There's a difference between walking and driving. I don't need a license to walk; no one can take away my right to walk. You probably remember "driving is a privilege, not a right" from your high school drivers' ed. Walking is a right.

Try this: turn your phone off, and hold it to your ear for the duration of a long phone call. At the end your ear will feel warm and perhaps you will feel sweat between your ear and phone. Where's that heat coming from, hmmm?

Try this:

sudo su

It has the advantage that you can now type suspend and be back at your regular non-priv user; fg will take you back to root.

Meanwhile, a 15 khz tone on a CD has three samples per crest. With three samples there is no way to diffrentiate between a sine wave, a square wave, or a sawtooth wave; all will sound exactly the same.

And you, having listened to those 15 kHz sine, square, and sawtooth waves recorded on LP can distinguish them, right?

Stay in school, son.

Gliding back to land is not a big deal, the biggest problem with the Shuttle is the false economy of having the main engines be re-usable. This means main engines are attached to the shuttle itself, which means the vehicle has to be mounted on the side of all that dangerous crap. If the main engines were one-use then the crew and orbiter could be on the very top of the assembly, safe from any fuel tank or SRB shenanigans. Furthermore, you could have a crew rescue rocket like the Apollo assembly had.

I'm not exactly sure what weaponry would be able to hit a target at 20,000 feet but it's a big, slow-moving target.

An honest-to-god SAM can probably hit one, but they don't have a lot of those in Afghanistan. Shoulder-mounted missiles won't go that high.

It will be approximately the same size in the sky as an airliner at cruising altitude. If there were no contrail and no sound, would you be able to see a 747 crusing above you? Paint it the colour of the sky as seen from the ground -- would you even know this thing was a few miles above you?

It may be slow-moving, but that also means no heat signature for an IR-seeker to lock on to. It's a large plastic bag, so it wouldn't be too hard to give the ship a very small radar cross-section. Best of all, it can be unmanned, so even if by some lucky chance the bad guys manage to shoot one down, big deal.

Not as designed, they couldn't.

Perimeter first required the human leadership to put it in an "alert" mode. Then it required that human leadership to drop out of communication. Finally, it required an actual human being (albeit a low ranking one) to actually push the button.

A simple surprise detonation on Russian soil would not do it.

Here we have yet another example of the Evil coming out of Microsoft. The State of Washington and its taxpayers have spent a pretty bit of coin providing an educated workforce for Microsoft, by creating all the infrastructure such as the electric utilities, the roads, the police, fire and the rest. Without all of these public services, companies like Microsoft would be much, much less profitable.

If these companies are so hell bent not to pay taxes--then why don't they move to Russia? When I lived there, zero taxes were taken from my pay. Companies paid hardly any taxes. Oh yeah, they had to pay the Russian Mafia because the tax-starved government had no power.

So, we see the most anti-American behavior imaginable is some hugely wealthy company like Microsoft scamming the taxpayer. I hope that the state of Washington hits M$ for their entire back taxes. Microsoft could pay it out of petty cash.

Since when is going along with excessive taxation being patriotic?

Damn right, citizen! But when I say my taxes are excessive they throw me in jail as a tax evader. Don't they undeerstand I'm a patriot?

Until we can throw corporations in jail when they commit crimes, or execute them for murder, bullshit like this is just empty rhetoric.

Copyright is not a civil right. It's not even property.

Bah! I mean to write '... companies can outsource to people from these "shithole countries" to reduce their costs as long as their execs also reduce their salaries and bonuses to what execs in that country get.'

"Cheaper" is just another word for exploitation. I think you're the one displaying hatred -- why do you think that workers in other countries don't deserve the rights, benefits and salaries that you get? I got mine, fuck the rest!

How's this: companies can outsource to people from these "shithole countries" to reduce their costs as long as they also reduce their salaries and bonuses to what execs in that country get.

We as a society need to remember that corporations exist at the pleasure of society, and must not be allowed to destroy society to make a buck.