In my misspent youth, I watched two guys install/hack an 1800 horsepower Allison V-1710 (V-12) form a decommissioned P-51 Mustang fighter, into a 1967 Ford Mustang.
An interesting endeavour, if somewhat foolhardy. I vaguely recall that "standard practice" back in the day was to put the V-12 on an industrial bandsaw and (sob) saw it in half to make a relatively lightweight 6 cylinder race car engine. I definitely recall seeing one such bandsaw with the two engine halves nearby. On a brighter note, I recently visited a facility in Florida and sat in a shop with what looked like 50+ Allisons, Merlins, and possibly other assorted V-12 engines lined up on the shelves, so at least someone is preserving and refurbishing them.
...when I was a kid in the 60's-70's the largest telescope in the world boasted a 0.5 meter mirror...
I presume that you meant 5 meters (the 200 inch Hale at Mt. Palomar)?
Or how a bucket of these might taste! They live in brine, are from the sea... Imagine these on french fries and potato chips!
Why were Futurama, Fry and anchovies the first things that immediately came to my mind when reading this?
Why were Futurama, Leela and Poppers(TM) the first things that immediately came to my mind when reading this? Better not try them -- Lrrr might be hanging around this star system.
Actually, no. SoCal gets shallow 3.x quakes all the time (the shallowest I happened to notice on the USGS map somelone linked to above was 9km), and frankly most of the time you don't even notice them
9km, eh? I used to laugh at people who made a big deal out of a 3.0 quake. Then one night there was a lowly 2.8 quake about 300m from my house (might have been directly under it, depending on the location quality). The depth according to the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network was 0km. It was certainly nothing like the M5-M6 quakes I've experienced, but it woke me from a deep sleep and got my immediate attention. I can't imagine how it would feel to be directly above an M6.5 or M7.
For all anyone knows, the M3.4 quake in Basel might have relieved stress that would otherwise have accumulated and flattened the town with an M6 20-30 years from now.
Pfft, that's only pseudo random data, why settle when you can get true random data
No "random" data that you get from the net should be trusted. I throw old 16-sided gaming dice to generate a transparent X-Y grid, which is then set over the top of my cat's litter box. The positions of the cat turds are normalized against a reference litter box and fed into a fancy matrix algorithm, the output of which is SHA4 hashed and truncated to make the WPA2 key.
You've got be kidding about running four guest vms on your laptop unless you are talking about running them one at a time
I always run one, and sometimes 3-4 VMs on my year-old Thinkpad, using VMWare Server. Most often my official work VM, but other times an Ubuntu-based Asterisk PBX and a couple of W2K3 VMs running a sophisticated Unified Communications telecom app. A couple of times I've run an OpenFiler SAN feeding two W2K3 servers via iSCSI. I can't remember whether I've set them up with Windows clustering or whether that was on a couple of physical servers. This is all for functional testing, not high-throughput load testing.
"May your future be limited only by your dreams." -- Christa McAuliffe