Coding HTML and Working on cars doesn't span multiple skill sets? Heck I know most people can do one or the other, and if they can not very well.
Your examples are stuff that you really can't teach, most of it is left vs right brained. You can be smart, span multiple classifications and still not be able to do stuff from 'the other hemisphere'. I can code PHP, fix my cars, cook, sew, build stuff out of wood and still make living doing Simulink controls, but I couldn't play music, speak a foreign language or design a good looking website for the life of me. Does that mean I'm not smart?
Some of the things you mentioned are like asking if he's teaching his daughter to be extroverted, tall, and good looking.
Who let you have that typewriter? Who didn't freak out and put you in a walker because you were more mobile than they expected?
Your parents played a bigger role than you give them credit for, even if it was just by not treating you like most parents treat their kids. Not that their genes didn't help, but on the basis that they were smart (even if just in how to raise a kid) you turned out smart.
It's a vicious cycle. Dumb parents who can't raise kids or expect the schools to do it raise dumb kids, who become dumb parents who...
While I think genes had a big part I'm sure there's a reason that my grandma (With a masters degree) raised 3 doctors, 1 engineer, 1 nurse, 2 CPAs and two more college graduates. Who then went on to raise 4 engineers, 2 doctors, 1 pharmacist, 1 cpa, 1 film editor and 2 more high schoolers.
Problem with most kids is, who is going to be their teacher?
My parents did pass on most life skills to me: cooking, cleaning, leatherworking (Dad's hobby), writing a check (my mom would let me fill out her checks when I was young), sewing, etc. But most parents can't even do this right now. One weekend I went back home I heard that the Home Ec teacher's daughter was Paying people to do her laundry at college because she didn't know how.
There is a good deal I picked up on my own or in Boy Scouts. Auto repair is a huge one. My parents didn't touch cars, even for oil changes. It took me my first car and my first oil change to replacing turbos and heads.
I'm with you. I can't wait to be a parent because in my mind, I get to duplicate all my knowledge that took me years to compile to someone who can pick it up in a short time.
I hate to say it but look around you. Look at your peers. I'm not talking about slashdot. I'm talking about a majority of America (from what I've seen). Do they really care what their kids know? Heck I can think of a dozen kids that their parents didn't plan on them (in Highschool). These people don't even have the life skills themselves, some barely passed highschool (if they ever did). What are they supposed to pass on to their kids? Plus most think it's the school's job. Heck most think that parenting is the school's job.
IMHO most of it's come from treating kids like people that must be protected instead of little learning machines. I've spent a fair amount of time around kids (cousins) and nothing is more annoying than when adults talk to them like kids. I've held fairly decent conversations with 4-5 year olds and they full understand what I'm saying without a cute voice and broken English. 200 years ago these kids were helping to hunt and garden. Most people would flip a lid if you wanted to put a gun in a 5 year olds hands. I bet that if you took a 15 year old from 1850 and a 15 year old from 2007 and dropped them alone *in their own environment* the 1850er could probably find his own food, cook his own meal, etc. Unless it was made out of plastic the 15 year old probably wouldn't know how to use money. Unless there was a microwave I bet most wouldn't even know how to make food. I had a friend in college whose stay at home mom always did everything for her. She burned Macaroni, who knew you needed water. You can't just dump it in a pot and turn on the heat.
Except my daughters are going to learn PHP9 none of that HTML Fluff. But thanks again for being the parent you are and I only wish that we had more people like you out there. Proof again that we shouldn't need a license to drive, but a license to have kids.
No matter where you are in the world, you should have an idea of what a football field looks like. Whether American Football, Football (Soccer to us in the US), Rugby, Aussie Rules or Canadian Football these sports are played throughout the entire world and played on roughly the same sized field. It's an easy visual way of representing how big the kite is. Other things such as Libraries of Congress and VW Beetles may be more abstract and furthermore not every country has a library of congress or got the VW beetle. But I can't think of a nation in the world that doesn't play one of the aforementioned sports. Even shut ins and geeks should have walked by at least one in their life possibly at their High School.
I can see the joke if they said "American Football field" or something where people in other countries could relate. Or possibly if they gave the length in feet or centimeters (as for most estimates a yard is the same length as a meter). Unless you were just being facetious.
All this is going to do is have dating sites pull out of NJ. On the drop down menu of "Where do you live?" NJ will no longer appear. Maybe a message saying "Sorry. You live in NJ. We don't have the money to deal with this. You're SOL." This isn't going to protect anyone.
DeskSpace has a much flashier spinning-cube effect for the Apple 'wow' factor, as you can see from the manufacturer's screenshot above.
The thing that I like about most Apple 'wow' factors is they're non-intrusive. Flipping between screens I don't want a 1 second visualization. I do it constantly and it'd get annoying and in my way. When I switch users. I don't mind that extra second because I do it once and it's nice to show that I'm actually switching users.
Disk images in general are one of those hidden gems I've liked about the OS since back in the day.
Open Disk Utility (/Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app)
File > New > New Blank Disk Image
Make it as large as you want. Make sure you change disk format to "sparse image". Then select your level of encryption you want (128 or 256 AES). Then Create. Enter a password and UNCHECK "remember in keychain" unless you don't worry about losing your own laptop and just want the encryption for offsite.
rsync over ssh. My debian box is my 'file central'. It syncs everything from my laptop. And then uploads to dreamhost. So when I go out of town this weekend I'll probably kick off a big sync so all my pictures get updated.
Although you CAN do it (dreamhost supports webdav, or you could even use FUSE and sshfs) I like my laptop to be extremely portable and I don't like to think much about it backing up, so I sync it to the next fastest thing (my desktop) and then send the files from there.
I just have.dmg files in my Documents/ folder which gets backed up.
All 'important' documents are in an encrypted sparse image. Not only does it help for dreamhost, but if my laptop is stolen. I have OS X autolog me in and I don't have Vault setup for my home directory (over kill IMHO). But all my tax returns, etc are on a disk image with the password NOT saved in the key chain. If you can break that, then you probably can get funding other ways.
If you really want to see my grandma's chocolate chip cookie recipie or my 9th grade report on standard oil. Congrats.
If you want to see pictures of my trip to Cali and Back, go ahead. I even made it easy for you as they're on the internet already. (Nudes of the GF are also on an encrypted sparse image).
If dreamhost goes under or I lose all my data there, I still have it on two hard drives here. For me to lose irreplaceable photos two things would have to happen within a week of each other.
1) House burns down and all local copies are taken out (or PSU goes nuts and fries both hard drives) 2) Dream host goes down and loses all backup copies of my data
While I'm not saying it's impossible... the chances of it happening are low enough that I feel fine.
This is exactly what I do. Except it also backs up my laptop and backs up off site. So far it's worked great and I haven't had to break into the backups.
Twice a day my server rsyncs everything from my MacBookPro. It then syncs everything to another drive. Once a day (usually when I'm going to bed) it Rsyncs to my DreamHost account.
This is only for irreplaceable stuff. Music, Movies, the world's backing those up for me. Pictures, Mail, Documents I like to keep around.
So take the grandparent's post a bit further. Buy two identical systems. Case, motherboard, etc. Place the machines at opposite ends of the house, or even see if you can talk your neighbor into being your off site host. String some GigE between them and go.
If you are trying to intelligently convey a point and you repeatedly (twice) use loose instead of lose. It wasn't a typo when making the post you were typing and your brain wanted to use lose and loose came out, twice.
How many +5 insightful posts do you see in Ebonics or l33t speek[sic]? I'm not saying everything on Slashdot has to be in perfect English form, however saying what you mean and meaning what you say is important. Take a look at most of the intelligent comments, they're not full of homonym mistakes.
So then someone figures out how to send data back after the student requests it. Making it look Identical to HTTP traffic. Heck wrap it in some Binary Data and I don't think anyone would know the difference.
Or toss it on 443 and let it fend for itself among ssl traffic.
That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. -- Sadly I and anyone that thinks like this is a terrorist. The USA has the largest military in the world and until we hit critical mass, there won't be another revolution. I don't think that this will ever happen in my lifetime.
How long until someone writes a p2p app that uses port 80 and http?
You shut down Napster, Kazaa replaced it, Kazaa got full of spyware, something replaced it.
I remember the FIRST torrent. I was sitting in my dorm room freshmen year slashdot posted a story about some 'new fancy' protocol to help bandwith of people wanting to distribute stuff. I downloaded the program and ran it. I thought "cool but there's not much here."
A year later there were 2-3 major trackers, but it was still pretty much under ground. 6 years later. Bittorrent is THE p2p everyone talks about. These people don't understand how the internet works nor how fast everything can change. Remember DiVX, I can't think of the last movie I downloaded in Divx, it's all Xvid now.
Pirates are intelligent, fast and have absolutely no loyalty. If there is a faster better cheaper way to distribute something, it will be adopted overnight.
1) This is a work laptop, why is it configured to use the users "home" SMTP address? If they need to send e-mail for work off site, they should be VPNing in anyway.
2) Internally blacklist every single computer. My company does. You can't get an SMTP connection out unless you go through internal.smtp.mycompany.com. If you want access to be able to send all you have to do is go to that same IP in a web browser. Login with your user/pass and click "add my IP." No baby sitting. If anything DOES happen you are responsible since you signed the computer up to access the smtp server.
I don't see how either of these 'problems' are even issues if you have a competent IT department.
Do you honestly think that most people even notice? Yes some geeks in some hardware benchmarking lab can show that SATA is X faster that PATA and 7200 is much faster than 4500. I haven't once noticed my hard drive speed being a problem. Powerpoint, Excel, Word, almost everything is always open. Heck I don't even run a local version of Matlab or Pro/Engineer and they are both adequately fast. Sure I know that when I launch Matlab that's when I move to Notes and check my e-mail and in 20 seconds I have Matlab. I'm running a program on a 100 MBit connection and it suits me just fine.
I can second this comment from a 100,000 employee Fortune 100 company.
We have meetings, desks in 2 buildings, remote job sites. Frankly I don't see how most of you people get your job done with a desktop computer. If I need to run into the lab I grab my laptop and it's on wireless. I have 1.5 hours until I need to find power. Same goes for meetings.
"Just a minute bob, let me share my screen, I have those results right here". If I need to go sit in a vehicle or on a job site, I take my laptop. Everyone is issued a docking station mouse and keyboard. Some people even get a second monitor. I've had people come in from 1000 miles away sit in my cube when someone was on vacation, drop their laptop into a docking station and start working.
The only people that have desktops are the modeling engineers where there is no such thing as too much power (Pro/Engineer) and then even most of them STILL HAVE LAPTOPS. I could be mistaken but I think all of our software engineers are on laptops. Controls engineers have laptops, field reps have laptops, marketing has laptops and management certainly has laptops.
I have a 2.2 GHz Dell M90 with 2 GB of RAM. It runs Matlab/Simulink just fine. I'm sure I could squeak a few more seconds out of a desktop but look at what I'd be giving up. If I need to go to another building for a day because I'll be there all day for meetings, I pack my laptop.
I don't know what our company does but my laptop is seamless on and off the network. If I'm off the network somehow my shared drive still shows up under E: all my files are there. Anytime I create a new file and go back to the network it gets synced. I don't even have to be on the network to login to the domain. Best I figure is it pings the domain controller, if nothing is found it logs in 'locally' (Which has helped out when I get locked out of my account because of some error and I need into my laptop. Disconnect from networks, login, connect back to network).
VW diesels up through the TDI could be run on nothing. The fuel cut off valve was just a solenoid (and I doubt this will disrupt that). Even then you could remove the solenoid and still run it, they were in production (In Canada) up through 1997.
You don't need a terribly messy brain to run a mechanically injected diesel engine.
Slashdot Mirror
Coding HTML and Working on cars doesn't span multiple skill sets? Heck I know most people can do one or the other, and if they can not very well.
Your examples are stuff that you really can't teach, most of it is left vs right brained. You can be smart, span multiple classifications and still not be able to do stuff from 'the other hemisphere'. I can code PHP, fix my cars, cook, sew, build stuff out of wood and still make living doing Simulink controls, but I couldn't play music, speak a foreign language or design a good looking website for the life of me. Does that mean I'm not smart?
Some of the things you mentioned are like asking if he's teaching his daughter to be extroverted, tall, and good looking.
Who let you have that typewriter? Who didn't freak out and put you in a walker because you were more mobile than they expected?
Your parents played a bigger role than you give them credit for, even if it was just by not treating you like most parents treat their kids. Not that their genes didn't help, but on the basis that they were smart (even if just in how to raise a kid) you turned out smart.
It's a vicious cycle. Dumb parents who can't raise kids or expect the schools to do it raise dumb kids, who become dumb parents who...
While I think genes had a big part I'm sure there's a reason that my grandma (With a masters degree) raised 3 doctors, 1 engineer, 1 nurse, 2 CPAs and two more college graduates. Who then went on to raise 4 engineers, 2 doctors, 1 pharmacist, 1 cpa, 1 film editor and 2 more high schoolers.
Problem with most kids is, who is going to be their teacher?
My parents did pass on most life skills to me: cooking, cleaning, leatherworking (Dad's hobby), writing a check (my mom would let me fill out her checks when I was young), sewing, etc. But most parents can't even do this right now. One weekend I went back home I heard that the Home Ec teacher's daughter was Paying people to do her laundry at college because she didn't know how.
There is a good deal I picked up on my own or in Boy Scouts. Auto repair is a huge one. My parents didn't touch cars, even for oil changes. It took me my first car and my first oil change to replacing turbos and heads.
I'm with you. I can't wait to be a parent because in my mind, I get to duplicate all my knowledge that took me years to compile to someone who can pick it up in a short time.
I hate to say it but look around you. Look at your peers. I'm not talking about slashdot. I'm talking about a majority of America (from what I've seen). Do they really care what their kids know? Heck I can think of a dozen kids that their parents didn't plan on them (in Highschool). These people don't even have the life skills themselves, some barely passed highschool (if they ever did). What are they supposed to pass on to their kids? Plus most think it's the school's job. Heck most think that parenting is the school's job.
IMHO most of it's come from treating kids like people that must be protected instead of little learning machines. I've spent a fair amount of time around kids (cousins) and nothing is more annoying than when adults talk to them like kids. I've held fairly decent conversations with 4-5 year olds and they full understand what I'm saying without a cute voice and broken English. 200 years ago these kids were helping to hunt and garden. Most people would flip a lid if you wanted to put a gun in a 5 year olds hands. I bet that if you took a 15 year old from 1850 and a 15 year old from 2007 and dropped them alone *in their own environment* the 1850er could probably find his own food, cook his own meal, etc. Unless it was made out of plastic the 15 year old probably wouldn't know how to use money. Unless there was a microwave I bet most wouldn't even know how to make food. I had a friend in college whose stay at home mom always did everything for her. She burned Macaroni, who knew you needed water. You can't just dump it in a pot and turn on the heat.
Except my daughters are going to learn PHP9 none of that HTML Fluff. But thanks again for being the parent you are and I only wish that we had more people like you out there. Proof again that we shouldn't need a license to drive, but a license to have kids.
No matter where you are in the world, you should have an idea of what a football field looks like. Whether American Football, Football (Soccer to us in the US), Rugby, Aussie Rules or Canadian Football these sports are played throughout the entire world and played on roughly the same sized field. It's an easy visual way of representing how big the kite is. Other things such as Libraries of Congress and VW Beetles may be more abstract and furthermore not every country has a library of congress or got the VW beetle. But I can't think of a nation in the world that doesn't play one of the aforementioned sports. Even shut ins and geeks should have walked by at least one in their life possibly at their High School.
I can see the joke if they said "American Football field" or something where people in other countries could relate. Or possibly if they gave the length in feet or centimeters (as for most estimates a yard is the same length as a meter). Unless you were just being facetious.
All this is going to do is have dating sites pull out of NJ. On the drop down menu of "Where do you live?" NJ will no longer appear. Maybe a message saying "Sorry. You live in NJ. We don't have the money to deal with this. You're SOL." This isn't going to protect anyone.
Oops, sorry.
Comedy Central != Cartoon Network.
The show's been on Cartoon Network for the last 7 years not Comedy Central
DeskSpace has a much flashier spinning-cube effect for the Apple 'wow' factor, as you can see from the manufacturer's screenshot above.
The thing that I like about most Apple 'wow' factors is they're non-intrusive. Flipping between screens I don't want a 1 second visualization. I do it constantly and it'd get annoying and in my way. When I switch users. I don't mind that extra second because I do it once and it's nice to show that I'm actually switching users.
Disk images in general are one of those hidden gems I've liked about the OS since back in the day.
Open Disk Utility (/Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app)
File > New > New Blank Disk Image
Make it as large as you want. Make sure you change disk format to "sparse image". Then select your level of encryption you want (128 or 256 AES). Then Create. Enter a password and UNCHECK "remember in keychain" unless you don't worry about losing your own laptop and just want the encryption for offsite.
A 2GB 'disk' takes up about 30 MB empty.
rsync over ssh. My debian box is my 'file central'. It syncs everything from my laptop. And then uploads to dreamhost. So when I go out of town this weekend I'll probably kick off a big sync so all my pictures get updated.
.dmg files in my Documents/ folder which gets backed up.
Although you CAN do it (dreamhost supports webdav, or you could even use FUSE and sshfs) I like my laptop to be extremely portable and I don't like to think much about it backing up, so I sync it to the next fastest thing (my desktop) and then send the files from there.
I just have
All 'important' documents are in an encrypted sparse image. Not only does it help for dreamhost, but if my laptop is stolen. I have OS X autolog me in and I don't have Vault setup for my home directory (over kill IMHO). But all my tax returns, etc are on a disk image with the password NOT saved in the key chain. If you can break that, then you probably can get funding other ways.
If you really want to see my grandma's chocolate chip cookie recipie or my 9th grade report on standard oil. Congrats.
If you want to see pictures of my trip to Cali and Back, go ahead. I even made it easy for you as they're on the internet already. (Nudes of the GF are also on an encrypted sparse image).
If dreamhost goes under or I lose all my data there, I still have it on two hard drives here. For me to lose irreplaceable photos two things would have to happen within a week of each other.
1) House burns down and all local copies are taken out (or PSU goes nuts and fries both hard drives)
2) Dream host goes down and loses all backup copies of my data
While I'm not saying it's impossible... the chances of it happening are low enough that I feel fine.
This is exactly what I do. Except it also backs up my laptop and backs up off site. So far it's worked great and I haven't had to break into the backups.
Twice a day my server rsyncs everything from my MacBookPro. It then syncs everything to another drive. Once a day (usually when I'm going to bed) it Rsyncs to my DreamHost account.
This is only for irreplaceable stuff. Music, Movies, the world's backing those up for me. Pictures, Mail, Documents I like to keep around.
So take the grandparent's post a bit further. Buy two identical systems. Case, motherboard, etc. Place the machines at opposite ends of the house, or even see if you can talk your neighbor into being your off site host. String some GigE between them and go.
I don't see how having 2 hard drives in a striped configuration will help you when you pull a disk. 1/2 of all your data is on one of those disks.
If you are trying to intelligently convey a point and you repeatedly (twice) use loose instead of lose. It wasn't a typo when making the post you were typing and your brain wanted to use lose and loose came out, twice.
How many +5 insightful posts do you see in Ebonics or l33t speek[sic]? I'm not saying everything on Slashdot has to be in perfect English form, however saying what you mean and meaning what you say is important. Take a look at most of the intelligent comments, they're not full of homonym mistakes.
Looser? Your PC is a promiscuous female? Please tell me you'll educate your son on the English language.
Lose != Loose
Loses != Losses
My son got an assignment from his 5th grade teacher that mixed up: who's and whose.
I have no problem with the natural evolution of language, but please get your words right.
Perl You Tube Uploader
I absolutely love this script. I even wrote a wrapper for it which has my password and login and uses the file name as the description, etc.
If I have a ton of videos I need to upload, right before I go to bed I just do a youtube_batch *.mp4. When I wake up everything is online.
Direct link to perl script
So then someone figures out how to send data back after the student requests it. Making it look Identical to HTTP traffic. Heck wrap it in some Binary Data and I don't think anyone would know the difference.
Or toss it on 443 and let it fend for itself among ssl traffic.
That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
--
Sadly I and anyone that thinks like this is a terrorist. The USA has the largest military in the world and until we hit critical mass, there won't be another revolution. I don't think that this will ever happen in my lifetime.
How long until someone writes a p2p app that uses port 80 and http?
You shut down Napster, Kazaa replaced it, Kazaa got full of spyware, something replaced it.
I remember the FIRST torrent. I was sitting in my dorm room freshmen year slashdot posted a story about some 'new fancy' protocol to help bandwith of people wanting to distribute stuff. I downloaded the program and ran it. I thought "cool but there's not much here."
A year later there were 2-3 major trackers, but it was still pretty much under ground. 6 years later. Bittorrent is THE p2p everyone talks about. These people don't understand how the internet works nor how fast everything can change. Remember DiVX, I can't think of the last movie I downloaded in Divx, it's all Xvid now.
Pirates are intelligent, fast and have absolutely no loyalty. If there is a faster better cheaper way to distribute something, it will be adopted overnight.
1) This is a work laptop, why is it configured to use the users "home" SMTP address? If they need to send e-mail for work off site, they should be VPNing in anyway.
2) Internally blacklist every single computer. My company does. You can't get an SMTP connection out unless you go through internal.smtp.mycompany.com. If you want access to be able to send all you have to do is go to that same IP in a web browser. Login with your user/pass and click "add my IP." No baby sitting. If anything DOES happen you are responsible since you signed the computer up to access the smtp server.
I don't see how either of these 'problems' are even issues if you have a competent IT department.
Do you honestly think that most people even notice? Yes some geeks in some hardware benchmarking lab can show that SATA is X faster that PATA and 7200 is much faster than 4500. I haven't once noticed my hard drive speed being a problem. Powerpoint, Excel, Word, almost everything is always open. Heck I don't even run a local version of Matlab or Pro/Engineer and they are both adequately fast. Sure I know that when I launch Matlab that's when I move to Notes and check my e-mail and in 20 seconds I have Matlab. I'm running a program on a 100 MBit connection and it suits me just fine.
Honently, who NEEDS that 7200?
I can second this comment from a 100,000 employee Fortune 100 company.
We have meetings, desks in 2 buildings, remote job sites. Frankly I don't see how most of you people get your job done with a desktop computer. If I need to run into the lab I grab my laptop and it's on wireless. I have 1.5 hours until I need to find power. Same goes for meetings.
"Just a minute bob, let me share my screen, I have those results right here". If I need to go sit in a vehicle or on a job site, I take my laptop. Everyone is issued a docking station mouse and keyboard. Some people even get a second monitor. I've had people come in from 1000 miles away sit in my cube when someone was on vacation, drop their laptop into a docking station and start working.
The only people that have desktops are the modeling engineers where there is no such thing as too much power (Pro/Engineer) and then even most of them STILL HAVE LAPTOPS. I could be mistaken but I think all of our software engineers are on laptops. Controls engineers have laptops, field reps have laptops, marketing has laptops and management certainly has laptops.
I have a 2.2 GHz Dell M90 with 2 GB of RAM. It runs Matlab/Simulink just fine. I'm sure I could squeak a few more seconds out of a desktop but look at what I'd be giving up. If I need to go to another building for a day because I'll be there all day for meetings, I pack my laptop.
I don't know what our company does but my laptop is seamless on and off the network. If I'm off the network somehow my shared drive still shows up under E: all my files are there. Anytime I create a new file and go back to the network it gets synced. I don't even have to be on the network to login to the domain. Best I figure is it pings the domain controller, if nothing is found it logs in 'locally' (Which has helped out when I get locked out of my account because of some error and I need into my laptop. Disconnect from networks, login, connect back to network).
$45 can get you an 80GB hard drive if you shop around. They're not 'expensive' they're expensive by comparison.
VW diesels up through the TDI could be run on nothing. The fuel cut off valve was just a solenoid (and I doubt this will disrupt that). Even then you could remove the solenoid and still run it, they were in production (In Canada) up through 1997.
You don't need a terribly messy brain to run a mechanically injected diesel engine.