Many European countries have the same reservations about the US; how can you protect the vulnerable poor without universal healthcare? How can you protect the environment whilst flouting Kyoto? The poverty which exists in areas of the US may be nothing in comparison with India, but is still considered barbaric by most of Europe. Which 'level playing field' would you like?

ALL labour is 'exploited'; that's how Capitalism works. It doesn't need to be put in such loaded terms, but the fact is that Capitalism cannot exist without the appropriation of surplus value created by labour - if you want Capitalism, you have to put up with 'exploitation'. It seems to me that 'competing', in a purely business sense, is exactly what India is doing.

Even there, we suffer from a lack of standardi[sz]ation; in the UK, this has always been called 4x2*(pronounced 'four-be-two'), which to my ears is even more tongue-rolly than 2x4. One of us needs to give that sucker a quarter-turn.

* Even though it has actually been 100mm x 50mm for decades

See, I believe in everyone's potential. Pardon's are great for those that demonstrate it, but how about looking to demonstrate it to the ones that committed the crimes?

Limited budget arguments don't hold water for me. If we seriously thought about education, we could do more for less, and even have it pay for itself. I do believe in investing in children, and I believe in compassion. Everyone makes mistakes, and people will disagree where to draw the line on who to have compassion for. But regardless, lets give everyone a chance at a second chance. Not just throw them in schools for criminals with three hots and a cot.

  If they are truly mentally ill (unable to be capable of understanding the damage done) they should be exculpated. I still say that we should focus on healing them and continue to learn and explore. If they are not mentally ill (capable of understanding the damage done) then educate and help them understand. Until they do, they are a danger to society...

As close as you can get != close enough. The furthest we can get space probes is the outer solar system but that doesn't mean that we should pretend that's close enough to observe a black hole.

>Independance from US control is the second motivator.

Primary motivator. Galileo isn't a UK department for transport initiative, you know. In fact the UK, due to it's low funding, is a bit player. ( I'm from the UK and only got to work on Galileo because I was based in another country at the time )

7 cubed is 343, so slightly more than a third of the mass.(Given equal density and similar shapes)

How uncivilised - more enlghtened parts of the UK abolished prescription charges years ago:-)

I'm afraid they have; we (the British) managed to wipe out the entire indigenous population of Tazmania in the nineteenth century.

And that's why we're starting with an all-fiber network :)

...but I'm not looking forward to the day when a few light pulses can alter human behavior. Just think about that.

That is essentially it, as long as the value proposition (works like a DVR, commercials don't run longer than skipping through commercials on a DVR take, the price is the cost of internet access instead of internet + TV) then migration will happen;

Let say a reasonable HTPC w/ 1080p display costs $1500 and cable with a DVR costs $60 a month, hulu pays for your HTPC w/ new HDTV in about 2 years; Add to that a $5 a month fee for what used to be $15 a month HBO and hulu charging for premium content: Hulu w/ service, after the second year, saves the consumer ~ $850 a year

I've reverse-engineered a lot of code from stripped object back to source. It got more difficult to do manually with some of the odd flows that RISC processors do and progressively more optimizing compilers, but it's hardly impossible. And there are fine tools to support it now.

Once you get to uncommented source for something where you roughly understand the program's function it's usually pretty easy to figure out what the author intended. Then you can comment it.

The fun part is finding errors. (I recall one where I was reverse-engineering a Unix driver and identified a place where the programmer had written (approximately) "if (a=b)" when he meant "if (a==b)". It was doubly fun to feed this back to a guy in the OS group - especially when I walked him through the code to the statement and he asked about a nearby assertion which had been conditionally not-compiled into the object that I was working from. He hadn't really internalized that I'd decompiled to source until I pointed out that I couldn't see the assertion. B-) )

Wow. I think I may have said something that could possibly be taken out of context in my previous reply. Having been unaware of the originations and meaning of that particular southern saying, which I just recently became educated about... I would like to retract my statement.

You see I thought you were referring to Sin you make at home.. when you know.. nobody else is around. Just yourself.

Umm yeah..... I think I am going to look up sayings before I reply to posts now....

Mininova doesn't have its own tracker... i.e. anything you get from Mininova actually comes from somewhere else, most often TPB.

You may well struggle to get any tcp-based communication, as this comment from
/usr/src/linux/net/ipv4/tcp_timer.c shows:

/* Increase the timeout each time we retransmit. Note that
* we do not increase the rtt estimate. rto is initialized
* from rtt, but increases here. Jacobson (SIGCOMM 88) suggests
* that doubling rto each time is the least we can get away with.
* In KA9Q, Karn uses this for the first few times, and then
* goes to quadratic. netBSD doubles, but only goes up to *64,
* and clamps at 1 to 64 sec afterwards. Note that 120 sec is
* defined in the protocol as the maximum possible RTT. I guess
* we'll have to use something other than TCP to talk to the
* University of Mars.
*
* PAWS allows us longer timeouts and large windows, so once
* implemented ftp to mars will work nicely. We will have to fix
* the 120 second clamps though!
*/

(I know this has been around for donkeys years, but I just checked on Slackware 13 and it's still in there.)