The video above does it some justice. I was quite a distance away (St. Louis), though it sure looked like it was falling nearby. Bright, traffic-light green body and tail, lasting maybe 5-6 seconds of its descent. When the object disintegrated it burst into a ball of yellow/orange, and looked not unlike the explosive, expanding shells they put off during the 4th of July.

Awesome sight. The trajectory must have been very horizontal for the tail to have been so long, and it must have disintegrated very high up in the atmosphere for it to be viewable over such a large area.

All he's saying is that the government should convert some military pork to space pork.

And considering how racist we humans are, meeting the aliens will def not be very peacefull, atleast at first, followed by decades of hatred. So it might be that we are better off not meeting aliens anytime soon.

Or maybe we meet aliens, but the distance is so vast, and neither of our technologies are capable for actually getting into same physical place, and we may only communicate with vast latency.

or maybe they are so much more technologically advanced, that despite them being very friendly our hatred pushes them away.

Who knows, possibilities are endless, but very few of them seem to be positive.

Oh I don't know... try almost any modern window, car body panels, ductwork etc - anything made of polycarbonate, HDPE, UHMWPE...

Not all plastics are untreated, basic PVC or supercheap plastic used in drinks bottles.

1 Photon to one electron is only half the story. If the photon has more energy than the electron then there is a loss. The electron has a fixed energy (band gap) and the photons *must* have that much energy or more before it works at all. There are other details too, in silicon its not a direct band gap, so each photon cannot just eject a single electron, it must also emit a phonon (heat). Silicon has a theoretical maximum efficiency (electrical) of about 29-30% IIRC in sunlight (thats at 100% quantum efficiency for all photons at and above the band gap).

No, the worst case is much, much lower. The problem is that there are two different definitions of efficiency going on here. The 90-100% conversion to electricity means that 90-100% of the absorbed photons are turned into single electrons. This does *not* say that 90-100% of the energy in the original photons is converted to energy in the electrons. In fact, just as in all other solar cell devices, the photons initially create fast moving electrons, converting all of their energy. But most of that kinetic energy is lost to heat before the electrons can be extracted from the device and used to do work.

So, the take-home message is that efficiency can refer to number of converted photons, regardless of how much energy was lost to heat.

I don't know, at least I can read Crawford without going to sleep. And many of his tomes are informative, such as his "thousands of places to get free, legal, online music."

KSysGuard and SystemTap do the majority of what you say you need.

Diamonds are only that valuable because of the De Beers monopoly. Still at highest quality diamonds, assuming with just a whiff of delusion that these diamonds could be sold for $80k per gram no matter what, then sure, you could probably make a profit. $80 million per kg is a pretty good price for payload.

And when you don't buy what they are offering they'll run to their government lackeys crying "Our sales are dropping! It must be those awful Internet Pirates! Please pass this new law which will give us massively increased powers of control over regular users' lives or we might just stop producing such fine works as Pointless Sequel 7 or Brainless Action Movie 12.

Have you ever seen a frozen waterfall? The water falls from a high energy position to a low energy position. There is certainly a "design" created. The trip from high to low energy doesn't have to be linear.

It is true, I stopped servicing my Dad's computer, put him on a user account on windows told him to use it and didn't do anything. Well, he figured it out, that windows sucks and is inheritantly broken if one as a policy doesn't buy anything for it....even the stuff we had bought was at this point broken... /.... and he didn't figure it out he just plays solitaire and checks email... dunno, hope this Ubuntu 64-bit computer ups his ante and teaches him google-fu, probably not, but you know at least I'll have the TOOLS to actually do something for&with the system, on the system, and by the system,

All it will prove is that these machines are hard to hack for outsiders. But the number one threat is that of insiders; mainly the government in place (who has most to lose in an election) and corrupt programmers at the company making the voting computers.

Actually you left out other wrinkles in the version trail. Windows 2.0 morphed into Windows 286 and Windows 386. Windows 386 was the precursor to Windows 3.0. Then after Windows 3.11 came Windows for Workgroups 3.11. Then there were the various SP updates to XP: SP2 was as big a change as the 3.0 to 3.1 switch.

If anyone still has a Windows 3.11 or Windows 3.1 system, they can use its calculator applet to compute the difference between those versions. Just use it to calculate 3.11 - 3.1 and be amazed by the answer.

Ah. Wishful thinking. Try to keep on that track as long as possible. Consider it a second childhood.

We have to deal with the mess we have. Yeah, Win* is a sloppy slut. I don't use it. Still, the net's polluted with Win* crap and I'll bet most of those on /. (have to|want to) use it every day. So, whether MS are incompetent idiots or not is irrelevant. We're in quicksand; what do we do? Just blame MS and go home?

For me, it's astounding to hear that Win 7 is still crackable days after release. This from the company that's been supplying business with software all these years. They still can't even figure out how to secure their binaries. How can we expect different from them in the rest of their realm?

HTH did we get from Wallace to malware?!? Probably my fault.

Still doesn't answer the question. We've email admins around the planet fighting this !@#$, and I still see some every day (yes, I know procmail & bogofilter, thanks).

I'm hoping Darknet shows up any day now, and any packets with MS signatures in them will be summarily dropped when detected.

Again, wishful thinking.