Think about growing a new arm...or a new anything. It might be an appendage you've never previously imagined before. "Thought" is not the same as motor control. I don't think my fingers into typing this post at 60wpmish. If I had to think about it it would take forever to type.
Now think about if you had a third arm growing out of your chest. How would you control it? Without the motor control that has been learned over several years of childhood and adolescence, what good will it do you? A good question is whether or not adults will ever even be able to master this technology.
It's my understanding that cochlear implants are useless for anyone born without hearing that hasn't had them installed by, say, age 5 or 6 or so. The reason being is that the brain must develop its auditory region during childhood and becomes incapable of making such a "major upgrade" after early childhood.
If this is the case, you may see young children doing amazing and unheard of things with these new interfaces, but us, the old man wannabes are just gonna be shit outta luck on this one. We may be stuck with the klugey manner of thinking of a flashing R while our children are growing new "arms" to control the world with.
Damnit, now I've made myself jealous. On a thought provoking side note finish: Right around now is when the generation that will have no idea WTF a dial tone is begins...
I use a CNC plasma table at work, the controller of which uses a 2gb flash drive for its main hard drive. It was manufactured sometime in 2000 or 2001, run about 8 hours a day or so...still working just fine. Not 15 years, but getting on towards 10, with *old* flash technology. I'd say flash is a very good idea for long life.
That's a pretty big payload. I can't wait to see that one ton of rare earth elements get the "crane" cable fouled up in its wheels because there's no way those cables just drift away like the simulation shows. Sure, the eggheads at NASA will have a plan to have the crane boost off again once the lander touches the ground but either the rover will be flipped or dragged along the ground or those cables will continue downward into the wheels and experimental equipment on the lander itself. Murphy's Law is begging on its knees right now to get its hands on this new extremely expensive soon-to-be piece of Martian masonry.
I seem to recall Viking doing just fine with the tried and true rocket landing method.
I don't think you're getting the part about how the people who are perpetrating these crimes are beyond any sort of "law" that the West has to desl with the problem. The next step is war, in one way, shape or form. I doubt something like this would cause a war between nations without a lot of other things going on, but it would certainly not be the first time the United States or Israel or Great Britain or France or Whomever...used governmental might to tackle problems with non-government organizations overseas.
Think Mossad circa 1965. A government with a righteous position going after criminals in countries where said criminals are above the law. I hesitate to call any country with working toilets uncivilized, but your use of the term civilized doesnt apply at all here. There is no law or law enforcement agency currently in place, anywhere, that has the jurisdiction or the capability to deal with these attacks.
When confronted by a situation such as this, a citizen's or government's only recourse is war. Period. You are *not* as far removed from feudalism and anarchy as you'd like to think you are. Government sanctioned slavery only disappeared around about 200 years or so ago...apartheid is still common practice all over the world...Israel, Pakistan, all over Africa and South East Asia. What makes you think your local district attorney is going to be able to help you fight bank fraud from Zimbabwe?
And I'm sure the Russians and the Chinese are just lined up outside their respective United States embassies with armloads of computer criminals who's main source of income comes from US citizens.
Western "laws" dont extend to most of the world, and yet just about every square foot of this Earth can receive internet access without all that much trouble. I could probably set up a wifi hotspot just about anywhere in Namibia for under $3000 USD. But that's nothing because these idiots made 20 grand in the first fifteen minutes of this hitting the wild because farming stupidity has always been an *extremely* lucrative trade throughout history and now the internet adds wonderful economies of scale to those activities.
American credit card companies have already proven more then willing to forgoe little things like, oh, gambling laws to allow them to generate more transaction fees overseas so how do you think you're going to get them to stop doing business with every unlicensed foreign financial institution? Set up a small bank in Africa/Arabia/Asia for six months, pay off the local government or mafia plenty to be left alone...farm stupidity for as much of that time as you can get away with, rinse and repeat.
I really doubt this particular encryption virus is the work of some random russian hacker sitting in his parent's basement. Computer fraud has been the realm of organized crime for quite a while now...especially in the eastern bloc. It may not be the "russian mafia", but it could very easily be a small russian dotcom that had a crazy idea, talked to a couple of financial people or already were a part of their organization...a well connected businessman in Russia could probably pull off such a scheme quite easily without attracting any attention at all on a local level.
Well, Dubyuh's already pretty much told the whole world he doesn't give a rats ass about the "rights" of his own citizens, let alone those of a foreign national running an extortion campaign against citizens of the US and other western nations.
My personal opinion is that these guys have a bullet with their name on it, its just a matter of time before stuff like this starts getting people killed on a regular basis. If the governments are not powerful enough or unwilling to tackle such criminal issues...one of these encryption bugs is going to hit the wrong CEO with too much money and/or spite and volia...you have a new episode of CSI Moscow.
Seriously? Would it cost more than a coupla hundred dollars to bribe the right people over at egold or whatever "bank" these asshats are using to find an address? Or a postoffice box, or a forwarding bank account somewhere with a name on it?
There is no recourse right now in the current criminal justice system for crimes of this nature. So my question is when is the rich guy going to make his own recourse...or does it start with the CIA? I have zero problems with the CIA going and finding homes for bullets in Russian spammers or Nigerian scammers or any other criminals who attack US citizens from outside the US.
This type of interhuman conflict is completely new to western legal systems and the source is coming from places where Western "justice" is scoffed at. Dont think I'm crazy...this is the kind of shit wars are started over.
Sounds clever, but no. As far as I know, I'm still typing this on a computer, factories are still running, production quotas are being met and a new generation of power production and energy efficiency technologies are popping up frequently.
I hate the word unsustainable. Human beings have been changing at an extremely rapid pace ever since the industrial revolution. How long have we used any one major power source? I'm not talking cooking your food and heating your home. I'm talking industrial power, to power factories and computers and offices and production lines (they're all robots now, eh?). Steel mills. Point and point.
Coal? What? About 300 years? Oil used in combustion about 100 years. Nuclear about 50 or 60 years now. The landscape is changing even more now, wind, solar (I forgot hydroelectric...about 100 years for electricity...and probably about since the dawn of time for industrial power, waterwheels, etc.), gas turbines, tidal power, biomass reactors. I personally like Toshiba's nuclear battery (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_4S). Plug it in and your small remote community has juice for 30 years.
To call any of these production methods unsustainable is silly. If it were truly unsustainable people wouldn't use it.
Nuclear is the most energy dense power source that we have available to use at the moment. The French have a brilliant nuclear power production system, waste and all. As far as safety goes, check out the FRONTLINE episode about the Three Mile Island meltdown. It was a meltdown. Catastrophic. No Chernobyl...and there's a reason for that. It worked like it was designed to. The China Syndrome, good movie, better propaganda.
I wish I remembered the number and I want to say I caught it on Wired or NYT...but you wouldn't believe the ridiculous amount of nuclear fuel used to power reactors in the United States that comes from decommissioned Soviet warheads. I want to say something like 50%.
In response to a few other comments in this thread:
One cannot assume that there is ample agricultural farmland everywhere upon which to plant windmills. Especially considering that these windmills must (should?) be placed in an area that typically has high winds. The larger more space efficient turbines are going to need higher winds to turn the larger blades (I'm assuming a bit here...). I come from central Illinois...cant exactly say that there's a lot going on very regularly in the meteorological sense.
To add to that, long distance transmission lines while common, I'm pretty sure they dont typically deliver electricity over thousands of miles. Great, the US has lots of open land. Let's fill Wyoming and Colorado up with wind turbines. Oh wait...nobody lives there...and to make all that power useful it would have to be transported over a long distance....all that windy space is useless to people living in Cleveland. One that I would think would be prohibitively expensive due to the resistance of our non-superconducting power lines.
Wind power *can* be a unique and interesting power production solution at a local level. Windmills can be quite beautiful and I don't consider them to be "clutter". But on a global or even a national scale, the cost is still very great, both in terms of land usage and raw materials as well as maintenance. Besides...number of homes is a tricky statistic. One good sized data center will suck your windfarm dry and come up asking for seconds.
The largest wind turbines weigh many tons....the structures that hold them many more. You cannot just plop one of these onto any spot of empty dirt you see. A considerable foundation must be poured of reinforced concreted, which may have to be anchored to bedrock, but IANACE (...civil engineer...). You dont want to have the thing sink or god forbid shift and fall. Even still you couldn't put them denser than the falling distance from one to another or a slight engineering snafu turns your billion dollar windfarm into the worlds most expensive set of dominos.
Think Japan. Maritime traffic at sea and real estate costs inland would make deploying large numbers of wind turbines a poor choice. A dozen 100 acre nuclear plants would produce the same power as many hundreds of wind turbines...the largest of which do take up considerable space around them, it's not just a footprint.
I'm not sure what the metric is exactly, but it has to do with something like, megawatt-hours-produced-per-acre. This measurement is used when discussing power production by some engineering geeks somewhere...sorry, just trying to point the discussion down a path quickly here and not really set it up too much.:-)
In short, as cool as we all would like wind power generation to be, it just falls way too short in the aforemention critical statistic. If you've seen the wind farm outside of San Fran, you know how big they can get. The nuke plant between SD & LA (iirc) is but a postage stamp compared to that windfarm and it probably has about twice the power output.
Wind is not population density friendly. At some point, land costs wipe out any efficiencies.
Symantec has already lost me as a customer. I began shifting my clients away from it as soon as the new spybot 1.5 released. It has a modicum of registry protection and it generally isnt a crapshoot as to whether or not its going to brick the computer its installed on...brick may be a strong term, but Norton/Symantec's footprint is way too much for a client machine...and now they want to add more.
Yeah...ditch these people now. AV on the client is a scam. Effective management and AV at the chokepoints can often provide enough protection I've found.
What about the other orbital telescopes up there already? Chandra and Spitzer already do a lot of the science that Hubble was being used for, considering those platforms...and isn't their one more...does Hubble still make sense?
Are the advantages of having Hubble outside the atmosphere still worth the expense? I'd rather see NASA spending their money on Mars.
I thought I had heard that new ground-based telescope technology has largely made the benefits of the old Hubble obsolete. Does anyone know anything more specific on that?
This response isn't for subby, it's for the readers, I already know that subby is over-comfortable with facism.
We here in the United States have created a culture of butting our noses into everybody else's business. This busybody nation of ours just can't seem to keep its hands to itself. We see all this slippery slope bullshit everywhere...what if, what if, what if? Well, what if you just left it well enough alone and punish criminals rather than trying to punish *everyone* ahead of time.
Everyone has a "it's not my fault" complex going on here. Life sucks, so you someone...criminality happens, blame their boss, so you sue them too. You people have to learn to understand that life *does* in fact suck, and there's not a damned thing you can do about that. Suing somebody, changing the rules to big brother supreme is NOT going to change that. It's not your fault, it's not their fault, it just is.
So do everyone a favour, and just knock this crap off right now. We've lived many, many decades in a modern society where behavior like this was not only not tolerated, but not necessary. Why is it necessary now? The interwebs? I call shenanigans.
When the revolution comes busybodies...it's not coming for the government...it's coming for you. Subby, YOU and all the other people here that agree with you have done your best to turn this into the Fascist States of America. Americans dying in Iraq for your "freedom" is truly tragic, because you're just not worth it.
I recently purchased an Illy ESE espresso machine. I'm in love. The thing is ridiculously expensive, but it almost beats my dishwasher as my favorite kitchen appliance. One can use the ESE pods (easy serving espresso) which are individually packaged in a CO2 atmosphere, or espresso ground beans...either way. I really like the pods as there is so little mess to deal with, I'm not cleaning up coffee grounds ever, and even the loose ground coffee comes out of the machine as a semi-hardened puck, making removal very easy.
The most beautiful thing about this machine is that it warms up in 30 seconds. 90 seconds after I touch the machine in the morning I'm drinking a fresh hot cup of espresso or if I feel like something lighter, the machine can make hot water for an americano. You *can* make regular coffee, one cup at a time with it as well. I also love it for that very reason...I love coffee, but I don't drink it quickly. Having a fresh cup, every time, has been a joy.
What if you live on Saturn? Drive-by might be your only option.
This might be a great way to test a real world system where one can only get updates from the overmind once a day or so. i.e. if you lived on Jupiter...or further. Say that big hexagon on Saturn is really an eons old structure built by non-humans...everybody and their grandmother is going to want to go up there and check it out. They're still going to want their email...
I'm a small business IT consultant and I once could label myself as a Microsoft hater. Not anymore. XP, for me, is just light years ahead of 2000...not only in stability but in features. Just think of having XWindows capabilities...remote terminal access...almost a necessity when you're trying to support a dozen different offices. From that standpoint alone, and organization could save tons of cash a year in not having to provide on site support for 100% of problems.
Add on the built in Windows Firewall, which certainly helps the less-able users keep their computers free of junk, and I'd say there's a very compelling reason to switch to XP.
Oh, yeah...and it's a TON faster. I know the Linux crowd won't be all that impressed...but I don't remember ever seeing any XP machine that takes 5 minutes to boot. Any 2000 machine that's been online for a year does that...(not really...but 2000 booting time is horrible).
Considering that Dems have been traditionally socialist-ish and Repbs have traditionally been, well, I'll not say progressive, but certainly individualist. Dem socialist agenda fits the Alien hive mentality a lot more closely than does any Repb agenda.
BUT, considering that neither party is different from the other these days....Kerry talking about tax cuts, Dubya spending money willy nilly. Meh...f em both.
Slashdot Mirror
Think about growing a new arm...or a new anything. It might be an appendage you've never previously imagined before. "Thought" is not the same as motor control. I don't think my fingers into typing this post at 60wpmish. If I had to think about it it would take forever to type.
Now think about if you had a third arm growing out of your chest. How would you control it? Without the motor control that has been learned over several years of childhood and adolescence, what good will it do you? A good question is whether or not adults will ever even be able to master this technology.
It's my understanding that cochlear implants are useless for anyone born without hearing that hasn't had them installed by, say, age 5 or 6 or so. The reason being is that the brain must develop its auditory region during childhood and becomes incapable of making such a "major upgrade" after early childhood.
If this is the case, you may see young children doing amazing and unheard of things with these new interfaces, but us, the old man wannabes are just gonna be shit outta luck on this one. We may be stuck with the klugey manner of thinking of a flashing R while our children are growing new "arms" to control the world with.
Damnit, now I've made myself jealous. On a thought provoking side note finish: Right around now is when the generation that will have no idea WTF a dial tone is begins...
I use a CNC plasma table at work, the controller of which uses a 2gb flash drive for its main hard drive. It was manufactured sometime in 2000 or 2001, run about 8 hours a day or so...still working just fine. Not 15 years, but getting on towards 10, with *old* flash technology. I'd say flash is a very good idea for long life.
That's a pretty big payload. I can't wait to see that one ton of rare earth elements get the "crane" cable fouled up in its wheels because there's no way those cables just drift away like the simulation shows. Sure, the eggheads at NASA will have a plan to have the crane boost off again once the lander touches the ground but either the rover will be flipped or dragged along the ground or those cables will continue downward into the wheels and experimental equipment on the lander itself. Murphy's Law is begging on its knees right now to get its hands on this new extremely expensive soon-to-be piece of Martian masonry.
I seem to recall Viking doing just fine with the tried and true rocket landing method.
I don't think you're getting the part about how the people who are perpetrating these crimes are beyond any sort of "law" that the West has to desl with the problem. The next step is war, in one way, shape or form. I doubt something like this would cause a war between nations without a lot of other things going on, but it would certainly not be the first time the United States or Israel or Great Britain or France or Whomever...used governmental might to tackle problems with non-government organizations overseas.
Think Mossad circa 1965. A government with a righteous position going after criminals in countries where said criminals are above the law. I hesitate to call any country with working toilets uncivilized, but your use of the term civilized doesnt apply at all here. There is no law or law enforcement agency currently in place, anywhere, that has the jurisdiction or the capability to deal with these attacks.
When confronted by a situation such as this, a citizen's or government's only recourse is war. Period. You are *not* as far removed from feudalism and anarchy as you'd like to think you are. Government sanctioned slavery only disappeared around about 200 years or so ago...apartheid is still common practice all over the world...Israel, Pakistan, all over Africa and South East Asia. What makes you think your local district attorney is going to be able to help you fight bank fraud from Zimbabwe?
And I'm sure the Russians and the Chinese are just lined up outside their respective United States embassies with armloads of computer criminals who's main source of income comes from US citizens.
Western "laws" dont extend to most of the world, and yet just about every square foot of this Earth can receive internet access without all that much trouble. I could probably set up a wifi hotspot just about anywhere in Namibia for under $3000 USD. But that's nothing because these idiots made 20 grand in the first fifteen minutes of this hitting the wild because farming stupidity has always been an *extremely* lucrative trade throughout history and now the internet adds wonderful economies of scale to those activities.
American credit card companies have already proven more then willing to forgoe little things like, oh, gambling laws to allow them to generate more transaction fees overseas so how do you think you're going to get them to stop doing business with every unlicensed foreign financial institution? Set up a small bank in Africa/Arabia/Asia for six months, pay off the local government or mafia plenty to be left alone...farm stupidity for as much of that time as you can get away with, rinse and repeat.
I really doubt this particular encryption virus is the work of some random russian hacker sitting in his parent's basement. Computer fraud has been the realm of organized crime for quite a while now...especially in the eastern bloc. It may not be the "russian mafia", but it could very easily be a small russian dotcom that had a crazy idea, talked to a couple of financial people or already were a part of their organization...a well connected businessman in Russia could probably pull off such a scheme quite easily without attracting any attention at all on a local level.
Well, Dubyuh's already pretty much told the whole world he doesn't give a rats ass about the "rights" of his own citizens, let alone those of a foreign national running an extortion campaign against citizens of the US and other western nations.
My personal opinion is that these guys have a bullet with their name on it, its just a matter of time before stuff like this starts getting people killed on a regular basis. If the governments are not powerful enough or unwilling to tackle such criminal issues...one of these encryption bugs is going to hit the wrong CEO with too much money and/or spite and volia...you have a new episode of CSI Moscow.
Seriously? Would it cost more than a coupla hundred dollars to bribe the right people over at egold or whatever "bank" these asshats are using to find an address? Or a postoffice box, or a forwarding bank account somewhere with a name on it?
There is no recourse right now in the current criminal justice system for crimes of this nature. So my question is when is the rich guy going to make his own recourse...or does it start with the CIA? I have zero problems with the CIA going and finding homes for bullets in Russian spammers or Nigerian scammers or any other criminals who attack US citizens from outside the US.
This type of interhuman conflict is completely new to western legal systems and the source is coming from places where Western "justice" is scoffed at. Dont think I'm crazy...this is the kind of shit wars are started over.
Sounds clever, but no. As far as I know, I'm still typing this on a computer, factories are still running, production quotas are being met and a new generation of power production and energy efficiency technologies are popping up frequently.
I hate the word unsustainable. Human beings have been changing at an extremely rapid pace ever since the industrial revolution. How long have we used any one major power source? I'm not talking cooking your food and heating your home. I'm talking industrial power, to power factories and computers and offices and production lines (they're all robots now, eh?). Steel mills. Point and point.
Coal? What? About 300 years? Oil used in combustion about 100 years. Nuclear about 50 or 60 years now. The landscape is changing even more now, wind, solar (I forgot hydroelectric...about 100 years for electricity...and probably about since the dawn of time for industrial power, waterwheels, etc.), gas turbines, tidal power, biomass reactors. I personally like Toshiba's nuclear battery (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_4S). Plug it in and your small remote community has juice for 30 years.
To call any of these production methods unsustainable is silly. If it were truly unsustainable people wouldn't use it.
Nuclear is the most energy dense power source that we have available to use at the moment. The French have a brilliant nuclear power production system, waste and all. As far as safety goes, check out the FRONTLINE episode about the Three Mile Island meltdown. It was a meltdown. Catastrophic. No Chernobyl...and there's a reason for that. It worked like it was designed to. The China Syndrome, good movie, better propaganda.
I wish I remembered the number and I want to say I caught it on Wired or NYT...but you wouldn't believe the ridiculous amount of nuclear fuel used to power reactors in the United States that comes from decommissioned Soviet warheads. I want to say something like 50%.
In response to a few other comments in this thread:
One cannot assume that there is ample agricultural farmland everywhere upon which to plant windmills. Especially considering that these windmills must (should?) be placed in an area that typically has high winds. The larger more space efficient turbines are going to need higher winds to turn the larger blades (I'm assuming a bit here...). I come from central Illinois...cant exactly say that there's a lot going on very regularly in the meteorological sense.
To add to that, long distance transmission lines while common, I'm pretty sure they dont typically deliver electricity over thousands of miles. Great, the US has lots of open land. Let's fill Wyoming and Colorado up with wind turbines. Oh wait...nobody lives there...and to make all that power useful it would have to be transported over a long distance....all that windy space is useless to people living in Cleveland. One that I would think would be prohibitively expensive due to the resistance of our non-superconducting power lines.
Wind power *can* be a unique and interesting power production solution at a local level. Windmills can be quite beautiful and I don't consider them to be "clutter". But on a global or even a national scale, the cost is still very great, both in terms of land usage and raw materials as well as maintenance. Besides...number of homes is a tricky statistic. One good sized data center will suck your windfarm dry and come up asking for seconds.
Uh, lol, I just actually RTFA and, uh, does that say that wind farm cost $70,000 per person it provides power for? Or was it $35,000 per person?
See my lower post...no, they cannot be mounted on buildings unless you want millions of mini turbines littering the countryside.
A for instance:
The largest wind turbines weigh many tons....the structures that hold them many more. You cannot just plop one of these onto any spot of empty dirt you see. A considerable foundation must be poured of reinforced concreted, which may have to be anchored to bedrock, but IANACE (...civil engineer...). You dont want to have the thing sink or god forbid shift and fall. Even still you couldn't put them denser than the falling distance from one to another or a slight engineering snafu turns your billion dollar windfarm into the worlds most expensive set of dominos.
Think Japan. Maritime traffic at sea and real estate costs inland would make deploying large numbers of wind turbines a poor choice. A dozen 100 acre nuclear plants would produce the same power as many hundreds of wind turbines...the largest of which do take up considerable space around them, it's not just a footprint.
I'm not sure what the metric is exactly, but it has to do with something like, megawatt-hours-produced-per-acre. This measurement is used when discussing power production by some engineering geeks somewhere...sorry, just trying to point the discussion down a path quickly here and not really set it up too much. :-)
In short, as cool as we all would like wind power generation to be, it just falls way too short in the aforemention critical statistic. If you've seen the wind farm outside of San Fran, you know how big they can get. The nuke plant between SD & LA (iirc) is but a postage stamp compared to that windfarm and it probably has about twice the power output.
Wind is not population density friendly. At some point, land costs wipe out any efficiencies.
Go see the ATLAS detector. The detectors are one of the coolest parts at Fermi's accelerator imho.
Symantec has already lost me as a customer. I began shifting my clients away from it as soon as the new spybot 1.5 released. It has a modicum of registry protection and it generally isnt a crapshoot as to whether or not its going to brick the computer its installed on...brick may be a strong term, but Norton/Symantec's footprint is way too much for a client machine...and now they want to add more.
Yeah...ditch these people now. AV on the client is a scam. Effective management and AV at the chokepoints can often provide enough protection I've found.
What about the other orbital telescopes up there already? Chandra and Spitzer already do a lot of the science that Hubble was being used for, considering those platforms...and isn't their one more...does Hubble still make sense?
Are the advantages of having Hubble outside the atmosphere still worth the expense? I'd rather see NASA spending their money on Mars.
I thought I had heard that new ground-based telescope technology has largely made the benefits of the old Hubble obsolete. Does anyone know anything more specific on that?
Coffee...it gets you goin in the mornin...
This response isn't for subby, it's for the readers, I already know that subby is over-comfortable with facism.
We here in the United States have created a culture of butting our noses into everybody else's business. This busybody nation of ours just can't seem to keep its hands to itself. We see all this slippery slope bullshit everywhere...what if, what if, what if? Well, what if you just left it well enough alone and punish criminals rather than trying to punish *everyone* ahead of time.
Everyone has a "it's not my fault" complex going on here. Life sucks, so you someone...criminality happens, blame their boss, so you sue them too. You people have to learn to understand that life *does* in fact suck, and there's not a damned thing you can do about that. Suing somebody, changing the rules to big brother supreme is NOT going to change that. It's not your fault, it's not their fault, it just is.
So do everyone a favour, and just knock this crap off right now. We've lived many, many decades in a modern society where behavior like this was not only not tolerated, but not necessary. Why is it necessary now? The interwebs? I call shenanigans.
When the revolution comes busybodies...it's not coming for the government...it's coming for you. Subby, YOU and all the other people here that agree with you have done your best to turn this into the Fascist States of America. Americans dying in Iraq for your "freedom" is truly tragic, because you're just not worth it.
I recently purchased an Illy ESE espresso machine. I'm in love. The thing is ridiculously expensive, but it almost beats my dishwasher as my favorite kitchen appliance. One can use the ESE pods (easy serving espresso) which are individually packaged in a CO2 atmosphere, or espresso ground beans...either way. I really like the pods as there is so little mess to deal with, I'm not cleaning up coffee grounds ever, and even the loose ground coffee comes out of the machine as a semi-hardened puck, making removal very easy.
The most beautiful thing about this machine is that it warms up in 30 seconds. 90 seconds after I touch the machine in the morning I'm drinking a fresh hot cup of espresso or if I feel like something lighter, the machine can make hot water for an americano. You *can* make regular coffee, one cup at a time with it as well. I also love it for that very reason...I love coffee, but I don't drink it quickly. Having a fresh cup, every time, has been a joy.
What if you live on Saturn? Drive-by might be your only option.
This might be a great way to test a real world system where one can only get updates from the overmind once a day or so. i.e. if you lived on Jupiter...or further. Say that big hexagon on Saturn is really an eons old structure built by non-humans...everybody and their grandmother is going to want to go up there and check it out. They're still going to want their email...
I'm a small business IT consultant and I once could label myself as a Microsoft hater. Not anymore. XP, for me, is just light years ahead of 2000...not only in stability but in features. Just think of having XWindows capabilities...remote terminal access...almost a necessity when you're trying to support a dozen different offices. From that standpoint alone, and organization could save tons of cash a year in not having to provide on site support for 100% of problems.
Add on the built in Windows Firewall, which certainly helps the less-able users keep their computers free of junk, and I'd say there's a very compelling reason to switch to XP.
Oh, yeah...and it's a TON faster. I know the Linux crowd won't be all that impressed...but I don't remember ever seeing any XP machine that takes 5 minutes to boot. Any 2000 machine that's been online for a year does that...(not really...but 2000 booting time is horrible).
About 90% of my graduating class would be lost after the first few paragraphs...
Considering that Dems have been traditionally socialist-ish and Repbs have traditionally been, well, I'll not say progressive, but certainly individualist. Dem socialist agenda fits the Alien hive mentality a lot more closely than does any Repb agenda.
BUT, considering that neither party is different from the other these days....Kerry talking about tax cuts, Dubya spending money willy nilly. Meh...f em both.