Why did this person get labeled troll? I'm personally for nuclear power (although i think we should at the very least be reprocessing and looking at Thorium reactors) and i found the article he linked to quite interesting. One could argue if those figures are correct that Japan doesn't have time to waste when it comes to cleaning up the mess and I would argue with Japan sitting next to the ring of fire if they build any new reactors they should be smaller and easier to shut down and get out of there in case of catastrophic earthquakes, maybe something along the lines of the small pebble reactor designs.

But no matter which side you are on in the nuclear debate, and I'm of the mind there is simply no truly viable alternative with our ever growing power needs, the article he linked to is an interesting take on the probability of another major earthquake and what the damage will be if it happens. Its a good read and certainly not worthy of a troll label IMHO.

While Vietnam was a puppet regime pretty much controlled by the spooks in the case of Korea it was actually a UN intervention and while the USA pretty much took over (our allies were still hurting from WWII and the last of the rationing had only ended in the UK a few years before) I'm sure the people of South Korea would tell you they are quite grateful that the UN stepped in and helped them. when you look at what a horrible place NK is compared to SK I find it awfully hard to say the Korean war was unjustified.

Oh and FYI but the lifestyle we live today is thanks to cheap credit and China's desire to become the manufacturing capital of the world, sorry to burst your bubble. One could argue the ME was over oil but even if there was no oil I believe there would still be conflict as the USA is allied with Israel and the majority of Muslim countries in the area have made it clear they will settle for nothing less than driving the Jews into the sea. Since most of America believes Israel has a right to exist regardless of whether there is oil there or not there would be battles over this issue and again FYI but most of America's oil comes from South America not the ME so if the ME dried up tomorrow there would still be conflict over Israel.

As bad as that is, it was apparently far worse in the past. See "The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence In History And Its Causes" by Pinker.

Uhhh...how EXACTLY are you gonna get a dozen pilots into an F22? I suppose you could use it as a relay but its an awful damned expensive relay with lousy loitering time.

Look the F22 is a turkey friend, its a way too damned expensive techno turkey that was built to fight adversaries that have nukes so would be suicidal to fight. We would be better off with the F15 Stealth as we can actually afford to buy those in number whereas the F22 will never get any cheaper, in fact will get more expensive as we go down the line because so few were made, its just not a great program. put one of our pilots in the F15 VS the F22 and long after the F22 has shot its wad and has hit bingo fuel the F15 will still be out there with plenty of shots left and enough fuel to prosecute.

I'm sorry friend but any way you slice it the F22 is a turkey, unless you are planning on starting WWIII, which even then I doubt its electronics would survive very long in that kind of conflict. Lets face it friend, there are really only two kinds of conflicts anymore, those with nukes and those without. The countries where this tech could be useful? Have nukes so it would be suicidal to attack them. the countries without nukes? Frankly their tech is 70s era at best and our modern jammers make those old SA/2 Guidelines pretty much just telephone pole obstacle courses. The kinds of countries were are liable to come into military conflict that don't have nukes frankly wouldn't stand up to the F16 any better than they would stand up to the F22, look at Iraq, every air to air battle was a turkey shoot and the closest our pilots got to getting blasting by enemy aircraft was when we sent those old Ravens in with no weapons to defend themselves which frankly was dumb as shit, we could have at least given them a gun and maybe a pair of sidewinders.

There just isn't any real way to sell the F22 as anything but a dick waving exercise. if the numbers are correct the Russians will have their own version for less than 100 mil flyaway and the Chinese will have their own stealth aircraft (built in no small part from our own stealth like the drone captured in Iran and the F117 they dug up in Kosovo) and it'll cost less than 60 mil flyaway. the only thing our MIC seems to be good at anymore is padding expense accounts, they sure as hell can't build a modern aircraft for a flyaway cost that simply makes them affordable to buy. Hell you could have gave every person in America whose homes were ready to be foreclosed on the deed to their home for less than we've sunk in the f35 and the damned thing still isn't off the ground and at last report has over 17 show stopping bugs, that's nothing to brag about friend, and the F22 has pilots refusing to fly it because its more likely to kill the pilot than the enemy. some awesome aircraft that is.

Uhhh..as an American Dubya got that nick because that is how the man said "W" when he pronounced his name. it was like Ford and falling on his butt, Bush had a VERY thick accent when it came to certain words or phrases and the comedians ran with it and Dubya stuck in the minds of many of us.

Sadly there are NO cute nicknames for Obama because he has turned out to be nothing but a giant lying sellout, and this is from someone who has voted D since Bush senior. As much as i didn't like Bush's policies at least the man was consistent in his beliefs and stood by them, Obama told one story on the campaign trail and then did a full 180 when he made it to the big chair. He has been nothing but divisive, tried to run a false flag op to get guns banned with fast & furious , and the only consistency in his administration has been to lie and divide the country, look at how he jumped into the Martin case without even bothering to find out any facts. he should be blamed for every race riot and attack on whites caused by that dumb ass political move.

But don't take my word for it friend, I'm sure you folks overseas don't have a great opinion of our president and if you look up what he said VS what he did you'll see the man lied his ass off. Most of us are pretty much expecting massive waves of violence and race riots when he loses in November because he has done nothing but stir up hate between the races and figure it'll be Watts riots all over again. that is the state of American politics friend, scary ain't it?

Because for normal folks (the non geeks out there) the Yahoo Portal has replaced the morning paper and the last figures i saw had yahoo mail as #1 in number of active users?

Frankly Yahoo has a BUNCH of original content....that nobody knows about. Did you know that have over 70 categories on their portal, from comedy and horoscopes to fantasy football? I didn't, not until I hooked up with my current GF who uses the Yahoo portal as her home page and decided to check it out. Hell I've been using Yahoo mail as a primary email for years, I like to explore, how did I not notice this? Its because they don't advertise these services, even on their own portal, instead they are on this little strip on the far left side of the page that doesn't draw the eye at all.

So lets see if this CEO knows what to do with all this content. if it were me I'd be featuring a couple of different categories each week front and center on the portal, change the placement and size of the category pane to make it more eye catching and maybe have a couple of little humorous "tutorial" videos pointing out all this free stuff. Because frankly they have plenty of content they just need to let folks know it exists.

Thanks, you really ought to try their pedals if you get a chance, they are cheap and have some really great tone. This is the one I have and I just love the thing to death. It has a copy of all the original presets in ROM so I can tweak all I want and never lose a sound, sounds great on a 5 string, the expression pedal lets me do some frankly awesome things because i can control ANY setting of ANY effect with the pedal, from the speed of the chorus to the level of distortion to pitch of the harmonizer, its just a great little pedal.

And wow..an 18? the low end rumble you must have had had to be insane! My Trace is only a 2-10 unit but its one of the last of the Brit Trace Elliots and the tone and power is just incredible. Once my band was opening for a group whose bass player was running an Ampeg SVT Tube with the full 8-10 cab and when he saw mine he said "You sure you don't want to use mine?" and I just laughed and said "Nah, when I fire this baby up you'll see, i'm good". of course he started to drool a little when i popped the case and whipped out My Squire Pro Tone 5, its all see through red swamp ash and lovely. Sure enough the next night we are opening up for them again at another club and he waves me over to their van, pops the door...and there is the twinkie to my Trace. I laughed and said "Where's the Ampeg? And i'm shocked you didn't just go for the whole package and get the Squire as well!" and he said "Screw that back breaker, your rig was clean and powerful and didn't take a dolly to move! And as for the Squire they were all out of the pro tones but.." and he popped out a Squire Jazz 5 LOL!

In the end i don't care if its big name or no name, as long as it has the TONE, for as you know with bass tone is all. Hell I need to take a pic of my most popular bass next to the pro Tone and upload it as you'd probably die laughing, but i get more complements on that old thing than any other bass. its a 1984 Washburn Force series (it was so old I actually had to write the company to find out what it was, it kinda looks like a P bass with the horns stretched) that is white with a black pickguard which I painted the pickguard with glitter fingernail polish, replaced the cracked knobs with a couple of B&W dice, the white face has aged to a lovely yellow and I have 3 1940s pinup girls sticker placed around the face that i picked up on beale street in the late 90s. It has this wonderful road warrior look and a dark thick tone with lots of lows and I don't know how many times I've had bassists come up and say "Sell it to me" LOL! Everyone talks about how cool that bass is when it is nothing but a pawn shop special that got customized when I was bored on the road.

so screw the audiophiles, if it works good for you? Its cool. I'm sure they'd gag if they saw that Washburn or me running a $70 pedal into a Brit amp but the audience and my own enjoyment is what matters and people remember the different and the weird.

The reason MS Home Server no longer exists is frankly nobody bought it and it didn't do Citrix style remote desktops anyway. Also you seem to think that the network can replace the PC when in most places, hell even a lot of colleges, the amount of bandwidth that would require would cost more than the machines to roll out.

But if you don't need the cycles the nice thing about X86 is that you can save money while still having a full desktop. I paid about $350 for my EEE PC AMD with 8Gb of RAM, it only uses 18w under load and gets 6+ hours on a charge. if you want similar on the desktop it is even easier as several make both kit and fully built E350 that are cheap and again low powered. I have actually done what you are suggesting, in that I replaced the majority of full size P4 hogging power towers at the local print shop with E350s that are about the size of a VCR and just pop under the monitor. For the workers there editing HD graphics naturally they required bigger units but there is no reason for the basic office workers or a school for that matter to need all that power.

So there really isn't a need to switch to a client server model when you can buy a unit that'll run a full blown OS and applications with low power and heat. sun tried what you are suggesting with the Sun Ray and last i looked those can be bought for $10 a pop simply because so few used them. By going with client server you'd need a pretty damned big server that would be blowing through power 24/7/365 whereas when not in use the desktops can go to sleep and only draw a couple of watts.

Finally you are forgetting a big chunk of the cost in client server which is licenses. Like it or not most places simply can't use linux as they have too much Windows software that is required to run and MSFT really sticks it to you if you are using terminal services. I have looked into your idea with some SMBs and frankly for less than several hundred seats it ends up costing more for the licenses than it does just to give everyone a bog standard desktop. Again there is always ways to save power and electricity on a desktop but any savings you'd have by going client server would be quickly eaten by the licenses so you'd end up losing money on the deal. Better to just stick with the way we do things now and simply use less powerful machines friend.

Bimbo Newton Crosby, for most the iDevices are just glorified PMPs whereas with X86 not only can you consume but you can produce as well. Hell with my little E350 i will edit multitracks straight off the recorder in Audacity just to see if we got a good take, on my desktops i do a lot of transcoding because some of my family is on widescreen, some 4x3 and ALL bitch if they have to watch the wrong one on their sets. I have customers that are artists, engineers, contractors, hell even the little happy home maker types are editing the photos from their cameras or making DVDs of their kid's soccer game in Windows DVD maker so there is a LOT of uses for even ordinary folks to actually create instead of just consume.

But then again every person i know that bought an iPad has a desktop AND a laptop AND the Ipad, so it isn't like they are actually doing without. All these fanbois that think the iPad is gonna magically replace X86 I have NO doubt they themselves have X86 at home and its probably used several times a week, because there are plenty of jobs where a PMP like the iPad just don't cut it. I know trying to type anything more than a simple tweet on one of those visual keyboards drives me up a damned wall, give me my little E350 netbook any day of the week as i've have a full paragraph written on it before i get to the second sentence on an iPad.

Oh and on the long life of X86? I'm typing this on the 1.8GHz Sempron at the shop while i wait on some board tests to check out. this PC is nearly 9 years old now but for the tasks that it has, being a driver and patch server and nettop? it is whisper quiet, it never hangs, it never sucks power, it "just works" and works so well i gave the customer $75 in trade in just to get it, with its built in card reader and super quiet operation its really a great unit. I can pick up a mobile Athlon for it dirt cheap but....why bother? Even with this 8+ year old box I have cycles to spare.

Uhhh...I didn't think I needed to actually spell it out as i assumed that most here would know who the president was, my bad if that is not the case. Doesn't change the fact that he lied his ass off "I'll leave medical pot alone!" and six months later he's busting more of them than Dubya, not to mention EVERY SINGLE PETITION that has gotten the requisite that isn't following the corporate agenda just got a flowery "LOL fuck off peasant" speech and ultimately was an absolute waste of time, see how it got so bad there was actually a "please stop ignoring us" petition. BTW did he tell everyone to fuck off with that one as well? I'm sure he put it in more flowery terms but that would have been the gist.

Given the choice between the idiot and the sell out I think I'd prefer the idiot as at least an idiot has principles, even if they are wrong, whereas the sell out will flip flop daily and lie his ass off while cashing the check and knowing damned well every word he says is absolute bullshit. Dubya may have been dumb as a bag of hammers but at least he believed what he said, even if he couldn't speak it intelligently, whereas Obama has done damned near a 180 on every damned thing he said on the campaign trail, hell you could run 2008 Obama against 2012 Obama and neither would have a thing in common other than bullshit ability.