Especially if you're the sort of person who likes that kind of thing.

Is this the last teenager still using AOL?

Could you get any melodramatic? Sounds like it should be a speech in Top Gun.

It has nothing to do with risk aversion to do and everything with there being few compelling reasons to build a moon base apart from chauvinism. I can't speak for the reasons for going 40 years ago, but I suspect chauvinism and grandstanding was a big part of it back then, too. I guess that's what you call desire/ambition/duty/honor/competitiveness.

And to the people trumpeting the "trickle down" research benefits from doing bizarre prestige projects like this -- that's a moderately reasonable argument, but one that can be made for any project of such magnitude. Once you're willing to accept that the end goal of the project is less important than the research it generates, a virtually unlimited number of projects start to be reasonable. Make a national effort to dig the deepest hole, ever, and you'll get some actual useful research out of it.

If you argue in terms of trickle down research and not on the practical merits of the project itself, you have to argue why the project has the most promising trickle down research. I.e. why would a moon base result in more useful research than digging a deep hole; and not just that, why would it result in more useful research than all the other conceivable ultimately pointless projects. Not to mention all those huge-scale projects which do have merit and which would all result in useful "trickle down" research as well. E.g. ultra high speed passenger trains along the coasts, all kinds of medical research projects, energy research. I'm sure the national highway system -- a project of epic scale and of immediate utility -- had some useful research coming out of it, despite not being particularly high tech.

My name is August West.

Good hello folks! It's wonderful to see we've made it onto Slashdot in-between releases again!

However, our website hardware is nearly toast, and is also co-located a long way away from where I live. It is an ancient VIA based system with a Celeron and 512MB of RAM. It also sports a Maxtor hard drive connected to a Promise Technology PCI IDE card, and LILO boots from a 3.5" floppy drive. Frankly, this wasn't really great hardware even when it was brand new, but it ran our site and mailing lists with excellent uptimes for over a decade in spite of that. It looks like the trouble could be a flaking Tulip based Ethernet card (getting DUP and dropped packets, and RX/TX errors). It was doing OK again after a reboot, but I'm having some trouble reaching it again for some reason.

We're looking for a new place to put the main site. Perhaps it could move to our other server, connie.slackware.com (in which case we need a PHP guru to port it to the latest version). There are other Slackware related servers that might be able to host us as well. To be honest, connie is also getting a little long in the tooth (that's a Pentium III with 256MB of RAM).

RIP bob.slackware.com, and long live Slackware!

I tried to find references for those quotes.

#1: I couldn't find evidence that Carter said that. Morgan Freeman apparently did say something like it (but I couldn't find a verbatim quote).

#2: Okay I couldn't bother trying to look up "guy replying to my facebook".

#3: Couldn't find anyone who said that, the parent comment is the top Google result and the only one vaguely related.

#4: Couldn't find anything related without quotes, with quotes the parent comment is the only result.

Yes, unfortunately I did leave out the worst of it -- the article in the Daily Mail which I saw only mentioned that first one. Serves me right for relying on that paper for anything, though I really figured publishing the drunken ramblings of a racist would have been their specialty.

Wow, shit, sorry for misrepresenting this. I wish I could edit my original post (and not just because copy/pasting mangled the formatting).

Here's what he wrote, according to the Daily Mail: âoeLOL, **** Muamba. Heâ(TM)s dead.â (I assume he actually wrote "fuck", there.)

Actually, there was a study comparing a double-blind placebo with "here, take this sugar pill containing no active ingredients", and the placebo was just as effective even when the patient know it was a placebo.

You'd think, but it doesn't seem to cause any issues around here. Shouldn't leave it lying around in your fridge for day(s), though.

Well, the raw onions are optional. People eat it with just salt and pepper, too. I like the raw onions, initially, but I grow tired of everything still seeming to taste like raw onions four hours and two toothbrushings later. ;)

Raw minced pork is also moderately popular in Germany, served on bread rolls with hardly any seasoning other than raw onions and salt and pepper.

I deliberately don't buy power from one of the biggest energy producers, and I'm pretty confident that they don't participate in green-washing in the manner you describe.

We pay extra to get power from renewable sources. The money goes directly to a company which only operates and builds up renewable energy sources. Of course we actually get power from our local utility, but each kWh we use is actually delivered into the German/European power grid somewhere from regenerative power sources.

Of course, since the plants (wind, mostly) are already built, their power would end up in the network anyway. But this way, the huge and pretty horrible ex-state monopolies don't get any of our money (the local utility company is publicly owned), and instead a company which invests into renewables gets most of it.