If we count back to the old Compuserve accounts... yeah, since about 1985-ish. That'd be just about half. Of course I've had USEFUL email accounts for substantially less time. From there we had FidoNet, then more Compuserve, then in late '94 I started an ISP... The ISP is long since gone, as is its domain, but I kept the personal/family domain I registered a couple of years in.

Sure, if you know what book you're looking for it's great. But if you're looking for something for which you may need to sort through a shelf or two of books, it seems like this would make it tougher to just pull a book down, browse through it, and move on to the next. I also remember many hours spent leafing through various works of fiction, looking for something I might enjoy reading by reading a few pages here and there to get a general idea of the author's style and the book's plot.

Of course it's academic (so to speak), as I haven't been inside a library in years now.

No, intentionally killing unarmed, noncombatant civilians makes you a war criminal. If I shell a building just to kill the civilian occupants, I'm a war criminal. If I have to shell the same building, killing all the occupants because I'm taking sniper fire from there... well, sucks to live in that building, but I gotta do what I gotta do to protect my troops. Collateral damage and civilian deaths during war are a fact of life. A sad and tragic fact of life, but a fact of life nonetheless.

When the apocalypse comes, I'll be happier that I have friends. And guns. And know how to distill booze. I probably won't care much about that dual pitch Correcting Selectric III I have stashed away.

I wouldn't say my machine is more secure than that of WordPress -- although, since theirs has been compromised and mine has not, I guess that's open for debate. One big difference is, I know what and where my vulnerabilities are, and I have my fingers in there daily so I'll know pretty quickly if and when someone breaks in. When hosting stuff on Other Peoples' Servers, you never really know for sure if they are secure, how secure they are, etc. Until you find out the hard way, of course.

As for my actual sensitive data, the stuff that would actually be inconvenient to have someone else see... yes, keeping it on my own system makes it more secure, for a number of reasons. None of which I'm ever likely to discuss.

In theory, you're right. In practice, not so much. Lots of money can (and often does) fundamentally alter the practices of many non-profits. Sure, they're nominally non-profit, with bylaws and directors. All of which/whom can be altered or replaced. If pallet loads of cash start flowing from the general direction of a Borg cube, enabling the construction of fancy new offices and much better compensation for the officers... well, you can see how that could happen. Many a nonprofit has been subverted by lots of money and infiltration by unscrupulous individuals.

You don't think they're just going to write a check, do you? They'll borrow a few billion and do the rest as a stock swap. It's a lot easier to defend borrowing and spending a few billion to acquire a competitor, than it is to spend a few billion upgrading your shitty infrastructure. One can be made to look really good on the quarterly earnings reports, the other can't -- at least to the average short term thinker, by whom we seem to be overrun.

I respectfully disagree. I believe the decision is based in large part upon whether intervention stands a substantial, realistic chance to do any good. Military intervention in places like Somalia would accomplish nothing productive; it's been tried. There often is no central government oppressing and attacking people, it's dozens (or more) bands of irregulars, led by warlords working mostly from drug money, fighting each other and taking the opportunity for the occasional tribal massacre. In some cases there *is* a central government oppressing and murdering people, but the alternative would be another Somalia.

In the case of Libya, it seems clear that the citizenry wants the current regime out, and the current regime is willing to kill a substantial percentage of the population to hold onto power. It's also a fair bet that, once the smoke clears, Libyans will be willing and able to establish a new government and bring things back to some semblance of normalcy.

If the decision were based solely upon maintaining a cheap oil supply, we could just as easily help crazy-ass dictators like Gaddafi restore order and suppress the rebellion, in exchange for a few price and production promises.

Gabble??? Or did you possibly mean Joseph Goebbels?

I can count way more than 20 just in this room. Every cell phone, every mouse, every keyboard, every monitor, my nifty Nixie-tube clock, the big LCD wall clock, both of my ham radio transceivers (at least 2 each), the phone, the FAX/printer, my Morse keyers, the cheap little stereo, hell - even the wireless headphones have at least two, one in the USB dongle and one in the headphones themselves. I'll even skimp and not count the couple hundred I have still in tubes, waiting to be put into the kits I develop - all of which have microprocessors.

If we're talking about just processors running Linux, UNIX, Windows, Mac or some other general purpose OS, then the number shrinks considerably - but it's still fuzzy. Seven desktops, laptops & servers, but the Blu-Ray player and TV are both running Linux flavors or derivatives, and my Android phone - well, it's less than a laptop but a hell of a lot more than a phone. But if you don't put a size limit on the question, there are microprocessors everywhere.

When sending troops to the US for a hostile takeover attempt, please remember that several million of the inhabitants are armed. We're not counted as part of the military, but we do make a pretty good defensive force.

That works great, but doesn't always scale well. For example, take my employer... over a quarter million employees, many hundreds of them being SAs who administer nearly every OS known to man distributed across over 30,000 servers scattered around the globe. They are by and large paid and treated *quite* well. However, the sheer numbers mean you're eventually going to encounter the occasional incompetent, or possibly the rare person with ill intent. Now you need something a lot more scalable than "check them out thoroughly before hiring them". If you don't believe that, your corporate auditors and government regulating bodies will gently tell you otherwise.

In many cases it's a mixture of enforced change management policy and commercially available, enterprise-sized tools to control, limit, grant, record and audit access to SAs. I may have root privileges on a server, or a few hundred of them, but in order to use that power I have to authenticate and everything is logged. Yes, I can turn all of that off... but the act of turning it off is, of course, logged and audited, and I had damn well better have a change control document to justify it.

I'm not going to mention specific tools here, because I do like my job and my employer (hi, Power Wielding / Paycheck Signing Overlords!) -- but they're not difficult to find. They are, however, generally expensive, and an enormous pain in the ass to implement and support.

I'd be looking for a horse and buggy sound clip for my wife's Fusion hybrid.

Check your math there, guy. 700 RPM cyclic rate = 11.6 rounds per second, emptying that 30 round mag in just a hair over 2.5 seconds. That's on the slow side. Colt says the CRC is 700-950 RPM, so it could be as short as 2 seconds.

Wrong on SO many levels. We'll start with the most damaging. Building the sear and selector yourself is, in the eyes of the BATFE, manufacturing a machine gun, and will land you a very hefty fine, likely a prison sentence, and a lifetime prohibition on ever owning a firearm. The BATFE feels that way about a shitload of different things, and you really, really do need to understand the regulations before you try anything that will look, in hindsight, monumentally stupid.

The $200 tax stamp allows you to own an existing, registered, legal full-auto weapon (or suppressor, short barreled rifle or shotgun, etc). It does not in any way, shape or form allow you to convert your AR-15 or AK clone to full auto using new parts. I know there are guys sitting here saying, "Hey, I just saw an ad for a guy selling pre-ban drop-in auto sears, they legal"... yeah, right. Buy one, and write me from prison to tell me how it worked out for you. And yes, you can buy the few M16 parts that make a machine gun - the sear, selector, etc. But you better be damned sure you have a legal M16 to drop them into.

And there are many, many full auto firearms that can be had for far less than $50K. The last time I looked the going rate for a rock-n-roll MAC-10 was about $3K, and M-16s started around $12K. You can find Stens, Thompsons, Uzis, the list goes on and on. Get out your check book and take your pick. Some are really pricey, some not so much.

Still wrong. You need a tax stamp (not a license) if it's a machine gun, or a short barreled (under 18") rifle or shotgun, a suppressor, or a very few other special situations. These are commonly known as "NFA" weapons, controlled by the National Firearms Act of 1934. Most except machine guns can be manufactured, as long as you know and religiously follow ALL of the rules ALL of the time, and do ALL of the paperwork BEFORE you start anything.