You can make it so that Windows doesn't 'see' the drive (at least, there's no letter assigned to it). I think this is what the GP post was refering to to disable the warning message.
Windows will always see every drive. Every drive will have a letter assigned. It is easy to deny access to drives for users, slightly more difficult to make them disappear in Explorer. However, they still exist from Windows' perspective and a command line window will still see them even if it gives a "permission denied" error when trying to view them.
"There's no such thing as a foolproof system, because fools are very clever."
Invent a better system, God will invent a better idiot.
But that still doesn't explain what you're afraid a naive user could do to a swap file.
Oh, I need space for my new pr0n collection or 3D game... DELETE... Or whatever. Users make up excuses that sound good enough until you spend more than five seconds thinking about it. Hell, we have developers delete stuff on boxes to move stuff they think has something to do with testing the application or whatever but is just the tenth copy of the same tar file or whatever on the same damn drive, but they are too clueless to do a find command or just use common sense (/usr/src? hello?) to know they should just forget what they are doing and talk to an admin to be sure.
Why is that any more absurd than blocking something such as BitTorrent, especially as BitTorrent's legitimate applications are increasing?
Color me naive, but I never realized BitTorrent had a following of pirates until recently. I always saw it billed as a way to grab large files (e.g. Linux ISOs) in a lot less time than HTTP or FTP transfers. In fact that is the only thing I ever use it for. To see organizations ban or restrict it pisses me off.
Fortunately, the content industries seem to be taking a halfway correct approach: find people violating copyright using a technology, and prosecute those people. Even if BitTorrent gets a bad reputation, there are enough of us using it legitimately that 1) we won't go to jail and 2) BitTorrent will still have a legitimate user base and stay alive (thank you, OSS!).
I have gone back and forth between admin and non-admin a few times, more time without admin rights. Some programs have a tough time running, mainly because they want to access stuff they really shouldn't.
I think the problem is the developer culture that built up around Windows, coupled with its changing ideas of how to separate code and data. With Windows XP we essentially have the core idea behind Unix: a/usr and/usr/local directory (Program Files), and a/home directory (Documents and Settings). However, I have several programs that insist on saving data in Program Files instead of my home directory. This could be as simple as using the %HOMEPATH% environment variable, or using one of several Win32 API calls that do the same thing. Unfortunately, developers get lazy, use Program Files, C:\, Windows, etc. to store data. The only exception should be daemons such as Apache and MySQL that do not "belong" to a user, sort of like "nobody" in Unix. And there you have/etc, instead of dot files in/home. Sigh. The way things are, and they way they should be...
Anyway, the point is that this can make it very difficult to run certain programs without elevated permissions when you lock down the Program Files and Windows directories.
You need to have about 5 MB of free space on the swap partition for voodoo reasons. Making the drive invisible helps with that.
Windows XP needs a "RECYCLER" directory on each NTFS and FAT drive, whether or not you enable the recycle bin for that drive. I actually ran into a hard "out of disk space" error the first time I tried this in XP. The error was non-fatal but would not go away. So I recreated my swap file about 10 MB smaller and the problem went away.
But I don't get the "invincible to user stupidity" bit. Are you afraid that your wife will somehow delete the paging file? I'm pretty sure that's not possible.
Oh come on. I have had to clean up enough customers' computers to know they find ways to do stupid things. Hell, I've destroyed enough of my own OS installs to know I can do it myself. Like the time I wanted to see just how much damage "rm -rf/" as root can do. Turns out it is as bad as I thought. (I was reinstalling anyway)
Another reasonable scheme (only good after you've defragmented the page file, or before its had a chance to fragment) is to specify a fixed size page file -- you just specify the maximum and minimum as the same. Not quite as efficient as your scheme, but a little easier to set up.
Yeah, but to get that set up right you need to defragment and move the swap file which is a few extra steps. Not that it is a bad solution, of course, one that works well with NT-based Windows because it is slightly less retarded than 95-based Windows. I found even in the old days of 3.1 and 95 that I would have issues with corrupt swap files, partly due to programs that misbehaved and a kernel memory manager that was about as smart as a doorknob. So I would have to spend an hour messing with the swap file to get it set up the way I wanted it... again.
One of the biggest performance helps is to keep the paging file from being fragmented, and I'm not talking about three or four fragments.
The best way to avoid fragmenting the swap file is a method I learned a long time ago, and the author mentions in his article but doesn't talk about much: keeping it on a separate partition. Sure, NTFS doesn't have a swap partition type like Linux does, but I keep a 2 gig partition with a fixed-size swap file on my WinXP box. Set the registry key to ignore "out of space" warnings for that drive, remove read privileges from everybody to that drive, and you basically have an invisible, un-fragmentable swap file that is invincible to user stupidity (I share my computer with my wife, so that last point is important. She does not have Administrator privileges on my box).
Re:Magnification does nothing
on
The Solar Death Ray
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Take a microscope and set it to 500X. Point the objective at the sun. Do you death rays spewing from the eyepiece? (Answer: no).
A while back I was at an observatory and the guy in charge said never to point a telescope at the sun. To demonstrate, he turned the telescope (10.5" refractor) toward the sun. We could see a beam of bright light coming out the eyepiece. He put a piece of paper in the middle of the light and it ignited into flames almost instantly.
Yes, telescopes and microscopes are not the same thing, but aren't they similar? What caused this? No, I am not a physicist, and don't know about optics and all that beyond what they taught me in college.
I hate to be the one to point this out, but um. They haven't actually killed anything. This more accurately should be called a Solar Plastic-Melting Ray.
No, he did kill some something: Army men. Okay, maybe they are made of plastic, but they're still men.
A spammer could effectively force this system to close down by putting an IBM email address as the forged FROM. Then when they spew tens of millions of spams, all the bounces go to IBM and IBM DOS's most of the internet.
This system uses IP addresses, not email addresses. Otherwise, a simple Joe job could effectively shut down the Internet because spammers would game the system.
Out of curiousity how many people are using PHP5? My hosting still only supports 4.3.something. And I'm still doing my testing strictly on 4.x to match current hosting options.
I tried using PHP 5 with my web host. It was a little bit slower, probably because version 5 was compiled as a CGI instead of a module. I am sure a comparison of both as modules would have been pretty close, if not dead even. Anyway, everything worked fine. From what I can tell version 5 is good for backwards compatibility.
As a US Government employee (US Air Force to be precise) I can tell you that Bank of America is regarded by most of us (us = gov't employees) as a faceless entity that cares nothing for customer service. I doubt this will come as much of a surprise to those of us who have been required by our occupation to associate with them for some time. Maybe now the powers that be will get their collective head out and pick a new bank.
I don't know how long you've been in the Chair Force, but you might remember a few years ago the fiasco with American Express. Being a charge card, not a credit card, the balance was due every month. This was a pain in the ass with TDYs that lasted more than 30 days. I knew people that would get cash advances of $500 from their American Express card to pay off their... American Express card. Eventually whomever had American Express stock at the Pentagon saw the writing on the wall and let us switch. Bank of America may suck, but they are a HELL of a lot better than American Express.
I just got back from a training TDY recently and had zero problems with Bank of America during and after my TDY.
Finally, fuck deregulation. Deregulation is merely a way to tell the rich fuckers to go ahead and fuck the poor fuckers up the ass. Regulation is critical.
Regulation has its place. You are correct, the top 2% elite rich in this country use deregulation to fuck us "normal" people. However, regulation can be bad, too. Regulation, through the FCC, is the reason why me, a 26 year old adult, am unable to hear the words "fuck," "shit," etc. on TV, nor am I permitted to see naked people unless I go buy porn. Why the "fucking shit" is the government protecting me against bad language and naked girls, while I can cuss up a storm and look at my wife naked?
Oh, I get it, it must be the children. Oh yeah? Well, parents need to keep tabs on their children and what they watch. The V-chip is a great idea, even if its execution was severely flawed. One of the great potentials of digital TV is metadata. Each show could come with multiple ratings for language, violence, sex, etc. Parents could then restrict what is visible on the TV without needing the FCC to protect their children. I know we have channel locks now, but nothing like it should be.
Technology could make the FCC irrelevant. Yes, I was a bit blunt. We need the FCC. But we only need about 5% of what it is today: a big, bloated bureaucracy that protect consenting adults from the word "fuck."
...before you complain at paying $80/month for two hours a week of television, perhaps you should give some consideration to the question of why the fuck you feel compelled to pay that much money for services you apparently don't even use. Last I looked, nobody required you to pay for every available premium channel when you only want to watch one or two.
Apparently you are not married. If you were you might understand. Also, due to channel tie-ins, I am unable to unsubscribe from worthless shit like Animal Planet, HGTV, Oxygen, et al. If it were up to me I would have a couple news channels, the weather channel, and Discovery HD Theater. However, I cannot get Discovery HD without all the HD channels. I cannot get HD service without digital service. I cannot get digital service without analog. Get the idea?
Anyway, my gripe is that with digital and HDTV channels increasing by at least one per month with my cable provider, I find more stuff worth watching (not much, but it is there). Eventually I want to put together a MythTV box with HD capability. I want to be able to record shows and watch them when it is convenient for me. I work full time, go to college full time, and have a family to take care of. TV time is very restricted, not to mention that 99% of the stuff on TV is worthless crap. However, the FCC and broadcast industry are working as hard as they can to remove this potential convenience from me. Fuck 'em all.
Advertisers are no longer willing to pay top dollar for airtime out of fear that their commercials will not be watched, prompting an exec to compare fast-forwarding to theft of service in a fit of hyperbole.
I pay over $80 a month for cable service. I get analog channels, digital channels, digital music/radio channels, and HDTV. I watch, at most, two hours a week. At $40 per hour, fuck the commercials, I should be able to do what I want with TV as long as I don't disobey copyrights. I.e. time shifting and moving it to a different devices (e.g. my computer) should be perfectly legal, FCC be damned.
First they get upset when Janet shows an ugly boob, nevermind that 99% of the population either has boobs or gets to see them on a regular basis, then they try to make it illegal for me to use content I pay for how I choose. I think the FCC needs to go bye bye. They have long overlived their usefulness. Deregulate!
True, but up to now it looked as though any free Windows app using QT was going to have to be locked into the version 3.whatever release that came with the book.
That would work, except the license for the version included with the book explicitly states not to distribute it. It is for testing, evaluation, and learning only. Yes, I own the book, and yes, I have written Qt applications using its software. However, I was forbidden from distributing them.
Java 5 does, it's still doing the conversion in the generated bytecode though.
Not quite. Java does not overload operators, it simply unboxes and reboxes your wrapper objects for you. It works similar to operator overloading to the user of the class, except it is about ten times less efficient.
I suspect that the planet will be fine in either case. Now perhaps not good news for it inhabitants...
I am willing to make the ultimate sacrifice, since both the U.S. government administration and I are both inhabitants of Earth. Much like fucking the fat chick at the bar while your friends get the hot chicks that are her friends, this is called "taking one for the team." Ah, short end of the stick. We meet again...
Some friends and I were actually going to make a footboard once, not that long ago, to move all the modifier keys to the floor. We figure that, if a church organist can play scales with her feet, we could speed up our typing significantly by never having to use two finger simultaneously by way of our feet doing that part of the job.
I think this is actually a good idea. Think about it -- pipe organs, guitar pedals, even the gas/brake/clutch pedals in a car -- using our feet to control machines is not a foreign concept. Why should computers be any different?
Stop worrying about every little thing that can kill you and start living.
Yes, but I want my son to live, and his son, and his son...
The environmentalists and some politicians may be a bit extreme to either side, but I think the issue is worth taking a closer look at... for my great great great grandchildren's sake.
The possibility of changes to the world's ocean currents is a very real possibility, and could have catastrophic consequences. However, they are not irreversable. I have read reports citing the fact that these currents have cycles, where every 10 or 20 thousand years they shut off, only to restart a century or two later. Yes, that would be catastrophic to us, but not to the planet. Hell, it survived a fiery birth, multiple major meteor impacts, magnetic pole reversals, caldera supervolanoes, et al. and the planet is still around. We might not be around later, but good ol' Earth sure will be.
Does anyone have a link to the actual report? This article just sounds like more scare mongering and dumbing down. As always, the devil is in the details, I want to see the details.
Actually, I think prison for any nonviolent crime is incredibly unfair, unless we institute some serious prison reform. As it stands now, prison is a violent place, and only violent people deserve to go there. It is a place where rape is a commonplace occurence, ignored by the authorities. Only the absolute dregs of society deserve to be put in that environment, certainly not copyright infringers, or tax cheats, or people like that.
Prison for nonviolent offenders is not a federal pound-me-in-the-ass-prison. Those offenders go to minimum or below-minimum security prisons. For example, a relative of mine was caught on a drug offense, but there was no weapon involved -- so he went to a prison with chicken wire fence. No rape, no violence, just a bunch of stupid people and a few smart people caught for tax evasion, fraud, etc.
I think "the system" knows that the medium and maximum security prisons have issues, so they only send the violent offenders there (making it a vicious cycle).
Frankly, if the big day comes in my lifetime, I just hope for enough time to relax and enjoy a good beer while I heckle the morans trying to evacuate the city by car.
Beer? Yeah, that would be good, but I would rather die with a beer in my hand and my wife's mouth... you get the idea;-)
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You can make it so that Windows doesn't 'see' the drive (at least, there's no letter assigned to it). I think this is what the GP post was refering to to disable the warning message.
Windows will always see every drive. Every drive will have a letter assigned. It is easy to deny access to drives for users, slightly more difficult to make them disappear in Explorer. However, they still exist from Windows' perspective and a command line window will still see them even if it gives a "permission denied" error when trying to view them.
"There's no such thing as a foolproof system, because fools are very clever."
Invent a better system, God will invent a better idiot.
But that still doesn't explain what you're afraid a naive user could do to a swap file.
Oh, I need space for my new pr0n collection or 3D game... DELETE... Or whatever. Users make up excuses that sound good enough until you spend more than five seconds thinking about it. Hell, we have developers delete stuff on boxes to move stuff they think has something to do with testing the application or whatever but is just the tenth copy of the same tar file or whatever on the same damn drive, but they are too clueless to do a find command or just use common sense (/usr/src? hello?) to know they should just forget what they are doing and talk to an admin to be sure.
Sigh. And these people have CS degrees?
Why is that any more absurd than blocking something such as BitTorrent, especially as BitTorrent's legitimate applications are increasing?
Color me naive, but I never realized BitTorrent had a following of pirates until recently. I always saw it billed as a way to grab large files (e.g. Linux ISOs) in a lot less time than HTTP or FTP transfers. In fact that is the only thing I ever use it for. To see organizations ban or restrict it pisses me off.
Fortunately, the content industries seem to be taking a halfway correct approach: find people violating copyright using a technology, and prosecute those people. Even if BitTorrent gets a bad reputation, there are enough of us using it legitimately that 1) we won't go to jail and 2) BitTorrent will still have a legitimate user base and stay alive (thank you, OSS!).
I have gone back and forth between admin and non-admin a few times, more time without admin rights. Some programs have a tough time running, mainly because they want to access stuff they really shouldn't.
I think the problem is the developer culture that built up around Windows, coupled with its changing ideas of how to separate code and data. With Windows XP we essentially have the core idea behind Unix: a /usr and /usr/local directory (Program Files), and a /home directory (Documents and Settings). However, I have several programs that insist on saving data in Program Files instead of my home directory. This could be as simple as using the %HOMEPATH% environment variable, or using one of several Win32 API calls that do the same thing. Unfortunately, developers get lazy, use Program Files, C:\, Windows, etc. to store data. The only exception should be daemons such as Apache and MySQL that do not "belong" to a user, sort of like "nobody" in Unix. And there you have /etc, instead of dot files in /home. Sigh. The way things are, and they way they should be...
Anyway, the point is that this can make it very difficult to run certain programs without elevated permissions when you lock down the Program Files and Windows directories.
You need to have about 5 MB of free space on the swap partition for voodoo reasons. Making the drive invisible helps with that.
Windows XP needs a "RECYCLER" directory on each NTFS and FAT drive, whether or not you enable the recycle bin for that drive. I actually ran into a hard "out of disk space" error the first time I tried this in XP. The error was non-fatal but would not go away. So I recreated my swap file about 10 MB smaller and the problem went away.
But I don't get the "invincible to user stupidity" bit. Are you afraid that your wife will somehow delete the paging file? I'm pretty sure that's not possible.
Oh come on. I have had to clean up enough customers' computers to know they find ways to do stupid things. Hell, I've destroyed enough of my own OS installs to know I can do it myself. Like the time I wanted to see just how much damage "rm -rf /" as root can do. Turns out it is as bad as I thought. (I was reinstalling anyway)
Another reasonable scheme (only good after you've defragmented the page file, or before its had a chance to fragment) is to specify a fixed size page file -- you just specify the maximum and minimum as the same. Not quite as efficient as your scheme, but a little easier to set up.
Yeah, but to get that set up right you need to defragment and move the swap file which is a few extra steps. Not that it is a bad solution, of course, one that works well with NT-based Windows because it is slightly less retarded than 95-based Windows. I found even in the old days of 3.1 and 95 that I would have issues with corrupt swap files, partly due to programs that misbehaved and a kernel memory manager that was about as smart as a doorknob. So I would have to spend an hour messing with the swap file to get it set up the way I wanted it... again.
No, I don't want admin privileges on her box. I don't want to have to deal with daily admin tasks. Instead, I am a power user. Oh yeeeeah!
One of the biggest performance helps is to keep the paging file from being fragmented, and I'm not talking about three or four fragments.
The best way to avoid fragmenting the swap file is a method I learned a long time ago, and the author mentions in his article but doesn't talk about much: keeping it on a separate partition. Sure, NTFS doesn't have a swap partition type like Linux does, but I keep a 2 gig partition with a fixed-size swap file on my WinXP box. Set the registry key to ignore "out of space" warnings for that drive, remove read privileges from everybody to that drive, and you basically have an invisible, un-fragmentable swap file that is invincible to user stupidity (I share my computer with my wife, so that last point is important. She does not have Administrator privileges on my box).
Take a microscope and set it to 500X. Point the objective at the sun. Do you death rays spewing from the eyepiece? (Answer: no).
A while back I was at an observatory and the guy in charge said never to point a telescope at the sun. To demonstrate, he turned the telescope (10.5" refractor) toward the sun. We could see a beam of bright light coming out the eyepiece. He put a piece of paper in the middle of the light and it ignited into flames almost instantly.
Yes, telescopes and microscopes are not the same thing, but aren't they similar? What caused this? No, I am not a physicist, and don't know about optics and all that beyond what they taught me in college.
I hate to be the one to point this out, but um. They haven't actually killed anything. This more accurately should be called a Solar Plastic-Melting Ray.
No, he did kill some something: Army men. Okay, maybe they are made of plastic, but they're still men.
A spammer could effectively force this system to close down by putting an IBM email address as the forged FROM. Then when they spew tens of millions of spams, all the bounces go to IBM and IBM DOS's most of the internet.
This system uses IP addresses, not email addresses. Otherwise, a simple Joe job could effectively shut down the Internet because spammers would game the system.
Out of curiousity how many people are using PHP5? My hosting still only supports 4.3.something. And I'm still doing my testing strictly on 4.x to match current hosting options.
I tried using PHP 5 with my web host. It was a little bit slower, probably because version 5 was compiled as a CGI instead of a module. I am sure a comparison of both as modules would have been pretty close, if not dead even. Anyway, everything worked fine. From what I can tell version 5 is good for backwards compatibility.
As a US Government employee (US Air Force to be precise) I can tell you that Bank of America is regarded by most of us (us = gov't employees) as a faceless entity that cares nothing for customer service. I doubt this will come as much of a surprise to those of us who have been required by our occupation to associate with them for some time. Maybe now the powers that be will get their collective head out and pick a new bank.
I don't know how long you've been in the Chair Force, but you might remember a few years ago the fiasco with American Express. Being a charge card, not a credit card, the balance was due every month. This was a pain in the ass with TDYs that lasted more than 30 days. I knew people that would get cash advances of $500 from their American Express card to pay off their... American Express card. Eventually whomever had American Express stock at the Pentagon saw the writing on the wall and let us switch. Bank of America may suck, but they are a HELL of a lot better than American Express.
I just got back from a training TDY recently and had zero problems with Bank of America during and after my TDY.
Finally, fuck deregulation. Deregulation is merely a way to tell the rich fuckers to go ahead and fuck the poor fuckers up the ass. Regulation is critical.
Regulation has its place. You are correct, the top 2% elite rich in this country use deregulation to fuck us "normal" people. However, regulation can be bad, too. Regulation, through the FCC, is the reason why me, a 26 year old adult, am unable to hear the words "fuck," "shit," etc. on TV, nor am I permitted to see naked people unless I go buy porn. Why the "fucking shit" is the government protecting me against bad language and naked girls, while I can cuss up a storm and look at my wife naked?
Oh, I get it, it must be the children. Oh yeah? Well, parents need to keep tabs on their children and what they watch. The V-chip is a great idea, even if its execution was severely flawed. One of the great potentials of digital TV is metadata. Each show could come with multiple ratings for language, violence, sex, etc. Parents could then restrict what is visible on the TV without needing the FCC to protect their children. I know we have channel locks now, but nothing like it should be.
Technology could make the FCC irrelevant. Yes, I was a bit blunt. We need the FCC. But we only need about 5% of what it is today: a big, bloated bureaucracy that protect consenting adults from the word "fuck."
Apparently you are not married. If you were you might understand. Also, due to channel tie-ins, I am unable to unsubscribe from worthless shit like Animal Planet, HGTV, Oxygen, et al. If it were up to me I would have a couple news channels, the weather channel, and Discovery HD Theater. However, I cannot get Discovery HD without all the HD channels. I cannot get HD service without digital service. I cannot get digital service without analog. Get the idea?
Anyway, my gripe is that with digital and HDTV channels increasing by at least one per month with my cable provider, I find more stuff worth watching (not much, but it is there). Eventually I want to put together a MythTV box with HD capability. I want to be able to record shows and watch them when it is convenient for me. I work full time, go to college full time, and have a family to take care of. TV time is very restricted, not to mention that 99% of the stuff on TV is worthless crap. However, the FCC and broadcast industry are working as hard as they can to remove this potential convenience from me. Fuck 'em all.
Advertisers are no longer willing to pay top dollar for airtime out of fear that their commercials will not be watched, prompting an exec to compare fast-forwarding to theft of service in a fit of hyperbole.
I pay over $80 a month for cable service. I get analog channels, digital channels, digital music/radio channels, and HDTV. I watch, at most, two hours a week. At $40 per hour, fuck the commercials, I should be able to do what I want with TV as long as I don't disobey copyrights. I.e. time shifting and moving it to a different devices (e.g. my computer) should be perfectly legal, FCC be damned.
First they get upset when Janet shows an ugly boob, nevermind that 99% of the population either has boobs or gets to see them on a regular basis, then they try to make it illegal for me to use content I pay for how I choose. I think the FCC needs to go bye bye. They have long overlived their usefulness. Deregulate!
True, but up to now it looked as though any free Windows app using QT was going to have to be locked into the version 3.whatever release that came with the book.
That would work, except the license for the version included with the book explicitly states not to distribute it. It is for testing, evaluation, and learning only. Yes, I own the book, and yes, I have written Qt applications using its software. However, I was forbidden from distributing them.
Java 5 does, it's still doing the conversion in the generated bytecode though.
Not quite. Java does not overload operators, it simply unboxes and reboxes your wrapper objects for you. It works similar to operator overloading to the user of the class, except it is about ten times less efficient.
I suspect that the planet will be fine in either case. Now perhaps not good news for it inhabitants...
I am willing to make the ultimate sacrifice, since both the U.S. government administration and I are both inhabitants of Earth. Much like fucking the fat chick at the bar while your friends get the hot chicks that are her friends, this is called "taking one for the team." Ah, short end of the stick. We meet again...
Someday people are going to feel awfully silly that they were worrying about terrorism instead of the warning signs of ecological degeneration.
Don't worry, Dubya and Rumsfeld will be dead before ecological degeneration gets real bad.
Some friends and I were actually going to make a footboard once, not that long ago, to move all the modifier keys to the floor. We figure that, if a church organist can play scales with her feet, we could speed up our typing significantly by never having to use two finger simultaneously by way of our feet doing that part of the job.
I think this is actually a good idea. Think about it -- pipe organs, guitar pedals, even the gas/brake/clutch pedals in a car -- using our feet to control machines is not a foreign concept. Why should computers be any different?
Stop worrying about every little thing that can kill you and start living.
Yes, but I want my son to live, and his son, and his son...
The environmentalists and some politicians may be a bit extreme to either side, but I think the issue is worth taking a closer look at... for my great great great grandchildren's sake.
The possibility of changes to the world's ocean currents is a very real possibility, and could have catastrophic consequences. However, they are not irreversable. I have read reports citing the fact that these currents have cycles, where every 10 or 20 thousand years they shut off, only to restart a century or two later. Yes, that would be catastrophic to us, but not to the planet. Hell, it survived a fiery birth, multiple major meteor impacts, magnetic pole reversals, caldera supervolanoes, et al. and the planet is still around. We might not be around later, but good ol' Earth sure will be.
Does anyone have a link to the actual report? This article just sounds like more scare mongering and dumbing down. As always, the devil is in the details, I want to see the details.
Actually, I think prison for any nonviolent crime is incredibly unfair, unless we institute some serious prison reform. As it stands now, prison is a violent place, and only violent people deserve to go there. It is a place where rape is a commonplace occurence, ignored by the authorities. Only the absolute dregs of society deserve to be put in that environment, certainly not copyright infringers, or tax cheats, or people like that.
Prison for nonviolent offenders is not a federal pound-me-in-the-ass-prison. Those offenders go to minimum or below-minimum security prisons. For example, a relative of mine was caught on a drug offense, but there was no weapon involved -- so he went to a prison with chicken wire fence. No rape, no violence, just a bunch of stupid people and a few smart people caught for tax evasion, fraud, etc.
I think "the system" knows that the medium and maximum security prisons have issues, so they only send the violent offenders there (making it a vicious cycle).
Frankly, if the big day comes in my lifetime, I just hope for enough time to relax and enjoy a good beer while I heckle the morans trying to evacuate the city by car.
Beer? Yeah, that would be good, but I would rather die with a beer in my hand and my wife's mouth... you get the idea ;-)