Also, this is not tangible personal property. It is a bunch of electrons.

Are you serious? Are you that much of an idiot?

There is a reason there is *intellectual* property law.

Property laws exist immaterial of what form the property takes -- trademarks and patents are all nothing more than ideas in our heads put to paper, and they are protected for a reason.

I can see this reasoning on another site, but I'd think the readers of Slashdot would have an understanding of what digital property entails.

We will not solve the problem with illegal immigration until we figure out how to do something sane instead of the War on Drugs. Right now the unintended consequence of the War on Drugs is that south of the border, drug lords are about as well (if not better?) funded as the governments, destroying the local economies. Some of the people seeking jobs in those economies end up coming to the US in search of work.

Seconded. When the power and everything else is out, I call to report it on my land line.

Saw a television documentary where they showed some blocks that seemed to have been poured like concrete, complete with marks of wooden crating. See http://www.visual--media.com/w... and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...

Here you go: http://eugeneciurana.com/fotki... -- that's a photo of the stashes we have in our home in Acapulco and in San Francisco. Both are in active seismic zones, and likely to get hit by some disaster at some point.

Since you can see most of the contents, I rather tell you about our guidelines for disaster preparedness:

* Have enough supplies to subsist for up to 7 days, normal calorie intake, for everyone in the family
* Ditto for water
* Tool box with emergency tools (wrench for gas and water valves, pliers, screw drivers, a couple of Leatherman tools), matches, and
* Solid alcohol stove and several refills
* Full first aid kit including gauze, ice packs, antiseptics, anti-diarrhea pills, etc. and a sewing kit
* Crank radios and flashlights
* Battery operated perimeter lamps
* Assorted Cyalume sticks in green, white, blue, and red colors
* Deck of cards, puzzles, etc. to kill the time

The food is all either canned or dehydrated, and it works way better than MREs. The only thing we'd miss are fresh fruits; we even have powdered milk. Every year around Dec/Jan I consciously cook with all the things in the food stash that are within ~6 months of recommended use by date. All those things are replenished and ready to go. We found that most cans and dehydrated food have an approximate 18-24 months duration, so we don't go on the Spam and etc. diet more than every other year for more than 2 or 3 days. Plus it's fun readying everything and testing, etc.

Last night -- the earthquake woke my g/f up (we were in our SF home). The bookshelves rattled a bit, and I was wondering if the quake had been strong enough to knock my motorcycle off the center stand, but the toddler was fine and slept through it, power never faltered, and otherwise it was a nice and uneventful evening.

I lived through several earthquakes in my life (in fact, all my life I lived in seismic zones) so I'll be happy to address questions, if any.

Cheers!

Maybe there's another reason that our infrastructure is crumbling...

(Line up the conspiracy theories.)

I would characterize those areas as IT and software engineering, and not necessarily Computer Science.

I would perhaps state that some areas of computing (e.g., systems design, architecture) are better grouped under software engineering, given their nature.

I almost feel that there needs a distinction between software engineering and computer science. To paraphrase David Parnas, computer science studies the properties of computation in general while software engineering is the design of specific computations to achieve practical goals.

Muddling the two disciplines causes heartache because you have people who are great at designing software, but cannot grok advanced math; and on the other hand, you potentially limit your solutions to what's within the realm of current applicability, without exploring other possibilities (e..g, reinventing new algorithms for quantum computation).

I would add a nuance to your point and state that real world experience matters in IT, but not in CS.

Computer Science is more about algorithms, systems architecture, and a lot of math. I did very little programming when I did CS in grad school and a whole lot of pretty awesome math (computational complexity, graphics, optimizations etc). Not sure about undergrad, since I did ECE, which, once again, was a whole lot of math (DSP, control systems, engineering electromagnetics, circuit theory, VLSI etc).

In any event, real-world relevance is more important to IT than it is to CS. I would say that it is however somewhat important in engineering, which, once again, is a professional degree.

B-schools often hire people who are not in academia per se, but have rich real world experience in solving business problems.

For instance, you will often find senior partners from top consulting firms teaching classes, because they bring to bear not just academic knowledge but also practical experience.

People who do their MBA are not there to just learn the latest and greatest management technique from academia -- they also seek to apply that to the real world.

And this is not just true for MBAs -- it is also true for law schools, medical schools, and many other professional degrees. You'll find former judges and lawyers teaching classes, and you'll find doctors and surgeons with real world experience tempering your academic knowledge with their real world experience.

Public policy is another area where you former civil servants often teaching classes.

Now we need the quasi-obligatory response that this is really a government problem, and if government weren't in there mucking about with needless regulation the free market would address the problem and we'd all be in broadband utopia at reasonable prices.

Star Trek movies have always been about space battles and ridiculous action, even though people like to blame JJ Abrams for that one. That said, there are quite a few Star Trek episodes that do a good job of dealing with a social issue and/or politics in an interesting way.

For really good Star Wars, you have to go to the books. The same expanded universe that Disney announced is no longer cannon so they can "free up" their screenwriters or some other bullshit. Well, as far as I'm concerned, if I have to choose between the movies or the books to consider cannon in that universe, I'll pick the books every time.

I've emphasized Voyager there for you, because that IS heretical. I hereby authorize burning you alive at the town square.

I mean, c'mon. You just finished praising B5 for making an honest attempt of respecting physics and you finished by praising the show that brought to you polaric ions, nucleonic beams, metrion isotopes, psionic properties, and fluidic fucking space? Every problem in that show is solved with last minute bullshit technobabble. When TNG used technobabble, they had a science advisor on the show to fill in the words, so they'd have some connection, no matter how small and fleeting, to some real science. Voyager just made up works that sounded sciency and they used it as the Deus Ex Machina EVERY...SINGLE...EPISODE..

I officially sanction your position. It is not heresy, it's truth. There is certainly Star Trek which is better than anything in B5, but "most" of Star Trek is far inferior.

Nothing shy of a nearby gamma burst or the eventual day when the sun goes red-giant is likely to end all life on Earth.

But there are a lot of things shy of that that can make life really uncomfortable for us, perhaps terminally so. It's happened 5 times before, to longer-lived species than us.

Don't forget that your insurance company would really like to get their spy dongle onto your ODB II port, too. So this HUD is really the third usage for the ODB II port, the first of course being the diagnostics that it was designed for. How soon before we have ODB-splitters?

I'm sure your insurance company would like their spy dongle to be the only thing plugged into your ODB II port while driving, especially if the only other available driving-time plugin was a HUD/distraction. But what if other more sensible plugins became available, even safety improving ones, say a breathalyzer lockout...