I have been down a 2km mineshaft(the shaft is deeper, but they only go down in +/-2km sections) in a 'cage'. There is no counterweight, but the AC winder that drops (yes, 'drops' is the right word) you and hauls you back out is pretty powerful. They account for cable weight and extension because there are rails in the cages and they need precision to match them up. They get about +/- 1cm. Operator skill is important..

Yes. It is possible even with old style cables, but to get anywhere in a reasonable time, you have to go bloody fast, and it is honestly really scary. It took us about 5 minutes to reach the bottom most of that time was slowing down. I don't recommend it for the the general public. Many shorter elevators are a far better idea. Can you imagine stopping at every floor for 1km?

At work I have a little AMD (1.6GHz I think) freebsd system with 2Gb of RAM that saturates gigabit easily. I have actually been quite impressed by the performance of ZFS. Perhaps I am easily impressed though. The last system we had was an off-the-shelf seagate home level NAS that ran some form of embedded linux and failed horribly.

It keeps complaining it wants another 2gb of RAM to enable prefetch or something, but I can't be bothered because it is really better than it needs to be, and it does provide me some minor redundancy.

unfortunately, I am no longer infected.

oh. mjwx beat me to it. Well played...

My hovercraft is full of eels.

Pretty much. Just bear in mind supernatural does not imply omniscient or omnipotent. Any being that can modify/break the rules of our universe would be supernatural(i.e. above our 'natural' laws.).

"Suppose we discovered that our universe was created by a non-supernatural being that lives in a "parent" universe."

Such a being would be "super-natural" to us, as in above and beyond the laws of our universe. As to the questions, it depends on the character of this being.

Jason above doesn't appear to be very Christian. I would hope he is not representative, and merely loud.

His reaction appears to be that of one fighting a losing battle, since deep down he doesn't believe the literal account in Genesis. Ironically that unnecessary tension within him will likely ultimately result in the loss of his faith. Leave him be, unless he learns better, it will eventually and sadly run it's course from uninformed christian to uninformed atheist. I am not entirely sure which is worse.

A DC drive is generally variable voltage/current and switched through a scr. At full power, they would be smoother. At low power, the switching frequency will cause severe ripple. 3 phase is better for simple rectifiers and is indeed smoother.

He lost me at 'Agile'.

That is how I read it too. Basically google is trying to use Youtube to leverage it's way into the audio streaming market. This in itself isn't evil, but the means they're using (brute force) is a bit shitty and the contracts they offer are also (allegedly - I haven't read one) shitty. That would be evil, or at least not good.

I thought everyone knew about Elvis!

I don't actually think this is about tolerance. Sure AC is a rude bastard, but he isn't entirely wrong. It is ... shall we say unwise... to jump upon every minor discovery as supporting a particular world view without considering it carefully first.

Personally, I don't buy a literal interpretation of Genesis, and I have found people who do tend to grasp desperately at anything that seems to support their argument, which often leaves them with egg on the face, as it were. Almost as if they don't really believe, but are trying desperately to convince themselves. It's a position that seems to me to be a bit antithetical to Christianity, and perhaps is ill-advised. I don't doubt that there are literalists who aren't quite like that, but it seems to be a trend of sorts. Perhaps because the television evangelists realised that a good conspiracy sells very well and have been pushing it for years to try and trap people in order to part them with their money.

Because no steam content is hosted locally. Right... ok, keep insulting me, you're really on a roll there, and it makes you look so good. Never mind that my complete complaint is that even if what you alledge is the case, why can't apple put "pending local approval" or similar in the store, instead of dangling something in front of you and denying it on the location of not your accound, but your credit card. So if I wanted to buy the game with a sa card while physically located in the states I should be able too. I understand governments can be thick, but I can't see a way apple comes out of this looking good. You certainly don't.

Oh, right. That would naturally explain why it was available on steam at the time. I stand corrected....