Post the story where some guy takes the existing XBox chasis, makes a mold of it, and casts his own in aluminum or clear plastic with lights inside of it and it might be worth the slashdotting that this guy's going to get.
Casting? Fsck that. Post the story where some guy takes the existing Xbox chassis and has a replacement made out of milled titanium, or maybe milled lucite. But casting? That is so 1999.
Fuck that noise. There are Navy CPOs who do the same thing, who don't get overtime, who are accountable, who have to do this in areas where people are shooting at them (or driving up to the ship with a Zodiac loaded with Semtex) and who get paid about 25k a year. Longshoremen are overpaid cargo monkeys. End of fucking story.
I've used the XPlay software with my PC laptop and a PCMCIA Firewire card to have filesystem access to my iPod. Works pretty well once you get it set up. The XPlay setup on my laptop was a bit involved, but I think that some of that might have been due to the PCMCIA Firewire card, get a laptop with built-in Firewire and you may not have this problem.
In the US, without revenues to continually prop up industries like agriculture and high-techology (i.e. military), the entire economy would disintegrate. Those revenues are derived from tax dollars. The money must come from somewhere. The realpolitik of the situation is that the richer are taxed "proportionately" because they have the cash.
You know, realpolitik aside, the fact is that progressive taxes are fair on compassionate grounds as well. It's a very significant indicator that vastly wealthy people (and yes, I do consider $200,000/year vast wealth) are living at a standard of living that is several orders of magnitude greater than everyone else and have a greater deal more disposable income than everyone else. Not only do they have the money to contribute, but in doing so, they are responsible for the coninuation of the system.
Well if continuation of the system means the continuation of agricultural and military subsidies then I'm against it. Our agricultural subsidies subsidize corporate farming, encourage illegal immigration, encourage environmental degradation and fuck over the third world who can produce many agricultural commodities far more cheaply than subsidized American and European farmers can but can't sell them on the world market because the Americans and Europeans are dumping their products. This is why the recent trade talks in Cancun collapsed, the third world is tired of hearing about how they have to open their markets to free trade while the developed world pumps billions of dollars into the pockets of huge agribusinesses.
The amount spent on cotton subsidies in the United States alone, almost 3 billion dollars, is greater than the GDP of several African nations. Wow, what a great use for our money, we pay American farmers to engage in environmentally destructive practices (such as cotton farming in west Texas) and we help keep the third world impoverished at the same time. Way to go! What a great justification for progressive taxation.
And then there's your argument about subsidizing high tech industry and the military. Gee, does this mean that if the government had less money that they wouldn't be able to invade countries like Iraq? Boy, there's another great justification for progressive taxes, they keep the military industrial complex humming! Way to go!
There is no moral justification for progressive taxation, you fail to offer one, offering instead a realpolitik explanation of "we have progressive taxes because that's where the money is". This is about as moral a statement as Willie Sutton's answer of why he robbed banks "Because that's where the money is" he said.
People who are in favor of progressive taxation are parasites who want the government to pay for a bunch of stuff but don't want to have to foot the bill themselves. I would like to test some of these people to destruction, give them the progressive tax system that they want, the one that pays for all of the wonderful programs that they want (such as agricultural subsidies, the military industrial complex, PATRIOT act enforcement, the War on Drugs) and then set the rates so that 95 percent of their income is in the highest bracket. Let's see how long they last when they're in the highest bracket and how long it is before they start screeching for some tax relief.
God I would love to see someone hack that sign. Imagine people driving down the road and all of a sudden the goatse.cx guy is displayed in full living color on a billboard. I'd love to watch that, but I'd hate to be on the road when it happened.
Why is it that whenever a story is posted about outsourcing that some unoriginal fucktard such as Phoenix666 has to post something along the lines of "why didn't the programmers do anything when manufacturing jobs were being moved offshore". Well fucktard, prove that they didn't. I know a lot of people in IT who were very concerned about American jobs being sent offshore, not just in IT but in manufacturing as well. We ought to take all of the morons who post drivel such as this and gas them with Zyklon B, they're genetically unfit and society would be better if they were dead.
Fuck the homeless, and the poor! We've spent trillions since the great society started in the 1960s, and what do we have to show for it. More useless fucking poor people breeding more useless, stupid children. Let's just sterilize all of the poor people, then the problem of the poor will be solved in a generation as they die out, then we can lower taxes and have a bitchen space program. Oh, and if you think that spending more money on education is going to improve it then I invite you to look at the following website. Scroll down the page until you find the graph under the heading "WHY NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND IS IMPORTANT TO AMERICA". If you look at the graph, assuming that you know how to read one, you will notice that the reading scores for nine year olds have remained constant, despite massive increases in appropriations. Indeed if you read further you will see that the Department of Education claims to have spent 242 billion since 1965, yet reading scores have remained constant since 1975. Hardly a ringing endorsement of success.
That's the subject of Manifold Space by Stephen Baxter. Baxter's answer to the Fermi paradox (if intelligent life exists in the galaxy why haven't we been contacted?) is that every once in a while one of these gamma ray bursters goes off and reformats a big chunk of the galaxy, wiping out all intelligent (and not so intelligent) life within its kill radius. Kind of sobering to think that one of these things could have exploded a few thousand years back and the wavefront could be heading towards us right now.
To sum it up, Bush is not the definition of Conservatism, and don't take him as such. If you are looking for the best definition of Conservatism, look at Rush Limbaugh (and actually try listening to him also).
I have listened to Limbaugh and if you're going to claim that Bush is not the definition of conservatism than neither is Limbaugh who is a snivelling toady for the Bush White House. Limbaugh is a moron, if he were ever in a debate with someone marginally intelligent (instead of sitting in front of a microphone beaming drivel to millions of proud dildoheads) he'd have his fat cowardly ass handed to him on a hubcap.
Also would you please explain how Iraq was a threat to this nation? We handed them their asses in Gulf War I and Gulf War II was even shorter. In case you weren't paying attention Osama Bin Laden was a Saudi Arabian, 15 of the 19 terrorists who crashed those planes on 9/11 were Saudi Arabians, none of them were Iraqis. American troops suffered a massive terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia in 1998 at the Kobar Towers barracks. Hmmm, where's the involvement of Saddam in all of this? Probably in the same place as all of those Iraqi WMDs, that is to say in George W. Bush fantasyland.
Oh, and can we really trust the Bush administration to fight the war on terrorism? I think not, Bush has lots of ties to the Saudis, and here's a picture that I'm sure that the Bushies would like to forget (In case you don't know the beaming gentlman shaking Saddam's hand is none other than our current Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld.)
Re:Faster startup times? Whatever...
on
MRAM in 2004?
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· Score: 1
The part that I found interesting was the statement that MRAM was up to six times as fast as static RAM. Assuming that MRAM is cheaper than static RAM, which it must be if they're going to be using it in low margin devices like PDAs and cell phones, imagine what this will do for CPU cache speeds and sizes. I could see the first installation of MRAM in PCs being as cache RAM for the CPU. I wouldn't mind having say 128Mb of level 2 cache per CPU in my system.
Do you want guaranteed availability of telephone service at uniform and reasonable rates, even if you live on a farm or in a slum?
No I don't. I am sick and fucking tired of having my phone service taxed so I can subsidize a bunch of fuckheads who want to live in rural areas. I live in a suburb. I pay higher taxes, have a smaller lot and a smaller house than I would if I chose to live out in the middle of fucking nowhere on a farm. Farm dwellers are not paying for my higher property taxes so I don't see why I should subsidize their phone service. As far as your comment about slums it's really an invalid argument since it's a lot cheaper to wire a slum, since most slums are characterized by high population density) than it is to wire say, the state of Alaska. If you want to live in the middle of nowhere then you have to have the maturity to realize that your decision has consequences, and you shouldn't piss and moan and ask other people to pay for it.
Have someone install a networking card on the motherboard thinking that it is a modem because it has an RJ-45 jack on the back and the phones on the PBX all have RJ-45 jacks on them as well. Power up the system, plug the "modem" into the PBX system. Watch the motherboard start to act badly as it tries, valiantly but in vain, to absorb AC from the phone system through a 10BaseT jack. Have the user complain all day long that their computer is acting funny. Go upstairs and look at it and ask why they have two networking cards and why one is plugged into the phone system. Have the user's co-worker, who thinks he knows something about computers, and who wants to get into the user's panties, explain that he found this "modem" and installed it on her machine so she could dial-out. Explain to the user and to her co-worker that he just installed a network card, that modems don't have BNC and 15 pin AUI connectors on them, prove this by removing the "modem" and showing them the 3COM ethernet logo on it. Explain that the phone system has AC current running through it to power all of the pretty red and green LEDs on their phones. Have the user's motherboard replaced because the AC from the PBX has fried it. Explain to the user and her co-worker that you won't come upstairs and fuck things up in purchasing if they promise to refrain from fucking up their computers. Oh, and the best part of this one was where the user told me that she had data on her computer that was "absolutely irreplacable" and that I just had to fix it. When I asked her if she had backed her data up she said "no" and I replied "Well, then I guess it really is 'absolutely irreplacable'."
Jerry Pournelle has some informative commentary on his website (Dont call it a blog!). Here is the link
I'm interested in reading this to see how Heinlein progressed as a writer and a person over his career. I wish that I could find copies of his "unpublishable" stories (the ones he sold off to editors that he didn't like, just to see how they compared to the mainstream Heinlein genre.
The story was Misfit. This is the story that introduces Andy Libby, who would appear in the later Heinlein novels Methusalah's Children, The Number of the Beast and To Sail Beyond the Sunset.
effects. After taking it and eating a meal you are seized with an uncontrollable desire to strip naked, lie belly down on a flat rock and hiss menacingly at your family and friends if they get too close to you.
I think the reason they're not going to sue Lawrence Livermore is simple. It's a bad idea to sue people who know how to make nuclear weapons, HERF guns and other instruments of destruction.
"Hey Darl. Looks like we got a UPS package from Lawrence Livermore. It's kind of large. must be all of the money they're paying us for those $699 Linux licenses"
"Oooooh! Oooooh! I love money! Open it right now and let's roll around naked in it.
cooling. Then I can pipe the hot water into my hot tub where all of my hot bitches are. Yeah, I know some hot bitches, what, are you saying that I'm full of shit because I have good slashdot karma? Hey, I'll bet that lots of guys here who post as often as I do know lots of hot bitches. Really, we do, Damnit! We do!
This is all real good advice except for one thing. The guy who posted this is wiring a frigging data center, not his house. I learned how to install circuit breakers when I was about ten years old, this holds no terror for me and I have run 120/240 all over my house. Of course I only have about 20 breakers in my panel, I know what they are and I have a big disconnect switch at the top that allows me to disconnect the power to the panel if I'm feeling really paranoid. On the other hand just because I'm comfortable running a 50 amp circuit for my hot tub does not mean that I am comfortable, much less qualified, fucking about with the wiring in the data center. For one thing there's a lot more of it, for another thing according to the poster it's seriously fucked, for another thing the poster is probably a systems administrator/engineer like I am. I have had to explain to a lot of people I worked with that just because something has power running through it (copier) or blinking lights (pager) that does not mean that I (the network and UNIX and if I absolutely have to desktop support guy) am responsible for, or qualified to, fix it. I usually don"t like to work with people who offer up the excuse that something isn't in their job description, but unless you're a qualified electrician working on the power panel is not in your job description and I would back up anyone who held to this and tell any boss who told me to do this to go fuck themselves.
And just remember, if you get burned over 50 percent of your body you're dead, because there isn't enough skin on what's left of you to graft on to what's burned. Actual percentages may vary but are probably lower. Having had some discussions with burn ward nurses while I was in the hospital I would have to say that staying the fuck away from this panel and hiring an electrician is the best advice. I mean really, do you want the pictures of your smoking corpse, riddled with electrical exit wounds to end up here?
And where's your operating system? Unless you have a brother who works for Microsoft you can plan on dropping anywhere from $160 to $300 for a version of Windows XP. Or, if you're running Linux/BSD you can plan on spending more time configuring the box than you would if you purchased a Macintosh with OS X. Also your machine is going to be one noisy son of a bitch with that Opteron in it. I run a 2Ghz Athlon XP and the damned thing sounds like a vacuum cleaner, even with a Thermaltake fan set on the low speed. And the case and power supply you selected, one word: pieceashit. If you bought a decent case and power supply (Lian Li and a PC Power and Cooling Silencer power supply) you'd be out another $200 or so, thus narrowing your price differential even further. This whole "I can build an x86 box for less money than you can buy a Macintosh" game is for idiots. It's like saying "I can turbo charge a Honda Civic so it will go faster than a Porsche Boxster and save lots of bux". Yes, Sparky, you can, but it's still not as good as a Porsche Boxster. It might be as fast on a straight track, but it still sux compared to the real thing.
I can think of a couple of other uses for cheap
on
The Diamond Age
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· Score: 1
diamonds. Such as the ultimate pair of safety glasses, hell, the yellow tinted diamonds they make now would be perfect for shooting glasses. Or how about using diamonds in telescopes and binoculars? Ultra hard lenses that won't scratch and are more resistant to cracking than current glass lenses. Diamond would also make a bitchin substrate for mirrors for reflector telescopes, the high thermal conductivity means that such scopes would cool down faster for observation that current Pyrex mirrors do.
Actually no. Firstly, thanks to the 1994 gun control act you can't get magazines with capacities greater than 10 rounds unless you're a cop. Thus the Taurus holds as many rounds as any 9mm you're going to purchase unless you're lucky and can find a pre-ban Glock, HK or Sig magazines, which are not cheap. For the price of one 15 round Glock magazine I was able to purchase three 10 round Taurus magazines. Secondly I'm a decent shot. I don't need 15 rounds to get the job done. If I do I have extra clips. Thirdly, if I want to I can load this up with some 230 grain Federal HydraShoks, which will put far more hurt on someone than any standard 9mm round. Fourthly I'm not planning on shooting it out with anyone wearing a Kevlar vest, in the unlikely event that such an event should occur I'll go for a head shot or for the legs. Fifthly 9mm is for pussies and idiot gang bangers. Sure, I own a 9mm Glock, but I bought it because of peer pressure. All of my other friends owned 9mm Glocks and I wanted to be cool like them. But I'd rather have a.45 or a.40 or a.357 or even a 38+P than a 9mm.
Post the story where some guy takes the existing XBox chasis, makes a mold of it, and casts his own in aluminum or clear plastic with lights inside of it and it might be worth the slashdotting that this guy's going to get.
Casting? Fsck that. Post the story where some guy takes the existing Xbox chassis and has a replacement made out of milled titanium, or maybe milled lucite. But casting? That is so 1999.
Fuck that noise. There are Navy CPOs who do the same thing, who don't get overtime, who are accountable, who have to do this in areas where people are shooting at them (or driving up to the ship with a Zodiac loaded with Semtex) and who get paid about 25k a year. Longshoremen are overpaid cargo monkeys. End of fucking story.
I've used the XPlay software with my PC laptop and a PCMCIA Firewire card to have filesystem access to my iPod. Works pretty well once you get it set up. The XPlay setup on my laptop was a bit involved, but I think that some of that might have been due to the PCMCIA Firewire card, get a laptop with built-in Firewire and you may not have this problem.
Who would hire him? He doesn't even have executive hair. Maybe he's really tall...
I certainly recommend that you post some facts to back up your post rather than unsubstantiated bullshit.
In the US, without revenues to continually prop up industries like agriculture and high-techology (i.e. military), the entire economy would disintegrate. Those revenues are derived from tax dollars. The money must come from somewhere. The realpolitik of the situation is that the richer are taxed "proportionately" because they have the cash.
You know, realpolitik aside, the fact is that progressive taxes are fair on compassionate grounds as well. It's a very significant indicator that vastly wealthy people (and yes, I do consider $200,000/year vast wealth) are living at a standard of living that is several orders of magnitude greater than everyone else and have a greater deal more disposable income than everyone else. Not only do they have the money to contribute, but in doing so, they are responsible for the coninuation of the system.
Well if continuation of the system means the continuation of agricultural and military subsidies then I'm against it. Our agricultural subsidies subsidize corporate farming, encourage illegal immigration, encourage environmental degradation and fuck over the third world who can produce many agricultural commodities far more cheaply than subsidized American and European farmers can but can't sell them on the world market because the Americans and Europeans are dumping their products. This is why the recent trade talks in Cancun collapsed, the third world is tired of hearing about how they have to open their markets to free trade while the developed world pumps billions of dollars into the pockets of huge agribusinesses.
The amount spent on cotton subsidies in the United States alone, almost 3 billion dollars, is greater than the GDP of several African nations. Wow, what a great use for our money, we pay American farmers to engage in environmentally destructive practices (such as cotton farming in west Texas) and we help keep the third world impoverished at the same time. Way to go! What a great justification for progressive taxation.
And then there's your argument about subsidizing high tech industry and the military. Gee, does this mean that if the government had less money that they wouldn't be able to invade countries like Iraq? Boy, there's another great justification for progressive taxes, they keep the military industrial complex humming! Way to go!
There is no moral justification for progressive taxation, you fail to offer one, offering instead a realpolitik explanation of "we have progressive taxes because that's where the money is". This is about as moral a statement as Willie Sutton's answer of why he robbed banks "Because that's where the money is" he said.
People who are in favor of progressive taxation are parasites who want the government to pay for a bunch of stuff but don't want to have to foot the bill themselves. I would like to test some of these people to destruction, give them the progressive tax system that they want, the one that pays for all of the wonderful programs that they want (such as agricultural subsidies, the military industrial complex, PATRIOT act enforcement, the War on Drugs) and then set the rates so that 95 percent of their income is in the highest bracket. Let's see how long they last when they're in the highest bracket and how long it is before they start screeching for some tax relief.
God I would love to see someone hack that sign. Imagine people driving down the road and all of a sudden the goatse.cx guy is displayed in full living color on a billboard. I'd love to watch that, but I'd hate to be on the road when it happened.
Why is it that whenever a story is posted about outsourcing that some unoriginal fucktard such as Phoenix666 has to post something along the lines of "why didn't the programmers do anything when manufacturing jobs were being moved offshore". Well fucktard, prove that they didn't. I know a lot of people in IT who were very concerned about American jobs being sent offshore, not just in IT but in manufacturing as well. We ought to take all of the morons who post drivel such as this and gas them with Zyklon B, they're genetically unfit and society would be better if they were dead.
Fuck the homeless, and the poor! We've spent trillions since the great society started in the 1960s, and what do we have to show for it. More useless fucking poor people breeding more useless, stupid children. Let's just sterilize all of the poor people, then the problem of the poor will be solved in a generation as they die out, then we can lower taxes and have a bitchen space program.
Oh, and if you think that spending more money on education is going to improve it then I invite you to look at the following website. Scroll down the page until you find the graph under the heading "WHY NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND IS IMPORTANT TO AMERICA". If you look at the graph, assuming that you know how to read one, you will notice that the reading scores for nine year olds have remained constant, despite massive increases in appropriations. Indeed if you read further you will see that the Department of Education claims to have spent 242 billion since 1965, yet reading scores have remained constant since 1975. Hardly a ringing endorsement of success.
That's the subject of Manifold Space by Stephen Baxter. Baxter's answer to the Fermi paradox (if intelligent life exists in the galaxy why haven't we been contacted?) is that every once in a while one of these gamma ray bursters goes off and reformats a big chunk of the galaxy, wiping out all intelligent (and not so intelligent) life within its kill radius. Kind of sobering to think that one of these things could have exploded a few thousand years back and the wavefront could be heading towards us right now.
To sum it up, Bush is not the definition of Conservatism, and don't take him as such. If you are looking for the best definition of Conservatism, look at Rush Limbaugh (and actually try listening to him also).
I have listened to Limbaugh and if you're going to claim that Bush is not the definition of conservatism than neither is Limbaugh who is a snivelling toady for the Bush White House. Limbaugh is a moron, if he were ever in a debate with someone marginally intelligent (instead of sitting in front of a microphone beaming drivel to millions of proud dildoheads) he'd have his fat cowardly ass handed to him on a hubcap.
Also would you please explain how Iraq was a threat to this nation? We handed them their asses in Gulf War I and Gulf War II was even shorter. In case you weren't paying attention Osama Bin Laden was a Saudi Arabian, 15 of the 19 terrorists who crashed those planes on 9/11 were Saudi Arabians, none of them were Iraqis. American troops suffered a massive terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia in 1998 at the Kobar Towers barracks. Hmmm, where's the involvement of Saddam in all of this? Probably in the same place as all of those Iraqi WMDs, that is to say in George W. Bush fantasyland.
Oh, and can we really trust the Bush administration to fight the war on terrorism? I think not, Bush has lots of ties to the Saudis, and here's a picture that I'm sure that the Bushies would like to forget (In case you don't know the beaming gentlman shaking Saddam's hand is none other than our current Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld.)
Could this be slightly more buzzword compliant?
The part that I found interesting was the statement that MRAM was up to six times as fast as static RAM. Assuming that MRAM is cheaper than static RAM, which it must be if they're going to be using it in low margin devices like PDAs and cell phones, imagine what this will do for CPU cache speeds and sizes. I could see the first installation of MRAM in PCs being as cache RAM for the CPU. I wouldn't mind having say 128Mb of level 2 cache per CPU in my system.
Do you want guaranteed availability of telephone service at uniform and reasonable rates, even if you live on a farm or in a slum?
No I don't. I am sick and fucking tired of having my phone service taxed so I can subsidize a bunch of fuckheads who want to live in rural areas. I live in a suburb. I pay higher taxes, have a smaller lot and a smaller house than I would if I chose to live out in the middle of fucking nowhere on a farm. Farm dwellers are not paying for my higher property taxes so I don't see why I should subsidize their phone service. As far as your comment about slums it's really an invalid argument since it's a lot cheaper to wire a slum, since most slums are characterized by high population density) than it is to wire say, the state of Alaska.
If you want to live in the middle of nowhere then you have to have the maturity to realize that your decision has consequences, and you shouldn't piss and moan and ask other people to pay for it.
Have someone install a networking card on the motherboard thinking that it is a modem because it has an RJ-45 jack on the back and the phones on the PBX all have RJ-45 jacks on them as well. Power up the system, plug the "modem" into the PBX system. Watch the motherboard start to act badly as it tries, valiantly but in vain, to absorb AC from the phone system through a 10BaseT jack. Have the user complain all day long that their computer is acting funny. Go upstairs and look at it and ask why they have two networking cards and why one is plugged into the phone system. Have the user's co-worker, who thinks he knows something about computers, and who wants to get into the user's panties, explain that he found this "modem" and installed it on her machine so she could dial-out. Explain to the user and to her co-worker that he just installed a network card, that modems don't have BNC and 15 pin AUI connectors on them, prove this by removing the "modem" and showing them the 3COM ethernet logo on it. Explain that the phone system has AC current running through it to power all of the pretty red and green LEDs on their phones. Have the user's motherboard replaced because the AC from the PBX has fried it. Explain to the user and her co-worker that you won't come upstairs and fuck things up in purchasing if they promise to refrain from fucking up their computers.
Oh, and the best part of this one was where the user told me that she had data on her computer that was "absolutely irreplacable" and that I just had to fix it. When I asked her if she had backed her data up she said "no" and I replied "Well, then I guess it really is 'absolutely irreplacable'."
Jerry Pournelle has some informative commentary on his website (Dont call it a blog!). Here is the link
I'm interested in reading this to see how Heinlein progressed as a writer and a person over his career. I wish that I could find copies of his "unpublishable" stories (the ones he sold off to editors that he didn't like, just to see how they compared to the mainstream Heinlein genre.
The story was Misfit. This is the story that introduces Andy Libby, who would appear in the later Heinlein novels Methusalah's Children, The Number of the Beast and To Sail Beyond the Sunset.
effects. After taking it and eating a meal you are seized with an uncontrollable desire to strip naked, lie belly down on a flat rock and hiss menacingly at your family and friends if they get too close to you.
I think the reason they're not going to sue Lawrence Livermore is simple. It's a bad idea to sue people who know how to make nuclear weapons, HERF guns and other instruments of destruction.
"Hey Darl. Looks like we got a UPS package from Lawrence Livermore. It's kind of large. must be all of the money they're paying us for those $699 Linux licenses"
"Oooooh! Oooooh! I love money! Open it right now and let's roll around naked in it.
BOOOM!
cooling. Then I can pipe the hot water into my hot tub where all of my hot bitches are. Yeah, I know some hot bitches, what, are you saying that I'm full of shit because I have good slashdot karma? Hey, I'll bet that lots of guys here who post as often as I do know lots of hot bitches. Really, we do, Damnit! We do!
This is all real good advice except for one thing. The guy who posted this is wiring a frigging data center, not his house. I learned how to install circuit breakers when I was about ten years old, this holds no terror for me and I have run 120/240 all over my house. Of course I only have about 20 breakers in my panel, I know what they are and I have a big disconnect switch at the top that allows me to disconnect the power to the panel if I'm feeling really paranoid. On the other hand just because I'm comfortable running a 50 amp circuit for my hot tub does not mean that I am comfortable, much less qualified, fucking about with the wiring in the data center. For one thing there's a lot more of it, for another thing according to the poster it's seriously fucked, for another thing the poster is probably a systems administrator/engineer like I am. I have had to explain to a lot of people I worked with that just because something has power running through it (copier) or blinking lights (pager) that does not mean that I (the network and UNIX and if I absolutely have to desktop support guy) am responsible for, or qualified to, fix it. I usually don"t like to work with people who offer up the excuse that something isn't in their job description, but unless you're a qualified electrician working on the power panel is not in your job description and I would back up anyone who held to this and tell any boss who told me to do this to go fuck themselves.
And just remember, if you get burned over 50 percent of your body you're dead, because there isn't enough skin on what's left of you to graft on to what's burned. Actual percentages may vary but are probably lower. Having had some discussions with burn ward nurses while I was in the hospital I would have to say that staying the fuck away from this panel and hiring an electrician is the best advice. I mean really, do you want the pictures of your smoking corpse, riddled with electrical exit wounds to end up
here?
And where's your operating system? Unless you have a brother who works for Microsoft you can plan on dropping anywhere from $160 to $300 for a version of Windows XP. Or, if you're running Linux/BSD you can plan on spending more time configuring the box than you would if you purchased a Macintosh with OS X.
Also your machine is going to be one noisy son of a bitch with that Opteron in it. I run a 2Ghz Athlon XP and the damned thing sounds like a vacuum cleaner, even with a Thermaltake fan set on the low speed. And the case and power supply you selected, one word: pieceashit. If you bought a decent case and power supply (Lian Li and a PC Power and Cooling Silencer power supply) you'd be out another $200 or so, thus narrowing your price differential even further.
This whole "I can build an x86 box for less money than you can buy a Macintosh" game is for idiots. It's like saying "I can turbo charge a Honda Civic so it will go faster than a Porsche Boxster and save lots of bux". Yes, Sparky, you can, but it's still not as good as a Porsche Boxster. It might be as fast on a straight track, but it still sux compared to the real thing.
diamonds. Such as the ultimate pair of safety glasses, hell, the yellow tinted diamonds they make now would be perfect for shooting glasses. Or how about using diamonds in telescopes and binoculars? Ultra hard lenses that won't scratch and are more resistant to cracking than current glass lenses. Diamond would also make a bitchin substrate for mirrors for reflector telescopes, the high thermal conductivity means that such scopes would cool down faster for observation that current Pyrex mirrors do.
Actually no. Firstly, thanks to the 1994 gun control act you can't get magazines with capacities greater than 10 rounds unless you're a cop. Thus the Taurus holds as many rounds as any 9mm you're going to purchase unless you're lucky and can find a pre-ban Glock, HK or Sig magazines, which are not cheap. For the price of one 15 round Glock magazine I was able to purchase three 10 round Taurus magazines. Secondly I'm a decent shot. I don't need 15 rounds to get the job done. If I do I have extra clips. Thirdly, if I want to I can load this up with some 230 grain Federal HydraShoks, which will put far more hurt on someone than any standard 9mm round. Fourthly I'm not planning on shooting it out with anyone wearing a Kevlar vest, in the unlikely event that such an event should occur I'll go for a head shot or for the legs. Fifthly 9mm is .45 or a .40 or a .357 or even a 38+P than a 9mm.
for pussies and idiot gang bangers. Sure, I own a 9mm Glock, but I bought it because of peer pressure. All of my other friends owned 9mm Glocks and I wanted to be cool like them. But I'd rather have a