Every dime "invested" in ethanol from corn/soy should be redirected into battery technology.

If we could put a minor hybrid assist in every car that provides say 5 miles on electric, it would improve efficiency for at least all the idle time at stoplights and such.

Get a decent transmission/battery for school buses, mail trucks, and other constantly running vehicles and knock off an additional chunk of wasted fuel.

Or maybe they have a separate network provider (perhaps a local company) for the spectators.

And yet ABB won't port their HP-UX app over. We use MicroFocus on UX, so it should be easy.

But no.

Until there is a supported COBOL environment in Linux, HP-UX on Itanium will be around for a long time.

I work in the power industry, and we use some very specific applications that are only available on HP-UX and AIX. HP-UX is by far their largest install base.

These apps are used by the power plants/coal mines for everything. As you'd expect, there are very few applications that are certified for use by the power industry that meet the regulations. The one we use will begin supporting LDAP instead of NIS next year.

There's no incentive for new players in this software market due to the small number of potential customers and the massive trust curve they'd have to meet to make somebody switch.

We're one of the reasons there's a pretty long road map for Itaniums and HP-UX.

There are a million web people.

If you can dig in and work your way into a position that supports and codes for these kinds of environments, you're likely to have a job for 40 years.

Yes, mobile devices are shiny.

But you need big telecom, big transaction processing and big power to make that happen. And that happens on big systems.

I know my department has a number of DBAs/developers that will be retiring over the next 5-10 years. There are no competitors for our business systems due to the regulatory framework, so it will be maintenance and upgrades. Maybe a migration from Oracle to SAP and back, depending on the management regime.

Something to throw out there.

It is polite to advertise that you're using RFspace.

Then if my neighbors just can't get theirs working, they know at least the first person to ask about which channel not to use on theirs.

I have enough other security features on mine to keep the normal riffraff out.

If somebody wants in, they'll get in, but they'll stick out pretty badly in my neighborhood. "Wonder why there's a doughnut truck out front with a satellite dish on top"

And then auctions it for charity, and buys another one.

I seem to remember he always gets a great novelty plate like "Thrifty" or something.

If a car blows through an intersection, and a cop sees it, it's ticket-time, and probably an arrest.

if a bike blows through an intersection, and a cop sees it, I doubt they'd expend the effort to track the bicyclist down.

I didn't say that all cyclists are bad. I said this one was.

All the cars stopped. The people walking in the crosswalk were nearly drilled by some jerk on his bike. Just kept riding, then rode through the next red light.

They want full access to the roads, taking a whole lane? Fine. Then they need to meet all of the same rules we do.
- No rolling red lights.
- No cutting between cars in their lanes.
- Turn signals
- Etc.

That always ensures quality.

How much dirty metal is mined to make a dirty oil drilling platform that's dumped into the ocean?

With an electric, that oil rig doesn't need to be built, maintained, and therefore won't pollute the ocean.

After you figure in licensing, support costs, it's about $350K.

I say that because I use the same gear, and that's how much it costs for 300TB. We have to add that every so often, so the number stuck. :-)

Certainly they get a better discount than I do.

I can't wait for that to hit.

That Kickstarter was exciting. "If we get this much money, we'll do this in Linux".

Ok, we just hit that number.

"If we get"

Ok, we just got that while I was typing the description.

You can give them satellite images of the house of the person that stole your identity, and they won't drive over for that.

So for something involving log files and such? Not a chance.

You should redirect all network traffic to goatse for a week, and just use a 3G hotspot while your normal one kills the thief's eyes.