More than Half of the world count south and north america as 1 continent named America. So for some that jump would not count as intercontinental.

That must be the half of the world that doesn't know geology or plate tectonics.

Car seats of are so much work and yet for children over 2, they are no better than seat belts.

Well, until auto makers start designing cars with child-sized seatbelts, I'm afraid we're stuck with them. As a parent of a toddler with another child on the way, the amount of extra work a child seat represents is miniscule compared to trying to get a three year old to pay attention.

So you won't mind if your SSN, bank account number, or secret 'sheep sex' photos are taken?

That's awfully presumptuous. Unless you can objectively compare a Vonnegut story to a Niven story, it's all just a matter of (somewhat) informed opinion. I like Lucifer's Hammer more than Moby Dick. Is it better or even as good? Hard to say.

Seriously, how is a PC a unit of processing ability? And one thousand million GB sticks is an Exabyte (hence the name). Perhaps you can just say 10^18 bytes. This is slashdot, not msnbc.

Or even a billion GB for those of us not in the Commonwealth. Of course, not everyone knows how big an exabyte is, but a billion 1 GB memory sticks is a pretty good visualization.

I guess size really does matter.

...welcome our new mouse-levitating scientific overlords.

I doubt it.

This is getting quite a lot of publicity and Telkom won't like the implications.

I suspect that they are already hatching (sorry) schemes of which Terry Thomas would be proud.

Also, don't make the mistake of assuming that Linux is an organized, centralized movement with some form of control emanating from the center.

think herding cats. One of the reasons I love it. I use windows at work (because that's what we use), and linux at home. I tinker with linux cos I like to do so. An OS is simply a tool, and bashing one over the other and arguing about who has the best script-fu or biggest e-penis is an exercise in ignorance -- but can, at times, be hilarious.

And, it has a special Bonus Myth!

Things always come in neat bundles of 10?

Generally a pipe has two directions you can travel, in and out. Ignoring the fact that walking into a pipe is a terrible idea and probably doesn't smell like rainbows and sunshine, I find that should one feel they are "lost" in a drain they should generally travel in the opposite direction they had originally chose to travel in. Clearly things get a little hairier when you start making turns at junctions but in that case, you asked for it. In either case, they should not have been deprived of the Darwin Award.

The python script crashes my Windows 7 RC machine (build 7100) at work quite nicely. I should mention that I needed to add "import socket" and change "s = socket()" to "s = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)". My software firewall is turned off as well.

Stories, generally posted by Americans, about UK CCTV schemes are often accompanied by text that states more or less explicitly, "Oh, those freedom-hating Brits! Thank God it doesn't happen here." Yet when the Americans implement even worse systems they (for some reason) don't choose to blame the entire nation for them.

It would be nice if posters could direct their ire to the place where it belongs, namely the people responsible for these policies, rather than the citizenry as a whole.

>> Add in all the books ever written, music and news papers published, what are we looking at? 50 PB for a full copy? Obviously you'd need redundant storage placed on various continents, and you'd expect to replace the hardware every once in a while, but what is our entire cultural history worth to us as a civilization? A billion dollars a year? Two? Keep in mind, it shouldn't just be the US or the EU funding this, it should be everyone.

>> Make it a requirement for companies that if they want copyrights on their works, they have to submit it unencumbered to the storage facility. That way there can be no excuses from the companies, that they don't have $work in production any more, as it'd be easy to sell access to a particular work. And if they can't submit it for whatever reason? Copyright expires on that particular work. That'd certainly get their asses in gear to get their entire back catalogue digitized.

I would argue that not all works are worth saving, in appeal to public benefit.