Eh? I don't mean to troll or anything, but since when has Postgres NOT been dead? It's a bit of a niche. I've worked with more than one database over the course of my 10 year web development career, MS-SQL, Oracle, MySQL, but certainly NOT Postgres. I don't know a single person who has ever used it.
There's a reason why they put an M in LAMP, you know :P

What I don't get is why people expect to raise the temperature all the way up to 300C so the ship will burst into flames, when 50C is enough to scald human skin and would likely get an invading army yelling and jumping into the water. Not to mention the brightness of the light would be enough to temporarily blind and disorient them.

The first person to write about this alleged incident was Lucian who merely mentioned *fire* (and since he wrote about it 3-4 hundred years after the fact, it's already not a credible source of information) while the second one, who came another 2-3 hundred years later (Anthemius) was someone who investigated "burning glasses" (lenses) and so he just MIGHT have had a bit of an agenda there.

Your link says they had to be narrow to be fast and as such they could not carry a lot of cargo. Also, the fastest clippers according to that article traveled at 16 knots while another post here claims that modern ships travel at 22 knots.

You can probably get by without fear in a nanny state ruled by the fearful masses, where everything has to be made perfectly safe, but try doing that in the jungles of your ancestors, where danger awaited around every corner...

Zynga was founded in 2007, Facebook was founded in 2004, I ran a virtual currency casino in 2003, and even before that, there were already some standalone slot machines built by Linden Lab itself. WTF? :)

Excuse me, but... What are you talking about?
I browsed the web with a 486 DX2-66 for many years, it took a while to load an 80KB HTML page straight off my hard drive - specifically, it was a mIRC scripting guide which had no images.
You would also have to wait a while for a JPEG to decode and display. If you were crazy enough to load one of these newfangled 4000x3000 photos kids have these days, your PC would start swapping and become unusable!

But, you need to keep in mind that the early web was entirely made up of text with the odd 16-color GIF for decoration. There was usually no flash or video, and a 24-bit JPEG of a pretty girl in sufficiently high resolution was more like a download than an embedded component of a web page! After all, a mere 50KB file takes 20 seconds to load at 2.5KB/s!

Graphics cards used an ISA slot and had 1 meg of memory! What they did at the time with that memory was store the frame buffer and enable you to display high (SVGA) resolutions!

I do have vague memories of seeing an MPEG-2 accelerator card, maybe it did JPEG, I dunno, but seriously, a web accelerator? When 3D cards finally came along (and you had to have them separately from your 2D card at the time) what they added was highly 3D-specific stuff like mip-mapping and Z-Buffer... not Flash.

Fruit used to be scarce and hand-picked from trees, but Man invented agriculture to control and infinitely replicate it!!!
Meat used to be scarce and chased all day long with bows and arrows but Man overcame Beast and herded it!

Nothing should be scarce. We are here to raise the bar of what Life consists of, and modern life consists of hanging out on youtube and being able to play on a whim whatever comes to mind.

It just needs to be taken one step further. There should be an official RIAA-backed repository of all music ever created, easy to use, with all lyrics, videos, whatever!

Or the RIAA should die.

Why should anyone be "accountable" if there is no such thing as "free will" and it's been clearly demonstrated that the brain makes its own decisions long before they reach your awareness? (source: study cited in malcolm gladwell's books)

One does not conciously choose to have poor impulse control and be verbally or even physically agressive or obese or frivolous in their spending. It is not a moral or character flaw. A simple pill can easily correct it within weeks. It's good to take responsibility away from people, as they are little more than meat automatons, programmed by their genes and the world around them.

That's why societies and companies and groups of people everywhere establish rules, acceptable behaviors and standard procedures.
To put what we believe so far, what experience has so far demonstrated, to be the best possible program into you.

I believe you are looking for the standby button.
Why do you even turn it off? Ecological reasons? Noise?
Even Windows can be up forever these days... and with the dawn of unlimited broadband and large *cough* downloads... most people just leave their computer on all the time.