Living by the sea has never been a particularly smart idea. You need look no further than the tsunami of a couple of years ago and New Orleans to see that. If they really think global warming is real and is going to cause sea level to rise and flood their city, maybe they should be proactive and sell their property to someone who doesn't believe it. But if they really think that sea level is going to flood their homes and they're just sitting there waiting for it to happen, they get no sympathy from me.
In any case, it is absolute arrogance to think that we can cause or prevent anything on this scale from happening. We're ants arguing about what we can do to stop a boulder from rolling down a hill with very little real idea whether or not that boulder rolling down a hill is a good or bad thing--but the point is irrelevant since the ants can't do nothing to push it or stop it. If the boulder is going to roll, it's going to roll whether the ants want it to or not. If the boulder isn't going to roll, the ants aren't going to be able to make it start.
And, no folks, I'm not ignorant on the topic. I've read a heck of a lot of material on the subject. I'm just more skeptical about some of the motives and a bit more critical about some of the conclusions that are drawn. No, I have no investments in anything remotely related to energy, oil or global warming, I don't know any politicians, I don't know anyone that knows a politician, and I have never made a political contribution in my life.
Which, I'm sure, opens me up to the jokes such as, "Well I guess that just leaves ignorance and stupidity as the only possible causes for your position on the subject." Whatever, guys. You look like chickens with your heads cut off.
Soooo...... are you gonna explain why localized cooling has nothing to do with global warming, or are you just going to make funny posts about how things are always simple and straightforward? Didn't think so.
No, in fact, I'm not. I'm just pointing out that they've entirely covered their bases. Based on the arguments they've made over the last 5 years, they will never be wrong. Heck, perhaps they're right (though I have my reservations). But if they're wrong, they'll be claiming "global warming" until the ice sheets start advancing south over Canada... and even then I can imagine them claiming, "Yes, but that's just a regional cooling that's a part of the greater global warming."
So lets do nothing, right? Just lay down now and die?
Only nut jobs think we're really driving ourselves to extinction. Like I said, nutty viewpoints like that cheapen the debate and really discredit your whole side of the argument. The world, and its species, have been more than able to adapt and survive climate changes in the past. We're a little bit above average, I'm sure we'll cope.
You appear to be insinuating that people who recognize the preponderance of evidence suggesting anthropogenic climate change is occurring argue that any instance of unusual weather is proof of global warming. Of course I shouldn't have to say that this is either intentionally misleading or simply really, really dumb.
I agree it's really dumb, but over the last 5 years I swear I've seen each of the arguments I listed in my previous message used as "proof" (or a reason to be concerned about) global warming. I'm not making this stuff up. And, yes, it is funny. It's also amusing watching you try to defend it.:)
I'm guessing you're also looking forward to the collapse of the food chain that a bit of warming could bring?
This is the kind of psychobabble that cheapens any "global warming" debate. The real paranoid nuts promoting absolutely radical, extreme (and improbable) scenarios come out. Like I said, it's fun to watch.
The temperature of the earth will fluctuate, up and down, over time. There is nothing we can do to stop that. Considering we're still pulling out of the little ice age that battered at least the northern hemisphere for the previous 400 years, it's not surprising that earth is warmer now. And that's a good thing. The little ice age was not a good thing for humans and, yes, I'd rather we be like we are now--or a little warmer--than a little colder.
Yes, but global warming can cause regional cooling. So even if it's cooler, it's warmer. Even if things are colder for you, that's just a byproduct of global warming at the regional level.
The global warming nuts have set up the argument real cute-like. They can't be wrong. Higher temperatures anywhere are proof of global warming. Lower temperatures anywhere are proof of global warming. Floods are proof of global warming, but so are droughts. More intense and milder seasons are both proof of global warming. Anything extreme is proof of global warming, but anything not extreme is not proof of the opposite. They're a bunch of nuts, really. It's funny to watch.
Personally, I'll take a warmer planet to a cooler one.
To: Mr. George W. Bush.
Please accept that Global Warming Exists.
Signed,
The rest of the whole damn world.
To: TwoTailedFox
Please realize that the earth is obviously going to be warmer now than it was in the previous 400 years since the previous 400 years was pretty much "The Little Ice Age." Also note that the article says it was relatively warm around the year 1000 and I promise that, despite the claims of the liberals, I had absolutely nothing to do with that!
The significance for the monks was that the Bible was telling them that the earth and heavens were unchanged since Creation and would remain unchanged forever after. Here was evidence that what their faith was telling them wasn't true. Sagan said the event caused quite a bit of problems for the monastery as the monks tried to reconcile their faith and reality.
I've been surprised before, but on the face that sounds like hogwash. That a flash of light on the moon (when they didn't know what the moon was nor what the flash of light represented) that was visible for awhile and then disappeared would cause them to question their faith seems silly.
As someone else pointed out, it's a question of how much you can buy, not how much you make in absolute terms. I'd rather earn $70,000/year in San Antonio than $100,000/year in San Francisco. Given those two options, you'd live far more comfortably in San Antonio (except for the heat, of course).
And earning 10x minimum wage in India may or may not be something to write home about if minimum wage is still abject poverty. Peanuts is still peanuts even if you're making 10x as many peanuts as the worst off in a poor country. I recently lived in Mexico where the minimum wage is about US$3.70/day. I honestly don't know how people that make that much live, even in Mexico. If I had been making 10 times that (US$37.00/day), it still would have sucked and been nearly impossible to live even remotely comfortably in Mexico, much less with a family.
Which just goes to show that "multiples of minimum wage" is not a valid way to compare salaries from country to country.
While I agree that anecdotal evidence is really no evidence at all, keep in mind that most companies don't require signification citations before making the decision to outsource. They look at the bottom line, see smaller numbers, and have their own anecdotal evidence (i.e. rumors, etc.) and go ahead and try to outsource. So anecdotal evidence really is enough in a discussion like that.
I don't know if American IT workers are really any better than Indian IT workers. I just know that every instance I've had first or second-hand knowledge of regarding American (and Mexican!) IT companies outsourcing to India has failed. It's come in over budget, lacking quality, and put everyone in a bad mood. In most of the cases, the outsourcing was abandoned; in on case, the company felt they had already sunk so much money in the investment that they had no choice to try to keep going and hope for the best--don't know how that one ultimately played out.
Anywy, like I said, I don't know if this means that American and Mexican IT workers are better than Indian IT workers; perhaps its an issue of communication, time zones, and culture. I just know that every case I have had first/second-hand knowledge of outsourcing to India, it's been a disaster.
I've been predicting for years that the outsourcing movement was nothing for American IT workers to be afraid of. I've been saying that companies were going to try it, get burned and/or see it just wasn't practical, and pull back. That's exactly what's happening. You can outsource manufacturing and low-skill/low-interaction jobs. But any job that requires communication and significant interaction with the customer (yes, including call centers) is not something that's going to work in an outsourced environment over the long-term. And we're starting to see the pullback I was predicting long ago.
This is Slashdot. If business profits, it's evil. Period. Never mind that most Slashdotters make a living because the business they work for makes a profit. Isn't hypocrisy a wonderful thing?:)
I get unlimited GPRS service on my Treo with Cingular for $40/month. So it's not too expensive. The problem is that it's too slow. Unless I'm more than about 10 minutes away from a computer (which only really happens when I'm on a road-trip or camping), I just wait to get back to my computer rather than dealing with the slow speed of Cingular's GPRS service. At some point I'll definitely ditch the $40/month plan and look into their pay-as-you-go GPRS plans, because I just don't use it enough to justify the $40/month charge. I planned to, but the speed (or lack thereof) made sure that I wouldn't.
No, it's not unreasonable. But this isn't a Buy American policy, it's a Don't Buy Chinese policy.
True, but it's a good first step. I also wouldn't buy anything for sensitive use from the Iranians or North Koreans right now, either. China is no different. China is not our friend and we are not their friends. Both sides put up with each other because we need each other. Given the opportunity, either side would pound the other with a rock--be that rock militarily or econimically.
And there's no way China could place any sort of backdoors on computers in a government network without getting caught eventually. If that happened China's entire electronics sector would take it up the ass as nobody would trust their products anymore. Would that be worth the perceived and real value placed on any data they might get? Probably not. China isn't stupid.
The world is addicted to cheap Chinese electronics. Dell, HP, etc. aren't going to stop using Chinese ICs and have the prices of their computers double. And most DFUs would rather have a cheap computer and think, "Well, sure, the Chinese want to spy on the U.S. Government, but they're not going to be interested in little 'ol me. Now give me that $400 computer please."
So, yes, I think they very well may make that gamble.
That said, I don't put much faith in this particular accusation. As far as I know, classified computers are not even connected to a public network--not even behind a firewall--so there'd be no way for the computers to "phone home." Still, it is not at all unreasonable for a government agency that handles sensitive, classified data to not trust that data to a computer by a company that is over 1/4th owned by an enemy. And, again, China IS our enemy. We might not be shooting at each other, but we are economic, political, and military enemies. China is the greatest threat to the U.S. right now. They're not building up their military by leaps and bounds just to parade it down the street on May Day, and they don't need that much firepower to take Taiwan. So keep a suspicious eye on them.
Unless I'm clueless, backdoors are software not hardware, and Levino makes hardware
Backdoors can be anywhere and they could just as easily be placed in hardware. In fact, they'd be much harder to detect in hardware since "opening up" a chip is a heck of a lot harder than disassembling executable code that is fully visible. Chips have a bunch of input pins and output pins--what goes on inside may as well be "maigc" unless you have a lot of time and money available to try to reverse engineer the IC.
Also, isn't almost all computers and electronics made in China today? What is unique about Levino besides they are an offshoot of an American designed piece of hardware (that odds are was fabed in China for years)?
This is just speculation, but it's not unreasonable to imagine that a given backdoor could only work in a given configuration involving multiple ICs with backdoors--in fact, unless the backdoor is in the processor itself, any given backdoor in an IC would probably have to operate in conjunction with backdoors on other ICs on the motherboard. For a backdoor to be useful, it's either going to send a memory dump back "home" (which is doubtful because it'd be big enough that it'd be easily detected) or it's going to have to be able to "spy" on the CPU. If the backdoor isn't in the CPU, it's going to take multiple ICs with backdoors to build a picture of what the CPU is doing based on its interaction with other ICs on the motherboard. So while many ICs may come from China, any potential backdoored ICs are probably only going to be able to do their job when used in conjunction with other ICs with similar backdoors and used on a motherboard that connects those ICs in a way that is conducive to the functioning of the backdoor.
Is this far-fetched? Maybe a little, but not much. Do NOT underestimate the value (perceived and real) that countries place on knowing thing about their military and economic competitors. If a company China had a stake in was known to have a contract for 16,000 computers at the U.S. State Department, it would be naive to believe that China wouldn't try to make the most of that as possible from an intelligence standpoint.
And, as I've already said, it's not unreasonable to think that the U.S. Federal Government should have a "Buy American" policy on products and services.
I'd personally like to see the Federal Government utilizing American products and American services. The Federal Government, at the very least, should be required to "Buy American." This is a good idea not just from a security standpoint, but from a political and economic one. One can make the argument that a private party should be able to buy their products and services from anywhere in the world, but it's insane that a government of the people of the United States would not purchase what they need from their own people.
If by "leaks" we mean things that are not politically expedient for the Administration that the public knows, this is a bad thing. If by "leaks" we mean legitimate security breaches of classified information, then by all means the phone records of journalist should be scrutinized. *
* Note: I do not like the idea of the phone call database. But if we go from the premise that the damn thing already exists, for better or for worse, I definitely think that plugging holes in national security is *not* a "bad thing." Again, assuming that by "leaks" we mean "issues of national security."
We are not talking about just defending what "it's yours" in here, we are talking about (just to set an example) invade other countries to get it's oil (cof-cof-irak-cof) and make up some cowboy story about chemical or nuke bombs.
Without touching on your other points, I'd invite you to investigate just how much oil we're "getting" from Iraq. If you still think that was the motivation behind the war, you've been influenced too much by media and popular culture.
I was wondering how that "out of sequence episodes" thing would work. Apparenty it doesn't. Good to know.
We're currenly subscribed to Blockbuster, but I'm not sure for how long. We're not really using the mail-in system very much. The only reason we haven't already cancelled it is because they give you a coupon for a free rental from a brick and mortar store once per week. As long as we use each coupon, the subscription makes sense even if we don't send/receive anything via the mail.
I've noticed the Netflix catalog seems more complete than Blockbuster on obscure titles, and it seems an unfortunate number of items in our Blockbuster queue are listed as "Long Delay." This isn't helping keep us with them. If/when my wife and I ever get efficient enough to know what we want to see a day or two before we want to see it, we may very well cancel Blockbuster and go to Netflix.
It would seem that you don't live in the Western U.S.
My problem isn't that there not be any signs of humanity for 10 hours, but I'd like to be able to see nature sometime during that 10-hour drive. Thank God there still are uptrillion square miles of non-developed land that retain its natural beauty. Hopefully the relatively harsh weather there that will be a natural deterent to over-expansion of mankind in those areas. I fear that a lot of mindless idiots are going to want to erect solar panel farms all over the place, though, and that'd be equally annoying.
It's amazing, though, that the same environmentalists that are supposedly against urban sprawl see nothing wrong with completely destroying a natural hillside with hundreds of huge windmills. Can you say "contradiction?" Basically they take the illogical position that there shouldn't be any more development where there already is development, but apparently they see nothing wrong with developing in areas that are currently "pristine." That's enviromentalist logic for you.
Nuclear power is clean, safe, and doesn't require the destruction of large areas of nature as is the case with both wind and solar power.
Cylons were formed by a race of superior beings that let their technoloy get ahead of them 1000 yaherns ago.
Of course that was in the real Battlestar Galactica. How those machines became a race of hot chicks is an entirely different matter that I'm really not too interested in seeing.
Challenge/response systems generate as much spam as they block.
If you are on a C/R system and you receive a spam, a challenge message is sent to the supposed sender. Spammers don't use their own email addresses but forge someone else. So for every spam your C/R system receives, it sends out a challenge email to some poor slob who just so happens to own the email address that is being abused today.
So now instead of you receiving a single spam you didn't want, your system received that spam and generater yet another email that someone didn't want. You've effectively doubled the amount of spam!
So, C/R is a piss-poor approach to spam control. On the infrequent occasion I send someone an email and get a C/R message back, I say "Screw it." I'm not going to solve their spam problem for them by jumping through additional hoops. They should just install a decent Bayesian filter and they can solve their spam problem without forcing *me* to go through hoops for them.
As someone else said, it doesn't much matter if it lasts 10 times longer or not. At some point, if you don't charge it, you're going to run out of power.
I just charge my Treo each night when I go to bed. I use it as my alarm clock so when I set my alarm, I make sure it's plugged in and charging. I've never gotten below about 70% even on heavy-talk days. If it could use 10% as much energy, I guess that would mean that at the end of the day I'd be at 97% instead of 70%. But it doesn't really matter either way as long as I charge at the end of the day.
Re:Then drive to your local state park which is te
on
Tilting At Windmills
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· Score: 1
It's hard to figure out what you're saying.
The fact is that there are many cities in which you can live in the city and still have a nice view and lots of green areas. Sure, L.A. is probably too far gone. Fine, put a windmill on the top of every building if you want because things are already too fr gone. But I see no reason to contaminate miles and miles of otherwise open countryside along a highway or just outside a city with windmills. Saying that we should have to drive to a national park to escape the ugly windmills is nonsense. Just don't put the windmills there to start with!
Bingo. Thus negating the benefits of building them away from people. So since people are going to be next to them no matter what we do, let's build them safe and close to where they're actually needed.
I personally would have no problem at all with a nuclear power plant in my city. But, thanks to environmentalists and fear-mongering, a lot of the public is scared to death of the idea. This is why I proposed putting them in the middle of the desert.
You obviously have never been in a military town in the desert. Yes, there'd be some people there. But you'd probably be looking at a town of around 25,000 people who move to there knowing full well that there's a nuclear plant there; that's quite different than convincing millions of people in dozens of cities around the world to accept a nuclear plant in their metropolitan area.
A huge nuclear complex in the desert is also easier to defend and secure and, in the worst case scenario that there is some kind of accident, having it happen near a town of 25,000 is better than in a city of 10 or 15 million.
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In any case, it is absolute arrogance to think that we can cause or prevent anything on this scale from happening. We're ants arguing about what we can do to stop a boulder from rolling down a hill with very little real idea whether or not that boulder rolling down a hill is a good or bad thing--but the point is irrelevant since the ants can't do nothing to push it or stop it. If the boulder is going to roll, it's going to roll whether the ants want it to or not. If the boulder isn't going to roll, the ants aren't going to be able to make it start.
And, no folks, I'm not ignorant on the topic. I've read a heck of a lot of material on the subject. I'm just more skeptical about some of the motives and a bit more critical about some of the conclusions that are drawn. No, I have no investments in anything remotely related to energy, oil or global warming, I don't know any politicians, I don't know anyone that knows a politician, and I have never made a political contribution in my life.
Which, I'm sure, opens me up to the jokes such as, "Well I guess that just leaves ignorance and stupidity as the only possible causes for your position on the subject." Whatever, guys. You look like chickens with your heads cut off.
No, in fact, I'm not. I'm just pointing out that they've entirely covered their bases. Based on the arguments they've made over the last 5 years, they will never be wrong. Heck, perhaps they're right (though I have my reservations). But if they're wrong, they'll be claiming "global warming" until the ice sheets start advancing south over Canada... and even then I can imagine them claiming, "Yes, but that's just a regional cooling that's a part of the greater global warming."
Only nut jobs think we're really driving ourselves to extinction. Like I said, nutty viewpoints like that cheapen the debate and really discredit your whole side of the argument. The world, and its species, have been more than able to adapt and survive climate changes in the past. We're a little bit above average, I'm sure we'll cope.
I agree it's really dumb, but over the last 5 years I swear I've seen each of the arguments I listed in my previous message used as "proof" (or a reason to be concerned about) global warming. I'm not making this stuff up. And, yes, it is funny. It's also amusing watching you try to defend it.
This is the kind of psychobabble that cheapens any "global warming" debate. The real paranoid nuts promoting absolutely radical, extreme (and improbable) scenarios come out. Like I said, it's fun to watch.
The temperature of the earth will fluctuate, up and down, over time. There is nothing we can do to stop that. Considering we're still pulling out of the little ice age that battered at least the northern hemisphere for the previous 400 years, it's not surprising that earth is warmer now. And that's a good thing. The little ice age was not a good thing for humans and, yes, I'd rather we be like we are now--or a little warmer--than a little colder.
The global warming nuts have set up the argument real cute-like. They can't be wrong. Higher temperatures anywhere are proof of global warming. Lower temperatures anywhere are proof of global warming. Floods are proof of global warming, but so are droughts. More intense and milder seasons are both proof of global warming. Anything extreme is proof of global warming, but anything not extreme is not proof of the opposite. They're a bunch of nuts, really. It's funny to watch.
Personally, I'll take a warmer planet to a cooler one.
Please accept that Global Warming Exists.
Signed,
The rest of the whole damn world.
To: TwoTailedFox
Please realize that the earth is obviously going to be warmer now than it was in the previous 400 years since the previous 400 years was pretty much "The Little Ice Age." Also note that the article says it was relatively warm around the year 1000 and I promise that, despite the claims of the liberals, I had absolutely nothing to do with that!
Signed,
President George W. Bush.
I've been surprised before, but on the face that sounds like hogwash. That a flash of light on the moon (when they didn't know what the moon was nor what the flash of light represented) that was visible for awhile and then disappeared would cause them to question their faith seems silly.
And earning 10x minimum wage in India may or may not be something to write home about if minimum wage is still abject poverty. Peanuts is still peanuts even if you're making 10x as many peanuts as the worst off in a poor country. I recently lived in Mexico where the minimum wage is about US$3.70/day. I honestly don't know how people that make that much live, even in Mexico. If I had been making 10 times that (US$37.00/day), it still would have sucked and been nearly impossible to live even remotely comfortably in Mexico, much less with a family.
Which just goes to show that "multiples of minimum wage" is not a valid way to compare salaries from country to country.
I don't know if American IT workers are really any better than Indian IT workers. I just know that every instance I've had first or second-hand knowledge of regarding American (and Mexican!) IT companies outsourcing to India has failed. It's come in over budget, lacking quality, and put everyone in a bad mood. In most of the cases, the outsourcing was abandoned; in on case, the company felt they had already sunk so much money in the investment that they had no choice to try to keep going and hope for the best--don't know how that one ultimately played out.
Anywy, like I said, I don't know if this means that American and Mexican IT workers are better than Indian IT workers; perhaps its an issue of communication, time zones, and culture. I just know that every case I have had first/second-hand knowledge of outsourcing to India, it's been a disaster.
I've been predicting for years that the outsourcing movement was nothing for American IT workers to be afraid of. I've been saying that companies were going to try it, get burned and/or see it just wasn't practical, and pull back. That's exactly what's happening. You can outsource manufacturing and low-skill/low-interaction jobs. But any job that requires communication and significant interaction with the customer (yes, including call centers) is not something that's going to work in an outsourced environment over the long-term. And we're starting to see the pullback I was predicting long ago.
True, but it's a good first step. I also wouldn't buy anything for sensitive use from the Iranians or North Koreans right now, either. China is no different. China is not our friend and we are not their friends. Both sides put up with each other because we need each other. Given the opportunity, either side would pound the other with a rock--be that rock militarily or econimically.
And there's no way China could place any sort of backdoors on computers in a government network without getting caught eventually. If that happened China's entire electronics sector would take it up the ass as nobody would trust their products anymore. Would that be worth the perceived and real value placed on any data they might get? Probably not. China isn't stupid.
The world is addicted to cheap Chinese electronics. Dell, HP, etc. aren't going to stop using Chinese ICs and have the prices of their computers double. And most DFUs would rather have a cheap computer and think, "Well, sure, the Chinese want to spy on the U.S. Government, but they're not going to be interested in little 'ol me. Now give me that $400 computer please."
So, yes, I think they very well may make that gamble.
That said, I don't put much faith in this particular accusation. As far as I know, classified computers are not even connected to a public network--not even behind a firewall--so there'd be no way for the computers to "phone home." Still, it is not at all unreasonable for a government agency that handles sensitive, classified data to not trust that data to a computer by a company that is over 1/4th owned by an enemy. And, again, China IS our enemy. We might not be shooting at each other, but we are economic, political, and military enemies. China is the greatest threat to the U.S. right now. They're not building up their military by leaps and bounds just to parade it down the street on May Day, and they don't need that much firepower to take Taiwan. So keep a suspicious eye on them.
Backdoors can be anywhere and they could just as easily be placed in hardware. In fact, they'd be much harder to detect in hardware since "opening up" a chip is a heck of a lot harder than disassembling executable code that is fully visible. Chips have a bunch of input pins and output pins--what goes on inside may as well be "maigc" unless you have a lot of time and money available to try to reverse engineer the IC.
Also, isn't almost all computers and electronics made in China today? What is unique about Levino besides they are an offshoot of an American designed piece of hardware (that odds are was fabed in China for years)?
This is just speculation, but it's not unreasonable to imagine that a given backdoor could only work in a given configuration involving multiple ICs with backdoors--in fact, unless the backdoor is in the processor itself, any given backdoor in an IC would probably have to operate in conjunction with backdoors on other ICs on the motherboard. For a backdoor to be useful, it's either going to send a memory dump back "home" (which is doubtful because it'd be big enough that it'd be easily detected) or it's going to have to be able to "spy" on the CPU. If the backdoor isn't in the CPU, it's going to take multiple ICs with backdoors to build a picture of what the CPU is doing based on its interaction with other ICs on the motherboard. So while many ICs may come from China, any potential backdoored ICs are probably only going to be able to do their job when used in conjunction with other ICs with similar backdoors and used on a motherboard that connects those ICs in a way that is conducive to the functioning of the backdoor.
Is this far-fetched? Maybe a little, but not much. Do NOT underestimate the value (perceived and real) that countries place on knowing thing about their military and economic competitors. If a company China had a stake in was known to have a contract for 16,000 computers at the U.S. State Department, it would be naive to believe that China wouldn't try to make the most of that as possible from an intelligence standpoint.
And, as I've already said, it's not unreasonable to think that the U.S. Federal Government should have a "Buy American" policy on products and services.
I'd personally like to see the Federal Government utilizing American products and American services. The Federal Government, at the very least, should be required to "Buy American." This is a good idea not just from a security standpoint, but from a political and economic one. One can make the argument that a private party should be able to buy their products and services from anywhere in the world, but it's insane that a government of the people of the United States would not purchase what they need from their own people.
* Note: I do not like the idea of the phone call database. But if we go from the premise that the damn thing already exists, for better or for worse, I definitely think that plugging holes in national security is *not* a "bad thing." Again, assuming that by "leaks" we mean "issues of national security."
Without touching on your other points, I'd invite you to investigate just how much oil we're "getting" from Iraq. If you still think that was the motivation behind the war, you've been influenced too much by media and popular culture.
We're currenly subscribed to Blockbuster, but I'm not sure for how long. We're not really using the mail-in system very much. The only reason we haven't already cancelled it is because they give you a coupon for a free rental from a brick and mortar store once per week. As long as we use each coupon, the subscription makes sense even if we don't send/receive anything via the mail.
I've noticed the Netflix catalog seems more complete than Blockbuster on obscure titles, and it seems an unfortunate number of items in our Blockbuster queue are listed as "Long Delay." This isn't helping keep us with them. If/when my wife and I ever get efficient enough to know what we want to see a day or two before we want to see it, we may very well cancel Blockbuster and go to Netflix.
My problem isn't that there not be any signs of humanity for 10 hours, but I'd like to be able to see nature sometime during that 10-hour drive. Thank God there still are uptrillion square miles of non-developed land that retain its natural beauty. Hopefully the relatively harsh weather there that will be a natural deterent to over-expansion of mankind in those areas. I fear that a lot of mindless idiots are going to want to erect solar panel farms all over the place, though, and that'd be equally annoying.
It's amazing, though, that the same environmentalists that are supposedly against urban sprawl see nothing wrong with completely destroying a natural hillside with hundreds of huge windmills. Can you say "contradiction?" Basically they take the illogical position that there shouldn't be any more development where there already is development, but apparently they see nothing wrong with developing in areas that are currently "pristine." That's enviromentalist logic for you.
Nuclear power is clean, safe, and doesn't require the destruction of large areas of nature as is the case with both wind and solar power.
Of course that was in the real Battlestar Galactica. How those machines became a race of hot chicks is an entirely different matter that I'm really not too interested in seeing.
If you are on a C/R system and you receive a spam, a challenge message is sent to the supposed sender. Spammers don't use their own email addresses but forge someone else. So for every spam your C/R system receives, it sends out a challenge email to some poor slob who just so happens to own the email address that is being abused today.
So now instead of you receiving a single spam you didn't want, your system received that spam and generater yet another email that someone didn't want. You've effectively doubled the amount of spam!
So, C/R is a piss-poor approach to spam control. On the infrequent occasion I send someone an email and get a C/R message back, I say "Screw it." I'm not going to solve their spam problem for them by jumping through additional hoops. They should just install a decent Bayesian filter and they can solve their spam problem without forcing *me* to go through hoops for them.
I just charge my Treo each night when I go to bed. I use it as my alarm clock so when I set my alarm, I make sure it's plugged in and charging. I've never gotten below about 70% even on heavy-talk days. If it could use 10% as much energy, I guess that would mean that at the end of the day I'd be at 97% instead of 70%. But it doesn't really matter either way as long as I charge at the end of the day.
The fact is that there are many cities in which you can live in the city and still have a nice view and lots of green areas. Sure, L.A. is probably too far gone. Fine, put a windmill on the top of every building if you want because things are already too fr gone. But I see no reason to contaminate miles and miles of otherwise open countryside along a highway or just outside a city with windmills. Saying that we should have to drive to a national park to escape the ugly windmills is nonsense. Just don't put the windmills there to start with!
I personally would have no problem at all with a nuclear power plant in my city. But, thanks to environmentalists and fear-mongering, a lot of the public is scared to death of the idea. This is why I proposed putting them in the middle of the desert.
You obviously have never been in a military town in the desert. Yes, there'd be some people there. But you'd probably be looking at a town of around 25,000 people who move to there knowing full well that there's a nuclear plant there; that's quite different than convincing millions of people in dozens of cities around the world to accept a nuclear plant in their metropolitan area.
A huge nuclear complex in the desert is also easier to defend and secure and, in the worst case scenario that there is some kind of accident, having it happen near a town of 25,000 is better than in a city of 10 or 15 million.