Good point about the increased reliability of a 'pressed' recovery disk vs. a home-burned one. I have never had a pressed disk go bad, but have had plenty of home-brewed ones do that, of all degrees of quality. I have also tried to burn a recovery DVD immediately after starting a new laptop, had that operation fail, and then discovered I could not make a second attempt. I had to pay the manufacturer for their pressed recovery DVD in addition to the price of the new laptop.

The kids who were camping apologized at the end of their patch, saying the repeater was the only way they could contact Dad from where they were. That makes me thing the repeater was an open one. However, I didn't note any of the repeater's details.

"open autopatches" Last week I heard one being used on a 2M repeater near Great Smoky Mountains National Park in an area with no cell phone coverage. Some young people camping in the park were checking in with Dad at home. YMMV.

Who was/were the victim(s) of this convicted murderer anyway? Buehler? Anyone? Not that they matter one bit.

I just did a quick and completely non-scientific study of asking several people about these, all of them hate them. Birds of feather...

the optimal size for fine control and large movements I suspect whatever is optimal varies from user to user. My hands are way too large for netbook keyboards. I have used trackpoints and trackpads, some are better than others.

the solution is to switch engine displacement unit in the US to, say a pint? An easier solution would be to put lies on the back of the vehicle, e.g, "6.9L" when the real engine displacement is "1.2L"

The funny thing is that very few computer salesmen know for which CPUs hardware virtualization is enabled, so the only result of Intel's market segmentation is confusion and dissatisfied customers. --- CPUs are not the only factor limiting virtualization. You have to factor in the motherboard, BIOS, graphics, and RAM. Intel offers a utility you can run that will tell you whether or not your system permits virtualization, but it is misleading. If you put an Intel CPU on a motherboard whose chipset blocks virtualization, the utility tells you the CPU is incapable of virtualization, even though it actually is, while it will not tell you that the chipset is the limiting factor. Motherboard manufacturers may capriciously block virtualization at the BIOS level and months later release BIOS versions which allow it. --- Computer salesmen are not the only ones ignorant of which components permit virtualization and which don't. Just go to Newegg or TigerDirect and search for, say, a laptop or a motherboard that will run virtualization under Win7. The information is never provided. I sent an email to Newegg 3 weeks ago asking for this information and have yet to receive a reply. Generally speaking, computer and motherboard manufacturers act as if they don't know and don't care which of their machines/motherboards permit virtualization and which don't. Various forums & boards on the internet which discuss virtualization from a user's point of view often neglect to give the specifics of successful virtualization.

My only experience was second hand, from an amateur mechanic who races farm tractors at contests. An engine he had been working on suddenly started to rev uncontrollably for no reason, fortunately it was parked & not in gear. He had just enough time to warn everyone, and he ran behind the tractor on the end opposite the engine before the engine exploded. I don't know how long the whole process took, but he described the explosion as a bomb going off with pieces of shrapnel flying & ricocheting in all directions. I would only try the remedy of blocking the air intake on a runaway diesel if I was already under the hood & the air cleaner was already off the machine. It takes too long to open the hood, remove the obstructing parts, and block the air intake with something. The basic cause of this problem is the diesel feeding on its own oil supply through an internal leak, which could be a bad seal, a crack in the block, or whatever. The only limit to the engine's speed would then be how fast the engine oil was getting sucked into the cylinders (something a witness can't determine until later, and maybe never), the amount of oil in the engine, and whether or not a key part seizes up due to overheating or oil starvation. That's why I said it would take a braver man than I to try to strangle a runaway diesel engine.

a runaway diesel (turbo bearing oil seal broke, hot engine oil continued to fuel the engine even with the engine shut-off pulled - stopped, then covered the air intake with my coat to finally choke it before it ran out of oil You're a braver man than I am. I wonder how many seconds of hyper-revving a diesel can take before it violently dissassembles itself.

Written Chinese has heaps of grammar. That is a side issue. What is remarkable is that people who speak mutually unintelligible dialects can use their own written language to make themselves clear to someone else who is literate in his own written language. That's a breakthrough. Which is easier, to learn to read & write a foreign language, or just to memorize several thousand characters with whatever written grammar the Chinese use? Is there a point for a literate Chinese to learn another Chinese dialect, or do they tend to rely on writing? I wonder if knowledge of any spoken Chinese language is necessary to become literate in Chinese, or could a student cut to the chase and simply learn the ideographs and the written grammar associated with them?

Larger brains = better thinking? Beyond a certain level in brain size, I doubt this is a valid rule. The 'best and the brightest' have repeatedly led their followers to doom and disaster. There is no reason to think the situation was that different 60,000 years ago. Maybe those big brains died out because they were too clever by 12.5%

that's nonsense. Progress is real. That's for sure. I was born naked, soaking wet & ignorant, now look at me.

pre-contact Polynesian societies, for example: women weren't allowed in canoes -- Those barbarians made their women swim to the uninhabited islands while the men got to ride in the canoes.

Thus, identical mitochondrial DNA will exist through the maternal hierarchy of families. There have already been found exceptions to this statement. See this: http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/347/8/576 A man with a severe mitochondrial disorder was found to have inherited his father's (not his mother's) mitochrondrial DNA, along with a new mutation unique to the patient which caused his disorder. From that article: "paternal mtDNA inheritance may go unrecognized ... because mitochondrial haplotypes are rarely investigated in diagnostic analyses."