The "refuse to spend money" thing assumes the company has the money to spend at all. This is often just not the case in the current economic climate. Consider how many small businesses are hanging on by a thread and simply do not have the resources to commit to even the most desirable improvements. And before you say that is obviously the mark of poor management, consider that many times the choice is between going bankrupt by spending money to fix a looming problem that has not yet materialized or staying in business another three months. How is choosing the bankruptcy option beneficial to anyone?

Sure, spending the money on a clean system that is not loaded with kludges, bandaids, and binder twine is the correct choice for the long term, but you cannot get to the long term if you completely ignore short term needs.

Interesting assertion. I'm quite happy most of the time and I do not have any deep self-loathing. Therefore your assertion is disproved. (Any statement can be disproved by finding a single example contrary to that statement.)

The original I replied to stated that not everything in nature serves a useful purpose. That assertion is plausible. After all, species do not survive because they serve a useful purpose - they survive because they are good enough at surviving.

On the topic of humans. If all humans vanished, slowly or otherwise, it would not take long for other predators to take over from us on the hunting side of things and as far as plant life goes, it would do just fine, in the general case. Thus, nature would get along just fine without us.

Admittedly, my wisecrack about humans serving no useful purpose was somewhat tongue in cheek. Obviously, the situation is not nearly so simple as such a statement would suggest.

Like, for instance, humans. Nature would get along much better without us, probably.

Theoretically, you can, indeed, do the same for the pressure difference. After all, you can calculate the necessary forces to move any particular grain of sand. You can calculate various forces from the wind. You can even throw in electromagnetic effects. However, the volume of calculation makes that difficult at best. So the wind tunnel is useful, and would be a faster way to see how different air pressure, air composition, etc., affect the result. And what's to say there weren't dozens or more different experiments calibrated to measure different aspects of the problem?

And no, I don't have a specific formula to share. But I also have not conducted a detailed study (and I never claimed I did) so I do not have a detailed understanding of the dynamics in play. Still, I would expect formulas used in fluid dynamics and, get this, the formulas related to gravity, would likely apply. And given there is probably an electrostatic effect of some kind with the small particles, formulas related to electricity and magnetism might be involved.

In any event, my assertion was that it *should* be possible. I don't have any special knowledge of the problem.

Also, sure, there are suspended particulates in the Martian atmosphere. However, those are not the particles that form the dunes in the first place. The dunes would be composed of the larger (heavier) particles that need more force to move. And before you ask, I'm basing that statement on having observed drifting sand.

Finally, let me direct to you my signature, "If it works in theory, try something else in practice." I have no delusions that my "theory" is any more correct than any other.

Seems to me that if you can work out the air speed needed to move sand with air of a particular density in at 1 g, you should be able to do some math to work out how that would translate at 1/3 g.

Even if this is possible (and it is on some of the hardware I've used over the years), the change must be made on *both* ends or no data can be passed through. It makes no difference if the downstream box switches its transmit and receive lines. You still have no way of making the upstream box do the same unless you have physical access to it, in which case there's no point doing the serial link anyway. So as long as the upstream box has not been tampered with physically, there is no way to send anything *that it is going to receive* because it's not listening for it.

For those who haven't seen it yet, let me repeat: changing one end to transmit on the receive line does not magically mean the other end is going to receive on its transmit line.

And those reports are promptly ignored by almost everyone that receives them, and here's why: of the 1000 or so I've recevied at $dayjob over the past decade, exactly zero have had anything to do with me, my customers, or my servers. All it takes is some lowlife to mention a bunch of random sites in their spam to deluge abuse contacts with irrelevant reports.

There's a PC port of Dungeons of Daggorath, authorized by the original creators of the game. See http://mspencer.net/daggorath/dodpcp.html for more information.

They're all the same size in Canada, too.

You forgot the "Fee Fee", unless they're already charging you that one?

Actually, "Don't you know that?" would be expanded to read "Do you not know that?" Same way "Ain't I?" turns into "Am I not" and so on.

There is a factor you may have neglected to consider: with a faster transmit, the distance between components can be longer with the same speed components. That is, the communication latency introduced by path length is lower.

Actually, adding the class E addresses would add *16* /8s. however, that would still maybe buy a year, if lucky. Not worth the effort.

Why not set up a private certificate authority? Then you can manufacture as many SSL certificates as you need for private use and all you need to do is distribute the certificate authority's certificate to each browser once for the entire enterprise. Every browser out there has a way to add additional trusted certificate authorities. Indeed, if you have a "centrally controlled" provisioning system, you can even add the certificate to your default system build. Then the scary warnings go away completely.