OneRing - to rule them all, and set up the next round of fights. (damn I've gone cynical this week)

So you are saying Machiavelli got it backwards? :)

Christian Bible (2 Chronicles 15:12-13) - "They entered into a covenant to seek the Lord, the God of their fathers, with all their heart and soul; and everyone who would not seek
the Lord, the God of Israel, was to be put to death, whether small or great, whether man or woman."

Christian Bible (Deuteronomy 13:7-12) - "If your own full brother, or your son or daughter, or your beloved wife, or you intimate friend, entices you secretly to serve other gods, whom you and your fathers have not known, gods of any other nations, near at hand or far away, from one end of the earth to the other: do not yield to him or listen to him, nor look with pity upon him, to spare or shield him, but kill him. Your hand shall be the first raised to slay him; the rest of the people shall join in with you. You shall stone him to death, because he sought to lead you astray from the Lord, your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, that place of slavery. And all Israel, hearing of this, shall fear and never do such evil as this in your midst."

Christian Bible (Deuteronomy 17:2-5) - "Suppose a man or woman among you, in one of your towns that the LORD your God is giving you, has done evil in the sight of the LORD your God and has violated the covenant by serving other gods or by worshiping the sun, the moon, or any of the forces of heaven, which I have strictly forbidden. When you hear about it, investigate the matter thoroughly. If it is true that this detestable thing has been done in Israel, then that man or woman must be taken to the gates of the town and stoned to death."

The difference between the Christian sects are trivial.... etc. Although I am in agreement with you about bringing peace to the Middle East being more or less futile, at least until the day some faction detonates a nuclear weapon at Mecca and/or Jerusalem.

That actually wouldn't be that bad an app to build - hmmm.

Yes, but it would cost NASA a fortune to clean up the site before it could be auctioned off. El Toro Marine Base was just taken off the Superfund list after 24 years and $165 million dollars to clean up the land after the base closed. Considering Moffet Field has been an experimental site as well as a military base, you can use the El Toro cleanup as a baseline - so instead of leasing the land to Google, making NASA money on the deal and also getting maintenance paid for, the suggestion is to spend $200 million and leave the land useless for the next 20 years or so while the cleanup takes place.

Interesting - according to this here, employers have to give you time off to vote. Check your state to see which law applies to you.

Not really - every green card issued during the 2005 fiscal year will be expiring and a replacement card (assuming renewal) issued. In addition, new cards will need to be issued for people who qualify for one through the regular channels (marriage, business sponsorship, lottery) and there will need to be replacement cards for those that are lost, stolen or damaged/destroyed. 4 million/year is what they expect and there is an option to buy an additional 20 million, just in case there is a need for it. (That way, they can have them on hand instead of scrambling.)

And as a somewhat full-time server admin (who made his money on the Windows side of the house and is only a somewhat okay Linux guy in his less than humble opinion) - your comment makes me cringe and reach for the Tums. The phrase you are looking for is "single point of failure". Faster boot times for servers that you don't have to reboot (we're talking Linux, remember - the Windows systems are the ones you have to reboot with security updates, although they've gotten better) - it is a non issue. When you spend more time waiting for the raid controller to spin up the hard drives and the memory count to finish than the server to get to a point where you can log in, boot speed is not that much of an issue.

Unfortunately, I don't qualify for the Long family - only one side is long lived, and only had one grandparent alive when I was married. If I had married at the age Maureen did, however I would have just made it. :)

gweihir - the GP could actually be in their late 20s and worked straight through to their doctorate. 2086 - 2014 = 72 years. Rough estimate using average high school graduation at 18, bachelor's at 23 (5 year plan), doctorate at 29 (6 years). That puts him/her at age 101 in 2086 which would be well within the range of possibilities. Move any of those numbers down (graduated high school early, did bachelors in 4 years, doctorate in 4) and that puts him/her in their late 90s. Life expectancy in their family may be longer (a for instance - my grandmother died when she was 100, her younger sister and brother are in their 90s and oldest daughter is in her 80s - and this is all for people who were born and lived before we had things like x-ray machines and vaccines) so it is plausible.

Vellmont - it isn't that we aren't all adults (or pretend to be adults) - it is the various filtering software of the places we may be reading from might flag the whole site (or at least the content we are trying to look at) as inappropriate for our location if it is riddled with the uncensored versions of what is considered profanity. That is the main reason you see the self-censoring of messages.

Actually for most people in the U.S., the cost of gasoline at $4.50/gallon is the tipping point - this was proven the summer before the market went boom - gasoline consumption dropped. As far as boycotting - it is going to have to be something besides price pressure, unless you are able to start nailing the providers who are doing this sort of thing for monopolistic practices.

There's a simple answer to this one from Oglaf:

http://oglaf.com/ornithology/

(note - while this particular entry is safe enough, in general this comic is *highly* NSFW - and may flag depending on which blockers your employers use)

This move means that the Security staff is now Google employees. It would not be in a Google employee's interests to sell company secrets, inside information or other things that might make the company not be able to keep Google employees on the payroll. This increases shareholder value because employees have a vested interest in seeing the company succeed whereas contractors do not have that impetus. In addition, it actually makes it less likely that the Security staff will unionize, which in turn also benefits the company. Finally, the increased community goodwill is an intangible factor but it does make the bottom line in that Google will now be able to say the company demographics more closely match the community (see the stats in the article regarding ethnic makeup of Security staff).