Explain to me the logic of posting a link about Sysadmin Appreciation Day that you know full well will cause the server to bog down. Is this some type of cruel joke?:P
And therein lies the problem. Sales taxes, because of their total fairness in percentage are completely unfair to the lower middle class and impoverished. Essentially, those classes end up paying a greater percentage of their income to taxation than do the wealthy, miring them in even more poverty. It would be a government supported step towards the old "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer" adage. A national sales tax would increase the ever growing disparity between the poor and the wealthy in this country, and that's why we don't have it (it's a political hot potato no politician wants to lay their hands on).
You raise an interesting point. But shouldn't the government seek to REDUCE taxes and the overall size of government than ask even greater demands from the so-called "wealthy". OK, you can stop laughing now.
I'm nowhere close to wealthy but I paid more in taxes this year than I took home when everything was said and done. Why am I a second class citizen because I applied myself? Perhaps I should get more representation in government since, well, afterall, I paid more into it. How fair is that?
Or should I be required to live my life according to a government prescribed plan, getting married and having children to lower my tax burden? That hardly seems right. Our current system of taxation encourages the lower middle class and impoverished to reproduce. This can only exacerbate the problem as these lower classes work the system to perpetually receive income from the federal and state governments.
And you call this system "more fair". The redistribution of wealth in this country will eventually spell it's collapse. Mark my words.
Ok, look. I'm paying at least half and probably closer to 70% of my income in taxes already.
There's the federal income tax, state income tax, state sales tax, and local property tax. There are gasoline taxes (thanks Clinton), sin taxes, water taxes, federal/state telephone excise taxes, car taxes, road taxes, marriage taxes (ok, i'm not married but), death taxes (and I'm not dead yet), and social security (ok, it's a stretch but..).
Now, I'm probably leaving out a few taxes already. Then we get people who bitch and whine and moan about no Internet taxation being somehow unfair. Well, you know what? I think ALL THE EXISTING TAXES ARE UNFAIR!
Come on. I'm a single white male. I don't ask much of my government. I don't even mind helping out the less fortunate to a point. But I don't like billions of dollars, some of which I had to contribute, going for handouts or military assistance to foreigners. I don't like the increasing amount of bureaucracy and outright Unamericanism (ok, maybe it's not a word) infesting nearly every level of our local, state, and federal government.
It seems that the more money we give to these people, the fewer freedoms we have and the more money they want. Don't pay the piper and you go to jail. What kind of land of the free, home of the brave is that?
So sit back and play armchair treasurer with our nickels and dimes. Soon, there'll be little or nothing left to tax. What then? Pay what you can becomes give us all your money and we'll let you be our slave. Where's the incentive to work and try to get ahead? Hell, our government is spending more per prisoner than I make in a year.
So, how about a compromise? Repeal the federal income tax and create a national sales tax that also applies to Internet items for transactions within the United States. And use the existing mechanism for mail-order products for state taxes (check here if you are in suchandsuch state to add 3.9% sales tax, whatever).
The money powers prey upon the nation in times of peace and conspire against it in times of adversity.It is more despotic than a monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, (and) more selfish than bureaucracy. It denounces, as public enemies, all who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes. I have two great enemies, the Southern Army in front of me and the bankers in the rear. Of the two, the one at my rear is my greatest foe...corporations have been enthroned, and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in the hands of a few, and the Republic is destroyed.
I saw what the merchant claimed was an "Austrian" enigma machine. It looked nearly identical to the pictures with 3 rotors and something like ciphermachine written on it (in German).
It was in excellent condition but the man wanted $7,000 for it. After searching my pockets, I decided to buy a 1938 austrian "zippo-style" lighter with an iron cross instead.
Anyway, this was probably six months ago but I have the guy's card still if anyone's interested.
Hrmph. I've seen the pre0.3 code and I'm sure 0.4 is similar.
There have been source releases but I think people were so appalled by the code that they ran away screaming. Why wasn't there a push then to start some project to rewrite portions of *that* code?
I say we just stop idolizing Rob and his code. His attitude is extremely poor and any work done off his codebase will just inflate his ego that much more. I can't picture him becoming a "benevolent" dictator in any project relating to his code.
So, we just start our own mod_perl based project with similar goals. We'll modularize everything so you can use a few or as many features as you want and drop it into any site.
I just happened to visit Fry's Electronics last night and on my way to get some memory, I saw the Linux tins. It was $50 but I bought it anyway.
Fry's (in Tempe, AZ) has a whole rack at the end of an aisle filled with the Linux version. I didn't see any missing when I took one.:/
Forget vaccuming.. how about mowing the lawn?
on
Cool Personal Robots
·
· Score: 2
I've wanted to build something to mow the lawn. It's not like I have a big yard in Arizona. It takes all of about 5 minutes to mow. But that requires the following sequence of events:
Step away from the computer!
Put jeans on (flying rocks and shrapnel from soda cans tend to hurt otherwise)
Put gasoline in mower
Check oil
Pull the string to start the engine
Pull it again fifty times until it starts
Find surplus Israeli military gas mask to avoid early death due to the smoke emitted from poorly maintained two-stroke engine. Also helps avoid smelling that ungodly ester coumarin!
Sweat. It's 120 degrees in the summer in Arizona. Need I say more?
Physical Exertion. Baaad.
Put everything away
Sleep to recover from exhaustion.
So, science fiction aside, anyone want to work on building a robot lawn mower?:)
The beautiful thing is they use the WAFL filesystem so you can expand your array when you need to without adding big sets of drives.
Granted, I don't have one but I've submitted the proposals and am waiting on financing. The F720 scales to 464GB, is network attached, has journaling (rad), and can benefit your WHOLE network.
Of course, you have to use NFS or SMB though. I've heard they start as low as $17k but usually $30-40k with a bunch of drives but it's difficult to find general prices without hearing the sales pitch.
This paper discusses testing the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center performed while evaluating the NetApp filers. It's geared toward Usenet news but if it can handle that, it can surely handle your mail situation.
Does anyone here have first hand experience good or bad with NetApp Filers? And some word on the pricing?
Wouldn't this technology (slow/speedup?) the Earth's rotation in time?
I mean, I understand that near equatorial conventional launches do the same thing and that maybe the atmospheric effects of burning tons of fuel isn't all that great but changing the Earth's rotational speed would cause some pretty drastic weather and climate changes, right?
So, I guess I'm wondering if this is more, less, or equally harmful to the Earth? If it's less, do we make them start using the technology in the opposite direction to offset the changes?
Ok, so if they shoot a slug at a reentry vehicle containing a warhead and atomize it in space, has there been any discussion about using this device to ward off a stray comet, meteor, or asteroid that could cause significant damage to the Earth?
It seems that this system may serve a dual purpose, at least over North America.
That is if the spacebound oil drillers don't blow up the asteroid first.:)
1) The threat of nuclear war sucks. I think we both agree on this.
2) Russia doesn't look too fondly on this since we have a treaty that prohibits us from developing an anti-ballistic missile program. They like the freedoms their retaliatory capability provides them. Russia, however, has a limited ABM system using nuclear warheads to protect Moscow (their command and control?).
3) The projected cost of the development of this system is $10.5 billion dollars. That's an awfully generous gift to an organization with whom we don't always agree (even though we can agree that a nuclear war would be very bad). While the United Nations may seek to promote peace, the only way it can enforce this is through eventual usurpation of the sovereign powers of our nation.
4) This system won't prevent an all-out nuclear strike (or at least that's what we are being told). This may be the spin to avoid pissing off the Russians while we bring the system online. Regardless, this system only protects us against intercontinental exoatmospheric missiles. "Backpack" nukes and missiles designed to stay in the atmosphere (nuclear cruise missiles?) won't be affected by this system. Maybe the thinking is that third-world "rogue" nations aren't quite there wrt cruise missiles and even if they are, these missiles are vulnerable to conventional munitions.
5) Conventional bombs will continue to kill far more people than nuclear weapons, IMHO.
It seems to me that religion is just a way to explain things that science could not. This was especially true 2000 years ago. There's a reason the church hated Galileo.
Religion versus science debates really irk me. Both are talking about the same things just from different perspectives. Religious folks tend to personify science.
I think it was Einstein who said something like his work allowed him to see into the mind of God. It's simply easier for us humans to personify science and nature.
"The situation is one our country has never experienced," he told a news conference after an emergency meeting of the government, called by Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi who set up an emergency task force.
Hrm, Fat Man and Little Boy? Times sure have changed. Now they're nuking themselves.
I used php since version 2.0 and liked it very much. It's extremely simple to write in and for the most part gets the job done.
Session management wasn't really addressed with PHP3. There are some libraries/classes out there that do it and I've used phplib internally in our organization and it has worked quite well.
I've recently switched completely away from php3 in favor of mod_perl. I write most non-web based applications in perl and found myself banging my head on the regular expressions and lack of libraries with php3. Why reinvent the wheel?
mod_perl can seem overwhelming at first. I've written a web-based mail application using Mail::Cclient and a bunch of other modules in the course of about 2-3 days of off and on programming. mod_perl doesn't come with session management built in but Apache::Session takes care of it.
I've settled finally on HTML::Mason. This is a very powerful way to write web-based applications and I highly recommend you check it out. Their home page is at http://www.masonhq.com/. The way the code is embedded in HTML is very similar to the way PHP3 does it with some powerful other features (dhandlers, ahandlers, etc.).
My biggest gripe about PHP3 is the lack of classes. There are a dozen sendmail.php3 classes and some other good stuff on the PHP3 code archives but with mod_perl, you capitalize on the entire CPAN with literally thousands of well-written and well-tested modules.
Anyway, that's my two cents. My experience with these have been with Linux only so YMMV with a non-UNIX platform.
> Maybe someday American's will elect > representatives who think agencies like NASA are > more important than making sure everyone can > have their own personal semi-automatic rifle and > direct the extra funding and resources > accordingly.
The government spends more money trying to make people *NOT* own firearms than they do protecting that fundamental tenet of the Constitution.
Now maybe if the government didn't have to spend millions of dollars looking into the abuses of power in the Executive branch, we could throw a couple tens of millions over at NASA. Not a lot, but every bit would help, eh?
Of course, government agencies tremendously overspend and NASA is no exception. The ballooning cost of the International Space Station is a prime example. Only the recent Deep Space projects have tried to reverse this problem.
Personally, I think life on Europa is kind of a geewhiz kind of thing. If there's life there, great. It doesn't do much for us though. We get the "we're not alone" thing settled or maybe not.
Wouldn't we be better off directing our resources at the crusty sphere we look at every night? You know, the moon that we abandoned twentysome years ago? It seems like the perfect stepping stone to deeper exploration. Of course, the tidal effects on the Earth of repeated lunar gravity assisted launches could be bad. Mars should be our prime target after that. Let's get the terraforming process started so if the environmental naysayers are right we have a place to go.
Hell, let's commercialize space as much as possible. It's the only way you or I are ever going to get the chance to go. Start mining some asteroids and setup a processing plant on the moon or something. Offer tours like you get at the Hoover Dam.
Deep space exploration is pretty cool. I'm a big fan of all the news that comes from it. But beyond the science of it, how does it help me? Not a whole lot, I'm sorry to say. Let's focus on some projects with achievable goals in the relatively near term.
Of course, if everyone voted Libertarian, we'd have a lot more resources to make this happen.
Who the hell sends porn through e-mail anyway? If they really want to catch abuse of company resources, scanning NNTP and HTTP access would be the place to look.
About the only thing you're going to find in people's mailboxes is a bunch of pornographic spam that they haven't deleted yet.
So who is to say they won't be able to reattach the nerves in 10-20 years? An application of nanotechnology (slashdot buzzword #1), perhaps?
I'm 22 years old. What if in twenty years I just donated some DNA, sperm, whatever they want to start a lobotomized clone (slashdot buzzword #2) of myself?
When I'm 64 (hrm, sounds like a beatles song) and my lungs and liver are giving out from years of smoking and drinking, just transplant my head to the clone and I'm all set.
Of course, no one has mentioned the problem of Alzheimer's disease or any of the other seemingly age-related dementia-type diseases. I understand that this is being pioneered to give paralyzed people a normal lifespan since their organs fail earlier but the life-extension option is definetly an option and shouldn't be dismissed.
Even if they couldn't reattach the nerves, some people may want to live paralyzed than die. After all, death is final.
Hell, why even reattach the body? Make some mech and put the head and some blood filtering device inside and use what muscle movements the head does have to control it. There are a lot of muscles in the face. Wasn't this the plot of some Robocop movie?
I work for a mid-sized ISP and we lost connectivity on Friday the 6th, periodically through the week, and Friday the 13th. As I write this, our frame-relay connectivity to UUNet (via MCI Worldcom) is down!
We'll survive it. We have a connection to another local provider (who uses UUNet as well but doesn't seem to be experiencing the same problems) and a PPP T1 link to AT&T. A simple route-map to prepend our AS to the UUNet BGP announcements and whala, AT&T handles most of the traffic.
As far as a secondary feed, I don't know what you're talking about. If you have a frame-relay circuit with MCI Worldcom, a secondary frame-relay circuit won't solve the problems. We'll expect compensation for violation of our service level agreement and CIR and be done with it.
This is a big deal. Someone will lose their job or face severe disciplinary action over it but they'll figure it out and things will be back to normal. Besides this, we've had *EXCELLENT* service for several years.
Slashdot Mirror
Explain to me the logic of posting a link about Sysadmin Appreciation Day that you know full well will cause the server to bog down. Is this some type of cruel joke? :P
Uhm, how the hell can you trademark coumarin the ester? We made this in high school chemistry class.
You raise an interesting point. But shouldn't the government seek to REDUCE taxes and the overall size of government than ask even greater demands from the so-called "wealthy". OK, you can stop laughing now.
I'm nowhere close to wealthy but I paid more in taxes this year than I took home when everything was said and done. Why am I a second class citizen because I applied myself? Perhaps I should get more representation in government since, well, afterall, I paid more into it. How fair is that?
Or should I be required to live my life according to a government prescribed plan, getting married and having children to lower my tax burden? That hardly seems right. Our current system of taxation encourages the lower middle class and impoverished to reproduce. This can only exacerbate the problem as these lower classes work the system to perpetually receive income from the federal and state governments.
And you call this system "more fair". The redistribution of wealth in this country will eventually spell it's collapse. Mark my words.
There's the federal income tax, state income tax, state sales tax, and local property tax. There are gasoline taxes (thanks Clinton), sin taxes, water taxes, federal/state telephone excise taxes, car taxes, road taxes, marriage taxes (ok, i'm not married but), death taxes (and I'm not dead yet), and social security (ok, it's a stretch but..).
Now, I'm probably leaving out a few taxes already. Then we get people who bitch and whine and moan about no Internet taxation being somehow unfair. Well, you know what? I think ALL THE EXISTING TAXES ARE UNFAIR!
Come on. I'm a single white male. I don't ask much of my government. I don't even mind helping out the less fortunate to a point. But I don't like billions of dollars, some of which I had to contribute, going for handouts or military assistance to foreigners. I don't like the increasing amount of bureaucracy and outright Unamericanism (ok, maybe it's not a word) infesting nearly every level of our local, state, and federal government.
It seems that the more money we give to these people, the fewer freedoms we have and the more money they want. Don't pay the piper and you go to jail. What kind of land of the free, home of the brave is that?
So sit back and play armchair treasurer with our nickels and dimes. Soon, there'll be little or nothing left to tax. What then? Pay what you can becomes give us all your money and we'll let you be our slave. Where's the incentive to work and try to get ahead? Hell, our government is spending more per prisoner than I make in a year.
So, how about a compromise? Repeal the federal income tax and create a national sales tax that also applies to Internet items for transactions within the United States. And use the existing mechanism for mail-order products for state taxes (check here if you are in suchandsuch state to add 3.9% sales tax, whatever).
Hrm,
I saw what the merchant claimed was an "Austrian" enigma machine. It looked nearly identical to the pictures with 3 rotors and something like ciphermachine written on it (in German).
It was in excellent condition but the man wanted $7,000 for it. After searching my pockets, I decided to buy a 1938 austrian "zippo-style" lighter with an iron cross instead.
Anyway, this was probably six months ago but I have the guy's card still if anyone's interested.
Synaptic
Tell me about it!
Yeah, that's it. Let's bombbard a federal government agency with paperwork.
Do you pay taxes? There's a surefire way to make them increase even more.
Dumbass.
Ehh, who'd want a Ford computer?
You know what they say:
Fix Or Repair Daily
Well, it seemed funny at first anyway. Laugh.
Hrmph. I've seen the pre0.3 code and I'm sure 0.4 is similar.
There have been source releases but I think people were so appalled by the code that they ran away screaming. Why wasn't there a push then to start some project to rewrite portions of *that* code?
I say we just stop idolizing Rob and his code. His attitude is extremely poor and any work done off his codebase will just inflate his ego that much more. I can't picture him becoming a "benevolent" dictator in any project relating to his code.
So, we just start our own mod_perl based project with similar goals. We'll modularize everything so you can use a few or as many features as you want and drop it into any site.
Heh, cool.
:/
I just happened to visit Fry's Electronics last night and on my way to get some memory, I saw the Linux tins. It was $50 but I bought it anyway.
Fry's (in Tempe, AZ) has a whole rack at the end of an aisle filled with the Linux version. I didn't see any missing when I took one.
I've wanted to build something to mow the lawn. It's not like I have a big yard in Arizona. It takes all of about 5 minutes to mow. But that requires the following sequence of events:
So, science fiction aside, anyone want to work on building a robot lawn mower? :)
This worked for me as well although I just happened upon it (didn't see anything in a few Deja.com searches).
Should I compile Mesa and use some lib optimized for my system? Will I see a performance increase doing this?
The Network Appliance Filers are really sexy.
The beautiful thing is they use the WAFL filesystem so you can expand your array when you need to without adding big sets of drives.
Granted, I don't have one but I've submitted the proposals and am waiting on financing. The F720 scales to 464GB, is network attached, has journaling (rad), and can benefit your WHOLE network.
Of course, you have to use NFS or SMB though. I've heard they start as low as $17k but usually $30-40k with a bunch of drives but it's difficult to find general prices without hearing the sales pitch.
This paper discusses testing the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center performed while evaluating the NetApp filers. It's geared toward Usenet news but if it can handle that, it can surely handle your mail situation.
Does anyone here have first hand experience good or bad with NetApp Filers? And some word on the pricing?
I've used VNC a little and afaik it just transmits the whole remote screen.
Does this thing do something different and display one window without all the win32 interface junk?
Wouldn't this technology (slow/speedup?) the Earth's rotation in time?
I mean, I understand that near equatorial conventional launches do the same thing and that maybe the atmospheric effects of burning tons of fuel isn't all that great but changing the Earth's rotational speed would cause some pretty drastic weather and climate changes, right?
So, I guess I'm wondering if this is more, less, or equally harmful to the Earth? If it's less, do we make them start using the technology in the opposite direction to offset the changes?
Hrm...
Information About Dot Pitch
.28 dp monitor?
http://www.csf.org.uk/csf/dot-pitch/ dotpit.htm
Monitor Specs
http://www.pioneerelectronics.com/ home/pdphd.htm
The page says the pixel (or dot) pitch is:
0.858 x 0.808 mm
So the pixels are what, three times bigger than a normal
Ok, so if they shoot a slug at a reentry vehicle containing a warhead and atomize it in space, has there been any discussion about using this device to ward off a stray comet, meteor, or asteroid that could cause significant damage to the Earth?
:)
It seems that this system may serve a dual purpose, at least over North America.
That is if the spacebound oil drillers don't blow up the asteroid first.
A couple of points:
1) The threat of nuclear war sucks. I think we both agree on this.
2) Russia doesn't look too fondly on this since we have a treaty that prohibits us from developing an anti-ballistic missile program. They like the freedoms their retaliatory capability provides them. Russia, however, has a limited ABM system using nuclear warheads to protect Moscow (their command and control?).
3) The projected cost of the development of this system is $10.5 billion dollars. That's an awfully generous gift to an organization with whom we don't always agree (even though we can agree that a nuclear war would be very bad). While the United Nations may seek to promote peace, the only way it can enforce this is through eventual usurpation of the sovereign powers of our nation.
4) This system won't prevent an all-out nuclear strike (or at least that's what we are being told). This may be the spin to avoid pissing off the Russians while we bring the system online. Regardless, this system only protects us against intercontinental exoatmospheric missiles. "Backpack" nukes and missiles designed to stay in the atmosphere (nuclear cruise missiles?) won't be affected by this system. Maybe the thinking is that third-world "rogue" nations aren't quite there wrt cruise missiles and even if they are, these missiles are vulnerable to conventional munitions.
5) Conventional bombs will continue to kill far more people than nuclear weapons, IMHO.
Synaptic
It seems to me that religion is just a way to explain things that science could not. This was especially true 2000 years ago. There's a reason the church hated Galileo.
Religion versus science debates really irk me. Both are talking about the same things just from different perspectives. Religious folks tend to personify science.
I think it was Einstein who said something like his work allowed him to see into the mind of God. It's simply easier for us humans to personify science and nature.
"The situation is one our country has never experienced," he told a news conference after an emergency meeting of the government, called by Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi who set up an emergency task force.
Hrm, Fat Man and Little Boy? Times sure have changed. Now they're nuking themselves.
I used php since version 2.0 and liked it very much. It's extremely simple to write in and for the most part gets the job done.
Session management wasn't really addressed with PHP3. There are some libraries/classes out there that do it and I've used phplib internally in our organization and it has worked quite well.
I've recently switched completely away from php3 in favor of mod_perl. I write most non-web based applications in perl and found myself banging my head on the regular expressions and lack of libraries with php3. Why reinvent the wheel?
mod_perl can seem overwhelming at first. I've written a web-based mail application using Mail::Cclient and a bunch of other modules in the course of about 2-3 days of off and on programming. mod_perl doesn't come with session management built in but Apache::Session takes care of it.
I've settled finally on HTML::Mason. This is a very powerful way to write web-based applications and I highly recommend you check it out. Their home page is at http://www.masonhq.com/. The way the code is embedded in HTML is very similar to the way PHP3 does it with some powerful other features (dhandlers, ahandlers, etc.).
My biggest gripe about PHP3 is the lack of classes. There are a dozen sendmail.php3 classes and some other good stuff on the PHP3 code archives but with mod_perl, you capitalize on the entire CPAN with literally thousands of well-written and well-tested modules.
Anyway, that's my two cents. My experience with these have been with Linux only so YMMV with a non-UNIX platform.
Synaptic
> Maybe someday American's will elect
> representatives who think agencies like NASA are
> more important than making sure everyone can
> have their own personal semi-automatic rifle and
> direct the extra funding and resources
> accordingly.
The government spends more money trying to make people *NOT* own firearms than they do protecting that fundamental tenet of the Constitution.
Now maybe if the government didn't have to spend millions of dollars looking into the abuses of power in the Executive branch, we could throw a couple tens of millions over at NASA. Not a lot, but every bit would help, eh?
Of course, government agencies tremendously overspend and NASA is no exception. The ballooning cost of the International Space Station is a prime example. Only the recent Deep Space projects have tried to reverse this problem.
Personally, I think life on Europa is kind of a geewhiz kind of thing. If there's life there, great. It doesn't do much for us though. We get the "we're not alone" thing settled or maybe not.
Wouldn't we be better off directing our resources at the crusty sphere we look at every night? You know, the moon that we abandoned twentysome years ago? It seems like the perfect stepping stone to deeper exploration. Of course, the tidal effects on the Earth of repeated lunar gravity assisted launches could be bad. Mars should be our prime target after that. Let's get the terraforming process started so if the environmental naysayers are right we have a place to go.
Hell, let's commercialize space as much as possible. It's the only way you or I are ever going to get the chance to go. Start mining some asteroids and setup a processing plant on the moon or something. Offer tours like you get at the Hoover Dam.
Deep space exploration is pretty cool. I'm a big fan of all the news that comes from it. But beyond the science of it, how does it help me? Not a whole lot, I'm sorry to say. Let's focus on some projects with achievable goals in the relatively near term.
Of course, if everyone voted Libertarian, we'd have a lot more resources to make this happen.
Who the hell sends porn through e-mail anyway? If they really want to catch abuse of company resources, scanning NNTP and HTTP access would be the place to look.
About the only thing you're going to find in people's mailboxes is a bunch of pornographic spam that they haven't deleted yet.
So who is to say they won't be able to reattach the nerves in 10-20 years? An application of nanotechnology (slashdot buzzword #1), perhaps?
I'm 22 years old. What if in twenty years I just donated some DNA, sperm, whatever they want to start a lobotomized clone (slashdot buzzword #2) of myself?
When I'm 64 (hrm, sounds like a beatles song) and my lungs and liver are giving out from years of smoking and drinking, just transplant my head to the clone and I'm all set.
Of course, no one has mentioned the problem of Alzheimer's disease or any of the other seemingly age-related dementia-type diseases. I understand that this is being pioneered to give paralyzed people a normal lifespan since their organs fail earlier but the life-extension option is definetly an option and shouldn't be dismissed.
Even if they couldn't reattach the nerves, some people may want to live paralyzed than die. After all, death is final.
Hell, why even reattach the body? Make some mech and put the head and some blood filtering device inside and use what muscle movements the head does have to control it. There are a lot of muscles in the face. Wasn't this the plot of some Robocop movie?
I work for a mid-sized ISP and we lost connectivity on Friday the 6th, periodically through the week, and Friday the 13th. As I write this, our frame-relay connectivity to UUNet (via MCI Worldcom) is down!
We'll survive it. We have a connection to another local provider (who uses UUNet as well but doesn't seem to be experiencing the same problems) and a PPP T1 link to AT&T. A simple route-map to prepend our AS to the UUNet BGP announcements and whala, AT&T handles most of the traffic.
As far as a secondary feed, I don't know what you're talking about. If you have a frame-relay circuit with MCI Worldcom, a secondary frame-relay circuit won't solve the problems. We'll expect compensation for violation of our service level agreement and CIR and be done with it.
This is a big deal. Someone will lose their job or face severe disciplinary action over it but they'll figure it out and things will be back to normal. Besides this, we've had *EXCELLENT* service for several years.