Man hours plus parts.

There are free servers out there, but the majority of them are text only.
Google provides one of the largest [Ranked #10 overall (source, top1000.org)] free services - text only, however.

Here's why:
1. Bandwidth is not free. Storage is not free.
2. Usenet necessitates having a huge amount of both to provide even a sub-standard to average service.

Some numbers: there is an average of ~5.4TB of post data peered daily [source: altopica.com]
The industry leader, GigaNews.com provides 622 days of binary retention - that means they have AT LEAST 3.2Petabytes of local storage, and the same in the AMS/IX farm.
They also provide most large ISPs with outsourced usenet, and their clients as well - so they're easily pushing 50 - 100TB of bandwidth a day [source: 2:30AM maths]

And that's pretty much why.

One nice is experience I had with xoops is that I was able to install the exact same module version (it hasn't been updated) I used back in 2005 on the latest release of Xoops. It still worked fine, many revisions later.

That won't work in joomla, trying to upgrade your site from 1.0 to 1.5. I bought a car rental app for joomla for $75. It came encrypted! I had no way to add a different make of car.. they didn't have Chevy, because the developer was French. After all the hassle, explaining to the customer, "no you can't do that" I would have been better off just writing it from scratch.

Other things I like about xoops is its "block" concept. Where you can create a new html block and specify what pages it appears on. For example, a disclaimer at the bottom of the site for a lawyer. But, say you need a different footer on the "pay your bill" page. Just create a new block.

It's not perfect. I would love to see a little more fine grained access restrictions such as a system of "locks and keys". I'm also a little bothered that they chose to take a joomla-esq approach of separating admin tasks. It used to be that you clicked on a module in admin, and you could edit all the functions related to that module. Now, in the admin screen there's a menu for modules and a menu for preferences. So, you edit everything for the module by clicking the modules menu, except the "preferences".

However, the cool thing is that because of the abstracted object-oriented design of xoops, the same module that worked on the old system still works on the new version of xoops. "Preferences" are just in a different place now.

Yes, you are correct. The state has no business criminalising any kind of speech.

Who cares? Are you arguing for science, or for little confidentiality fiefdoms?

There is literally no point in doing Science (with a capital S) if the data isn't available for scrutiny by everyone. Without scrutiny, it's all he said/she said, rumours and bullshit.

As to signing confidentiality agreements etc, there comes a time when a researcher has to decide: does he want to contribute to human knowledge (=> don't sign) or does he just want to wank around with secret data (=> sign it)?

It sucks to be unable to use purportedly available data, just because it can't be divulged, but it's better that way in the long run.

Unsupported data is worse than useless, it's a cancer that grows every time someone else quotes the unsupported result, until it gets to the level of unchallenged folk wisdom within the community.

Not very good analogy. Particle physics generate data by experiments. You can't "generate" data in observational sciences.

A couple of years ago I was in a zoo taking pics of the animals. I had a very strong idea of what sort of pics I wanted, so I spent a good 30 to 40 minutes in front of each enclosure waiting for a particular animal to move into the position where I wanted them framed. And when they weren't doing what I wanted I was still sitting there watching them intently.

During the waiting the animals were not always visible and on several occasions I heard people come up behind me, glance into the enclosure, pay attention for about 5 seconds and then move off after not having seen anything. And on one occasion I heard a mother rush past and when she couldn't see anything immediately she told her kids "there's nothing in here". It was truly amazing to see how little people actually took in after paying for the activity.

However I'd much rather prefer to see dolphins in the wild than animals in a zoo

I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft is behind this. Which would be a severe case of the pot calling the kettle black.

If anyone needs to be broken up, it's MS, for collusion between their application software (esp. MS Office) and their OS, and their browser, and now they're trying to take over search from Google with "Bing".

Strange how this group complains about Google, but completely ignores MS.

Hmmm... I'm probably a bit spoiled from living in a student town where everybody have between 10-100 Mbit. That's not really the norm for the rest of the country (yet). Also, since most people I know (that is, young, nerdy people) pirate video over the internet already I over extrapolated a bit. You are probably right on that point. Still I doubt how large market share bluray will have. It will be interesting to see.

They didn't miss it. The Islamic golden age significantly predated the age of enlightenment. They already had advance science and math long before Europe and the Christians. Arabic numbers? Algebra? However, the culture eventually turned towards religion and here lies the result. As opposed to the age of enlightenment, where people turned away from religion, and hence the civilization prospered.

> Just from my own experience, it seems like there are a bunch of different things going on when you try to multitask.
Yep ;-) From my own experience, the time-slicing model is pretty accurate, except that there is enough processing for a certain amount of things in the conscious mind. There is a lot more processing ability in the subconscious. Plus, much of the processing occurs at lower levels, like how much of coding is actually in the fingers, how much of driving is the the eye-hand-foot coordination. It's more like a higher level affecting a control loop well after the control loop has done its initial reactions.

How often:
Not realy paying attention and miss a turn off?
Not really paying attention and do the turn off to where you used to go?

For fun, try walking with total concentration and total conscious control of all aspects of movement and balance.

For things that require immediate attention (driving, balance) you develop well-trained reflexes.
For everything else you can do such as replaying what you were hearing when you were not paying attention. (Saved my bacon many a time while sleeping in class)

The two-tasking theory seems to me to be more a case of the one, two, many. Without a clear distinction between the nature of the two and the many. I like yours better. Probably much more like a continuum between the one task in the forefront and everything else going on in the background(s). If you think or concentrate enough, you forget to breathe, so the two-task thingee must be some kind of oversimplification.

And you are aware most job offerings tend to take the kitchensink approach? "Lets include every word we ever read and then demand 4 years experience with it. iPAd, senior engineer!".

Also (java) matches javascript.

I know you are blowing smoke because PHP is not listed. Oversight or some other reason?

Oh and wouldn't your query also match "Need highly skilled X developer who knows enough Java to migrate us away from the steaming pile of crap?".

Or indicate that there are no good Java developers to be found?

What about companies that offer you a nice cup of java every morning?

I know that a job count for PHP has to discount those companies with .php in their url.

In fact, does posting a few queries to Monsterboard not tell you anything more then that you have to much time on your hand?

No, it's about preventing further incidents of crime. Incarceration is no more than that. They can't hurt anybody because they're locked up. Rehabilitation is also a good idea for the same basic reason - preventing further crime.

Confusing incarceration with punishment is very similar to confusing incarceration with rehabilitation. It's just not effective as that kind of tool, but it doesn't keep people from using it that way.

(Other judgments are about deterrence as a means to prevent crime, and function to varying degrees; and dysfunction for that matter...)

My PC is more often than not just a thin client. I do most my work on my servers. A mere 4GB of RAM is to wimpy for real work. I'd say I'm out of Wifi coverage maybe an hour or two a day while driving and at the store. I'm almost never out of 3G coverage.

If you need a warranty then you can't handle installing and running random apps. The poor sucker stuck supporting you doesn't want to deal with your mess either.

I've been a registered iPhone developer and I could compile and run whatever I wanted on something like 50 devices. While I agree it'd be nice not to have to pay to be an iPhone developer $100/year is hardly an issue. You spend far more than that trying to purchase the tools and education needed to be a decent Microsoft developer (yes I know they offer some crap free tools). The biggest limitation is truly that you have to own a Mac or at least have access to a Mac. You can buy a Dell Mini for <$300 and install MacOS, which the last version cost $30 or is easy to download from Torrent, though or many other PCs will run MacOS so it's not as bad as it could be. THAT is the most annoying part of being an iPhone developer IMO though.

As I said you don't have to go to Apple to get what you want. You can do whatever you want if you're willing to take full responsibility for your own actions, voiding your warranty, and are smart enough to follow a simple HOWTO guide. May as well blame Apple for selling scissors and trying to get you to put them in a safety case before running with them.

I blame the do-whatever-the-fsck-you-want attitude of the PC market for why consumers have such a bad experience. Example: Most Windows issues ARE the fault of the user or because their cheap ass hardware craps out. Microsoft does nothing to require hardware to be of good quality or to keep users from getting themselves in trouble. Therefore most people think Windows sucks even if they are to lazy/cheap to switch to a Mac or Linux (which both also suck BTW - just less). Windows does suck but the vast majority of it's problems aren't really it's problems. I think requiring a license to access a computer or the Internet would be going to far but a simple safety isn't a bad idea. I like it on my rifle too.

True, but if you block by IP, you risk blocking other sites on the same host. For example, a medium-sized business may think they're blocking access to http://ebay.com/, but suddenly discover they're also blocking the revenue source http://paypal.com/.

Technically, multiple sites shouldn't be on the same page, but...