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http://www.snappingturtle.net/jmc/tmblog/archives/ 003518.html explains, iTunes uses quicktime to play audio files. Since quicktime supports plug-ins, all you need to support flac or ogg is to get a plugin for quicktime. The link refers to a flac plugin (haven't searched around for the best one) and the following link has a ogg plugin. http://jsp.vs19.net/osx/oggtunes.php

Define "functioning". Canada's socialized health care, for example, is suffering in numerous areas.

Also, until Canada pays for its own defense, I don't think it's cricket for our Great White Neighbors to be so snarky about how "caring" their government is. Didn't I read an article about how Canada's disaster team was unable to go help with the tsunami disaster because they couldn't lift the tonnage? Yes I did.

Safety nets used to be provided by families and churches--you know, by people who choose to help those in need. When the government does that, it's not a matter of choice, and coerced charity is as good a shorthand for socialism as I've ever seen.

I gave you an address. I assumed you were intelligent enough to use Mapquest or Yahoo Maps. My mistake. 600 Sawyer St., Houston Tx, 77007. Bitch.

Oh yeah, as for your 'glorious military', your country doesn't even have any way to transfer its disaster relief team to southeast asia...so you're not sending anyone for help with the tsunami cleanup. Here's some proof. Dickless wonder, it appears all your talk is just that.
Here.

Now I know the other reason Canada will never invade the US: they couldn't transport their military here, unless we lent some of our vehicles to them again like we usually do. The main reason, of course, is that Canadians are afraid of Americans, as your refusal to meet with me after YOU asked ME for an address shows. Well, it's apparent that the word of a Canadian wannabe-"Real American" is worth exactly what the person is: nothing.

Did you not read the complete linked article?

TMLutas thinks I'm too pessimistic.

He thinks he's totally discredited this article by pointing out that solar satellites would use solar cells instead of mirrors and boilers. Actually, in high-power designs, boilers and turbines have surprisingly good efficiency, much better than the 15% he quotes for solar cells, which waste the majority of the light which strikes them because the frequency is wrong. That's not where I think the efficiency problem lies, anyway. The problem is the power downlink to the ground, especially the conversion to RF and back to electricity in the receiver. They'll both be terrible.

He thinks he's found a citation for 90% efficiency in conversion of DC to microwave RF. Unfortunately, what he has found isn't relevant to this problem. It's easy to do that if you're only talking about a few watts. It is not at all easy if you're talking a gigawatt. No one is going to get 90% conversion of electric power to microwave transmission at gigawatt power levels. No one is going to come remotely close.

This is one of the few remaining applications where semiconductors have not yet displaced vacuum tubes. In a modern TV transmitter rated for 500 KW or 1 MW, everything is transistorized right up to the very last amplification stage, which uses vacuum tubes the size of garbage cans.

The satellite downlink will have to generate and transmit as much RF as a thousand such TV stations. Doing that is difficult. Doing that with 90% efficiency is "nontrivial".

Doing it at microwave frequencies merely adds to the fun, because extremely high frequency applications are also extremely unforgiving. I'm not really sure just how you'd generate microwave RF at gigawatt power levels, quite frankly, but whatever approach gets used, it ain't gonna achieve 90% conversion. Not gonna happen.

Lutas concludes, SDB took on an almost impossible task, proving that something cannot be done feasibly. No, I'm afraid not. I don't contend that these things are and will always remain infeasible (though the ones I discussed are definitely infeasible right now). What I contend that they cannot be done soon enough, large enough, to have any political effect on this war.

I'm not claiming he's right. But his arguments deserve proper consideration.

The fix is in distributing generation so that it's more local to consumption and increasing the intelligence of the grid. If you have local power generation that fulfills a significant part of your needs and have all your electrical uses rated so that stuff gets cut off in an intelligent automated fashion, power outages get much less annoying and you can work around problems like every single refrigerator and HVAC unit turning on at once when power is restored, a problem that really slows down the speed at which the grid can be restored after a major outage.

The fix is in distributing generation so that it's more local to consumption and increasing the intelligence of the grid. If you have local power generation that fulfills a significant part of your needs and have all your electrical uses rated so that stuff gets cut off in an intelligent automated fashion, power outages get much less annoying and you can work around problems like every single refrigerator and HVAC unit turning on at once when power is restored, a problem that really slows down the speed at which the grid can be restored after a major outage.

The fix is in distributing generation so that it's more local to consumption and increasing the intelligence of the grid. If you have local power generation that fulfills a significant part of your needs and have all your electrical uses rated so that stuff gets cut off in an intelligent automated fashion, power outages get much less annoying and you can work around problems like every single refrigerator and HVAC unit turning on at once when power is restored, a problem that really slows down the speed at which the grid can be restored after a major outage.

The fix is in distributing generation so that it's more local to consumption and increasing the intelligence of the grid. If you have local power generation that fulfills a significant part of your needs and have all your electrical uses rated so that stuff gets cut off in an intelligent automated fashion, power outages get much less annoying and you can work around problems like every single refrigerator and HVAC unit turning on at once when power is restored, a problem that really slows down the speed at which the grid can be restored after a major outage.

The fix is in distributing generation so that it's more local to consumption and increasing the intelligence of the grid. If you have local power generation that fulfills a significant part of your needs and have all your electrical uses rated so that stuff gets cut off in an intelligent automated fashion, power outages get much less annoying and you can work around problems like every single refrigerator and HVAC unit turning on at once when power is restored, a problem that really slows down the speed at which the grid can be restored after a major outage.

The fix is in distributing generation so that it's more local to consumption and increasing the intelligence of the grid. If you have local power generation that fulfills a significant part of your needs and have all your electrical uses rated so that stuff gets cut off in an intelligent automated fashion, power outages get much less annoying and you can work around problems like every single refrigerator and HVAC unit turning on at once when power is restored, a problem that really slows down the speed at which the grid can be restored after a major outage.

Home Depot would probably shrink and put in a service bureau with huge, highly efficient 3D printers. Contractors could order a part by net, print it themselves if it's their own design, and just drop by to pick it up when they see their print is done.

But this has implications for customs and banned technology as well. Make your own weapons, for instance, wouldn't be as good as commercially made stuff but it certainly would put holes in unarmored people.

Professor Marc Herold's results have been pretty thoroughly debunked here, here, and here. Other studies based on reputable sources put the number of civilian casualties at no more than 1500.

Even if the number of civilian casualties in Afghanistan were greater than the number in the 9/11 attack (or 10 times as many), there is a distinct difference between deliberately targeting civilians and civilians being killed unintentionally during attacks on military targets. So long as armies insist on fighting in populated areas, there will unfortunately always be civilian causualties.