Don't get me wrong, it was a well made short film, and the special effect were impressive, but as far as I recall the extent of the idea was aliens blowing the crap out of Montevideo, with the explosions getting bigger and bigger. Granted that's probably as good a plotline as Transformers 2, but all in all, I would rather see money go to somebody that has shown they can write a good story, and not just map out action scenes.

Will these 25 million people still be able to use the blocked cels to call emergency services? If not, then I wonder how many people will die or suffer injury as a result. I'd have to think it will be more than will be saved by inconveniencing terrorists.

Assuming of course, a spherical chicken in a vacuum.

This is not the accepted scientific way to test extreme claims. The accepted way would be to get a professional magician to offer a million dollar prize to anyone whot can prove global warming to the magician's satisfaction under conditions the magicians controls.

I'm a little surprised Exxon hasn't pushed for such a scheme, because it's the surest way to be certain that global warming is never proved.

Of course it's not the radius that matters. It's the diameter.

I believe it goes well beyond what can be done with IM.

In Twitter I can post on a subject, and see what hundreds of other people around the world are saying about the same subject. I can reply to what they say, and they can reply to what I say. All this in real time. I can also refer back to what was said after that fact, and link to it.

This can be done via web, SMS, or any of a dozen client apps. I can also follow individuals and subjects via RSS feeds.

A cool recent trend is that many organisations now monitor and use Twitter as a PR exercise. I once casually commented on Twitter about a missing piece of information on an obscure government website, and a week later got a reply from a government worker saying it had been fixed. I commented about how a restaurant chain had removed an item I liked from its menu, and got a reply from the restaurant with a recommendation. A friend wished out loud how much they would like this new video camera they had just heard about, and within an hour the manufacturer replied telling them of a contest in which they were giving a way a hundred of the cameras.

Try doing that with IM.

Trying to ride on the coat-tails of Felicia Day's hit indie geeky music video (Do You Wanna Date My) Avatar, which shot to the top of iTunes/Amazon/YouTube on Monday. How very sad.

Instead of creating new domains, they should be recycling old ones.

Not really. It just kind of... grew. Started with a dual-Xeon Intel server (tower) I picked up off craigslist. Set it up with the two IDE drives from my previous box, plus two SATAs in RAID-1. Added a Promise SX8 8-port SATA PCI-X card, but had serious problems with it under the version of Ubuntu I was using. So I picked up a Marvell 8-port PCI-X card and it's worked great, with 4 drives in RAID-10. The SX8 is still there, and hopefully the kernel glitches I experienced will be fixed if and when I need it.

The case is maxed out for HDs, so any future expansion will be with 4-drive enclosures and eSATA backplanes from cooldrives.com.

One could argue that since they are not losing any soldiers, they are not being decimated at all.

Any kind of HD-based archival backup system can eat up a ton of space. Try storing every version of every user/config/log/data file that every computer you deal with has had on it for the last two years. Even with something efficient like rdiff-backup, that still eats up quite a few sectors.

That and PVRs. And RAID.

My home fileserver has 8 HDs in it, and 12 still-unused SATA connectors for expansion.

I'm pretty sure they use people who've got the right... uhm, what do they call that stuff?

5ytrutrfxjtrhszgsfh xf dz gfjfhdz 5yer45yez yerxn yrhd fhd45ye7 tfxh gfc v vfh rxdfxhd rhdb

that the rules of business are much like the rules of an RPG simulation. Some can be bent, others can be broken.

Oh shit, no. Sorry, I learned that watching The Matrix.

To repeat: "If everyone logically arrived at the same logically correct answer"

Which means everyone votes the same, so the statement is correct.

Granted though, I am making the tacit assumption that people are voting without first looking at the poll results. I believe that is in the general spririt of voting, polls, and surveys, and that is how I always vote. To my mind, anybody who has to look to see how other people vote before making up their own mind, is a pretty sorry example of a voter.

However, if everyone did as you suggested and viewed the results before voting, then in general they will be faced with a different set of circumstances and could logically arrive at different answers. But then probabilistic forces would come into play, because you would never know how many other people are voting at that instant. If by chance there was a sudden surge of voters, and by chance they all opted to vote for "in between", then that could make "in between" the most popular answer, and if the poll happened to end just then, then it would spoil everything. That may be extremely unlikely, but it would alway be theoretically possible. The only way to be absolutely certain that it couldn't happen would be to always vote for "most popular".