Configuration is relatively easy if all you've got is a couple of zones. Maintenance is what takes work. You don't just turn a switch on and let things go on their own.

Keys expire and need to be rolled over. Signatures expire even more often and need to be refreshed. Your TLD registrar needs to have a robust mechanism for establishing and maintaining the trust chain. And it can all go to hell in an instant if someone's behind a router that is filtering EDNS, or TCP DNS queries, or truncating DNS packets, or doing anything else that speaks of assuming that anything DNS-related that isn't less than 576 bytes over 53/UDP is Evil And Must Be Destroyed.

There are plenty of tools out there for doing this all relatively painlessly, but it takes diligence and a higher level of meticulousness than most sysadmin tasks. On the other hand, for small setups, it's no worse than keeping an eye on your logs for interesting activity.

(For the record, I built my workplace's DNSSEC implementation in about 3 weeks, and got it 90% right before I had to go help my wife give birth. But we have dozens of zones, with subdomains, and multiple field offices running their own masters, so we had to deal with TSIG-signed zone transfers with external entities in addition to our primary master. And now that we've got it turned on, we get at least one report a week of someone having issues getting to one of our sites because of said upstream routers that are messing with DNSSEC queries.)

And as someone who used to work for a company operating satellites in GEO, I'll say that this would be a hell of a trick if they could pull it off. Let's start with the process of disposing of a spacecraft in GEO. You do a series of burns that alternately raise the apogee and perigee until the orbit is somewhere between 50-100 km higher than GEO.

Now let's look at the geosynch transfer orbit. Apogee at GEO, perigee at 200 km. Even if you raised the apogee above GEO to the level of the graveyard orbit, you would need to raise the perigee above GEO as well in order to avoid crossing other orbital paths. So your rendezvous vehicle needs to be able to reach GEO, first and foremost. This takes four or five burns to get that perigee up -- sure, you could do it in one (and they did do it in one in the early days), but that doesn't afford you a lot of control over the final position once you do reach GEO. Which is what they'd need in order to make a rendezvous.

Yes, you could drift the disposal vehicle to the G-15's position. When we drifted satellites to other orbital slots, we'd drift them at about half a degree per day. They could drift this one faster, but it would still not be a quick fix.

And, finally, you'd have to BUILD THE BLOODY THING. Nobody currently has a vehicle that could pull this off. By the time someone could even do a back-of-the-envelope design on how to do it, G-15 will have arrived at the 105W libration point, and it'll settle there along with the other GEO sats that were allowed to run out of fuel before we realized that we had to dispose of them.

Sure, it had some D&D-obligated women in skimpy clothing, but everything else that made it good was clearly targeting a mature audience:

- 100,000+ words of text to tell the story -- sure, kids read books like that these days, but at a video game's pace? Not so much.
- Your character could do almost anything to anyone purely out of self-interest, and most of it wasn't physical. If you didn't manipulate a particular someone to your own ends over the course of the game, you probably didn't talk to them at all. Like in the first Fallout, you could talk the final boss to death if your stats were high enough.
- The best way to build up your companions' strengths was to help them explore their pasts and personalities.
- You never actually find out what it is that you did to curse yourself with immortality...but it was so heinous that your continued existence is threatening the fabric of the universe. Just try to imagine what it might have been. Go on, I'll wait.

Modern games, though, are getting into "show, don't tell".

The systems may have come out of the west, but without the extra moisture that they picked up when they started swinging out over the Atlantic (or in the case of the huge weekend one, from when it swung through the Gulf on its way north out of the SW), they wouldn't have dumped nearly as much snow as they did.

And this is why I get all bunchy whenever some congresscritter trots out the phrase "the best health care system in the world". With sufficient money and knowing where to go and who to talk to, you can indeed get some of the best care here in the US. But that ignores the fact that the methods of payment (and the focus on treatment rather than maintenance/prevention, which are also part of the system) are completely screwed up.

And aren't we also being told to consolidate trips and minimize our local travel to save gas and cut vehicle emissions? What's better for the environment, a single 10-mile round trip to Wally World, or making an 18-20 mile aggregate circuit of town to hit all of the local businesses, assuming that your town still has everything you need in places that aren't big-box retailers?

I'm all for supporting local businesses, but nothing in this world comes without a tradeoff.

I had a job where I got 25 days PTO, plus the standard holidays. I walked away from it to go become a government contractor.

The problem was that I could barely take any of it. Six week-long software deployments each year, and effectively being unable to take time off for 2 weeks after each deployment (in case something went HORRIBLY WRONG), or the 2 weeks before the deployment (make sure that nothing affects the coders' ability to get their code changes in!)...do the math, that's 30 weeks that were pretty much unavailable. For the last 2 years I was there, I was pretty much capped out at 35 days of accumulated PTO and even started taking every other Friday off to stay under the cap. Finally after about 3 months of this, my manager practically ordered me to just take a week off and be done with it.

In my exit interview, I named this as one of the primary reasons I was leaving. If companies are treating employees as "resources", then they need to properly schedule "maintenance downtime" for those "resources" just like they do for the servers and the switches.

I love the idea of LED bulbs (much more so than CFLs, since those die quickly in our 25-year-old house), but they've currently got the same problem that CFLs do: they won't work with a dimmer. Yes, I know that some CFLs are dimmer-compatible now, but they're hard to find.

I'm nothing resembling an electrician or electrical engineer, but I have a conceptual idea of how you would make it work. Add a microcontroller that reads the incoming voltage. As the voltage steps down, turn off individual LEDs in the array in a fixed sequence. Half voltage == half of the LEDs are off, for instance.

Is the science sound on this? And would it add more than, say, $2/bulb?

b) Stop the users typing so fast.

Typing too fast caused people to die, in one case:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

Specifically, go down to near the bottom of the entry where it mentions that: [t]he equipment control task did not properly synchronize with the operator interface task, so that race conditions occurred if the operator changed the setup too quickly. This was missed during testing, since it took some practice before operators were able to work quickly enough for the problem to occur.

This is why I was hoping to the gods that Hillary didn't end up on the ticket, much less winning. Everything else about her aside, I would not have wanted our first female president to have inherited this mess, ended up a one-termer (for I do believe that no matter who wins, he's likely to be a one-termer), and have folks pointing fingers in 2012 saying "this is what we get for electing a woman to the presidency" and making it impossible for a woman to be elected for another 50-100 years.