*air-punch*

I knew procrastinating Debian upgrades for most of a decade would pay off! I am VINDICATED!

You think? I spent three years without a job, writing code 10 to 12 hours a day on weekdays and 2-4 hours a day on weekends. I spent my entire (liquid) life savings staying current on that mortgage and paying for utilities and food. I had $600 left in the bank when my first paycheck at my new job arrived. I don't know what your definition of "went for it" is, but that should be good enough for anyone.

(Actually I spent 34 months without a job, if you want to be excruciatingly precise.)

I went for it.

I failed.

I have no debt other than the mortgage I started with, excellent credit, and a good job. What did I do differently?

I gave up when the money ran out and went back to work for The Man, rather than throw good money after bad. Trying to launch a startup is a gamble and should be treated precisely the same way. Only use money you can afford to lose and do not spend one thin dime of money you don't have trying to "win it all back" if you hit bottom. Quit and go home.

Too late for you, but for other people thinking about it, this can't be repeated enough.

Clarissa MacDougall was eventually upgraded to an actual character. By the time Children of the Lens came around, she was a mental match for her husband. "Doc" Smith was one of several Golden Age writers who actually moved with the times. The Golden Age faded, but at least the survivors lost some of their prejudices.

Just get a CuBox-i. 2"x2"x2" cube, available in three editions. The quad-core with 2 GB of RAM version that's equivalent to this Amazon thing is $130 and it has a microSD card slot, so you can fill it with as much or as little flash memory as you feel like paying for. I run Android on mine, but it also boots any of several different Linux distributions. It doesn't come with a remote or a game controller, but it has USB, and the quad-core version has BlueTooth. All versions have an IR receiver. No Amazon prime subscription needed, no custom manufacturer-mangled smart TV version of Android required, and it has access to the Google Play store.

Small business that doesn't have a "tie the world to our services" agenda can still deliver a product designed for customers, rather than consumers.

Somebody actually remembers that pine could read news, not just email. Talk about obscure...

They had better not be. Dropbox offers no source downloads, but rsync is GPL. If they are using some form of the rsync protocol, they had better be using their own clean-room implementation, or they're currently in violation of the GPL.

You watch way too many horror movies. The average adult male has about 1 gallon of blood. The average adult female has about a pint less. It's not a very big tank.

Disingenuous post is disingenuous. The poster illustrates the 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th 8th, 9th, 15th, and 19th amendments. Leaving out the 2nd is not some grand conspiracy. It illustrates what the ACLU fights hardest for, and everyone knows the ACLU doesn't bother with the 2nd amendment. There's an entire organization devoted to just that one, so no need to duplicate effort.

Right. Because that was so necessary when 3D games took off, especially first person shooters. The only way Duke Nukem 3D could ever have been popular is in "a full body harness with active and resistive joints, hand sockets and a headset." What the hell are you smoking and why haven't you shared with the rest of us?

I see you're acquainted with the US political system...

A finer example of the Dunning-Kruger effect I haven't seen in quite a long time.

No, they won't be without fuel.

I grew up on a farm. Where do you think tractors get fuel? I'll give you a hint. You'll never see a tractor at your local gas station. Farms, even very small farms, have their own large fuel dumps and buy fuel in bulk.

The farm I lived on had both a gasoline tank and a diesel tank. Diesel is a no-brainer—farms buy it in bulk, colored pink, because it's much cheaper than buying fuel from a retail station because it's exempt from road taxes. Not all tractors run on diesel however, so you also buy gasoline by the tanker-load. On the farm on which I lived, we kept approximately one year of operating fuel on site. Larger farms keep less than that, but still keep a very large quantity on hand. Oh, and the gasoline tank? The pump was hand-cranked. No power outage could stop me from pumping gasoline, and gasoline is what is used to power portable generators, and the goddamn diesel pump has a goddamn plug. If the power is out and you want diesel, you plunk your generator down next to it and plug it in. There is no "OMG fuel is impossibly inaccessible" scenario. Retail stations are a little bit harder to deal with, but not nearly as hard as you seem to think.

You have something you read online somewhere and now you think you know everything. My cousin has worked in a food distribution warehouse for the past 8 years. Not all supply chains are created equal. Yes, there is very little depth in perishables, but perishables are neither essential nor even the bulk of what is eaten. Dry goods have a supply chain as much as half a year deep. Canned goods have a supply chain as much as two years deep. Other non-perishables have supply chains that run at least three months deep. That Easter candy you're buying right now? It was made five or six months ago. It was packaged for retail sale 3 months ago. It sits in a warehouse between times.

That doesn't even count unprocessed grains in silos, of which there are many millions of tons, already harvested (in case your "OMG combine harvester fuel is permanently inaccessible" scenario actually does come to pass). The farm I lived on and all the neighboring farms siloed the harvest and kept it, usually for months. Any modern successful farm is being run by someone who is watching the commodities and futures markets and making sale decisions that maximize financial gain. The farmer has explicit control over when he sells and when he delivers. It is only very loosely tied to the seasons, and the larger the farm, the looser the connection, since the largest farms can afford the largest silo complexes.

But all of this is irrelevant.

Really. I don't believe you.

I am an engineer, but I have expertise you so obviously lack in the field that matters here. I spent six years writing software for testing equipment for electrical wires, including power wiring. I don't have a Ph.D. in power systems engineering from the University of Missouri at Rolla, but my coworker in the office across the hall from mine did. I know how power systems work. Most importantly, I know the thing about the grid that you don't. Say hello to your friendly neighborhood circuit breaker. You should read the whole article.

This is obviously going to come as a shock to you, so I'll try to be gentle.

Circuit breakers aren't used just in that little box in your house. Every single electrical substation in the entire grid has, at a bare minimum, either a manual switch or a circuit breaker. Nearly all electrical substations have both. Only substations in cities that are severely cramped for real estate have only one or the other. The reason should be obvious to you, if you'd spent even half a second thinking about what you wrote in your other post. The transformers at the substation are indeed very large and very expensive. Therefore, they are protected. With circuit breakers. Big ones.

The power grid is not like consumer electronics. It's all outdoors and exposed. It is subject to all kinds of disruptions, from lightning strikes to trees falling on lines to ice snapping lines to vehicles damaging utility poles to wind ripping the tops right off of utility poles (happened here last summer). These things happen on an almost daily basis somewhere in the world. Most of those accidents can cause ground faults. Some cause short-circuit faults. The breaker blows, opening the circuit and protecting the transformer, along with all the other equipment connected. There is nothing mysterious about the effects of a coronal mass ejection that would prevent those circuit breakers from working. Yes the grid goes down. No, the grid is NOT damaged. It's just full of open circuits. Guys with wrenches will be kept very busy for a few hours running around resetting all the breakers in the correct order. The guys at the power plant will be resetting overspeed brakes on the generators that tripped when the load vanished. Next to nothing will actually be broken and require replacement. The grid is BUILT to handle faults. It has to be, or nothing would ever work because power companies would be replacing transformers every time they turn around.

These are the facts. Learn them, and stop lecturing about things you don't understand. If you really have designed "systems from end to end" I sure as hell hope you had nothing to do with the wiring, because your ignorance of the subject is epic. So very condescending. So very wrong.

Isn't that precisely what this research result is all about? It's not like they're hawking a product. We knew learning was affected by electrical currents already. Slashdot covered that story. One presumes this result fines that down in terms of what parts of the brain are involved. Or possibly it broadens the study group. I don't know since I can't read the article, but it's going to be something like that. It's research. Experimental research, rather than empty hypothesizing. These researchers are learning how the brain works, and whether or not it's a "delicate organ" as you claim. You only have a hypothesis. They're finding out.

Except some viruses, which have no DNA at all. Some have DNA. Some have only single-helix RNA. Some have double-helix RNA. They're the last surviving remnant of the simpler system from which DNA life evolved. DNA life was so successful in its expansion across the planet it obliterated its precursor (essentially by eating it).

The only way we will ever see that in action "in the wild" is by exploring other worlds. Unless and until we find DNA precursor life on another world, we will only have laboratory experiments to show us how we got here. Eventually those laboratory experiments will be as reliable as the experiments that prove how your microwave works, but they will always be artificial. If you want to see it happening live, get out and explore the galaxy.

They already are.