The spectrum is not that limited. I live in an apartment building and can see over 30 different wireless networks. I have absolutely no issues with my own wireless.

You can't compare the two situations.

What you're seeing are beacon frames. Even if 99% of them are trashed by noise, your wireless networking hardware will remember the 1% that get through and log the AP's information.

"...he shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed..."

Saddam Hussein was a Ba'athist revolutionary, which is to say he advocated a mixture of Arab Nationalism and socialism. National socialism IS Nazism.

However, the inane aspect about it is that while Republicans blamed Obama for what happened in Benghazi, fact remains that their position on Libya/Qadaffi was no different from the Democrats.

Some think using force is the solution to every problem and some believe democracy is the solution to every problem.

The disaster of the Arab spring is what you get when you combine the two ideas.

To kill 650'000 shitheads. Mission accomplished. Wish they had killed more though.

While it's true that Sadam's military was full of essentially modern day Nazis, we weren't attacked by Nazis on 9/11. We went after the wrong bunch.

Saudi Arabia would have been a better target but the Bushes were too busy holding hands with the King.

And for anyone who doesn't remember, this was the film that Obama blamed the Benghazi attacks on. Despite later admitting that, no, oops, that wasn't what caused the attacks at all.

"Oops"?

The attack happened on Sept 11th just before the 2012 election.

You don't really think it was an accident that they blamed some film-maker and threw him in jail to deflect responsibility from themselves, do you?

It looks to me like these drives write a large amount of data as a spiral of multiple tracks so that the platter must rotate many times to complete the write.

That's fine for streaming data sequentially to the disk for long term storage.

Random writes must be dog-slow, though.

That isn't specifically true at all. It's all about whether you can reproduce, and have a surviving child more than it is about dying.

But there's an advantage to having parents and the parents of parents continuing to live on.

While older adults might not be able to reproduce, the help and assistance of older non-reproducing adults can factor into their descendent's ability to reproduce.

I work in immunology and the coevolution of host and virus to the point where it is harmless would be a Good Thing (TM).

Perhaps good in the long run, but coevolution implies the evolution of the host, too, and that requires an increase, at least temporarily, in the number of dead humans (that pesky selection part of evolution).

Alas, WW2 doesn't seem to have been about religion, and it's still the largest war in human history (and if it were split into two separate wars, they'd be the two largest wars in history).

You're just using too narrow a conception of religion, IMO.

Fascism, National Socialism, and Communism all have their true-believers. And some of them are so certain their faith is the correct one that they're willing to kill for it.

Interesting, though, that the vote happened after the election, when it was known who would control the Senate in 2015 and 2016. And interesting that those that are losing power oppose surveillance while those that are gaining it support continued surveillance.

This might suggest the possibility that each side fears the use of the NSA against them by the other side.

I'd hate to think the USA has gotten to that point but I don't think anything would surprise me now.

Why did we get away from that technology for space exploration? If you're going to spend the money to conduct a mission of this sort why limit yourself to the power provided by solar panels? It would be a pisser to have come this far only to have the mission fail because the probe can't get enough power to carry on operations.

Two reasons: fear that an accident might release plutonium dust into the atmosphere, and the relative shortage of plutonium.

It looks like the Republicans will have 54 Senators in 2015, in part, I think, to support given them by libertarians (except perhaps in Virginia where a Libertarian candidate took support from the Republican primarily).

Might this be a move by Democrats to reach out to libertarians who tend to be the strongest opponents of the surveillance of the public by government?

Not every interesting program property that one wishes to prove can be transformed into an example of the halting problem.