Your ideas are intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter. No seriously, I'm with you on the 3mbps/sec DSL situation and am wondering what software/hardware you use for this. I see this as being quite handy on Patch Tuesday and similar. I have half-ideas as to how to make it work, but I'm interested to hear about your tried-and-true setup.

Not really, no. It remains neither an actual poll nor a random sample, and the selection biases are completely unknown.

My complaint is that the 97% draws an invalid link between abstracts written and opinion. 99.999% of scientists have an opinion on AGW; that doesnt mean they have written a paper on that. The way you determine that is to do a random sample poll, not to use a selection-biased sample and draw faulty conclusions on it.

That 97% number IS bull, and its right there in the link you provided, under abstract:

We find that 66.4% of abstracts expressed no position on AGW, 32.6% endorsed AGW, 0.7% rejected AGW and 0.3% were uncertain about the cause of global warming. Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW, 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.
So of the abstracts which discuss global warming, 97% support AGW. Except, you would not call that an unbiased sample, nor would that be an acceptable selection criteria in any other poll, ever.

I generally nope out of any AGW conversation because theyre cesspools of illogic, ad hominems, and general idiocy, but come on. That 97% claim is like saying "97%*** of CoD players hate the game (***- 97% of players posting negative posts on the message boards)".

Any idiot off the street with a copy of Windows has access to Powershell and 90% of the .Net stuff behind it.

It IS accessible. Every copy of Windows since 2006 has included Powershell, which is one of the easiest to learn things you will ever come across, and it can handle 99% of the tasks your average non-programmer user will ever want to do, from simple GUI's with scripted events, to excel automation, to bulk administrative work. Theres even an IDE for it built right into windows.

Im not an OSX guy but I understand things are pretty similar over there, with whatever OSX uses (Applescript?), and Im pretty sure most Linux distros come with Perl or Python (if not theyre a 1-liner away).

If you're not finding those scripting languages accessible enough, you dont care enough about the project you want to do. Alternatively, maybe some people just dont naturally have a gift for the type of thought process required by programming-- and I dont think that needs to be a "problem".

We are using OSI. Forget about UDP, and layer 2 protocols other than ethernet?

Most people can ignore most of OSI, but its still there. Signal recieved by interface, layer 1 signalling is removed, layer 2 headers are removed, layer 2 headers are re-written, layer 1 signalling is reapplied, signal sent out.

"et" IS a word in latin. The "C" is the abbreviation. Et c.

...And wiped out in the great depression, and rebuilt in World War 2. That IS capitalism.

For the record, the North had quite the booming economy even without slave labor, even before slavery was abolished.

Communism relies on a breed of human that doesnt exist: One that is perfectly rational, selfless, and lacking any sort of vice.

When you find one of those, maybe we can start talking about communism.

Well, duh. MapPoint and S&T was a plastic-disc software title, intended for end users to do stuff without an internet connection. See kids, in the days between the joys of attempting to re-fold a paper map and always-on, always-connected internet streamed maps, companies got all the street information together and sold a software release in a perpetual licensing format. People could then take their laptops and a serial (later USB and/or Bluetooth) GPS add-on and navigate with a laptop, without worrying about data plans, cellular outages, or getting stuck on a necessary phone call that brought into question one's allegiance to accurate navigation.

In the case of MapPoint, routes and distances were mass queried and used in tandem with Access and Excel to make geographical and topological data useful in a business context.

Websites are going to use Google maps (or yahoo/mapquest/bing, to a much lesser extent) because their APIs allow embedded maps nice and easily. For folks who need offline information, Google Maps was never intended to fill that space. Now, it seems, Delorme is the sole holdout for plastic disc mapping software.

Annoyingly, it's not just Encarta. It's seemingly any offline reference title. Grolier's is paywalled to oblivion, Britannica gives the first two paragraphs, Simon & Schuster haven't sold a reference app in years, and Wikipedia is, well, Wikipedia.

Now yes, the internet is how we get data around fastest, and even CDs were a de facto subscription since you'd buy a copy every year or two to stay current. I get that. Where plastic disc media had some usefulness to it was that, for K-12 schooling, it was easier to cite them as one would cite a traditional printed volume. Additionally, even if not the most bleeding edge information, most information contained therein would remain relatively consistent from year to year (especially ones on historical matters; technological matters, less so for obvious reasons). It also provided a baseline with which to compare other sources. If Encarta and Wikipedia disagreed, it'd pose the question of 'why'. Was there some sort of major breakthrough that allows Wikipedia to show its strengths as being an up-to-the-minute, crowdsourced reference, or is the Wikipedia article amidst an edit war? At least with Encarta, there's some semblance of "information freeze" where it's accurate to the point where the disc was pressed, and can be relied upon as such.

Sending reference works "to the cloud" makes sense, until companies paywall the whole thing, you don't know what you're really getting when you fork over your Mastercard, and it causes people like me to wax nostalgic for the plastic disc for well-written, relatively unbiased descriptions of WWII battles.

How many times do you have to hear someone say "hey I have a great idea", and listen to him, and then watch a million people starve to death, before you're just being an idiot for listening to them?

Appealing to some mythological communism that apparently hasnt been gotten right after some dozen attempts and some 100 million dead in the process doesnt engender a whole lot of trust that you'll pull it off the next time.

And for the record, int he past 150 years (or even the past 50 years) the average salary, standard of living, level of education, and level of technology have all drastically risen. We havent hit a problem yet despite 150 years of luddites decrying the end of the world as we know it.

I dont think you have the knack of how technological progress interacts with standards of living. You seem to think that increased efficiency necessitates an increase in poverty, when historically the opposite has been true.

Alternatively: Panama canal engineers deign to use heavy machinery rather than workers equipped with spoons! How will ditch diggers make a living?!?!?!