One would think critical power networks would be close systems.

I can try to make this point brief and direct.

  Fearlessness? callous children?

  The reason why the United States' version of a Capitalist Democracy is hurting is because when there is profit or savings involved nationalism goes out the window. Plain and simple. Apply it to every bottom line situation.

    Mars is dead because it's magnetic field stopped after it's cores cooled. When a planet has no magnetic field, charged particles from the sun bombard the planet stripping the atmosphere. Mars' surface gets nasty amounts of radiation from the sun. If we could find a way to heat the cores again we could grow anything we wanted on the surface in 20 million years or so.

Slashdot is a great engineering community?

I thought this was the only Information Technology Comedy sight on the internet.

  You could make an argument that all human behavior can be traced to genetics. In fact my father is typing this same reply at another forum over at AARP.COM. He can't spell either.

  year 2600 dictionary: Capitalism --- [kap-i-tl-iz-uhm] -noun. An economic system in which the means of production and distribution are privately owned by Walmart.

      The simplest explanation is usually the answer.

These 2 pilots failed to answer around 10 different air traffic controllers as they were flying through different ATC zones, over a time period of 77 minutes. Either they had the comm turned off, they were out of the cockpit or they were sleeping. Either way the real answer will probably get them fired so they will never admit to it. At first they said that they were arguing over NTSB policy which is a comical excuse, so they changed it to the laptop excuse. The laptop excuse might be plausible for a one pilot plane, but it is not believable for 2 pilots approaching a destination and flying right by it. My guess is that they were sleeping. Because the pilots are the only ones who know what occurred in the cockpit that day, they probably won't ever admit the truth.

    There has always been and will always be a 22% chance that 90% of the time, 45% of the people will only be correct 62% of the time when attempting to predict the future to 100% accuracy. Henceforth and seemingly only a partially untrue tautology.

    Two-and-a-half football fields? Does this include the stands and the parking lots? They couldn't give it to us in meters?

    My first computer was a Radio Shack/Tandy Color Computer II, around 1980-81.

    My Second computer was a Commodore Vic 20, wich I used to connect to compuserve with a 300 baud modem around 1981-82. The one thing I remember most is that Compuserve modelled thier chat rooms after the CB Radio Scene. When AOL came around the chat rooms were much easier to navigate then Compuserve and they never recovered. I didnt spend much time on Compuserve in the '80s because they charged by the hour and being a young teen, I didnt have the money. Trying to explain to my parents that I was using the phone to connect to other computers was a lost cause. After that, the C-64 BBS scene took off and life was never the same. Great Memories.

    Plenty can be said about the cons of AOL such as the software being classified as a virus. There was a time period from 1996-2003 when AOL chat rooms had hundreds of thousands of participants 24 hours a day. For us introverts it was a social mecca.

On the old games, they actually ended when you made 3 critical errors. The whole idea was to get better each time you played to get further into the game and possibly beat it.

Today all games are about experience gaining and gold hording. Play lousy for 6 months, get to level 90 so you can kill the creatures with one click. Oh, and the game only ends when you stop paying your monthly bill.

  My 17 year old nephew comes from a long line of mechanically inclined men from both side. Recently he started playing guitar in a horrid hard core band. He won't string his own guitar. He takes it down to the local shop and pays an extra 20 bucks for them to do it. It's hard to come to terms with that mentality.

  I always made extra cash as a House Painter and as an Amateur Carpenter while working in IT. I did this full time during the IT dark days of 2002-2004.

  One thing that hasn't been pointed out is that the reason I was able to learn these skills is because my father and uncles were tradesman. If you have family ties to tradesman you are going to pick up skills and have the opportunity to work on large construction jobs when you are young.

  A few times a year I get calls to work nights/weekends for general contractors where I temporarily make more money than my salaried day job.

If a person doesn't know any tradesman/contractors from ages 16-25 then they are much less likely to learn the skills.

  I played a MUD right up until 2002. Please don't tell anyone. The MUD was DragonRealms from play.net. The average nightly players are still near 1000. All text baby. Prep Fireball, wait, cast!
My first text based game was ZORK on a C64. The farmer's sons were insane.

I grew up 5 miles from the water on Central Long Island's "South Shore". When I was a kid my friends father had a large garden, about 80 yards by 20 yards. Every year when he would till/turn the soil, large crumbling shells would turn up. We always wondered why they were so close to the surface in a place that had been above sea level for millions of years. Maybe this is the answer.