It'll be interesting to see what kind of modifications they make to the course, either to add signage and other course markings, or to degrade what already exists to make it more challenging. I was particularly interested in finding out that they'll be using the section of the base (now the Southern California Logistics Airport) that the Army's been using for MOUT (military operations in urban terrain) training.
If the competitors aren't careful, there might be some new wrecks to add to scenario training...
Also, by law, under the Virgina right to carry statute, concealed carry permits do not apply in most universities and colleges (as well as to a whole laundry list of other areas):
So even if there were people who had permits for concealed carry, if they were on campus at the time, it's likely that they would not have been armed, for fear of arrest and prosecution.
Sound like what happened to the Beta brand in the industrial market after consumers rejected it in favor of VHS...
It's also what happened to the MiniDisc recording system (found a home in portable professional recording), and although we can't completely blame Sony for what happened to DAT, consumers preferred the cheaper and inferior cassette tape to the wonderous but overly expensive and DRM encumbered digital audio tape (which was the de-facto standard for professional portable recording until solid state and hard drive based recording came along.)
Sony just really likes the small part of the market, doesn't it?
In other words, after countless generations of "be fruitful and multiply", and numerous religious wars, most non-believers have either been removed or otherwise been bred out of the gene pool?
Uh bullshit. Let's say I'm merchant A, and I do everything by the book, and have never had a breach.
I can still get screwed if merchant B has a breach, as far back as a year ago, if I'm taking card not present transactions, and get stuck with an order from some punk who uses a stolen number.
Is it right that I get penalized for charges made and authorized by the issuing credit card company, due to no fault of my own?
A lot of people will say that's the cost of doing business. The problem is, that there is no incentive to fix anything broken with the system as far as protecting MERCHANTS from fraudulent transactions. Fact of the matter, there's no incentive to fix all the things broken with the system that make identity theft possible, since the people who would be most motivated to fix those things (credit card bureaus and the issuing companies) have moved all the cost to the merchants and merchant banks, and the have no control over the bureaus!
So I can't use a social networking site at a library... even to network for a JOB?
What about people (for example some small bands) who maintain their websites through services such as MySpace, because they can't get, afford, or know how to do the coding to set up a website of their own?
Or users of services like Facebook, where a school organization or club may be hosted mostly or entirely on the service, because the tools are extremely convenient to use and FREE? All of a sudden, those tools become off limits - neither club officers nor the members can communicate until an alternate (and probably more expensive) method is set up.
Someone is being paid way too much money to come up with these ridiculous bills.
Correction, in direct sunlight, backlit LCDs do not fare well - which means pretty much every color screen on the market.
My ancient transflective Palm LCD works just fine in sunlight, as did my old black & white PowerBook Duo.
There have also been past incidents where frats, having been banned from using alcohol in initiations (to prevent alcohol poisoning), switched to water, because "water is safe!"
There's a reason they tell you to eat and drink and the trail... and not just drink. If you want to get into the nitty-gritty of the mechanisms of water posioning, consider this:
1. Your nervous system uses electrical impulses 2. These electrical impulses rely on ions from such elements as Sodium (Na), Potassium (K), and Calcium 3. These electrical impulses regulate everything from brain function to the beating of your heart 4. Imbalance of ions due to excessive water consumption without some sort of accompanying salt (for example, a snack bar, or a bag of chips) disrupts your nervous system 5. Various organs shut down, or go unregulated 6. You die
Given that in many districts, the price of a successful re-election campaign runs into the millions of dollars, we'd have to pay them a hell of a lot to resist the odd hundred-thousand here, and the odd hundred-thousand there (in PAC/soft money contributions, of course).
I'd rather that for every amendment, or bill, each congresscritter give up a portion of their salary to fund that piece of legislation - the bigger the appropriation or earmark, the bigger the chunk that comes out of their salary. If the congresscritter makes enough in tips to break even, no harm done. If the congresscritter doesn't spend any money, no harm done. If the congressscritter goes broke, but wins the hearts of voters, they get to come back in and (theoretically) do good on behalf of voters - at the cost of their previous year's salary.
Of course, it will never happen. Not when the entire government treats the citizens like a never-ending piggybank...
UCLA actually had a separate student/employee ID. You'd use this number instead of social security.
Given this practice, it boggles the mind that there was a table left unguarded somewhere that had the actual SSNs. I'm thinking financial aid is the culprit here (since all the load papers demand your SSN). Either that, or admissions, since that would be pre-issuance of your UCLA ID.
My biggest annoyance is with people who park themselves behind me and engage cruise control, and then let their minds wander off. Whenever I have to slow down (LA traffic), they inevitabley find themselves panicking at about 1-2 feet from my bumper and slamming down on the brakes.
This is why I leave EXTRA room when I see this kind of situation (someone tailgating) in front of me, or change lanes completely to either pass the situation, or let the situation pass me.
The police were responding to a backup call by CSO's for someone who was asked to leave after normal hours in the library, but wasn't. The suspect was non-cooperative because "he did not want to participate in a case of racial profiling". Note that the his own lawyer states that the suspect went limp after officers refused to let him go (if you watch the video, he was screaming at them "GET YOUR HANDS OFF OF ME").
Also, please note that the taser was used in "Drive Stun" mode, to provoke pain, not to knock the suspect out, in order to achieve compliance. In years past that pain compliance would have meant a hammerlock, a baton to the solar plexus, getting slammed to the floor, or pepper spray. What officers should have probably done was zip-tie all of his limbs, call for backup, and cart him off like a trussed turkey, and let his ranting indict him (he WAS disrupting a computer lab after all, and probably would not have gotten much sympathy from people working on midterm papers). Instead they zapped him multiple times and gave him an audience... not bright.
So the story that everyone is getting worked up about isn't a student who got brutalized for not having his ID, but an asshole who provoked the cops to become a cause célèbre, and the cops who played right into his hands. And to think my tax money is going to have to be spent on this thing if it ever goes to trial. Bah!
I never claimed that being a minority is permanent. That's the nice thing about mob rule, it's quite democratic.
However, that doesn't invalidate the idea that a pure democracy will act in the interests of the majority, because that's what the definition of a democracy is (although the definition of who the voting majority may vary.) If 51% of voters in a system designed around a simple majority decided that it was better to spend tax dollars on fudge ice-cream for everyone, than to build an intercontinental highway system, the government would spend tax dollars on fudge ice-cream, the 49% who wanted an intercontinental highway system be dammned.
The United States, for example, is not a pure democracy, given that we have a republican (as in we vote for representatives instead of directly voting on laws, for the most part) federation with constitutional limits. The system of checks and balances (the division of power into three branches of government, a constitution, requirement of supermajority to amend said constitiution, etc.) was designed so that abuses could be minimized.
Mind you, I'm not against self-determination. But there's a reason that few governments in history larger than say, a city-state, have used pure democracies (although, most of them have to do with being more efficient time and money-wise.) It would be an interesting experiment to implement a true democracy, now that we have the technical capability for people to actually cast their own votes on every single piece of legislation. Would we get mob rule? Or would we get more thoughtful voters?
Governments are the collective will of the people? What the hell have you been smoking?
Dictatorships are the collective will of one person. But they're still a government. Oligopolies, either through social or economic classism are the collective will of those in power. But they're still a government. Democracies are the collective will of the majority (see tyranny of the majority). If you're in the minority, your will isn't represented. Tough luck.
And, even if the government is the collective will of the people in one area, unless you have world government, they can still take actions that benefit them at the cost of everyone else.
And finally, you gave the example of the Tragedy of the Commons for why private ownership fails to preserve land better than public ownership. I'm sorry, but I don't think you understand what the Tragedy of the Commons is supposed to illustrate at all.
From the link you provided to wikipedia:
"The paradigm example is the use by individuals of communally owned land for the grazing of animals owned privately by those individuals."
What you said:
"I personally get net ahead by abusing my piece of the commons."
If it's your piece, then it's no longer common, is it? Unless you subscribe to communism, in which case it was never your piece to begin with.
Going back to the original argument, the idea behind private ownership of land is that any party can own the land, and use it however they wish. If they want to stripmine it, that's within the boundaries of ownership. However, nothing stops organizations whose sole purpose is to conserve land (ie, Sierra Club and the like) from purchasing the land, and keeping it in its original state (or restoring it, if it's been altered.)
Contrast this to governmental control, where if enough wealthy (and suitably short-sighted) land developers gain influence over government, they can do things like allow logging, mining, oil extraction, as well as pipeline and road construction, since it's "public land".
As far as Tragedy of the Commons, If you're going to advocate communism/socialism/collectivism, you're going to want to use an argument that doesn't exist to shoot down the concept of collective ownership...
Mechanical Turk was work. This is actually fun, if you get a decent partner, and the images are loading at an acceptable rate. The problem though (this may be good or bad) is that to get a match, you try the lowest common denominator terms first, or at least that's how it seems my partner was trying. Thus instead of Google Wallet, you get wallet, instead of Nascar, you get car, etc.
I'm sure they must be keeping track of the terms entered though, to see if they can average approximations between different sessions for terms that didn't match then, but were entered multiple times by different people.
I'm guessing that it's more complex to set up an animal-supporting artificial biosphere in space than one to support humans.
The flip side of this is that if we're able to build a bullet-proof biosphere, then we can take earth wherever we go. Power up a couple of fission (hopefully one day fusion) reactors, grab a huge ice asteroid for reaction mass, and take a tour of the universe. Hell, if we have enough reaction mass, we could accelerate at 1G, torch-ship style, flip the ship over and deccelerate at 1G.
If every pixel on the screen had its own lens that could throw the focus such that you'd have to focus either closer or farther, you could use the z-axis parameter in 3-d games (Half-life 2, for example) to render objects with different screen focus levels. It still wouldn't solve the problem of 3d, since both eyes would still perceive the same information - so there wouldn't be the overlap in view you would normally get from observing a real object, however you would get focal depth information.
What might be interesting is pairing this technology with 3D-goggles so you can finally combine the focus depth information with the overlap of two screens, for training applications.
"The Pentagon's pursuit of network-centric warfare began in the info-tech boom of the 1990s--largely influenced by, of all things, Wal-Mart."
You do realize that it's WalMart's logistical and networking infrastructure which has made as unstoppable and large as it is today, right? Remember, when WalMart started, it was nothing more than a bigger, less fancy, five and dime store, completely beneath the notice of the giants of the time - Sears and K-Mart. Today, WalMart dominates the landscape, and Sears/K-Mart are also-rans. And yet, Sam Walton managed to go from one little store in Bentonville, AR to leader of the US retailing indstry - selling pretty much the exact same items as Sears/K-Mart.
Everybody learns from WalMart. Why should the government be an exception?
I was quite content filtering with SA until the most recent dictionary attack run (which is still in progress). Overnight, they started sending thousands of messages through a distributed bot network, and SA was eating up serious resources as a result. I ended having to dedicate half my weekend to reworking my filters to bounce known dictionary attack e-mails (of which there are currently 4500) so that they wouldn't hit SA - and this is an incomplete solution. Really, what I need is something to stop them at the SMTP level - someone suggested mailavenger , but since I'm not running my own box for mail, that would be a bit hard to implement.
At this point, I'm filtering using a.redirect file, procmail, SA, and pine. Pine feeds the unknown e-mails to a folder for review and extraction to fine-tune the.redirect file. procmail filters out the worms. SA does a hell of a job defending against regular spam (of which I get about 300-400 a day).
No, I wouldn't shed a tear if every spammer in the world was rounded up and sent to Gitmo. Well, maybe tears of joy...
Horsepower isn't really an issue. Electric motors are capable of generating large amounts of torque - enough to rip the motor loose of the mounting if you're willing to give it enough amperage (do a google search on EV drag racing - no shortage of smoking tires there.) The issue is battery life. You load the motor that heavily, and you will lose a lot of energy through resistance losses, thereby depleting your driving range.
So to answer your question, haul away, but be prepared to sacrifice range for pulling capacity.
No. X.com was a banking service that was later merged with Paypal. Paypal existed for processing payments before X.com was absorbed. I know this because I had accounts with both, and after X.com was taken over, they killed off the checking services.
I was rather pissed that Paypal dropped the beamable cash idea (I chose not to pursue the same line of business for my startup at the time because they already had one up and running), so I'm glad they're finally putting those patents to use.
So what you really want is something that will secure erase the data you want to get rid of, put a bunch of random files on, optimize the drive to eliminate gaps, then "normal erase" the random files so that you do have gaps, but they have data in them.
Hmmm. Sounds like a damn nifty idea to me!
I mean, if you really wanted to be through about this, you'd image the laptop the moment it came into your posession and put the contents on a replacement drive, remove the old hard drive and put it aside. When you turn it in, put the old hard drive back in.
Slashdot Mirror
It'll be interesting to see what kind of modifications they make to the course, either to add signage and other course markings, or to degrade what already exists to make it more challenging. I was particularly interested in finding out that they'll be using the section of the base (now the Southern California Logistics Airport) that the Army's been using for MOUT (military operations in urban terrain) training.
If the competitors aren't careful, there might be some new wrecks to add to scenario training...
Also, by law, under the Virgina right to carry statute, concealed carry permits do not apply in most universities and colleges (as well as to a whole laundry list of other areas):
p roduct_id=771
http://www.vacle.org/php-bin/ecomm4/products.php?
Chapter 2, Section V, item L
So even if there were people who had permits for concealed carry, if they were on campus at the time, it's likely that they would not have been armed, for fear of arrest and prosecution.
Sound like what happened to the Beta brand in the industrial market after consumers rejected it in favor of VHS...
It's also what happened to the MiniDisc recording system (found a home in portable professional recording), and although we can't completely blame Sony for what happened to DAT, consumers preferred the cheaper and inferior cassette tape to the wonderous but overly expensive and DRM encumbered digital audio tape (which was the de-facto standard for professional portable recording until solid state and hard drive based recording came along.)
Sony just really likes the small part of the market, doesn't it?
In other words, after countless generations of "be fruitful and multiply", and numerous religious wars, most non-believers have either been removed or otherwise been bred out of the gene pool?
Uh bullshit. Let's say I'm merchant A, and I do everything by the book, and have never had a breach.
I can still get screwed if merchant B has a breach, as far back as a year ago, if I'm taking card not present transactions, and get stuck with an order from some punk who uses a stolen number.
Is it right that I get penalized for charges made and authorized by the issuing credit card company, due to no fault of my own?
A lot of people will say that's the cost of doing business. The problem is, that there is no incentive to fix anything broken with the system as far as protecting MERCHANTS from fraudulent transactions. Fact of the matter, there's no incentive to fix all the things broken with the system that make identity theft possible, since the people who would be most motivated to fix those things (credit card bureaus and the issuing companies) have moved all the cost to the merchants and merchant banks, and the have no control over the bureaus!
So I can't use a social networking site at a library... even to network for a JOB?
What about people (for example some small bands) who maintain their websites through services such as MySpace, because they can't get, afford, or know how to do the coding to set up a website of their own?
Or users of services like Facebook, where a school organization or club may be hosted mostly or entirely on the service, because the tools are extremely convenient to use and FREE? All of a sudden, those tools become off limits - neither club officers nor the members can communicate until an alternate (and probably more expensive) method is set up.
Someone is being paid way too much money to come up with these ridiculous bills.
Correction, in direct sunlight, backlit LCDs do not fare well - which means pretty much every color screen on the market. My ancient transflective Palm LCD works just fine in sunlight, as did my old black & white PowerBook Duo.
In my day, all you needed was a 228 and a TMP for backup. How the world has changed...
Google hyponatremia.
l (short version)/ a/2005/02/04/BAGNSB576121.DTL (longer article)
m
http://geo-outdoors.info/hyponatremia.htm
There have also been past incidents where frats, having been banned from using alcohol in initiations (to prevent alcohol poisoning), switched to water, because "water is safe!"
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,146359,00.htm
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c
http://www.mashinc.org/resources-essay-water.html (another frat initiation using water that resulted in death)
There's a reason they tell you to eat and drink and the trail... and not just drink. If you want to get into the nitty-gritty of the mechanisms of water posioning, consider this:
1. Your nervous system uses electrical impulses
2. These electrical impulses rely on ions from such elements as Sodium (Na), Potassium (K), and Calcium
3. These electrical impulses regulate everything from brain function to the beating of your heart
4. Imbalance of ions due to excessive water consumption without some sort of accompanying salt (for example, a snack bar, or a bag of chips) disrupts your nervous system
5. Various organs shut down, or go unregulated
6. You die
See: http://www.people.eku.edu/ritchisong/301notes2.ht
Given that in many districts, the price of a successful re-election campaign runs into the millions of dollars, we'd have to pay them a hell of a lot to resist the odd hundred-thousand here, and the odd hundred-thousand there (in PAC/soft money contributions, of course).
I'd rather that for every amendment, or bill, each congresscritter give up a portion of their salary to fund that piece of legislation - the bigger the appropriation or earmark, the bigger the chunk that comes out of their salary. If the congresscritter makes enough in tips to break even, no harm done. If the congresscritter doesn't spend any money, no harm done. If the congressscritter goes broke, but wins the hearts of voters, they get to come back in and (theoretically) do good on behalf of voters - at the cost of their previous year's salary.
Of course, it will never happen. Not when the entire government treats the citizens like a never-ending piggybank...
UCLA actually had a separate student/employee ID. You'd use this number instead of social security.
Given this practice, it boggles the mind that there was a table left unguarded somewhere that had the actual SSNs. I'm thinking financial aid is the culprit here (since all the load papers demand your SSN). Either that, or admissions, since that would be pre-issuance of your UCLA ID.
My biggest annoyance is with people who park themselves behind me and engage cruise control, and then let their minds wander off. Whenever I have to slow down (LA traffic), they inevitabley find themselves panicking at about 1-2 feet from my bumper and slamming down on the brakes. This is why I leave EXTRA room when I see this kind of situation (someone tailgating) in front of me, or change lanes completely to either pass the situation, or let the situation pass me.
Read this article before passing judgement:
http://dailybruin.com/news/articles.asp?ID=39026
The police were responding to a backup call by CSO's for someone who was asked to leave after normal hours in the library, but wasn't. The suspect was non-cooperative because "he did not want to participate in a case of racial profiling". Note that the his own lawyer states that the suspect went limp after officers refused to let him go (if you watch the video, he was screaming at them "GET YOUR HANDS OFF OF ME").
Also, please note that the taser was used in "Drive Stun" mode, to provoke pain, not to knock the suspect out, in order to achieve compliance. In years past that pain compliance would have meant a hammerlock, a baton to the solar plexus, getting slammed to the floor, or pepper spray. What officers should have probably done was zip-tie all of his limbs, call for backup, and cart him off like a trussed turkey, and let his ranting indict him (he WAS disrupting a computer lab after all, and probably would not have gotten much sympathy from people working on midterm papers). Instead they zapped him multiple times and gave him an audience... not bright.
So the story that everyone is getting worked up about isn't a student who got brutalized for not having his ID, but an asshole who provoked the cops to become a cause célèbre, and the cops who played right into his hands. And to think my tax money is going to have to be spent on this thing if it ever goes to trial. Bah!
I never claimed that being a minority is permanent. That's the nice thing about mob rule, it's quite democratic.
However, that doesn't invalidate the idea that a pure democracy will act in the interests of the majority, because that's what the definition of a democracy is (although the definition of who the voting majority may vary.) If 51% of voters in a system designed around a simple majority decided that it was better to spend tax dollars on fudge ice-cream for everyone, than to build an intercontinental highway system, the government would spend tax dollars on fudge ice-cream, the 49% who wanted an intercontinental highway system be dammned.
The United States, for example, is not a pure democracy, given that we have a republican (as in we vote for representatives instead of directly voting on laws, for the most part) federation with constitutional limits. The system of checks and balances (the division of power into three branches of government, a constitution, requirement of supermajority to amend said constitiution, etc.) was designed so that abuses could be minimized.
Mind you, I'm not against self-determination. But there's a reason that few governments in history larger than say, a city-state, have used pure democracies (although, most of them have to do with being more efficient time and money-wise.) It would be an interesting experiment to implement a true democracy, now that we have the technical capability for people to actually cast their own votes on every single piece of legislation. Would we get mob rule? Or would we get more thoughtful voters?
Governments are the collective will of the people? What the hell have you been smoking?
Dictatorships are the collective will of one person. But they're still a government.
Oligopolies, either through social or economic classism are the collective will of those in power. But they're still a government.
Democracies are the collective will of the majority (see tyranny of the majority). If you're in the minority, your will isn't represented. Tough luck.
And, even if the government is the collective will of the people in one area, unless you have world government, they can still take actions that benefit them at the cost of everyone else.
And finally, you gave the example of the Tragedy of the Commons for why private ownership fails to preserve land better than public ownership. I'm sorry, but I don't think you understand what the Tragedy of the Commons is supposed to illustrate at all.
From the link you provided to wikipedia:
"The paradigm example is the use by individuals of communally owned land for the grazing of animals owned privately by those individuals."
What you said:
"I personally get net ahead by abusing my piece of the commons."
If it's your piece, then it's no longer common, is it? Unless you subscribe to communism, in which case it was never your piece to begin with.
Going back to the original argument, the idea behind private ownership of land is that any party can own the land, and use it however they wish. If they want to stripmine it, that's within the boundaries of ownership. However, nothing stops organizations whose sole purpose is to conserve land (ie, Sierra Club and the like) from purchasing the land, and keeping it in its original state (or restoring it, if it's been altered.)
Contrast this to governmental control, where if enough wealthy (and suitably short-sighted) land developers gain influence over government, they can do things like allow logging, mining, oil extraction, as well as pipeline and road construction, since it's "public land".
As far as Tragedy of the Commons, If you're going to advocate communism/socialism/collectivism, you're going to want to use an argument that doesn't exist to shoot down the concept of collective ownership...
I recently started bouncing all the spam my filters can detect to a GMail account. After 1 week of operation, here's what GMail is reporting:
"You are currently using 839 MB (30%) of your 2776 MB."
Is it just me, or does the patent drawing for this device look suspiciously like the probe from homeworld?
Mechanical Turk was work. This is actually fun, if you get a decent partner, and the images are loading at an acceptable rate. The problem though (this may be good or bad) is that to get a match, you try the lowest common denominator terms first, or at least that's how it seems my partner was trying. Thus instead of Google Wallet, you get wallet, instead of Nascar, you get car, etc.
I'm sure they must be keeping track of the terms entered though, to see if they can average approximations between different sessions for terms that didn't match then, but were entered multiple times by different people.
I'm guessing that it's more complex to set up an animal-supporting artificial biosphere in space than one to support humans.
The flip side of this is that if we're able to build a bullet-proof biosphere, then we can take earth wherever we go. Power up a couple of fission (hopefully one day fusion) reactors, grab a huge ice asteroid for reaction mass, and take a tour of the universe. Hell, if we have enough reaction mass, we could accelerate at 1G, torch-ship style, flip the ship over and deccelerate at 1G.
Who needs a planet?
If every pixel on the screen had its own lens that could throw the focus such that you'd have to focus either closer or farther, you could use the z-axis parameter in 3-d games (Half-life 2, for example) to render objects with different screen focus levels. It still wouldn't solve the problem of 3d, since both eyes would still perceive the same information - so there wouldn't be the overlap in view you would normally get from observing a real object, however you would get focal depth information.
What might be interesting is pairing this technology with 3D-goggles so you can finally combine the focus depth information with the overlap of two screens, for training applications.
"The Pentagon's pursuit of network-centric warfare began in the info-tech boom of the 1990s--largely influenced by, of all things, Wal-Mart."
You do realize that it's WalMart's logistical and networking infrastructure which has made as unstoppable and large as it is today, right? Remember, when WalMart started, it was nothing more than a bigger, less fancy, five and dime store, completely beneath the notice of the giants of the time - Sears and K-Mart. Today, WalMart dominates the landscape, and Sears/K-Mart are also-rans. And yet, Sam Walton managed to go from one little store in Bentonville, AR to leader of the US retailing indstry - selling pretty much the exact same items as Sears/K-Mart.
Everybody learns from WalMart. Why should the government be an exception?
I was quite content filtering with SA until the most recent dictionary attack run (which is still in progress). Overnight, they started sending thousands of messages through a distributed bot network, and SA was eating up serious resources as a result. I ended having to dedicate half my weekend to reworking my filters to bounce known dictionary attack e-mails (of which there are currently 4500) so that they wouldn't hit SA - and this is an incomplete solution. Really, what I need is something to stop them at the SMTP level - someone suggested mailavenger , but since I'm not running my own box for mail, that would be a bit hard to implement.
.redirect file, procmail, SA, and pine. Pine feeds the unknown e-mails to a folder for review and extraction to fine-tune the .redirect file. procmail filters out the worms. SA does a hell of a job defending against regular spam (of which I get about 300-400 a day).
At this point, I'm filtering using a
No, I wouldn't shed a tear if every spammer in the world was rounded up and sent to Gitmo. Well, maybe tears of joy...
Horsepower isn't really an issue. Electric motors are capable of generating large amounts of torque - enough to rip the motor loose of the mounting if you're willing to give it enough amperage (do a google search on EV drag racing - no shortage of smoking tires there.) The issue is battery life. You load the motor that heavily, and you will lose a lot of energy through resistance losses, thereby depleting your driving range.
So to answer your question, haul away, but be prepared to sacrifice range for pulling capacity.
Before it was "paypal" wasn't it X.com?
No. X.com was a banking service that was later merged with Paypal. Paypal existed for processing payments before X.com was absorbed. I know this because I had accounts with both, and after X.com was taken over, they killed off the checking services.
I was rather pissed that Paypal dropped the beamable cash idea (I chose not to pursue the same line of business for my startup at the time because they already had one up and running), so I'm glad they're finally putting those patents to use.
So what you really want is something that will secure erase the data you want to get rid of, put a bunch of random files on, optimize the drive to eliminate gaps, then "normal erase" the random files so that you do have gaps, but they have data in them.
Hmmm. Sounds like a damn nifty idea to me!
I mean, if you really wanted to be through about this, you'd image the laptop the moment it came into your posession and put the contents on a replacement drive, remove the old hard drive and put it aside. When you turn it in, put the old hard drive back in.
Then there's REALLY nothing to see.