Sure. But what happens if someone else goes there and takes it down?

The flag by itself is meaningless if the US can't contest its removal.

Well, stuff in space _is_ scarce, in the sense that it's not infinite, that is. Sure, there's _a lot_ of non-stellar mass in the solar system, but the parts of it that are easily accessible with current technology is really pretty limited. Luna, Apollo asteroids, and the occasional comet, mostly. And to make things even trickier, what happens when people start living out there permanently? That chunk of rock will be just as much 'their' property as any piece of terra firma.

Start with the simplest way to handle ownership claims and see where that goes: You have to go out and stick a flag on it to even have a shot at such a claim being legit. In person, or will a probe suffice? Define "probe"; don't want anyone spamming the surface of Mars with 1" radio cubes and claiming the entire planet as a result. For that reason, I'm inclined to limit ownership claims solely to putting boots on the ground. You own your unmanned probe and anything in produces using unowned resources (so automated factories are allowed), but the body as a whole is still up for grabs.

Of course, how much can you claim? The entire asteroid/cometplanet? Well that sucks. The EU founds a small colony on Mars just a few weeks ahead of the US and Chinese, so they get the whole pie? I guess you could make it a function of how many people you actually have there, but do they have to be there permanently?

And hey, who's going to enforce all this anyway? Considering the potential riches involved, nobody is going to accept a UN ruling that means that country A gets the piece of rock that country B just spent $10 billion putting a mining facility on because A sent a suicide volunteer on a one-way trip to put them on said rock before B.

I suspect that in the end, the 'border's will be decided in the traditional way. Namely, guys with guns moving them around until they conclude that getting a bigger piece of the pie for themselves would be more trouble than it's worth.

I have 350 heads on a 305 engine and a Nikon D3200 with a 18–55 with a new DX-format CMOS that can do 3.4 FPS while I chat over IAX using G.729.

Header check, maybe? The best way to confirm it is to look at the headers and find out where it came from - most people on the 'net these days who know their stuff can read that.

I'll be frank, I've never fully understood the basic concept of a flu vaccine.

Sure, flu season comes around, and a lot of people come down with the $animal plague. A few die from complications, but by and large, we get over it.

Enter into it, here, the current vaccine. It protects against a prior strain, but that leaves any new strain open to attack without reprisal. People get the flu, accordingly.

It's not to say it isn't completely without benefit, as I do know a few people who take it to keep from getting ill, and it's mostly because they have respiratory issues. But really, aren't we just protecting ourselves from something that really is more of a bogeyman that makes us miserable for a few weeks out of the year?

I suppose this would assume that waves have some intelligence, and are attacking these ships. I'm of the opinion that these waves are more like the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal, where you would be better off covering your eyes with a towel to fool them into thinking the ship - or at least, the crew - are invisible.

Well, it would probably just do as much good.

That's just what he _wants_ you to think!

You basically cannot overstate just how indestructible these things are. I visited one in Atlanta and the owner said that just a few months earlier an 18" wide tree had fallen over onto the house. This would have caused tremendous damage to any regular house, but this dome shrugged it off almost entirely, with the stump of a limb poking a 6" hole through the wall. There's that beach dome in Pensacola that survived repeated direct strikes of powerful hurricanes back in '04-'05 that just leveled every surrounding structure. The only damage it took was things like the main stairs washing away, which they were designed to do anyway. There's a story about a guy who bought a piece of land with a monolithic dome barn on it and hired a contractor to demolish it. Took the guy a solid week of whaling on it with a wrecking ball before it came down. There was a cheap knockoff version of a monolithic dome (no rebar) in Oklahoma that took a _direct_ hit by a tornado. Terribly damaged, but the structure is still intact. Lastly of course is the dome in Baghdad that served as a government office building. During the US invasion back in '03, they dropped a 5000 lb bomb on it. The bomb punched through and destroyed everything inside, but the building is still standing.

I live in apartments in the Seattle area - in fact, I'm a few miles out from the Microsoft campus. We get people who don't use the ILEC or incumbent cable co, the latter whose name sounds like "bombast" - because they're cheapskates ,so they filch off of others' open wifi.

This includes the front office. Which they used for sharing, and that includes file sharing - which poses a risk, in this day and age, for cancelling all internet service for the front office, something they rely on.

Personally, I need to have a notice eating at my mail like I need a hole in my head. It might push security by the openness, but I don't need to be spending too long setting this stuff up - I have homework.

There was a short story with the same thing, though the name and author escape me. 20 minutes in the future, when police recover the DNA of the criminal from a crime scene, if they couldn't be found by normal means, they'd build a virus targeting that person and release it into the wild (left unspoken was how often they had false positives). It wouldn't kill them, but it would do something highly distinct (like turn their skin blue) and force them to seek medical attention, at which point they were easy to capture. The plot revolved around a kingpin being the first able to evade contracting 'his' virus and the resulting panic and PR fiasco. Turns out he had just quarantined himself in a hermetically sealed chamber.

What confused me when I read it was why the authorities, when they found out what he'd done, didn't just laugh and say "Ok, so he's locked himself into a room from which he can never leave and cannot even have visitors. Sounds like a prison cell to me. And best of all, he's paying for it out of his own pocket. If there's ever a leak in his chamber or if a disgruntled minion 'accidentally' comes into contact with him, we'll get him then. Until then, he can cool his heels in a tighter cage than any we have available. Case closed".

Gonna reinforce here.

PEX tubing for your plumbing is pretty damn cool, and pretty cheap. No worries at all about pipe corrosion if you have funky water, and they tend not to burst. Moreover, the right kind of box can set your valves for all fixtures in one central location. The bad news, however, is that you can't just cut the valve if you're on the commode and the commode suddenly springs a leak on the intake.

As for hardline networking, just do it. Have a wifi spot for guests and laptops, but for desktop boxes, well, wifi never really made sense to me - and besides, it's hard to beat the reliability of a copper CAT6E line, or fiber, or....

Perhaps this is going to be ready when the IPv6 flag day is?

This is exactly what I did wit my 10 year old. I would say it was a success. He has since replaced the video card himself. I would call it a success.

True, but they can also get sick, get scared, run away, people form emotional bonds to them, and if the claims of future BigDogs are true, would have a hard time carrying those sorts of payloads (400 lbs).