How much greater is your income because you received those loans and could go to a much better school? How much more skilled and productive are your work colleagues because they took similar loans to attend a better school? And let's not pretend that either social security or medicare will "go broke". There are going to be drastic cuts in benefits, but they've _always_ been "broke". They're not designed to hold a reserve fund, they're designed to churn their taxes pretty directly into the benefits allocated at the moment.

This doesn't automatically make these loans or programs loans a good investment or justified, but it seems important to provide the basic counter so people are reminded what the real issues are when someone makes a confused, self-serving claim like this. After all, the anonymous poster probably isn't on fire right now: why is he paying taxes for a fire department he's unlikely to need?

If you're only setting up a few systems with modest weight and heat production, in an out of the way corner, consider a half-hight rolling rack if you can find one from a company going out of business, or a local auction house. When my clients have been short of cash for glamorous data centers, I'm helped them find local dealers or even used temporary shelving from a local hardware store, such as Home Depot, for short term and very inexpensive shelving.

Just be careful not to overload such shelving, and be careful to protect your floors. If you start loading it with equipment, it be heavier than a refrigerator on flooring that isn't designed for that kind of load and damage the floors.

I highly recommend the opera at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhEH00rlmz8, from the Ig Nobel prizes a few years ago. It captured the most recent banking crisis rather well, and without the need to blame human greed on misused mathematical formula.

As long as the charges are for a distinct offense, double jeopardy does not apply. Review the definition of double jeopardy carefully. And double jeopardy hardly applies to US courts for UK convictions.

I'm afraid it is _not_ a good idea to comply. Getting a warrant is an expensive proposition, and the officer will be harassed by their own superiors if they do it too much. By allowing a search, you give them opportunity to find, or for corrupt police, to plant evidence of other infractions. You may not have the time to participate in this civil resistance. But if you can protect your privacy, and help protect that of other innocent people by making a show of it, resisting such searches early, politely, and not in the middle of a political roundup is the time to train people that innocent people do not want to be searched.

If it were profitable enough to pay for the armed guard, the merchants would have hired them. Paying for the armed guards via military or police forces just transfers the cost to taxpayers.

The pirates are *poor*, from a bankrupt country in the midst of rebellion, or their own country's military would arrest them when they docked.

Isn't it easier to "send blood flow" to a moving limb? Try warming up your hands or feet on a cold day without flexing them: it really does help to move them. Also, just thinking about the body movements, I think an animal that already has some motion going can dodge or jump more easily than one standing completely still. That tail gives some leverage to twist or turn the _rest_ of the body, doesn't it?

Did you publish the rattlesnake IR astronomy theory? That kind of analysis is one of the delights of science.

I'm afraid your premise is flawed. The ideal of "meritocracy" needs some standards to measure "merit". A degree in the relevant field is a very powerful and effective measure of that merit. It's not the _only_ such measure, but it's a very easy one for a hiring manager or interviewer who is not expert in the field to verify.

> Death can get a human being on Earth as easily as on Mars.

This is simply untrue. On Earth, you can walk around in shirtsleeves at least part of the year for most of the inhabited landmass, shelter is relatively easily built, the air is breathable, fresh water is within walking distance, and there is idible biomass. There may be _shortages_ of all these due to overpopulation, but there's a starting place. The necessary investment for all these is stunning, and the loss of any one for even a short period is lethal. Until we master closed ecologies a lot more effectively or set up a real delivery system to Mars system for these staples, in very large amounts, colonization by more than a few explorers is out of the question. And given the shipping costs, unless we do something like colonize the rings of Saturn for easily shippable water and rocket fuel, there's no point. If you've colonized asteroids and especially ice asteroids, why _bother_ with a planetary surface?

When the training and support for an individual colonist is so large, there is utterly no point in _wasting_ it on prisoners. There are plenty of volunteers, skilled and healthy and eager, to take up such posts.

No, Kevin engaged in active destruction, both deliberate and accidental, of the systems he probed. You seem to think he just engaged in social manipulation: while effective, it's hardly the only tool he used. And the destruction was as much from his _incompetence_ than from his expertise. By re-arranging and casually ruining core security systems he made production systems crash repeatedly, lose data and code, and cost developers, customers, and companies many millions in lost work. He also _kept_ doing it, even when he turned informant against other crackers and cut deals with the FBI to avoid prosecution.

Mitnick was, indeed, _much_ more dangerous than this guy. He was also too insistent to _stop_ after being caught repeatedly.