojure's strong preference for immutable data. You'd have a lot more pain using STM in a language not designed for it.

I don't see this comparison made often, but I like to express the data transfer cap as a sustained bandwidth and relate it to the peak bandwidth they advertise. 5 GB cap in a 30 day month is 5 GB / (30 * 24 * 60 * 60) = about 2071 B/sec sustained rate over the month. That's right, if you average 2.1KB/sec for the month, you hit the cap. That's sure a lot lower than the advertised (peak) bandwidth.

This is one of my pet peeves, but not because I replay the level thinking I can beat it (usually the story proceeds and it's clear I couldn't have won). What annoys me is that I've invariably used 95% of my items trying to stay alive and do some damage, and I have to reload to reclaim them.

One of my favorites is an alias for easily grepping process lists:

alias psg 'ps -ef | grep'

Want all your processes? 'psg [username]'
Want to see all processes not owned by root? 'psg -n root'

I mostly use it searching for process names or usernames, but you could grep for pids and such too.

I hope things will change and that we aren't doomed to repeat history, but I'm not very optimistic about it. When the Republicans got the presidency and Congress, they ended up going against their "small government" plans and voted in a ton of special-interest appropriations. It seems unlikely that in the same situation, the "larger government" party would do anything different.

I think Obama will try to curb excesses, but I have little doubt Congress will be pushing for them. Someone needs to tell them they were elected to make the best choices for the nation, not to get the most money for their state or the best boost for their reelection hopes.