He went to jail for sending emails? Perhaps he should have just sent a death-threat to his somebody by email, probably would have netted him less time.
Seriously, more and more nowadays you read about people being incarcerated for defying authority, the government, of worse: corporations. Real crime is being pardoned, especially corporate white-collar criminals, while the jails are being filled with people just trying to exercise their rights.
America strikes me as a very odd country. There, you have a right to bear arms, based on the revolution against the government sometime ago. Yet somehow, say one wrong thing, against the government, or against their sleazy funders (big business) and your screwed. Give us another 10-15 years, and the crime for whistleblowing with be more than murder - and you'd be better off solving your problems with a gun than making an honest attempt at helping your fellow countrymen.
But around here I'm pretty sure that asking an unqualified worker to go playing around in an electrical deathtrap would be a violation of the labour code. At the very least the WCB (Workers Compensation Board) would be breathing down their neck for so endangering an employee.
Have you asked management about having somebody handle it? Most upper-levels will hear this and put "potential of death" together with "potential for big lawsuit" if nothing else. Many do value the lives of their employees as well, if not their sanity.
There's ample, untapped, opportunities for our government to legalize and tax commodities that have no real harm on society, but are illegal for moral concerns.
Not to mention all the money currently being sunk into preventing/policing such things in the first place. Not that I believe all drugs should be legal, but certain things (pot) the US seems a bit extreme over (I'm from Canada though).
As an owner of pet rats, one thing I've noticed is their sometimes disturbing similarities to humans in habit.
At one point, my two female rats were constantly squeeking and making noise at night. No problem, nocturnal animals, they're just more active in the dark. However, I also noticed that oftimes when I turned on the lights, that the rodents were "cleaning each other" in a position often labelled as a number just shy of seventy.
Now, at first I dismissed this, thinking that I was imagining things. However, after talking to several rat owners and a few petshops, I have garnered that this can indeed be more than simply a hygienic practice.
Afterwards, I'd throw things at the cage when they made too much noise to shut them up. At least until one morning after I found they'd dragged in the shirt I'd thrown and perforated it for nesting material. I liked that shirt too.
Now, I've got two new rats. They don't often exhibit the same behavior as the old ones, but sometimes they will. I'm considering breeding one of them (baby rodents being quite cute 'n all), and I wonder if this will change their behavior towards each other after the babies have grown (and one rat has had an encounter of the opposite sex as opposed to the same). And of course, if I got enough rats perhaps I could make some of this
Is that they make a hell of a lot more money scamming people for smaller amounts of cash (not small even, just smaller) over a unlimited period of time than for 1-time-fees over a possibly smaller period of time.
One trick is however, that with number portability competition will theoretically increase. So, you can always move your connection to a cheaper cell provider, and/or one that doesn't charge for the "ability" to switch.
Personally, I think it's asnine, as you're paying for the ability to switch your number to another carrier should you be dissatisfied with the current one. When I switch cars I pay a flat fee for insurance switchover, and many other things work this way - why do US phone companies get to pull this BS?
<rant> and thank gawd I'm Canadian... and wish half our major industry wasn't run by American corps...
If you really want to be supportive of the artists, but you're tired of some of the sh*t that comes out in the US (and yes, often enough badly dubbed movies/eps with crappy voiceactors are worse than badly-but-understandable done fansubs) I think the best way would be to get the Japanese version and the fansub.
Going with what you've described above, you can figure out the gist of what's going on from the fansub and perhaps some translational articles, and remake them if you have the equipment to do the subbing/burning etc. That's for hardcore, or you could just watch the fansubs that you downloaded off kazaa while still feeling good because you've supported the original artist by actually purchasing a legit DVD as well.
The question is: How many times do you watch anime where you don't know the language, and the subs are bad but you can figure out what they're trying to say? Must be nice to have the burner and time to sub, as I'd love to correct some of these awful translations myself.
Oh, and as a question: another issue is timeframe. How long does it take for the ripping/re-burning of a DVD (subbing I suppose depends on the episode and translations done) on an average DVD burner now?
Is while Quebec was also in the periphery of the effect grid, they avoided this domino affect - most likely because what they had already experienced. While it is a different situation (it wasn't based on bad grid so much as horrendous weather conditions), the Quebecers put in safeguards to protect their grid and thus didn't go down with everybody else when this happened.
Of course, there were supposed to be safeguards that prevented the domino effect anyhow, but perhaps somebody should check out what Quebec had different that actually worked because the existing "safeguards" obviously didn't this time.
I'm thinking that they should place blame later, and just get the f***ing power up again. Piss on either of our governments for the blame game, and just find a solution so that it doesn't happen again - I think that would satisfy most people more than putting fault on anyone else.
And yes, Americans are quite good at shrugging off blame, and Canadians are good at not blaming others - except when it comes to Americans. And when the American gub'mint ain't perfect, flinging our nosepickings at them isn't a great solution either. Perhaps we both need to grow up, as gov't seems to degenerate to the maturity of a 5yr-old whenever blame is ambiguous (blame the other Country, other political party/candidate, whatever).
When I signed up for my cellphone *plan* 3 years ago, my phone came with the plan. However, I'm fairly sure that the phone was still paid for, and the telco was taking the hit in order to snap me in a 3yr contract.
At about 2.5 years, the stupid little startac phone took one last jump from its holster (the plastic holster it comes with really sucked) onto a concrete floor and split in half. Repair price was >$100.
So, I went out and bought a new phone, a compact LG with which I am rather satisfied. However, with a $300CAD price on a refurb, and a $500CAD price on a new phone, I can't see how phone companies are taking a loss on these. Open them up, not a lot of components here, other than the main chip - at $500 I'm thinking that some companies at least are pulling decent profit on these phones.
So far, the only extra feature I've ever found useful on my phone are the forced-network commands (not all phones let you force Analog when you need to get a signal through) and VAD (Voice Activated Dialing) for when I am on the go. No comments about cellphones and cars please, I try to avoid such usage unless I'm getting directions.
However, a lot of features are rather cool, just not useful to the average person. A cellphone shouldn't be a PDA, and in most cases I'd rather get extra battery life than a slew of useless features.
However, if they could come up with a standardized interface for cellphones, perhaps they could enable them all to interact with existing devices a little better. It's hard to make something that uses a cellphone to dial-up internet connections when different cell manufacturers all have a different interface. I mean, at least let me have a car charger that works in more than 1 phone!
And for built-in features or operating system, how about flash-cards? Plug a new one in and have a cellphone upgrade.
Of course, most of these things will be avoided by cellphone companies, because interoperability mean s it is easier to switch to a competitor's phone, and making phones more upgradable would simply lose the profit from idiots who buy a new cellphone every year....
is a "companion" virus to update infected machines now that windowsupdate.com is no more. How about keeping the domain around, but either modifying the DNS server to point it at the IP of RIAA.org, or perhaps just a slight modification to the hosts file of local machines?
If they think a slashdotting was bad, I'd love to see their server smoke after all the infected windows machines start saying "hello"
Smaller drives would result in less worry about "wobble" (of the drive platters) in the case of shock, and less travel-distance for the needle. Now the real question is, are drives dying to demagnetism (caused by greater cluster density) or just shitty design? The lost one I had frag out on me (30GB maxtor) overheated to death, and others have been issues with the needle, so I'm guessing that the less movement that is required of mechanical components the better!
I do understand it being used in consoles and mp3 players. Just not in a workstation.
Depending if they go down enough in price (and after a few years, they likely shall). If they become common - we could see something to the extent of a hot-swappable minidrive enclosure for microdrive. Basically it would be like floppies except a lot bigger and of course using hard-disk architecture.
Really convenient when, say, you're a tech or something else that might involve transferring large amounts of files (of course, DVD's are 4.3GB and drives getting cheaper, but not really so convenient to rewrite).
They're not "standing behind their product" so much as reacting to a class-action lawsuit. In other words, it's cheaper to cut a deal and say that they'll accept OSX returns for users of these particular machines than go through court (with the possibility of losing).
This way, they'll only lose a little money on the returns of OSX by users that actually bother to bring it it. It's likely that a lot of G3 users won't even know they have the option of a return anyhow.
Allowing it to burn fuel for localized (low) flight and explode it to explode for fast-acceleration/long-distance (high altitude) flight might perhaps solve this? Of course, I'm not sure how much work or overhead it would be to create a system that allows both methods to be used....
From what I am getting, one power plant goes down... then local power starts sucking off of remote plants in order to supply itself, and they go down... which dominoes down the line?
Now, would it be possible to just cut off the original station that caused the failure, then start bringing everywhere else (which should still be able to supply for their own demand) back up?
I realize it's cool, and probably convenient, but why not just go for something with a flash card, or a small memory buffer and interface port where the student can sign out the device in his/her name (and get a small upload of the test) - do the test - and re-dock+upload the answers?
I think we should pass SCO a little info.
Consider, if you will, the pulse, aka the lifebeat of SCO's business, as the very people they are pissing off. So now...
OK, here's the pulse. And here's your finger... far from the pulse, jammed straight up your ass.
Seriously, at some point SCO took their finger off the pulse, and lost touch with their customers. Even if Linux does somewhat suffer due to current litigation, do we really think that Unix would make a comeback. Can SCO believe that those using linux would give up, forget that SCO is evil, and switch to SCO Unix?
I, for one, will be boycotting SCO... perhaps we should offer them a chocolate covered pretzel?
Unfortunately no. I could use this to others using nix routers or whom had a local 'nix machine - but in my case I'm trying to tunnel my local IPX for windows machines through linux. Those on the other end don't have 'nix machines (just crappy windows ones), so they couldn't use this.
How about transmitting a signal through some form of changing medium? Really, with the lavalamp approach, all that fancy webcam stuff isn't needed. How about just using a lavalamp type setup with various different floating substances (density, reflectiveness, etc) and shooting some for of beam through it at various areas - calculating the number based on the returned signal?
You don't really need a lavalamp for this either, passing an electrical signal over a short arc-gap, perhaps filling with a changing substance would probably also product random voltage fluxation.
Of course, the real issue is making randomness with a large range (1-100% with many many decimal points) and a large enough variability (that is, any decimal number between 1-100% having an equal opportunity for occuring at any particular interval).
I'm thinking that in electrical and biochemical reactions there would also be a lot of randomness, the wide-universe and entropy and all considered?.
I find it interesting that as a candidate you run a blog. If you were elected, would you continue to run your blog, and therefore allow us insite into life of a political entity, or would you restrict it to non-political matters?
There seems to be a fine line in politics between: what shouldn't be said (confidential), what isn't said (cover-ups), and what is heard (3rd-rate, confused and often not 100% true). How about something to the extent of a blog for politicians, where you run over basic issues covered in a day. Hell, not only would it help the people know what's going on, but it would help you keep track of it too.
Is there any reason the public should not have more insite into what happens in politics? For many major situations we simply don't know what's going on until it happened (and cost us large amounts of cash or a blow to our rights/privacy/etc). Is it so hard to keep a somewhat understandable (perhaps not even offical) journal of a days happenings, just so the public can be informed? We don't need daily expense totals, just the bigger picture as it's happening. Hell, I'd be happy to see my tax money go to supporting a keyboardist/webmaster/whatever just to keep such a thing up-to-date, in case of hand-cramps or politicians that can't type very well.
The government represents the people, and while the internet is helping us lend a voice to our opinion, it could also be used as a tool to let the people hear the voice of politicians (exempting stupid internet/email campaigning ideas). How about it, any reason politicans shouldn't become more "plugged" and lift the veil of secrecy currently hanging over it?
What I've been trying to do is build a VPN-style bridge between my internal network and outside windows machines.
So far, nothing in linux world seems to suit my needs, but the original principle was that I wanted to be able to tunnel my internal IPX/SPX connection (games) through TCP/IP on a VPN channel out to external machines.
For games where I want to play against my friends LAN-style but without sometimes boggy servers such as battle.net etc it would be nice. It also helps get around CD-key issues (I have the original disk, but want to use 2+ machines on my end when people are over).
I don't think the Java solution would cut it for this either, but perhaps somebody can offer a better solution (freeswan doesn't seem to do it, or I am using it wrong as well)
A good question would be "how often" to clean these things too, although that probably depends on the user. I still think that the grossest devices are those used by smokers (icky yellow coating on keyboard/mouse) - we get these at work and I prefer to replace rather that have to handle them.
Mice are pretty easy to clean though, the exacto solution mentioned above works well. Keyboard can be more of a pain. If you're the type who sometimes *gasp* snacks at the keyboard especially (little crumbs between keys). I've heard that dumping it in soapy water shouldn't be a problem, so long as you give it a good drying interval afterwards (electronics don't mind water so much as water+electricity). A dishwasher will do ya good as well, as long as you don't put anything on high-heat so that plastic/sensitive components get damaged (again, decent drying interval afterwards)
This would probably work well for ball-mice too, at least for general cleaning, but probably not for optical as you don't want any soap coating the IR sensor???
With the invention of all these funky robots etc etc, you'd think somebody could come up with a useful mouse-cleaning tool? I'm kill for these at work... perhaps something where I could send all my dirty ugly mice down a conveyer on have them come out sparkling clean.
I remember reading that a lot of card-type storage devices were write-limited. That is, they have a preset range of write operations they can achieve before the card becomes non-writable (one user apparently had an issue with this when putting a swap or log file/partition on an MMC card).
Not to knock journaled filesystems, but wouldn't they pull extra writes in order to store the journal on the removable device? I'm not 100% sure about journal writes, but I think this require at least 1 extra write to the card for the journal per operation? Not a huge thing, considering they are capable of writes in the millions, but still a little more detrimental to the life of the card - these things aren't meant to replaced often-written-to devices such as hard-disks anyhow though.
Slashdot Mirror
You can set up a phone number to reject any incoming collect calls. It would take about 10 calls and he'd probably just stick it on auto-reject
He went to jail for sending emails? Perhaps he should have just sent a death-threat to his somebody by email, probably would have netted him less time.
Seriously, more and more nowadays you read about people being incarcerated for defying authority, the government, of worse: corporations. Real crime is being pardoned, especially corporate white-collar criminals, while the jails are being filled with people just trying to exercise their rights.
America strikes me as a very odd country. There, you have a right to bear arms, based on the revolution against the government sometime ago. Yet somehow, say one wrong thing, against the government, or against their sleazy funders (big business) and your screwed. Give us another 10-15 years, and the crime for whistleblowing with be more than murder - and you'd be better off solving your problems with a gun than making an honest attempt at helping your fellow countrymen.
But around here I'm pretty sure that asking an unqualified worker to go playing around in an electrical deathtrap would be a violation of the labour code. At the very least the WCB (Workers Compensation Board) would be breathing down their neck for so endangering an employee.
Have you asked management about having somebody handle it? Most upper-levels will hear this and put "potential of death" together with "potential for big lawsuit" if nothing else. Many do value the lives of their employees as well, if not their sanity.
There's ample, untapped, opportunities for our government to legalize and tax commodities that have no real harm on society, but are illegal for moral concerns.
Not to mention all the money currently being sunk into preventing/policing such things in the first place. Not that I believe all drugs should be legal, but certain things (pot) the US seems a bit extreme over (I'm from Canada though).
As an owner of pet rats, one thing I've noticed is their sometimes disturbing similarities to humans in habit.
At one point, my two female rats were constantly squeeking and making noise at night. No problem, nocturnal animals, they're just more active in the dark. However, I also noticed that oftimes when I turned on the lights, that the rodents were "cleaning each other" in a position often labelled as a number just shy of seventy.
Now, at first I dismissed this, thinking that I was imagining things. However, after talking to several rat owners and a few petshops, I have garnered that this can indeed be more than simply a hygienic practice.
Afterwards, I'd throw things at the cage when they made too much noise to shut them up. At least until one morning after I found they'd dragged in the shirt I'd thrown and perforated it for nesting material. I liked that shirt too.
Now, I've got two new rats. They don't often exhibit the same behavior as the old ones, but sometimes they will. I'm considering breeding one of them (baby rodents being quite cute 'n all), and I wonder if this will change their behavior towards each other after the babies have grown (and one rat has had an encounter of the opposite sex as opposed to the same). And of course, if I got enough rats perhaps I could make some of this
Is that they make a hell of a lot more money scamming people for smaller amounts of cash (not small even, just smaller) over a unlimited period of time than for 1-time-fees over a possibly smaller period of time.
One trick is however, that with number portability competition will theoretically increase. So, you can always move your connection to a cheaper cell provider, and/or one that doesn't charge for the "ability" to switch.
Personally, I think it's asnine, as you're paying for the ability to switch your number to another carrier should you be dissatisfied with the current one. When I switch cars I pay a flat fee for insurance switchover, and many other things work this way - why do US phone companies get to pull this BS?
<rant> and thank gawd I'm Canadian... and wish half our major industry wasn't run by American corps...
If you really want to be supportive of the artists, but you're tired of some of the sh*t that comes out in the US (and yes, often enough badly dubbed movies/eps with crappy voiceactors are worse than badly-but-understandable done fansubs) I think the best way would be to get the Japanese version and the fansub.
Going with what you've described above, you can figure out the gist of what's going on from the fansub and perhaps some translational articles, and remake them if you have the equipment to do the subbing/burning etc. That's for hardcore, or you could just watch the fansubs that you downloaded off kazaa while still feeling good because you've supported the original artist by actually purchasing a legit DVD as well.
The question is: How many times do you watch anime where you don't know the language, and the subs are bad but you can figure out what they're trying to say? Must be nice to have the burner and time to sub, as I'd love to correct some of these awful translations myself.
Oh, and as a question: another issue is timeframe. How long does it take for the ripping/re-burning of a DVD (subbing I suppose depends on the episode and translations done) on an average DVD burner now?
Is while Quebec was also in the periphery of the effect grid, they avoided this domino affect - most likely because what they had already experienced. While it is a different situation (it wasn't based on bad grid so much as horrendous weather conditions), the Quebecers put in safeguards to protect their grid and thus didn't go down with everybody else when this happened.
Of course, there were supposed to be safeguards that prevented the domino effect anyhow, but perhaps somebody should check out what Quebec had different that actually worked because the existing "safeguards" obviously didn't this time.
I'm thinking that they should place blame later, and just get the f***ing power up again. Piss on either of our governments for the blame game, and just find a solution so that it doesn't happen again - I think that would satisfy most people more than putting fault on anyone else.
And yes, Americans are quite good at shrugging off blame, and Canadians are good at not blaming others - except when it comes to Americans. And when the American gub'mint ain't perfect, flinging our nosepickings at them isn't a great solution either. Perhaps we both need to grow up, as gov't seems to degenerate to the maturity of a 5yr-old whenever blame is ambiguous (blame the other Country, other political party/candidate, whatever).
Where did you get this information?
When I signed up for my cellphone *plan* 3 years ago, my phone came with the plan. However, I'm fairly sure that the phone was still paid for, and the telco was taking the hit in order to snap me in a 3yr contract.
At about 2.5 years, the stupid little startac phone took one last jump from its holster (the plastic holster it comes with really sucked) onto a concrete floor and split in half. Repair price was >$100.
So, I went out and bought a new phone, a compact LG with which I am rather satisfied. However, with a $300CAD price on a refurb, and a $500CAD price on a new phone, I can't see how phone companies are taking a loss on these. Open them up, not a lot of components here, other than the main chip - at $500 I'm thinking that some companies at least are pulling decent profit on these phones.
So far, the only extra feature I've ever found useful on my phone are the forced-network commands (not all phones let you force Analog when you need to get a signal through) and VAD (Voice Activated Dialing) for when I am on the go. No comments about cellphones and cars please, I try to avoid such usage unless I'm getting directions.
However, a lot of features are rather cool, just not useful to the average person. A cellphone shouldn't be a PDA, and in most cases I'd rather get extra battery life than a slew of useless features.
However, if they could come up with a standardized interface for cellphones, perhaps they could enable them all to interact with existing devices a little better. It's hard to make something that uses a cellphone to dial-up internet connections when different cell manufacturers all have a different interface. I mean, at least let me have a car charger that works in more than 1 phone!
And for built-in features or operating system, how about flash-cards? Plug a new one in and have a cellphone upgrade.
Of course, most of these things will be avoided by cellphone companies, because interoperability mean s it is easier to switch to a competitor's phone, and making phones more upgradable would simply lose the profit from idiots who buy a new cellphone every year....
is a "companion" virus to update infected machines now that windowsupdate.com is no more. How about keeping the domain around, but either modifying the DNS server to point it at the IP of RIAA.org, or perhaps just a slight modification to the hosts file of local machines?
If they think a slashdotting was bad, I'd love to see their server smoke after all the infected windows machines start saying "hello"
Smaller drives would result in less worry about "wobble" (of the drive platters) in the case of shock, and less travel-distance for the needle. Now the real question is, are drives dying to demagnetism (caused by greater cluster density) or just shitty design? The lost one I had frag out on me (30GB maxtor) overheated to death, and others have been issues with the needle, so I'm guessing that the less movement that is required of mechanical components the better!
I do understand it being used in consoles and mp3 players. Just not in a workstation.
Depending if they go down enough in price (and after a few years, they likely shall). If they become common - we could see something to the extent of a hot-swappable minidrive enclosure for microdrive. Basically it would be like floppies except a lot bigger and of course using hard-disk architecture.
Really convenient when, say, you're a tech or something else that might involve transferring large amounts of files (of course, DVD's are 4.3GB and drives getting cheaper, but not really so convenient to rewrite).
They're not "standing behind their product" so much as reacting to a class-action lawsuit. In other words, it's cheaper to cut a deal and say that they'll accept OSX returns for users of these particular machines than go through court (with the possibility of losing).
This way, they'll only lose a little money on the returns of OSX by users that actually bother to bring it it. It's likely that a lot of G3 users won't even know they have the option of a return anyhow.
Allowing it to burn fuel for localized (low) flight and explode it to explode for fast-acceleration/long-distance (high altitude) flight might perhaps solve this? Of course, I'm not sure how much work or overhead it would be to create a system that allows both methods to be used....
From what I am getting, one power plant goes down... then local power starts sucking off of remote plants in order to supply itself, and they go down... which dominoes down the line?
Now, would it be possible to just cut off the original station that caused the failure, then start bringing everywhere else (which should still be able to supply for their own demand) back up?
I realize it's cool, and probably convenient, but why not just go for something with a flash card, or a small memory buffer and interface port where the student can sign out the device in his/her name (and get a small upload of the test) - do the test - and re-dock+upload the answers?
I think we should pass SCO a little info.
/pulse/finger /ass/finger
Consider, if you will, the pulse, aka the lifebeat of SCO's business, as the very people they are pissing off. So now...
OK, here's the pulse. And here's your finger... far from the pulse, jammed straight up your ass.
Seriously, at some point SCO took their finger off the pulse, and lost touch with their customers. Even if Linux does somewhat suffer due to current litigation, do we really think that Unix would make a comeback. Can SCO believe that those using linux would give up, forget that SCO is evil, and switch to SCO Unix?
I, for one, will be boycotting SCO... perhaps we should offer them a chocolate covered pretzel?
SCO: mv
Unfortunately no. I could use this to others using nix routers or whom had a local 'nix machine - but in my case I'm trying to tunnel my local IPX for windows machines through linux. Those on the other end don't have 'nix machines (just crappy windows ones), so they couldn't use this.
How about transmitting a signal through some form of changing medium? Really, with the lavalamp approach, all that fancy webcam stuff isn't needed. How about just using a lavalamp type setup with various different floating substances (density, reflectiveness, etc) and shooting some for of beam through it at various areas - calculating the number based on the returned signal?
You don't really need a lavalamp for this either, passing an electrical signal over a short arc-gap, perhaps filling with a changing substance would probably also product random voltage fluxation.
Of course, the real issue is making randomness with a large range (1-100% with many many decimal points) and a large enough variability (that is, any decimal number between 1-100% having an equal opportunity for occuring at any particular interval).
I'm thinking that in electrical and biochemical reactions there would also be a lot of randomness, the wide-universe and entropy and all considered?.
I find it interesting that as a candidate you run a blog. If you were elected, would you continue to run your blog, and therefore allow us insite into life of a political entity, or would you restrict it to non-political matters?
There seems to be a fine line in politics between: what shouldn't be said (confidential), what isn't said (cover-ups), and what is heard (3rd-rate, confused and often not 100% true). How about something to the extent of a blog for politicians, where you run over basic issues covered in a day. Hell, not only would it help the people know what's going on, but it would help you keep track of it too.
Is there any reason the public should not have more insite into what happens in politics? For many major situations we simply don't know what's going on until it happened (and cost us large amounts of cash or a blow to our rights/privacy/etc). Is it so hard to keep a somewhat understandable (perhaps not even offical) journal of a days happenings, just so the public can be informed? We don't need daily expense totals, just the bigger picture as it's happening. Hell, I'd be happy to see my tax money go to supporting a keyboardist/webmaster/whatever just to keep such a thing up-to-date, in case of hand-cramps or politicians that can't type very well.
The government represents the people, and while the internet is helping us lend a voice to our opinion, it could also be used as a tool to let the people hear the voice of politicians (exempting stupid internet/email campaigning ideas). How about it, any reason politicans shouldn't become more "plugged" and lift the veil of secrecy currently hanging over it?
What I've been trying to do is build a VPN-style bridge between my internal network and outside windows machines.
So far, nothing in linux world seems to suit my needs, but the original principle was that I wanted to be able to tunnel my internal IPX/SPX connection (games) through TCP/IP on a VPN channel out to external machines.
For games where I want to play against my friends LAN-style but without sometimes boggy servers such as battle.net etc it would be nice. It also helps get around CD-key issues (I have the original disk, but want to use 2+ machines on my end when people are over).
I don't think the Java solution would cut it for this either, but perhaps somebody can offer a better solution (freeswan doesn't seem to do it, or I am using it wrong as well)
A good question would be "how often" to clean these things too, although that probably depends on the user. I still think that the grossest devices are those used by smokers (icky yellow coating on keyboard/mouse) - we get these at work and I prefer to replace rather that have to handle them.
Mice are pretty easy to clean though, the exacto solution mentioned above works well. Keyboard can be more of a pain. If you're the type who sometimes *gasp* snacks at the keyboard especially (little crumbs between keys). I've heard that dumping it in soapy water shouldn't be a problem, so long as you give it a good drying interval afterwards (electronics don't mind water so much as water+electricity). A dishwasher will do ya good as well, as long as you don't put anything on high-heat so that plastic/sensitive components get damaged (again, decent drying interval afterwards)
This would probably work well for ball-mice too, at least for general cleaning, but probably not for optical as you don't want any soap coating the IR sensor???
With the invention of all these funky robots etc etc, you'd think somebody could come up with a useful mouse-cleaning tool? I'm kill for these at work... perhaps something where I could send all my dirty ugly mice down a conveyer on have them come out sparkling clean.
I remember reading that a lot of card-type storage devices were write-limited. That is, they have a preset range of write operations they can achieve before the card becomes non-writable (one user apparently had an issue with this when putting a swap or log file/partition on an MMC card).
Not to knock journaled filesystems, but wouldn't they pull extra writes in order to store the journal on the removable device? I'm not 100% sure about journal writes, but I think this require at least 1 extra write to the card for the journal per operation? Not a huge thing, considering they are capable of writes in the millions, but still a little more detrimental to the life of the card - these things aren't meant to replaced often-written-to devices such as hard-disks anyhow though.