My first guess of how this fire happened is that someone had done some welding in a compartment and something caught fire. Usually the Navy is pretty good about removing flamables in the area. They even go so far to have a "fire watch" for several hours after the welding was done to ensure that nothing catches fire. it will be interesting to hear what the root cause is.

That's standard procedure for welding (mandated by the insurance companies). And welding could well still be the root cause: in one place I worked, a fire broke out after smoldering unnoticed for over eight hours.

Or it could be a short-circuit and we just got lucky that it occurred on a drydock rather than at sea. Or *drumroll* terrorism.

*Cough* *Cough* dimensions of 1:4:9 - the first three integers squared.

There is no "first integer". Perhaps you meant the first three nonzero natural numbers?

That's not smart. That's dishonest.

In what way is it dishonest? Where is the deception? Or did you perhaps confuse not meeting your unrealistic expectations with lying?

Nobody forces no one to take a minimal pay job.

Nobody forces no one to offer minimum wage. But economic circumstances - offshoring of real jobs and the plague-like spread of McDonald's, Wal-Mart and their ilk - do indeed force plenty of people to take minimum wage jobs.

You take a job, and you accept the pay, you do the job (I talked from experience since I've flipped burgers for minimum wage.)

You offer minimum wage, you get what you pay for. And your job history of burger flipping is irrelevant to the discussion, unless you are suggesting that the world owes you a debt for your presumably heroic job performance there, and unrelated third parties should thus do more than you pay them for.

What the hell is wrong with you people that you think your duty to do your job is a function of the hourly wage you so willingly accept?

What the hell is wrong with you people that you think you can pay minimum price and get top quality? Are you really so full of yourself that you think a peon who doesn't give his everything for a few crumbs off your table is being "dishonest"? Or are you yet another libertarian defending the right of the powerful to abuse the weak in the name of freedom?

- who verifies the meter is accurate?

You can have your own usage monitor on your computer or router if you want

That's not good enough, unless you're willing to let my on-desktop usage monitor triumph in court over the ISPs usage monitor - in which case I gurantee mine will read zero usage.

We are talking about a billing meter here. One who's reading determines how much money you owe to another entity. That means it needs to be calibrated, sealed and read by a third party entity to be even remotely trustworthy.

There are plenty of perfectly valid answers. Most policies are fine as long as they are clearly-defined.

So why didn't you clearly define any?

And discouraging the people who torrent petabytes just because they can would do no harm.

It would do harm to those people. It would also do harm to anyone who actually needs that data by reducing the number of potential seeds in the swarm. It would do harm to anyone trying to archive data by lessening replication and thus shortening retention.

But that's okay. These aren't important people or usages, according to your judgement, so it's okay to "discourage" them. Just as long as you remember that you and your usage aren't important to someone else, so it's every bit as okay to discourage you.

Oh, sorry. I forgot. You're special, so you, and only you, put the Internet to the proper usage - such as posting to Slashdot - and should thus be left unmolested while everyone else is "discouraged". Sorry. Carry on, then.

Ordinary citizens can set up mesh networking and render the wired service providers damned near obsolete.

Don't worry, we'll just make it a crime to run an open access point since someone might use it to do something bad and not be caught. That'll take care of that.

By far, the predominate OS that FF runs on is Windows. Thus, the developers are concerned about frequent OS crashes.

I dunno, Windows 7 64-bit hasn't actually crashed on me even once in 2 years, and doesn't seem to require restarts (Firefox does) or reinstalls. Sure, Linux is far better - good command line + multiple desktops + an unified software update architecture - but I have to admit, Microsoft finally got their shit together in the minimum acceptable standards department. Even if it took them a quarter of a century.

Not having looked at the source myself, I don't know if it's possible to optimize FF's sync behavior; but I do know that it's impossible to eliminate it.

It is for me. The only time I want synchronization is when I add a bookmark. So, how do I stop Firefox from syncing except when I hit CTRL-D?

I sense an argument along the lines of Kirk > Picard coming up.

No, because Kirk and Picard are both military starship captains; they do the same job and their job performance can be compared. Comparing Ritchie and Tesla to Steven Jobs and Edison would be more like comparing Cochrane to Quark: one or both may or may not be brilliant, but one is a scientist and the other a businessman, so their abilities aren't really comparable.

I see no evidence that the two party system suppresses good people from running or that multiparty systems create great politicians.

What a multi-party system does is give a credible threat of revolution.

In a two-party system your choices are bad and worse (from your point of view), and the parties know this. What do they care about pleasing their base; where is it going to - to the even worse party? No, all that matters are the swing voters and unaligned groups.

On the other hand, in a multi-party system there are always opportunistic smaller parties ready to capitalize on dissatisfaction and welcome defectors. And if there's not, you can simply find one yourself, based on whatever ideals you seem fit.

So, in other words, a multi-party system encourages political involvement by the general public, while a two-party system encourages darkness induced audience apathy. A multi-party system is great if you trust your fellow citizens more than politicians, and a two-party works wonders if you want the plebes to keep their filthy paws off of power while still giving lip service to democracy.