The sun going nova is the least of our worries for long term survival. There is a more pressing problems which will bite us in the ass within the next hundred or so years (and possibly a lot sooner than that): depletion of the world's oil reserves and the resulting economic crash and collapse of modern farming methods.
Our current society cannot be maintained without a realistic new energy source. It's foolish to spend money on space flight when we urgently need working fusion power or some other alternative power source with a high net energy return.
Life in 2104 is going to have a whole lot more in common with 1804 than it does with 2004. Start making some Amish frends now.
If you can name one incalculably valuable spinoff the manned space program has given us in the last 30 years, I'll give you my next paycheck
Fuel Cells. Contact info is on my homepage. I'll be expecting a check in the mail shortly:-)
Re:Damn straight...
on
The Wrong Stuff
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· Score: 1, Flamebait
No, the US government financially rapes it's citizens to such an extent that they can afford funnel billions of dollars worth of contracts to their rich campaign supporters.
Exactly what I was going to say. People are always going to be smashing up their cars, recession or not. A good mechanic who also has a decent business education isn't going to go hungry.
Driving at a fixed, arbitrary speed does not improve safety one bit.
The maximum safe speed is dependent on the driver, the vehicle, traffic, weather, lighting, a dozen other variables. There are times when it's actually SAFER to drive 80 in a 55 zone. There are other times when driving 50 in a 55 zone is far too fast.
There is actually evidence that suggests that driving over the speed limit is actually safer, because it forces the driver to devote more attention to actually watching the road (and looking out for cops) and less attention to the radio, cell phone, and other distractions. Inattentive drivers cause FAR more accidents than attentive drivers who speed.
but you're going to run into problems with other mail servers possibly not wanting to accept mail from you.
Very true, which is why my outgoing mail is relayed via my ISP's mail server. I'll agree that static IP would make my life easier, but what I have works well enough.
But if you don't have a static IP address then you aren't going to be running a mail server... at least not without the help of another mail server to act as a smart host and be an MX host for local domains.
Funny, I *do* run a mail server without a static IP address. My current setup has a static backup, but previously my backup mail server was also on a dynamic IP.
Fire is not the problem, grounding is. With all the components touching a common metal frame, they are all at the same ground potential. If you start mounting components on a nonconductive surface, there's a possibility that each subassembly could develop a different potential, leading to unstable operation and in the worst case, arcing.
I'd also be pessimistic and assume that a lot of PC components are engineered with the assumption that they're going to be grounded to a common chassis. It wouldn't be hard to build a harness out of some wire and screw terminals and ground it to the power supply's case (or the external ground). Better safe than sorry.
No, the words you are both looking for is "effective" and "ineffective".
Anyhow, I have to disagree with you that laws are neither good nor evil; and a law's intent has no bearing on how effective it is. "Jim Crow" laws are some of the canonical examples of laws with evil intent. These laws were very effective in acheiving their desired results, even if that results was evil. Contriwise, some of the best-intentioned laws fail to achieve any positive result.
If your ISP has delegated a reverse lookup zone to your DNS servers
That's a pretty big "if". While it's true, it's going to be irrelevant to someone who doen't have their own a static IP block. If your ISP isn't going to give you a static IP, they sure as hell aren't going to delegate reverse lookups.
I think it has more to do with blocking servers and preventing people from using their home DSL account to host a Counterstrike server.
If that's the purpose, then it's horribly ineffective. It's trivial to set up a dynamic DNS solution which is virtually transparent to the outside world. It's not a perfect solution, but for a low-traffic domain, it's satisfactory.
In my setup, I have a cron job on my Linux box which runs zoneclient
every 10 minutes. Zoneclient queries my router for it's external IP address, and if it has changed since the last check, it tells my DNS provider to update the appropriate A records. 10 minutes is a pretty arbitrary number, it's good enough for my purposes. I could crank the cron job up to run 1/min without any trouble, but that seems like overkill to me, since I usually only wind up getting a new address once or twice a month.
Dynamic DNS probably isn't good enough for a serious production server; but it's adequate for a private mail server, especially if you have an external store-and-forward backup server to hold your mail temporarily. For a game server used by you and your friends, this setup works perfectly.
Some, but probably not as much as you might think, given the disparate penalties. In Victorian England, the worst that could happen to one for getting caught with porn would be a social stigma. In Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, it could be fatal.
Are you stupid, being willfully ignorant, or simply incapable of comprehending the English language?
To quote the law again:
The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and, except as provided in section 313 of title 32, under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard.
Let's map this out so it's a little clearer for the hard of thinking:
An able-bodied male who is a US citizen or who intends to become a citizen, becomes a member of the militia on his 17th birthday, and remains in the militia until his 45th birthday. If he is a veteran of the regular Army, Air Force, Navy, or Marine Corps, he remains in the militia until his 65th birthday.
A female US citizen is a member of the militia only for the duration of her membership in the National Guard.
National Guard membership ONLY affects the militia status of female citizens. If you are male, you ARE in the militia, whether you like it or not, UNLESS:
You are younger than 17
You are not a veteran and are 45 or older
You are a veteran and are 65 or older
You have a physical handicap which prevents you from serving
You are not a citizen and you do not intend to become a citizen
but it's perfectly reasonable to set aside a small part of the media and allow the government to regulate it to a reasonable level.
No, it's not. Repeat after me:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Notice the complete lack of words like "except" or "unless" or "but" in the First Amendment, which do appear in some of the other Amedments? This means that there are no exceptions, exemptions, or loopholes.
It is not reasonable for the US Government to do something which the Constitution expressly forbids it from doing. Period, end of story. No amount of revisionism, semantics, or wishful thinking will change the simple fact that the government is forbidden to censor either the press or private citizens.
Only guy I knew who was a card-carrying member of both the ACLU and the NRA.
Meet another one. The ACLU is a pretty good organization, other than their illogical, hipocritical, and self-contridictory stance on the 2nd amendment.
No way to cheat? All that cheese and wine must be rotting your brains. How about taking 5 pre-printed ballots instead of one and dropping them in the ballot box? Sounds like a way to cheat to me.
The system you describe sounds incredibly wasteful -- if you have V voters and C candidates for P positions, you need CVP pieces of paper (To be fair, every candidate for an office needs 1 ticket per voter). This means that at the end of the day you have 1VP pieces of paper in the ballot box, and (C-1)VP pieces of paper in the trash can.
An OS in ROM makes a whole lot of sense for a constrained hardware platform. Most of the 8-bit computers had a significant part of their OS in ROM. One of the major reasons the Amiga worked as well as it did was that it's OS was significantly ROM based.
Ask your doctor friend how one can successfully starve, would you?
One can successfully starve by starting out with a substantial amount of body fat. That's why your body naturally accumulates fat -- it's saving that energy for a rainy day. Of course if that rainy day never comes, you've got a different problem. If you've got too much body fat, getting your metabolism to shift into starvation (fat-burning) mode is a good thing, as long as you stop before you run out of fat. Low-carb diets like Adkins and South Beach work by fooling your metabolism to go into "starvation mode" without actually starving.
When your body runs out of fat, that's when you start having the problems you describe. If you have no body fat reserves left and still aren't eating enough, your body does two things: it starts burning muscle mass for fuel, and it starts shutting itself down to conserve energy. Neither of these is particuarly good for you, but it's better than dropping dead.
Saying that anyone with an IQ under 100 is stupid would be patently offensive to approximatly 3.25 billion people. It would also be true, at least from a certian point of view. Stating an unpopular or unpalatable truth is not trolling.
Then one just orginises for the election to occure on Saturday so thousands of public servents & teachers are available all weekend
Around here, schools are closed on election day, as are most state & local government agencies.
There's no way I want the doofwads from the MVA mucking with the election results. They can barely manage to process a drivers' licence renewal without borking it up; I can only imagine the carnage that would ensue if they handled the ballots.
because they vote on Tuesday for some stupid reason
Tuesday elections do indeed stem from a stupid reason. The practice dates back to horse-and-buggy days, and was designed to allow people to go to church on Sunday and then walk or ride to the polling place -- usually the county courthouse -- which could easily be a full day's travel.
Changing to a saturday election wouldn't improve voter turnout; doing so probably would hurt it. This is because employers are required by law to give their employees time off to go vote; many businesses even make election day a paid holiday for their employees. Since the polls are typically open from 8AM to 8PM, anyone who wants to vote can easily do so either on their way to work, on their way home from work, or on their lunch break.
IMHO the real cause of the low voter turnout is apathy and resignation. When the choice is voting for the puppet on the left and the puppet on the right, there's really little point in bothering, because both puppets are being controlled by the same people.
E-Voting is a solution looking for a problem (Or more accurately, a product looking for a market).
Up until the recent primary, my home state (Maryland) had used a pretty foolproof ballot system -- basically you connected two dots next to the name of the candidate you wanted to vote for. The completed ballots were put into an electronic scanner which gave counts, making it efficient, but there was an indisputable hardcopy record to go back to if you needed to do a recount.
Come on, pen and paper has lasted for 5000+ years as a way of recording information. Sometimes the best tool for the job is the simplest one.
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Our current society cannot be maintained without a realistic new energy source. It's foolish to spend money on space flight when we urgently need working fusion power or some other alternative power source with a high net energy return.
Life in 2104 is going to have a whole lot more in common with 1804 than it does with 2004. Start making some Amish frends now.
You can get parkas with aerogel insulation. A sub-zero rated parka which is as light as a windbreaker is pretty nifty.
No, the US government financially rapes it's citizens to such an extent that they can afford funnel billions of dollars worth of contracts to their rich campaign supporters.
Exactly what I was going to say. People are always going to be smashing up their cars, recession or not. A good mechanic who also has a decent business education isn't going to go hungry.
The maximum safe speed is dependent on the driver, the vehicle, traffic, weather, lighting, a dozen other variables. There are times when it's actually SAFER to drive 80 in a 55 zone. There are other times when driving 50 in a 55 zone is far too fast.
There is actually evidence that suggests that driving over the speed limit is actually safer, because it forces the driver to devote more attention to actually watching the road (and looking out for cops) and less attention to the radio, cell phone, and other distractions. Inattentive drivers cause FAR more accidents than attentive drivers who speed.
I'd also be pessimistic and assume that a lot of PC components are engineered with the assumption that they're going to be grounded to a common chassis. It wouldn't be hard to build a harness out of some wire and screw terminals and ground it to the power supply's case (or the external ground). Better safe than sorry.
Anyhow, I have to disagree with you that laws are neither good nor evil; and a law's intent has no bearing on how effective it is. "Jim Crow" laws are some of the canonical examples of laws with evil intent. These laws were very effective in acheiving their desired results, even if that results was evil. Contriwise, some of the best-intentioned laws fail to achieve any positive result.
In my setup, I have a cron job on my Linux box which runs zoneclient every 10 minutes. Zoneclient queries my router for it's external IP address, and if it has changed since the last check, it tells my DNS provider to update the appropriate A records. 10 minutes is a pretty arbitrary number, it's good enough for my purposes. I could crank the cron job up to run 1/min without any trouble, but that seems like overkill to me, since I usually only wind up getting a new address once or twice a month. Dynamic DNS probably isn't good enough for a serious production server; but it's adequate for a private mail server, especially if you have an external store-and-forward backup server to hold your mail temporarily. For a game server used by you and your friends, this setup works perfectly.
Some, but probably not as much as you might think, given the disparate penalties. In Victorian England, the worst that could happen to one for getting caught with porn would be a social stigma. In Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, it could be fatal.
To quote the law again:
Let's map this out so it's a little clearer for the hard of thinking:- An able-bodied male who is a US citizen or who intends to become a citizen, becomes a member of the militia on his 17th birthday, and remains in the militia until his 45th birthday. If he is a veteran of the regular Army, Air Force, Navy, or Marine Corps, he remains in the militia until his 65th birthday.
- A female US citizen is a member of the militia only for the duration of her membership in the National Guard.
National Guard membership ONLY affects the militia status of female citizens. If you are male, you ARE in the militia, whether you like it or not, UNLESS:- You are younger than 17
- You are not a veteran and are 45 or older
- You are a veteran and are 65 or older
- You have a physical handicap which prevents you from serving
- You are not a citizen and you do not intend to become a citizen
Got it?Ohhh... like that ever-popular Taliban favorite, "Babes in Burquas VII". I hear that you can actually see their hair in that one.
It is not reasonable for the US Government to do something which the Constitution expressly forbids it from doing. Period, end of story. No amount of revisionism, semantics, or wishful thinking will change the simple fact that the government is forbidden to censor either the press or private citizens.
The system you describe sounds incredibly wasteful -- if you have V voters and C candidates for P positions, you need CVP pieces of paper (To be fair, every candidate for an office needs 1 ticket per voter). This means that at the end of the day you have 1VP pieces of paper in the ballot box, and (C-1)VP pieces of paper in the trash can.
An OS in ROM makes a whole lot of sense for a constrained hardware platform. Most of the 8-bit computers had a significant part of their OS in ROM. One of the major reasons the Amiga worked as well as it did was that it's OS was significantly ROM based.
When your body runs out of fat, that's when you start having the problems you describe. If you have no body fat reserves left and still aren't eating enough, your body does two things: it starts burning muscle mass for fuel, and it starts shutting itself down to conserve energy. Neither of these is particuarly good for you, but it's better than dropping dead.
Offensive != False
There's no way I want the doofwads from the MVA mucking with the election results. They can barely manage to process a drivers' licence renewal without borking it up; I can only imagine the carnage that would ensue if they handled the ballots.
Changing to a saturday election wouldn't improve voter turnout; doing so probably would hurt it. This is because employers are required by law to give their employees time off to go vote; many businesses even make election day a paid holiday for their employees. Since the polls are typically open from 8AM to 8PM, anyone who wants to vote can easily do so either on their way to work, on their way home from work, or on their lunch break.
IMHO the real cause of the low voter turnout is apathy and resignation. When the choice is voting for the puppet on the left and the puppet on the right, there's really little point in bothering, because both puppets are being controlled by the same people.
Up until the recent primary, my home state (Maryland) had used a pretty foolproof ballot system -- basically you connected two dots next to the name of the candidate you wanted to vote for. The completed ballots were put into an electronic scanner which gave counts, making it efficient, but there was an indisputable hardcopy record to go back to if you needed to do a recount.
Come on, pen and paper has lasted for 5000+ years as a way of recording information. Sometimes the best tool for the job is the simplest one.
And if you do every manage to build an idiot proof system, nature will respond by building a better idiot