Government owned distribution has its drawbacks, but what about a public owned cooperative? It would operate like a corporation except that the shareholders are also the customers. There are two sticking points to this approach though- initial capitalization and competition. Startup costs for this kind of enterprise are not insignificant, and even if a cooperative could be established, existing providers would slash their fees (to the point of taking a loss) to insure that a cooperative would not gain market foothold.

You were supposed to say 'George Soros" not "Michael Bloomberg'. At least get your right wing talking points right.

Their last update bricked broadcom blades of the G1 variety.

boochiboochiboochiboochi is acceptable as well here in the states.

Depends on the pinball machine. Pinbot? Definitely.

That might by you some time at best. You can wipe the server drives, but then you will be charged with contempt or worse obstruction of justice. The first you may hear of it is your front door smashed in and cops with guns (and a warrant) in your house.

Let's get hypothetical...

One of your nephews or cousins that uses your e-mail server decides to purchase a pressure cooker online. He also has some friends in Europe that he e-mails once in a while. What do you do when the NSA asks you for all the e-mails stored on your server?

They have agents in every neighborhood in the US that are perfectly capable of spying on Americans under the pretext of "delivering mail".

You think I'm joking?

I've totally written crappy vine reviews. Quite a few in fact. I'm sorry.

The bottom line is when I get my Vine newsletter, most of the time all of the stuff that I might consider buying/reading is already gone. I don't know if Vine has 'favorites' program where certain people get access to items before others, but most of the time Vine is a bust for me. I'm left with the items/books that are leftover- which often means technical books. I'll get these things if I have an interest in the topic, but I just don't have the time to delve into the finer points of signal processing. It will sit on my shelf and gather dust until I find something I want on Vine that is actually available, then I have to write a review to be able to get that thing.

I've pretty much given up on Vine. It's a waste of time, and not worth the guilt of writing a crappy review. Even if you write a heartfelt review, people will mark it as unhelpful anyway. Call me jaded.

When I had to get the first draft of the human genome onto CD, I used 2 bit substitution and run length encoding on repeats. gzip definitely did not cut it.

BTW, I don't mean to make Davidovits (That's his name) out to be a crackpot. I don't think he is.

I believe that patents in this area have been held by a French chemist for quite some time. (So long ago, they have probably expired) If you do a google search on "Geopolymer" you will find some fascinating stuff. One of his theories is that the blocks of the Great Pyramids were not quarried, but rather cast like concrete.

Disclaimer... while I have been an Apple user for a long time, I do get a lot of milage from other hardware and operating systems. I wouldn't call myself a fan boi.

I bought the G5 Power Mac within a month of its release. This is pretty much the same case that is the current Mac Pro. I was totally disappointed. It had a lot of great features, but it was freakin' HUGE.

Over the years, I've hoped that Apple would get their desktop case down around a Micro-ATX form factor, but they never did. An obvious design flaw was ignored by The Steve for umpteen years. This new case seems like an extreme reaction to the size issue- which is great. It's tiny. There's some great engineering in there. But unless this new soda can is priced to sell, this is a play straight out of Apple's 1992 playbook. It isn't 1992, and that play didn't work so well the first time around. If they want to pull that shit, they need to fit 4-6 of them in a 2U form factor and get back into the server market.

In today's economy, is it feasible to price your products out of reach for an average consumer? Maybe I'm just envious because I know I will never be able to afford one of these things. It's not like I have the same job I had when I bought that monstrous G5.

Pia Zadora.
mmmmmmmmmmm!

eom