+1 +1 +1, for the love of God, +1

Disk space is cheap (modulo the current supply problems); disk management is expensive. RAID, index time, backups all conspire to make that $100 Fry's special cost 10x as much in reality.

...though "ability to see into the UV part of the spectrum" is not quite as useful as "ability to smell into the future" (my personal fave).

For everyone else, it's:

1. Get on coaster.
2. Break a hip/rib; dislocate a shoulder on turn 1.
3. Be in horrible, horrible pain until passing out from pain and/or dying from acceleration.

Awesome. I wouldn't even call this a nice thought experiment--it's just stupid.

Dang it. Now I want to bake a pie.

Mmm. Pie.

Actually, getting a relative newbie to get BIOS to boot from something other than a hard disk is way worse than learning a VM environment IMO. I'm all for the VM idea, whether VMware Player or VirtualBox. VirtualBox can import OVFs, too, so it's fairly easy to get just about anything that has been made as a virtual appliance to work.

I worked at SJSU up until 2008 and the policy was that access wasn't particularly restricted in any way but support for non Windows/MacOS was fairly limited.

Except in the College of Engineering--we tried our best to support basically anything the students would come up with, no matter how weird. Getting something bizarre working on our network was a point of pride :-). The school flirted with implementing Clean Access, but I don't know if that ever actually happened (and from the sound of it, the plan was that only Windoze users would have been affected).

Now you just wait a centon. What do you mean we aren't using a base 10 timing metric? ;-)

Folks toss about the phrase "Epic Fail" far too loosely. Here's what a real Epic Fail looks like:

The DRM code has a bug that, when a certain condition happens (time passes, specially-formulated packet received, etc.), it overclocks the CPU to the point that it catches on fire. Within minutes of the event, most of the millions of PS3s in the wild have set peoples' homes ablaze.

As a result, thousands die and the insurance industry collapses. Anarchy reigns, so there's nobody to enforce copyright anymore and the original DRM is rendered irrelevant.

THAT is an epic fail.

B-52s FTW!

I'm personally more of a fan of "Love in the Year 3000" than "Funplex," but it's a good album nonetheless.

The explanation is simple. The plucky young upstart warrior (and perhaps the rest of his party) just defeated the final boss using his strongest-ever attack. One involving, say, exploding materia*.

What everyone saw was just the endgame cutscene for that (at a safe distance, of course).

* Materia is a Final Fantasy VII term. Substitute your favorite mystical RPG energy thingy here if you like.

...the fact that Catholics believe you can buy your way out of sin...

Whoa, there, Martin Luther. Let's not get ahead of ourselves.

I know the church is hardly perfect and that there have been plenty of problems both past and present, but I don't believe the buying of indulgences has been an actual issue within the last couple hundred years.

We Catholics owe a debt of gratitude to Martin Luther for pointing out (vociferously) many of our old problems, but...

I'm pretty sure the Spanish Inquisition is over, as well. Want to blame present-day Catholics for that, too?

...the head of the church is the pope - not Christ

Who says? Again, I'm hardly a perfect Catholic, but I'm pretty sure nobody ever said "ignore this Christ guy--the pope's where it's at" at any point. Believe it or not, we Catholics are Christians, despite what various (misinformed) non-Catholic Christians might believe. We just have a larger bureaucracy :-)

Does the Catholic Church have problems? You bet. Tons. Most of them related to being a huge, largely-decentralized *, and very forgiving ** organization. We do *not*, however, believe in the sale of indulgences or in the non-primacy of Christ. If you insist on attacking us, please do so with at least 20th century problems, not with 14th century ones.

* - Each individual diocese has a surprisingly large degree of autonomy from Rome. Hence the reason some dioceses dealt with the pedofile priest problem better than others.

** - Believe it or not, both the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition ended a long time ago. We tend to be a pretty forgiving lot nowadays.

Take one meter. Make a cube of that side, a cubic meter. Fill that with water near the sea level and you get a volume of 1 kiloLiter of water. Which happens to have a mass of 1 Megagram.

There. Fixed that for you. A 10cm-cube of water is 1l = 1kg. What you mentioned is 1,000 times larger.

Mod parent up.

My life has gotten SO much better since I started using ack(1). Key features:

• By default, it ignores files that should be ignored (binaries, cvs/svn/whatever files), which makes for MUCH faster searches.
• Significantly better display options and other "do what I mean" sanity.
• Pure perl and therefore uses Perl regexes.
• You can restrict searches to files of a specific general type ("ack --php" searches only .php .phpt .php3 .php4 .php5, e.g.).

No disclaimer necessary--I'm not involved with development, just a really happy user.

IANAL (yada, yada), but...

In general, you can't be prevented from saying almost anything. You can, however, suffer consequences from what you do say.

That's the big difference.