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Ooops. That's Illudium Q-36 - Not Plutonium - for the Explosive Space Modulator.

It still obstructs my view of Venus!

Trinitron was invented to avoid paying royalties on the original shadow-mask design. They ended up with a cleared, brighter picture than the original.

I suppose nowadays somebody that didn't invent anything would have patented "sending TV pictures in colour" and everyone would have had to pay royalties to them.

Sure, but the Pfhor have got an interstellar navy with plasma weapons, powered armor, transporters, and cybernetic slaves with more plasma weapons, not to mention the possibility of making our sun go nova.

Irrational optimism

http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1838976

http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=91182

Or at least, as relevant as the average lie about this topic is to every topic it is posted in. Idiots.

http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=653343 Not exactly 32 bit color, but I think we can oblige your Screen of Death color wishes to a degree.

The worst part about all this electoral confusion is that blaming the electoral college is how you make sure the system never changes. The electoral college is based on squarely in the constitution and would be a major undertaking to change. However the constitution has nothing at all to do with how each state allocates there votes. That can be addressed on a state by state level. Currently most states are winner take all. Which means that a thousand or so voters (or the fraud perpetrated on a thousand or so voters) can decide millions of peoples worth of vote. If all the states switched to proportional voting then the margins for how much the popular vote can differ from the results would decrease. It would also severely reduce the rewards for disenfranchising voters, and candidates would have to do a better job of appealing to the majority.

While I basically agree with you, I think it's important to realize that changing to proportional allocation of electors is also often against a state's self interest. Basically, when the state votes for president as a block it has much more power and is more likely to get candidate attention (and promises). This might not be immediately clear, but you can look here for a good explanation of what influence the electoral college (under the winner-takes-all system currently used in most states) has based on the Banzhaf power index. Another point is that in any state with a clear majority for one party, it is against the interests of their party to switch to proportional allocation of electors. The issue of party power might be resolved by making a pact among many states (with different party dominance) to do it, but you'd still be faced with the fact that it would simply make some states less powerful.

Still, you're correct that changing the electoral college is even less likely.

1 Kings 7:23 "He made the Sea of cast metal, circular in shape, measuring ten cubits from rim to rim and five cubits high. It took a line of thirty cubits to measure around it." or "And he made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one brim to the other: it was round all about, and his height was five cubits: and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about."

While the Bible doesn't actually state the nature of pi, and a cubit is an extremely rough unit anyway, it's amusing to note that if you properly define cubit as being a fixed length and assert that the word circular refers to a near-perfect circle, the units just don't work out unless you redefine space, and along with it, Pi. Putting the "fun" back in "fundies".

http://everything2.com/index.pl?node=Pi%20in%20the%20Bible

Any "Church" that charges for its teachings and also has them copyrighted to prevent free distribution is not a church it's a scam at best and a dangerous cult at worst.

Germany has stated that "...the chief purpose of Scientology is not religious, but economical in nature...", which is probably the closest thing to consider. And don't forget that both Tom Cruise and John Travolta are members of that outfit. (I wouldn't even call it Cult...)

And the myth as it seems that there was a wager between Heinlein and Hubbard about starting a religion, it seems to be half-true. But I don't think that Heinlein ever planned on catching up on starting a religion... He would probably gotten himself into FSF or some other outfit instead with his statement of "Pay it forward" if he had been born at a later date. (Today it's more than 100 years since Heinlein was born, he was born 7 July 1907!)

Especially the "Pay it forward" approach is important. Even if you do someone a service and that person isn't able to return the favor you can always set the "pay it forward" approach to the problem.

The way of the leaf is not for everyone, but to those who choose to accept it...

Personally, I currently have a court case and around 8 or 9 knife cuts on my arms from an incident similar to this recently. I didn't stoop to his level, he decided to throw a few punches before I struck back, and when he realised he couldn't defeat me he pulled the weapon.

The text of a legal document sets forth a demand, a contract, etc. The writing is not creative, it is just a listing of facts or positions. I was told this by one of the top partners at WSGW (top legal firm in Silicon Valley) when he advised me to copy another company's contract. The formatting of the contract (e.g. the forms you can buy at a stationer's store or download pdfs online) is creative layout - you can't just photocopy the contract and use it as that is a copyright infringement. But if you want to make your own form with a different layout and using the exact same words, that is perfectly legal.

Of course, lawyers can CLAIM copyright on their legal documents, but that doesn't mean they are correct. Lawyers make false claims all the time, when it suits them or suits their case. Recently the RIAA made a claim that it is illegal to rip music from your own CDs to listen to that music on different devices that you own. In the 1974 Supreme Court ruling in Sony VS Universal Studios, this type of personal use copying was ruled as fair use, but that didn't stop the RIAA from making this new outrageous claim.

Come on, no American is going to know Mordecai Vanunu

You give them your personal details (name, address, phone number, etc) and get a card that you use at checkout to get discounts. Then they track everything you purchase, and this results in a number of interesting things happening. You get targeted junk mail from them and all of their business associates. Your purchasing is tracked, so you can get investigated, arrested or fired from your job because you bought the wrong thing at the wrong time. http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1755043&displaytype=printable

Remember, in the US, we elect through the electoral college... So, how much is your vote worth? At the extreme ends, Wyoming, which has the least number of people for a state gets 3 electoral votes for about 500,000 people (0.0006%), whereas California has 55 for 38 million people (0.00001%). Therefore, for every 1 vote for a Republican in Wyoming, 60 votes for a Democrat in California are needed to cancel each other out. And this mathematician wants to make it more "fair" by giving more votes to smaller states?

First of all, the TFA is addressing representation in the House of Representatives, not in the electoral college, where the disproportionate representation of small states is mainly due to the electors they get for their Senate seats. Secondly, while I too used to believe that the disproportionality you're talking about was a problem, I have since read a very interesting article that treats the problem using something called the Banzaf Power Index to assess how much power people in each state actually get through the process. This is a more rational way of comparing the power of people in different states, and it shows that effectively many people in small states do not have disproportionate power in the process. Now, this analysis doesn't show that the current system is fair, it simply shows that it's biased in a different way than you suggest and, in fact, tends to give more power to people who live in larger states, because the large voting block of electors (in states where they all cast their votes for the same candidate) is more powerful.

In any case, if you're concerned with people having disparate power in the federal government depending on what state they live in, the real problem is obviously going to be representation in the Senate. Since representation in the Senate has no proportionality built into it at all, and the Senate is at least as powerful as the House, the disproportionate power of people in less populous states over congressional legislation has to be the most serious departure from equal representation. But even if we could all agree that that's bad, it's probably unlikely to change since it would require an amendment to the constitution that must be ratified by 3/4 of the states; people are unlikely to support drastically reducing their own power. Just look at how hard it has been for the people of DC simply to get representation at all.

Stop sniggering. You know it's now called Urectum.

Dude.. Microwaves are soo yesterday. These days its all about running linux on a dead badger.

In one issue of the Ron Paul Survival Report, which he had published since 1985, he called former U.S. representative Barbara Jordan a "fraud" and a "half-educated victimologist." In another issue, he cited reports that 85 percent of all black men in Washington, D.C., are arrested at some point: "Given the inefficiencies of what D.C. laughingly calls the 'criminal justice system,' I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal." And under the headline "Terrorist Update," he wrote: "If you have ever been robbed by a black teenaged male, you know how unbelievably fleet-footed they can be."

Can one of you idiots supporting Ron Paul please attempt to explain away comments like that? Because the rest of us can't get enough of the entertainment provided by your stupidity.

source

That's one of oldest trolls/meme's around here. http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1391352

At risk of stating the obvious, this won't get anywhere near as popular as Wikipedia because everyone can't edit any article (thereby keeping the articles up-to-date and reaching decisions by consensus so ensuring accuracy)--although I do suspect that Google will be able to develop a better interface--Wikimedia is in desperate need of developers to work on RFEs.

An on-line encyclopedia model where articles are owned has been tried many times before by the likes of ODP/DMoz spin-off, the Open Encyclopedia Project, and Slashdot spin-off, Everything2. In fact, nearly all the online encyclopedias except Wikipedia have some kind of article ownership even if in some cases it isn't absolute (including Wikipedia predecessor, Nupedia, of course, which was abandoned when it was realised how successful the anyone-can-edit model they were trialing was).

Commission

The last bit of data would suggest they were on commission in 2002.

Still on commission?

Stills looks like they are.

For more on radioshack sucking visit radioshackstucks

In A Deepness in the Sky, Vernor Vinge posited Programmer Archaeologists would replace all new development. http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=760521

Thanks, I already know Python.

In A Deepness in the Sky, Vernor Vinge posited Programmer Archaeologists would replace all new development. http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=760521

"Like you don't open a double-A battery, you just plug [the reactor] in and it does its chemical thing inside of it. You don't ever open it or mess with it."

Uh huh... Nuclear reactions are not chemical in nature... spokesperson without a clue.

But on a side note, am I the only one who thought of Asimov's Foundation series, when the Foundationers had nuclear reactors the size of walnuts???

Seriously, though I remember something similar made in Japan that would power a remote city in Alaska for 30 years without pollution.

Yay! Go Nukular!

Be careful: 300mg is enough to kill an elephant.

Maybe we can call it Everything2.

I welcome our Next Tenants... whatever.

Think of ourselves as a well succeeded cluster of cells. Think of the cell as a collection of proto-organisms.

We are an undefined life form. Trying to get out of the shell.

Mankind, shoal. Swarm, individual.

Collective consciousness is far beyond particular will.

He studied city planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design for a year, leaving before completing the program

I'm not sure that WoW is actually a bad leadership training ground.

But the claim of those who so very badly want games to be "relevant" somehow is that it's an excellent leadership training ground.

According to the breathless prose of TFA, gamers "naturally think outside the box and possess a unique set of skills that have been developed and honed during hours of game play." Which is hooey: even a MMORPG is a box, and the truly unique skills of computer games are things like rocket jumps, which are not very useful in the real world.

(Of course, TFA also claims that "Strategy is more about vision and less about planning ...more about being creative and intuitive and less about being rational and precise." And that the game America's Army "gives recruits a realistic insight into the business of modern warfare". The authors are clearly not in a close relationship with consensual objective reality.)

Is sitting on your butt interacting via a network a to fulfill arbitrary imaginary goals a better way to learn leadership than helping teach karate classes? Or running a poetry workshop? Or getting a bunch of people together for a charity event? Or even just spending an evening in a bar, listening to random people tell their stories and coming to understand their thoughts?

Games can be fun. You can even learn lessons from them with real-world applications - American political leaders would be well-advised to learn the fundamentals of Go, and come to understand the futility of throwing more resources into a doomed scenario.

But the idea the computer games are the best thing ever, some radical new path to skill and wisdom and understanding, is bunkum of the highest purity.

Why don't we try to destroy tropical cyclones by nuking them?

This seems as good a time as any to link to "Guns don't kill people, robots kill people." http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1449753
Read on for a true story of a man, the CIA, and a robot named kill -9

Ah, a variation on the good old "we can neither confirm nor deny" Glomar Response

If your ideal is everything, use everything.

1. It's not a good idea to make available images of currency - especially high resolution images - which this campaign is doing with their pictures of the penny. The Mint/Bank of Canada have a number of tools to control what images are distributed and copyright/trademark infringement is just the first tool. This is just the penny after all, not Toonies or not 50$ bills.

2. Everybody wants a piece of the GST, it's an ugly issue. The municipalities didn't properly cover their asterisks when they launched this campaign, despite have communication with the mint before the launch. It's no surprise that the gov swings the hammer left too them. Hitting the campaign in the pocketbook, while dirty, is still part of the game.

3. The Canadian Mint is actually a business. They make currency for other countries, and until recently had an edge of the world in the technology used to mint coins. Now they are losing business to upgraded mints in Europe and elsewhere, but that doesn't make them any less concerned with profits and intellectual property.

I suspect this case is politically motivated, but I don't mind the mint cracking down on the use of Canadian Currency IP. Money/Currency is too important to allow random muddying of it's image and IP. There's a reason you don't photocopy money, or scan it, or draw Mr. Spock on 5$ bills - it's not some random meme but an Instrument of Trade. Even the littlest penny.

I had read three supposedly fact-packed paragraphs at the top and still didn't know what it is. For a useful down-to-the-point introduction, with the experience of three-minute googling I'd recommend those:
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/reductio+ad+absurdum
http://everything2.com/index.pl?node=reductio%20ad%20absurdum

I want to point at one more accomplishment over the last few yearsthat really deserves a standing ovation: on 9/11/2001, Slashdot was the only major news feed on the web that didn't crash due to overload, and this on technology and bandwidth that was way way WAY behind what we have now.

I had the same fundamental problem with the redundancy of TCWWW. I swore several times, and never followed through. To start a web site that always redirected to http://qqq.domainname.com/ . Note this also "solves" the cookie problem. ;-)

Of course, I never ended up doing... ah well. Good times back in th elate '90s. Oh and my Everything(2) node http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=383 registration date makes me feel fairly old too. I jumped on when the DNS information got leaked and got myself a nice "RudeDude" graphic rendered before the box crashed and the feature was turned off.

Does this remind anyone else of the short fiction story I don't know, Timmy, Being God is a Big Responsibility?

I'm not from New Zealand, but I think with a name like "Police Act" that the law should roughly state: The beatings will continue until morale improves.

It's worth reading this rant on that popular joke slogan.

I believe that pocket is for a watch not change/lipstick.

See: http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=146309

Trumpet WinSock? Now that brings back memories. I even remember how the Internet was already exploding to a wider audience when Windows 95 came out. Yet Win95 completely missed the boat. Anyone remember the original "Microsoft Network"? Faced with the competition of the Internet it bombed badly in its original incarnation. A good rundown of the history of Microsoft and the Internet can be found here: http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1519892 I think it is clear that the Internet and the Search Engines were already on their way before Microsoft even came close to catching up.

http://www.propellerhead.tv/2006/03/unwinnable_fre e.html
http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=660235

Or, if you dislike ACLU/IJ/etc for whatever reasons, you can strike on 9/11/07, as part of a grassroots movement which has been endorsed by several organizations but is controlled by none of them... and which could mean the start of something big.

Just to expand on that: Sugar contains about 16KJ per gram. A Li-Ion battery can store up to 150 Watt-Hours per Kilogram (source)... which, if I'm doing the conversion right, is 150 W-h/kg * 3600 seconds/h * 0.001 kg/gram = 540 joules per gram - about 1/30th the density of sugar.

Sugar is stable because you need to input more energy in order to release the stored potential. This isn't conductive to a battery (no pun intended) since it would either have to output power all the time, recycling some of the output to maintain the process, or contain some other energy source to start the process when you need it (ie: a battery... and somehow I find the idea of a "battery powered battery" entertaining.)

Catalysts can greatly reduce the energy needed to trigger the reaction of course, sometimes low enough that the energy in ambient temperatures is enough (making the reaction appear spontaneous). By definition, this ruins the "stablility" of sugar as an energy storage medium, and you're right back where you started - the possability of an uncontrolled release of energy, only with 30 times more energy per unit mass.
=Smidge=