I want a hard drive with some frikin' lasers!!!!!

How is the government knowing your DNA sequencing a violation of privacy? Can it be used to get into you bank account? How about tracking your current location or what you might do with your free time? As far as I can figure the only thing any government can do with your DNA sequence is use it to compare against other DNA sequences. I would appreciate it if someone could give me an example of how DNA could be used for violating privacy.

In my experience I don't think the "baddies" would have known anything. Our UAVs were the RAVEN variant. It was recently shown on Acts of Valor. Its a pretty small airplane that operates on a battery power source. When it reaches an altitude of 300ft (100m) you can't hear it.

It might have helped but UAVs were allocated to the shooters. I was just a simple support guy. If a satellite was already flying overhead and all I had to do was download the images to my SIPPER computer it would have helped.

I was in OIF 06-08 and I would have loved to have this intel a couple times. Once I was sent out to recover a vehicle that had been blown up, and due to terrain requirements, I had to take a road that hadn't been traveled on for some eight months. Consequently we didn't know it was heavily defended with IEDs and had huge ditches from rain runoff (pretty common in desert environments). It took my convoy about 24 hours to travel 5 kilometers because we had to improvise material to fill in the holes enough for the trucks to travel over. The satellite coverage wouldn't have helped with the IEDs but it might have helped give me a better idea of the road conditions.

Another time I was leading a convoy of about 30 vehicles and the route I chose had been blocked by another unit the previous day. It can be an emotional event to turn around that many vehicles in some Iraqi towns.

I think our problem runs much deeper than a simple education problem. We live in a society that preaches that all opinions are equally valid and equally true. Further we teach that there is no social foundation for morality other than "we evolved this way". Then with the next breath we say "do good things". Good things like doing well in school, taking care of the family, obeying traffic laws ect. When our children ask why what can we say other than "because society demands it". What if they are different from society? What if their evolution took a different path? In short there is no decent moral ground to stand on in this society. We truly believe that our interests are more important than others. We desire short term gain over long term goals. Every problem we have in society at this point is rooted in the fact that our own personal desires take precedence over anything else.

mod ^ funny

Our own oort cloud goes almost half the way to Alpha Centari A

It's regularly assumed that the Oort cloud exists, but there isn't any empirical data supporting this assumption. IMHO it seems to be circular reasoning to say comets exist because of the Oort cloud, and the Oort cloud exists because there are comets.

Has anyone actually observed the Oort cloud? Is it even possible to observe it?

I think you're the only one who got the joke. I've never even tried to pick up a girl in a bar. When I go to a bar I am only concerned that the bar has a good selection of micro-breweries

I have no issues making eye contact and being bold and assertive in a bar. I can even talk in detail about the implementation of a hyper-drive and shield modulation and yet I have never been able to take a woman home! Obviously you are wrong.

Do you realize that everyone came within a hairs breadth of dying on the 13th Apollo mission? Oh yeah, everyone DID die on the space shuttle challenger AND Columbia. Also, don't forget the entire Apollo 1 crew died in a fire on the ground. Sure it's tested, but that doesn't mean it's safe.

There are too many people on Slashdot that disagree just to be contrary

The Army may like meetings and PowerPoint too much, but at least everyone wore the same damn thing and swearing at each other was considered an art form.

*pales, I hate noticing grammar errors after submission. Anybody have a bucket?

The primary concern in any upgrade situation is identifying where the bottleneck is most acute. On most systems the bottleneck is RAM (especially Windows based computers). Upgrading a HD from 7200RPM to 10000RPM increases file fetching rate an approximate 28 percent while buying two 7200RPM drives and running RAID 0 can improve efficiency 50 percent (optimal conditions assumed). This pails in comparison to the throughput a CPU and a GPU are capable of accomplishing. Increasing RAM inevitably decreases the fetch time of commonly used files and compensates for the typical user's inability to uncheck the box "run at startup". I would contend that it is only in very special cases that any other upgrade would need to be accomplished first to improve performance.