Yeah, but the question is what percentage will survive such a calamity? The average American has a week or two's worth of non-perishable goods and I have been to Japan and Europe and the folk I met there had even less sizable pantries. Me, well every time I see a crazy deal for something that will keep for a long period of time like rice, pasta, canned beans or vegetables I buy a bunch of it. This xmas I bought 24 tins of refried beans for 10 dollars, 30 cans of real Spam for under 40 dollars and 4 20lb bags of brown rice for 60 dollars. Once it is past the expiration date I buy more than donate the slightly expired food to a food bank. For about 300 dollars a year and bargain hunting I have built up about 6 months worth of food for myself. I plan on getting a 50 gallon drum for water soon and this will all fit in a medium sized apartment easy. Oh and chicks dig a man who has a larder, especially in colder climates I think it might be hard wired into their brains.

Yeah, and the Wright Brothers plane and 20-30 years of tinkering it took to build a reliable plane never happened because the first 5-10 years the planes could barely stay aloft and they learned nothing from their failures and sub-stratospheric flight. You might point out we already know how to build a rocket that can go orbital, even to the moon and beyond. Well I will tell you that none of that knowledge exists in any complete form outside of JPL, ESA, NASA, JSA and now the Chinese space agency. Building a rocket engine is non-trivial, let alone the rest of the systems and until the government starts open sourcing that knowledge the private industry is going to have to learn that on their own.

I agree, my mother just got something like that in her retirement house and it is easy enough for her to maintain. These 500-800 dollar setups for backup power are nice when needed and better than nothing but if you are without power for up to a week invest in a more robust solution.

Agreed, and the ability to even use that emulation with X11 on anything besides Windows Vista with Cygwin is an unknown. With stupid reviews talking more about functions maybe 1% of the user base ever will use more than just basic 3-button and a scroll wheel functionality I wonder how much of these poor design decisions are due to a self-feedback loop of more features is better = higher reviews. The Wireless Laser Mouse Series from Microsoft for instance has a horrible time at clicking the middle mouse button so to open new tabs and close old tabs you have to map it to one of the side buttons which you will hit by mistake. It was so useless as an actual interface to the computer I just took out the laser diode assembly and played with it and plugged in my old LX3 from Logitech.

You have never used a university email system than. Gmail is the best spam experience I have had except when I worked at an unnamed company with a subdomain email addy Me@xx.xxx.com. I got two viruses sent to me the whole time I was there and not a single spam in the 18 months I worked there.

I prefer IBM's new Lotus Symphony, I mean it has tabs and it is based on openoffice.

I just use an ebook reader to read the most current stories on about 100 different rss feeds I have. A little htmltopdf and I got more news than I have ever been able to read in a 2 hour daily commute. What is this news "paper" you speak of?

Just got back from getting my traditional Christmas meal, Pho and saw someone out on 10 using a baby biketow for presents with 8 inches of wet snow on the road. Of course she was flipping off everyone as they swerved around her. I stopped got out of my car ahead of her and asked if she wanted a ride to wherever she was going. She replied she was going to Gresham, which for those of you who don't know Portland is a good 20 miles away. For sure, a holiday moment I will not soon forget as she proceeded to flip me off when I got back into my car. I know about keeping Portland weird, but do they have to be crazy too?

Portland here to, and I hope this is a wake up call for the area to be better prepared in the coming years as the climate is in flux. Who knows this might only be a taste of whats to come as weather patterns shift worldwide, there could be regular snow in San Fransisco again. The lack of shoveling and salting the sidewalks is disheartening for a town that prides itself on catering to pedestrians. The narrow 1970's plows on almost all the city trucks were designed for roads before bike lanes. All of Washington county's bike lanes are now unusable so you have cyclists taking their life in their hands at this point to get a bag of groceries. Metro is not doing much better.

Does anyone think that the person who is Cowboy Neal might not enjoy jokes at his expense anymore?

Agreed, winter in the northern regions used to mean that you had 3-7 months to be inside. Now we work year round even if we can do it from our homes. Even 50 years ago the Northern States slowed down economically much more dramatically than now when winter rolled in. People worked less hours in most industries, spent less on food which rose in price seasonally and spent the vast majority of their money on necessities not niceties. Also spending time in the proximity of an extended family for such a long period of time built more dependable family units, increased social skills and allowed one to hone or teach a craft/skill or two. Some of us now work or go to school from home year round now and I have noticed many people who have such an arrangement live alone such as myself. I worry about my career/studies affecting a distinct lack of progress socially but at the same time I look forward to being snowbound to work in physical solitude on my projects, only popping my head online once in awhile to keep abreast of things. It would be nice to have someone to share this time with and share recipes, exchange bodily fluids and the like but she would have to have a similar inclination to use this time as a resource of solace. In the next few years I am considering moving to Alaska or NW Canada to work with even less distractions for a good chunk of the year. Anyone else thought about something along these lines?

I play Flight Sim X at 1680x1050 with moderate AA and AF and I have not gone below 25 fps. What ungodly setup do you have 2 or 3 monitors? chris

I have that game and it is not as much GPU limited as the code is not parallelized very well, from what I gather like most games of that era they used an Automatic Parralelization compiler. Now that kids are graduating from college with 3-4 years of smp programming under their belts and not decades of serial algorithm design we will see better use of the multi core setups. I would not be surprised to see people keeping quad core and even dual core systems for a few extra years as software performance catches up. Even with 2 8800's with my old dual core it would crawl along at ~10 fps in large battles and now that I have a quad core it may do a few more fps.

This article addresses more high-end gaming systems in SLI mode. Are there any RTS games out there that really tax a single NV 8800 GT even? I have a 7600 x3 setup from about 3 years ago that I hardly ever use anymore because a 2x 8800 GT OC is almost 2x as fast and was about 300 dollars cheaper, well 2.5 years later. I only get SLI with a single video card and usually upgrade at the first sign of low fps in a game I am playing, so it saves me money in the long run not having to buy a whole new setup. I have one more PCIe16 slot waiting for 8800's to get under 100 bucks. I am half tempted to get this deal though as I could upgrade my media server in the living room with the memory, hmmmm.

Yawn, troll.