conservation of evil. It has to go somewhere. Comcast seems to be at the root of every bad deed these days. I think we figured out that google is dumping its evil quota on comcast.

I just bring a car jack, and jack the seat in front of me right off it's rails.

Ali Baba and it's sister consumer site, Ali Express, are aptly named to recall the famous arabian theives. I've bought lots of items on ali express and my experience is that anything above $40 for sale is going to involve you losing your money to a thief. Things like Suunto watches sell there under $100 but guess what, they are either counterfeits or you never get what you order. Same with Seagull brand watches. It's a theives market. Sure Ali baba has dispute resolution mechanism but the theives know how to work this to their advantage. A typical transaction goes like this. You buy something and you get a tracking number. The item never arrives. You check the tracking number and it's a real tracking number and it shows the item arrive but was deliver to some other city. You file a dispute. The thief ("merchant") offers you a $20 discount for your inconvenience and promises to reship it. If you accept this offer then you close the dispute and cannot re-open it. Needless to say the item never arrives. The tracking number is just one the thief recycled from some other past shipment to satisfy the alibaba purchase tracking. If you are clever enough not to accept the $20 offer then what happens is the dispute goes back and forth with the theif saying he's out his product and could you please agree to split the cost. If he's lucky you walk the time for the transaction past the Alibaba protection period. If not you remeber to escalate it. Then theres a month or more of incommunicado with the Ali baba site where they weigh your claims of non-arrival with the theifs attempts to seem conciliatory. Perhaps alibaba refunds your money but you don't know till one day it just happens.

I've been down this road so many times with "almost but not quite too good to be true" that this is the norm not the exceptions. The theives know that you know that somethings are too good to be true. so they price they scam appropriately. For example, often one theif will have a dozen different IDs on alibaba and then will sell the same suunto watch for a spectrum of prices. He's effectively titrating for the chumps wariness level. Exactly how much below MFG retail do your antennas go up verus your own greed to get the best deal. So you fool yourself by picking the seller with the price you are willing to believe. But they are the same guy.

Alibaba closes down the theif sometimes, but a week later they pop up with the exact same scam.

Right. I did a more relevant calculation of that here:
http://science.slashdot.org/co...

Something I've wondered about is why we don't see more relativistic protons hitting earth or the ISS. Is the relative velocity of everything in the universe extremely low? I don't think so. So where are these missing showers on earth right now?

Let's see if I can work this out correctly;
First assume the spaceships weight negligibly different than the mass of the fuel. The thrust needed to push the weight at a steady 1g will be proportional to the mass of the ship at each interval of time. SO the rate of mass burn is proportional to the mass which means the mass is a decaying exponential.

M = Mo * exp( -g * time / thrust_to_weight )

If you think about this for a moment it becomes clear that any amount of mass would do since as the mass gets lighter it takes less fuel so the ship could go indefinitely at 1g. The problem is the assumption that the ship weighs nothing. so let's fix that.

dM/dt = -g*(M+Ms)/thrust_to_weight.

where Ms = mass of ship and M = mass of fuel.

I'm spacing on how to solve that equation so I'll approximate it by saying that until M = Ms we can mostly ignore the ship mass. therfore for a 6.6 year flight time the fuel required is about:

Mfuel = Ms * exp( g* (6.6 years)/thrust_to_weight )

Mfule = Ms * exp( +303,800,000/thrust_to_weight).

So you need a rather high thrust to weight ratio due to the coefficient in the exponetial.

Let the pillory for my "obvious" math errors begin!

it's a matter of fuel with sufficient thrust to weight ratio (unless you want to start thinking about using the interstellar gases as the propellant--- that get's dicey because they will be approaching your craft at near the speed of light)

traveling with a 1G acceleration:
1/2g t^2 = 1/2*11*3E8

so t = 3.3 years to half way. 6.6 years to go all the way and thus 13.2 years for the round trip.

Thus you could easily go there and come back in your lifetime.

Note that this is also Faster than light can make the round trip. However that is not any violation of relativity. THe people on earth would have aged a lot more than 13.3 years during your trip. But you would only have aged 13.3 years.

Last century, I worked for a magazine sales company that did telephone soliciting. We loved it when people slammed down the phone because it meant no wasted time. The worst was when someone wanted to chat. One time a kid answered the phone and I asked for the dad. She said, "He's out in the garage under the car" and ran off to fetch him. It was a dillemma what to do next. Hang up? wait?. Another time the person on the other end kept repeating only the word yes during my sales pitch and then 5 minutes in switched to "can you please speak chinese". Even when I said "goodbye".

These days, I tell them I'm really glad they called and I need to move to the phone by the computer so I can purchase what they are selling. Then I set the phone down and go about what I was doing.

Nah this is just Sony Electronics wanting to leverage their entertainment holdings to sell TVs and PLayers with proprietaty formats while Sony Entertainment wants to maximize sales. Or maybe I got it backward. Anyhow lots of diversified companies have internal conflicts. The IBM PC which uses all non-IBM parts was not made by the primary Computer division at IBM. Samsung also has internal competition with conflicting objectives,

except a lot of places now won't roll the video if the ad is also blocked.

it's the surveillance I don't like. In theory this surveillance is supposed to get me relevant ads but it just creeps me out with it's persistence. I don't really need relevant ads ever. What I actually like is being exposed to lots of different ads. It gives me a sense of what the world is up to in a way. SO I don't mind the ads. It's not like TV ads that I have to wait through. they are just off to the side. What I don't want therefore is the surveillance. it has negative value to me. I don't want targeted ads.

If I could be sure I could be surveillance free I'd pay $230. But I don't see how that is possible. How would I know? where does one draw the line-- things like cookies for sessions and autologin on returning to a site and resuming my netflix movie where I left off are useful. What about amazon auto suggest? I once bought a book on amazon about sexual practices in different cultures and for months I had autosuggests for dildos and some amazingly raunchy bondage movies that I had no idea amazon carried. My sense of embarrassment prevented me from using amazon when other people were in the room. I think however this is not really the surveillance I am worried about. I can easily not use amazon and certainly in the future I always now check the "people who bought this also bought..." before I purchase some item that will trigger things I don't want it suggesting to me. SO that's containable.

But that experience makes me wonder what that little search did for my google profile. Am I now pegged as a dog fucker on google because the key terms I used for a scholarly search had other meanings? I know that google pricks up it's ears when a search leads down a path to a purchase.

You might ask why do I care. I just do, and that's normal. were trained in caring about appearances when were on the playground.

"Surfboard" is what you surf on and it goes with the "surface" theme.

How about "Webbie" who would guide you like clippie ("It looks like you are searching for tentacle porn, today")?

I nominate the name (acronym): UFIA or UFIA explorer