No, the Maglev train project here in Munich was cancelled. Mainly because the costs were horrendous and the duration of the trip (about 40km between Munich city centre and the airport) would only be a bit longer if they put in a (much cheaper) express S-Bahn (suburban train) instead.

The only commercial Maglev AFAIK is again in China, and just like the fast train mentioned above it was also entirely designed and built by German companies.

Virtualization gives some advantages:

1: You can move the VM between physical hardware with little trouble. Power off VM, robocopy the files, power it on. For older Windows operating systems that required a reinstall if the underlying HAL changed, this is a large lifesaver.

2: Fast backups with the snapshot functionality.

3: Cloning -- need more instances, grab more hardware, fire up Hyper-V or ESXi, slap the VM on and go to town.

4: Clustering -- several physical machines can host one VM through a SAN and if one box fails, the failover can pick up where the main machine left off on the machine (not the app) level. This means you don't need to worry about how apps will deal with jumping MACs or hardware changes unexpectedly.

5: Security. If a VM got infected, it can be powered off and rolled back to a safe snapshot, and also a snapshot taken of its dirty state for forensics.

6: Ability to run on future hardware. Say everyone ditches x86 and amd64 and decides to go to IBM's POWER architecture and emulate legacy stuff. The stuff in the VM won't care that is is actually isn't running on a different CPU.

Of course, virtualization's disadvantage is performance losses due to the added overhead of more context switching.

For a MMO, virtualization isn't really needed except at the database core. If a zone server [1] goes down, there will be people nerd raging on the forums, but in reality if someone gets to it in 24 hours or so, people won't be pulling their subscriptions. The only real thing that would cause people to bail is a large player database rollback, so days to weeks of playing are lost. However if you have a good database cluster, this isn't going to happen.

Virtualization is just one of many IT tools. Sometimes it is an excellent thing to have. Other times, there isn't any real need to have it, especially for CPU intensive stuff on a server that can be cloned or easily reimaged with the apps on it.

[1]: I'm assuming zone servers handle the combat mechanics, only sending updates to the core player database when a player loots an item, dies, logs out, disconnects, or at a periodic interval if nothing else changes.

That's true for many more countries. I understand that even under the taliban, there were quite a few people who thought Afghanistan was pretty nice to live in.

Most who tithe also pay taxes. In my case, charitable donations outweigh federal taxes. That isn't bragging. My overall charitable donations have dropped off on a percentage basis from when I was single.

The thing about supporting a church and its local benevolence programs (and indirectly a denomination along with its national to worldwide relief programs) is I feel that I have some influence on how the funds are spent. Perhaps you have the ear of your political leaders. I don't. I'd rather give to charities that do good locally where I can see the results than let the government do the work and take their own high percentage of the funds for administrative costs. I don't make a show of my giving locally. I can't think of anyone at the church I attend that does.

I would debate your OT perspectives, and would point out that OT contracts were interesting if I remember Jewish history correctly in order to get around the year of Jubilee type events. Righteousness is a condition, not an act. Some "good" acts should follow you if you are righteous, but such acts do not make you righteous. Indeed, God compares our righteousness to filthy rags.

The NT certainly teaches that you should be willing to help those in need to the full extent of your ability to give, you should give without thought of blessing - laying up treasures in heaven if done with the right motives, and do so without making a production of it, just as you say. The Bible also teaches that you are to provide for your family, so the expectation is not that you give everything you make away either. There does need to be balance.

I would agree that too much of what is donated is going to infrastructure - whether buildings, sound systems, video production systems, or the like. Too many churches want a big building for convenience rather than running multiple services in a small building. But that isn't different than the OT times. The first tithe supported the Levites. The second tithe was for sacrifices, feasts, and travel (the party reference you obliquely made). The third tithe (collected every three years) was for support of others. Offerings to build buildings were in addition to the 33 1/3% "tax" rate by the theocracy. It also isn't uniformly true across all churches in the world - the vast majority of which are not mega-churches. For the amount of work that most pastors do and hours they put in, their salaries are remarkably inadequate.

The thing is, regardless of whether today's giving is done as it should be or not, people are not as charitable as they once were. The latest statistics I've been able to dig up show around 2.5% of household income is given to charity (2007 numbers). In the period of the 1930's through the 1950's, it was 3.2%. It was even 2.9% in the 1910's. Those are percentages of inflation adjusted after-tax disposable income, also, just to be clear on how low the numbers really are. People, taken as a whole, don't come close to giving a tithe to charity. Even so, most are charitable enough to tip waitresses unless there is some really bad extenuating circumstance. Considering how many things tax dollars are paying for, and our convoluted U.S. tax laws, to say that taxation today is anywhere close to true tithing is funny.

The unobtainium was under the great tree, not inside the floating mountains. They said the area with the floating mountains was near some sort of "vortex" and left it at that. It was this vortex that screwed up the instruments, and they did not say the soul-tree was at the heart of the vortex, it was simply hidden in the area. Had the unobtainium been been responsible for the floating mountains, they obviusly would have mined those first, since they would have had to be mostly unobtainium if that was what was causing them to float.

Also if you noticed, the unobtainium didn't float without being on that device which suspended it.

Last but not least to me, I thought unobtainium was a retarded name for it. They could have gone with a more standard made-up metal like adamantium, or just given it a less stupid sounding name. It was nothing more than a plot device to explain what the greedy corporation was doing there, otherwise it had no real bearing on the story. Even when they destroyed the great tree they didn't move in and start mining the unobtainium, they decided to try and destroy the soul tree instead.

Other than that though I thought the movie was awesome, and was more an encouragement to respect your environment than anything else, which I think is a good thing.

Last I checked (at or after Hardy), when I walked through my university halls for a few minutes, then opened my laptop and wanted to go to slashdot, I still had my home IP. There's no encryption on the network.

What did I do different/wrong?

Also, use WPA2. From what I hear, WEP is broken (dead horse). So is WPA (dying horse, if not dead yet). Use WPA2. I want to encourage people to use WPA2 as the canonical arbitrary, "random" wifi encryption scheme, when they just need a name to throw around.

Really not credible? Are you sure? The costs tend to be of the nickle and dime you to death sort. If your employees spend just 48 minutes a day waiting for their computer when they should be able to do their job, there's your 10% right there. They may not spend that daily. Perhaps a lesser amount, but then spend a whole day tracking down a series of errors that shouldn't have happened or twiddling their thumbs because the VPN is down. Or perhaps they spend it 10 seconds at a time manually tricking the software into doing the right thing on each transaction.

Other losses are more vague. For example, your crappy order fulfillment system screws up two important orders. One of those customers never calls again because of the problem and the difficulty of straitening it out in a timely manner.

Iv'e got two of them in my dinky SOHO NAS unit.

Great place for movies and reruns of Sanford and Son!

Actually, that's exactly what a jingoistic fascist would say.

A person who is truly "nationalist blind" would give no shit about what nation anyone came from. If a Mexican comes here to live, then there is nothing wrong with that, and there shouldn't be any quotas on letting them in either.

As to being a civil rights person, big deal, Fred Phelps was a civil rights worker, but that doesn't mean he's not a bigot.

And while I'm a Hispanic HYPHEN American, that doesn't say crap about my race. It says something about the ethnic background and culture that I came from, which is just as American as apple pie is American.

American isn't this happy homogeneity that you seem to think is its ideal. America's ideal is that everyone can be themselves, and not have to put up with someone calling them a racist, just because they hold to their Hispanic culture.

I know that there are "brown" racists... I LIVED IN EFFING NEW MEXICO! I lived in a world where Hispanics were the majority already, and just as many of them are racist as whites are racist. I was also raised by a father who was racist against Hispanics himself.

Guess what? America isn't perfect, and there are some people who like the idea of making a new nation separate from the USA, and that doesn't make them wrong, evil, or racist. And the automatic assumption thereof is bigoted.

Seriously, if you're "nationalism blind", then why the hell do you even care about dual citizenship? Being nationalism blind means not caring what country a person is from, or pledges their allegiance to, and our modern culture is pushing more towards acceptance of multi-citizenship rather than the jingoistic forced uninationalized "my nation is the best" bullcrap.

Sonic Team created some of the worst censoring filters ever. For the censor on Phantasy Star Online, they somehow managed to miss "fucker" but the word "queue" was absolutely forbidden. Apparently, the ban on talking about your "hoes" extended also to your "sHOES", and God forbid that you might want to mention what you're going to be doing with your HOES on SaTURDay. In Phantasy Star Universe, it actually interferes with legitimate gameplay discussion, because the game's Partner Machines, when spoken of in plural, becomes abbreviated, "PMs", and Sonic Team cannot permit us to discuss a woman's monthly cycle.

Ultimately, the extreme censors caused me to learn more curse words (and periphery offensive terms) than I was aware of prior to engaging in their excessively-censored games. There's a bit of a Streisand Effect involved in censorship, I think.

Well, I was so foolish to RTFA and I am kinda infuriated now. The article tries to make a valid point about the importance of net neutrality and open source, but in my opinion fails horribly to do so because it mixes it up in a hodgepodge of buzzwords and misunderstood and wrongy applied concepts.

I cannot even start to describe what I feel is wrong with this article, but the last paragraph contains two especially big stinkers:

-First, the ill-fated assumption that the performance and the responsiveness of the iPhone is just an "implementation detail" and that Android phones would have an advantage because they have better specs. As if there never have been cases in IT history where the competitors with the better specs lost out (*cough* iPod killers *cough* Console wars *cough*)

-And even more wrong the assumption that just because Android is an open-source implementation, the web itself would become more open. WTF? Why should it make a difference whether the platform with which I access the web is open, when the web application itself isnt (regardless of the fact that both Android and the iPhone use the same browser engine)? And why should for example Amazon (which is named in the article) be more inclined to open up its data when we use an Android device opposed to an iPhone?

I know that the argument that he tries to make is that openness is very important and that we should strive to not get proprietary insulas in the web as we had in traditional applications. But I think that openness he strives for is not necessarily tied to open source and net neutrality, you need better data portability and better access to the data stored inside those web entities, which is a whole different can of worms right there.

So the big mistake of this article is not promoting open source and net neutrality, which are important. The big mistake is assuming those two will be sufficient in achieving the kind of openness that he wants. They wont, but he fails to see that.

Doh! Yeah, sorry about that :) I guess I could not decide whether PST was a bad format or a dud, so naturally, it became a dad ;)

Its good to see Microfsoft open up the Outlook PST format, if only to improve importing into other mail clients like Thunderbird etc.

But honestly, using the PST format in other applications sounds like a terrible idea to me: Those monolithic PST files, which Outlook uses to store mail data get corrupted easily (at least in my experience) and storing all your email data in one gigantic file always struck me as a really bad design choice anyway.

Interesting poll, but I dont get that measurement unit. Can someone convert those into Libraries of Congress for me? I mean, it is about books, right? ;-)