Nothing special, though most of the problems have been with new disks rather than burned-in ones. I've had desktop 3.5" drives (500MB 2007) that went bad in the first week, or that went bad after a couple of years of use, both in desktops and in USB shoeboxes, and I've had a lot of laptop drives go bad over the years from just the usual abuse that a laptop gets from a commuter with a cat that likes to sit on the desk. Maybe Spinrite can fix them, haven't tried it.
You have proposed a [blah blah blah checklist here...]
1. - Sorry, there's plenty of legitimate email advertising, solicitation, and marketing - as long as the recipient has actually asked for it. And much of the spam that I get is already illegal, such as bank-account phishing and Nigerian scams.
2. - Suckers are born every minute, and so are new scams.
3. - It's too easy for spammers to hide, and too hard to write laws that only nail spammers and not legitimate emailers, and governments don't have jurisdiction internationally.
4. - Sorry, but that's even dumber than prosecuting drug users. If you want somebody to come in and complain that they bought Nigerian Herbal Fake Viagra from $spammer and it didn't work, arresting them for it won't make the process of admitting they were stupid easier for them. Arresting somebody who bought a worthless stock that was getting pumped and dumped isn't really helpful, plus they're not buying it directly from the spammers. And lots of the spam recently (at least from what gets through my filters) has been bank phishing, not sales - you certainly shouldn't arrest somebody for logging in to what they think is their own bank's web site.
The big win with SSDs is low latency read access - you don't have to wait for rotation or seek time to start fetching your data. That's really useful for many kinds of data applications, speeding up transactions in databases, etc. If you RTFA, and look at some of the benchmarks like Windows Startup, they totally smoke rotating disks - and if you're trying to run servers in a datacenter, you've got less downtime if you ever have to reboot the things. They also consume less power, which is good for some kinds of applications, though they cost enough you're not going to save any money.
Battery-backed-RAM-based SSDs are a different game entirely, because they also give you very fast write speed, and that's where a lot of the whoop comes from; according to this article, the SSDs were a bit slower than a 10Krpm disk drive, so that doesn't apply here. The RAM type are really useful for database commits, where you need to get the journal saved to stable storage so you can go on to the next transaction. But even there, the low read latency of the flash-based disks is going to help a lot, especially for multi-user applications.
There's also the perception of reliability - I've certainly had lots of disk drive failures on mechanical disks.
Animation is *such* a broad space. Some kinds of animation don't need much resolution or bandwidth, e.g. South Park. Other kinds might want lots of pixels or at least wide format, but they're still fairly low bandwidth, e.g. cartoons with lots of things in them or landscapy shapes. But there are kinds of animation where you really do need more quality/bandwidth, e.g. you're starting with photo images and doing interesting things with lighting that you want to show off.
Depending on what you're doing, it may be that YouTube, or YouTube in full-screen mode, may be enough, or it may not, and Youtube's been talking about handling higher-resolution video as well.
Check out how long they've had the.nl name, and look at their web pages to see if they appear to be legitimately in business first. If they've had the name for a while and seem to be doing something real, they're probably safe to deal with. On the other hand, if they registered the name last week and are in the "domain name services" business, they're probably scammers and you shouldn't even reply.
(Your Slashdot article didn't have the domain name or your name in it, so I can't really tell.) Good luck!
If you were a car dealer or specialized repair shop, then it may have been reasonable for you to own a domain using several of their trademarks. That's certainly too broad a set of categories to be a likely hobbyist organization. Sounds like you were cybersquatting.
That's a different case from acquiring generic names (which can be rather dubious as well), and a much different case from what the main article was about, which is somebody who owns a domain that's based on his own name.
Obama's winning the California electoral votes anyway, so my vote's more productive voting for somebody I want to win than if I have to vote for Obama just to keep McCain from winning. (Too bad the Libertarian Party's been taken over by lizards - I'll probably hold my nose and vote for Barr anyway, and he's better than he was 10 years ago and has some really good positions on privacy and the 4th amendment, but it's not like he really gets Libertarianism yet even though he's joined the party.)
But Bush and Cheney radically transformed American government when they and their cronies got elected - a president who was good as opposed to evil could do that too, though it's tougher, and Bush had it easier since his party had majorities in Congress who were afraid of him. Imagine a President who decided to clean house at the CIA, FBI, Pentagon, DEA, and Homeland Security, making them publish the truth about what they've done over the last N years, let the prisoners out of Gitmo, pardoned people convicted of drug possession, made La Migra do the job the Constitution gives them (which is to naturalize immigrants)... it could be serious change even without the help of Congress.
While the CP and LP have some similarities, they've got radically different core beliefs. The Constitution Party wants to restore the US government to its Biblical roots - it's much more obvious if you read their candidate's literature and not just the party's. The Libertarian Party is aggressively secular, believing in personal freedom and non-initiation of force, and thinks the government should stay out of religion.
I'm religious, and Libertarian, and while there are LPers whose anti-religious positions annoy me, and while the party appears to have been taken over by right-wing lizards recently, it's far far better than supporting a political party that believes in giving government power to enforce religion, and I'm skeptical about the CP's support for free markets and freedom of travel.
But I agree with you on Nixon - GWBush has been the worst president since Roosevelt and probably Lincoln. On the other hand, if you propped up Nixon again, it'd probably be Cheney moving Nixon's mouth and waving his arms the way he did with Bush.
Oh, of course it's important - though things that are obviously extra-important get saved as individual files, and I try to take most of the bloated powerpoints and save them directly rather than leaving them to burn space. PST files have gotten much more reliable during the last couple of versions of Outlook, though they're still ugly, and I'd much rather have a better format for my email (even/bin/mail format:-) But typically I'll get a couple of ad-hoc queries a week along the lines of "hey, back when Customer X was your account, did they ever install that $foo or could they never get it working?" or "has anybody had a customer do $bar, and how did it work?" or "Customer Z finally decided their old system is broken enough they have to replace it, can you tell me whether any of the N different things we've proposed to them in the last 3 years that were all too expensive are better than the too-expensive system they're looking at this time?" And the way to answer them is usually to mount up last year's email box (stored in separate parts because Outlook chokes if mailboxes get too big) and wait for Outlook to search through them.
On the other hand, I also keep a number of my old Eudora mailboxes around, which are 10% the size, and easy to grep through. (I split off separate files when I'm doing a major backup round or when I upgraded software versions.) One of my antivirus programs thinks there's something dangerous in there, and won't tell me exactly what or where, but it appears to be random characters in a MIME header divider somewhere:-)
Why use your real location - either use your local police station, or find some location that Google Maps will send him down a long string of dark country roads to an abandoned factory by a river somewhere...
Well, duh - of course it's to get money. There are some suckers who haven't spent all their money trying to collect big bucks from Nigeria, and sending out Herbal Fake Viagra pills is really just too much trouble when all you need to do for your money is refrain from shooting somebody. It's as much fun as baiting trolls.
There's certainly no need for the FBI to force ISPs to implement DKIM to identify senders of spam; to the extent that technologies like that work, ISPs that want to get rid of spamming users will use them, and ISPs that want to attract spammers will charge extra for allowing you to generate fake DKIM records.
Besides, why are you referencing the FBI when you're purporting to be in the UK? SPF won't help directly - its job is to prevent spammers from impersonating real users through forgery, though this does reduce some kinds of spam as well.
I've got a 30GB disk that's about full, with almost no music on it. A few years ago, disks jumped rapidly from 1GB to 2GB to 10GB then 30GB, so I've had enough space for quite a while, but I've finally caught up with Moore's Law.
My work laptop uses MS Windows, Office, and Outlook. My current Outlook PST file is ~2GB for the past year, and I've got a total of about 10GB including older mail - I've found that really valuable, though bloated. And there's all that Powerpoint bloated material from training, presentations, etc. (And of course there's swap space, another 2GB or so.)
Steven Wright has a line about "I bought a humidifier and a dehumidifier and put them together in a room to fight it out." That was what happened with our dual A/C system in the first computer room I helped build, back in the early 80s to support our VAXes. We had a couple of chilled-water Liebert units that were bigger than the computers, and management had decided to get two of them so we'd never lose cooling. Turned out we couldn't actually run them both at once, though I don't remember if they were fighting more about temperature or humidity - one unit would be pushing a bunch of cold dry air under the floor, which would blow into the sensors of the other unit, which would push a bunch of warm wet air under the floor, etc. And any time there was a power failure, the A/C wouldn't automatically restart, but the VAX would, so if this happened overnight or on a weekend, the room would reach 130 degrees (F), at which point the power system would decide their might be a fire and shut everything down until the room got cooler - which would take a while, since it wouldn't let us use the A/C. So we'd get in on Monday morning, have to open the back doors to the lab and go steal desk fans.
My late-90s lab had much smaller equipment - a bunch of routers and PCs in an enclosed office - but it still generated enough heat that we needed extra A/C. We didn't own the building, and the A/C unit that the landlord put in the ceiling would occasionally ice up and start dripping water onto our desk, but fortunately it usually missed the rack. For a couple of weeks during one of the A/C repairs, they gave us a big standalone thing that blew cool air into the room and warm air out through the ceiling ductwork. It had enough room in the top to chill a couple of bottles of wine, so our winetasting that month did whites.
Do not print out the whole set of documentation - that much highly dense paper in one place could collapse into a small black hole, endangering the planet.
So we've got stuffed animals around the house, some of them on the bed, and they're more likely to be feline (lions, tigers, pumas, etc.) rather than bears. My previous cat decided that all of them were pillows for cats to lie down on, though he'd chew the whiskers off of them.
My new cat (who's about 4 years old) generally feels that way, but one day he hopped up on the bed and saw a tiger that's about the size of a housecat, and he freaked. He cautiously snuck up to it, worried it was going to attack him, until he got close enough to sniff it and could be sure it wasn't real. After that he's been ok with it. Also there's a cheetah that's about half his size that purrs when you squeeze it (cheetahs are the only large cats that purr), and he'll go over and knead on it repeatedly to make it purr.
Ignoring your joke for the moment, cooking veggies affects digestibility a lot more than cooking meat, which stomach acids will grind up quite nicely. Various cooking techniques make meat last longer, so if you kill a megafauna you can eat more of it before it spoils, and therefore get more calories out of it, but otherwise the main effects are making it taste better and make you less likely to get sick.
On the other hand, breaking down veggie materials by cooking can often make them more digestible, so not only can your digestive system be more efficient (and therefore smaller), but also it set us up for the invention of grain-farming a lot later.
The theories about cooking's primary effects being on how much of the calories go to the brain are interesting, but cooking also affects division of labor within societies and need for communication, and those would have affected brain development as well.
Meat, including fish, is pretty digestible even if it's raw, and the richer ~80% of humanity doesn't have much problem getting enough calories or protein. Cooking does affect how long you can keep meat around after you kill it, but it has a lot more effect on the digestibility of vegetables and (much later) grains and beans, as well as making those foods edible longer after picking.
Also, a lot of the "raw food" movement out there is really processing food using techniques such as hydration and sprouting, so while it's not cooking at high temperatures, it's still making food more digestible than just eating it raw.
I'm a veggie, but I'm happy to cook my food - some of the raw-food stuff is good, but I find some of the flavorings they use surprising, such as the "liquid aminos" that are basically MSG relatives, not that I'm particularly bothered by it.
Most meatloaf recipes I've seen include bread or breadcrumbs and onions; often they'll include multiple kinds of meat. Much of the point of meatloaf is stretching a limited supply of cheap meat.
Women weren't sitting home idle while their men were out hunting and gathering (except to the extent that *everybody* in a hunter-gatherer society generally works a lot less than farmers or office-droids.) In most traditional societies they tended to do gathering, and some types of farming after farming was invented. Male brute strength is helpful for some kinds of farm work, such as handling oxen while plowing and maybe fighting off wolves, and men presumably did some amount of gathering work while hunting, but you can't do too much gathering because hauling around lots of food gets in the way of stalking and attacking animals.
Is newsfeed volume still doubling every however-often?
There was a while in the early-mid 80s I used to read all of netnews, and a bit later I used to read it by printing it out on 4-up double-sided laser printer (except for net.singles, which was too large), plus I kept a couple of days of limited newsfeed on a spare server with a 32-MB disk.
Most of my Usenet posting was done under various !-path addresses, from machines whose names probably no longer are in use, though some of my mid-90s stuff was on @-format addresses that also don't reach me.
For quite a while, one of my big spam sources was web archives of mailing lists I was on, though by now that's drops in the ocean.
While binary files certainly changed Usenet radically compared to the netnews I started using in 1981ish, long hair, dope smoking, and Dutch-speaking weren't anything newly introduced by Napster users:-)
And cross-posting was always fine, as long as you posted to appropriate groups and weren't trolling. (Well, and as long as you didn't forge headers to let you cross-post something to net.announce and non-moderated newsgroups, which had seemed like a good idea at the time.) The best-known act of spamming on Usenet, Cantor&Siegel's green card spam, deliberately *didn't* cross-post - it posted separate identical-body articles in ~6000 individual newsgroups, so you couldn't just delete the thing once when you first saw it.
As Captain Segfault says, real quantum computers will break factoring-based asymmetric crypto (i.e. RSA and DH key exchange and signatures) and can effectively halve the key size for some kinds of symmetric crypto. So this not only means using longer keys for symmetric algorithms, but pushes us towards traditional Key Distribution Center methodologies such as Kerberos and similar things we forgot during the 90s, and possibly to HMAC-based signatures (which are a more annoying loss.)
But D-Wave's system, if I understand their blurbs correctly, can't do the Shor's-Algorithm things that radically speed up factoring, so it's not going to do that. On the other hand, it may be useful for other search-based security attacks, such as finding your phone records in the NSA's big database or whatever.
An Old Leftie friend of mine used to go to Cuba a lot as a reporter for his (US-based) union newspaper. When he was young, he'd help cut sugar cane to help the revolution; when was old, he'd go to the beach and drink rum. The US travel and spending rules were offensive, but you could work around them as long as you weren't trying to actually do business down there. I think you could go for educational purposes as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing special, though most of the problems have been with new disks rather than burned-in ones. I've had desktop 3.5" drives (500MB 2007) that went bad in the first week, or that went bad after a couple of years of use, both in desktops and in USB shoeboxes, and I've had a lot of laptop drives go bad over the years from just the usual abuse that a laptop gets from a commuter with a cat that likes to sit on the desk. Maybe Spinrite can fix them, haven't tried it.
You have proposed a [blah blah blah checklist here...]
1. - Sorry, there's plenty of legitimate email advertising, solicitation, and marketing - as long as the recipient has actually asked for it. And much of the spam that I get is already illegal, such as bank-account phishing and Nigerian scams.
2. - Suckers are born every minute, and so are new scams.
3. - It's too easy for spammers to hide, and too hard to write laws that only nail spammers and not legitimate emailers, and governments don't have jurisdiction internationally.
4. - Sorry, but that's even dumber than prosecuting drug users. If you want somebody to come in and complain that they bought Nigerian Herbal Fake Viagra from $spammer and it didn't work, arresting them for it won't make the process of admitting they were stupid easier for them. Arresting somebody who bought a worthless stock that was getting pumped and dumped isn't really helpful, plus they're not buying it directly from the spammers. And lots of the spam recently (at least from what gets through my filters) has been bank phishing, not sales - you certainly shouldn't arrest somebody for logging in to what they think is their own bank's web site.
The big win with SSDs is low latency read access - you don't have to wait for rotation or seek time to start fetching your data. That's really useful for many kinds of data applications, speeding up transactions in databases, etc. If you RTFA, and look at some of the benchmarks like Windows Startup, they totally smoke rotating disks - and if you're trying to run servers in a datacenter, you've got less downtime if you ever have to reboot the things.
They also consume less power, which is good for some kinds of applications, though they cost enough you're not going to save any money.
Battery-backed-RAM-based SSDs are a different game entirely, because they also give you very fast write speed, and that's where a lot of the whoop comes from; according to this article, the SSDs were a bit slower than a 10Krpm disk drive, so that doesn't apply here. The RAM type are really useful for database commits, where you need to get the journal saved to stable storage so you can go on to the next transaction. But even there, the low read latency of the flash-based disks is going to help a lot, especially for multi-user applications.
There's also the perception of reliability - I've certainly had lots of disk drive failures on mechanical disks.
Animation is *such* a broad space. Some kinds of animation don't need much resolution or bandwidth, e.g. South Park. Other kinds might want lots of pixels or at least wide format, but they're still fairly low bandwidth, e.g. cartoons with lots of things in them or landscapy shapes. But there are kinds of animation where you really do need more quality/bandwidth, e.g. you're starting with photo images and doing interesting things with lighting that you want to show off.
Depending on what you're doing, it may be that YouTube, or YouTube in full-screen mode, may be enough, or it may not, and Youtube's been talking about handling higher-resolution video as well.
I guess that's cats, not dogs, but whatever...
Check out how long they've had the .nl name, and look at their web pages to see if they appear to be legitimately in business first. If they've had the name for a while and seem to be doing something real, they're probably safe to deal with. On the other hand, if they registered the name last week and are in the "domain name services" business, they're probably scammers and you shouldn't even reply.
(Your Slashdot article didn't have the domain name or your name in it, so I can't really tell.) Good luck!
If you were a car dealer or specialized repair shop, then it may have been reasonable for you to own a domain using several of their trademarks. That's certainly too broad a set of categories to be a likely hobbyist organization. Sounds like you were cybersquatting.
That's a different case from acquiring generic names (which can be rather dubious as well), and a much different case from what the main article was about, which is somebody who owns a domain that's based on his own name.
Obama's winning the California electoral votes anyway, so my vote's more productive voting for somebody I want to win than if I have to vote for Obama just to keep McCain from winning. (Too bad the Libertarian Party's been taken over by lizards - I'll probably hold my nose and vote for Barr anyway, and he's better than he was 10 years ago and has some really good positions on privacy and the 4th amendment, but it's not like he really gets Libertarianism yet even though he's joined the party.)
But Bush and Cheney radically transformed American government when they and their cronies got elected - a president who was good as opposed to evil could do that too, though it's tougher, and Bush had it easier since his party had majorities in Congress who were afraid of him. Imagine a President who decided to clean house at the CIA, FBI, Pentagon, DEA, and Homeland Security, making them publish the truth about what they've done over the last N years, let the prisoners out of Gitmo, pardoned people convicted of drug possession, made La Migra do the job the Constitution gives them (which is to naturalize immigrants)... it could be serious change even without the help of Congress.
While the CP and LP have some similarities, they've got radically different core beliefs. The Constitution Party wants to restore the US government to its Biblical roots - it's much more obvious if you read their candidate's literature and not just the party's. The Libertarian Party is aggressively secular, believing in personal freedom and non-initiation of force, and thinks the government should stay out of religion.
I'm religious, and Libertarian, and while there are LPers whose anti-religious positions annoy me, and while the party appears to have been taken over by right-wing lizards recently, it's far far better than supporting a political party that believes in giving government power to enforce religion, and I'm skeptical about the CP's support for free markets and freedom of travel.
But I agree with you on Nixon - GWBush has been the worst president since Roosevelt and probably Lincoln. On the other hand, if you propped up Nixon again, it'd probably be Cheney moving Nixon's mouth and waving his arms the way he did with Bush.
Oh, of course it's important - though things that are obviously extra-important get saved as individual files, and I try to take most of the bloated powerpoints and save them directly rather than leaving them to burn space. PST files have gotten much more reliable during the last couple of versions of Outlook, though they're still ugly, and I'd much rather have a better format for my email (even /bin/mail format :-) But typically I'll get a couple of ad-hoc queries a week along the lines of "hey, back when Customer X was your account, did they ever install that $foo or could they never get it working?" or "has anybody had a customer do $bar, and how did it work?" or "Customer Z finally decided their old system is broken enough they have to replace it, can you tell me whether any of the N different things we've proposed to them in the last 3 years that were all too expensive are better than the too-expensive system they're looking at this time?" And the way to answer them is usually to mount up last year's email box (stored in separate parts because Outlook chokes if mailboxes get too big) and wait for Outlook to search through them.
On the other hand, I also keep a number of my old Eudora mailboxes around, which are 10% the size, and easy to grep through. (I split off separate files when I'm doing a major backup round or when I upgraded software versions.) One of my antivirus programs thinks there's something dangerous in there, and won't tell me exactly what or where, but it appears to be random characters in a MIME header divider somewhere :-)
Why use your real location - either use your local police station, or find some location that Google Maps will send him down a long string of dark country roads to an abandoned factory by a river somewhere...
Well, duh - of course it's to get money. There are some suckers who haven't spent all their money trying to collect big bucks from Nigeria, and sending out Herbal Fake Viagra pills is really just too much trouble when all you need to do for your money is refrain from shooting somebody. It's as much fun as baiting trolls.
There's certainly no need for the FBI to force ISPs to implement DKIM to identify senders of spam; to the extent that technologies like that work, ISPs that want to get rid of spamming users will use them, and ISPs that want to attract spammers will charge extra for allowing you to generate fake DKIM records.
Besides, why are you referencing the FBI when you're purporting to be in the UK? SPF won't help directly - its job is to prevent spammers from impersonating real users through forgery, though this does reduce some kinds of spam as well.
I've got a 30GB disk that's about full, with almost no music on it. A few years ago, disks jumped rapidly from 1GB to 2GB to 10GB then 30GB, so I've had enough space for quite a while, but I've finally caught up with Moore's Law.
My work laptop uses MS Windows, Office, and Outlook. My current Outlook PST file is ~2GB for the past year, and I've got a total of about 10GB including older mail - I've found that really valuable, though bloated. And there's all that Powerpoint bloated material from training, presentations, etc. (And of course there's swap space, another 2GB or so.)
Steven Wright has a line about "I bought a humidifier and a dehumidifier and put them together in a room to fight it out." That was what happened with our dual A/C system in the first computer room I helped build, back in the early 80s to support our VAXes. We had a couple of chilled-water Liebert units that were bigger than the computers, and management had decided to get two of them so we'd never lose cooling. Turned out we couldn't actually run them both at once, though I don't remember if they were fighting more about temperature or humidity - one unit would be pushing a bunch of cold dry air under the floor, which would blow into the sensors of the other unit, which would push a bunch of warm wet air under the floor, etc. And any time there was a power failure, the A/C wouldn't automatically restart, but the VAX would, so if this happened overnight or on a weekend, the room would reach 130 degrees (F), at which point the power system would decide their might be a fire and shut everything down until the room got cooler - which would take a while, since it wouldn't let us use the A/C. So we'd get in on Monday morning, have to open the back doors to the lab and go steal desk fans.
My late-90s lab had much smaller equipment - a bunch of routers and PCs in an enclosed office - but it still generated enough heat that we needed extra A/C. We didn't own the building, and the A/C unit that the landlord put in the ceiling would occasionally ice up and start dripping water onto our desk, but fortunately it usually missed the rack. For a couple of weeks during one of the A/C repairs, they gave us a big standalone thing that blew cool air into the room and warm air out through the ceiling ductwork. It had enough room in the top to chill a couple of bottles of wine, so our winetasting that month did whites.
Do not print out the whole set of documentation - that much highly dense paper in one place could collapse into a small black hole, endangering the planet.
So we've got stuffed animals around the house, some of them on the bed, and they're more likely to be feline (lions, tigers, pumas, etc.) rather than bears. My previous cat decided that all of them were pillows for cats to lie down on, though he'd chew the whiskers off of them.
My new cat (who's about 4 years old) generally feels that way, but one day he hopped up on the bed and saw a tiger that's about the size of a housecat, and he freaked. He cautiously snuck up to it, worried it was going to attack him, until he got close enough to sniff it and could be sure it wasn't real. After that he's been ok with it. Also there's a cheetah that's about half his size that purrs when you squeeze it (cheetahs are the only large cats that purr), and he'll go over and knead on it repeatedly to make it purr.
Ignoring your joke for the moment, cooking veggies affects digestibility a lot more than cooking meat, which stomach acids will grind up quite nicely. Various cooking techniques make meat last longer, so if you kill a megafauna you can eat more of it before it spoils, and therefore get more calories out of it, but otherwise the main effects are making it taste better and make you less likely to get sick.
On the other hand, breaking down veggie materials by cooking can often make them more digestible, so not only can your digestive system be more efficient (and therefore smaller), but also it set us up for the invention of grain-farming a lot later.
The theories about cooking's primary effects being on how much of the calories go to the brain are interesting, but cooking also affects division of labor within societies and need for communication, and those would have affected brain development as well.
Meat, including fish, is pretty digestible even if it's raw, and the richer ~80% of humanity doesn't have much problem getting enough calories or protein. Cooking does affect how long you can keep meat around after you kill it, but it has a lot more effect on the digestibility of vegetables and (much later) grains and beans, as well as making those foods edible longer after picking.
Also, a lot of the "raw food" movement out there is really processing food using techniques such as hydration and sprouting, so while it's not cooking at high temperatures, it's still making food more digestible than just eating it raw.
I'm a veggie, but I'm happy to cook my food - some of the raw-food stuff is good, but I find some of the flavorings they use surprising, such as the "liquid aminos" that are basically MSG relatives, not that I'm particularly bothered by it.
Most meatloaf recipes I've seen include bread or breadcrumbs and onions; often they'll include multiple kinds of meat. Much of the point of meatloaf is stretching a limited supply of cheap meat.
Women weren't sitting home idle while their men were out hunting and gathering (except to the extent that *everybody* in a hunter-gatherer society generally works a lot less than farmers or office-droids.) In most traditional societies they tended to do gathering, and some types of farming after farming was invented. Male brute strength is helpful for some kinds of farm work, such as handling oxen while plowing and maybe fighting off wolves, and men presumably did some amount of gathering work while hunting, but you can't do too much gathering because hauling around lots of food gets in the way of stalking and attacking animals.
Is newsfeed volume still doubling every however-often?
There was a while in the early-mid 80s I used to read all of netnews, and a bit later I used to read it by printing it out on 4-up double-sided laser printer (except for net.singles, which was too large), plus I kept a couple of days of limited newsfeed on a spare server with a 32-MB disk.
Most of my Usenet posting was done under various !-path addresses, from machines whose names probably no longer are in use, though some of my mid-90s stuff was on @-format addresses that also don't reach me.
For quite a while, one of my big spam sources was web archives of mailing lists I was on, though by now that's drops in the ocean.
While binary files certainly changed Usenet radically compared to the netnews I started using in 1981ish, long hair, dope smoking, and Dutch-speaking weren't anything newly introduced by Napster users :-)
And cross-posting was always fine, as long as you posted to appropriate groups and weren't trolling. (Well, and as long as you didn't forge headers to let you cross-post something to net.announce and non-moderated newsgroups, which had seemed like a good idea at the time.) The best-known act of spamming on Usenet, Cantor&Siegel's green card spam, deliberately *didn't* cross-post - it posted separate identical-body articles in ~6000 individual newsgroups, so you couldn't just delete the thing once when you first saw it.
As Captain Segfault says, real quantum computers will break factoring-based asymmetric crypto (i.e. RSA and DH key exchange and signatures) and can effectively halve the key size for some kinds of symmetric crypto. So this not only means using longer keys for symmetric algorithms, but pushes us towards traditional Key Distribution Center methodologies such as Kerberos and similar things we forgot during the 90s, and possibly to HMAC-based signatures (which are a more annoying loss.)
But D-Wave's system, if I understand their blurbs correctly, can't do the Shor's-Algorithm things that radically speed up factoring, so it's not going to do that. On the other hand, it may be useful for other search-based security attacks, such as finding your phone records in the NSA's big database or whatever.
An Old Leftie friend of mine used to go to Cuba a lot as a reporter for his (US-based) union newspaper. When he was young, he'd help cut sugar cane to help the revolution; when was old, he'd go to the beach and drink rum. The US travel and spending rules were offensive, but you could work around them as long as you weren't trying to actually do business down there. I think you could go for educational purposes as well.