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It was a nice effect but I had my slow as Christmas laptop at the time and the moving balloons became a nuance very quickly. It is sad when the laptop comes to a crawl due to the Google search page

I am requesting advice on how to solve a bad CD-ROM driver in Windows XP. The problem started when my wife asked me to burn a CD for her on my computer. I of course asked her why she couldn’t do it herself and she told me that she didn’t have a CD burner in her computer. I of course knew this wasn’t true because I built the machine myself and used my old burner. After a heated discussion I drug her up to the computer and showed her that she was either plain wrong or out of her mind. This is when I discovered that she indeed didn’t have a burner and I had to apologize which wasn’t very pleasant.1. The CD burner is a Plextor 790A. 2. I can see it located on the 3rd IDE channel in BIOS and everything looks good.3. I can boot from the CD fine so there is no obvious problem with the drive. Right now I am running Spinrite to make sure it is not a bad hard drive sector.4. The drive does not show up in Windows Explorer.5. The Device Manager shows the drive but shows there is a problem with it. The error message is a rather non-informative corrupt driver message. No problems with DMA or IRQ requests.6. I deleted the driver and restarted. When the machine came back up, the driver was reinstalled by Windows. Same message and error.7. Windows detects the drive correctly (name and model). Plextor does not have a standalone driver on their website as Windows XP should already have the driver. (And it does, it just doesn’t work).8. I replaced the IDE cable with no improved results.Any suggestions on what to try next? I am fairly sure that the drive is working properly. The drive has worked in the past but this driver just will not load. Currently I am thinking it is a corrupt hard drive sector which just happens to be where this CD burner driver is located but I am open to suggestions.

You can make your own firewall/router fairly cheap which has the added benefit of being faster and more secure than most consumer routers. Most routers run fine on 5+ year old hardware as most of the embedded routers (think the Linksys blue box) runs on much less. First, put together a working machine either by begging, borrowing, but not stealing. Next, either get a Linux distribution or a free router application. A list of suitable Linux distributions can be found at http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/. I personally use the Astaro Security Gateway (https://www.sophos.com/en-us/products/unified-threat-management.aspx) which is a great all in one package that is free for home use. Another possibility would be to purchase a Microsoft TechNet Plus subscription for around $250. This has a high price tag but you get every single OS, including all the servers, for a really good price. TechNet is similar to a MSDN subscription so donât use the servers in a commercial environment. If you are in school, your school may already have a MSDN agreement with Microsoft which will get you everything you need for free. If youâre not a Microsoft guy, almost every Linux distribution is free and can be configured as a server. The most expensive part of this equation is the hardware which with a little looking, Iâm sure you can get for free. If anything, search the classifieds or put a word out that you are looking to learn about computers but donât have one. If someone made this comment to me, I would load them up and send them on their way. Just donât be afraid to let people know what you want.

I can’t speak for Logitech directly but I can say their chips are good. My last webcam purchase was for a front porch security monitoring system. I bought a Rocketfish branded webcam which is sold by Best Buy. Once I took the shell off, there was a Logitech chip inside. The resolution was great and the low light level detection was impressive. I will say that you will have to have more than a low end machine to use the higher resolutions. I was using my old and decrepit laptop and had a hard time maintaining the medium resolution. As an actual webcam I doubt you could go much over 800x600 due to your Internet bandwidth.In the end, my project just didn’t pan out because I didn’t have a good way of getting the webcam signal from my front porch to my desktop. I had the webcam hooked directly to the laptop which was then acting as a network server. USB 1.1 and 2.0 has a strict cable length of 16 feet so the laptop has to be right next to the camera to operate. This also leaves me without a laptop when I need to use it.To this day I am still looking for a fairly affordable solution to my problem. I tried to run the USB signal over Ethernet cable but gave up after about a week of trying. I suspect a powered USB to Ethernet adapter is preferred but haven’t found anything that is unpowered (don’t want to go through the hassle of running a power line just for this) and under $100. If anyone has suggestions I would love to hear them.

My favorite show was on the hot water heaters turning into rockets. Sure they had to turn off every safety device on the hot water heaters but they went off every single time. I don’t think I have seen anything else on Mythbusters that was that predictable. They also had a follow-up show that demonstrated that a hot water heater can bust through a two story building and still come out the top of the roof. Almost brought a tear to my eye.The best explosion has to be the concrete truck from the broken concrete truck and dynamite myth. They loaded the truck with high explosive and set it off. Nothing left of a several ton truck. I just vaporized. I think this one actually did bring a tear to my eye.

My method will certainly raise some red flags. Once all the files have a new owner, putting the laptop hard drive back and booting it will raise hell. Personally I doubt the laptop will boot but I have never tried to do it myself. If the laptop does manage to boot, either the profile will not be loaded or the user will not be able to access their files. The second method of resetting the password will also raise a red flag but perhaps not as large. The normal method of breaking the password by booting from a Linux distribution only sets the Administrator password to NULL. When the laptop user comes back and finds that they either donât have a password or it is nothing, questions will be asked. I know I would certainly be finding out what happened if it was my laptop but a more casual user may not notice. I do know of a way to find the password in some cases using the Linux method but I have never tried it on Vista or Windows 7. I know Vista really started to lock down security so it may not be possible anymore. I have always held the philosophy that knowledge is not dangerous; itâs how you use it. Knowing how to do such things has no harm. Doing this to your own systems or with permission also does no harm and is actually helpful. Doing this to steal information is simply illegal. Threat this like a loaded gun. Do what is right and the gun is a good thing, not bad. P.S. I did not elaborate on the password breaking method because there have already been hints of breaking the TOS. If the powers that be approve it I will go into detail. I have already posted several times about resetting the Windows password at http://forums.xisto.com/topic/91164-topic/?findpost=1064355282.

Resetting the password is one option that I have talked about here before but I think in your situation the easiest would be to copy from one hard drive to another.1. Considering you want to copy from a laptop hard drive, you may need to purchase a 2.5" to 3.5" IDE Hard Drive Adapter (http://www.cablestogo.com/product/17705/5.9in-laptop-to-ide-hard-drive-adapter-cable) or (http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/). I believe the connector for SATA is the same for laptop and desktop hard drives.2. Take the laptop hard drive out of the laptop and connect it to your desktop PC. The laptop hard drive should be connected as a secondary or auxiliary hard drive meaning your desktop OS still boots and the laptop hard drive is recognized as a drive letter other than c:/. For IDE the laptop will be a slave and for SATA it will be anything other than SATA1.3. Once you have booted to your desktop OS see if you can access the laptop hard drive. If so copy your files, else see below.a. Windows sets the owner of a file to the current System SID which is unique to every Microsoft box. You will need to take ownership of the laptop files before you can access them. (I am doing this from a XP machine so I might not have it completely right but it is very similar.)b. Right-click the laptop drive letter and go to security or permissions.c. Click the Advanced tab and acknowledge any UAC warnings along the way.d. Click the Owner tab in Advanced tab.e. Select your current account or the Users account and set that to the new owner. Make sure you also select the Inherit from parent check box.f. It may take a few minutes for the permissions to be changed. If you still can’t access the files try changing the permissions one more time, perhaps with a different option. I find it sometimes takes me a few tries before everything is working.4. If the laptop drive has encryption (BitLocker) or your files are encrypted then give them up for dead. You might be able to get them if they are encrypted by the Windows built-in encryption but that is beyond my knowledge.

I forgot to mention an important part of my experience.I did get an average SAT or standardized test score but I just didn’t have the math background I needed to go straight into the engineering classes. I turns out that my high school somewhat cheated me on my education, especially on math. I did poorly on elementary and middle school assessment tests and was thus labeled as below average. Starting in middle school, I was placed in the lower level classes with the other “stupid kids.” To the school system’s credit, I didn’t do well in school so I suppose they did place me where I should have been.Somewhere in my sophomore year of high school I woke up to the fact that I was better than the grades I was getting and all of a sudden school and the world made sense. I went from the bottom to almost the top of my class. I would call myself a late bloomer.As it turns out, my earlier assessment tests were haunting me. Even though I was doing great in all of my classes, I was still in the lower math class. I had traded in my vocational classes (residential wiring) for advanced placement physics. The earlier assessment tests said that a vocational class is where I should be and I should never take anything like physics or calculus. The tests were wrong or at least flawed. But I was already in the “stupid” math class and there was no way of getting out this late in the game. Going into community college, I started with college algebra and then pre-calculus. I had gotten to the pre-calculus level in high school but the quality of the high school math I took just wasn’t very good. I started out in college remedial classes and I am glad I did. Once again looking back, this was also best because I got a good foundation that my high school just couldn’t touch.So do I agree with standardized tests? They have value, that’s for sure but I think they are too heavily relied on for placement. As you can see I am still a little bitter at the situation I was put in all because someone read a test in elementary school and said this person will never go to college and should be given a lower education. I now have a master’s degree in engineering and have been offered a possibility of getting my doctorial degree. Should standardized tests be used? Yes but perhaps not as early. Today kids are given assessment test in 1st, 3rd, and 5th grades. This really pidgin hole’s a child into one particular life track that is hard to break from once the powers that be have assigned it to you.Looking back it’s not the standardized test that predicts one’s success. It’s the determination to be successful. It’s a person’s attitude to look at life and say I WILL DO IT no matter what everyone else says. This is what will get you through college and not the standardized test. While getting my BS, the best students turned out to be the ones that had this determination and not the standardized test scores. So if you don’t have the test scores to get into the best school, don’t worry as long as you have the will to accomplish your goal. After all, the standardized test is only a predictor and means nothing unless you have the determination to finish.

My higher education experience is based on the US system which I assume varies at least somewhat from India. It sounds like India has a unique problem which is a supply and demand problem regarding schools and students. There are a high number of students wanting a college education while there are just not enough schools to fill the demand. The leads to schools only accepting the “best” students. With time this should eventually go away as more schools are built but it may be a considerable problem at this time.I see this same scenario played out in the US all the time, if not to a lesser degree. Prospective students believe they have to go to the most prestigious and expensive college in the country. For some reason they think this is the only way and there just is no other option. If they don’t have the standardized test scores or the money then they have nothing to live for. This is simply not true and I am living proof of this.Coming out of high school I never really had the ambition of going to one of the top named engineering schools. I was a good student but my SAT score was average and I didn’t have colleges knocking on my door offering scholarships. I was in the position of coming from a not poor but certainly not rich working family. This meant that a private or well known school was out of the question. I ended up going to the local community college and getting my core classes out of the way. I was lucky because this community college had a transfer program setup so that once I graduated, I would then go to the state college and finish my BS degree. Looking back at things this was certainly the best path for me. The community college tuition was relativity cheep (compared to other options) and I did well with a great GPA. In fact I did so well I was awarded a scholarship to finish my remaining work at the state college.The moral of this story is that you don’t have to go to a big name and expensive school to be successful. The big names have strict entrance standards because the demand is high and the supply is low. Open your eyes to new possibilities such as your local community college. You may not be as admired by your friends but you will get a solid education and in my opinion, get a better valued education.

When I read the title of this thread I would have guessed that the following would be the top keyword searches:SexPornFree musicFree sexThe mesothelioma connection is interesting. I know that in the United State, the asbestos injury industry is a cash cow for many law firms (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asbestos_and_the_law). I see television ads all the time for mesothelioma lawyers so it must be making someone money (most likely not the victims). I guess getting mesothelioma cases on Google is very lucrative, otherwise no one would pay those prices.It also might be that the number of clicks is fairly low. There is a high supply of lawyers but a low demand for them. Thus a true mesothelioma click may only happen every week or so.

I used Microsoft Front page for many many years on Xisto with no problems at all. I personally like it because it is easy to use and you can knock out a fairly nice webpage in no time. This all changed when Microsoft dropped support for FrontPage and went with Microsoft Expression (http://www.microsoft.com/expression/eng/) sometime in 2006. In a way your question is a moot point because FrontPage is obsolete and essentially doesnât exist anymore. A few years ago the FrontPage extensions stopped working on the Xisto server and after reinstalling the extensions numerous times and spending hours trying to figure out the problem, I decided that it wasnât worth it and jumped ship. I went with Adobe Dreamweaver and completely redesigned my site. For anyone starting a new website, please avoid FrontPage. It is obsolete and doesnât work with Xisto. For more reference I have already discussed this in a few other threads. http://forums.xisto.com/topic/91655-topic/?findpost=1064358764 http://forums.xisto.com/topic/92330-topic/?findpost=1064363946 http://forums.xisto.com/topic/95962-topic/?findpost=1064392722

I don’t know about the weak minded part as long term Christians are constantly under attack and they are usually in the minority. The truly weak would constantly change positions. On purely the number of post it looks like I am squarely in the minority and I have to offer considerable arguments to even stay even. I personally don’t mind being called weak minded so no offense to me and I hope everything I have said is no offence to anyone else.There is great difference between religions. Just because you call yourself a church doesn’t mean you are religious.As a side note (I thought about making a separate thread but was too lazy), why are there so few new replies. Over the past week there have only been maybe 10 new replies according to the Posts since your last visit tool. Is Xisto dying, closed registration, or something else?

I have to admit that looking at creation from a rational scientific view would be worthless. My professional training is of an engineer so I have lots of respect for science and math. When you apply science to God or creation you come to the conclusion that God doesn’t exist and creation is false. So why would someone who makes their living with logic believe in God? The answer is faith which cannot be measured (at least not scientifically).I actually find the creation and evolution go together fairly well with the exception of the fourth day when the sun, moon, and stars were made. Plants were made on the third day but no sun till the fourth (but there was light and darkness from the first day) (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+1&version=NLT). Some make the argument that this account is from the prospective of someone on the ground. Perhaps there was a heavy atmosphere that prevented directly seeing the sun till the fourth day (http://www.keyway.ca/htm2002/sevncrea.htm)?What I find even more remarkable is that if this story is a creation of man, they had a really good understanding of science 2000 years before the Common Era. Even a few hundred years ago we were burning people alive at the stake for witchcraft, but a few people over 4000 years ago had the idea that light > earth/sky > earth/water, plants > sun, moon, stars > fish, birds > mammals/man. Even though it doesn’t exactly fit evolution, it’s still close enough to make one think. If one thing is a constant, it’s that science is always changing and getting better. Perhaps one day science will look more like creation?

A few more tid-bits:1. The Book of Genesis is not the oldest book of the Bible, that goes to Job. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Job). As usual there is some debate.2. Genesis was most likely written by Moses while in the wilderness. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Genesis). Even more debate.3. Several time periods in the Bible cannot be taken literally such as â40 days and 40 nights.â The 40 days and nights appear many times throughout the Old and New Testament and many believe this is not actually 40 days and nights (https://www.franciscanmedia.org/). This could mean that the âdaysâ during creation were not literal days.4. Most Christians believe that the Bible is the inerrant word of God. More accurately this means that the original document between God and the author had no errors or mistakes. As the document was copied and handed down over 1000âs of years, mistakes were introduced (which is the attribute of man). What we have now is as close as we can get to the original. Most manuscripts that the modern Bible is based on are from the 2nd and 3rd century (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dating_the_Bible).

The Bible is a book of faith and quite simply you have to have faith to believe it. Otherwise is it just a collection of fairy tales.I’m personally a Christian and still believe the Bible and also in evolution. Unlike some, I believe that evolution is just the means that God used for creation. I don’t fully understand creation (no Christian does) but I have to have faith that what science says and what the Bible says is actually the same. There are many places in the Bible that have double meanings and some subjects are just left open to interpretation. Also many books of the Bible were poetry in the original Hebrew so English translations can never fully convey the intended message.The Catholic Church has made the statement that “faith and scientific findings regarding human evolution are not in conflict, though humans are regarded as a special creation, and that the existence of God is required to explain both monogenism and the spiritual component of human origins.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_and_evolution)More to the point are there dinosaurs in the Bible? Maybe. The term livyathan and behemoth both appear in the Bible (http://www.clarifyingchristianity.com/dinos.shtml). There have been many speculations but no definitive answer.This is just my opinion and will continue if everyone is willing. Sometimes it is nice to take a break from strictly computer related topics.

Rudy, not all DVDs are copyrighted and there are plenty of legitimate reasons to ask this question. When my son was still in the oven, we had an ultrasound done and the technician gave us a DVD of the procedure. Of course the grandparents wanted a copy but the DVD had minor protection on it. I had great pain getting the ultrasound into a compact avi for email. I eventually got it to work but it was way too much trouble for the average user. Considering this is a medical image, shouldnât I have full access to the information?

I guess I am just Mr. doom and gloom on this thread, but I do care about Xisto users so I will continue with my march of caution. I also haven’t seen anything else from the original poster so maybe his problem was solved.Running a FTP or even your own web server is a valid way to share files, especially for short periods and if you have sufficient upload capacity and technical skills. My biggest problem with running a FTP server is my upload speed. Even though my ISP advertises a 1M/bit upstream connection, FTP always flat lines at 110 k/bits. This is more than enough for small files but if you are talking about a 500+ Mb file, you better pack a lunch because it will take many many hours to upload. Keep in mind that Internet speed is dependant to two major factors, your download speed and the server upload speed. Commercial web servers and the like usually have an inverse connection compared to a residential service. This means they have large upload bandwidth and almost no download bandwidth. With a FTP server you are now the provider and the overall performance will be limited by your upload bandwidth.A web server is another option but I wouldn’t recommend it unless it is in a separate DMZ on your network and you keep it diligently updated and locked down. I can’t say that web servers are the number one security risk but they are certainly in the top five. Attackers routinely scan random IP space for open ports (if you don’t believe me, run Wireshark directly behind your modem with no filtering) and the first port they look for is 80 (web server) closely followed by 21 and 20 (FTP), and 23 (telnet). If they find an open port they get to work with automated tools that WILL find any security holes. If you are on a properly secured DMZ, a compromised web server should not affect the rest of your network but expect to get all kinds of nasty things on your server, including added web pages that serve malware. A web server running on your personal machine should be avoided because the web server is the first step in breaking into your machine.If you run either a FTP or web server, try to run it only when needed and never let it run for long periods unattended. When running my FTP server I require a username and password over a SSL connection and I never run it unless I am physically at the machine. I have my router set to forward the FTP traffic (which I have changed from the default 21 to a random high number port) to only my machine and block all other machines on my network from accepting FTP traffic.You can download a high quality FTP client from Filezilla (https://filezilla-project.org/) and also a FTP server from Filezilla. In my opinion there is no other client other than Filezilla. I have had limited experience with the server. I used it shortly right after it came out (just out of beta) and had some problems and went back to my current solution. I am sure they have made improvements and I will try it myself again when needed. The best part is it is free which many other server programs will set you back a few hundred dollars.

Using public sites like DepositFiles and RapidShare also means anyone can, and most likely will download them. Depending on how sensitive the material is this may be an option. Encrypting the files may solve the problem but even using a strong encryption mechanism still leaves the files open to brute force attack.I personally use these sites myself but I would never put critical or sensitive information on them even under high encryption.

Interesting plan that just will not work in the real world unless you target a very particular population such as the environmental activists. In a free market the number one factor in deciding what power plant to build is the relative cost of energy or how much money it takes to make one watt of electricity. Wikipedia has an excellent article on this at http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ You can see that coal is by far the winner at 28-38 $/Mw (megawatt) which is why the US has hundreds of coal plants. Nuclear is also a good economic winner at 40-70 $/Mw. Some of the alternatives such as wind is 75 $/Mw, regular solar cells is 120 $/Mw (I would hate to have my local power come from this), and solar thermal is 85 $/Mw. It sounds like the sterling engine may be between the solar thermal and traditional solar at around 100 $/Mw. This means that my electric bill which is now $200 for good ole coal power will now be $666.67. As far as Iâm concerned, I will keep coal and still be able to pay for groceries.

I’m not sure how long you plan on storing your documents but it sounds like an online backup solution may work. This only works if you are the only one needing access to the documents but may be more economical in the long run. In general it is wise to backup all of your important files to an offsite location.Carbonite (https://www.carbonite.com/) – Unlimited online backup for about $70 USD a year. I personally use this service and I am happy with it. The transfer rates are mind numbingly slow but once you get past your initial backup, things go fairly quick. This is not for frequent movement of files but you can access your files from a web interface from anywhere if needed. It does a good job for the cost and considering I have 200+ Gb backed up, $70 a year is a steal. If you do decide to go with Carbonite, message me so you can add me as a referral and I get one month free next year :)Jungle Disk/Amazon S3 (https://www.jungledisk.com/)/(https://aws.amazon.com/s3/) – Use the Amazon service to store your files in the cloud based on the amount you transfer and the amount of data stored. Jungle disk is a third party application that uses Amazon S3 as the storage medium. I originally tried this as my online backup solution but the storage costs got too pricy for my particular situation (several hundred Gb). I know of people who swear by it but they transfer and store fairly small amounts of data. The person that I am thinking of pays around $0.14 per month for under 100 Mb of data.Mozy (Mozy.com) – Similar to Carbonite but charges $4.95 per month. I have had no experience with Mozy but haven’t heard anything really good or bad either. Something to check out.

I personally love the magnets in dead hard drives and I break them open every chance I get. Hard drives use neodymium magnets (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neodymium_magnet) which has one of the highest magnetic densities available. After you get one of these suckers, all of your regular refrigerator magnets will be thrown in the trash. I have one holding papers to my refrigerator right now and there is no need to hold your breath as you walk past it (I could hold a small phone book on there if I wanted). Moving the magnet may be a little hard once it is in place but it is still worth it. Nothing says hold the kids finger paintings like a hard drive magnet.As earlier attributors have alluded to, you shouldn’t open a hard drive unless it is dead, and certainly not if you value any of the data on it. Professionals use a clean room with virtually no dust and if a speck dust gets between a platter and the head moving at 7200 RPM, bad things can happen. This may be blown out of portion a little bit because I have heard of several acrylic hard drive mods that have worked and worked may years after the mod (http://case-mods.linear1.org/hard-drive-mod/).I actually have all the tools that you mentioned but I never even bother. I put the hard drive in a vice on my drill press, put a ¼” – 3/8” bit in the chuck and go to town on all of those torx bolts. Just drill out all of the heads and the cover will pop off. A flat head screw driver should do the rest. If you do want to do it the proper way, you can go to a hardware store and buy a torx driver set and some snap ring pliers. Sears is usually a good starting point for general tools such as a torx screwdriver set (http://www.sears.com/craftsman-5-pc-mini-torx-screwdriver-set/p-00941105000P) or those snap ring pliers (http://www.sears.com/k-tool-international-5-piece-reversible-snap-ring/p-00918739000P). Snap rings are usually associated with cars and trucks (ball joints, ect.) so you may have to look in the automotive section.You may want to be careful with those platters. There are generally two types, metal and glass (also silicon). The metal ones will just bend if you hit it and are virtually indestructible. The glass ones on the other hand will shatter into thousands of nasty little pieces if you hit them. Metal is good if you drop your good hard drive from a few feet in the air but the glass ones are nice if you need to get rid of evidence quickly. If you do drop your good hard drive and it doesn’t work any more, you may want to give it a shake and see if you can hear rattling where the glass platters broke.To answer Spencer’s question about stripped out bolts, get a set of screw extractors (http://www.sears.com/craftsman-10-pc-screw-extractor-set-w-vinyl/p-00966196000P) which should do the trick.

My first point is there is no such thing as a truly undesirable individual. No matter how ugly, fat, or insert assumed defect here, there will always be someone out there that will love you and think you are the most beautiful person alive. I believe that the reason many of the above people can’t find a mate is their own lack of self confidence. Not to get too graphic here, but if you have been on the Internet for more than 10 seconds then you will get the idea there are some “interesting” fetishes out there. If you look long enough and are comfortable with who you are then you should have no problem finding a meaningful and long lasting relationship. The problem is that people (all people) are insecure about who or what they are and are afraid to open up and accept that another person could ever love them. This results in low self esteem that naturally squashes inter-personal relationships that could become intimate relationships.The second point is that I don’t believe a robot could ever fulfill the fully dynamic relationship of a human husband or wife. Of course you might marry a robot and be happy for a little while but it will be more of lust than love. What happens when you need more than someone to have sex with, cook your dinner, or clean the house? (Although it would be great if a real wife would do this, kinda makes me want a robot.) Here are a few examples: • Children. Not everyone wants children but human women are biologically programmed to want children. There may be exceptions but I feel that they are very few and far between. Having your wife drag you to the baby store just to look or cry when she doesn’t become pregnant are not the best things to have happen to you but none the less are experience that you would not have with a robot. • Will your robot partner grow old with you?• Fighting. Well this might seem like a pro and not a con but fighting can bring a couple closer together when the dust settles. Many fights come about when the needs (or perceived needs) of one partner are not being met. Perhaps the wife wants a $150 hair cut and you say that we don’t have the money. There is a possibility that a fight will ensue which will require a heated discussion and eventually a compromise by both parties. This makes you grow as an individual and perhaps not be so selfish the next time. After all it did come out that we had the money, it was just being stored in the computer fund. A robot can fight back a little, perhaps that upgrade that you promised her, but in the end she is going to cave to you and you get your way because she is programmed that way. This makes your robot like a Russian mail order bride that may fight but at the end of the day you are master and she ends up with the table scraps. The only advantage to the robot in this case is that you will not wake up with a steak knife in your chest or important body parts missing in the middle of the night.• In-laws. This may also be s sore subject but I personally like my in-laws. If your car breaks down in the middle of nowhere and needs a new $3000 transmission, are you going to call the robot manufacturer and ask for a loan to get you by?• Religion. With most people considering themselves at least somewhat religious, how will your robot mate make it to the afterlife? This also dives into morals and strong personal beliefs. Your real human wife had a dog that she absolutely loved when she was in elementary school. As a result of that, she now regularly volunteers at the animal shelter and gives copious amounts of your (our) money to feed abandoned flea infested fur bags at the pound (I didn’t have a dog that I liked growing up). Does the robot have the same childhood memories or strong feelings about dogs? What does your robot wife think about abortion, gun crimes, or is she a Democrat or Republican? These things can be perhaps programmed but you will be the one choosing the program so it will be far from a surprising on the first date.• A need to know that someone really cares and it’s not just programming. What happens when a parent dies and you need someone to cry to?These are just a few examples why robot marriages will not become main stream even in a few hundred years. Not to say they will not happen, just that normal well balanced individuals will not even consider the option. The fist robot marriage will most likely be a publicity stunt for fame and fortune. Just like celebrity marriages, it will be lucky to last more than six months. After all, Dennis Rodman married himself.If you have been married for more than six months then you will soon realize that marriage is much more than sex. The so called bad stuff means as much if not more than the good stuff. A robot no matter how well programmed, will never replace the common human marriage.

I don’t believe that an unknown Internet user creating a backup of your site will cause a significant site slow down. While reviewing my Xisto hosted site, ycoderscookbook.com, I have seen several instances of a complete site download. Some of the automated tools even left their calling card in the form of browser identification in the HTTP headers. I’m not sure why someone would want to copy my entire site but I don’t see anything wrong with it. During the months that this happens I only see a slight increase in Xisto bandwidth usage and since Xisto has ISP level servers and bandwidth, I don’t think anyone noticed the site was any slower. Now if someone decides to copy the entire site a few thousand times a month then I would have an issue because that would use my bandwidth limit of the month. Outside of this, feel free to copy as long as you remain a respectable human in the process (don’t plagiarize or use all of my bandwidth).

As I demostrated earlier, it is 20 years just to get YouTube.

Interesting question. I am actually surprised that that you, FireFoxRules, asked it as it sounds like a crazy idea that I would expect from a newb. At any rate it did get me to think so I will propose an answer. Assumptions ⢠You have an insane Internet backbone connection will guaranteed reliability and speed. I will assume that you have a 100 Mb/sec connection which is usually only available to ISP level organizations. ⢠You have an appropriately sized upstream connection to do all the requesting. ⢠You actually get the bandwidth you paid for. I personally have a â10 Mb/sec down and 1 Mb/sec upâ consumer cable connection. I have never seen anything close to these numbers in real life. The closest I have seen is 2 Mb/sec down (downloading ISOs from Microsoft MSDN) and there is a hard limit of around 115 kb/sec up that I constantly hit. A more typical download speed is around 500 kb/sec for regular web browsing. ⢠We will ignore all network structure and latency issues and assume you have a direct connection to your target with no hops in between. o The nature of TCP/IP will limit you to around 80% of your bandwidth under ideal operation. When you have only two computers on a network (the idea case) you will still never get 100% bandwidth because of TCP header overhead, IP header overhead, other traffic such as ARP requests, and IP timing issues. A typical network usually sees only 45-50% bandwidth because of collisions. A stressed out network may only get 10%. o There is latency between your request and the data. Machine and router hardware delays. Usually microseconds. Every hop adds delay. Usually milliseconds. Server response time. Usually small compared to everything else but could become an issue. Ranges from milliseconds (typical) to minutes. o In total you should expect to take at least 50% off your promised bandwidth in an idea case. This brings out 100 Mb/sec connection to more like 50 Mb/sec; but as stated earlier, we are ignoring this. o Internet speed is based on more than your connection speed. The bandwidth of the server is also very important. You may have sufficient bandwidth but if you request from a server that is slower than your connection, you are stuck with their speed. I find that a typical website will only transfer up to 50 kb/sec so you will have to download from many different servers at the same time to fill your 100 Mb/sec pipe. ⢠You have enough computing power. At 100 Mb/sec you are starting to get into the range of IDE hard drive data transfer range. You will also want to have several threads going at the same time to maximize bandwidth utilization. You want to download a different webpage while you are waiting on the request for a separate page. Better yet, you want to keep your bandwidth pipe full even if you hit a slow server or a timeout which can be up to 2 minutes. I would guess that you would need 150-300 threads or requests going at the same time to meet this demand. A single computer likely will not be able to do this alone so you would end up with at least 5-10 servers on your end to pull this off. This of course breaks the idea case of no network congestion or collisions as described earlier.⢠You have enough storage space. A quick search shows that YouTube alone has around 7.7 petabytes of content (http://beerpla.net/2008/08/14/how-to-find-out-the-number-of-videos-on-youtube/ . Newegg is showing 1TB hard drives for around $90. With the needed hardware and controllers, you are looking at around $100/ TB. At this rate you will need 7700 1 TB hard drives which would cost you around $770,000. A related article on BackBlaze (https://www.backblaze.com/blog/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/) shows you how to build your own 67 TB 4U rack server for $7,867 including drives and rack hardware. At the BackBlaze rate, 7.7 PB will cost $904,118 or almost 1 million dollars. Gottchas ⢠Connection speeds are measured in BITS and not BYTES. There are 8 bits to a byte so this means that you need to divide your connection speed by 8 right off the top. This will make our 100 Mbit/sec connection a 12.5 Mbyte/sec connection. With typical network delays, this would become 6.25 Mbyte/sec. Now letâs do some calculations (whips out trusty TI-89 calculator). 12.5 Mbyte/sec*60 seconds = 750 MB/min 750 MB/min* 60 mins = 45 GB/hour 45 GB/hour *24 hours = 1080 GB/day or ~1 TB/day (1.08e12) With the YouTube example above of 7.7 petabytes (10e15)⌠7.7e15 Bytes/1.08e12 Bytes/day=7129.63 days 7129.63 days/365 days/year = 19.5332 years Just downloading the YouTube database with an insane Internet connection will take you almost 20 years and almost 1 million dollars just in hard drive storage. Hope this answers your question