Don't tell anyone, but I'm from the future and wanted to give you a heads up how it goes:

Test 1: Make sure all thrusters installed pointing out.

Test 2: Humans can only withstand how much thrust?

Test 3: Make sure to thrust away from, not underneath, falling debris.

Test 4: Emergency homing signal for safe landing should be changed to not match Arbys drive through wireless mics. "Smoked with real smoke from real wood that's on real fire" ended up being a grimly accurate tagline.

Test 5: Turns out Ed was right and we really do need to add a laser canon for those damn pelicans.

Test 6: Success!

wyoming has radiation?

Hell yes! Have you measured background radiation in the rockies?

communication delays?

Ever tried to maintain cell signal on the way to Yellowstone?

nothing to see, or to do?

Once you've seen Frontier Days once...

No medical equipment?

I go up there all the time with no medical equipment.

I don't know what that gravity would do to your digestive systems.

That's why every astronaut has died immediately after return from space with even less gravity...

I have to break character here and say - you are SUCH a retard. That's enough fun for me. You may carry on if you wish.

No, because they're too busy re-launching the crashed browser because the inadequate RAM on the device makes it choke and die on today's Javascript-heavy web pages.

The iPad 1 is a great tablet for letting your kids watch movies on an airplane, but it's obsolete for most every other use. Even my wife, who would still be watching TV on a 13" tube set if I hadn't given it away, finally gave in and bought a last year's iPad air versus putting up with it any longer.

IMHO, the iPads are pretty decent at longevity -- I have 8.3 on my iPad 3 and it's arguably no worse than it was on 7.x.

I think Apple could benefit everybody by doubling (or more) the RAM they put into iPads. New OS releases and expanding app capabilities eat into RAM to the point where you can't keep apps cached in RAM long enough and app switching becomes app re-launching and the inevitable grinding away as they refresh paged-out objects from the network.

IMHO this is what makes them slow/crash/obsolete. I'm sure the iPad 1 with 4 gigs of RAM would still be pretty useful.

It's a good question.

When our house was built in 1957 it had a fuse panel. Someone in the late 1970s/early 1980s upgraded it to a 100A breaker panel and did some significant wiring changes.

When we remodeled in 2003, I had the service upgraded to 200A and beat the total chaos of rewiring by having the new service feed a 200A panel and then fed the old panel from the new panel, deftly avoiding the chaos of trying to rewire a hot mess of Romex, BX, flexible metal conduit (original to the house) and EMT to a new panel.

A commercial electrician I used to work with did the wiring when he built his house and piped all of it, most of it in 1" EMT with a couple of strategic junction boxes. In theory he could rewire relatively easily by just pulling more wire in existing pipe.

I always kind of wondered why houses didn't go one better and have raceways integrated into them.

It's been like this since the P4/Foster Xeon:
Desktop->workstation/1P server->DP server->MP server.

This is the final spin of the Haswell line, Broadwell-EP Xeon's are set to launch at the end of the summer.

Uh, it's nearly as much CPU power (141 cores at 5.2GHz, but even more CISC that x86) as the current mainframe, zSeries hasn't been about brute CPU in decades, it's about balanced CPU and I/O combined with high QoS and absolute stability. As an example the Z13 has nearly 1GB of L4 cache in the I/O coprocessors.

Pretty sure you are going to need a drink long before low gravity messes with you.

Pretty much all other reasons you list as problems could be applied to a move to Wyoming, but people do that all the time.

Please explain how you can be so fucking obtuse as to wave away the example of Libya (which she enthusiastically supported) and her vote in favor of the Iraq War AUMF.

On second thought, don't bother. You have nothing interesting to say and are conveniently ignoring the points that don't line up with your world view.

It's only outdated if you don't want a dedicated device for time. Some of us do want or need such a device, preferably one that doesn't need to be recharged every 24 hours, do a bunch of shit we don't care about, and occupy half of our lower arms. A nice looking watch is also a fashion statement; I'm not talking Rolex level (although you can certainly do that), just something that looks halfway decent and goes with most of your wardrobe.

There's still a market for dedicated devices. What does a smartwatch give me? Don't need it for fitness, it will never compete with a decent runner's watch for durability and ease of use. Don't want it for time, my real watch is less cumbersome and has a battery life measured in years. Can't do anything productive (e-mails, shopping lists, etc.) with it that I can't do better with my smartphone. Directions? That might be an argument, but again, how is the watch better than my phone? I've gotten around foreign cities where I don't speak the local language using my phone and Google Maps. Where's the game changer in doing the same with my watch?

Something like Steam's daisy wheel perhaps? It wouldn't be perfect since the only inputs would be cardinal directions instead of two separate input surfaces, but probably at least as fast as graffiti and probably more accurate.

You're thinking of the local water company with it's water filtering plants and pipes that lead directly to your home. That is not where fracking is happening. Fracking is done out where there isn't public water and sewer.

Hate to break it to you, but yes, fracking very much IS happening right in the middle of where there are water and sewer service. Both Cleveland and Pittsburgh, the 31st and 23rd largest MSA's in the country are right in the middle of the shale boom and both states have their department of natural resource (exploitation) overruling local control so there's plenty of drilling happening in the middle of communities (my town of 30k took the DNR to the state supreme court to try to block projects after we had several leaking wells contaminate drinking water and local streams)

Is "well water" (drill hole into water table, pump out water) always used raw and unfiltered? Has it traditionally always been safe to drink anywhere you can sink a well, or is there some history of bad wells due to natural contamination?

Every home I've ever been that had well water at least had a water softener and often had issues with high iron content. A woman I worked with who grew up on a farm said they had to buy bottled water (the giant kind of bottles you see on old school water coolers) for visitors because they had some kind of low-level bacterial contamination her family was immune to but would make guests sick.

It seems like it would be common sense anymore to have a whole-house reverse osmosis system if you had a well. If not for health then for not choking your plumbing with mineral build up and making your washing machine and dishwasher work.

I think it depends on how you define "rich fuckers". Astronomically, family-dynasty rich? Sure, they pay big property taxes either in an urban school district which is so chronically underfunded and mismanaged that their generous and unused contribution doesn't make a difference or in some elite suburb which is so generously funded their contribution doesn't matter. And they're so rich they don't care.

On the larger scale though, the HENRY (high earner, not rich yet) generally flock together in affluent suburbs where their property taxes are pooled to fund really great school systems and where housing prices and housing policies basically redline the non-affluent out of the district.

The real benefit of this isn't the money per se, but the way it keeps out the problem children of the urban wasteland -- those whose parents don't participate in their kids' education or really provide any structure in their lives. These kids are the drag on urban school systems through discipline problems, the extra work required by teachers to get them back to any kind of baseline, special education needs, etc.

An average funded school district can educate children well if the kids have some kind of parent-engaged baseline to start with.

Maybe it's less about the skill distribution curve and more about the "damage" distribution curve -- the idea that those at the low end of the skill curve cause the majority of the headaches.

Aren't they already getting squeezed?

There are more than a few decent layer 3 switches with command sets nearly Cisco config compatible that don't require the high-dollar smartnet for support and then companies like Juniper at the high end.

Most places where I see Cisco switching deployed could have gotten away with most anyone's switching product and gotten the same performance and they barely tap the feature set and certainly not to the point where they're doing anything Cisco specific.