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Black people voted for Democrats by...
+91 points in 2008
+77 points in 2004
+81 points in 2000
+72/+76 points in 1996 (depends how you count Perot)
+73/+80 points in 1992 (Perot, again)

So that's a 13-16 point bump, among a demographic that makes up ~10% of the electorate. At best, Obama would have gotten an extra 2% in the total popular vote. Meanwhile, the summary found 3-5% voting against him because he's black. So it clearly worked against him.

And that's assuming the black people voted that way because Obama was black, and not because they were sick of the racist crap that they heard throughout the election season. They lean heavily against Republicans (gee, why could that be?). Hearing endlessly about Jeremiah White, hearing Michele Obama referred to as "Obama's baby mama", hearing Rush singing "Barack the magic negro", hearing all the birther nonsense (I actually forget when exactly that started) etc., probably just made them trust Republicans even less.

But go on, keep thinking of all the black people in America as some barely sentient hive mind that just votes for people who look like them, and never consider issues on an individual basis. That's not racist at all. Nosiree.

Some medical equipment can contain radioactive isotopes - really strong stuff. Scavengers don't know this, and start pulling things apart, exposing radioactive elements. "The Goiânia Radiation Incident" is a text book example.

A cesium-137 radioactive source was left in an abandoned clinic in the city of Goiânia, capitol of the Brazilian state of Goiás. Scavengers took the massive device, gouged out the iridium window, which allowed high gamma radiation and a beautiful blue light to escape, and sold it to a junk-yard owner. The blue glow of the small cylinder of cesium chloride that was inside the device made it appear very valuable, so it was broken into pieces and used for decorative or magical purposes, including rubbing on the skin. A six-year-old girl ingested some of it. At least 244 persons had measurable contamination of cesium chloride on or in their bodies, with twenty of them being seriously radiated. Ten of the twenty had extensive decontamination and radiation-damage treatment. To date four of these have died.

There was a reduction of the national debt during the 90s-era Republican Congress (1997, 98 and 99 to be specific).

And who controlled congress during the Bush spending spree before the Democrats took over congress? Who controlled congress during the reductions in deficit in the 50s-80s? It's right here. The Democrats controlled both branches of congress right up until Reagan took the presidency and the Republicans took the senate. You can't have it both ways: you can't blame the president when it was Bush in the white house and then blame the Republicans in congress when it was Clinton who was president.

But, since you trotted out the same argument you always hear, here is the data that shows that on average, the deficit is reduced under democratic control of congress as well as under democratic presidents. The correlation just isn't as strong. The bottom line is that, statistically, Democratic party governments do a better job at reducing the deficit!

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If it was easy to cast a vote with a pencil and a paper and now it's not that easy, then *it is* machine fault.

You really, really, really underestimate some people's stupidity. This is NOT a technology problem. It's a stupid people problem:
1. Remember hanging chads? You know, the thing where some people couldn't figure out that you had to poke the entire piece of paper out.

"In Miami it was discovered after the election that the punch card machines in some areas had not be cleaned for eight years and the voters had difficulty dislodging the chads."

Note that the voting machine company themselves said the the machines had to be cleaned regularly, or the votes wouldn't be counted properly.

2. Remember where some people voted for multiple people on their paper ballot and were disqualified? Sure, maybe they were purposely trying to throw their vote away. More likely they couldn't figure out how to use a PENCIL properly.

You mean the famous Palm-beach butterfly ballot? The one where George Bush was the first name on the list, and to vote for him you punched the first hole, and Al Gore was the second name on the list, and to vote for him you had to punch the third hole? Yes, if you maybe call an election worker and ask-- I suppose an ordinary person might be able to figure this one out, that punching the second hole meant you're actually voting for a name on the next page of the ballot.

That "take tax money from all for the benefit of a subset of taxpayers" is the very definition of Public Policy. The only form of taxation which wouldn't follow that rule would be some incredibly pedantic (and probably unworkable) implementation of Communism. Can you cite an example where tax money (or even non-tax money, for that matter) is spent in a way which does not benefit one sub-group over another?

On a national level, defense, the Interstate system (which was funded as a defense project), basic science research, the list goes on. These don't benefit everyone directly but they do at least benefit everyone indirectly. Municipal wi-fi benefits a relatively wealthy segment of the population (those who can afford laptops and, to a lesser extent, those who can afford computers generally) at the disproportionate expense of those who cannot afford those fancy toys, and who don't derive indirect benefits either (so far no one's proposed a believable way in which municipal wi-fi benefits the poor, it's just a neat toy for Slashdotters and business people).

More to the point (and I meant to put this in my previous post) it's not even really needed most places. As I drive around DC or Baltimore, I can pick up any number of wireless access points that are open for use (deliberately, although there are at least as many that are just left unsecured). Even in my small town in suburban Maryland, I know of at least two places with public wireless Internet and those are just the ones I've been to that have it posted on the door. The market pressure to put wireless access in is pretty strong where it makes sense to do so, and it tends to avalanche -- one business does it, and others follow to keep up and not lose their customers (who, in fact, tend to be the ones with disposable income as noted above, and are thus valuable customers worth keeping around).

WiFi is unregulated spectrum. You have no guarantee, and no right to demand, that anyone else reserve any portion of that spectrum for your usage.

That's true, but that's exactly why municipal wireless access drives free-market access away. There are no guarantees in a market without a government network, but that applies equally to everyone. If a competitor stomps on your channel, you at least know it affects their revenue in the same way it does yours and can usually come to a mutually beneficial agreement. A government network doesn't have to make accommodation with its competitors, though -- it's funded by tax money, so it's going to be there regardless. You end up with a municipal wireless network and nothing else (not even private free APs, because why pay for bandwidth of your own if you can just use what's already there?)

And it doesn't need to be expensive, or necessarily impacting on scarch spectrum. Many muncipal network projects aim, for example, to lay pennies-per-meter fiber along side thousands-of-dollars-per-foot water and sewer lines (utilizing the same rights-of-way) which need to be run into every home anyway. The legislation many Carriers are proposing would make that particular economic efficiency illegal.

That's still a tough call. Universal network access is a lot harder to derive universal benefit from than it looks -- Blacksburg, VA made a lot of noise about becoming the first "electronic village" around 1994 or so, and the whole idea went nowhere according to friends of mine who lived there at the time (although the BEV website is still around). Who owns that fiber network, and for what purpose? Is the municipality going to provide telephone or network service over it? Is the fact that they've laid their own going to mean rather than let a telco lay fiber, they'll mandate that the telco use and pay for the municipal fiber? Without knowing more about a specifical municipal setup we can't know if it's equitable for everyone or not, and even then our definitions of "equitable" may differ.

Nevermind...I'll make it easy:

http://arts.bev.net/roperldavid/politics/PartyCont rol.htm

MAM (matter/antimatter) reactions are much more complex than the simplistic answer that site gives. Think about what a particle accelerator does, like the Fermilab proton-antiproton collider or the SLAC electron-positron collider. They produce a whole zoo of exotic particles, such as the recently discovered top quark in the 1990's, from matter-antimatter collisions.

In a matter-antimatter reactor for power, you're probably combining hydrogen and antihydrogen. Let's just consider the proton-antiproton interaction as over 99% of the mass is in that pair of particles. The most likely result of a proton/antiproton collision at low energies is a bunch of pions. While neutral pions can decay into photons (energy), charged pions cannot due to conservation of charge and have to decay into muons plus neutrinos. Muons will eventually decay into electrons plus more neutrinos. The neutrinos end up carrying off over half the mass-energy you started with.

Even in the ideal situation where all the resulting electrons and muons find corresponding antiparticles in the reaction chamber and annhilate, the efficiency is around 40%. That's very unlikely and real designs calculate closer to a 10% efficiency which is still great compared to fusion reactors.

Oh, and here's a calculation for the ideal case.

Unfortunately, your description is still pretty accurate. It is nothing but a hick town, always has been, always will be. The largest employer is the University, and the second is Walmart. On the other hand, from what I've heard, the University has a good computer science program, although I've never felt any desire to try it.

I worked there from Mar. 1999 - Aug. 2000, so I'm not sure if they've changed the pricing scheme or not. I'm also not 100% positive that it was $40 a month. When I was involved, we were planning, and I left either during, or shortly after the fiber was strung. We knew we had to be comparable to cable modem in terms of price, but had to be faster (obviously). Phase 2 was going to connect the hospital to the university, which would then connect to the rest of the town. (For those who haven't been to Lock Haven, the hospital is on top of a hill, and the town is about a mile west down in a valley with the Susquehanna river. The University is right in the middle, if you draw a line between the Hospital and City Hall.) I'm not sure if they ever got that far or not.

As of June of 2000, there were only 2 other such projects in the country, and the only one I can think of is Blacksburg Electronic Village in Blacksburg, Virginia. I guess it was just too expensive to try it in a larger city, but if I had a cool million or so (I'd do it for free, as long as a VC gave me enough money to spend), I'd go for it. I'm sure there are lots of companies in the country that would sell their souls for a 10mb connection for $40 a month.

I should also point out that the 10mb connection was shared 50-50 with the school district, which worked out well because the school district would use most of the bandwidth between 8am and 3pm, and the rest of the time was peak for the ISP. When I left, we had around 4500+ subscribers at $12 a month (give or take... special prices and all), so that was enough to pay for the relatively large pipe.

Hydrostatic shock as it's called, is a myth. Yes, some energy from a bullet can be transfered in the form of a shockwave, but it's such a small percentage as to be discounted.

The only place of any authority I've herd the term mentioned it from the USAF gunnery range training personel, who claimed that the main gun in the A-10 warthog had enough energy to actually do this.

Now, I'm not saying if they're right or wrong, but to their credit, there is more possibility of it being true in this case, then from say, small arms fire, since the weapon they're talking about fires 30mm depleted uranium shells, designed to kill fully armored tanks from the air.

Other than the word of the gunnery instructors, I have no evidence to back up this being anything more than a myth either, though it is far more likley to be true than small arms.

Just out of curiosity, I looked up the weight of the depleted uranium shells (0.74844 kg or 1.65 Lbs), and their muzzle velocity (1067 m/s or 3500 Ft/s).

Then I converted the weight into grains and fed that into the calculator here. I got a result of 314102.56 Ft-Lbs. Convert that to joules and you get 425,865.873284 joules. Sigvigantly more than the 500 joules at the muzzle quoted for a 9mm hand gun shell.

Does this make it possible to have hydrostatic shock with this gun? I have no idea. I couldn't find the formulas. But we are talking about something with almost 1000 times the energy here. If it's not happening with that, it's not happening with anything.

This is what happens when I post right after waking up. I Rambel on without ever making a point.

Que será será.

Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, VA, has worked with city leaders to install 10Mbs Ethernet connections throughout the entire city. If you want to find a plan that will provide fast, inexpensive connectivity to the entire community (including students living off campus), I'd start poking around at www.bev.net, especially the BEV Digital Library, which tells you exactly how to plan and implement such a system.

Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, VA, has worked with city leaders to install 10Mbs Ethernet connections throughout the entire city. If you want to find a plan that will provide fast, inexpensive connectivity to the entire community (including students living off campus), I'd start poking around at www.bev.net, especially the BEV Digital Library, which tells you exactly how to plan and implement such a system.

This might seem pretty obvious, but if you're trolling /. for name recognition in the geek community, you might at least pay lip service to the plank in your platform. If Open Source ranks behind the marketing terms "sustainable growth, protection of our environment, improving quality of life, building a stronger school/community relationship and improving the economic status of all city residents" and is just tossed in "among other things", why bother to bring it up? If, on the other hand, it is something you care about, your constituency is probably down the road in Blacksburg.

The details of the implimentation of the original BEV project are still available.

Boucher does represent Virginia's "Silicon Valley", but it's Southwestern Virginia, not Northern Virginia ("Virginia's Technology Corridor", so say the interstate signs :) ).

He's the congressional representative for the ninth district of Virginia, which happens to include Blacksburg, VA, home of Virginia Tech, and an awful lot of innovation. Blacksburg is also the home of The Blacksburg Electronic Village, which was a fairly early (circa 1993) project to bring widespread access to the community (ethernet in apartments, etc.). Finally, Blacksburg is home to Cliff.

Interestingly, Blacksburg is also home to BizNet Technologies, Inc., who built BOES (Borderless Order Entry System) for DE Technologies, whom you may remember from this slashdot article on an egregious patent for international commerce. So this latest legislation is definitely a feather in his cap, and an indicator of his continued integrity. It's nice to see that he regards the people as his constituency, not the businesses.

Boucher seems quite friendly to the consumers' side of technology, and, as congressional representatives go, he's been a pretty good one (I'll vote for him again, when given the chance). His record of late shows a committment to undoing some of the boneheadedness that seems to be inherent in the system. He was instrumental in the reactive legislation to undo the "work for hire" clause the RIAA's PAC slipped into the satellite act. He's working with Carl Malamud on the open source tax credit proposal. To use the vernacular, he rocks.

Eek. Did I just say a Congressman was cool?

Blacksburg, VA is the home of Virginia Tech. We were a testbed for AT&T to see what would happen if a small town got connected. For example, the flower shop has a web page, as does the local cd store. I have a direct 10baseT ethernet connection to my ISP via the ethernet port in the wall of my apartment.

Reader's Digest has done stories on us entitled, "The Most Wired Town In America". Oddly, we're not even mentioned on that page.

Check out the Blacksburg Electronic Village if you care ;)