You know the govt probably wants pretty badly to RFID all currency. Would make it trivial for police to know how much cash you've got on you from a distance.

I expect to be back to only using cash in about 20 years.

If the economy keeps heading in the direction it's going, I expect to be using the barter system within 20 years.

Like as in: Hey Mr. Blacksmith, I'll swap you 3 dozen fresh hen's eggs for a pound of nails and this here yearling billygoat for welding up my broken plow blade.

Just wait until Congress realizes how much money they can save by passing a new federal law requiring homeowners with spare rooms be required to become the new "temporary room & board" for military personnel.

...whacko stupid politicians. If one proposes a stupid law, he gets a life sentence to a mental institution since he's clearly a danger to society.

All the technical, math and logic knowledge in the world is useless if you can't communicate it clearly to others. Proper grammar is an essential foundation of being able to communicate clearly.

I've been flying for over ten years now. I even own my own small plane, a mid-1960's Piper Cherokee. Ownership and upkeep is not as expensive as you'd think, but I do keep it hangared at a small rural airport far enough outside the suburbs that hangar rent doesn't kill my bank account. It's a bit of a drive to get from my house to the airport, but not too unbearable. You can buy a similar plane right now for about $25K since the used plane market is in the toilet due to the economy. Now is definitely the time to buy one if you've got the cash and desire a small plane of your own. I can fly halfway across Texas from the Dallas area to Houston in about half the time it takes to drive, and I figure my plane gets roughly about the equivalent of 15 MPG on a typical cross-country flight and is a lot more fun than driving.

...actually it was 31 years ago, in 1979 to be exact.

The flights were a little short, and the landings were kinda rough however.

All of my firm's clients are government agencies in Texas, more that half of whom are in some form or other of law enforcement. For some strange reason, the software auditors don't seem too eager to mess with Texas.

I personally have plenty of proof of God's existence.

I've been praying for a white Christmas for many weeks. This is an extremely rare thing for north Texas. The last one I had was 15 years ago. This morning I awoke to 10 inches of snow on the ground and am stuck in my house, unable to even get my car completely out of the driveway... I got it stuck in a 4-foot tall snowbank in my front yard. The last time I prayed for a white Christmas was 15 years ago when my best friend's son was born and it was the child's first Christmas, and my friend had named his firstborn son after me.

My father passed away from terminal cancer in September. I prayed hard for weeks for it to rain whenever the day came that he died. This is a special relationship between me and God for it to rain whenever someone I love dies. I held my dad's hand as he drew his last breath and within the hour a huge thunderstorm came out of nowhere, completely unforecasted, and it rained so hard there were flash flood warnings issued by the national weather service.

God is very real and he does indeed answer prayers. Sometimes the answer is "no" and sometimes the answer is a huge "YES" in a mind-boggling intensity.

He's answered a lot more than simple snow-for-Christmas prayers for me too. Far too many times for me to go into detail here and now, but I hope you get to know Him better someday.

One of the absolutely most important things to them was to stay connected with their god.

When their home was destroyed and their whole world was crashing down around them, in addition to collectively fighting for survival against the invaders, they all turned to their god for help.

But then this movie is only just fantasy, and we humans collectively do a rather shitty job of staying with our God and when the going gets rough, only a small percentage of us turn to God for help.

Merry Christmas everybody!

G7s?

G6, the G7 was a typo.

Should say "I'm running a brand new DL370 G6... " instead.

Too much Lophraig between my brain and the keyboard tonight.

I'm running a brand new DL370 G7 with a pair of 2.93GHz Nehalams and Oracle VM Server 2.2 (specialized RHEL 5.3 Xen) and it seems to be working fine, except for a completely unrelated SAS backplane / SmartArray p410 failure I experienced before the box was a month old, but that was just a simple fluke of a hardware failure like any server can experience.

The Apollo program and moon landings were surely the peak of the USA.

...in that because its beam is so narrow, that the speed measured is more precisely the speed measured between the target vehicle and the LIDAR gun itself, not necessarily the forward speed of the target vehicle down the road. Since the patrol officer is always sitting off the side of the road, that introduces what's known as the "cosine error" which is actually in the speeder's favor since the LIDAR device will show the officer a slower speed (vehicle's actual forward speed times the cosine of the angle between straight ahead vs a line between the front of the vehicle and where the officer's LIDAR is actually located). Most of the time, the cosine error is negligible, but if the officer is sitting far enough off the side of the actual roadway and the angle is big enough, the cosine error can be several MPH in the speeder's favor.