Yeah, last time I tried to fabricate a steak, it got a little out of hand and I had to flush the whole project down the sink with lots of sulfuric acid. They really are easier to grow but ya got to get them there first. Sending lots of food as seeds might be a good bootstrap. finding water and other necessary organic substances to keep them growing might be tricky but I believe we already established that there is viable soil there.

I actually don't think there is a profitable resource in the universe that won't be exploited by us. Just takes a kick in the pants is all.

Brilliant.

and for those of you who have no idea what he's (she's?) parodying, http://www.timecube.com/

They don't do business the same way you do. If the monitoring tool shows a pod with 2 drives down, they just ignore it. Two RAID arrays out and they might replace it. When all three go, they pull the pod and replace with a new one. Then they scavenge the carcass for parts. The magic is in the software. They don't simply save files on servers, they have software that manages where things are stored and stores everything in multiple places.

To give some perspective, at your stated one or two percent failure rate per month, a 45 drive pod would last over a year before all three RAID 6 arrays were likely to have failed. Just "refresh" the dead drives in each pod every three months and the likelihood of actually losing a whole pod is miniscule.

In their world, a drive failure is a non-event. An array failure is an "indicator of possible proplems". A pod failure is a reason to schedule it for maintenance tomorrow. The only thing that might get them to sweat is if they lost 10% of their boxes simultaneously.

There are two ways to run a reliable business. Either buy expensive reliable stuff and watch it like a hawk, or buy cheap stuff and make it redundant and self-healing.

Who gets to decide what our laws are in general? Are you against the law if you do X? Y? Z? Building foundations of law is a difficult task, but in the end we managed - "who is to say" is not really much of an argument. The danger that it would banish speech that is politically unpopular is a better point - it is a dangerous tool to have, and it does make me a bit nervous to suggest we weaken our existing strong tradition against its broad use, although the cost of not doing so could be quite harmful. Like the basic costs of having laws and courts (what if we make a mistake?), it is a muddy water into which we must tread gingerly.

And yes, to a certain extent we do need to be protected from them, not like a bunch of children, but rather like a bunch of humans. We have seen times in history when people have been captivated by the ideas of these groups. Would you deny history?

No, I'm not proposing a magic number system :) Apart from Scientologists, I would not muzzle any of those groups.

Better change that to a management consultant. I heard of this place that got rid of all his phone sanitizers and got royally screwed.

That isn't adding "general welfare" as a end-run around enumerated powers so that anything the government wants to do is fine. It is adding the power to collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises to those two things with a restriction on how they can be used.

So a tax on gasoline with the aim of reducing gasoline usage as opposed to with the aim of raising revenue to fund the government would be unconstitutional (not that anyone cares) at the Federal level.

If you really think that's adding "general welfare" as a new power then you must also think that the government can't spend money it gains from selling assets on "general welfare", right? That's not listed in those revenue items after all.

It would be in the "general welfare" for the government to kill all disabled people and elderly people whop are no longer productiviely contributing to society. Is that OK?

Or is it only things you think are in the "general welfare".

And yes the government has been in that camp since moments after the ink dried on the document.

Agreed. I guess what you call "free property" is what Proudhon calls "possession" in "Théorie de la propriété", II, 158.

Brains are not neural nets, neural nets are a simplified model of how we think the human brain works. And I would bet that no one completely understands how the human brain works. You're original point still seems valid though.

Windows 2000 is 5.0
Windows XP is 5.1
Vista is 6.0