a simple disconnect switch on the +12V wire going to the fuel pump mounted within reach of the driver would be cheap and 100% effective.

Just until you get sued into oblivion for unintended deceleration, because some joker/kid/pet thought it would be funny to hit that switch while the car is going 80 mph on the highway. Or people just complain about the killswitch activating mysteriously just before they "happened" to have an accident.

It depends how you compare them. My meaning was in comparing all vehicles which could service the ISS in any way, now or in the future. As it stands now, we have or might have the Shuttle. COTS has two contenders at the moment, Falcon 9 flying a Dragon capsule and Taurus II flying a Cygnus capsule. Only the Dragon aims to handle crew. Russia has both the Soyuz and Proton, the latter is strictly unmanned. The EU has Ariane 5 which might be manned at some point in the future. Finally, there's the H-II which lifts Japan's HTV to the ISS. Of these many vehicles, only the Shuttle, Ariane 5, and Soyuz are or could be manned vehicles.

Makes AI and pathfinding much easier.
check out Empire total war's hex/grid less engine before it got patched, the devs blamed the totally freeform movement for the massive performance hit. I personally don't see much of a problem with hexes, but I abhor grids (too simplistic).

I think Seinfeld, rather, had it right. "Limited to what, how many you can sell?"

I don't understand why they are so upset with the "analog hole". It's far quicker and easier to simply rip the DVD than to try to record an analog signal in real-time. You're right, if they think their copy protection will keep people from ripping DVD's or BR disks, then they are truly ignorant. Once one person rips it, the video will be shared on the net quite easily. However, capturing and converting the analog signal is a PITA.

Oh yeah, I thought I might add: if the asking price in a Chinese market is $40, you know they'll part with the device for a fraction of that. They probably get them for $10-15 each and are pleased if they make $25 each.

Why foe really? You can just ignore people you don't like, or their comments, or add a reply to what you think is a retardo comment, or moderate there or whatever. Use your allotment to only friend, then you can get access to more journals hitting your messages. Personally I think the journals are worth more on slashdot than the articles most of the time.

Now what I think needs fixing more is the meta moderation system. I'd like the old style back. The new style..I can't see the point, I stopped meta modding because of that, and I use to once or twice a day all the time, tried to really be neutral about things and adjust the scores more fairly, to help stop mod abuse.

That's trade secret law IIRC. It's different. IANAL.

I'm not sure your "best case" use cases are really accurate... first, I'm not sure I've ever seen a printer with a 1M page lifespan. I understand that you chose that number because that's the claimed paper-equivalent in one pack of the PET, but in reality, a lot of that investment will probably be wasted. And you neglected to include toner cost in your laser printer case.

Given how accurate the 5 day *weather* forecasts have been, I fear that the climate service will be about as accurate
as Dick Cheney shooting lawye... er, quail with a shotgun.

Here's a question on climate that anyone with a *good* clock can independently verify- why has the earth not slowed down in rotation? More specifically, the loss of glaciation over land (that is, non-floating) is supposed to be "tremendous". Using the figures published by the IPCC, if you do the calculation of the change in Izz (the moment of angular momentum of the Earth as it turns on it's axis, as a whole, as those glaciers melt down into equilibrium ocean), you see that it's on the order of a fraction of a part per million. That sounds tiny, but it's not- it's 2.6 seconds per month per PPM _every month_, so it's 2.6 seconds the first month, 5.2 seconds the second month, 7.8 seconds the third month, etc.

So, why is it that the earth spin rate / tidal drag equations from 30 years ago continue to predict the actual spin rate of the planet to parts-per-trillion accuracy? Something is clearly wrong when a simple measurement with a quality clock no better than Harrison could have built in 1761 can show that the Earth spin rate is simply not following what it must given the claimed rates of melting.

The problem with this statement (and this thread) is that Bush wasn't from Texas - he was from Connecticut.