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If you go to the web site, it will say "View > Source". If you click View > Source (in most browsers) you will see the source code. Scroll down a bit, and you will see an absolutely huge chunk of binary and a link to http://nickciske.com/tools/binary.php. Go to the site and translate the binary and you'll get... more binary. You have to translate it about three or four times before you get the following: 26-14-12 7-22. Take each number and subtract it from 27. Then take that number and translate it to letters. (ie, 1 is A, 2 is B, 3 is C, etc.) It spells out Amo Te, which is Latin for I Love You. As far as I know, she never found it.

You can probably understand why I'm posting this as AC.

this article on autoweek from a little over a year ago (almost to the day) talks about how bill gates and other rich folkses fought to get the porsche 959 made street legal. obviously this would have cost a tad more than a bunch of segways

Suchetha

nitrous contains more oxygen than air
Compared to liquid oxygen though, they should be pretty similar in oxygen content. The the reason nitrous oxide is used rather than liquid oxygen is that when NO2 is used as an oxidiser, the nitrogen atom that is evolved releases a large burst of energy when it forms N2. Ie:

2 N02 => N2 + 2O2 + energy.

The following is a link explaining the energy difference between an N-O bond and an N-N bond. Simple nitrogen chemistry

Oh...sorry. Wrong Genesis.

No, no you were right.

here you go strait from NASA

After doing a little digging, it turns out that Mauser is on record as saying that Canada's violent crime rate has undergone a "horrifying increase" in the last decade, despite the fact that violent crime has actually decreased 11% in that time period.

If Mauser is willing to deceive people by claiming that violent crime has increased when the readily-available facts show that violent crime has decreased, the worth of any study he is responsible for is called seriously into question. Evidence suggests "The Failed Experiment" is little more than a biased opinion piece. Too bad - I'd hoped for much more.

This is absolutely not true. The homicide rate in the United States has be falling steadily for the last several years, while the homicide rate for Canada has been increasing. John Lott has an article discussing the abysmal failure of Canada's gun control program here. Pete.

Hi! Your post was about the look of a gaming machine- You must be new to these, I can tell. Let me show you around.

The problem is of course, most all TV shows and movies produced are crap. And I dont think the SW TV show is any more or less likely to be crappy TV than any other sci-fi/fantasy show.

You should try Amish Friendship Bread, which takes 10 days to make (you're basically growing the yeast yourself from a small sample). Very tasty stuff.

Here is a good reference on the basis of church state separation. In particular look for quotes from James Madison on the subject since he was one of the principals in writing the amendment.

As I understand it the founders intent, and their statements factored in to the interpretation of the law in the courts, is to insure government does not aid or hinder religion. I would be inclined to say that attacking "In God We Trust" is probably a bit excessive but it is in fact a case where government is promoting religion and probably shouldn't. Making people pledge allegiance to a nation and God at the same time is really over the top though all the people in the U.S. who are excessively proud of their belief system will NEVER see it that way though it is obvious.

George W. Bush's faith based initiative is a sterling example of why the founders wrote the amendement. He can argue that they are social services and charities, and its OK for him to fund them with my tax dollars. Unfortunately there is a high probability that when they pull needy people in to their aid network they will promote their religious beliefs and will endeavor to convert the unfortunate souls to their religious persuasion, in fact in many cases the bible and religion is going to be the basis of their social outreach and treatment. As soon as they do that using government funding they have violated the bill of rights, no ifs, ands or buts. Religious institutions should want to disavow Federal funding since it really compromises them and it will tie there hands in their religious outreach unless they want to get sued.

"Religion is part of what makes a person."

I'm sorry but with this statement and some of the others you make me nervous and make me glad there is separation of church and state in this country.

Religion is NOT part of what makes a person unless you exercise your right to freedom of religious choice and make it so. For anyone who doesn't want to make religion part of their person IT IS NOT and our Constitution defends their right to make that choice.

Many early Americans were fleeing states were there was a dominant religion that was intertwined with the state. It inevitably resulted in discrimination against religious minorites at a minimum and more often in outright persecution. It is simply a bad thing to do because once you start it a little here and a little there it will snowball into religious persecution almost inevitably.

I don't want, and I don't think the Founding Fathers really wanted government leaders making decisions colored by religious doctrine. Certainly their religious and moral upbringing will factor in to their decision making and perhaps they might even pray or meditate on the subject but they should leave the specifics of their belief system at the door when it comes times to enter the oval office and make a decision.

George W. Bush and John Ashcroft in particular can't seem to keep their religious views apart from their government duties. I also don't want Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson influencing my government and passing laws which enforce their religious and moral doctrine. Even worse is the possibility U.S. policies in the Middle East, including waging war are colored by apocalyptic beliefs peculiar to evangelical Christians. For example one of those doctrines which is disturbing is that there must be a Jewish state in Israel to set the stage for the second coming which leads to giving Israel a blank check from the U.S. and to the U.S. taking down Iraq, Iran and Syria for no reason other than they are hostile to Israel.

As for when and where you pray I think you are right. You should be able to do it whenever and wherever you want. In fact I'm pretty sure you can. Close your eyes and quietly pray to yourself. But I don't think you really just want to pray in school or the office, you want to flaunt the fact that you are praying, get others to join in, do it out l

The last one looked gorgeous, but the plot was almost non-existent.

"I am particularly enjoying the visual effects. The script is a little weak, dost thou not think?" - Iolo (incidentally describing Every Play And Movie Ever Made[tm])

Final Fantasy movie was, at least in spirit, rather close to FF series (well, I'm not familiar with FF series in particular, but even I could spot dozens of things that were, ahem, probably typical to the genre.)

CRPGs rarely have overly complex plots either, there's mostly just recycling of the same old stuff - but at least they bother to get the nitty-gritty details different in each part. And in my opinion, that's okay, if a little bit predictable. What I don't know is what is a good plot? Before you say "unusual", I usually have to say that "usual" can also work. Details matter - often even more than the actual bigger picture. (You can get away with "they take the Ring to the Mountain and destroy it there" synopsis if you spend a thousand pages describing how it's done while keeping it interesting enough...)

Argh, I should get to sleep...

Of course, I'm also hoping for a direct to DVD release

Don't worry! What I heard is that it is direct-to-DVD. (Or, more likely considering my unfortunate geographical location, direct-to-overpriced-DVD-and-bittorrent release. =)

Don't like how creditors treat you? PAY YOUR FUCKING BILLS.

How are you supposed to do that if paying said bills will put you at risk of:

1) Not having proper food to eat.
2) Not having proper clothing to wear.
3) Not having proper shelter to live in.

Yes, one should fufill all their financial obligations, but to do so at the expense of one's health and well-being is stupid!

How can one 'PAY [THEIR] FUCKING BILLS' if they are dead, too sick, or otherwise unable to work to earn money to pay said bills? That is the inevitable outcome when one does not pay food/clothing/shelter bills first!

Then, in another thread, the poster said he got $300,000.00 in medical care to save his life. He can't 'pay in full' as his estate is only worth $70,000.00 What should he do?

To address the bigger issue....

Should the American health care system be 100% totally moved to an 'ability to pay' setup to avoid giving needed health care to 'lives not worthy to be lived' because the ones in need cannot afford the health care they need to stay alive!

Here are some 'horror stories' of such thinking

John Q (2002)

License To Kill / Hospitals reserve the right to pull your plug

Then there is the horrific true(?) story of the dying kid who was 'kicked out' out of the emergency room and left to die in an alley(?) on the side of the hospital -- anybody have a URL to that story as I wanted to link to it but couldn't find it via Google.

Enjoy Since these clowns seem to be going by file name only, I wonder if a little turn-about poisoning would be in order? A zillion files names which all point to a file with someone screaming "What the hell do you MPAA/RIAA-hireling dumb-fscks think you're doing?" That should make entertaining evidence to play for some court.

here's a website on it...

Fixed link: http://empgen.tripod.com/#English

Cineplex Odeon did this back in the early 90's. Allowing people to rent out a theater to play nintendo. It tanked, big time

If they were green women from Rigel 7, then yes!

You're probably thinking of Vladimir Smirnov (see also Fencing's Most Terrible Moment), at the 1982 world championships in Rome.

Dyirbal (an Australian Aboriginal language) has four genders. Masculine, feminine, neuter, and edible non-flesh food.

Cherokee and Arabic has three numbers. Not like 1, 2, 3; but, singular, dual, and plural.

Chinese as a spoken language does not exist. Each "dialect" (not an entirely acurate word depending on its intention) is mutually uninteligible when spoken. Hence, may be considered seperate languages. The term dialect is applied to them because they share a common writing system. A Mandarin speaker will not understand a Cantonese speaker, but can read a message from the Cantonese speaker easily.

There is some excellent info on Hal here , here and here.

Actually, of those three only Benford is actually employed as a scientist. Brin quit science for full-time writing a couple of decades ago (although he still seems to dabble a bit in various fields), and Reynolds recently did the same.

Anyone with half a brain would pick classist, because it actually has some relevance. (I suppose race sometimes has relevance, but only as a coincidental overlap with class) It's been "proven" that Mac users are smarter, and the most significant reason is that because they tend to be more expensive, and not as affordable to people without higher education. The same could apply here: people with miniscule budgets are going to be, on average, less intelligent than those with bigger ones. [insert penis joke here] ....except for the fact that the entire *economy* in Asia is much more crappy than in places like the US. So even the really smart ones will have a hard time affording a more expensive version. So Microsoft really doesn't have a "pick" - they're being pretty racist here.

As opposed to spiritual rubber, perhaps.

Here's what Gandhi actually thought about the situtation. Notice that, while 'violently' anti-violence, he conceeded that, if there ever was a just war, WWII was it, simply because of the genocide attempted by the Nazis.

And, duh, his quote is exactly what he did, against the English. He dared them to shoot him. That was the entire base of his passive resistence movement. He wasn't advocating mass suidcide because he disliked Jews, he was advocating it it was the logical extension of his non-violence policy: Allow your enemy to kill you while you do absolutely nothing wrong, and let the world watch.

This had interesting implications to the way scientific papers were written. Rather than the modern form (just about 300 old) going like "Theorem-proof-example etc.", it was all heavily interwened with theology, intents of the creator, fabric of the world, etc., whatever the domain of the research in the natural sciences was!
Not in Newton's case. In fact, the impersonal, Olympian modern style of scientific writing basically dates back to him ("hypotheses non fingo"). Theorem-proof-example was exactly the way he wrote. Take a look look at the Principia.

Actually, Lamborghini started out making tractors.One day Ferruccio Lamborghini complained to Enzo Ferrari that the clutch on his Ferrari was unsatisfactory. Enzo answered "What does a tractor maker know about super cars? Go back to your farm and leave the supercars to me.". The rest is history.

I'm really disappointed. I've been waiting and waiting for Batman: Year One directed by Darren Aronofsky (Pi, Requiem for a Dream). If there was anything he'd be able to bring to the film, it would be darkness and originality. Unfortunately the WB didn't like it very much.

See this site for more details.

Read the ingredients label and let google tell you more about it...

Still want to drink that diet soda? How about letting it sit in the sun before drinking?

You can choose to believe it's all bogus and nothing is wrong with aspartame, but just in case, I'm staying away from it as much as possible.

Thanks for the website compliment - I try :)

In Zimbabwe, yes, there is a dismal failure. I wouldn't put it down to race relations all that much though, although they do play a part. Bob Mugabe (the president) is severely abusing his own people, most of whom are black, as is the majority of the political opposition. Personally I think he's simply grown power hungry and arrogant. My own country's relationship and attitude toward him I find shocking and disgusting, treating him like there's nothing wrong, but I have no reason to believe that what has transpired in Zimbabwe will repeat themselves in South Africa - we don't have a Mugabe.

In South Africa I don't see overwhelming trouble in the near future. Economically we are growing, but too slowly. This can only worsen when Aids starts hitting our labour force (this sounds heartless, but it is the bigger picture. Obviously I feel for the human element as well). This will hurt our economy, certainly. However, I don't think the country will descend into civil anarchy or anything like that - if anything I think the overall situation will improve despite all these problems.

The government appears to be beginning to get a handle on many issues which have plagued the country since democracy in '94. It is widely predicted that the ruling ANC, which currently has 70% of the vote and accordingly the 2/3's majority they need to pass any bill in parliament, will not see a majority anywhere near that big again. Accordingly politics will become more representative in the near future (say after two voting periods - 10 years), where the ANC will be in charge most likely but the other parties will wield considerable parliamentary influence as well. This can only be a healthy and good thing for a democracy.

Let me put it this way: I'm a white male Masters student at a South African university, and I have no intention of leaving the country when I graduate. I feel positive about the country's prospects. A good intro to the country can be found at this site, while this is the official internet gateway to the country.

Onto the cricket...

Yes, a Test cricket match, one of the two major international varieties, is scheduled to take 5 days. The other version takes about 6 hours, while a newer, shorter version recently introduced takes about 3 hours. The basic rules are explained here much better than I am capable of doing so. I personally think it is the most awesome of sports, which may of course be slighly tempered by the fact that South Africa is quite good at it...

An excellent cricketing link if you have a further interest is here.

Hope this is concise enough. Always a pleasure to spread some info about my home or my favourite sport!

We have even had an air tax; well, we called it a 'poll tax' (aka community charge); but it was clearly an air tax, since you only had to pay it as long as you were breathing :-)

We also used to have window taxes and clock taxes; with predictably silly results.

And of course the tea tax we levied on one of our (now ex) colonies... they never completely forgave us for that (p.s. the UK likes what you've done with the place- we want it back now) :-)

Planning to commit a crime is considered a crime in some cases.

Hell, according one site site It is illegal to enter some community in Washington with criminal intent without phoning the chief of police.

site

People were saying these things and freaking out just like this when Reagan passed his tax cuts and less than ten years later the debt was gone, grown out of by the huge economic boom they inspired.

What?????!!!!! *Boggle*

No wonder people voted for Reagan and Bush Jr. believing shit like that.

The debt has constantly grown for at least a century and practically tripled under Reagan. The deficit has mostly grown as well, except for the years under Clinton where it finally went down and was just about to become a surplus before Bush passed his tax cuts.

See:
http://www.cedarcomm.com/~stevelm1/usdebt.htm
http://www.littlepiggy.net/deficit/index.php
http://members.tripod.com/~zzpat/graphs.htm
http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/faq.html
http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/5Debt.htm

This link will help explain his post to you.

So what you're saying is you're going to host it on Tripod? Or will you use Geocities instead?

" I was actually assaulted at a Best Buy for refusing to purchase a PSP (pushed)..."

You should have given the guy one of these.

Another way of saying this last result is that for every two additional black Republicans in the average precinct, there was one additional spoiled ballot. By comparison, it took an additional 125 African Americans (of any party affiliation) in the average precinct to produce the same result.

Lichtman and others have shown no cause of black voter disenfranchisement. Yet many people still claim that black voters were intentionally disenfranchised by Republicans even though Democrats were in charge of all the Counties in question. Given the tremendous amount of hatred directed at black Republican politicians like Thomas, Rice, Powell, Paige, etc., it is easy to believe that there would be a much wider bias.

I do like Firefox a lot. It is a wonderful browser, and it is improving at a rapid pace. But I will not use it until the devs get their heads out of their arses. It is not as secure as IE for one simple reaon: no javascript whitelisting. IE has it in the form of security zones.

If firefox ever adds jscript whitelisting to the main app or someone develops an extension for it (that is kept up to date with current releases) I will switch in an instant. Unfortunately I am getting the impression that the devs are very pro-jscript and have no interest in making it easy for users to browse with it off completely. Instead they want to only allow disabling it's most annoying and obvious features. This is a woefully inadequate solution.

With IE I can browse with javascript completely off while still being able to shop at sites like newegg or amazon with jscript (and activex if necessary) automatically enabled. There are many sites nowadays (created by incompetent web designers)that won't even load without javascript. I will either ignore such sites or take the chance on giving them temporary trusted or partially restricted status.

People talk about how insecure and dangerous ActiveX is and they're right, but javascript is almost as bad. IMO, anyone who surfs the internet with javascript on is asking for trouble and shouldn't be surprised when they find it. And, no,I am not talking about popups. Javascript is a hell of a lot more than just the window popup or resize functions. The recent slammer worm, while an example of an exploit of bad IE security in the form of BHOs is also an example of the dangers of javascript. This worm could not function without it and it did not rely on popups or resizing. It used javascript that would never be blocked by the kind of partial blocking that firefox uses.

Mozilla has also had security zone capability through user pref javascript settings for a long time, but a UI for it has never been included in the official browser. At this point it looks like it never will.

There was some effort expended at actually producing a UI for the zones but nothing seems to have come of it. The devs who were working on it gave up when they saw this which unfortunately is not capable of javascript whitelisting at least in current versions of mozilla or firefox.

There have been some attempts at extensions to add in jscript whitelisting to mozilla, but there is nothing that works with current versions of either mozilla or firefox.

All of this work is at least 1-2 years old. Some of it is as 3-4 years old. Nothing is currently being done with any of it. Obviously the devs don't consider it an important feature. In fact they consider it so unimportant that even when it's already in the code, they can't be bothered to make a UI for it it.

So thank you very much, but I will stick with a much safer browsing experience on IE with pwrtwks to give me two click security zone control and trust setter and IE Zone Editor to give me even more control over IE's wonderful security zone features.

For the one remaining gigantic IE annoyance, those popup "warning" windows you get when browsing with activeX turned off on sites with activeX, there is a way to turn them off. It works.

Santa Claus: Kindly old elf, or CIA spook?

(mirror here and maybe here))

I think you misspelled "Clinton" as "Reagan".

(The following statement with attachments was issued by Texas freshman Congressman Steve Stockman regarding a mysterious fax message his office received just as a bomb exploded at an Oklahoma City federal building. Also attached is a memorandum Stockman sent to Attorney General Janet Reno a month before the bombing inquiring about possible planned raids on "citizen's militias." In the memo, Stockman questioned the advisability and legality of the possible planned raids, suggesting that "a bloody fiasco like Waco" could result. A final attachment consists of a statement by an FBI spokesman that the Congressman's office acted properly in their handling of the fax.)

• late 30's or early 40's (Kaczynski was 53 when arrested);
  
• white male, 5'10"-6' tall, 165 pounds, with reddish-blond hair, a thin mustache and a ruddy complexion (Kaczynski is a white male, 5'8", weighed 143 when arrested, with brown hair, bearded and pale skin);
  
• a blue collar worker with a high school degree (Kaczynski hadn't had a job in the last 25 years and has a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Michigan in addition to being a graduate of Harvard University);
  
• a meticulously organized person, reclusive and having problems dealing with women (Kaczynski was a recluse who apparently did not deal with women at all, and he was slovenly and unkempt).
  

Check out your bank of America account instead to see how much money you have.

http://www.BankofAmerica.com

Here's a very simple flash game: John Kerry Medal Toss (mirror)

"With John Kerry's Medal Toss you get to throw your military medals over the fence onto the White House lawn just like he did. Now you might not think it is right to throw you medals away in some kind of symbolic action, but that's okay they're not really your medals."

Anyone else remember the "Cities in Flight" novels by James Blish? Whole cities lifting off from the Earth, off to find brave new worlds... Blish not only wrote many of the Star Trek novels, he wrote dozens of sci-fi books over about 4 decades.

How about the Cauzin Softstrip? Never had one myself but always though they were cool... for a (not very long) while, the 'puter magazines of the time were printing their BASIC programs encoded for the Softstrip, saving hours of typing...

Wasted cycles, who cares? But, more importantly, these wasted cycles also take _my time_ for them to render. I find window management more of a chore than necessary already, now I'm supposed to be entertained or something while things flip around in a 2d representation of 3d space?

Why can't companies like Sun focus on things that are important to computing that are real problems. What problem is this 3d stuff solving?

Here is a small list of things people:

- Uniform cut and paste and drag and drop in a windowing environment.
- A way to install software (yes, its 2004 and there is no sane way to install 3rd party software)
- Common APIs for common "desktop" tasks. Wanna "rule the desktop"? How about providing something new? Like a uniform spell checker that you can embed in all apps. Its annoying that I can't spell check this post. I have spell checkers, but I cant just do it. Why is it that I do a search in a web page, and then I spend more time searching the screen for the little highlighted word than it took me to initiate the search? This is broken that it take me more time to find something that the computer has already found. How about a "file centric" GUI instead of a GUI centric GUI? I prefer the commandline, why? Because it allows me to do anything I want to my files that are sitting in front of me. I can say "vi file", or "cp file somewhere", or "cmp file1 file2", "cc file", "ispell file", or even create a new file! etc. In a gui, I have a list of my files, but I can't do anything with them. If I'm in a file browser, what are my options? I can click on something, sort it differently, thats about it. How about something away from the "Apple or Start menu"? Take a look at LaunchBar for the Mac. At any time, all I have to do is hit "applethingy-space" and then start typing what I want to launch. I can launch any app faster than hunting it down and double clicking on it, or meandering through some menu. What about revision management in docs? Why can I find any document on the web in less than 30 secs, but it takes forever, if not impossible to find something on my computer or our LAN? I could go on and on.
- How about software that instead of saying "No such file or directory", or "ls -M
ls: illegal option -- M
usage: ls [-ABCFGHLPRTWabcdfghiklnoqrstu1] [file ...]" I didn't make that up, that is what I cut and pasted from a FreeBSD box. But instead gives the user hints as to what to do. Perl does this to some extend. With its help in finding a runaway bracket or quote instead of saying "parse error".

I find my computing experience lacking day to day, but I never thought, "You know what? I need more eye candy to solve these problems". The WIMP/Desktop interface has pretty much not changed since the Xerox Star came out with it in what 1979.

Look at the iPod for inspiration. No its not perfect, but its significantly different from a slew of other devices that do the same thing, but for some reason people like the iPod better. Look at Apple with Expose and Rendezvous. Again, not perfect, but at least different.

Oh, and btw, Microsoft is actually getting it right with Longhorn. This appears to be a step towards a filecentric OS. Also, Microsoft has added many things to the file manager window such as "common tasks" or whatnot (I'm not a M$ customer, but I've seen these things).

EOR

Here's a little chronology of New York City Subway graffiti. It hasn't been maintained for awhile so there are some borken links but you get the idea... you can see the 'Development of Style' from the 1972 rudimentary to the mid 1980s.

Many musicians already know this. Have you ever heard a soloist described as "lyrical"? (grep for "lyrical")

Have you ever heard a musician compare improvising a solo to "telling a story"(grep for "telling a story")

Ever heard a short musical idea described as a "phrase"?

Listening to a good jazz solo is a lot like listening to a conversation: There are main points, and there are variations on that point. It should be grounded but not to repetative

What is the soloist doing when he attempts to "build"? Actually the ideal process hardly ever takes place--that is, it is hardly ever the case that a conscientious soloist plays a thinking solo for a hard-listening hearer--but when this does happen, the key process is memory. The soloist has to establish for the listener what the important POINT, the motif if you like, is, and then show as much as he can of what it is that he sees in that motif, extending the relationships of it to the basic while never giving the feeling that he has forgotten it. In other words, I believe that it should be a basic principle to use repetition, rather than variety--but not too much. The listener is constatnly making predictions; actual infinitesimal predictions as to whether the next event will be a repetition of something, or something different. The player is constantly either confimring or denying these predictions in the listener's mind. As nearly as we can tell (Kraehenbuehl at Yale and I), the listener must come out right about 50% of the time--if he is too successful in predicting, he will be bored; if he is too unsuccessful, he will give up and call the music "disoganized."

Thus if the player starts a repetitive pattern, the listener's attention drops away as soon as he has successfully predicted that it is going to continue. Then, if the thing keeps going, the attention curve comes back up, and the listener becomes interested in just how long the pattern is going to continue. Similarly, if the player never repeats anything, no matter how tremendous an imagnation he has, the listener will decide that the game is not worth playing, that he is not going to be able to make any predections right, and also stops litening. Too much difference is sameness: boring. Too much sameness is boring--but also different once in a while.

-Richmond Browne

Many musicians already know this. Have you ever heard a soloist described as "lyrical"? (grep for "lyrical")

Have you ever heard a musician compare improvising a solo to "telling a story"(grep for "telling a story")

Ever heard a short musical idea described as a "phrase"?

Listening to a good jazz solo is a lot like listening to a conversation: There are main points, and there are variations on that point. It should be grounded but not to repetative

What is the soloist doing when he attempts to "build"? Actually the ideal process hardly ever takes place--that is, it is hardly ever the case that a conscientious soloist plays a thinking solo for a hard-listening hearer--but when this does happen, the key process is memory. The soloist has to establish for the listener what the important POINT, the motif if you like, is, and then show as much as he can of what it is that he sees in that motif, extending the relationships of it to the basic while never giving the feeling that he has forgotten it. In other words, I believe that it should be a basic principle to use repetition, rather than variety--but not too much. The listener is constatnly making predictions; actual infinitesimal predictions as to whether the next event will be a repetition of something, or something different. The player is constantly either confimring or denying these predictions in the listener's mind. As nearly as we can tell (Kraehenbuehl at Yale and I), the listener must come out right about 50% of the time--if he is too successful in predicting, he will be bored; if he is too unsuccessful, he will give up and call the music "disoganized."

Thus if the player starts a repetitive pattern, the listener's attention drops away as soon as he has successfully predicted that it is going to continue. Then, if the thing keeps going, the attention curve comes back up, and the listener becomes interested in just how long the pattern is going to continue. Similarly, if the player never repeats anything, no matter how tremendous an imagnation he has, the listener will decide that the game is not worth playing, that he is not going to be able to make any predections right, and also stops litening. Too much difference is sameness: boring. Too much sameness is boring--but also different once in a while.

-Richmond Browne

Yet like any other totalitarian society, Canada lacksthe Right to Keep and Bear Arms (see also Lott). The Right of Free Speech is also incredibly limited by the requirement of not offending anyone, and let's not forget Freedom of the Press is only a secondary consideration.

Canadians are simply more comfortable with less freedom. Then again, so are people in California and Massachusetts...

What are you talking about, the Cole being small? It's an Aegis - only half the length of the largest ship in our fleet.

Don't let her length fool you. She only displaces about 8,000 tons. The largest ship in our fleet is the USS Enterprise with a displacement of about 85,000 tons. That makes the Aegis boats (which I will grant are large for destroyers) about 1/10th the size of a Carrier. So yes, destroyers are "small".

Yorktown only "survived" the bomb hit to its deck, with the loss of 66 crew. It was taken out by two torpedoes.

Bomb *hits*, plural. She took three bombs to her deck and was still able to be repaired enough to reach 20 knots. When the two torpedos hit, she was taken out of the battle, but most of her crew was still alive. You complain that she lost 66 crew to bomb attacks. Out of the nearly 3,000 men on board, that's not a bad survivability rating. Until someone invents Deflector Shields, people will die when bombs make contact with a naval vessel.

Two other points I'd like to make. First, the Yorktown was rushed out the door without adequate repairs. Even her air group had to be partially replaced with those from the Saratoga to get her to sea on time. Had she been fully operational, she may not have had to leave the fight. The Lexington also took three bombs and two torpedos and was still able to make 25 knots and launch planes. Had they not been worried about the fires giving away their presence to the Japanese, she would have sailed back to port for repairs. It took FOUR more torpedos to scuttle her after the crew was evacuated.

Secondly, had the Yorktown or Lexington been a Jeep, she would have sunk to the bottom with pretty much all of her 850 crew members. 850 people! As opposed to a REAL carrier where 80-90% of the crew survive the battle. The Navy is working hard to improve this by adding more automation to modern carriers. In a hit, there would be fewer crew to injure or kill.

How about the dinky little boat that hit the Cole? 225kg. A rather small operation, easily financed by a couple of people with an axe to grind, but they were easily able to supply the sort of firepower that Japanese bombs in WWII supplied.

I said it before, and I'll say it again. A torpedo boat is a torpedo boat. And 225kg of explosives is nothing to scoff at. Perhaps you like to explain how a ship in port would have been able to avoid the explosion, and how the explosion would have managed to neither put a hole in the ship, or kill anyone?

Cole didn't sink. Yeay. It took 250 million dollars to fix it, and they killed crew. That's (1/2? 1/3?) the cost of building a brand new one.

And this is a problem because... ??? The US spent less money than building a new ship, and got their ship back in service a lot sooner than a new ship.

And the bad guys killed some people. WHAT DO YOU THINK WAS GOING TO HAPPEN? If you bomb or torpedo a boat, PEOPLE DIE.

I don't understand this fascination of yours with some mythical Jeep carriers that could have somehow prevented a ship in port from getting attacked. The solution to the problem of Guerilla attacks against Naval vessels is to keep the vessels in open waters. When they're in open waters, nothing can touch them.

They're going to abuse whatever ones they can! They're going to cheat in any way physically possible! That's the point!

It's not about cheating. It's about war. In war, you find any way possible to kill the enemy. The only problem with terrorists is that they kill people without a real cause. They can never win a war, they just like to kill as many people as possible.

A dozen reinforced speedboats hitting a submarine as it leaves port?

Yeah. Cause those will stand up to the military guns just fine. (Not.) Thanks to nuclear power, there's only one port that submarines need to visit: high security military ports for nuclear refueling. And they