Don't forget the Testosterone^WHistory Channel's "Ice Road Truckers," "Axe Men" and the like.

The Bad Astronomer says it's fake.

Only if your job can't be outsourced. You think American business management is gonna give you the job just because the better qualified guy moved back home, and can work for even less there than he did here?

Disclaimer: I don't have anything against outsourcing, and certainly not against these folks that are moving back home to take advantage of better opportunities (more power to them). I'm just pointing out a fact about the current US business environment.

It's not. For the record, I hate working in Windows, because it feels so damn limited. But I know there are a lot of people for whom $300 is worth far less than the hassle of trying to get their job (or even their entertainment) done on a non-MS platform.

I think you've got some numbers wrong. Even with a heat sink right at freezing, the reactor would need to heat the water to 2850F just to get the Carnot efficiency to 85%. [Source]

Supercritical steam plants get almost 50% efficiency, but (steam) nuclear plants operate at lower temperatures and pressures, so their efficiency will necessarily be lower.

God...I suppose I'm transforming into Comic Book Store Guy here, and you might even be trolling me, but...

Um, no? There's no shortage of instances where the "you can't send matter out through an incoming wormhole" thing was a key feature in the main plot thread. EM radiation can travel both ways, matter can't. Just off the top of my Comic Book Guy head:

1. Team of redshirts stuck on a world adjacent to a black hole. Black hole keeps wormhole from earth to said planet open indefinitely. Team can't just step back through the gate -> enough story to fill an hour.

2. Carter goes looking for info to help O'Neill when he's got the Ancient database downloaded into his head. DHD on the planet is borked, earth can dial in to video chat, but Carter's team can't step back through the gate. O'Neill has to draw up instructions for a fix so Carter can repair the DHD and come back home.

3. Anubis dials in and dumps energy through the wormhole in an attempt to blow up earth's gate. They could have just shoved a nuke through the gate and put a big honking block of lead in front of it. Problem solved. Oops, that conflicts with canon -> we have a story that will fill an hour again.

I'm sure there are more. And now, if you'll excuse me, I need to get some real work done so I don't feel so much like a basement-dwelling loser for knowing so much Stargate lore. :)

I thought of that, just didn't mention it. I didn't recall any instances of dialing in or out from ships in hyperspace or otherwise FTL, but I know I've missed a significant number of episodes over the years, so I didn't think I could conclusively say they'd never done it.

But it's been so long since Lost in Space came out that most people either don't remember Dr. Smith, or don't even know who you're talking about. :)

I can think of two reasons:

1. It's been established frequently in the other two series that matter will only travel in an outgoing direction through a stargate, so you'd need somebody to dial in instead.
2. The ship was (I think) in motion, faster than light. I don't think they've ever said whether it's possible to dial in or out from a gate moving that fast.

And then there's the consideration that they wanted to kill somebody off in the pilot for dramatic purposes, so a stuck door and air loss is as good a MacGuffin as anything else. It is consistent with the established rules in the series, though.

WARNING: The information below is NOT safe for work. It is provided for informational purposes only. Neither Slashdot nor I assume responsibility should you decide to follow up on it. You have been warned.

There are people from the GNAA that troll here, and that's what I was referring to. It's pretty lame, I should be ashamed for making the joke, but somehow I'm not.

In fact, I'm almost hoping that somebody will make a webpage for MSGNAA.

I'm sure that somebody could do something creative with that image Microsoft Poland photoshopped.

Ok, *now* I'm ashamed.

Thank you very much!

Wow, awesome selection of priorities. They're mostly subjective, with no way to measure whether they're achieved or not. Great for hand-waving excuses later about why nothing gets done.

Anyway, do you have a reference for Yoran's statements on weak Windows security? I must have chosen the wrong keywords when I looked for them.

This is the same Cringely that's an "expert" on the user interfaces of nuclear power plants, isn't it? Does he have some sort of credentials that might actually make him an expert in cyber security? Looking on his site....

So just like his venture into nuclear power expert-ness, his IT knowledge is at best second-hand.

Thanks to the submitter for the links to an actual story, though. :)

I'm sure DeVry and U.o.Phoenix will be glad to pump out several thousand associate degrees in Cybersecurity Expertry or something in the next three years for them to sort through. That way DHS can say they interviewed thousands of candidates and only took "the best."

I don't know about all the other points, but this one I can say something about. The first thing I did when got a new Vista machine was strip all the preloaded Dell crap out of it, got all the current updates, then downloaded and installed Firefox. I only use IE if forced to by a business-related website that I have to visit.

And what do I see? Sometimes it's just slow as fuck. I'm sorry, but it is. Usually the monstrous slowness centers around file system activity: trying to copy a folder with lots of small items in it, or trying to delete five small files, or extracting a medium-sized ZIP archive. It's not just slow, it makes the machine completely unresponsive for 10+ seconds at a time. I don't care enough to profile it, because I only use Windows when I have to for work, and I can always get up and make a cup of coffee or something.

I dual-boot Ubuntu on the same machine. I use it all the time for grad school and work. I do disk-access-intensive things on Linux, generally stuff that's way more demanding than the things I try on Windows. I *never* see the kind of crappy performance I get under Vista.

So, no, Vista isn't slow because I don't know how to use my computer--it's just slow sometimes.