Table salt has a 1:1 correlation to sodium chloride. Therefore no additional information is conveyed using the chemical name. While I appreciate your desire to be geeky, may I point out that "table salt" is 33% more efficient at conveying the intended information?

Both Russia and America are part of the same ecosystem; anything devastating enough to affect Russia at any scale would in turn affect us.

Remember that fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself; I bring you...

The Law Which Must Not Be Named

Gas Turbines, and Diesel-Electrics both require oxygen and fuel. As for fuel, a nuclear sub needs to be refueled less often. More importantly, it doesn't breathe air. That means it can run deeper and longer than any other design (pending storing your own oxygen).

DRM will always be an excercise in fail.... at least until human cyborg components are mandatory.

Are you unaware of the signal behavior of a cell phone shortly before it receives a call? I have noticed on several dozen occasions that if a cell phone is located near an unshielded speaker or speaker signal wire (a headphone cable, for instance), the speaker will emit a series of beeps in a particular pattern.

Obviously, the cell phone is inducing current into the wire. The man's behavior is not psychosomatic in nature, necessarily. The cell phone does behave differently when it is negotiating a new call.

As for your tests, I whole-heartedly agree that this would be the best way to prove it. However, finding a scientific method of doing it is somewhat hard to do, since any experiment must be repeatable, and the experiment matter may be hard to find (i.e. is not believed to exist at all by some people). Also, it is hardly humane to conduct experiments on a person who negatively reacts to a cell phone; if he was telling the truth, and the radiation knocked him unconcious, who knows what further radiation might do?

Okay, as they say, blood is thicker than water. As well-meaning as these kind folks on Slashdot are, you and I know that you cannot get out of a support role. In truth, it is a meaningful service you can provide. But, since you're commited, why not examine ways to reduce your problems? Sure, there are lots of software options, but I'm more of a hardware kind of guy. I bought a $100 router with twin hardware firewalls. Even using free ZoneAlarm under Windows XP Professional, I have had zero spyware, malware, viruses, rootkits, etc. In well over a year. That's with four windows XP machines and 3 Ubuntu machines on the network, plus printer, XBOX360, etc. I lock my wireless network to MAC-only and leave it otherwise open and unencrypted.

You raise good points, but let me question one of your assumptions. First lets suppose that we do in fact spend $88 Billion on our military annually. You are right to refer to our military as "a dormant lion of a military that needs nothing more than a twitchy trigger finger on its leash to free an unholy uproar of annihilation and chaos", in fact, most militaries are. If you ever studied the Roman Empire you might remember that the biggest problems in government happened when the the military had nothing to do. If they weren't needed, could you cut military spending? Um... no. Because soldiers like to get paid. If they don't, things like government coups happen. I seriously doubt we are completely immune to this. So, basically, since we have a military, we must maintain it and feed it money so it doesn't turn around and gnaw our faces off.

I agree that noise in space is an issue, but the issue of lasers is a bit more complex. Star Wars does not have lasers. Rather it is a form of plasma, much like the matter that makes up a light-saber. Now I suspect that as plasma travels through space it radiates heat and light, much like any other super-heated compound would do in a vacuum.

I am not competent at carpentry, in the sense that I am completely inexperienced and untrained, yet I was able to do work for habitat for humanity.

fascinating. I know that I've experienced bit rot w/ a lot of cds and dvds in the past. But I've been using T-Y since 2004, and haven't had a bad disk since. If you wish to consider taiyo-yuden cd/dvd in the future, I buy from supermediastore.com.