These are awesome, and are good for younger kids too!

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=snap+circuits&aq=f&oq=&aqi=g10

The Smokey the Bear campaign still lives, although its much more minor today then it used to be. The reason is that forest fires are bad that are not planned out in advance...You see our Forestry department (which my father worked for) started their own fires to clear out fire causing underbrush, and to create fire breaks so to speak back in the day. They today also use controlled burning to further help forests along, but never do they want people to start fires....You insinuated that in your comment, and uncontrolled fires are fought very aggressively and to this day fire-fighters for the forestry department lose their lives to protect people from these fires.

There is no catastrophe as you say, and the rule is that they still fight fires to prevent them from getting too large. The reason being none other then the fact that if the fire gets too large it destroys the ecosystem whereas a smaller fire will simply plant the seeds for a new stronger and vibrant forest.

Yellowstone is also a case in point of a catastrophe, but that thought is now in the past and today fires and their benefits to nature are more understood. You find more issues with fires when people plant plants that are not native to the area, a drought occurs, and of course its prime material for a large fire around civilization. We hear about this all the time in California....

The bigger issue in Oregon and Washington is the remnants of old logging camps that left underbrush so thick that forests couldn't come back. Over the years, this has been burnt off or otherwise cleared out to make way for new forests....That is the largest issue in Oregon is bringing back those old areas that to this day are still remnants of lumbering practices back before Teddy R....

So, just before the cancer kill you, you get smart enough to cure it?

This is the same thing that would happen in the real world if we were all immortal. It is why life has meaning. Characters should die when they get old. Items that are bound to that character will disappear. There could be a memorial wall for important characters.

You can buy these systems now. I did the 3d tracking interface for this. Low cost phased array antenna with a really long read range. http://www.rfctrls.com/ If they had this at the conference they could have done realtime 3d tracking of everybody threre and had the cameras follow people.

is this just a list of data from other government sites? why no central proxy, web services, atom feeds, or other useful features besides just linking?

while I was trying to get work done today. This was pretty scary. I mean, besides not being able to search google and check my email, there are other sites that wouldn't work. Some apache projects and also nabble use google analytics apparently, so I couldn't even load those pages. Also, I couldn't load slashdot's main page because it apparently uses googleads or something like that. What suggestions to people have for this? What other sites were not accessible during the outage?