Or releasing genetically modified mind blowingly hot humans into areas with human overpopulation issues, so that all the offsprings or grandkids are infertile. Come on, y'all know where this genetics technology is heading to why do I have to be the first one to say it?.. first mosquitoes, then your human declared enemies.. then your human competitors in business.. especially if you are tribal, gang-like or clan like in your mindset.. Thank you Monsanto Laboratories and Agilent Bioscience for these miraculous tools to fix "problems" in biology.

Hahahahaha.

Why would you want to waste all that precious gas it has successfully collected, every bit of which is worth treasure in the vast emptiness and nothingness of space. Even if you have to run nuclear processes to convert them say from oxygen toward iron, or from lead toward iron, via solar panel harvested star energy and an inefficient Hirsch fusor, it's stuff, tangible matter in your hands in the vast vast vast vast vast emptiness and nothingness of space. Stuff you can transform to make bodyparts for life out of. You cannot make children out of vacuum, you need matter, like carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, etc. Do not waste a single drop of matter, and you can live just fine on rotating cylinder artificial gravity space stations around it, such as in orbit around a Neptune. Venus is different - you want to ping pong it to a region or shade it right where it is where its surface temperature is such that collects water from the nearby and relatively abundant solar wind. You're not wasting a lot of matter, in absolute terms or relative terms, unlike in the not so deep solar gravity well case of the humongous Neptune, where matter is hard to come by, and it's also humongous amount, in absolute terms, compared to the size of Venus.

Ok, well I see nobody came up with this, and I've thought about it more. The whole point of putting up a huge ring instead of a huge lens, is again, to save weight. But with astronomy it is usually not the triangulation accuracy that matters, as in, 3d-vision of knowing the distance, but light collection and image sharpness. So what I said about partial outer fresnel lens rings, binocular style, is not correct, the very purpose of the ring is increased light collection surface area all focusing to a single point to create the image, doing it at minimum weight possible, and if they carried on along the lens, it would get prohibitively heavy in the center. However, this problem of increased surface area without increasing the weight has been already solved, and it's called the Fresnel lens itself. And in fact, the central rings of the Fresnel are the lightest, because they can be made flat and nearly parallel, so super thin, while the outermost rings are the heaviest, because of the steep angle requirements for diffraction there, unless you are willing to increase the frequency of the rings making them each skinnier and narrower, compared to pretty fat stripes of glass in the center. Also the achromatic requirement for the materials near the outer rings increases - meaning the prism-like refracting glass cannot split the colors of the rainbow, but the material has to be accurately achromatic for all frequencies, possibly UV and infrared too, or whatever you can get. So as far as astronomy goes, and light collection surface area just an opaque disk in the center is no better than a traditional Fresnel lens, other than the requirement on the accuracy of shape and accuracy of focal point manufacturing, which may be slightly less of a problem with a single outer ring, but why not pay attention and tune it to the max you can tune it, instead of putting up an opaque disk. Even with an opaque disk the opaque part needs to be closer to the lens, so that when you have to steer the gigantic ring contraption with rocket fuel, you only have to move the ring, not the opaque disk which is close to the camera or focal point, and if you go with a Fresnel lens, you could have locally installable and removable filters that could block out certain rings at a time if needed, and only allow the outermost one, or innermost-ones to collect the light, or if you allowed slight achromaticity, varying the focal point could collect the blue, red, yellow, etc portions along the rainbow individually, including UV and infrared by themselves too, which then you can computer compound to reconstruct the image.

So in the astronomy sense of looking at distant galaxies, the binocular 3D vision sense, kind of like looking out into the sea for ships from a port, and seeing the distance with binoculars which is not possible with a single telescope, so for astronomy sense the 3D effect is not important, because the base of the triangle you use in your computations to get your 3D view is so minuscule compared to the hypotenuse and other sides of the triangle, that the math still spits out error, and you cannot tell how far a galaxy is with a couple hundred mile binocular spacing, maybe a spacing that spans the entire solar system between two telescope looking at the exact same thing might work. However what a 3D vision can do in space is see nearby objects, or search for nearby objects. You simply put your eyeballs into a cross-eye for near range, such as looking between Neptune and Pluto, or just behind Pluto, and then whatever you're looking at, if any objects come into intense focus while everthing before them and behind them blurs out, you can instantly find meteorites, even if they are extremely small, headed for Earth. We just had a near miss of a fairly gigantic meteorite that whizzed by Earth and missed, on Jan 26, and the non omnipotent lifeforms on Earth that split the Red Sea during Exodus could have altered its course to make it slam into Earth, precipitating a global catastrophe that would instantly put an end to stupid lawn mowing that people do everywhere, simply because oil shipments would have stopped, and then using manual scythes is actually not a problem for bugs, flowers, mushrooms and other lifeforms, on grass and flowers that have grown knee high, but the constant harassment every 2 days by a lawnmower and complete lack of flowers, that is a problem presently that needs to be addressed. So there is more time until another one of these near misses whizzes by and intentionally gets crashed to put an end to the out of control often senseless natural destructive behavior of one of the species on Earth, called humans. And in that cutting grass to create a couple foot protective zone from snake in the grass for your kids around the house is not a problem, if you want to. Or if you have to destroy weeds because you need to grow food there. Or you have to hunt to feed yourself, but not for mass market. Or you have to pollute a natural water in a way where it can easily absorb it and deal with the pollution without extinction issues, but you make a living on it, in economically dire circumstances. Like my cat Geoffrey only destroys when he's hungry, and even then 1 out of 7 mice escape by his dabblings. It's the out of control senseless and useless destruction, such as grass cutting on an uninhabited lot, or even, say Walmart street front lots, over mere sense of beauty is what's at stake here, and if you do not like the flowers and weeds that have been around for hundreds of millions of years, you can import other flowers that are prettier to you and more pleasing to your eyes, but there is a desperate need for flowers, for butterflies, bees and even ants, and in turn spiders, dragonflies to live happily. So in any case, having binocular like searching telescopes sweeping in plane and out of plane of the planets (the recent near miss whizzz by was coming way out of plane) 3d-vision looking for anything that turns up in-focus is a worthy thing to do, and for that you need a decent size triangle base for the trigonometric sine cosine triangulation land surveyor calculations, which your brain processes unknowing to you when you see in 3D vision one object farther than another.

By the way the chromaticity issues arising with lenses and prisms have also been solved already, including in astronomy, through eliminating diffraction and instead using total reflection, i.e. paraboloid mirrors, like in your flashlight, but instead of a light bulb at the focal point giving you a parallel beam, you put a concave paraboloid mirror at the bottom of a pipe, and put the camera where he light bulb would be to collect the image. So while even for a Fresnel lens you need some kind of thickness except for the very flat central part, for mirrors you can make those any small thickness that is structurally still sound, and even break them up into individually movable portions (and then you have to get very good with the alignment technology, such as laser interferometry distance measurements between 2 or 3 mirrors to pick up their precomputed positions when trying to aim at something.) But here, if you truly want to save on weight for a telescope instead of using a single Fresnel lens ring around the outer edges and blacking out the center ones with an opaque material, make that opaque material into a paraboloid mirror (possibly from Moon-mined aluminum), and in space where the only bother is solar wind plus micro-meteorites, possibly aluminum foil thickness might be acceptable, as long as you can create an accurate shape. Either with the Fresnel lens ring, or multi ringed huge Fresnel lens, or the mega-paraboloid mirror, the issue is geometrical accuracy in the mirror shape. On Earth they used to use mercury-pools set aspin, and the spinning created a super-accurate paraboloid surface on mercury, kind of like when you spin a bucket of water the water surface rises up at the sides, and the center stays flat but depressed, a parabolid shape, of course not accurate in practice if you just jerked the bucket, but should be pretty accurate if you have maintained uniform spinning for a while. Of course in weightlessness there is no driving force to force a liquid surface into a paraboloid, so for artificial gravity you may need a big rotating cylinder space station where you produce individual paraboloid elements of the paraboloid mega mirror to check your CNC calibrations, unless you trust your CNC's enough to accurately make the individually tiltable laser interferometry alinged paraboloid components, that line up on command to focus light from a distant galaxy, and get out of focus when a bright object passes by in the view, such as a planet, to not burn up the camera by heating it to the boiling point of tungsten, desert solar concentrator style, merely off of the light they collect reflected from, say, Uranus.

No, they are normally black, as long as you're talking about the huge ones. The white ones, like the one I carry around between my legs, only come S and M sizes only, maybe L if she's lucky, but not XL, XXL or XXXL. And women are addicted to XXXL. Like even in the Bible, God: Adam, why did you eat the apple from the forbidden fruit tree? Adam: because Eve told me to do it. God: Eve, why did you eat the apple from the forbidden fruit tree? Eve: because the black snake, that looks like one huge dick, told me to do it, and I'm addicted to huge dicks and could not resist. That pretty much sums up the rest of history that followed ever since.

So how long til they turn this thing around toward Earth, and now I'll get to watch nature documentaries about how the moist egg exits from the anus when a spider lays her eggs, in high definition, filmed directly from a geostationary orbit.

The whole thing is like putting a huge lens into orbit, and if you kept the center parts it would be heavy, but it would collect more light, but if you cut it out, you can still get the resolution except with less light collection. It's all about saving weight and sacrificing light intensity in the name of maintaining high resolution. That's what binoculars with spread out sighters via internal prisms do, they do not increase the light collection area, just the accuracy in the triangulation math when you increase the base. In fact they don't even need a whole disk, just two partial disks, separated at a distance, and leave the rest of the circumference out too, black that out too. Make it like a big binocular. Or spread it out, say 6 fresnel refractors spaced around the imaginary circumference at 60x6=360 degree angles. Or 4 each at 90 angles. And you could play games at reorganizing these things, and the blocking out of the central light part you could do closer, at the camera, like 2 inches before it at 2 inch opaque disk diameter, or 200 yards at 200 yard opaque disk diameter, whatever is necessary to get a good image out of the zoo of your interacting fresnel things miles or hundreds of miles ahead. It's kind of like a desert tracking mirror focusing solar tower, where you can move your mirrors about to miles away if you want to, and play around with the settings depending on what you're looking at, a high light intensity thing where you can spread out farther to collect the light and get huge resolution, or something barely tinkle tinkle little star, where you have to regroup closer together to get some minimal light intensity to work with, but sacrificing resolution. And if you have these all over the place, you could vary the blocker size in the center by moving it from 2 inches to 200 yards and back. Most high quality cameras have flexibility on adjusting focus via a movable lens and light intensity via a shutter, what they don't have is the spread out interpupillary distance of a binocular.

But if they do put it up as it is, maybe they gain experience for when they have to put up a couple thousand square miles of opaque things, like movable solar panels, at the Lagrange point between Earth and the Sun to regulate global warming, because I already got enough bills on my plate to figure out where the hell I'm gonna get the money for them to pay, and I'm tired about the world leaders wasting their breath at conferences thinking up new ways to tax me, like a stupid carbon tax, when the solution is simple, when it's too bright, you put on some shades, or, like at the beach, if the sun is burning you too hot, you put up an umbrella. Doh! I don't understand what's so complicated about this. Fuck these idiots and their stupid carbon tax and carbon trading. Life loves carbon, like the Dead Sea is the most productive area on the planet in nongreenhouse circumstances, where tomatoes grow the fastest, because it has the highest CO2 partial pressure, other than not having enough water that you have to import and irrigate with. Life hates deserts but loves CO2 in the atmosphere, and the problem with CO2 in the atmosphere is that it makes the planet hot and creates more deserts and melts glaciers and moutaintop snow and causes sea level rise eventually, in a self amplifying and accelerating way, and the solution is take care of your home, like your planet, and if it gets too hot, cool, via brute force if necessary.

Actually I love mass surveillance, where I get to constantly bitch about how I hate it, and they do it "illegally" as in catching somebody speeding on cameras, or knowing someone is cheating on their wife, etc. It used to go under the term "gossip" in villages without which village communities cannot self regulate, and same should go for mass surveillance. It should be done to the maximum possible extent, but should be kept illegal to the maximum possible extent too, such as its recordings without warrants never holding up in court, not allowed to be broadcast on tv or internet, etc. Like traffic cams without a police officer present, no. The tv show COPS is a different story, you see what an officer sees, but this omnipresent surveillance machine of bugs and spying and secret cameras invade too much on privacy, without warning, without effort on the part of invaders, and create an unhealthy balance for power abuse. Like I don't want no traffic camera issued speeding tickets, but I love police officer issued ones, and in all this I still want them to see if anyone speeds on cameras. But they gotta be like a catholic priest with a vow of silence after a confession. He can pedal things in the village to mend the situation without openly being able to discuss what exactly he heard. That's what this surveillance technology creates, high tech confessions and only specially selected people taking a vow of silence should be able to perform it and review it. I do not go to confessions much, but say, if I made a mistake, and got drunk and got a girl pregnant without my wife and kids knowing about it, and that girl wants to go through with the pregnancy and does not want to abort, the best thing to do is to tell the priest, who summons the elderly women and subtly guides them or hints what the task is, who love such a task of descending on your wife and taking care of her if she happens to ever find out, as an emotional support network, without actually telling her, and also arrange for the illegitimate out of wedlock child to be born, and to be well taken care of. That child is not a waste, a precious being, and also a stable family should not be broken up over it. The situation is known by many, it is cared for by many, and it's a complex situation that's very difficult to manage without the support network initiated by a confession booth and the elderly women who are not isolated off or shipped off to nursing homes. If anything, I think as soon a woman hits post menopause, she instantly qualifies to be a surveillance person of traffic cameras, cellular trackings, etc, and take that vow of silence that priest do about confessions, and their findings and recordings should always be considered illegal, not to hold up in court or broadcast on TV, other than maybe as statistics.

"my hand categorically rejects two button mice — the dangling ring finger causes me genuine physical discomfort"

guess what mine rejects categorically?

Well the US Government started in 1776, so it's done fairly well so far, and I have these postal stamps that say USA Forever, aka forever stamps, if that's any kind of omen.

Run away to space stations - unlike the Bible Exodus across the divided Red Sea running away from the big dark Egyptian cock your women find resistible and can't stop sucking, this time it's gonna be an Exodus into outer space (using Mt. Everest as a ramp) running away from the GMO contraptions that are gonna kill us all that your profit greedy purely biotech focused corporations (like Monsanto or Agilent, both of which used to focus on other technology, like rubber or electronics) can't resist popping out one after the other, telling you it's safe, and it's Roundup resistant, unlike all the 1 billion year old "weeds" or 4 billion year old e-coli bacteria "germs" they will displace. Oh well, at leaast biotech is not as scary as AI research, like self driving cars that can tell the difference between a deer or a plastic deer lawn ornament 500 yards ahead, because Exodus into outer space is an easy solution against it, same with nuclear holocaust, you can simply run away from the problem your exploration and curiosity created Star Trek style leaving behind a big mess, but AI is gonna be smarter than you and screw you over with tricks and chase you down, come Exodus after you, no Exodus for you foolish earthling. Just watch Screamers 1996 movie for a dose of reality to lose your naiveness about these advancements in progress, or progress in advancements. You can't hold back progress. That's the argument commies used against "obsolete" capitalists.

The only thing that ultimately guarantees "publicly accountable" is the 2nd Amendment, once your 1st Amendment rights to bitch have been squashed by corrupt conspirators. If it can be called corrupt in a moral sense, but not in a legal sense, then there is something wrong with the law and the legislators that pimp it. Such as a customer does not have to buy anything such as insurance or lottery tickets he does not want to buy for any reason, most often that is price, or benefit returned for that price, but even simple things, like when shopping for a TV, some sales clerk offends you, you have the right to not buy a TV, even if you get an extreme bargain, even if you get the TV for free. He can walk out of the store and not do business with them and the lesson is that if they do it to the other customers too, they too don't have to buy, the customer is king in the Land of the Fre and the Home of the Brave and he does not have to do business with you unless he feels like he is getting a deal, or becase he likes you, or whatever his reasons are. If you offend a customer he has the right to walk out of your business and boycott it as far as removing his life from yours goes, he does not have the right to come back and bomb that business maffiozo style, but he has the right to shun you. That's how Amish people treat each other - they shun each other when circumstance require. They don't beat you with a stick, they don't hang you, they don't bomb you with explosives, they don't shoot you with a gun, they simply remove the benefit of what their life provides to you from you, called shunning. Usually you can take it for a while but the end result is most often just the person shunned leaving. I have the right to shun counties that have been abusive to me. Such as cutting my wildflowers. For instance, look at this picture http://commons.wikimedia.org/w... and look around at the girl's feet. A butterfly or other bugs would find this terrain absolutely gorgeous, because they could easily survive on the nectar collected from the abundant, natural wildflowers. If your sense of beauty is distorted when the only beautiful thing is a perfect green 8 millimeter tall grass lawn devoid of any red, yellow, blue or white, then I think you need to go to a shrink to get your head checked out, but in any case you have the right to be the best way you see fit for you, including cutting you grass, and I have the right to be the best way I see fit, such as not cutting mine. The argument that nature untouched by man is ugly does not fly. Nature does not need a constant human touch to be beautiful. Ask all the jungle people around the world what they think. And even if you cut the grass and steal it from my land, don't send me bills that cost more than $10 for the 20 minutes it takes to cut it per incident, which would come to $30/hr when going from neighboring lots to neighboring lots. We have a clash here over what's beautiful, and a couple hundred feet away at the end of he street there are a ton of standing wildflowers behind the fence on the lot of the public rail transit system and that is not attacked or constantly cut, so it's also a discrimination case. Under the circumstances I have the right to refuse accepting a job within county borders, over corrupt county government abuses, and withdraw the benefit my existence would provide to them, such as paying taxes. If the county attacks me financially to devastate me, I have the right to try to shun them financially in return. And then after considering the attacking from the county on the financial front, here comes Obamacare, a direct attack on my financial world straight from the Federal Government, trying to force me to go on government aid under my social holding me responsible for the bankrupt government's financial problems too, while making enormous payments on arbitrary prices on this on line Health Insurance Marketplace puppet show. I'm a customer and the basic rule is that I don't have to do business if I don't want to, I don't have to buy. Duh. I failed kindergarten but even I can comprehend this much of basics in Liberty, I think Obama and his cabinet need to go back to kindergarten, because they are failing at these very simple concepts miserably. So now my health is attacked, I get the fuck xrayed out of me, infected like crazy, just to show up at a hospital unable to pay, without insurance, to make an example case for Obamacare. Fuck this bullshit. I have the right not to show up at a stupid hospital and take my chances with my plain immune system with any disease. I have the right do die if I so see best fit, to make an example case out of Obamacare. Give me liberty or give me death, literally, to the letter, in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.

Aluminum beats copper on a weight basis in electric conductivity, and is used exclusively for intercity high voltage overhead cables. At household voltages is does have contact oxide coating resistance overheating and corrosion issues compared to copper, but internally it's an excellent conductor, especially when you consider the price too.
So an aluminum siding should successfully block out the whole electromagnetic spectrum, other than very low frequency that goes around it like through the roof what's not covered with metal, or the sides of the attic not covered with metal, i.e. holes in the Faraday-cage, and at the other end, beyond microwave, terahertz, infrared, visible, UV, only x-ray and gamma-ray can penetrate aluminum siding, so for imaging you cannot really use diffracted waves like FM or AM radio ones that go along unpredictable paths, so these guys must surely be equipped with x-ray and gamma-ray cameras, otherwise they are wasting their precious time for every house they pass which is covered in aluminum, or garage doors which are aluminum. And it's all a minor issue on the radiation exposure front, except when one of your neighbors gets one of these cameras and constantly keeps it on you, and the radiation dose keeps adding up, giving you cancer, or just simply suppressing your immune function, and then they call it AIDS, as in Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, and what it really means is that you Acquired a Neighbor who Acquired a portable or non-portable X-ray camera or just the X-ray gun part of it, and constantly keeps it on you, for, oh, I don't know, trying to own the block reasons to chase other people of different ethnicity away, kind of like intentionally littering the grounds around your home, trying to make you move, this is now ours too, you gotta go, take over time. Welcome to America, where if you're a homosexual or we just don't like what you do, like you have a problem signing our intellectual property slave contracts, you have an increased chance of acquiring what we call AIDS, which has nothing to do with infections or biology other than radiation exposure.

If an intergalactic invasion looks like this, possibly with some pulsating electromagnetic propulsion we still don't know much about, it may be STL not FTL, i.e. slower than light not faster than light:

http://www.cv.nrao.edu/~akimba...

And you could have a couple million years to get your 22 stage Teller-Ulam contraptions ready for a welcome, especially if the convoy of messengers you send ahead for a treaty never signals back at the speed of light, meaning they don't respect the don't shoot the messenger to begin with the basics. The Milky Way is very hazy though, and it's hard to see which way they would be coming from, or even if they arrive, it may be a while til they arrived to get hostile in your neighborhood, if ever. Maybe, like Star Trek officers, they know how to coexist with other life forms without trying to attack everything in their path. But the Dzenghis Khan gang of Mongols taught a very good lesson to any naive douche bags who blindly expect other intelligent creatures to be peaceful. You never know, and because of that skill in defense in important. Even the Native Americans were better off with bows fighting against gunpowder, than if they only had leather strap stone/wood handle battle axes. Though Shaka did win battles against the British with spears and very quick troop movements, but even simple spears used for hunting hogs in the jungle have more action to a distance than a caveman stone/leather strap/wood handle axe. You have a good fighting chance even with inferior technology, not much, but much better than nothing. Neither the Indians nor Shaka said OK, because you have superior weapons, therefore we welcome you as our new intercontinental (as opposed to intergalactic) overlords.

I used to not be a big fan of the Mars program because it's so far compared to the Moon, however no matter how bad you fuck up Mars with your experimenting, it's not gonna affect us on Earth, unlike the Moon. However I'd still like to see minor mining on the Moon for global warming shades to put up at the Lagrange point between the Earth and the Sun, that cover, say 1% of Earth's surface area, possibly be aluminum backed single space grown crystal silicon solar power stations too at the same time. But I would not want the Moon to be gone completely in 500 years, but I have no problem with Mars being ripped to pieces via mining and space stations made out of all of it.
Venus is gonna take a while to terraform. I'm thinking 10,000 years to 10 million. But it's never too early to start, especially if near miss incidents out there that occur once every 10 million years, such as a mega asteroid/comet almost knocking one of Jupiter's moons out of orbit, and you could direct that to actually do knock it out, in a way where it goes round the Sun and impact Venus just right to get it spinning and higher up in orbit from the Sun, with possible consequences on Earth's orbit, which I don't know about. However if you could get it in one shot in the same orbit as Earth on the exact opposite side of the Sun, that would be great, or if you had 3 such planets composed running equidistant on a circular Earth-like orbit, that would be cool too, because you'd have line of sight that way too, but otherwise no orbit interactions, like one going faster than the other. And even if you left them alone eventually they would naturally accumulate water, such as captured hydrogen oxygen from solar wind, and not boil/distill it off out of the atmosphere like Venus does, because they would be at the right distance. I think before pounding stuff into Venus, there has to be stable and self sustaining space station life, and then Life from Earth is guaranteed to make it even if some mega comet half the size of Earth comes out of nowhere and slams into it at high speed, and you didn't see it coming. Don't keep all your eggs in one basket if you can afford not to. A possibly very fast way to start terraforming Venus would be to put up semitransparent huge shades for it too. That's what you do at the beach, when he Sun is burning too hot, you put up an umbrella.

Or our present problems of melting glaciers and mountaintop snow, and icebergs, all covered under the global warming issue we blame on rise of atmospheric CO2 levels started around 1700 with the industrial revolution and the move from beast muscle power to coal/steam, then gasoline/diesel. If anything the nuclear things helped in this picture, as they avoid emitting CO2, and the big issue with them was that people kept blowing them up and scattering the emissions into the troposphere constantly, until above ground tests were banned, or even underground tests are no longer conducted much. The biggest function of nuclear today is to cut out CO2 emissions by providing like 20% of electricity needs, and in the future, we have this quack prophecy of cry wolf an asteroid is gonna hit Earth a few days from now on Jan 26, and it's gonna pass like the year 2000 problem, without as much as a fizzle or much smoke, but eventually it's a possibility that a huge collision with another large size meteorite would happen, the chances are minuscule but collisions do occur out there in the Universe, and if one came our way and we had no tools like the Teller-Ulam designs, we'd be sitting ducks. It's like it's better to have a gun when a bear attacks you, or if you're a small sized person a large muscular person attacks you with a knife, it's a great equalizer, and it's better than a knife or a sword or even a stone/wood handle battle axe the caveman had. Facing an asteroid coming at Earth with conventional explosives is like forcing a person in the wilderness of Alaska infested with grizzly bears to carry a stone/wood caveman axe as protection. It's not the weapon that matters, but what you do with it. If you keep making test explosion mushroom clouds and spew the emissions all over the globe, then yeah, you're an idiot. If you make all electric from it, and not emit anything, and only hold these high power weapons for outer space ping pong tasks, or as a defense against some intergalactic invasion of some hostile alien species that try to eat you, then you're not an idiot. But they should add an 11th commandment to Moses' stone tablets, that says "Thou shalt not drop an atomic bomb on thy neighbor's head, especially if he's not dropping one on yours." I don't understand what's so complicated about this stuff?

Yeah like my mother's radio needed one of them 2 prong 110V power cables, because the old one got frayed underneath the plastic jacket, and Radio Shack had it, for like $13, I don't remember, but I could have spent more on gas trying to shop around to see which store has it, like where would it be at Walmart? You'd have to check out alarm clocks or something to see if they come with one, for like 6 or 7 dollars, just for the cable, and you could spend an entire day going from Walmart to Target, while in Radio Shack they have it. Later I ordered some 90W 18V laptop power supplies from China on Ebay, and I won the biddings at like $4 a piece for like 4 of them, and they come with such cable, 2 prong, which she uses now, but they took over 30 days to ship, via free shipping, imagine that. Radio Shack has a place in the world, it's a name like Coca Cola, or HP, or Caterpillar or Harley Davidson, that's American and holds a special place in people's hearts, even if all of the above may be overpriced compared to the competition, except HP, which now is a purely computing company after spinoffs like Agilent that used to be the core of HP before computers, which now spun it off as Keysight Technologies and Agilent became yet another purely biotech company like Monsanto that spun off old school things they used to be involved in, such as rubber science and equipment. It's hard to keep track anymore what's where who's called what, but the traditional high quality military grade measuring equipment that HP used to be before computers appeared on the scene is now called Keysight.

Win2k did not have the glitter and looks of XP, but it came with much less garbage also, like no messenger install that's hard to shoot, and it was also the last version of Windows that worked without activation on specific hardware for retail versions, which fail to work after 3 or so items in your hardware fail and need replacement, then you have to reactivate, and Microsoft may tell you sorry, we no longer support XP, go out and buy a new computer that run Windows 8, or something along those lines. Win2k shines in this respect that it is like a diamond, forever, unlike XP which is meant to die fast, if you bought a retail version per copy license of Win2K that you can carry from dead hardware to dead hardware forever, the OEM copies being more iffy on the legality, but even in an apocalypse where the Internet or phone systems are defunct or Microsoft is simply no longer in business and nobody takes over issuing activation keys for old versions of XP, you can keep running Win 2K if you have a large enough cache of hardware to replace failed ones along the way, and it does not care what it runs on, nor does it monitor or keep track of hardware items that get replaced as they fail and start moaning that it's no longer running on the same computer it initially was installed on, please reactivate. Reactivate with who, in an apocalypse? Reactivate with who 200 years from now? Win2K is forever, XP and later are not. Of course Dell, Hp, and similar versions of XP work without activation, because they check the bios in the computer, and as long as you keep replacing failed motherboards with another from the same vendor, they should keep working. However they tend to be nonstandard cases and don't accept standard motherboards, if you feel like putting something else into them, and also they feel to me like they all have remote kill switches, and not as trustable as a generic motherboard from say Gigabyte, Abit or MSI, and the like.
I'm only running XP on this HP Mini 200 (with like a 5W Intel Atom) netbook with 9hr battery life, because that's what HP let me get after I found it to simply crawl too slow in performance with Win 7, and it kinda rocks with XP in speed, but I don't really like XP because it comes with too much snooping garbage hiding in the background when I'm on the internet with it, directly from the HP/Microsoft gang, and for long term I'm digging in my heals with Win2K as the last OS for offline, noninternet home use, and presently lots of people are dumping XP capable computers on Ebay simply because Microsoft end of life'd them on it, and I'm like yeah baby, gimme gimme give it to me this awesome treasure at these unbelievably low prices. Other people's garbage is my treasure, because they don't realize what insane value they are throwing away. Starting with XP life is in the fastlane with Windows, but Windows 2000 and prior are forever, as long as you can find hardware that runs them.