I'd tell him to stop watching Kevin Smith movies and leave it at that.

OK. Tell that to MPEG-LA. By your definition it's a cartel plus extortion. Have fun with that.

Asteroid mining is the only way we're going to build large structures in space anytime "soon". There's plenty of asteroids, this issue can be revisited later.

Isn't there one near the Mexico border in NM that already exists?

Yeah your right. The australian one was AARNet (Australian academic research network)

Why is low power consumption a special, unique requirement? All of my computer equipment was chosen and/or assembled with low consumption in mind. My Desktop's TDP is under 350W and I can play games at 1920x1200, albeit not with everything turned on any more. I have a small fleet of netbooks for performing long-running tasks or for traveling, I sold an HP EliteBook and bought three of them. I even took an EEE 701 4GB running Jolicloud on a six-week vacation to Panama. My most power-hungry portable has two cores and the CPU has a TDP of 13W, and I'm undervolting.

Much of the goal was to be able to run on solar for long periods, which I do occasionally. Not so much lately, unfortunately, but I've mostly rebuilt my mobile solar rig. That reminds me, I should order some aluminum piano hinge.

Yet that is exactly what they are supposed to do. Its not even really that hard.

Every CA hack to date has been preventable as was the fault of the CA simply not putting the required effort into doing their job or being flat out malicious. Stop trying to make it out like its an uber hard job, its not.

INTERPOL itself has no teeth. It's left to the nations themselves to decide if they care what it has to say on a case-by-case basis. It permits information sharing (etc) but does not require it. Their goal is "To ensure and promote the widest possible mutual assistance between all criminal police authorities within the limits of the laws existing in the different countries and in the spirit of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights" and not to enforce laws themselves.

Only if you fail to understand that it's always pointed at something interesting to the wearer. I know this is complicated, but please do try to keep up.

Yes, and so do many netbooks. My Acer Aspire One D250 only came with 1GB, as did my EEE 701, but those are old. My LT31 came with 2GB. I upgraded the dimm to get lower-latency memory, mostly to speed up the integrated graphics. Most of the machines that will support 1GB will support 2GB and some of them will even take a 4GB SODIMM, but don't count on it.

Part of the reason I used Minix was I had an old second hand 286. because I couldn't afford one of the new-fangled 386s. Computers where bloody expensive back then! At the time I had started using a local BBS called "Omen" which had just gotten a brand spanking new ISDN connection to this new thing called "ARPAnet" (aka "Australian research something something net") , aka the australian wing of the internet, and it had two amazing features 1) IRC, 2) Usenet (There was also Gopher but eh..... Usenet was better indexed and also had hilarious flame wars). Anyway it struck me that if I had a unix I could get a SLIP connection to the internet and run IRC *and* Usenet simultaneously using the magical wonder of multitasking. Omen was using Linux (very very brand new) but since I didnt have a 386 I couldnt use it. So I grabbed Minix, since I couldnt afford Xenix or SCO Unix (Pre SCO getting brought out by Caldera and then turning cthulhu it was a great company).

Problem is Minix didnt have a network stack :(

A lot of people have the wrong impression about the good professor after the infamous exchange, but they miss that this is what academics do, and despite the flameyness of the exchange, Linus and Tanenbaum had a great deal of respect for each other. After all Linus was, for all purposes, Tanenbaums greatest student. I remember borrowing his book from UWA and getting the disks from the UWA computer club, following the instructions to get a functional minix up, then following his book to write a driver for my highly bugshit WANG (yes that was the brand name lol) hard drive controller. I learned more from that about how computers *really* work, than almost any thing I've ever learned. The difficulty of his book was notorious, probably the only books I found harder was Walter Pistons music theory book "Harmony", and Deleuzes philosophy text "Capitalism and Schizophrenia". And like those books, in its field Tanenbaums work shook the foundations of academia.

Enjoy your retirement old man, you deserved it.