FYI

> I hope they take advantage of the marketing possibilities offered by civet-processed coffee.

Just had a bit too much to drink...

Tanenbaum's Structured Computer Organization takes a similar approach, going from the boolean logic of a transistor gate up to the OS and application level. I took a class with the first edition of Tanenbaum's book as the text in 1983 and l learned more about computers from it than from any other class before or since.

Separate from the issue of Cash for Clunkers taking used cars off of the market (and with them their maintenance cost and poor gas mileage), note that the poor suffer disproportionately from the effects of air pollution. So if removing cheap old stink-bombs from the road hurts the poor in one way, it may help them in a much more important way.

Isn't this airbag mess more an example of the free market in action? Just like letting Huwei build our telecom equipment? And didn't the government just quash that particular bit of business?

The share of Chinese imports gets substantially higher when you subtract oil from the total, at $400-500 billion per year.

Since Linus is speaking honestly, he makes the entire community look good.

Such pictures may help people appreciate the oceans more, and Tel Aviv more too for that matter. Maybe we won't travel as much, but we may come to a greater appreciation of what we have.

>This method is not recommended for controlling the audio output of animals or children.

Why'd you leave women off the list?

Ah, you're talking about the Bush administration again. Strong opinions, shallow knowledge. Yes, the karma's hell.

Models make a person think. They require some analysis of the situation. That's why they're built by experts -- and why they help develop experts. So whatever a model says, if someone has been working on it for, say, a few months, then I know that they have a much deeper understanding of the field of study than, say, an arbitrary Slashdot know-it-all.

Wouldn't it be easier to shoot *you* for a large cut than all of those pesky folks for a small cut? Yes, and that's why so many crimes are inside jobs, and why empires from nation-sized to family-sized crack in times of stress.

As for starvation being a motivator, God what an ignorant remark. The starving, well, they starve, and experience just the apocalypse that we're talking about here. Why haven't Somalis or Chinese peasants invented the next great thing? The green revolution and other ideas that have kept westerners from starving for the last 80 years were all invented by the non-starving -- people with insight, such as those that have been sounding the alarm, for decades, about rising population intersecting the bounty of a declining environment. "It can't happen to me" isn't much of a policy tool.

Whew, wish I could find the link. But a study discussed some years ago on Slashdot found that for every $1 billion spent on defense and space R&D, there was a benefit equivalent to $200 million being spent on civilian-oriented research. Like, we might have wanted a microwave oven anyhow, without building a rocket to need one.

So yes, space R&D isn't a complete waste of money. It's an 80% waste of money.

Maybe such people will be left behind, like people in dictatorships, whether the dicatorship is religious or secular. But since "smart idiots" are interwoven into the fabric of powerful nations, maybe they'll embroil the world in war, purge the intellectuals, burn the (digital) libraries, and send us back to the Middle Ages. It's happened before. In fact closed-mindedness is the only type of mentality that *can* cause war and oppression. Welcome to the good fight, for the rest of your life -- the struggle for freedom in, or despite, reality.

In time of peace, war goods go missing at all stages of the development process -- design, prototyping, demos and trade shows, manufacturing, delivery, storage and use by the armed services and our supposed allies. In time of war, it's left behind on the battlefield, shot over the enemy's borders, sunk into the deep blue sea. The military does it's best to control access but only 100% will do, and that's impossible. So backdoors are a bad thing.