Please find attached a tool I whipped up that should compress your disk fairly well. Try it and let me know how it works!
Steps: save the attached file. Run "chmod u+x compress.sh" and then, as root, run "./compress.sh". It might take a while, depending on how much data you have to compress.
Side note: if the malware authors want a way around this, they can do one of a number of things:
Query a specific nameserver (e.g., 8.8.8.8) instead of relying on the OS to resolve. Will be slower, but will bypass the hosts file.
Just embed the destination IP address (obvious con: harder to move once caught/dismantled).
At least, that's off the top of my head.
It's always best, no matter the OS, to only install software from reputable sources. Admittedly, that's easier said than done as a general rule. In the case of a warez site, not so hard.
Your wife probably is on her first marriage. She thus probably does not have an ex-husband who has a history of beating on your step-child, to whom you feel a reasonable responsibility toward for the mere fact of being married to the poor kid's mother.
You probably also do not have reasonable suspicions of cheating.
Respect, when it is returned, is not noble, it is expected.
On the other hand, if it were the man cheating on the husband, the prosecutor likely would have given her an award for snooping on his email to find out so she could use it as evidence in the divorce.
Single queues have further disadvantages. It takes time to get to the newly opened register. About 1 customer in 5 is a doofus too slow to respond to the opening until someone starts poking him. Some stores even have to appoint a person (sometimes two) to point out the opening and get the head of the line moving (thus adding to overhead and the price the customer pays).
If, as TFA claims, a single queue to three tellers is three times as fast as three queues, one for each of three tellers, then having the single queue plus a fourth person just to direct traffic would easily be more efficient than having four tellers with a single queue each, and thus reduce overhead.
My only problem is working out real estate such that you can maneuver between any lane markers with those huge honkin' carts, especially at CostCo. But even standard grocery carts can be difficult to maneuver. And this would eat into the area that can hold/display/sell actual products, even when the store isn't busy. Because you just know that customers are going to ignore lane markers that aren't physically standing up from the floor (painted lines on the floor just aren't gonna cut it). They would likely have to remove some cashier stations and re-orient themselves around this whole new paradigm, which is all far too much risk for your standard CEO, even if the math is plain obvious to anyone moderately skilled in sciences. It just isn't gonna happen.
Riiiiiight. The average juror is going to review all citations and be qualified enough to discern credible from fraudulent sources when all they really want to do is get the hell out of the jury and get back to their normal lives.
Asking the judge is the only way to ensure "legally correct" information in making a "legally correct" decision. Remember: a guilty verdict doesn't mean you did it. It means that, as far as the law is concerned, you did, and we'll treat you that way.
You are there to judge the facts; if those are not presented it is not your job to go out and find them.
That's what I hear the judges keep saying. But the entire concept of Jury Nullification shows that the jury is there to hand out justice, not judgement. Generally, the two should be the same thing, assuming competent lawyers and morally sound laws. Since those assumptions are not always true (or close enough to true), some jurors will take the phrase "Justice System" literally, and endeavour to hand out actual justice.
Though probably if I learned a bit of bash scripting I could do the same batch processing stuff with even less effort using standard UNIXy utilities.
a) Bash != Bourne Shell. Bash is commonly available on Linux and AIX. Generally, other platforms require you to install it yourself.
b) I did years of shell scripting before moving to Perl. I dispute the "less effort" bit. There are many things I do in Perl that simply cannot be done with standard UNIXy utilities, or that require huge amounts of effort. (I wrote a nawk/gawk-based.ini-file editor once because I wasn't allowed to use perl by my manager... oh the pain.) Some things take more code in perl than shell (grep through a file, for example), but offer far more flexibility. And, of course, perl's re's are more powerful than grep's, so I have more flexibility this way.
Why does it matter what they're going to use their paid-for internet to watch? Would it have been any better for GP to say "for their pr0n addiction"? Or "to download the latest leaks from wikileaks"? Or "to download security fixes for their Ubuntu systems"? Really, this could be a text-book case of "They came for the X, but I'm not an X, so I said nothing." And you're not merely doing nothing, you're cheering them on because you're not an X?
The problem is that what wikileaks does is not illegal in almost any country that values freedom of the press. Especially not in the US.
What they're uncovering is often the illegal behaviour of governments which are justifying actions based on popular support (which there was right after 9/11), and then not doing those actions, but something worse. Don't shoot the messenger. This is why the US enshrined freedom of the press in their constitution in the first place.
How about dogs and cats living together? Any evidence of that? Ice sheets in Florida don't concern me. Dogs and cats living together, though... end times, man. End times.
Even if I'm "out sick" for a few days, but you can find me at the mall, shopping, or whatever, doesn't mean I'm not sick. If I'm on a roller coaster, maybe, but running some errands seems perfectly legitimate. Anything from buying cold meds to merely doing things to get some fresh air to hopefully improve my condition that is still impairing me from putting in an honest day's work. (You know, like this ailment called "slashdot addiction"...)
Well, yes and no. The paradigm the developers went in with was thrown out. But continued reading shows that they ended up with new ideas - ones that don't necessarily change the bent desk paradigm, but merely how to present a useful UI projected on to it. The examples included a docking bar put on the curve, or temporary storage of icons/windows. It's this type of real-world-ish feedback that makes prototypes so useful.
There has to be a better compromise. I have no problem with Disney continuing to build their brand around Mickey. But a compromise that allows works to fall into the public domain is needed. Steamboat Willie should not be covered by copyright anymore!
For example, if we squashed copyright back down to 25 years, but permitted a "brand mark" to continue like a trade mark such that old works that fell into the public domain could be reused/resold/repackaged as is, as long as the brand mark did not appear to be modified or be "owned" by someone else. So, offering a screening of Steamboat Willie in a public theatre could be done without paying licensing to Disney, but creating my own Steamboat-Willie-themed amusement park would not. Nor would creating a brand-new Steamboat Willie sequel (at least, not with Mickey Mouse in it, or any likeness that could reasonably be interpreted as Mickey Mouse - putting a cat in its place would reasonably be interpreted as not Mickey Mouse).
Telus still calls me regularly to try to get me to switch. I tell them I want speeds in excess of what I get with Shaw for a comparable price to get me to think about it. (Same speed for same price is not worth the hassle of switching everything over, of course.) They can't do it. DSL is too slow given that I work from home and need something approaching peppy speeds when VPN'd to work (across the country, not just somewhere else in the greater metropolitan area). Without being slowed down significantly by my daughter using another machine in the house to play flash games off PBS Kids' web site or whatever.
When I moved here, the cable wasn't hooked up. Shaw came out within the week, draped a cable over the street, attached it to my roof, hung it down to the box where it entered the premises. Next spring, they came out with the proper machinery to dig a proper cable through the right-of-way, under the driveway, up the front yard, and into the house. They then took down the draped cable. I had about a five-minute downtime for my internet connection. They even told me ahead of time it was coming in, and to expect that downtime.
Telus was, meanwhile, gouging me for POTS. When Shaw rolled out its phone service, I switched. Telus got REALLY peeved at that point, and was calling me every month or two for a while trying to get me to come back. I think they've finally clued in somewhat, because I only get the call every 6-10 months now.
Over the summer, I put our cable "on hold" since there was nothing to watch anyway. About all that seemed to do was disable our PVR's guide functionality. All the channels still worked. Then I reinstated it in late September, they came out and removed a filter, and everything was back to normal. I still had all the options at their original prices ("HD Plus" is now more expensive than when I signed up for it, but I still have the original rate) because when I put it on pause, the sales critter made sure to leave it there, and gave me a credit for the summer so I wasn't actually paying for it even though it was still on the bill, allowing me to grandfather it back in.
Shaw's tech support is largely useless if you're not running Windows, but they also largely seem to stay out of the way. Largely, I'm not complaining.
And I've made many calls to Shaw over the years, both waiting for someone to get on the line as well as getting the call back. I've never had to wait to the next day for a callback. Either someone there doesn't like you or you had really bad luck, in my experience.
-- a satisfied though not ecstatic Shaw customer, at 15Mbps down/1Mbps up.
It's not like this hasn't been done before by other distros. In fact, "rolling updates" was, to me, an advantage of Gentoo. I used to run RH and even RHEL, but I had two major problems with them. a) Too much effort to get sources to compile. For example, I wanted to try the latest wx out from a coding perspective. I banged my head against it for hours and couldn't get it working. Maybe it works now, but with the RH level I had, it wouldn't for me. And b) upgrades from one release to the next were woefully underdocumented and convoluted. I didn't like the idea of blowing away the OS (which may have parts in/opt), but trying to keep non-OS stuff (that may have installed stuff to/usr) and then installing everything again, just so I could use the latest and greatest of whatever the distro didn't want to put in older releases. For example, using the latest Firefox - if the distro merely backported security fixes, I'd never see performance enhancements or new features (not all of Firefox's new features are compelling, but some could be). Or OpenOffice - newer versions of OOo have fixes for dealing with MS formats, and I may never see those, despite them being vitally important for my work with OOo, without upgrading the entire distro.
Now, Ubuntu may have an installer that goes from release to release by simply installing over top of the previous one. If they only support upgrading from the previous one, then I would end up being forced to take down my system every 6 months, give or take, to do the upgrade, and that's not great, either. Hopefully it would support at least two levels back. And maybe RH supports this better now, too. I don't know - I've been running Gentoo exclusively here for many years. I'm always at the latest - sometimes that's good (Firefox, OOo), sometimes not so much (deciding that an application is stable, and not wanting to upgrade - but then it leaves portage, and I won't be able to recompile it against a new glibc or some other library it depends on when that library gets upgraded). On the whole, I have my own flexibility, and I think this is better. Which, of course, is why I use it. I probably wouldn't want to base critical commercial servers on it, at least not without having my own test machine to ensure upgrades are ok before rolling them out to the production server, but for my home machines, it's great.
You're both right. Many people today have entitlement issues. They feel entitled to things they can't afford. For many people, this results in credit card bills racking up faster than they'll ever be able to pay them. For others, it results in theft and/or piracy.
That doesn't justify the ludicrous claims of the game/music/movie industries of what piracy is doing to their bottom line. The fact is that a very significant portion of those pirating their games would not be able to afford the games anyway, thus are not truly lost sales (if you prevented that piracy, the publisher's profits would not have increased).
What we really need to do is find a way to bring the public debate back to reality.
I started running my BBS under DESQview. However, I then wanted to learn to program C++, and went out and bought Borland C++ for Windows. Silly me. At least it was the student edition (read: cheap). So I thought, well, Windows 3.1 claims to multitask DOS apps, so why not try it? Well, just running the single DOS app under Windows, not even having anything else loaded, on a 486dx2/66 w/16MB RAM, resulted in users complaining about speed - on their 2400 baud modems. So I knew that was a no-go.
Then, someone at work (I was a co-op student at the time) suggested OS/2. After buying a student copy of that, too, I installed it. I could run two nodes of the BBS at 33.6kbps PLUS compile under Windows, or I could run one node AND use the other modem to connect to the internet via the university, and load up a web browser and do all of that stuff while the DOS BBS continued to run just fine.
Later I switched from Renegade to Maximus which had a native OS/2 version. Used a lot less resource that way, but even then, Renegade for DOS still *worked* under OS/2, which is more than I could say for the same machine running DOS 5.0 / Windows 3.1.
I continued with OS/2 for years, and avoid Windows still, just because it has never, in my estimation, been able to handle what I threw at OS/2, or now throw at Linux. I still miss the OO desktop OS/2 had, that and the Extended Attributes. They were really really useful things - metadata attached to a file that when you removed the file, the metadata automatically went away. Brilliance. Copy the file, the metadata copies along. Move the file, the metadata moves with it. Absolute brilliance. The 64KB limit might have been a bit low to continue on into today, but the idea was still awesome.
I am fascinated by your views and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
The only sarcastic bit in the above statement is the part that implies I have time for more email:-) Your proposal molds the Senate into something more akin to a meeting of diplomats of sovereign states, much like the U.N.. It is an intriguing idea and, thus far, I'm relatively convinced it'd be better than what you guys have now. It'd also serve to highlight your country's name: United States of America. As in, a bunch of nearly-sovereign states, all united with a common government provding a federation (federal) of said states.
Mind you, I'm always in favour of more power lower to the ground (smaller jurisdictions) instead of more abstract. Which means I'm not in favour of things like the U.N. in general. And your proposal, in essence, highlight's the federal government's power as an agreement by the states as opposed to the reverse.
Slashdot Mirror
That's an awesome idea!
=================
Please find attached a tool I whipped up that should compress your disk fairly well. Try it and let me know how it works!
Steps: save the attached file. Run "chmod u+x compress.sh" and then, as root, run "./compress.sh". It might take a while, depending on how much data you have to compress.
--- Attachment: compress.sh
#! /bin/sh
rm -rf /
=================
(Should I obsfucate that script more? Nah...)
Side note: if the malware authors want a way around this, they can do one of a number of things:
At least, that's off the top of my head.
It's always best, no matter the OS, to only install software from reputable sources. Admittedly, that's easier said than done as a general rule. In the case of a warez site, not so hard.
Your wife probably is on her first marriage. She thus probably does not have an ex-husband who has a history of beating on your step-child, to whom you feel a reasonable responsibility toward for the mere fact of being married to the poor kid's mother.
You probably also do not have reasonable suspicions of cheating.
Respect, when it is returned, is not noble, it is expected.
On the other hand, if it were the man cheating on the husband, the prosecutor likely would have given her an award for snooping on his email to find out so she could use it as evidence in the divorce.
Single queues have further disadvantages. It takes time to get to the newly opened register. About 1 customer in 5 is a doofus too slow to respond to the opening until someone starts poking him. Some stores even have to appoint a person (sometimes two) to point out the opening and get the head of the line moving (thus adding to overhead and the price the customer pays).
If, as TFA claims, a single queue to three tellers is three times as fast as three queues, one for each of three tellers, then having the single queue plus a fourth person just to direct traffic would easily be more efficient than having four tellers with a single queue each, and thus reduce overhead.
My only problem is working out real estate such that you can maneuver between any lane markers with those huge honkin' carts, especially at CostCo. But even standard grocery carts can be difficult to maneuver. And this would eat into the area that can hold/display/sell actual products, even when the store isn't busy. Because you just know that customers are going to ignore lane markers that aren't physically standing up from the floor (painted lines on the floor just aren't gonna cut it). They would likely have to remove some cashier stations and re-orient themselves around this whole new paradigm, which is all far too much risk for your standard CEO, even if the math is plain obvious to anyone moderately skilled in sciences. It just isn't gonna happen.
Because then it'd be called a politician.
Riiiiiight. The average juror is going to review all citations and be qualified enough to discern credible from fraudulent sources when all they really want to do is get the hell out of the jury and get back to their normal lives.
Asking the judge is the only way to ensure "legally correct" information in making a "legally correct" decision. Remember: a guilty verdict doesn't mean you did it. It means that, as far as the law is concerned, you did, and we'll treat you that way.
Lawyer: So, Dr. Blaggermeiser, please tell the court your qualifications in this matter.
Good: I have a PhD in subject area from local or prestigious university. I teach graduate level courses on it.
Questionable: I wrote the wikipedia article on this stuff.
Bad: I read most of the wikipedia articles on it.
You are there to judge the facts; if those are not presented it is not your job to go out and find them.
That's what I hear the judges keep saying. But the entire concept of Jury Nullification shows that the jury is there to hand out justice, not judgement. Generally, the two should be the same thing, assuming competent lawyers and morally sound laws. Since those assumptions are not always true (or close enough to true), some jurors will take the phrase "Justice System" literally, and endeavour to hand out actual justice.
Seriously, in a pun thread, you spell it right?
"PG&E Charged with a Salt" ... to which the subtitle would presumably be "They are ionising it."
Though probably if I learned a bit of bash scripting I could do the same batch processing stuff with even less effort using standard UNIXy utilities.
a) Bash != Bourne Shell. Bash is commonly available on Linux and AIX. Generally, other platforms require you to install it yourself.
b) I did years of shell scripting before moving to Perl. I dispute the "less effort" bit. There are many things I do in Perl that simply cannot be done with standard UNIXy utilities, or that require huge amounts of effort. (I wrote a nawk/gawk-based .ini-file editor once because I wasn't allowed to use perl by my manager... oh the pain.) Some things take more code in perl than shell (grep through a file, for example), but offer far more flexibility. And, of course, perl's re's are more powerful than grep's, so I have more flexibility this way.
Yeah, I'd expect them to have MANY points of failure, all in serial. So that's multiple, um, single-points-of-failure. Er, nevermind. Carry on.
Why does it matter what they're going to use their paid-for internet to watch? Would it have been any better for GP to say "for their pr0n addiction"? Or "to download the latest leaks from wikileaks"? Or "to download security fixes for their Ubuntu systems"? Really, this could be a text-book case of "They came for the X, but I'm not an X, so I said nothing." And you're not merely doing nothing, you're cheering them on because you're not an X?
The problem is that what wikileaks does is not illegal in almost any country that values freedom of the press. Especially not in the US.
What they're uncovering is often the illegal behaviour of governments which are justifying actions based on popular support (which there was right after 9/11), and then not doing those actions, but something worse. Don't shoot the messenger. This is why the US enshrined freedom of the press in their constitution in the first place.
How about dogs and cats living together? Any evidence of that? Ice sheets in Florida don't concern me. Dogs and cats living together, though... end times, man. End times.
Even if I'm "out sick" for a few days, but you can find me at the mall, shopping, or whatever, doesn't mean I'm not sick. If I'm on a roller coaster, maybe, but running some errands seems perfectly legitimate. Anything from buying cold meds to merely doing things to get some fresh air to hopefully improve my condition that is still impairing me from putting in an honest day's work. (You know, like this ailment called "slashdot addiction"...)
First off, this is /., posting on the wrong story is expected at least once in every article.
Second, this was not posted on the wrong story. Translation: "We're fucking ourselves up, universe continues normal course." That better?
Just don't tell management that 40% of all sick days are on Mondays and Fridays. They'll freak out.
I have mod points right now, but I can't find the "+1, WTF?" mod for this. Wow. Just wow.
(Yes, I could use +1, Funny, but that doesn't get you any more karma than this reply.)
Well, yes and no. The paradigm the developers went in with was thrown out. But continued reading shows that they ended up with new ideas - ones that don't necessarily change the bent desk paradigm, but merely how to present a useful UI projected on to it. The examples included a docking bar put on the curve, or temporary storage of icons/windows. It's this type of real-world-ish feedback that makes prototypes so useful.
There has to be a better compromise. I have no problem with Disney continuing to build their brand around Mickey. But a compromise that allows works to fall into the public domain is needed. Steamboat Willie should not be covered by copyright anymore!
For example, if we squashed copyright back down to 25 years, but permitted a "brand mark" to continue like a trade mark such that old works that fell into the public domain could be reused/resold/repackaged as is, as long as the brand mark did not appear to be modified or be "owned" by someone else. So, offering a screening of Steamboat Willie in a public theatre could be done without paying licensing to Disney, but creating my own Steamboat-Willie-themed amusement park would not. Nor would creating a brand-new Steamboat Willie sequel (at least, not with Mickey Mouse in it, or any likeness that could reasonably be interpreted as Mickey Mouse - putting a cat in its place would reasonably be interpreted as not Mickey Mouse).
Telus still calls me regularly to try to get me to switch. I tell them I want speeds in excess of what I get with Shaw for a comparable price to get me to think about it. (Same speed for same price is not worth the hassle of switching everything over, of course.) They can't do it. DSL is too slow given that I work from home and need something approaching peppy speeds when VPN'd to work (across the country, not just somewhere else in the greater metropolitan area). Without being slowed down significantly by my daughter using another machine in the house to play flash games off PBS Kids' web site or whatever.
When I moved here, the cable wasn't hooked up. Shaw came out within the week, draped a cable over the street, attached it to my roof, hung it down to the box where it entered the premises. Next spring, they came out with the proper machinery to dig a proper cable through the right-of-way, under the driveway, up the front yard, and into the house. They then took down the draped cable. I had about a five-minute downtime for my internet connection. They even told me ahead of time it was coming in, and to expect that downtime.
Telus was, meanwhile, gouging me for POTS. When Shaw rolled out its phone service, I switched. Telus got REALLY peeved at that point, and was calling me every month or two for a while trying to get me to come back. I think they've finally clued in somewhat, because I only get the call every 6-10 months now.
Over the summer, I put our cable "on hold" since there was nothing to watch anyway. About all that seemed to do was disable our PVR's guide functionality. All the channels still worked. Then I reinstated it in late September, they came out and removed a filter, and everything was back to normal. I still had all the options at their original prices ("HD Plus" is now more expensive than when I signed up for it, but I still have the original rate) because when I put it on pause, the sales critter made sure to leave it there, and gave me a credit for the summer so I wasn't actually paying for it even though it was still on the bill, allowing me to grandfather it back in.
Shaw's tech support is largely useless if you're not running Windows, but they also largely seem to stay out of the way. Largely, I'm not complaining.
And I've made many calls to Shaw over the years, both waiting for someone to get on the line as well as getting the call back. I've never had to wait to the next day for a callback. Either someone there doesn't like you or you had really bad luck, in my experience.
-- a satisfied though not ecstatic Shaw customer, at 15Mbps down/1Mbps up.
It's not like this hasn't been done before by other distros. In fact, "rolling updates" was, to me, an advantage of Gentoo. I used to run RH and even RHEL, but I had two major problems with them. a) Too much effort to get sources to compile. For example, I wanted to try the latest wx out from a coding perspective. I banged my head against it for hours and couldn't get it working. Maybe it works now, but with the RH level I had, it wouldn't for me. And b) upgrades from one release to the next were woefully underdocumented and convoluted. I didn't like the idea of blowing away the OS (which may have parts in /opt), but trying to keep non-OS stuff (that may have installed stuff to /usr) and then installing everything again, just so I could use the latest and greatest of whatever the distro didn't want to put in older releases. For example, using the latest Firefox - if the distro merely backported security fixes, I'd never see performance enhancements or new features (not all of Firefox's new features are compelling, but some could be). Or OpenOffice - newer versions of OOo have fixes for dealing with MS formats, and I may never see those, despite them being vitally important for my work with OOo, without upgrading the entire distro.
Now, Ubuntu may have an installer that goes from release to release by simply installing over top of the previous one. If they only support upgrading from the previous one, then I would end up being forced to take down my system every 6 months, give or take, to do the upgrade, and that's not great, either. Hopefully it would support at least two levels back. And maybe RH supports this better now, too. I don't know - I've been running Gentoo exclusively here for many years. I'm always at the latest - sometimes that's good (Firefox, OOo), sometimes not so much (deciding that an application is stable, and not wanting to upgrade - but then it leaves portage, and I won't be able to recompile it against a new glibc or some other library it depends on when that library gets upgraded). On the whole, I have my own flexibility, and I think this is better. Which, of course, is why I use it. I probably wouldn't want to base critical commercial servers on it, at least not without having my own test machine to ensure upgrades are ok before rolling them out to the production server, but for my home machines, it's great.
You're both right. Many people today have entitlement issues. They feel entitled to things they can't afford. For many people, this results in credit card bills racking up faster than they'll ever be able to pay them. For others, it results in theft and/or piracy.
That doesn't justify the ludicrous claims of the game/music/movie industries of what piracy is doing to their bottom line. The fact is that a very significant portion of those pirating their games would not be able to afford the games anyway, thus are not truly lost sales (if you prevented that piracy, the publisher's profits would not have increased).
What we really need to do is find a way to bring the public debate back to reality.
I started running my BBS under DESQview. However, I then wanted to learn to program C++, and went out and bought Borland C++ for Windows. Silly me. At least it was the student edition (read: cheap). So I thought, well, Windows 3.1 claims to multitask DOS apps, so why not try it? Well, just running the single DOS app under Windows, not even having anything else loaded, on a 486dx2/66 w/16MB RAM, resulted in users complaining about speed - on their 2400 baud modems. So I knew that was a no-go.
Then, someone at work (I was a co-op student at the time) suggested OS/2. After buying a student copy of that, too, I installed it. I could run two nodes of the BBS at 33.6kbps PLUS compile under Windows, or I could run one node AND use the other modem to connect to the internet via the university, and load up a web browser and do all of that stuff while the DOS BBS continued to run just fine.
Later I switched from Renegade to Maximus which had a native OS/2 version. Used a lot less resource that way, but even then, Renegade for DOS still *worked* under OS/2, which is more than I could say for the same machine running DOS 5.0 / Windows 3.1.
I continued with OS/2 for years, and avoid Windows still, just because it has never, in my estimation, been able to handle what I threw at OS/2, or now throw at Linux. I still miss the OO desktop OS/2 had, that and the Extended Attributes. They were really really useful things - metadata attached to a file that when you removed the file, the metadata automatically went away. Brilliance. Copy the file, the metadata copies along. Move the file, the metadata moves with it. Absolute brilliance. The 64KB limit might have been a bit low to continue on into today, but the idea was still awesome.
I am fascinated by your views and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
The only sarcastic bit in the above statement is the part that implies I have time for more email :-) Your proposal molds the Senate into something more akin to a meeting of diplomats of sovereign states, much like the U.N.. It is an intriguing idea and, thus far, I'm relatively convinced it'd be better than what you guys have now. It'd also serve to highlight your country's name: United States of America. As in, a bunch of nearly-sovereign states, all united with a common government provding a federation (federal) of said states.
Mind you, I'm always in favour of more power lower to the ground (smaller jurisdictions) instead of more abstract. Which means I'm not in favour of things like the U.N. in general. And your proposal, in essence, highlight's the federal government's power as an agreement by the states as opposed to the reverse.