It doesn't matter how much land it takes to create animal protein, not per se, not in relation to sustainability.

The Great Plains once has giant herds of bison roaming across them. Humans could eat those bison sustainably as long as they didn't take enough bison to disturb the equilibrium between bison and grass. Taking one bison out of the equation would simply cause the equilibrium to produce one more bison. Reducing the buffalo herd from 25 million to 600 on the other hand is a different matter.

What matters for sustainability is the disruption of natural systems, not the acreage.

OCZ? That's probably why it survived.

So were those all consumer-level drives, or were any of them sold as "enterprise"?

They're only required to gerrymander minority districts if they have a history suppressing minority votes.

This is kind of like equitable relief, where the court compels a guilty party in a civil case to perform some action to remedy an unfair action it performed earlier.

I haven't laptop-shopped in a long while, I'm kind of awash in them right now, but last time I looked even most fairly low-end laptops were offered either with a small SSD or a larger HDD; say, 40/250, 80/400, 120/500, something like that. The very-lowest-end machines (netbooks) were coming with as little as 4GB flash, but up to 16 or rarely 32GB as you say. It was however often on a module that you could upgrade if it wasn't already a 32GB.

I've only had one 3.5" drive warn me with scary noises before the noises were so scary that they frightened it out of giving me any data. In fact, the first 3.5" drive I had fail did so silently but with the smell of smoke — turned out that it (a Seagate half-height RLL drive whose ST- number shall remain forgotten if I am lucky, I could use that space for phone numbers) had experienced stiction and then burned the stepper power trace off the board. By the time a jumper wire had been soldered across the trace, the drive cooled down and it spun up and functioned again. The next time it stuck hard and burned the trace off again, so I just popped the case lid off without damaging the foam gasket, reached in and spun the spindle with my thumbs and then popped the lid back on after giving it a quick puff to blow any dust off the top platter, soldered on another jumper, and it worked faithfully until I retired it. I believe that was a 40MB with at least three platters, if you could see 'em you could've about counted the cylinders. It never made a bad noise through the whole experience, and it was basically an antique by modern standards.

I did have one 2.5 inch drive develop massive bearing whine before failure, but I've had two fail silently.

The state lottery commission.

Oddly enough, a state that can't be counted on to run an election competently and honestly can *still* manage to run a competent lottery.

don't you? I do. It's compressed, too. And what's more, you can have this on your phone. Most of the alternate Android kernels I've tried have come with zRam support, but it was also [relatively] recently added to Ubuntu as a default feature.

actual swap is so 1990s. even in the last decade I was mostly disabling it. in fact, I don't have any swap enabled on any computers, from 128MB RAM (the least of anything I've got, now — and they're pogoplug v4s and a dockstar) up to 8GB. This only caused me problems in Windows 7, where Java shits itself when trying to use 3GB out of 8GB (yes, it's 64-bit) even when I have no other foreground applications whatsoever. But then, Windows is what it is, incredibly polished in some areas, an incredible turd in others. Kind of like Linux. All I want is video from my firewire camera (which is working fine, actually, in spite of being literally one of the earliest examples, an iBot) in V4L applications. Is that really too much to ask? Apparently yes, yes it is. And sadly, it used to work, I've done it before. v4l2-loopback doesn't work and vloopback doesn't build, I haven't yet figured if the right diddling can make that happen or if the interfaces it needs are gone.

You mean the typical wal-mart shopper? I'm guessing 640k should be enough for anyone.

No, it didn't. It was sleazy, it was wrong, it was something that we should not tolerate from any gaming company, but it was part of the deal for a review copy up front and every respectable gaming review outlet turned them down. Yeah, you read that right.

Bah, humbug. If you want to replay the game in the future, download the cracked version that doesn't authenticate to anything. Then you can install it to a virtual machine with working drivers. Just buy it first, and make sure to buy the same SKU that the cracked version is based upon. That might not be an airtight legal defense, but at least it'll be clear that you were trying to do the Right^WLegal Thing(tm)

So is the question whether update downloads are encrypted? The ones for the Xbox and 360 aren't. Dunno about the 180. You can download them and unpack them with alternate tools. I would imagine that mostly the ones on the PC aren't either, but I haven't actually checked to see what it looks like when say STO downloads an update.

Once the files are laid down, though, it's only a matter of doing any necessary authentication, if your game has that sort of thing. And in theory, that can be patched out. The game assets are not being stored encrypted in any game I've played yet. You can rummage around the files if you can grok their formats. Again, given the example of STO, the assets are stored in .hogg files (yes, really, because they're pigs) and you need to use an unpacker to get access to the assets. Predictably, when I searched for this information (just now, I haven't modded STO) one of the first hits related to nude patches. Yay internets.

That's not the answer either. The answer is to tie them to geographical features which define "bioregions", sadly itself not a highly defined term. We can usually recognize 'em when we se 'em. All the people in a given bioregion have a natural confluence of interests, and arbitrary districting works against that.

Sometimes governments need to collapse sooner rather than later. Less dogs will be under the porch.

If you are too stupid to parse out some bad characters which obviously all replace the same character, you are not my target audience. You are probably unable to comprehend simple concepts anyway, let alone anything worth discussing on slashdot.

Oh yeah? Did it build whole cities in them that the country doesn't need? That worked out really well for China, so you decided to take on the approach at home. But I'm pretty sure the wind turbines haven't leaned over and scraped away any massive patches of natural habitat.