I am so tired of this "it is like car insurance" bullshit. I don't drive, Portland has got an excellent public transportation system and I don't need a flipping car, so I don't have to buy car insurance. However, I will have to buy health insurance or be fined. Total and utter bullshit. What the hell happened to personal liberty? Why the hell do I have to be "mandated" to buy anything from a private company? The federal government can go fuck themselves.

At risk of feeding the troll, I do a helluva lot more that "flash an LED" with my home etched boards. For example, I use a wireless XBee radio to read my power meter and chart my daily usage. Many of the folks at http://www.doityourselfchristmas.com/ do some amazing things with their home etched boards, more that just flashy-blinky lights. So, AC, maybe instead of trolling /. you should go read a book or two, lest you end up demonstrating idiocy to everyone. I'll finish with this quote from Friedrich Nietzsche: Anyone who has declared someone else to be an idiot, a bad apple, is annoyed when it turns out in the end that he isn't.

You obviously have not drunk enough Mt. Dew or played enough Warcraft.

Surf like an Egyptian. Really makes me wonder what would happen here in the US if the government though they could get away with it during an "emergency."

Are you really that flipping naive? Israel is using nukes as a deterrent, defensive weapon, which has so far worked. Iran has stated that they want to "wipe Israel off the face of the earth," http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/oct/27/israel.iran and would probably use nukes as an offensive weapon, at least that is my interpretation of "burn in the fire of Islamic fury." So GFY before you tell people to STFU!

Exactly! If this were not true the State of Oregon's State Data Center (SDC) couldn't charge what they do. Current charges: http://www.oregon.gov/DAS/SDC/docs/rates/Rates.pdf - we often try to host outside the SDC because of service level agreements, agency accessibility for managing the resource and price. If we were to pay what it costs, how would we support a bloated SDC staffing structure. The SDC now has more staff than the agencies who moved to the SDC did and the service quality is down (4 flipping weeks to open a firewall port), availability is down (nowhere near the promised 99.9% uptime), costs are up! Yes, sadly, I work for the state and helped move our agency, DHS, to the SDC a few years back - wish I could turn back time.

Who only got one?

Welcome to my pants!

Reason: Works for me. Comment: Nice API and easy to understand too.

...in earth weight or moon weight?

...go fark yourself. ARRRR

...makes me ashamed of my country.

Aren't we trying to avoid the RAIGs?

The purpose of a prison sentence is punishment. We can also try to rehabilitate the criminal, but recidivism rates suggest that we are failing at that. All of our actions, positive and negative, have consequences. If you commit a crime, that consequence is some form of punishment. If a prison sentence was indeed viewed as vengeance, then we would allow the victim or family of the victim to inflict some sort of consequence on the criminal. We don't, so I don't understand why you think we, US citizens, think it is revenge. Please help me understand the basis of your viewpoint.