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It's not like there is really there much else to do in Montana, anyway.

Only if you're a couch potato. But if you have interests and a physical activity level slightly higher than the average /. ectomorph/endomorph, it's hard to be bored. Montana is home to two of the most impressive parks in the world (Yellowstone & Glacier NPs), hiking, biking, rafting, archaeological/paleontological stuff, skiing, etc...

BIG! I'm no volcanologist but I do know that the ground above this volcano is seriously distended already, and has been for some time. And that this is no ordinary volcano. I suppose the big question is there anything anyone can do to stop it? Is there a patch or anything? Can we just lance the surface and let some of the lava out? But it will be really interesting to see how long they encourage tourists to visit the place!

One of the advantages of living in the city was that there are no deer.

I live in NY and we have history all over the area i live. Granted its not 800 years old its still amazing.


within a 20 mile radius around my house I can go to Brotherhood Winery, the oldest Winery in america.
My good friend lives in a house older than our country (1765)
I can go to the home where Franklin D. Rosevelt grew up
I can go to many different battlegrounds from the American Revolution I can go to Washington's Headquartersin Newburgh on the hudson.
i got the Hudson River, and West Point.
And I work at a National Historic Hotel The Mohonk Mountian House which has ALOT of history for such a place


You see where I am going. I may not have the history of Europe, (Dont get me wrong i would LOVE to go out there, Amsterdam is nice this time of year) But there are so many things here and this is only in a 20 mile radius around my house in a small town.

If i did my math right that would be 459.651343 libraries of congress
http://www.cr.nps.gov/nr/travel/wash/dc79.htm

http://www.nps.gov/grca/naturescience/index.htm
"Did You Know?
The more recent Kaibab limestone caprock, on the rims of the Grand Canyon, formed 270 million years ago. In contrast, the oldest rocks within the Inner Gorge at the bottom of Grand Canyon date to 1.84 billion years ago. Geologists currently set the age of Earth at 4.5 billion years."

(This is gonna hose my karma, but it's something I feel strongly about so damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead! )

There is a major benefit that Java brings to the table versus PHP and that is security. My inside voice says that the only way to secure a PHP webapp is to delete it. My outside voice says that if you've just got to have a particular PHP package, then fine - that particular PHP package you can have, along with an SSL cert, a site-wide ACL and off-machine logging so that *WHEN* the app gets hacked, you know who to go after. :P

Some folks don't think that PHP has anything intrinsically wrong with it, that PHP is just trying hard to be an incredibly helpful language, that it's not a bad language - it's just drawn that way. I don't think so. It's got a history of stuff like: "Oh, you provided some URL parameters? Allow me to convert those into variables automagically!" (Yes, yes - this has since been changed but it was around for a long, long time and is still available if you set the proper config variable) "You want to talk to a database? Please, feed me a string and I'll do whatever you want me to do. In fact, if you give me several things to do, I'll do them all!" (Hooray for SQL injection) And on it goes.

I'm sure a case could be made that schlock code written in any language can be abused - but in the typical Java (or Perl, or Ruby, or Python, or some other non-PHP language of your choice) framework you've got to work a lot harder to create exploitable things. PHP is entirely too damn easy to be bitten by unforeseen circumstances - witness the same vulnerabilities being lovingly replicated over and over and over in lots of different projects.

In closing, yes it takes more up-front effort to bang out a simple CRUD app in Java versus what the average tutorial or manual would tell you to do in PHP. But the Java version isn't vulnerable while the PHP version is and will require a net greater expenditure of effort to understand and fix the problem. And that's not talking about the energy burned up by the poor shmucks running the code and having to clean up and rebuild after the app gets owned. (No, I'm not still bitter phpBB, Gallery, Wordpress and PHP-Nuke. Not at all. I don't even miss my data anymore. Nor do I regret having to deal with my account being used to attack other machines. Not one bit.)

I'll avoid any commentary about which agency is getting the short end of the stick, they're both worthwhile programs and IMHO good uses of tax dollars. I just want to make the facts clear.

Considering that we give NASA less than we give the National Park Service, it's utterly dumbfoundingly breathtaking what they are able to accomplish.

It also doesn't hurt that the shuttle software engineers are a totally different breed. Or more to the point, the way they write software is totally different. This is a good writeup about why.

You are exactly right. I would be all for young kids having a cell phone w/ 2 buttons only- one for the police, and one for my cell.
Another question is how young is too young to be out alone. Until at least 4 or 5 years old, I had my eagle eyes on my kids at all times (Or my wife was watching them). If a kid is 3 years old and out wandering around alone, is the issue whether they have a cell, or whether they should be out alone at all?
On a related note- I have to get this off my chest re cell phones. I ride my bike almost everyday on the Ohio and Erie Canal towpath trail. I know everyone has stories about cell phones driving them crazy- but yesterday, not once, but TWICE, I was almost hit by people riding while on their cell phones. I am used to seeing people on their cells while walking. I have seen tons of parents out with their kids in an amazing national park ignoring their kids and the surroundings while on the phone. But seriously, it is the people riding unsteadily with one hand on a crowded (with horses, cyclists, joggers, runners and hikers)trail that make me crazy. Sorry for the rant.

Because this program is a charter school of a school district, the teachers' union sees it as a threat similar to brick-and-mortar charter schools. Every student in a charter school program, virtual or physical, means one less student in traditional public schools. Per-pupil funding follows the students, threatening the status quo favored by the incumbents.

Image

Pygmy populations derived from elephants or mammoths are known from several locations throughout the world, including the islands of Malta and Sicily in the Mediterranean, several islands in southeast Asia, and Wrangel Island in the Arctic.

Nova did a nice little show about the Wrangel ones, if I remember right.

Populations of wooly mammoths did indeed evolve into the "pygmy" mammoth.

Pygmy populations derived from elephants or mammoths are known from several locations throughout the world, including the islands of Malta and Sicily in the Mediterranean, several islands in southeast Asia, and Wrangel Island in the Arctic

Nova did a nice program on the questions about the little hairy elephants a few years ago, I think concentrating on the ones on Wrangel.

If you want to go a little further down, Abraham Lincoln publicly stated that he had no intrest in slavery either way, it was none of his business. He engaged int eh civil war to hold together the Union and nothing else. His later decision to emancipate the slaves in the area under martial law was commendable, but it wasn't part of his agenda,

That's an interesting way of looking at things, but a few facts lend itself to a different interpretation. First off, the Republican Party was an abolitionist party. It was founded to be abolitionist. Lincoln could not have been possibly been nomimated as a Presidential candidate if he wasn't abolitionist. It would be as absurd as Democrats nominating someone who was pro-life or Republicans pro-choice, it just is not going to happen.

Furthermore, Lincoln had plenty of quotes against Slavery:

http://www.nps.gov/liho/slavery/al01.htm

"The institution of slavery is founded upon both injustice and bad policy" 1837
"I have always hated slavery" 1858
"I believe the declaration that all men are created equal is the great fundamental principal" 1858
"Those who deny freedom to others, do not deserve it for themselves" 1859

So, basically, from the beginning of his career, all the way up to and including the civil war, which included being the first Presidential Candidate by an abolitionist party, Lincoln was anti-slavery.

Lincoln's civil war spin about 'preserving the union' was, well, a lie. The civil war was always about slavery. Lincoln lied to the American People about why the civil war was being fought, and he pretty much did it for his own religious beliefs. He overruled his generals, he alienated Europe, and in fact, at the height the war, one of his ex-generals actually ran for President against him, and it was only a set of victories for the Union that handed Lincoln his re-election. Fancy that. The one thing I don't get about Lincoln, is why he made his disasterous choice of Vice President.

Find the link between PIGS and APES and you'll have something.

I think I just did.

How many people do you know that are murdered in a public theater?

Science is concerned with gaining knowledge about the natural world by observation. To do their job, scientists systematically describe phenomena, classify observations, and reach conclusions. This often involves controlled and replicable laboratory experiments, such as those in chemistry or psychology, but it may also consist of detailed observation without experiment. Some fields cannot solely rely on experiments; these are called historical sciences. Geology, evolutionary biology and archeology are historical sciences that deal with past events that no longer can be directly observed. The evidence left behind, however, can be studied to reconstruct what took place (Ashmore and Sharer 1996:10).

I have also been trained as a Wilderness First Responder and can tell you that at least "extremely thirsty" people have such an incredibly deranged world view that definitions of "pain" get thrown right out the window.

There are many examples of what biologists term 'gigantism' on islands.

There are even more examples of dwarfism on islands because of the low energy environment and relative lack of predators. Pygmy mammoths are one good example. The recently found hobbits are another.

As a result of which, 90% of our middle class would be being paid substinance level wages, working 12-16 hour days to be able to eat...

... could I interrupt a second here? The British, at least, were empowered to do exactly that with the Irish, after taxing all their land away. Taxes have nothing to do with man's inhumanity to man. That happens both with and without taxes, though more often with taxes.

My real problem with taxes is corruption. That is, the real purpose of taxes as we actually see it, is to create raidable nest eggs that corrupt government officials can divert to their own assets. The more taxes, the more corrupt officials are supported. The less taxes, the less they are supported.

I have yet to see a single tax-based fund that isn't usually mismanaged and often outright stolen from. That includes Social Security, road building, school construction, Government pension funds, school operating funds, NASA... the list goes on.

Okay, thank you. Please go on...

ANP, in Bar Harbor, has these at the summit of Cadillac Mountain. One of the major attractions at ANP, these urinals get a lot of use. No noticeable smell and the rangers seemed happy about the reduced maintenance.

Yes, I went to a national park and asked about the urinals.

It's not. It's in New Jersey, despite what the Supreme Court likes to think.

http://www.nps.gov/stli/

Located on 12-acre Liberty Island in New York Harbor, the Statue of Liberty was a gift of international friendship from the people of France to the people of the United States and is one of the most universal symbols of political freedom and democracy. The Statue of Liberty was dedicated on October 28, 1886 and was designated a National Monument on October 15, 1924. The Statue was extensively restored in time for her spectacular centennial on July 4, 1986.

Liberty Island is federal property located within the territorial jurisdiction of the State of New York.

Sounds good, I think we should extend the homestead act to their claims. After they manage to farm the lunar surface they deserve it.

That area is nowhere near San Francisco; it's a 5 hour drive north. Happens to be my favorite vacation area right there at Lassen Volcanic National Park http://www.nps.gov/lavo/lassen_volcanic_national_p ark_home.htm, one of the more beautiful areas around (and not 'cow-fouled'). While there I had taken a side trip to the radio telescopes there in the past. They used to be bigger ones owned by one of the universitys. They were removed to make way for this project. Anyway, the area is a nice place to visit and Hat Creek is awesome.

I just had one of those suckers go through the washing machine a while back. Still works.

I've lost count how many times my little 128 MB Dell has made the trip through the washing machine. It works fine. My 512 MB Lexar drive had to be replaced when I was troubleshooting someone else's computer and it stopped working. Lexar replaced it without any problems. Now, if we had that scale of a problem. Take my advice. Don't worry, don't keep anything on you except your driver's license. You'll be taken care by the red cross and the feds will have declared marshal law and everyone in the nation will be issued biometric ID cards anyway. If your rich, you should have a vacation home in an out of the way local that isn't on anyone's hit list. If you aren't rich, the best thing to do is try not to live in any major high profile cities or political points. I'd think Mt. RushMore http://www.nps.gov/moru/ and The Statue of Liberty http://www.nps.gov/stli/ would be better targets than anything else though.

Goal isn't to kill people. It is to creat mass choas, panic and terror. I'd target New York City's Water Supply System http://www.nyc.gov/html/dep/html/watersup.html rather than the city itself. The panic and terror that would create would be much more than if NYC was wiped off the face of the map.

I just had one of those suckers go through the washing machine a while back. Still works.

I've lost count how many times my little 128 MB Dell has made the trip through the washing machine. It works fine. My 512 MB Lexar drive had to be replaced when I was troubleshooting someone else's computer and it stopped working. Lexar replaced it without any problems. Now, if we had that scale of a problem. Take my advice. Don't worry, don't keep anything on you except your driver's license. You'll be taken care by the red cross and the feds will have declared marshal law and everyone in the nation will be issued biometric ID cards anyway. If your rich, you should have a vacation home in an out of the way local that isn't on anyone's hit list. If you aren't rich, the best thing to do is try not to live in any major high profile cities or political points. I'd think Mt. RushMore http://www.nps.gov/moru/ and The Statue of Liberty http://www.nps.gov/stli/ would be better targets than anything else though.

Goal isn't to kill people. It is to creat mass choas, panic and terror. I'd target New York City's Water Supply System http://www.nyc.gov/html/dep/html/watersup.html rather than the city itself. The panic and terror that would create would be much more than if NYC was wiped off the face of the map.

Considering that in the US you can catch it from squirrels

Jersey is one of the Channel Islands, which are a group of islands in the English Channel, more or less.

Look everybody, don't believe a word he says.

In the first place the channel islands are off the coast of Santa Barbara, California.

Further, Jersey and Guernsey are breeds of cattle rather than islands as the OP claims.

Sheesh, he even goes as far as to claim that he was born on a cow ;-)

This site seems to disagree with you.

http://www.nps.gov/nace/oxhi/poultryi.htm

"the progenitor was a simple integrated circuit with two transistors in 1958 ... [w]e are probably at the same stage with Y-junctions"

Intel debuted the 4004, the first commodity microprocessor chip, in 1971 with 2300 transistors. That's 13 years, during which we had a space race (and Minuteman missile program) to stimulate investment. Today we have $trillions in returns on chip investment as stimulus, as well as an existing investment/manufacturing/marketing infrastructure. As well as highly useful micron-scale chips and software for design. So perhaps we're looking at a breakthrough "nanoprocessor" sometime earlier than 2028.

Coming from one of the hardest-core Linux zealots: MacIntosh. MacIntosh is about ten-heptillion evil-points behind Microsoft. They would have to resort to mass genocide just to keep up.

Nevertheless, the whole legal system needs a French-revolution-style remodeling. What happened to the Emancipation Proclamation?
http://www.nps.gov/ncro/anti/emancipation.html

Reminds me of when the government approved cutting down the oldest living thing on earth.

As a public service, here are some facts about Culberson County, Texas.

* The county seat is Van Horn.

* As you can see by the satellite photo, the rugged Guadalupe Mountains meet the barren, flat Llano Estacado.

* Culberson County includes the highest point in Texas, part of Guadalupe Mountains National Park.

* Road geeks will appreciate the significance of this fact: Van Horn is the western terminus of U.S. Highway 90.

* Due to the lack of water, tourism and mining are the only sources of income. For details on how the county's 3,407 souls bide their time while waiting for the new spaceport to be built, see the Handbook of Texas Online.

And in the tongue-in-cheek words of singer-songwriter Brian Burns:

Welcome to Texas,
Don't anybody get me wrong;
We're glad y'all came to see us,
Just don't forget to go back home.

What's the point of better architectures when Apple is moving to the brain-fucked x86 ISA? It's hard to be enthusiastic about computing when you know the beast just got a new lease on life.

Perhaps you are in the wrong business or hobby. If inconsequential details like what CPU is sitting at the heart of Apple's proprietary design causes you emotional distress you really need to reconsider your life. Assuming of course that you are not in advertising and needed the faux x86/PPC conflict. If so please continue with your distress, otherwise, have you considered forestry?

http://data2.itc.nps.gov/digest/usajobs.cfm

From http://www.nps.gov/prsf/

On October 1, 1994, the Presidio became part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Since 1998, the Presidio has been jointly managed by the National Park Service and the Presidio Trust. The Presidio Trust is a special public-private governmental agency tasked with managing most of the buildings of the Presidio and making the park financially self-sufficient by 2013.

Certain areas are rented to non-profit groups, and much is set aside for public space, but development in the Presidio is required for it to pay for itself. It is the only National Park Service unit expected to do so.

The Presidio Trust site is here.

Here are some examples...

I first saw this on the Korean war memorial in Washington DC (see images at top of that page). That one is low resolution, but a really neat effect. closeup of surface

Done. Grand "Teton" National Park

Hi! :)

1)
Um, how is teaching that "The Theory of Evolution" is a *GASP* THEORY and not a fact, insane?!? Sometimes I wonder if people actually listen to their own thoughts before speaking. Usually, I don't wonder for very long, as it becomes apparent quickly enough upon observation.

I am not a fundalmentalist, fanatic, etc. However, I do believe in Creation rather than Evolution -- not just because somebody told me so, but because of my own research over the past 20 years into both schools of thought. Obviously, your in-depth research has led you to a different conclusion. You DID do your own research, right? I don't suggest that you didn't, of course. It's just that I really, really hate having to endure listening to someone spouting someone else's passion as if it were their own, though they never bothered to delve into and make certain for themselves, whether the original speaker's words had any foundation (and whether they believed in Creation or Evolution).

Here is a story of balance: When I was in high school, I had a friend whose mother was a Biology teacher. She was very intelligent; I enjoyed our conversations. One day, in the middle of a conversation, she said, "I just don't see how you could believe in Creation. I thought you were more intelligent than that." Let me tell you, this was a slap in the face! If my world revolved only around me and my viewpoint, I could have said the same thing to her. Am I the only one who thinks this is rude (and arrogant)? There are many highly intelligent people in the world who believe one way or the other. Obviously, level of intelligence is not an indicator of whether one thinks in terms of Creation or Evolution. Equally obvious to me, is that thinking towards the one or the other is no indication as to whether someone is intelligent or not. People on one side seem often to think the other side is, at kindest, misdirected, at worst, evil spawn. :>

In reality, the ratio of idiots to geniuses in each camp is probably about the same. I have seen plenty of "lemmings" in both groups, unfortunately. Really, there is room for everyone to respect each other's right to religious freedom without the hate-mongering.

Also unfortunate, is that natural selection does not seem to be weeding out the lemmings, but rather seems to be multiplying them. I guess we will just have to wait for some Higher Up to clean up! *grin*

2)
The teacher's job is not to fill the children's minds with their whole version of truth. The teacher's job is to teach children how to learn. Along the way, they do learn some basic "pre-digested" knowledge. It is a system of efficiency (however well it may or may not work). It is a starting point. However, when I was in school, some of the best teachers were the ones who encouraged a good debate to stir the thinking juices. So, yes, I would prefer teachers to mention some of man's accomplishments, whether they were ultimately proved to be true or false. Nobody points to ... [hmm. I was going to make some comment about the Wright brothers, but found this cool link, showing a long arial history before them, which evinces my point anyway. hehe. Research is a good thing. http://www.cr.nps.gov/nr/travel/aviation/ideafligh t.htm ] *ahem* Also, not too many people are petitioning to have Nazi history removed from the books, though most people agree that their thinking was seriously flawed.

--Kejope

Actually, according to this, Hubble does routinely look at earth. It mentions that it observes no details, most likely because it is essentially focusing at infinity. I suspect it looks at large, uniform areas such as white sands, NM for calibration purposes.

The telescope is for all intents and purposes, Hubble is farsighted, designed and aberration-corrected to look at things far away. The earth is pretty close. I think Hubble would need the large equivalent of reading glasses to accommodate this. This focusing ability may be wrong, because it would be difficult to explain the good images of the moon (see this post).

Does anyone ever stop and think, "gee, where did all the fireflies go?"
or the frogs, chipmunks, birds, salamanders, butterflies, ... I could go on.
How many people know what a firefly is these days? We've decimated our ecology by removing the natural vegetation from our front and back yards in some stupid quest for the perfect lawn: uniform, monoculter, weed and pest free.
Then we wonder where all the wildlife went (we killed their homes and removed their food) or why the summers keep getting hotter every year (we've replaced shading, cooling trees with lawn and concrete, or why the air quality sucks so badly and little Timmy has lung cancer and has to breath from a fucking oxygen tank (we've polluted our lawns with chemicals pushed from an industry that doesn't give a fuck about your kids - only your money).
These genetic monstrosities (if they were ever to become even remotely possible) do nothing to restore the ecosystem that we and our animals friends rely on to survive.
Get educated about the environment and the small part you can do to restore the remaining fragments. Even your little patch of lawn can make a difference.
wild ones
green landscaping
plant conservation alliance

That number is the total number of deaths, not just those that were killed in the field of battle. That number is above 50,000.

You are wrong. Even factoring in those mortally wounded and deaths from disease, the death toll from the entire Gettysburg Campaign wouldn't even approach 50,000. You are referring to the commonly used-estimate of around 50,000 casualties in three days of battle at Gettysburg but making the common mistake of substituting deaths for all casualties.

From the NPS' Gettysburg website: "It was also the bloodiest single battle of the war, resulting in over 51,000 soldiers killed, wounded, captured or missing."

You can also look at Wikipedia's page on the Battle of Gettysburg in case you don't trust a website run by the US Government (spoiler: 51,000 casualties).

I'm guessing you got your info from here, which is also wrong.

By rapidly, do you mean 5 to 6 million years? Here is at least one discussion that reviews the geology of the Grand Canyon. And here is another, by the National Park Service. They use professional geologists to test their theories.

And, please, the next time you plan to rant about Noah's flood, please feel free to post with a user ID.

Ok, you honestly believe that a mega tsunami from some volcano in the canary islands is more likely to happen than the mega volcano that is sitting just outside seattle's city limits?

So it's a national park and not a state park, but Big Bend is big enough to get far away from technology

Its obvious you havn't been to Texas before, or if you have it was probably Houston. Texas is one of the most beautiful states in our country, and west texas is one of the most remote pricstene areas in North America. Look at some of the pictures of Big Bend National park (NPS) and tell me its the country's asshole.

OT, but FYI, Mt. St. Helens is in the very southern part of Washington State, almost in Oregon, no where close to the Seattle/Redmond area. It's a common misconception.

Many people see pictures of Mt. Rainier (which is close enough to Seattle to severely harm the city were it to violently erupt) and just assume it's Mt. St. Helens. Apparently many people think Washington state has only the one mountain. Mt. St. Helens gets all the attention because it likes to blow up more often, but Rainier is larger and more important. Neither are mountains you would want to ski.

OT, but FYI, Mt. St. Helens is in the very southern part of Washington State, almost in Oregon, no where close to the Seattle/Redmond area. It's a common misconception.

Many people see pictures of Mt. Rainier (which is close enough to Seattle to severely harm the city were it to violently erupt) and just assume it's Mt. St. Helens. Apparently many people think Washington state has only the one mountain. Mt. St. Helens gets all the attention because it likes to blow up more often, but Rainier is larger and more important. Neither are mountains you would want to ski.

What's amazing to me is that these scientists conveniently ignore the fact that the Earth's climate was warm enough during a period of time in history, where the ice receeded enough to form a land-bridge between Asia and North America.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. You've got that backwards. The Bering land bridge between Asia and Alaska formed because the Earth had grown cold enough that enough water was trapped up in glaciers that the water level receded, allowing the people to walk across the land below today's sea level. That was a likely drop of about 300 feet.

What's the explaination for that, since most of these scientists believe that we were just a bunch of monkeys during that time

We evolved from a common ancestor to monkeys. Humans didn't fully evolve into their current form until about 100,000 to 150,000 years ago. The Bering bridge last emerged above water about 70,000 years ago.

Camp Topaz here we come! I just hope they've got atleast a DS3.