nemo

that would put the spuds on par with the drinking water in DC

Just guessing here: A scale model of the web of communications between ordinary citizens and terror groups, thereby justifying the phone taps in place and the probe you're about to receive. The energy provided through the regenerative braking that we'd all be able to use if the big three detroit automakers would just release all those *secret* patents for hybrid automobiles and associated technology. The secret behind the movie "Cocoon"

that would be a lot of chips... how come you can't eat them after you listen to your stereo for a bit?

I ran across this water-powered clock over at ThinkGeek.com and was disappointed by the description of how it works. And why wouldn't something like this work on a larger scale? Thanks

Just a thought... I had a memory stick start to go bad a while back, and chased inconsistent errors all over my filesystem. The difference in our situations: my machine was already dual-booted - watching the same machine flip out in different operating systems narrowed the problem to hardware pretty quickly.

This just seemed relevant.

Google publishes APIs so that anyone (including the government) can use their search capabilities in whatever way they choose. Not using those APIs to do something creative is a problem on the part of the government, not Google. Nope.(pdf)

That's the thing - the censorship is based upon 'dirty word' algorithms, not actual content; therefore it is relatively easy to defeat. Google's logic on this appears to be: Appease the government enough to allow the service Let the users around the censorship as easily as possible Provide general population with far more information than they had access to before, despite the concessions required to get it to them For a company that tries to 'not be evil' it appears that they were faced with two choices that were both evil and attempted to choose the lesser.

I'd want to move away from physical movement for control / navigation of our little brain-in-a-box... Accidentally erasing a highlighted line of text due to a sneeze is bad enough, but an inadvertent rm -rf * from a bean burrito would drive me over the edge.:lol:

Without the help of any devices, you are taking about the computers of yesterday: the human mind. Essentially using meditation to set up peer-to-peer knowledge networks? I'm not extremely knowledgeable on the subject, but I've yet to see a 'mind reader' that truly was. I like the thoughts expressed earlier on this thread, about embedded devices, but I don't think embedded is the way to go; at least not completely. I'd be more for an interface (think wetwired USB) that would allow a device to be plugged in to the mind, but also removed and upgraded without surgery when required (Moore's Law would be pretty painful otherwise).

This was the purpose for .Net - write once, run anywhere. Unfortunately, as we've seen, unless you're writing something remarkably simple, each language has its own nuances that must be observed for your code to work properly. VB6 and VB .Net are not designed to be compatible - Microsoft essentially wrote a new language that was similar on the front end to VB (controls are identical with the addition of a few more) but almost completely different on the back end. MSDN will be your friend on that problem. I've pretty much resigned myself to three languages at this point: C (mostly Linux coding), VB .Net (Windows and some Mono environment stuff) and Java. The problem I have with the nosebleed-high level languages is that they take so much responsibility away from the programmer. I actually prefer to be responsible for the memory I use and then deallocate. I cannot stand errors in my program that point toward a library that I didn't write or implicitly include. I'd love to eventually play with C#, but at the moment, time is not something I've got an abundance of. Perhaps later.

Mmm... yeah - that's exactly what I was thinking:hihi: Awesome answer - thanks.

So I'm rolling up a tie-down strap (the ratcheting kind - Irish's got me moving appliances today), and I'm watching my quarter-turns get more and more productive as the roll becomes bigger. Now I'm curious - what is the formula for determining how productive each quarter turn will be? Assuming that the strap is 1mm thick, how do I know how much strap I will wind on my 47th turn, as opposed to my second? Thanks, Nemo

tartanism - your comment was already addressed by an admin earlier in this thread. getting back to the actual point of this thread, which appears to be whether capital punishment should be abolished, i find myself looking for a difference between life in prison without the possibility of parole and capital punishment. cost doesn't appear to be a significant argument. people say that CP is inhumane, but those same people look forward to the inmate getting gang raped for years and years - i'm not catching the humanity in that. it appears that once a person has committed a capital crime, society is simply looking for what it deems to be the best revenge possible.

I've also heard "they" are behind a number of technological breakthroughs, also as of yet unknown to the general public... I'd have sworn I met one of "them" once, but all I remember is him putting his sunglasses on and asking me to look at this popsicle stick with a shiny light on one end...