I wonder about mental wear and tear, and not just in terms of the physical dynamics of memory, but in terms of pure psychology -- can your psyche handle 300 years? I'm not sure mine could. The resentment, the bitterness, the lack of tolerance only seems to get worse, not better.
I also know that I couldn't psychologically handle doing my existing job (networking consultant) for 300 years. The good news is that I wouldn't have to, but could switch to a new career without the problem associated with taking on an entirely new career at an "advanced" age.
But the bad news is that you'd be pushed into it since some people would keep their jobs for longer than a normal career of 40-50 years, and it would be then impossible to compete with people with 100s of years of experience.
The irony being that we might end up switching careers anyway, since few careers/industries/technologies are likely to remain viable for an individual over that kind of timeframe.
I'm not a scientist, and it seems weird to me that they would stop spending money on something that still works and gone someplace nothing else has. It just seems wasteful. And it's not like they can justify it by saying they'll have a replacement there tomorrow, either, since they won't.
I also thought it was weird that they had to authorize more spending when the rovers were still working past their estimated useful life. You've got a remote control car on fucking Mars that still works and somebody wants to just switch it off? It reminds me of rich kids who throw out good toys simply because they're bored with them.
I guess the space program has become just like any other corporate entity -- if it can't show glossy, short-term results that look good in:15 on the evening news, it's "not viable." Yay. Another triumph of modern civilization.
Brasso contains ammonia, too, which is why it works so well on brass.
It's one of those items that rookie ammo reloaders want to use in their tumbler media because it does such a nice job on candelabras, but the ammonia weakens the brass so it's a no-no for cleaning brass ammunition casings.
I'm not sure what ammonia would do to/for the polycarobonite.
I'm not even sure how something like this became TWO operations/taskforces, but it's a great example of truly ridiculous government priorities. I think they better learn to watch out for people buying strange small quantities of tubing and plumbing at Home Depot, too.
The local paper had an article about the new FBI porn project and said it was THE running joke of the FBI; nobody takes it seriously and people are legitimately challenging the FBI on this one in the wake of all the other concerns. It's seen as a Gonzalez attempt at currying favor with evangelicals for a Supreme Court seat.
I was really expecting it to be something Google would add, but where's the IMAP support?
Is there some technical reason none of them support IMAP? Too intensive from a bandwidth/CPU perspective? I'm always amazed at the number of places where you'd expect modern email to find just POP.
Whether anyone wants to admit it or not, sex IS the outcome of all successful dating situations (even for religious zealots who wait until they've confirmed their dating status with a state called "marriage").
There's a ton of simulation that could be put into encounters that involve sexuality -- aggression, passivity, willingness to be adventurous, the level of emotional commitment required/desired, and that's just scratching the surface.
The depiction doesn't even have to be super hard core.
And it would probably be a learning experience for a lot of people "WHY DO I LOSE MY SIM DATE WHEN I STICK MY FINGER IN HER ASS ON THE FIRST DATE?!?!"
FN wouldn't be in the arms business if American John Browning hadn't gotten sick of Winchester and taken his designs to Belgium and given FN something to make besides bicycles. A lot of the stuff for Sig-Sauer pistols are made here or in Canada; I'm not even sure if many of the components are imported at all.
And you've forgotten Remington, Winchester, Ruger, Colt and Smith & Wesson on your list. And then there's other important niche makers, like Kimber and Kahr. I'm not entirely sure what the relationship is between US Browning and FN, but I think most High Powers in the US are made here.
Taurus makes a ton of weapons, too, and is neither American nor European.
And most of the European gun makers wouldn't be making guns if the US wasn't buying them. The lion's share of Glocks end up in the US, I think FN still makes the US SAW, and we seem to buy an awful lot of HK MP5s.
I'm not sure who buys stuff from Steyr; do they even have a current civilian product?
I wonder if it's a cultural phenomenon of the clueless executives -- since "everyone" they know uses AOL it must be a big enough phenomenon to be worth buying, even though they really are losing business and their other web tools lag, outside of the captive IM space.
It's only in the last hundred years or so that "we" have decided that the use of force (deadly or otherwise) is only justifiable under the narrowest of circumstances. Prior to that it was not only acceptable but justifiable to use even deadly force in reponse to only threatened property crimes.
Instead we've allowed ourselves to become dependent on the use of force by law enforcement, who in turn have become reluctnant to use it for fear of lawsuits and politically motivated prosecutors charging THEM with crimes.
The net result is a public wholly dependent on a law enforcement system that is reluctant to protect them and yet isn't liable when it DOESN'T protect them.
Reginald Denny should have had a good handgun in his truck and the willingness to use it. The rest of the mob would have been de-motivated to continue attacking had their initial attempts resulted in dead attackers.
I know a lot of people (including myself, until now) simply assumed the card had some magick code on it that opened the door, and once they checked out, the code stopped working, so key cards got:
1) left in the room when you walked out. There's probably a box on the cleaning carts where they get chucked. Highly insecure.
2) left in the rental car or wherever. You're done with it and presumably it has no information relevant to you.
3) idly thrown away (probably the most secure, provided its a sufficiently yucky trash can)
4) Taped to office doors or cube walls to make a "gee, I travel a lot" mosaic.
The idea that they're somehow secure because they MIGHT get stored and reused seems laughable.
If all that's required is that spyware needs to pass some confusing and oblique definition of "approval", shouldn't I be able to get a bank or other business to agree to some other murky "agreement" which would give me access to THEIR systems, and hence the ability to take from them?
The problem with all of this is the click-through agreement. By using click-through agreements, spyware and companies that distribute it, are able to cloak themselves in legalese and create a (likely) defensable position whereby the user gave them "permission."
Congress needs to *bar* the click through agreement; if software companies want to create a binding contract, they need to get me to sign paper. If they want electronic contracts, there should be a wholly seperate process from the installer *and* some statutory requirement that the language be held to a maximum length and a "reasonable person" clarity requirement, as well as key disclosures like "we can take your information and do whatever we want".
If the spyware vendors and their frontmen HAD to disclose "we're gonna monitor you, mine your private data and install more software you cannot remove" in plain language, nobody would accept it. That they can cloak it in dense legalese nobody understands with catch-all inclusionary clauses makes it meaningless.
I suppose on some system 10 or more years ago it was the only full-screen text editor and better than some vendor-included vi for doing application development.
I've never been a developer, beyond a few shameful but effective perl and shell scripts, and I've never managed to learn vi or emacs. I made a run at emacs because it seemed kind of like a text-mode desktop, but it was always *way* faster to download and install joe, edit what I wanted editing, and get back to whatever I was actually trying to accomplish than to stumble around in emacs.
Disclaimer: I'm not an RF engineer, and outside of maybe 1k of Perl code I'm not a programmer either (and many wags would have you believe Perl isn't programming, but I digress).
I can only assume that detection of the copy protect flag involves some software routine that has to do some kind of error checking to be sure that the flag is actually present.
Why can't that routine assume the flag *isn't* present unless there is really good detection of it? Why assume that "maybe" cases DO have the flag?
I had a friend who went to the dentist and ended up with a bunch of problems. He went to another dentist and the second said "Oh my god, WHO worked on YOU?!". He submitted a complaint to the dental board, complete with records from the second dentist. Outcome? "Not sustained."
I told him not to expect anything -- the medical community self-polices not because it does any good, but because it provides great insurance against real legal sanctions and problems. I don't know for a fact, but I would almost bet that in many states the self-policing medical boards have to sustain a complaint before any further review of the doctor's case or punishments can be meted out.
I think what he should have done is threatened a lawsuit but have been willing to accept a cash settlement of $5k along with an agreement to not discuss the outcome. It would have more than covered lost wages, additional dental procedures and pain and suffering, and he probably would have gotten it.
You're assuming, though, that the stabbing knife is sharp enough to only cut and not tear, and that the stabbing motion is a perfectly straight in-and-out motion.
I think a lot of knife wounds happen in the course of a larger physical altercation, which can result in a lot of twisting, tearing motions that can cause a lot of injury. I'd also wager that most are dull as dishwater and do a lot of tissue damage as they are forced in and out.
Your 18th century ball is about 430 grains, which is about twice the size as the largest common handgun round (230 grain.45 ACP), and something like 4 times as large as a common 9mm round of 115 grains. There are larger handgun rounds available, but they're not commonly used -- 45 Long Colt,.44 S&W Special and.44 Remington Magnum can take slugs in the 250-300 grain range).
Where bullets tend to do a lot of damage isn't straight-line wound cavities or even through hydrostatic shock, but deflection off bones resulting in fragmentation and "pool table" wounds.
I read just the other day that American police officers are more likely to die when stabbed than when shot.
There's likely a ton of explanations. Yours, regarding multiple stabbings, and perhaps others -- criminals are likely to be ignorant of firearms and may use very small caliber guns which are more likely to be wounding than fatal, the widespread adoption of bulletproof vests, the gross inaccuracy of most criminals leading to wounding shots.
And there's the fact that having a hunk of metal jammed into your torso or neck is pretty darn damaging, at at least as damaging as many common handgun bullets.
What bothers me about this is what China appears to be becoming -- this weird, totalitarian-corporate hybrid which Western businesses appear all too willing to support.
I can't help but think that corporations, which are almost always defined as anti-democratic entities, prefer a totalitarian government, since a totalitarian government allows for easy limitations on the things that drive corporations nutty -- labor rights, environmental regulations, consumer protections, and freedom of speech.
I'm curious why there appear to be no commercial, modular DVRs where you can add storage via USB2/Firewire.
In an ideal world, the entire system would be modular with connectivity via both Ethernet and USB2/Firewire.
I'd have:
Base module -- akin to a Tivo. Includes CPU, storage, tuner and display output. Has Firewire/USB2 ports and Ethernet
Remote module -- Base module with no storage, but ethernet ports, USB2/Firewire, tuner & display. Ideal for bedroom.
Storage modules -- HDD / DVD recording boxes cabled via FW/USB2 to a base or remote module.
Recording scheduling would be distributed dynamically among units based on existing schedules and available storage, and the units could play any program on a connected unit.
For the neophyte, they could sell a "base" module akin to a Tivo's hardware and sophisticates could add additional stuff as they see fit.
My old boss and the owner of my wife's company both had a personal rule that they would NEVER counter an offer and would always let the employee walk to the other job.
Their philosophy was that if the employee really wanted the extra money they would take the extra job -- that they're asking for a counter offer means they really want to stay and they're playing for a raise.
...you're only worth what somebody else is willing to pay you.
I've heard the same thing from my last employer and while it's hard to disagree with such hard-nosed economic logic, I think it breaks down for a lot of IT jobs because IT jobs tend to be pretty fluid -- they often flow around the rigid HR-type job descriptions. Developers admin systems, admins doing programming, DBAs doing admin tasks AND programming, guys (like the grandparent poster) doing it all. Immersively intellectually challenging work that involves taking calls once a week about spyware and why the Intraweb is down? Or repetitive tasks, but never suffering end-luzers?
The "other job" that may pay me more may or may not include more job responsibilities, but I can almost guarandamtee you that the other job will not end up being the "same" job.
And then there's the whole question of "pay". How much are some bennies worth? How much is it worth to have a job with a ton of flexibility with start-end times vs. one with real rigid work hours? And if the former is a 60 minute gauntlet of traffic and the other is a 10 minute walk?
A boss who's a dick but makes sure to hire a lot of sharp people? A boss who's a saint but tolerates nincompoops? A closed door office vs. a low-wall cube in a farm? 8 days off you can take whenever vs. 3 weeks that requires D-Day logistics to be able to take a single day?
All of these things jumble together to make the "someone who pays more" concept so untestable that it's hard to measure.
I don't mind using screwdriver boxes for non-critical production systems, but the problem I always had was the fucking nightmare trying to figure out which rackmount cases worked with which drive trays and so on and on. I kind of got burned once buying the parts for a system, finding out that there was no realistic way to cable the drive trays to the IDE RAID card.
I also think that there's enough upcharge with rack mount cases and boards that you're almost better off buying a McSystem from HPaq and dispensing with the nuisance.
And hell, didn't Bush say something about committment us to putting a person on Mars by 2020? And then what have we heard of it? Nothing? The "goal" doesn't have the drive behind it that the moon mission did almost 40 years ago. When 2020 comes and goes, nobody will even remember that we had a goal of getting to mars. In fact, I bet 75% of people right now don't know that we have a goal to reach mars by 2020 (or whenever that was).
In the late 50s and 1960s our leadership was inspired by big ideas -- beating the Russians, exploring new frontiers, accomplishing a shared goal that was meaningful. A lot of this was a leadership mentality that was shaped by our leadership's more general education and exposure to the collective drive needed to be successful in WW II.
Unfortunately we now have a leadership that's inspired by lawyers, MBAs and other technocrats who only manipulate details, they aren't inspired by anything more than personal material gain and the maintenance of power. Asking them to support a goal with more philosophical inspiration and common cause than tax reform is unlikely.
And this is to say nothing for the budget constraints imposed by fighting a couple of wars and bunch of other sinkholes for cash.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder about mental wear and tear, and not just in terms of the physical dynamics of memory, but in terms of pure psychology -- can your psyche handle 300 years? I'm not sure mine could. The resentment, the bitterness, the lack of tolerance only seems to get worse, not better.
I also know that I couldn't psychologically handle doing my existing job (networking consultant) for 300 years. The good news is that I wouldn't have to, but could switch to a new career without the problem associated with taking on an entirely new career at an "advanced" age.
But the bad news is that you'd be pushed into it since some people would keep their jobs for longer than a normal career of 40-50 years, and it would be then impossible to compete with people with 100s of years of experience.
The irony being that we might end up switching careers anyway, since few careers/industries/technologies are likely to remain viable for an individual over that kind of timeframe.
The National Guard have been the most professional, courteous and respected group in the city.
Of course they are. Compared to the fucking NOPD they are probably angels.
I'm not a scientist, and it seems weird to me that they would stop spending money on something that still works and gone someplace nothing else has. It just seems wasteful. And it's not like they can justify it by saying they'll have a replacement there tomorrow, either, since they won't.
:15 on the evening news, it's "not viable." Yay. Another triumph of modern civilization.
I also thought it was weird that they had to authorize more spending when the rovers were still working past their estimated useful life. You've got a remote control car on fucking Mars that still works and somebody wants to just switch it off? It reminds me of rich kids who throw out good toys simply because they're bored with them.
I guess the space program has become just like any other corporate entity -- if it can't show glossy, short-term results that look good in
Brasso contains ammonia, too, which is why it works so well on brass.
It's one of those items that rookie ammo reloaders want to use in their tumbler media because it does such a nice job on candelabras, but the ammonia weakens the brass so it's a no-no for cleaning brass ammunition casings.
I'm not sure what ammonia would do to/for the polycarobonite.
More bent priorities!
I'm not even sure how something like this became TWO operations/taskforces, but it's a great example of truly ridiculous government priorities. I think they better learn to watch out for people buying strange small quantities of tubing and plumbing at Home Depot, too.
The local paper had an article about the new FBI porn project and said it was THE running joke of the FBI; nobody takes it seriously and people are legitimately challenging the FBI on this one in the wake of all the other concerns. It's seen as a Gonzalez attempt at currying favor with evangelicals for a Supreme Court seat.
I was really expecting it to be something Google would add, but where's the IMAP support?
Is there some technical reason none of them support IMAP? Too intensive from a bandwidth/CPU perspective? I'm always amazed at the number of places where you'd expect modern email to find just POP.
But it IS insightful.
Whether anyone wants to admit it or not, sex IS the outcome of all successful dating situations (even for religious zealots who wait until they've confirmed their dating status with a state called "marriage").
There's a ton of simulation that could be put into encounters that involve sexuality -- aggression, passivity, willingness to be adventurous, the level of emotional commitment required/desired, and that's just scratching the surface.
The depiction doesn't even have to be super hard core.
And it would probably be a learning experience for a lot of people "WHY DO I LOSE MY SIM DATE WHEN I STICK MY FINGER IN HER ASS ON THE FIRST DATE?!?!"
FN wouldn't be in the arms business if American John Browning hadn't gotten sick of Winchester and taken his designs to Belgium and given FN something to make besides bicycles. A lot of the stuff for Sig-Sauer pistols are made here or in Canada; I'm not even sure if many of the components are imported at all.
And you've forgotten Remington, Winchester, Ruger, Colt and Smith & Wesson on your list. And then there's other important niche makers, like Kimber and Kahr. I'm not entirely sure what the relationship is between US Browning and FN, but I think most High Powers in the US are made here.
Taurus makes a ton of weapons, too, and is neither American nor European.
And most of the European gun makers wouldn't be making guns if the US wasn't buying them. The lion's share of Glocks end up in the US, I think FN still makes the US SAW, and we seem to buy an awful lot of HK MP5s.
I'm not sure who buys stuff from Steyr; do they even have a current civilian product?
I wonder if it's a cultural phenomenon of the clueless executives -- since "everyone" they know uses AOL it must be a big enough phenomenon to be worth buying, even though they really are losing business and their other web tools lag, outside of the captive IM space.
It's not callous, it's reasonable.
It's only in the last hundred years or so that "we" have decided that the use of force (deadly or otherwise) is only justifiable under the narrowest of circumstances. Prior to that it was not only acceptable but justifiable to use even deadly force in reponse to only threatened property crimes.
Instead we've allowed ourselves to become dependent on the use of force by law enforcement, who in turn have become reluctnant to use it for fear of lawsuits and politically motivated prosecutors charging THEM with crimes.
The net result is a public wholly dependent on a law enforcement system that is reluctant to protect them and yet isn't liable when it DOESN'T protect them.
Reginald Denny should have had a good handgun in his truck and the willingness to use it. The rest of the mob would have been de-motivated to continue attacking had their initial attempts resulted in dead attackers.
Including the spyware their employees might install -- or worse, have installed "for" them by weaknesses in browsers?
Kleenex isn't necessary. Usually there's about 8 times more towels than actually used by even super-hygienic non-geeks.
A bath towel is actually adequate for the entre special $24.95, 8-hour movie package.
It's the free hand lotion they tend to run out of.
I know a lot of people (including myself, until now) simply assumed the card had some magick code on it that opened the door, and once they checked out, the code stopped working, so key cards got:
1) left in the room when you walked out. There's probably a box on the cleaning carts where they get chucked. Highly insecure.
2) left in the rental car or wherever. You're done with it and presumably it has no information relevant to you.
3) idly thrown away (probably the most secure, provided its a sufficiently yucky trash can)
4) Taped to office doors or cube walls to make a "gee, I travel a lot" mosaic.
The idea that they're somehow secure because they MIGHT get stored and reused seems laughable.
If all that's required is that spyware needs to pass some confusing and oblique definition of "approval", shouldn't I be able to get a bank or other business to agree to some other murky "agreement" which would give me access to THEIR systems, and hence the ability to take from them?
The problem with all of this is the click-through agreement. By using click-through agreements, spyware and companies that distribute it, are able to cloak themselves in legalese and create a (likely) defensable position whereby the user gave them "permission."
Congress needs to *bar* the click through agreement; if software companies want to create a binding contract, they need to get me to sign paper. If they want electronic contracts, there should be a wholly seperate process from the installer *and* some statutory requirement that the language be held to a maximum length and a "reasonable person" clarity requirement, as well as key disclosures like "we can take your information and do whatever we want".
If the spyware vendors and their frontmen HAD to disclose "we're gonna monitor you, mine your private data and install more software you cannot remove" in plain language, nobody would accept it. That they can cloak it in dense legalese nobody understands with catch-all inclusionary clauses makes it meaningless.
What was the incentive to learn it ever?
I suppose on some system 10 or more years ago it was the only full-screen text editor and better than some vendor-included vi for doing application development.
I've never been a developer, beyond a few shameful but effective perl and shell scripts, and I've never managed to learn vi or emacs. I made a run at emacs because it seemed kind of like a text-mode desktop, but it was always *way* faster to download and install joe, edit what I wanted editing, and get back to whatever I was actually trying to accomplish than to stumble around in emacs.
Disclaimer: I'm not an RF engineer, and outside of maybe 1k of Perl code I'm not a programmer either (and many wags would have you believe Perl isn't programming, but I digress).
I can only assume that detection of the copy protect flag involves some software routine that has to do some kind of error checking to be sure that the flag is actually present.
Why can't that routine assume the flag *isn't* present unless there is really good detection of it? Why assume that "maybe" cases DO have the flag?
I had a friend who went to the dentist and ended up with a bunch of problems. He went to another dentist and the second said "Oh my god, WHO worked on YOU?!". He submitted a complaint to the dental board, complete with records from the second dentist. Outcome? "Not sustained."
I told him not to expect anything -- the medical community self-polices not because it does any good, but because it provides great insurance against real legal sanctions and problems. I don't know for a fact, but I would almost bet that in many states the self-policing medical boards have to sustain a complaint before any further review of the doctor's case or punishments can be meted out.
I think what he should have done is threatened a lawsuit but have been willing to accept a cash settlement of $5k along with an agreement to not discuss the outcome. It would have more than covered lost wages, additional dental procedures and pain and suffering, and he probably would have gotten it.
You're assuming, though, that the stabbing knife is sharp enough to only cut and not tear, and that the stabbing motion is a perfectly straight in-and-out motion.
.45 ACP), and something like 4 times as large as a common 9mm round of 115 grains. There are larger handgun rounds available, but they're not commonly used -- 45 Long Colt, .44 S&W Special and .44 Remington Magnum can take slugs in the 250-300 grain range).
I think a lot of knife wounds happen in the course of a larger physical altercation, which can result in a lot of twisting, tearing motions that can cause a lot of injury. I'd also wager that most are dull as dishwater and do a lot of tissue damage as they are forced in and out.
Your 18th century ball is about 430 grains, which is about twice the size as the largest common handgun round (230 grain
Where bullets tend to do a lot of damage isn't straight-line wound cavities or even through hydrostatic shock, but deflection off bones resulting in fragmentation and "pool table" wounds.
I read just the other day that American police officers are more likely to die when stabbed than when shot.
There's likely a ton of explanations. Yours, regarding multiple stabbings, and perhaps others -- criminals are likely to be ignorant of firearms and may use very small caliber guns which are more likely to be wounding than fatal, the widespread adoption of bulletproof vests, the gross inaccuracy of most criminals leading to wounding shots.
And there's the fact that having a hunk of metal jammed into your torso or neck is pretty darn damaging, at at least as damaging as many common handgun bullets.
What bothers me about this is what China appears to be becoming -- this weird, totalitarian-corporate hybrid which Western businesses appear all too willing to support.
I can't help but think that corporations, which are almost always defined as anti-democratic entities, prefer a totalitarian government, since a totalitarian government allows for easy limitations on the things that drive corporations nutty -- labor rights, environmental regulations, consumer protections, and freedom of speech.
I'm curious why there appear to be no commercial, modular DVRs where you can add storage via USB2/Firewire.
In an ideal world, the entire system would be modular with connectivity via both Ethernet and USB2/Firewire.
I'd have:
Base module -- akin to a Tivo. Includes CPU, storage, tuner and display output. Has Firewire/USB2 ports and Ethernet
Remote module -- Base module with no storage, but ethernet ports, USB2/Firewire, tuner & display. Ideal for bedroom.
Storage modules -- HDD / DVD recording boxes cabled via FW/USB2 to a base or remote module.
Recording scheduling would be distributed dynamically among units based on existing schedules and available storage, and the units could play any program on a connected unit.
For the neophyte, they could sell a "base" module akin to a Tivo's hardware and sophisticates could add additional stuff as they see fit.
My old boss and the owner of my wife's company both had a personal rule that they would NEVER counter an offer and would always let the employee walk to the other job.
Their philosophy was that if the employee really wanted the extra money they would take the extra job -- that they're asking for a counter offer means they really want to stay and they're playing for a raise.
...you're only worth what somebody else is willing to pay you.
I've heard the same thing from my last employer and while it's hard to disagree with such hard-nosed economic logic, I think it breaks down for a lot of IT jobs because IT jobs tend to be pretty fluid -- they often flow around the rigid HR-type job descriptions. Developers admin systems, admins doing programming, DBAs doing admin tasks AND programming, guys (like the grandparent poster) doing it all. Immersively intellectually challenging work that involves taking calls once a week about spyware and why the Intraweb is down? Or repetitive tasks, but never suffering end-luzers?
The "other job" that may pay me more may or may not include more job responsibilities, but I can almost guarandamtee you that the other job will not end up being the "same" job.
And then there's the whole question of "pay". How much are some bennies worth? How much is it worth to have a job with a ton of flexibility with start-end times vs. one with real rigid work hours? And if the former is a 60 minute gauntlet of traffic and the other is a 10 minute walk?
A boss who's a dick but makes sure to hire a lot of sharp people? A boss who's a saint but tolerates nincompoops? A closed door office vs. a low-wall cube in a farm? 8 days off you can take whenever vs. 3 weeks that requires D-Day logistics to be able to take a single day?
All of these things jumble together to make the "someone who pays more" concept so untestable that it's hard to measure.
I don't mind using screwdriver boxes for non-critical production systems, but the problem I always had was the fucking nightmare trying to figure out which rackmount cases worked with which drive trays and so on and on. I kind of got burned once buying the parts for a system, finding out that there was no realistic way to cable the drive trays to the IDE RAID card.
I also think that there's enough upcharge with rack mount cases and boards that you're almost better off buying a McSystem from HPaq and dispensing with the nuisance.
And hell, didn't Bush say something about committment us to putting a person on Mars by 2020? And then what have we heard of it? Nothing? The "goal" doesn't have the drive behind it that the moon mission did almost 40 years ago. When 2020 comes and goes, nobody will even remember that we had a goal of getting to mars. In fact, I bet 75% of people right now don't know that we have a goal to reach mars by 2020 (or whenever that was).
In the late 50s and 1960s our leadership was inspired by big ideas -- beating the Russians, exploring new frontiers, accomplishing a shared goal that was meaningful. A lot of this was a leadership mentality that was shaped by our leadership's more general education and exposure to the collective drive needed to be successful in WW II.
Unfortunately we now have a leadership that's inspired by lawyers, MBAs and other technocrats who only manipulate details, they aren't inspired by anything more than personal material gain and the maintenance of power. Asking them to support a goal with more philosophical inspiration and common cause than tax reform is unlikely.
And this is to say nothing for the budget constraints imposed by fighting a couple of wars and bunch of other sinkholes for cash.