My first PC still had the first model 64kb motherboard, and the cassete IO interface, but instead I splurged to install dual 180k single sided floppies and the first 16 color monitor. When hard drives became available I bought one of the first 5MB hd directly from IBM before anyone knew they existed, and it took me the better part of the year to figure out how to do the low level format it needed to be useable. BIOS support? Well, why do they call these the good old days?

What? Make them think? Make Congress think? That's an Oxymoron, having both terms in the same sentence.

Besides they will never think, because if they did, then all that money paid to them to buy political/financial favors might be all for naught. The rich will never let that happen.

Actually, with each small quake it is less likely that that particular area will see a major quake, because the tectonic stresses are being gradually released. What then becomes important is, with those plates sliding, where is the stress now building up? If the areas now building up stress snap under this new pressure we could see something major, but in a different location along the same fault. Some day I would hope we could predict where these stresses are likely to build up and deliberately frack those faultlines to weaken the rock structure so that the stresses never have a chance to build up to any significant magnitude. As long as the stresses dont have a chance to build we could keep the quakes down to a safer level. One day, with enough data collected, we might just be managing quakes by fracking.

Do you have any refrence for that assertion? The lensing clearly show actual filiments of higher redaction which would be a completly unnatural static formation for matter to arrange itself in. There is no natural laws of physics that could account for this to my knowledge. Please expand on your assertion, as I would certainly like to know more if there is any real evidence.

We need all the sciences to assemble the complete and real picture. In the case of dark matter we need the philosophy/logic to pull everyone else back down to earth right now. An example of where philosophy/logic comes into play is in falsifying a theory when it breaks the actual laws of physics and thus makes no logical sense. Case in point, "Abell 520 bullet cluster" vs "dark matter" theory. Assuming the most current gravitational lensing experiments are valid, the dark matter theory looks pretty dim right now. In order to get the needed distribution of dark matter that appears in the gravitational lensing survey of Abell 520 you need a "special property" for all dark matter. That special property is that while it provides extra mass to pull on normal matter, the dark matter itself must be immune to being pulled on by normal matter, or it would otherwise not be lensing in the distribution we currently see. That can't be, without breaking the laws of physics as we know it today. Dark matter is therefore not a predictive theory to explain what we currently see, without some kind of heroic extensions glued to its sides. One only needs a single true contradiction to properly falsify a theory, and the consequences of Abell 520 is promptly being ignored.

.
Dark Matter Core Defies Explanation
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pa...

Of course I admit I am a little biased in my analysis above, because my own theory actually predicts this lensing effect and doesn't even require any new fictitious or magic particles to do it. When the Abell 520 survey came out it merely confirmed my hypothesis of how the physics actually works at the quantum level.

Actually I was hoping for that. If only it were built on a flood plane and everyone had a chance to actually see how seaworthy it is. Those steel and concrete piles driven into the ground would likely not let it get away, and certainly it has no possibility of ever floating. Sinking is the only alternative, if you can even call it that.

I do have to wonder, with all the concrete footings, if the floor is actually wood and bowed up at the edges like a true ship hull would have been, so we can watch all the people slide towards the keel where the eliminated swill from the animals would have collected by the ton before it gets carted up several stories to be thrown out the one tiny window. Of course they didn't have steel wheel barrows back then, so they woud have to put the animals to work. You couldn't even hire someone for that these days. No wonder they want to raise the minimum wage!

Is this one big enough to be a real Biblical ARK? Probably still not large enough to carry two of every species, but still fun to calculate how close it would come to that goal. I'm guessing (seat of the pants/armchair calculation) we are roughly about half the way there if we discount things like bacteria, fungi, and viruses (the actual majority of lifeforms on earth). Waste disposal would be one heck of a problem, and with only one window, to shovel it out, yikes!.

The FCC has an Android App that will test your data connections from your phone, and allows them to monitor your provider bandwidths. When your phone connects to your local WiFi the app is testing your Cable ISP, and when not, its testing your cellular ISP. In both cases the data is collected by the FCC to make sure your bandwidth is not being throttled unnecessarilly.

In theory the ISP's might look to see where your data is headed and make adjustments based on that, but that of course would be deceitful. No, they wouldn't do that would they?

If you are into system security then check this one out. Security by hardware isolation is very hard to crack. Even the NIC and its kernel drivers live in its own VM and protects your system via IOMMU.

If you give Comcast the ability to become the gatekeeper to their competitors services you have crossed the line. This is not about emotions rather stifling the freemarket. At least change the equasion so that comcast charges the customer directly so the customer knows who is milking then and can then choose the lowest bidder of those services ( if there is one, but thats another problem). The customer is already paying for Internet services, and the costs of that service should be directly reflected in that price. Its dangerous to give the ISP the right to adjust the indirect costs of other businesses whos services are depending on that connection that is already paid for by the customers monthly fees. Allow this and Comcast will be able to kill off their direct competition.

I doesn't need to be *that* old, just not the latest model. It is a known fact, from a previous SD article, that older models slow down when a new iphone is released, which always coincides with a bright new shiny OS upgrade. If you upgrade the older hardware to keep up with the Jone's you are likely to have a slower phone,ipod, or ipad after you are done.

So true. At the end of the day it only takes a single copy of non-drm'ed music file to hit the street and all the Billions they spend to lock it down are wasted. Basic problem: You give the buyer the data, and you give them the key to read the data, and then ask them nicely (via leagal threats) to not put the two together in a way that is not authorized. Like that will ever happen. You only need one pissed off geek that can't play their newly purchased music to make it all worthless by providing a single download of that music file as a simple mp3. Hell, you can plug your speaker wires into another console to record it. Game over. I've personally never seen a system I couldn't break, but then I'm too honest to be that one pissed off geek. There are so many others out there that are not as honest.

What is the point to "interactive music" anyway. I like to listen to music, not hold a conversation with it. Why would I even want this? Its just a solution looking for a problem.

I have several suggestions from the things I do to stay on top of things. I have limited time to devote to my passion but there are things you can do to multitask.

Podcasts: pick up a used ipod and subscribe to the astronomy related podcasts.

Kindle: get a used kindle that has the bubble-type keyboard, and let it read books and papers to you. The keyboard lets you start/stop the reader without looking, for in the car use. Download Calibre application and convert online/document resources and copy them to the kindle. You are not stuck with just Amazon eBooks, but many of them are good.

When online use an RSS reader and connecty to the publications feeds: e.g. http://iopscience.iop.org/ http://arxiv.org/ http://www.physicsforums.com/ http://prl.aps.org/ http://phys.org/ http://physics.stackexchange.c... http://prd.aps.org/ and many blogs!

They can prevent you from allowing others to connect into a service you are providing. Public Tor servers (aka entry/exit nodes) would thus be against the user agreement and likely result in termination of services. Running the client portion should not run afoul of that agreement. (ianal)

They would first need to prove illegal activity is happening, and that would be difficult, but then there are known exploits for some Tor applications that can be used to leak data which can give away this kind of evedence of your activity. The question is, would they go through the trouble to inject these exploits into your system so that they can find out what you are doing? Like unsecured DNS, or injections of web bugs into your open http traffic. That sounds illegal to me, and a clear invasion of privacy. Privacy is exasctly the reason for using Tor in the first place, so don't expect those kinds of users to sit back and say nothing when terminated.

... count. The uptake of new users is going to decline big time. Established users will learn to deal with the changes, but new users will be turned off before learning how to turn all this off.