Would the components necessarily have military style dates on them? I would expect a device like this to use as many commodity parts as possible to keep costs low. Is it possible that some parts would have markings on them intended for the US civilian market?

I'm not familiar with military equipment so I don't know what lengths they go to in removing civilian markings from equipment.

Hmm, slashdot appears to be eating my carriage returns

I can walk into my local Comcast office and pay my monthly bill by cash or check. Comcast does in theory need to know what your address is to activate service*, so even if you use a fake name, you can still be found. *I do know that you can actually move a modem around on the Comcast network: I moved within the same city recently, the modem I was using at the old address worked fine at the new address, with no changes to the account. I did eventually change my account so the bill came to the correct place, so I don't know if this was a temporary or indefinite situation, but it kept working like this for a month and a half before I made the address change. In theory this means that you can find a neighbor without internet through Comcast, and make a fake account at their address. Decline the installation service and hook up the modem yourself and you should have completely anonymous internet**. **you have to live with Comcast internet and pricing, but in some areas you have to do this anyway.

To be fair, the point of the GP post was this:

If we consider communism a religion, presumably we are modifying the definition of religion to include all strongly held dogmas or belief systems.

In this context, we could legitimately equate atheism to a form of religion, since atheists tend to have very strong beliefs about the nature of the universe.

FWIW: I think that the above argument is silly. As the parent post points out, we have a perfectly good language, which clearly defines religion. What the GP should recognize is: in the absence of religious fanaticism, other forms of zealotry such as political fanaticism may take over (ie. soviet communism). This of course leads to the same types of negative social consequences, as the religious type. By its very nature, atheism makes no dictates about how a person should act, and consequently avoids creating fanaticism in the detrimental sense that we are thinking of here. (Atheists can however be fanatically boring if you wind them up)

The way I understood the current situation is the following:

Image for a second a piece of paper, there are two overlapping circles on it. One represents the people who want to run Linux on the PS3 and are trying to hax0r it. This circle is about the size of a quarter.

The other circle is for the people who want to pirate games and cheat AND HAVE THE TECHNICAL SOPHISTICATION TO FIGURE IT OUT THEMSELVES. The diameter of this circle is roughly the same as the Linux camp.

Basically, you have a very small group of people, who's only motivation for hacking the platform is Sony's removal of the boot other OS function. This group of people then gives away the plans for their hack, and thus enables all the people from your 50m circle who can't hack a PS3 on their own.

Claiming that the Linux crowd is irrelevant here, ignores the fact that one motivated person can release an exploit which will work for everyone, and I think the Linux crowd has a much higher ratio of people who might find those exploits than the crowd of wall-hack/aimbot enthusiasts.

Cheers

Your 'high school math' analysis however fails to address the fact that these solar installations are not distributed evenly across the earths surface. If we consider only the local area around the solar installation, rather than the entire earth, we would expect a much greater impact on the local energy absorption. Further we know that seemingly small changes can have notable impacts on the local climate, for instance slashdot recently discussed how air traffic may significantly modify local weather patterns . For an honest assessment of the impact I would agree with the gp, the input of actual climatologists is important.

For those of you who are wondering if they missed some huge drop in netbook pricing like I was: That $49 is the price as subsidized by a 2 year contract with Verizon wireless. The cheapest non subsidized netbook on that list is the Lenovo IdeaPad S10-2 for $149.

At least on some laptops it is worthwhile to disable the SD card slot. I know that in the case of some EEEPC's the SD card is on the same integrated USB as the webcam, and shutting that whole thing off actually nets a fair drop in power consumption.