I always liked Knuth's choice quote from John von Neumann on the subject:

        "Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin."

- Michael

I don't think anyone seriously contemplating relativistic or FTL travel expects to be physically accelerated to such speeds. After all, if stationary interstellar hydrogen is effectively hitting you at teravolt levels, it means that every particle in your body (and the ship) has actually been accelerated to velocities equivalent to the particles in the LHC beam. Not bloody likely. We need warp drive, subspace, wormholes, or something else to solve the problem, not ridiculous conventional acceleration.

- Michael

With a small scope, your best bet is low magnification so you get good brightness. If you can get sufficient brightness, the Pleiades are magnificent. The stars are jewel colors! The Andromeda galaxy is a pretty good target as well, as is Jupiter. Saturn is a much smaller image than Jupiter due to distance, and you won't be able to magnify it enough to see colors with a small scope. In general, try the low-number M objects. They are low numbers because they were the first to be catalogs, hence in general low-hanging fruit as it were.

Also, something amateurs often overlook is using binoculars for astronomy. The image-stabilized ones are particularly excellent for hand-held use. Once again, light-gathering power is the goal, not magnification.

- Michael

Jungledisk is a nice front-end to Amazon S3 for which I pay around $1 a month. The transfer fees for S3 are irrelevant over time, and I end up paying around $15 a month to back up my entire personal dataset from 3 different machines. I can get to any of my stuff from anywhere if needed, and the incremental backup system keeps things current with no overt action from me. I include my personal mp3 collection (big), digital photos, and everything else I care about. I spend a lot more than $15 a month on soda, so the $15 seems like a bargain to me.

There may be cheaper solutions out there, but why bother? This one is plenty cheap enough, and works great for me.

I have set up three households with over-the-air DTV now. The first was with amplified 'rabbit-ears', and was marginally successful. The next two were with the RCA 'smart' antenna that auto-tunes to the target channel when used with a compatible converter box (I used Tivax units). They both work wonderfully. All three were indoor installations in suburban Tampa, FL. Bye, bye, Brighthouse!

- Michael