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Riiiiight, because no one ever counterfeits hard currency, never used it to buy off politicians, never laundered, never dumped, never hoarded, never used it to bribe people, never used it to pay soldiers to murder people, etc.

Just in case you don't get it: A _digital_ NOR a _physical_ currency is NOT immune to the many (government & private) abuses. That is, there are MANY issues with money ... namely its design and mis-implementation.

* http://mises.org/books/whathasgovernmentdone.pdf
* http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul124.html
* http://www.gmlets.u-net.com/explore/problems.html
* http://www.amazon.com/Problem-Money-Its-Not-About/dp/0984502009

When are you going to stop being delusional that some magical pseudo-authority figure is the answer to everyone's perceived problems?

--
"Necessity is the Mother of Invention, byt Curiosity is the Father." -- Michaelangel007

After many years of travel and living in other countries, my political views shifted from right to left and I felt myself to a "liberal" democrat.

After years of also traveling a lot abroad and also living abroad at times, I went exactly the opposite way. I was always libertarian but I shrank further away from Democrats. Well not exactly Democrats, but from Statists who want the state to exert control over all aspects of life - which currently is sadly equivalent to Democrat as essentially none of them do anything to block statist activity.

The thing is, going around any former Soviet run country and talking to people about how things were, you could see the Democrats heading this direction a mile away. The Republicans perhaps were overly militaristic but in a whole different way that was healthier for the people.

There's a great book that explains exactly what is happening here - Liberal Fascism. Many people on Slashdot keep arguing liberals are not fascists but then when liberals take control we see actions that were unthinkable even from the worst actions of the non-Statists Republicans (and there ARE a number of Republicans who are also quite Statist, like McCain).

Not if he bought a fake.

Even if he bought a real one, the vast majority of them don't work very well. If you really want to prepare for the zombie apocalypse, stick with good old rechargeable AA or AAAs, a programmable charger, and either a generator or a large regulated solar panel.

It appears that Amazon already has a groceries section. This appears to be them just expanding it into a less-esoteric selection.

It would seem you aren't entirely out of luck. The FC5025 Floppy controller can be combined with the TEAC FD55GFR in order to read Apple II disks.

the device looks very similar to the looxcie . Except someone has removed the record light to let people know it's on, increased the battery life and priced it for the government market. It even has a similar 30 second feature.

You'll need the electricity savings to offset the absurd cost of the MacBook Air.

Somehow nobody mentioned one of the prime bits of stupidity here: your proof of absurd pricing is a link to some random bozo on Amazon Marketplace who's listed an out-of-production 2011 model (Sandy Bridge CPU) for about $500 more than you'd pay for a brand new 2012 Air (Ivy Bridge CPU) direct from Apple's online store. (And oh by the way, speaking of Haswell, wait a few weeks and the 2013 Haswell model will probably be out.)

After clicking around a bit on amazon, it looks like they've become a terrible place to buy a new Mac. They used to stock a wide variety of new machines themselves but they're barely doing it any more. Almost everything you get when searching is used or new old stock, and most of it's being sold by non-Amazon sellers.

This is a neat little book that gave me a lot of neat ideas back when I still had the energy to dedicate to mobile robotics as a hobby. This is an invaluable reference for any mobile robotics hobbyist.

The difference is, there is no evidence Amazon was telling the publishers they couldn't sell their books cheaper elsewhere - that's the crux of the issue with the way Apple was doing it here.

Yeah, absolutely no evidence

Both Amazon (AMZN, Fortune 500) and Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500) have agreements with those publishers that ensure they'll receive the best prices for e-books over any of their competitors, Blumenthal said in a prepared statement.

Nobody ever saw Amazon do it

An agency model combined with most-favored-nation clauses were implemented by Apple and Amazon for e-book sales
Similar models used in other markets

And Amazon most certainly doesn't have anything called "most favored nation clause" in any of their terms, only something called "price matching". https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help/search?query=price%2520matching&page=1 - it's their most favored clause in the nation.

What "most-favoured" clause of Amazon's are you talking about?

Here's the one for Kindle Direct Publishing (Search for "Matching Competitor Prices")

By "price-match" we mean where we sell the Digital Book in one or more of the Available Sales Territories at a price (net of taxes) that is below the List Price to match a third party's sales price for any digital or physical edition of the Digital Book, or to match our sales price for any physical edition of the Digital Book, in any one of the Available Sales Territories.

Or carry a modified cable where the USB power wires are connected but the data wires are not.

If you don't want to DIY, take a look at this sync cable (iPhone 4S or earlier) which has an extra end for only charging.

If you want a generic portable computer with an ARM CPU, buy an Allwinner-based tablet. Those use the Allwinnner system on a chip, which has an ARM core and costs about $7 in quantity. They're under $70 in the US, around $30 in Shenzhen.

"Huston, please send up one of these

Thank you.

Not USB-powered, but could work:
http://www.amazon.com/Monitor2Go-15-6-HDMI-Portable-Monitor/dp/B00AYH7AIE

It's 15", has a 1600x900 resolution, and does everything else perfectly. I doubt it would be hard to get one of those portable battery extenders to interface with it and make it untethered as well as portable. Something like this, perhaps? http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005NGLTZQ

Not USB-powered, but could work:
http://www.amazon.com/Monitor2Go-15-6-HDMI-Portable-Monitor/dp/B00AYH7AIE

It's 15", has a 1600x900 resolution, and does everything else perfectly. I doubt it would be hard to get one of those portable battery extenders to interface with it and make it untethered as well as portable. Something like this, perhaps? http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005NGLTZQ

There friend, you've hit the crux of it. Until we all agree on the cause we cannot in good conscience be sure that we're attacking the right problem.

Until an abundant source of non-carbon energy is up and running these things are science fiction.

If you believe that CO2 is the problem there are really only two options, (1) a return to a stone age existence by a population dramatically reduced by mass murder. Merely simplifying the lives of 7 billion people will not work. And (2) implementing large scale industrial process to sequester CO2 from the atmosphere and bury it. A bountiful carbon-neutral source of energy is required for this, it might require as much energy as we use to run our civilization. Nuclear fission is the only such possible source on the table.

The only CO2 sequestration technique that impressed me as possible was proposed by Marshall Savage in his book The Millennial Project... where floating OTEC platforms along warm equatorial waters pump cold nutrient-rich ocean water to the surface creating an algal bloom around the platform that is confined by booms. Some would be used to feed fish farms, but the bulk of it would be packaged into weighted bales and sunk into the ocean. It may have been a slow and arduous process (OTEC are only marginally possible and the best energy efficiency is ~1%) but it would at least work.

I've seen lots of global warming combative measures, and some that would induce warming to help combat an ice age... that involve synthesis of something and scattering of that something over large areas, but it all requires a clean energy budget that we just don't have. So it all comes down to energy.

In order to even consider these things we would need that proverbial 'clean, abundant and too cheap to meter' energy source.

If safe nuclear fission remains off the table and undeveloped, specifically the thorium fueled liquid fluoride molten salt reactor, it looks to me like we're screwed.

I personally never believed that pure chemical CO2 was a serious issue climate-wise, although if you believe coal is a problem (carbon black, atmospheric particulates) then we've always been on the same page.

It is no wonder that so many people fall back to the depopulation return to stone age solution. They refuse to realize it but they are really advocating mass murder by proxy --- for when the ineffective conservation phase has failed and the problem becomes worse they will elect bold courageous leaders who are not afraid to get the process rolling, and the (selective) mass murders will begin.

Mankind does encourage global warming and glacial melt via deposit of carbon black on the surface and arctic pollution. This is a particulate/aerosol problem not a purely chemical CO2 problem, which is why I think temperatures in the Antarctic have been more stable than the Arctic, the world's worst carbon polluters are in the Northern hemisphere.

Another (fascinating!) recent paper poses that our 1970~2002 use of Chlorofluorocarbons (CFC) was a key driver in the brief global temperature rise rather than carbon dioxide emissions.

Mankind does encourage global cooling regionally via airplane contrails, the seeding of clouds where none would otherwise form (it adds up) --- as described in this kick-ass documentary Global Dimming from BBC Horizon.

You'll need the electricity savings to offset the absurd cost of the MacBook Air.

If it saves you $50 in electricity per month over your present system, all other factors being equal, in 3 and a half years you'll be saving money. People don't buy luxury to save money. Relevant car analogy, not a single 2013 Ferrari model gets 20 MPG or better. By contrast, most Kia vehicles get 30 MPG or better.

The moral of this story? Poor people care about economy, wealthy people care about performance, and business people look for a happy medium.

You're citing older low to mid-end cards, some of which from a simple google are in fact available with DisplayPort, if only one port.

(For reference, on the nvidia side the 7xx series is rolling out now, 5xx is two product generations old.)

If you can afford a 4K display today, you can afford the graphics card to drive it. Tomorrow, it won't matter because nothing about this will be a problem.

> Who wants to stare at 30Hz on their computer all day? Is this 1992? That's the last time I saw an interlaced display on a computer.

30Hz is perfectly acceptable on a computer display - especially if you are staring at it all day. If you want to play video games, that is another issue, but for work like photo editing or software development or spread-sheets, word proceessing, email, or even just web browsing, 30hz is plenty. You won't even notice the difference.

I speak from experience, I used to have one of those Viewsonic 3840x2400 22" monitors. The model I had could do about 32Hz at most and as long as I wasn't playing a video game, you'd never know the refresh rate was so low.

Posting as AC because I was diagnosed with schizophrenia a couple of years ago and lived with it long before I knew what it was.

Short answer: they don't.

These cases get more attention partially because the stories are more exciting and that's what grabs people's attention. You aren't going to see news articles about someone hallucinating about the sound of a window sliding closed, but you will hear about someone who ran into a highly populated area and wrecked havoc because the voices told them so. Auditory hallucinations can be anything from nonverbal sounds to compliments to insults to orders to gibberish.

That said, there is a tendency for the the voices to be negative. From my own experience with the disorder and from talking with a few others who have dealt with it, I believe that the negativity is brought on from whatever incident or on-going circumstance brought on the disorder. My psychiatrist told me that there are some people born with a genetic predisposition towards the disease, but that most of the time, there needs to be a traumatic event for the symptoms of the disease to manifest. This was certainly true in my case and after a few years of looking back and learning to cope, I can see how much of what the voices told me are related to my personal trigger event.

So that's my $0.02, but it's not quite the same in any two people so YMMV.

If you're interested in the subject, my therapist recommended the book Surviving Schizophrenia: A Manual for Families, Patients, and Providers by Dr. E. Fuller Torrey. It's a little on the thick side, but it was incredibly helpful to me when I was coming to grips with my reality being turned on it's head.

You can also put your own content (DRM Free) on a Kindle account so that it syncs between devices just like purchased content.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle

Bullshit. Amazon does not require DRM. It is an option that the publisher chooses. I chose no DRM for my book, because I think DRM is stupid. (link) Once upon a time, long ago, Amazon may have put on DRM by default, but they've given publishers (big and small) the option to have it or not for a long time. Bitch at the publishers about DRM, and unnecessarily high prices for ebooks. They need to learn that both of these are turning off customers and depressing sales.

First of all, the alleged price of $5000 is pure speculation. None of the other sources reporting on the Asus 4K monitor have mentioned it, and the Extreme Tech article describes the price as "our guess".

Secondly, the article is flat-out wrong when it says that Sharp's 4K monitor "doesnâ(TM)t seem to have been released" so far. In fact, the PN-K321 has been released and you can buy one on Amazon for $4900. A few other online retailers have it, too, for slightly lower prices. There is one weird caveat; you currently need an AMD card for it to work properly, because it uses DisplayPort 1.2 with MST and basically shows up to the OS as two 1920x2160 monitors. You have to use Eyefinity to get the OS to treat it as one large screen. This Youtube video (not mine - I only wish I could afford this thing!) shows how it's done.

The Sharp monitor isn't even the cheapest 4K device currently on the market. That distinction belongs to a 50 inch Seiki Digital TV which costs $1,399.99 on Amazon. But this device can only take a 30 Hz input, due to the limitations of the HDMI protocol. I've also heard some criticisms of the panel quality.

What I and many others are hoping is that the Asus 4K monitor can lower the price point on this technology. If it sells for the same $5000 as the Sharp monitor, it's a non-event since it does nothing to advance the state of the art. But if they can get it down to $2500 or lower, then we'll start to see it show up in "extreme" gaming rigs and some professional workspaces, and maybe in a year or two they will be affordable for mainstream power users.

First of all, the alleged price of $5000 is pure speculation. None of the other sources reporting on the Asus 4K monitor have mentioned it, and the Extreme Tech article describes the price as "our guess".

Secondly, the article is flat-out wrong when it says that Sharp's 4K monitor "doesnâ(TM)t seem to have been released" so far. In fact, the PN-K321 has been released and you can buy one on Amazon for $4900. A few other online retailers have it, too, for slightly lower prices. There is one weird caveat; you currently need an AMD card for it to work properly, because it uses DisplayPort 1.2 with MST and basically shows up to the OS as two 1920x2160 monitors. You have to use Eyefinity to get the OS to treat it as one large screen. This Youtube video (not mine - I only wish I could afford this thing!) shows how it's done.

The Sharp monitor isn't even the cheapest 4K device currently on the market. That distinction belongs to a 50 inch Seiki Digital TV which costs $1,399.99 on Amazon. But this device can only take a 30 Hz input, due to the limitations of the HDMI protocol. I've also heard some criticisms of the panel quality.

What I and many others are hoping is that the Asus 4K monitor can lower the price point on this technology. If it sells for the same $5000 as the Sharp monitor, it's a non-event since it does nothing to advance the state of the art. But if they can get it down to $2500 or lower, then we'll start to see it show up in "extreme" gaming rigs and some professional workspaces, and maybe in a year or two they will be affordable for mainstream power users.

Man, what a complicated way to solve a simple problem.

The free market to the rescue.

Imagine an autonomous robot getting lost during a war, only to get uncovered 10 years after the war ends and going on a rampage (say, killing every armed police officer it finds)...

A whole series.

Those who haven't read The Dying Earth series, or Jack Vance's later Lyonesse series really are missing a treat. It isn't for no reason that in 2006 his fans published a meticulously copy-edited 44-volume edition of his works, usually selling for over $3500. (There are cheaper editions, of course.)

Gene Wolfe is a big fan of Jack Vance's writing. Wolfe himself is one of the best writers ever - the Science Fiction Writer's Association named him Grand Master for lifetime achievement this year. (29 named in the last 38 years, 10 still living, Jack Vance was named in 1997)
Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, which made his name, recasts Vance's Dying Earth series, while adding mind-bending depths. Highly recommended.

Tell me about it! And the TI-57 manual Making Tracks into Programming was phenomenal.

I just wish I knew about the constant memory trick with the infinite loop blanking the display back then. Where *was* the internet!

By the late 1960s, the US panic over Russia's launch of Sputnik had resulted in a significant increase in investment in science education at all levels. In particular, an experimental program was started at the public Bronx High School of Science in New York City, with the goal of exploring whether high school age students could successfully program computers. (Computers often cost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, so this felt a bit like seeing whether students could fly a jetlineer). The school procured a number of small systems including several of the legendary Olivetti Programma 101s.

The school's main machine, though, was an IBM 1620. It was a decimal (not binary) machine, and the high school's was had the minimum 20K digits (not bytes!) of memory. Originally, input and output was only via punch cards and the built in typewriter, but by 1968 or 1969 an IBM 1311 disk drive, which was itself the size of a small washing machine, added 2 Million digits of persistent storage, and a 1443 lineprinter was also added.

Students were taught, in this order: machine language, then FORTRAN II, then assembler. That's not a typo. Since the machine was decimal, it wasn't too hard to type in raw machine code onto cards, which could be loaded directly into memory by a short self-booting loader program, which was included on the front of each card deck. There was an assember, but until the hard disk showed up the assembler required that an intermediate deck be punched and loaded each time an assembly was attempted. So, for moderate size programs, it was often easier to write machine code directly. This typically involved manually computing and setting the absolute target of each branch. Here's a picture of the cover of the textbook that students used to learn 1620 programming.

This experiment was, in my opinion, wildly successful. I'm aware of at least 4 quite well known computer scientists who started their programming careers in the 1960s on that machine at Bronx Science. In general, many programmers from that era learned on 1620s. Like PDP-11s and Apple-2's later, 1620s were machines that an individual could get easy access to, and could learn to program at both a low level (machine or assember) and higher level (FORTRAN, LISP). Famously, the 1620 did not have a general purpose adder implemented in hardware: the add instructions would not produce the usual results until software loaded a table of partial sums into a fixed location in memory. The machine's nickname was thus CADET: Can't Add, Doesn't Even Try.

Also (See Innovator's Dilemma) different segments of the market will grow at different rates so one cannot extrapolate from one "failure" in a segmented marketplace to Moore's Law and especially to the variation of Moore's law which states that computing power (not necessarily transistors) will double every 18 months. Of course we then get into the problem of defining computing power.

Secondly, looking closely at Moore's Law on a logarithmic scale you'll see that it doesn't EXACTLY follow the "line," sometimes the plotted points fall below, other times above.

Julian Barbour's The End of Time is a good read by someone who's done a lot of work on this issue.

Go read the "Wool" Omnibus from Amazon now, by Hugh Howey or something. The prequel is... not as good. The above line is a fair condensation of those 400 pages, but the Wool Omnibus is good.

I second, third and fourth this. Go read it right now. (Think, um... City of Amber meets Doctor Strangelove as told by George Orwell and Stephen King... and that's pretty much Wool. It's your basic "cosy catastrophe nuclear bunker last refuge of humanity ark" story. Only not cosy, at all.)

It's a heck of a read, and the premise is probably only a paranoid nightmare from a sick brain.

Probably.

But then I remember that actual people who thought themselves sane built nuclear weapons, were perfecty prepared to burn the entire world down to protect their ideology, and that those same kind of people still train to use them, and I throw up in my mouth a little.

Greenpeace management actually seems to believe in their activities and, while not above sensationalism to garner attention and support, to the best of my knowledge they have never fabricated evidence to vilify their targets. They've done some stupid things over the years, but they've also accomplished a lot of good. This stands in marked contrast to PETA's activities.

PETA has a history of lying going back to its early days. In one of the chapters of The Brain That Changes Itself, Norman Doidge reports how one of the founders of PETA got a job at the lab of one of the pioneers of neuroplasticity to care for Chimpanzees used in a study and, when the researcher was away, staged pictures to make the lab's treatment of animals appear cruel and unethical, even criminal. The researcher was blacklisted as a result and neuroplasticity took 20 years to recover. In those intervening years, countless human victims of stoke and other brain injuries suffered needlessly as a result.

PETA are an agglomeration of self-serving unethical narcissists and useful idiots. Their attempted emulation of CoS tactics to smother criticism is just the latest example of their perfidy. Unlike Greenpeace, I can't think of a single achievement of PETA's that I would consider to be positive. A better parallel would be James O'Keefe III.

I'd see about making a game based on Redshift Rendezvous by John E. Stith.

So, I co-wrote this book on virtual security and am a former VMware Cloud Solutions Architect. And I'll preface this advice by saying that, if you want to talk more in depth, feel free to ping me. First initial, last name at gmail will work. (The email I have attached to slashdot I glance at occasionally, but it gets almost purely spam and so I'd likely miss anything.)

From my perspective, the first question is which hypervisor to use:
- VMware is mature, you can get a free license for the base hypervisor (which is quite feature rich; this is no trial product) for up to 32GB per physical box, is widely used. If VMware remains as relevant in the future as it is now, it's actually a very solid skillset to have.
- If you have physical hosts over 32GB, VMware ceases to be free
- Some features require more advanced VMware stuff, including vCenter server, which isn't free - for example, VMware's live vm migration feature (vMotion)
- VMware is almost entirely closed on the internals; hypervisor is closed source (other than a not-useful-for-your-purposes "open source" bundle that contains their modified GPL code only); they have a bunch of APIs for internal functions (ie, tracking changed blocks on the virtual iscsi devices, for example), but those are generally restricted to partners; so if your students want to actually hack the virtualization layer, they can't. Then again, letting them do so wouldn't really be safe.
- On the other hand, VMware layers do have nice APIs that are reasonably accessible for doing non-internals stuff; things like powering VMs on and off, changing their allocated RAM and cpus, etc
- VMware has a nice set of tools, including CLI tools, which work well even with the free versions, that can allow you to move virtual machines in and out of specific hypervisors (not while the VMs are powered on), and into and out of VMware's desktop products (Workstation for Windows and Linux, Fusion for Mac). (google ovftool for the cross-platform CLI tool, for example; it can import/export to/from ESX, vCenter Server, Workstation, Fusion, and vCloud instances)
- VMware has a nice set of tools for snapshots and backups, even on the base hypervisor; for example, I have a personal ESX box at a provider and I use this tool to back up the VMs back and forth, which can be done from outside the OS without powering the VM down, and it's free.
- I found using some things I'd think of as mandatory for a lab environment (ie, thin provisioning) were just built-in on the VMware side and required a fair bit of extra work and added extra wrinkles

The virtual networking on VMware is dramatically more mature from my experience; my experience with Xen & KVM is now dated (it's been 2 years since I was in the thick of writing that book, which was the last time I was really in the thick of exploring the open-source hypervisor networking bits). I found that depending on the version of the hypervisor OS, which hypervisor, which kernel, which guest, etc, you could fall into all sorts of traps. I had some examples in the book where I showed, for example, generating and applying ebtables configurations to the host OS (the Xen Linux hypervisor OS) to block forged frames from coming across the bridge from one of the guest Linuxes, for example.

Compare that to the VMware side, you could in theory wire up everything to dumb hubs, even, and enforce network separation at the hypervisor layer with VLAN tags applied to the portgroups where you attach VMs. (Warning: not suggesting you blindly do that; but VLAN enforcement on the VMware side is fairly rigid if configured in a good way.)

My own book is a fun read for some of these concerns, although Haletky's book is probably the canonical work on the subject. (Although it is -slightly- dated from bein

So, I co-wrote this book on virtual security and am a former VMware Cloud Solutions Architect. And I'll preface this advice by saying that, if you want to talk more in depth, feel free to ping me. First initial, last name at gmail will work. (The email I have attached to slashdot I glance at occasionally, but it gets almost purely spam and so I'd likely miss anything.)

From my perspective, the first question is which hypervisor to use:
- VMware is mature, you can get a free license for the base hypervisor (which is quite feature rich; this is no trial product) for up to 32GB per physical box, is widely used. If VMware remains as relevant in the future as it is now, it's actually a very solid skillset to have.
- If you have physical hosts over 32GB, VMware ceases to be free
- Some features require more advanced VMware stuff, including vCenter server, which isn't free - for example, VMware's live vm migration feature (vMotion)
- VMware is almost entirely closed on the internals; hypervisor is closed source (other than a not-useful-for-your-purposes "open source" bundle that contains their modified GPL code only); they have a bunch of APIs for internal functions (ie, tracking changed blocks on the virtual iscsi devices, for example), but those are generally restricted to partners; so if your students want to actually hack the virtualization layer, they can't. Then again, letting them do so wouldn't really be safe.
- On the other hand, VMware layers do have nice APIs that are reasonably accessible for doing non-internals stuff; things like powering VMs on and off, changing their allocated RAM and cpus, etc
- VMware has a nice set of tools, including CLI tools, which work well even with the free versions, that can allow you to move virtual machines in and out of specific hypervisors (not while the VMs are powered on), and into and out of VMware's desktop products (Workstation for Windows and Linux, Fusion for Mac). (google ovftool for the cross-platform CLI tool, for example; it can import/export to/from ESX, vCenter Server, Workstation, Fusion, and vCloud instances)
- VMware has a nice set of tools for snapshots and backups, even on the base hypervisor; for example, I have a personal ESX box at a provider and I use this tool to back up the VMs back and forth, which can be done from outside the OS without powering the VM down, and it's free.
- I found using some things I'd think of as mandatory for a lab environment (ie, thin provisioning) were just built-in on the VMware side and required a fair bit of extra work and added extra wrinkles

The virtual networking on VMware is dramatically more mature from my experience; my experience with Xen & KVM is now dated (it's been 2 years since I was in the thick of writing that book, which was the last time I was really in the thick of exploring the open-source hypervisor networking bits). I found that depending on the version of the hypervisor OS, which hypervisor, which kernel, which guest, etc, you could fall into all sorts of traps. I had some examples in the book where I showed, for example, generating and applying ebtables configurations to the host OS (the Xen Linux hypervisor OS) to block forged frames from coming across the bridge from one of the guest Linuxes, for example.

Compare that to the VMware side, you could in theory wire up everything to dumb hubs, even, and enforce network separation at the hypervisor layer with VLAN tags applied to the portgroups where you attach VMs. (Warning: not suggesting you blindly do that; but VLAN enforcement on the VMware side is fairly rigid if configured in a good way.)

My own book is a fun read for some of these concerns, although Haletky's book is probably the canonical work on the subject. (Although it is -slightly- dated from bein

There are a lot of good answers here to your direct question, but I'd like to step back and look into solutions that are recently available for the more general problem you are facing.

I have to wonder what it's costing the school district to acquire and maintain the hardware to run your classes. On top of that, you're having to worry about the overhead of securing/patching and maintaining backups.

(Disclaimer: I work for Google on Compute Engine.)

Have you evaluated whether an IaaS service like Google Compute Engine would be more convenient and cost-effective? Security, backups, and persistent storage are all taken care of for you. Google's base VMs are 13.2 cents per hour. For a class of 30, that's about $4 per class session. There are about 180 days in a school year, so that's $720 per class for the entire year. If you have 4 classes a day, that's about $3,000 for the entire year, assuming your VMs are all running the entire time every class session. In practice, if I were teaching the class, I'd lecture for 3 days a week and have VM time 2 days a week, with the option of the students being able to access their VMs outside of class from home, so the actual cost will probably be lower.

As far as hardware is concerned, Chromebooks are $250 each. I bet you're spending significantly more than that per machine in your labs. You can use the terminal tab in ChromeOS to SSH into the VM instances.

Have you considered an IaaS provider? If not, I'm curious to hear how the current offerings out there in the market fall short of the solution you're looking into now.

They have a free usage tier.

I've come from the same background as you it seems and appreciate what you're saying. I agree that a lot of 'ardent' Christians are more interested in having people being judged by their theological belief structure (Trinity, Calvinism, Allah!=Jehovah) rather than their actions.

My observation over time is that the Christ of Matthew, Mark & Luke talks about that people will be judged by their actions. The Good Samaritan as one simple example. And further on - that people who don't forgive others will not be forgiven (the unforgiving servant parable, Lords Prayer - forgive me as I forgive etc) And BTW - that seems to be the only real unforgivable sin - regardless of the unforgiving person's theological understanding / or 'belief'....yet you don't get John or Paul elaborating on that... which makes me call into question their understanding - and/or our interpretation of them. (Just to be clear though - it's only unforgivable while you remain unforgiving. And modern psych / the popular understanding can vouch for unforgiveness being self destructive)

So I have to divide the NT to remain with an internally consistent systematic theology. Basically I'd throw out the book of John for starters (or demote more specifically). Because I think that's the greatest problem right there (and go with the other half of the early church that didn't accept The Book of Revelation too I suggest).

I love this book I've recently read called Moral Transformation - and I was coming to similar conclusions already - that God doesn't require a bloody sacrifice in order to forgive - and the fact that there are purification rituals and sin sacrifices in the OT are more a product of the what Israelites were comfortable with / 'needed' after a couple of hundred years in Egypt following Egyptian customs - but wasn't what God had originally intended. The book also addresses how the modern day idea of Christ's death has morphed significantly from what the early Christians understood - and lo and behold - Christ's death doesn't become a mysterious requirement for the forgiveness of sins! God will forgive those who recognise their bad deeds and decide that if they were ever faced the same situation again - they wouldn't make the same mistake twice.

Again - I'd recommend the above book for a thorough treatment of the topic.

Suppose, for example, that you used a steel pipe for a barrel and maybe a block of metal for a bolt face, then were able to print a reliable fully-automatic action and a high-capacity magazine. You could easily assemble the rough equivalent of a machine pistol.

There already is a step-by-step guide on how to do all that, with no 3D-printing involved at all.

http://www.amazon.com/Supernormal-Stimuli-Overran-Evolutionary-Purpose/dp/B0057DC3VY
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/article16.aspx

Which agree with your point and then go beyond it... People become "neuroadapted" to the new level of stimulation and have as much pleasure as before, except they tend to have negative health effects of a diversity of things they need for true health.

The BeagleBone Black has 2 PRU's which allow for realtime operations on the I/O, something that Linux (being a non-realtime OS) cannot handle on its own. This allows, for example, a BeagleBone Black user to use cheap Sonar Sensors to cm accuraccy, something that is not possible on the Raspberry Pi or other embedded Linux devices without external hardware. Do you know if the Cubieboard has something similar?

Yes, it's always the physicists and mathematicians for some reason who hold these ideas.

No, not always. If I recall correctly, engineers are most likely to believe in God, but I would think that all scientific disciplines are represented. Here are just a few.

Francis Collins - Physician - director of the Human Genome Project
John Polkinghorne, KBE, FRS - Physicist, author of From Physicist to Priest
Donald Knuth - Computer Scientist - Creator of TeX, and author of:
                                The Art of Computer Programming Availble on Amazon
                                Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About Available on Amazon
                                3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated Available on Amazon

There are many more.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that smart people can't be stupid.

Spending much time on Slashdot will disabuse you of that notion. What is smart and stupid can be an elusive quality, and you may find as you go through life that they will rearrange themselves at times. The phrase, "It seemed like a good idea at the time." exists for a reason. "Stupid" people can show up in surprising places, like the mirror. Everyone should check there, from time to time.

Yes, it's always the physicists and mathematicians for some reason who hold these ideas.

No, not always. If I recall correctly, engineers are most likely to believe in God, but I would think that all scientific disciplines are represented. Here are just a few.

Francis Collins - Physician - director of the Human Genome Project
John Polkinghorne, KBE, FRS - Physicist, author of From Physicist to Priest
Donald Knuth - Computer Scientist - Creator of TeX, and author of:
                                The Art of Computer Programming Availble on Amazon
                                Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About Available on Amazon
                                3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated Available on Amazon

There are many more.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that smart people can't be stupid.

Spending much time on Slashdot will disabuse you of that notion. What is smart and stupid can be an elusive quality, and you may find as you go through life that they will rearrange themselves at times. The phrase, "It seemed like a good idea at the time." exists for a reason. "Stupid" people can show up in surprising places, like the mirror. Everyone should check there, from time to time.

Yes, it's always the physicists and mathematicians for some reason who hold these ideas.

No, not always. If I recall correctly, engineers are most likely to believe in God, but I would think that all scientific disciplines are represented. Here are just a few.

Francis Collins - Physician - director of the Human Genome Project
John Polkinghorne, KBE, FRS - Physicist, author of From Physicist to Priest
Donald Knuth - Computer Scientist - Creator of TeX, and author of:
                                The Art of Computer Programming Availble on Amazon
                                Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About Available on Amazon
                                3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated Available on Amazon

There are many more.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that smart people can't be stupid.

Spending much time on Slashdot will disabuse you of that notion. What is smart and stupid can be an elusive quality, and you may find as you go through life that they will rearrange themselves at times. The phrase, "It seemed like a good idea at the time." exists for a reason. "Stupid" people can show up in surprising places, like the mirror. Everyone should check there, from time to time.

This is basically correct. Most people state the 2nd law of thermodynamics backwards. There isn't any fundamental law of nature that causes entropy to increase with time. Rather, we define "forward in time" to mean, "the direction of increasing entropy." In our local region of spacetime, that translates to, "away from the big bang."

What's surprising is how few physicists really understand this. None of my textbooks ever described it that way. Yet Boltzmann understood this perfectly well in the 19th century, and described the situation very clearly.

If you're interested in learning more, a good book on the subject is From Eternity to Here by Sean Carrol. The author has also given a couple of TED talks on the subject.

Xbox One includes and requires Kinect. This means that each Xbox One has an internet connected camera. In every living room, dorm room and bed room where someone places an Xbox One http://windowsitpro.com/blog/csi-effect-not-everyone-wants-kinect-camera-their-living-room

Good thing they make a highly sophisticated camera disabling device. The bigger concern is, if the console is voice activated to turn on, is the audio recorder always on?

They make a reusable filter for the thing
http://www.amazon.com/Keurig-K-Cup-Reusable-Coffee-Filter/dp/B000DLB2FI

Shoot at 6 bucks you could get a couple and prefill them the night before.

I like it because I never drink an entire pot of coffee, but you cant beat the simplicity of a 20 dollar coffee maker.

The "future" has been here for a long time now. It's just that the media shit storm has caused more people to suddenly notice.

Making ammunition is trivial:

    - bullets can be cast from lead http://www.amazon.com/Cast-Bullets-E-H-Harrison/dp/B0007ASOHO
    - primer can be strike anywhere matches carefully ground up, or fashioned from chemicals http://cryptome.info/0001/tm-31-210.htm
    - gunpowder is simple chemistry http://www.amazon.com/Do-Yourself-Gunpowder-Cookbook/dp/0873646754
    - cases can be turned on a lathe (granted they're not as malleable as those which are formed, but they'll last for a couple of firings) http://www.janellestudio.com/metal/turning_brass.txt

and of course, doing a muzzle loader eliminates the need for that, just need a patch