Except, the human forms at the olympics are not the fat, neckbearded types who sit around commenting on slashdot all day; the olympians are a collection of the fittest bodies the world has to offer. Nobody is going to have problems with those bodies.

And for your own body at nudist camps: I've been to a few nude resorts, and the main denominator of the attendees is their acceptance for all sorts of human forms. Of course there will be a couple pervs hanging around that you'll shock with your unbleached anus and your lack of a mutant monster cock, but the rest of us will gladly go naked ski-jumping with you.

Your right, I accept you're correction. I hope I didn't trigger you're obsessive compulsive disorder.

However, I find it strange that your taking note of such an error, because you're first sentence is a fragment in which you use the word 'near' in place of the word 'nearly'. You're second sentence ends with a preposition, and then you're third sentence is an inexcusable mess, with a spelling error ('clebrity') and misused semi-colon. Worst of all, in a crowd of nerds, you opened a parenthesis and didn't close it! To prevent widespread chaos, and you're inevitable lynching let me fix that:
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Anyway, if your needing a ride down to the place where they take away nerd cards for grammar errors, I'm going that way anyway. It won't be all bad, maybe we can try to pick up some chicks afterward; I hear that's what non-nerds do.

7years and millions of dollars were spent to make sure that box staid checked. That's a good sized conspiracy in my book. It's a stupid, sucky conspiracy created apparently to protect the nationally damaging secret that we hire idiots to important agency roles and other agents will stand behind them for some sort of fellow agent brotherhood, but I'd still say the word conspiracy works. No offense to better conspiracies.
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I like you're sig; I haven't seen beta, but the whining has to be twice as bad.

I agree, that rabidreindeer oughta switch mechanics since private mechanics will usually do what you described, but he's also right that they don't have to do that.

Just as we have the option of working off the clock to do our debugging, mechanics can choose to do the same thing and in small shops they often choose to for the sake of costumer good will and personal pride. I suspect if you find a good private developer to contract some small coding projects to, he would come back and fix serious bugs for free as well. I'd certainly consider doing that if I was that developer.

Because they don't have to, big repair centers won't do this for you and their employees usually won't. The employee ran the standard diagnostic tools in the standard way; the tools indicated a problem that is to be fixed with X (even if his gut tells him Y), which he then installed precisely to specification. Didn't work? Not our problem; talk to the manufacturer about making better diagnostics. And the same goes for software development projects. In both cases, the employee got paid a rate to do X, like hell I'm coming back in to work for free and buying my own hardware because now my boss wants me to do Y.

Don't care. I still want to check the status of my dryer on via internet. And I'm still going to sell my neighbor on how great it is to sit upstairs and monitor the dryness of my clothes from my computer and so he should totally buy my tripped out dryer monitor project.

I, and I think "they," totally accept your fact. We just don't care. We like playing with computers and were going to continue to put them everywhere so we can play with them in new ways and we are going to talk on the internet about how fun it is to have them all. You don't have to join us.

As someone who has had to live with some pretty disgusting roommates, I would pay a premium for a fridge that automatically discarded moldy food and not have to argue about who gets to decided what's too moldy: the fridge decided and I threw it out!

Also, just last week I had something (I forget what, happens every few months) hidden behind some jars until it rotted and I had already bought another one. If it had had an RFID tag, I'd just ask my fridge if I had one, where it was and how long until it officially expired.

No, I don't want to study the arts of fridge organization, schedule regular fridge checkups and better vet my house guests or in general, do anything if I can just buy a piece of technology to make all of that easier. That's what technology does: make things easier.

Theoretically, but in reality, anything that looks too suspicious has to be investigated. Otherwise, if someone who actually wanted to build a bomb knew that fake data was discarded, they just run 10,000 random queries in the exact same manor as the few real ones they need and easily hide their intent. Or consider after a terrorism indecent, the report on why some beyond-obvious activity wasn't caught, "Well, they looked too much like terrorists, like they were some caricature perpetrated by someone trying to troll us so we ignored it."

Also, I know for a fact that once you check so many boxes, They have to come do an investigation. My random e-mailer pissed off the secret service right after 9-11*. Though in that case, my service provider passed on the unusual activity when they noticed I got their domain blacklisted by Yahoo for spam email; I wasn't caught by NSA spying.

The question you would be asking anywhere but slashdot would be: "why did you do that?" And the answer would be: in a course I was taking at college, internet monitoring came up, and I single handedly argued against the whole class and teacher that They would not show up for a few emails with the word bomb. So I went home to prove the class wrong and maybe the class was kinda right.

Your idea sounds really cool, kinda like what TOR does but more-so. I just wanted to point out that random activity does get noticed. Your welcome to try your own experiments though!

No really, non-techies, who own a machine for fun, often just need a web browser and some games, which Ubuntu has. On some laptops, Ubuntu can even use the wireless card without all the typical struggle to get the driver into the kernel.

It's not until you have to install printers and run niche software that other operating systems actually start being needed.

Really is that weird. What operations do your coffee machines do that requires a full featured operating system?

Though, my coffee maker was $2 while I've known people who have owned several hundred dollar, personal, espresso machines, so my conception of coffee machine might not be up to snuff.

I was thinking the exact same thing: I'm in front of my computer typing furiously right now. I kinda wish I had a chip to record this moment of what looks like extreme productivity.

That might actually be great PR for upper management; as it is ,I believe they just golf all day, except when it's time to pay themselves bigger bonuses. If they staged a few productive meetings, I'd be all "Wow! Management actually does stuff; I had no idea!"

Yeah, but like alot of things tha t aren't hard, they are hard to people completely new to it with none of the common knowledge people who do these things have about it.

When I first realized I didn't know how to steer on snow, luckily everyone around me did know how, and no accidents occurred when I went spinning down the freeway. In Atlanta, I've been told, most people aren't experienced with snow driving, one person losing control starts a chain reaction of people suddenly realizing they can't control their vehicles.

Whoah hoah, rich guy! Your welcome to save up whatever amounts you want, but the question really is: if you had what you currently consider to be plenty of money (in your case 5m), would you still be working, or would you put that in your newly created 'jet fund' and continue slaving away?

$1mil invested to grow at 5% per year would give me (and most of the US population) more than my after tax and 401k subtracted salary. I would retire immediately unless you can find me something more fun than drinking margaritas on the beach, which in my case would not be cleaning toilets.

And for people who aren't dead?

I.e. can I get this to replace my long distance X-girlfriend? Or would it also decide I'm getting too creepy and we need to break up?

I can't be the only slashdotter that wants it for this purpose.

No we don't. The longest battleship I know of is 333m long and the worlds longest ship is only 460m long [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world%27s_longest_ships]. These are exceptional, we don't build even these short things these all the time. You are looking for a 500m radius, which means we need something twice that long to make 2 little habitable zones on either end.

Hunks of space debris traveling at relativistic speeds may need to be accounted for. Also radiation shielding is not just for humans, it screws up all your electronics too. Plus there are other design You do need to make this proposed space ship pretty durable as well. Also consider that aircraft carriers need regular servicing, so put that in your budget too.
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We built the worlds longest craft ever and armored it for space; let's launch it:

A fully loaded space shuttle is something like 200,000lbs and the launch weight (e.i. fuel + breakaway boosters) is something like 4,500,000lbs, over twenty times the weight of the craft. Launching the shuttle costs about $450,000,000 per mission [http://www.nasa.gov/centers/kennedy/about/information/shuttle_faq.html#10]

The seawise giant (1/2 the length we need) with no cargo is 183,408,960lbs. And assuming I we can magically scale our shuttle-scale launch gear up to that size at no additional cost (we'd probably launch the pieces and asseble it in space, though we don't have the tech to do so yet).: its launch weight will be 4,126,701,600lbs and cost $412,670,160,000 to launch. 400billion, which is actually doable, but that is just for the launch assuming everything goes perfectly and we already have all the equipment sitting around.
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So, yes its technically possible and earth could use fewer religious zealots hating science, but this is alot of work to prevent astronauts from getting dizzy on landing.