That actually answers something I was wondering about the other day. My company was looking at a facility in Houston and it's in a brand new industrial park that is literally across the street from some of multi-million dollar homes I was amazed that the homeowners didn't manage to kill the project, and now I understand why they couldn't.

FWIW, I think zoning is like any other form of government intervention: a necessary evil. Some is absolutely required, a little more is ok, and it's only when those in power have an axe to grind, or engage in mission creep that the problems start. I'd honestly hate to live somewhere without at least rudimentary zoning, lest someone come along and build a sewage treatment next door, or put in heavy industry across the street from your $5M house like the example above.

Not true. In addition to amplification, a phono pre-amp also has to apply the R.I.A.A. equalization curve which is the reverse of the one used on the feed to the cutter head when the master disc is recorded.

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Stop signs are not effective for traffic calming.

Yes and no.

It's more related to the time period in which those neighborhoods were built, and how they were built. Grid street patterns were normal before WWII, along with smaller houses (Victorians, Craftsman bungalows, etc.). "Subdivisions" didn't become common until the postwar era, when sprawling ranch houses with two-car garages and big yards were popular.

Not coincidentally, those postwar subdivisions were also getting built at the same time as the civil rights movement: at the time, black people were "blockbusting" in those grid-street neighborhoods, while the white people were moving out to the curved/cul-de-sac subdivisons to get away from them. In fact, the restricted number of subdivision entrances/exits, along with the higher housing prices (enforced in the zoning code by minimum lot sizes, which forced lower-density development) were, in part, tools to keep out those perceived to be undesirable.

I know a "50 something" retired guy whose hobby is archiving pirated music. He claims to have "more than 250,000 albums" on HDD's. Sounds impossible but maybe he means "songs".

Assuming 3 MB per song (in MP3 format) and 10 songs per album, on average, 250,000 albums would take up only about 7.5 TB. That's not too far-fetched: the whole thing could even fit on one disk!

and then what happens with they start trying to lay the hurt on them for listing pirate links (as it is almost impossible to block these witthout only showing sponsored content)

Hopefully, it would drive the popularity of peer-to-peer distributed search engines like YaCy or Seeks.

And you really want a wireless solution, either RF (Zigbee, for example) or carrier current (X10). Carrier current, these days, is probably no cheaper than RF, and RF doesn't have anywhere near the interference and propagation issues that carrier current does.

No, what you really want is a low-voltage wiring standard (which encompasses both power and control, so that you can directly drive LED lighting without having a bunch of 120VAC transformers everywhere). That way you could wire the house once and not have to worry about incompatible proprietary bullshit.

Doesn't your school have guidance councilors and an appeals process to make exceptions for issues like that?

Y'all need to go to a better school. At my college, several of the lower-level CS classes had special "X" sections that were more interesting and challenging, and let us avoid having to deal with the non-CS-majors who had no idea WTF they were doing.

That's not an accurate recipe: KFC is pressure-fried, not just regular [pan|deep]-fried.

Christianity started out violent but eventually mellowed out for the most part. Islam is just several ticks behind the times.

Just post them all on "Hot or not"

I don't think a parent wants The Internet rating their 11-year-old daughter's anterior end (especially if the score is extremely high or low.)

Scotty: "Files? How quaint".

"It's the best script ever because I get to shoot first this time!" -HF