It appears to me that a fundamental teaching in some religions or some sects of a religion is the concept that anything that does not fit that sects' interpretation of their holy book is blasphemous and that blasphemous statements cannot be heard or tolerated. To openly witness this blasphemy would be in itself blasphemous.

It appears that some of these so called 'fundamentalists' put this anti-blasphemy policy above all others except for their god. All those commandments, they come after the anti-blasphemy policy.

What is worse, is that many of the commandments in Christian rules are expanded in Islam to include all mankind, not just 'thy neighbor', they this anti-blasphemy policy seems to be rule #1, and appears to salt all the other rules to allow them to be twisted ever so slightly to allow modern Islamic terrorism.

(disclaimer, Islamic religion is not the only one that produces terrorists, even today, but Islam appears to be the greatest source.)

uh, yeah it is

I agree with your premise, but I think that you are overlooking 1 vital safety concern. The average vehicle in the US is much larger than the average vehicle in Europe. So a very safe car in Europe is not necessarily a very safe car in the US.

Remember, every other American has a gigantic SUV, Hummer, Excursion, Expedition, Suburban, Tank, etc.

Smart vs Hummer = very very bad.

Is this a serious thing? IANAL but this could be attacked from a number of angles. Invasion of privacy. Regulation of currency beyond state's rights.

agreed, debt was clearly intended to cover what is owed for a sales transaction. Simply put, you could force a customer to receive the goods before they may payment, then there is in fact a debt to be paid.

I have switched to lower power computing. I once ran massive computers that were honestly, way overkill for my needs.

I now run atom and zacate based systems. In fact, storage uses more electricity in my house than cpus. This is my next project to tackle as I switch to lower rpm, 2.5" and ssd disks.

I'm not a tree hugger, I don't play Al Gore scare tactics to convince people that the world is ending blah blah blah. what I am doing is measuring my short term cost vs long term electrical savings. I don't but low power just because and I don't drive a prius because they are not less expensive to drive (until the 2012 pluggable prius, 45 miles on electric is about cost parity with my gas car)

I do have a very large media library. I have many TB of ripped content from boxes of dvd videos now happily stored in boxes in the garage. Lots of content pulled from my DVR, web downloads etc and all exposed to my TVs and computers via appletvs cracked for XBMC which is a very low power ARM platform, or the zacate based fileserver/player.

Wrap this all up and switching from my 25W atom/zacate fileservers (3 of them) to ARM setups can save me about $50 per year. Additionally, These file servers themselves can output to the TV eliminating the need for a few appletvs. Right now my zacate fileserver is the only one able to output to TV, the atom's dont have to video capability to playback my videos without added hardware that increases the expense and power consumption.

Then again, most people could realize $50-$100 savings by turning off power strips and cutting out a lot of standby waste.

the flaw in your argument here is that apple's images had icons that were the correct aspect ratio but the shape was wrong. if the image was just squashed, the icons would be squashed as well.

I have a similar situation in the North-Central US. From Montana to Michigan, broadband access is surprisingly hard to come by in the middle of cities. Billings Montana is nearly 150,000 and 7 blocks from the City AND Federal court house there is no broadband! Fargo ND, on main street, No broadband. Wausau Wisconsing, 4 blocks from hotel-row along the interstate, no broadband. In fact, of the 30 locations I service in this area, 1/2 of them are unable to get any broadband at all and must rely on T1 service for hugely inflated rates.

I suspect that all of these companies infringe on some of another companies patents. This is the beginning of patent wars that may lead to an eventual reform of patent law.

Yes you can. Your own prior art doesn't disqualify a patent. You can patent something years after products including the concept are on the market if you produced those items.

RHEL/CentOS and ubuntu make very good servers and clients.

I myself prefer debian on servers over ubuntu. RHEL/CentOS is about on par with debian for me also.

from my googling, there really wasnt anything at all. The flip was not unique and had no unique technology in it. it was a standard camera turned sideways with a stylized case. Canon and Nikon had similar features at the time in a very similar form factor except that they had a much lower frame rate on the video.

1/2 Billion is a LOT of router and switch sales to make up.

Maybe the worst thing we can do is to not pursue modern, safe nuclear power and let these older reactors stay in use. Coal is not clean no matter how much politicians and coal companies want you to believe it is. There are no alternatives today except nuclear that can support our cities. Nuclear power is an excellent stop-gap but 'ancient' reactors that are still in service today are a disaster waiting to happen and my point is proven in Japan right now.

The fact is that these reactors are perfectly safe in ideal conditions but clearly cannot deal with multiple failures from a natural disaster (or worse?) a terrorist attack. That makes it very easy to leave them in service. Maybe Japan's current situation can be learned from but hopefully the solution isnt to *just* decommission old facilities but to replace them with modern designs such as Toshiba's 4S http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_4S

I wouldn't disagree with that. I would say that Latin would give a more solid foundation that a piecemeal approach but that learning Latin is certainly not the only way. What may be more appropriate is to split the difference and learn Italian as your first romance language so you get a 'modern' grammar saving all the stress of Latin grammar while getting vocabulary that is as close to the common denominator as possible.

I learned French for a year but never was able to completely keep up in casual conversation. I did a year of Italian after which I was a much better Italian speaker than a French speaker. I went back to French for some refreshing and ended up becoming much more skilled at French as a result of learning just passable Italian. Spanish is the same. Basic Italian gives you about 70% of basic Spanish.

English is a whole other beast. French and German both give a lot of loan words over but Danish/Norwegian feels much more like the big contributor. So much of the Scandinavian languages are hidden in English. I have been learning Danish on and off for a few years, never really dedicating any significant effort but enough to get by, and every time I learn some more I can see how English was influenced by a Scandinavian language.

If I were to suggest base lanuages to learn english, Latin wouldn't be on the list. Learn a Scandinavian language, Italian, the German or French. The Latin roots are sitting there in Italian already so why waste effort on a dead language when you can get a living language cheaper right?