Apparently 2018 has an opportunity for a 501 day free-return trajectory. It could just be a flyby.

In Canada we *get* the results of the election within hours of the polls closing, usually 2 or 3. That's with four federal parties who make the math of who exactly won a little more difficult.

Hand counting isn't as slow as you think it is when you have enough people organized to do the job properly.

When I started my own business, I got myself a safety deposit box. Every time I go to the bank to cash my cheques, I use an external 3.5" HD mount, backup critical files using a script, take a hard drive into the bank and remove last month's copy. It has the added benefit of being fire and earthquake proof (two things I won't have if I stored them in my home.

I only have about 200GB of data I consider "critical" though, but the same thing would scale up. At ~$40/year for a small safety deposit box it's one of the cheapest and most robust mechanisms for keeping your critical data safe.

I only have one working eye, you insensitive clod!

Dyson Spheres. Explains all the dark matter. ;)

We went to the VLA this summer on a 4 week driving trip from Canada. Very cool, though the array was in the "D" configuration, which meant it was spread out over miles and miles and less cool to photograph. You do get to walk right up to one of the radio telescopes though.

Just a hint, the road signage for the VLA is very difficult to see. Watch all signs like a hawk. It's a bit further West than we thought it was. If you find yourself getting too close to the western mountain range turn back (signage was easier driving westwards anyways).

Also, New Mexico is awesome, and Santa Fe is incredible... we stayed there for 3 days and it was a great place to make a base camp and explore other places in northern-Central New Mexico (including Taos - cultural, not sciency).

The only other sciencey thing we did while there was go to the (free admission) (not Ray) "Bradbury Science Museum" in Los Alamos. If you love the bomb, I mean *really* love it, it's the place for you. We all found it exceptionally creepy.

My 100Mbps last mile copper line here in Canada (Shaw Cable - been active for the past half year) has a 500GB/mo cap. There's talk of a 250Mbps with 1TB/mo cap (or unlimited) options coming out later this year. The price isn't exorbitant too, too much for college kids, but $99/mo with digital cable isn't *that* bad.

It's not all horrible up here.

(And yes, Teksavvy should have the right to offer the same Internet service without cable on the same copper at a fraction of that price)

This also means that a USB drive could also be used to hack a Linux system. *shudders*. I feel dumb now too, I would have presumed that would have been a safe way to check out what the device was.

You're pretty much screwed. I know Virgin Mobile offers $30/mo plans for 500MB, prices go up from there.

Out of curiosity, I'm about to make the reverse trip. What's my best option for a wifi cellular hub in the US if I don't already have hardware?

I'm actually planning on this. I'm also taking a "vacation" to the states, where the only way I could get away for 3 weeks was to be tied to a cellphone.

Apparently Tracfones are ludicrously cheap ($10) and call call anywhere in the US at 20 cents/min. I'm planning on tying this to a VoIP line, so I can use the cell to call outside the US for only another couple cents per minute.

For those of you from the DOS era, you might want to consider backing up those old floppies ASAP if you do want to keep them. I pulled out some 15 and 20 year old 3.5" floppies recently. A good percentage of the 15 year floppies had errors and most of the 20 year old floppies did. These were disks stored in a cool, dry place.

My PC days go back to 1988 and PC-DOS 3. I still love to play some of those old games, but honestly DOSBox is the way to go.

Couch Piracy means getting bed bugs in your home. Yarr!

Eli Pariser's recent TED talk states Google does this too, except instead of clicking a like button, it just assumes you like what you click on.

We Canadians are kings of strategic voting: voting for the candidate most likely to beat the person you like the least. Voting for the Pirate Party really is (almost) a vote thrown away. Three things though:

1) Not all "3rd party votes" are wasted. The NDP looks like they may be surging into second place ahead of the Liberals. Watch your local polls carefully and make an informed decision
2) If someone calls up your house for polling purposes, by all means reply "Pirate Party".
3) If you *really* like the Pirate Party, donate to them. Or better yet, join them and try to make their message stronger/more refined.

Being a Slackware user for many years, I went the MythTV+Slackware route when I got my HTPC up and running. One day I managed to totally break my system and decided "What the hell, let's give MythBuntu a go". What used to be a 2 hour+ set up time went down to 10-15 minutes. I actually switched my server over to Ubuntu soon afterwards and haven't looked back.

MythTV and Ubuntu (and mediabuntu) marry well together on both the backend and frontend. It's worth an afternoon to try out if you have the hardware around. I used nfs instead of smfs to connect the two, but the principles the same. Plus I have additional "TV" sets all around the house with dual booting partition. Those took a little extra time to set up but it is a bonus.

Some of the new mini SSD based machines (Like the Acer Revo) might be the way to go for the frontend. They're powerful enough and can playback HD video. MythTV works great on my Asus EEE 901 running Ubuntu Netbook remix.