This sounds so reminiscent of things like the Mandelbrot set, where there are always adjacent points with different outcomes, no matter how far down you go. Who knows if it really is related?

Good point, and yes, it probably is.

The notion of a spherical earth dates from around 400 B.C.

Indeed.

Eratosthenes (276 BCâ" 195 BC) did a pretty good job of calculating the actual size of the Earth. The wikipedia article on this is pretty well done. Given the tech he had at his disposal, I think his assumptions and calculations are pretty amazing.

Brazil is considered one of the world leader in ethanol, the country with the most successful alternative fuel program, one of the cheaper (if not cheapest) ethanol technologies and, by using sugar cane, one of the most energy efficient. All cars here can easily handle up to E40, and most cars can handle any mix of gas and ethanol. Oh, and the flex fuel technology for any kind of mix? Mostly developed here also.

I'm not one of those gaia worshipping eco-nuts but I've long thought that we should be producing more flex vehicles that will run on just about anything from e-0 to e-100, then we should let market economics deal with pricing. Making alcohol out of corn is stupid. Sugar cane, as you mention is one of the more efficient ways to do it. From what I understand saltgrass is pretty good for it too. The basic problem is, none of this is really based on economics. It's all politics and power, with a rather unhealthy dose of religious zealotry thrown in the mix.

I would love if if I had a choice of what kind of fuel to power my vehicles with. If instability in muslim lands cause the price of gas to skyrocket, which seems to happen occasionally because death and destruction seems to be built into their religion, then we'd be able to switch to other alternatives. You'd take a hit on mileage, because as has been discussed here up thread, there is nothing you can do about the energy density of alcohol vs. petrol. However, you'd know that up front and be able to make intellegent decisions about it. As it is, with government mandating this and that, and making sure their political buddies are paid off in the front-loaded primary states, we're living with the worst of both worlds, we're still hostage to those muslim nut-jobs, and at the same time are subsidizing inefficient methods of alcohol production.

I don't give a crap about carbon. what I care about is that you need energy to run an industrialized society. We should be going about it intellegently, rather than the haphazard ways we are.

Well done. If I had mod points, you'd have 'em.

Rather than 'plant haters', I think the term 'floraphobic' would be more apt these days.

It does make it unsolvable, but anyone who knows what they are doing with a cube can pretty quickly determine that it has been 'hacked' in this way. First thing I do when solving the cube is to check the corners. It's obvious that something is wrong if certain combinations come up. If you do the same kind of thing with one of the middle cubes it's a little less obvious, and is similarly unsolvable.

Yes, there is generally a difference between an 'arm' and 'ordinance', however it was clearly not something the founders would have cared much about. At the time, it was perfectly legal to own ordinance such as cannon. In fact it was formally recognized as such, in the Constitution itself. Article 1, Section 8, specifically refers to the "grant letters of marque and reprisal" as a power of Congress. Letters of Marque are issued to private warships, among others. In the day a private warship would pretty much require the private ownership of cannon.

My Dad won't read Wikipedia either. He gets his information from Fox News.

Wikipedia is useless for anything political unless you happen to agree with the political slant of the article.

Want information about metalurgy, great. Wikipedia rocks for that.

Want formation about anything where there is political finger pointing? Not so much.

Hypocrites .. that's what I think those that support gay marriage are. They don't give a flip about equality, they only want to force their moral beliefs on those that disagree, and enable a very small group of select people to get benefits. If they truly wanted equality, they would fight to ELIMINATE all benefits tied to being married. Tax laws could be changed to allow for household incomes to be used. Social Security survivor-ship benefits could be simply modified to allow for one person to receive them, and set several rules (such as living together for a number of years while working and paying social security taxes). D

Well said. While I don't agree with everything you had to say, I agree with the sentiment almost entirely.

What we are seeing is a repetition of the pathologies that have driven witch hunts in the past. I think it's amazing how much power the press has given such a tiny percentage of the population to demand that they be obeyed lest bad things befall the dissenters. It's astounding to watch it in action, and mirrors many dark times in the history of our civilizations.

But it's not likely..... they can't be transmitting on cell phone frequencies from their station anyways, as the transmission outside frequencies within their operating privileges would be a FCC violation that could get their station licenses revoked.

Yup. So they couldn't do so openly. These days, there are plenty of ways to do so anonymously. Given some of the cool tools out there in the Ham world for connecting radios, I wouldn't be at all surprised to find an Elmer who could do some interesting things with cell phones if they wanted to.

Yeah, I'm a ham, but I'd never put my callsign on /.

So, you made a donation to organized crime. How charitable.

As did this police department ...

US local police department pays CryptoLocker ransom

=snip=

A local police department in Swansea, Massachusetts, has paid cybercrooks behind the CryptoLocker ransomware attack to decrypt files locked up by the malware on police computer systems, according to local press reports.

The police department spokesman claimed that the infection had been mopped up and their systems secured, with no personal information stolen.

=end snip=

Agreed. Republicans want to take away certain aspects of your liberty. Democrats want to take others. Neither has any desire whatsoever to actually increase liberty, because that would mean they would lose that much more control over your lives.

Both parties are two sides of the same coin.

We should just start referring to the 'two' political parties in America as the Janus party.

One of the points of a SD (or SDEX) card is that you can read it very simple in an other device. By formtitting it it in JFFS2 or YAFFS you cannot read/exchange the card in windows. Inconvinent, but technically possible.

Shouldn't that be considered a feature. Who wants their data to be infected by a windows device? I've formatted most of my sd cards that are not used in a camera or similar device to ext2 or ext3. To most ms-windows users, it would look like a bad card. I have no problem at all with that.

I wish this was a general practice among book publishers. Buy the dead tree version, and on the inside is a card one can scratch off, scan a QR code, and download the eBook version. Best of both worlds -- a paper copy for the bookshelf, and a copy on the E-reader.

Baen Publishing does essentially with some of their books. A couple of years ago, I bought the hardback of a book from their '1632' series, and it came with a CD that contained every other book from the series, plus some others. All with no DRM. It's one of the things that makes me a loyal customer. I reward companies that don't treat me like a potential thief.

I've tried lots of different mp3 players under Linux, but always eventually come back to rhythmbox. I've only got 18k songs or so, so I don't know how it handles larger loads. The thing that I like more than anything else, is how easy the search facility is to use. I mostly run it on a random walk, but if I want something specific, it is easy to find exactly what I want, either by artist, title, or album.

My biggest problem is getting it to exclude certain subdirectories for cataloguing.

As a former Marine, I have some experience with hand grenades, and I can assure you that every case of grenades comes with an entire booklet of warnings, written in dense legalese.

Once the legalese is stripped away it all boils down to "Once you pull the pin, Mr. Hand Grenade is not your friend!"