> "Mostly Harmless" seemed a deliberate effort by Adams to kill the series.
A worse railroad drive off a bridge than was "Sherlock Holmes' Final Case" with the the deaths at Reichenbach Falls. It only succeeded in poisoning the previous novels of the series in retrospect. It probably should have been retitled "I'll Show You All Why You Shouldn't Ask For Sequels!!!"
> Without his work, we would have The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings - nothing else at all
No, we wouldn't even have that. Only he, and his family, and a few friends to whom JRRT told bedtime stories about elves and gnomes, would have had any of it. It was only when Christopher began correcting JRRT, reminding Daddy that he told it differently the last time, that JRRT started putting anything on paper, just to be consistent. Without that, he would never have produced anything more that Farmer Giles and Ham (at least that non-professional philologists would read).
> Please, tax me more, and repair the roads/network infrastructure/health care in America.
You know that you can give more to the federal government than they tax from you? I think that it is called the Deficit Reduction Fund, or something like that. It might even be a line on the 1040; there is an equivalent fund for my state government that is. Just give all you want, that way. You can increase your taxes as high as you want.
I do not know if contributions to that are deductible (on next year's form, of course:-) .
You're under the mistaken impression that welfare benefits are a lot of money...they aren't. Hell, the home interest deduction, middle class welfare, costs the government more money.
And you are under the mistaken impression that welfare benefits are paid to the poor, rather than to sociologists and social workers as salaries, who then administer a much smaller total amount going to the "official" recipients. The administrative costs are so high that a charity with those expense rates would have its officers sent to jail for fraud.
> Wasn't NASA funded using US tax dollars when these patents were granted ?
And now it will return money to the government coffers. NASA, as an agency of the government, can no more keep its revenue than could the IRS or the Customs Service.
If they *are* permitted to keep the money in NASA accounts, then their appropriation will go down until the accounts are exhausted.
> to enhance NASA's funding and decreasing the amount of funding that comes from tax dollars.
Except that it doesn't increase the funding. If the Congress wants NIH to have $28 billion (the 2003 figure, per Wikipedia) and NIH made $3 billion the previous year, they will include the expectation of $3 billion into the process and just allocate $25 billion. Thus, the NIH probably asks less for the licenses than it could get, and expects the licensees to come testify to Congress, whenever the appropriations come up, that NIH *really* needs $38 billion (so they can license even more patents for less than they are worth).
If NASA gets from the patents sale an amount equal to its yearly appropriation (not likely, but a simple example), then the money will either go directly into the general fund, or else the appropriations will be reduced for years to come, because NASA would be expected to live off its nest egg.
Do you think that the IRS, or US Customs Services (which was the biggest income producer until the income tax was ameded into the Constitution), were ever self-supporting?
> What "landslide" is this you speak of? The one that's > currently in negative territory, making it an antilandslide?
You forget. These are the people who really DID believe that the selected exit polls that showed a Kerry victory MUST be better than the real elections watched over by Democratic Party operatives. If they had been voters in 1968, they would have agreed with Michael Stivic (aka, Meathead, from All In The Family) that he cannot believe that the country didn't elect Eldridge Cleaver over Nixon OR Humphrey.
Since they don't know anyone who says they will vote for McCain, nobody must be. QED.
> for example, this Washington Post - ABC News poll records an > 18 point swing among white women after Palin was selected by > McCain (I'm surprised, because Clinton and Palin are almost > 180 degrees apart on so many issues.)
Ignoring the Elizabeth Bathory Before St. Francis voters, what probably happens is that Hillaryites become Undecideds, Undecideds become Palin/McCain voters, and Wouldn't Bother Voting For McCain conservative women are now voting for him because he selected a conservative (and conservative woman is even better, for them).
Very few hard-line Hillary supporters will vote for McCain, but the extremes are always the smallest part of the pie. They just make all the noise, and contribute a lot of the money. Since parties and party organizations have had their power stripped, the extremists can effectively take over, like the extremists in the Rump Parliament, who wanted Charles I of England dead, kept driving off the less committed.
> Clearly we need to find terrorists and deliver better recording equipment to them
We TRIED to equip them with cell phones, but someone leaked that. We would LOVE to equip them with the latest video equipment, but he has to sign for it. Wouldn't want to snuff^H^H^H^Hend it to the wrong person.
Agreed. These are the equivalent of the "home movies" of John D. Rockefeller that were shown, after his retirement, during the newsreel segment of a motion picture show, to "prove" that the old monopolist was just another grandpa, just like everyone else's, and not some terrible person. I would not be surprised if Stalin didn't do the same thing, too.
> The theories that are currently in favor say that T. Rex was not a predator at all, but a scavenger.
This is a false dichotomy. All real predators eat carrion when they find it, and climax predators like lions spend as much time stealing prey from smaller predators as they do hunting, because prey stealing is easier when you are the biggest. Vultures will also kill helpless animals that haven't had the decency to die before the they arrived.
> And that is why today's young'uns all love Velociraptor.
No, they all love Utahraptor (sp?), the velociraptor look-alike that actually is as large as Spielberg's raptors were. Real velociraptors were the size of chickens to turkeys, and are no more scary, by themselves, than a single piranna. That they *call* it a veliciraptor explains why I do not pay attention to the opinions of small children in matters of, well, anything, but especially paleontology.
> As a person interested in seasteading I am quite > concerned over paying royalties to Google over > running a server in my future home.
Only if you power it via wave or tidal action, and have your seastead flagged in a country that recognizes this patent.
Frankly, I think that if you want to power a data center consisting of more than a few microcontrollers, you had better locate it in the Bay of Fundy or mouth of the Amazon to get those 6 foot or higher tidal bores, or near a fault which you manipulate to produce regular tsumanis (which probably violates the "Don't Be Evil" mantra).
This patent is possibly the Google equivalent of an April 1 RFC.
"If this is Microsoft's response to the 'I'm a Mac' ads, it should fold up its tent and tell the world to switch to Apple."
Or at least switch to Chiat-Day, Apple's firm, previously famous for airing the Mac 1984 ad ONCE, and letting the networks replay it for weeks.
I saw it last night, and I didn't even realize that it was a MS ad; I thought it might be for something else that Seinfeld has done. In any case, it was the least interesting ad since feminine hygiene products started appearing in commercials. Unless ad number 2 is much better, MS should fire their agency, fast.
Or diabolically clever. Anything big, but not on the list -> US wants you to THINK that it is a spy satellite, whatever it really is. Imagine the terrorists in their camp, taking cover from every communications satellite, while the real recon birds have fired rockets to new orbits and are using their side-looking cameras to catch them when they come out from their hideouts. And who BUT terrorists would hide from suspected spy satellites?
The 13th Warrior had a line roughly like "Anyone can calculate strength; now he has to calculate what he doesn't know." to describe faking one's weaknesses. In this case, that the policy is *just* stupid.
> however, men/can/ change their names when they get married
Men can change their names at any time, for any reason, the same as with women. Women just tend to do it on a particular occasion.
They can also live under an assumed name, so long as no fraud is intended. John Wayne never legally changed his name from Marion Morrison, for instance; he just stopped using it.
All of which is irrelevant to accusations of domain squatting, given that it has been his name since whenever.
one may always use one's birth name (or married name in the case of a woman, since men don't change their names when they get married) to do business even if it is identical to an existing company in the same line of business.
Tell it to the MacDonald brothers, who were successfully sued by Macdonald's after they started another burger joint with that name, when they had sold their original to Ray Kroc. If he sells his domain, he can never have another like it, whether in.us,.me, or.sickporn, or they will have trademark infringement grounds.
Anyway, they are registered in the Netherlands, only, and he has the TLA version. He can sue them for defamation if they do anything untowards, especially if he had his, first. If they were registered in every country BUT the USA, they still wouldn't have a leg to stand upon.
Further, they would have to argue that they are well known in the United States and also that he has no legitimate use for the domain.
Which, unless they are Shell Oil or Rutger Hauer, they aren't. Even if it is just a family or school nickname, or an old D&D character, his priority beats theirs. If they wanted to be global or have a global internet presence, they should have registered it here, first.
_
OTOH, no need to be a dick about it, unless they try calling in the liars, excuse me, lawyers, to do more than just make sure of every dotted I and crossed T after the OP agrees. And have his own lawyer look at it, with respect to US, Netherlands, and EU laws, in general, so that the OP knows what he shouldn't try, anymore, such as samedomain.us (firstname_samedomain.com would probably work, though -- maybe they can pay for its registration in perpetuity from a well-established registration company).
> I believe UTC is not affected by DST, whereas GMT is.
No, it isn't. UTC==GMT, at least until they redefine UTC. It is UTC because no one at Greenwich was on GMT during WWII, and the name became a bit silly. And the French didn't like it, either.
> I know sun spots are a different temp than the sun overall > - has this had an effect on the energy output of the sun?
Paradoxically, the fewer sunspots, the quieter the Sun, and the lower the received radiation, and so the Earth cools. More sunspots (which are cooler than the rest of the almost perfect vacuum of the photosphere) implies that the Sun is hotter, so we get hotter.
> We have to show everyone that global warming is caused by a lack of sunspots
Sorry. Global Warming is ameliorated by a lack of sunspots. Sunspots, although cooler than the main disk, are an indication that the Sun is putting out more energy, not less. There were far fewer sunspots during the Little Ice Age than just before it or in its early stages, when they had been discovered.
> After all, the Earth is about be destroyed in the Rapture anyways, so why do we care?
Well, first you have to believe that the Rapture is really supposed to occur before the Time of Tribulation, which even a cursory read of Revelations demonstrates is NOT what is predicted, by any stretch. Therefore, an inerrant Bible implies that there will be no easy way out, like that. Furthermore, everyone moving things along towards Armageddon works for the other side, so probably you shouldn't help, unless Eternal Damnation is your idea of fun.
> And one point you need to remember; people my age have > been paying INTO Social Security since the 50s; > applying a means test seems hardly the way to encourage > voluntary compliance.
I thought that was why the government had men with guns and liens. The last that I heard, paying into Social Security was no more voluntary than paying sales tax. If your employer doesn't pay, you are still liable for "your share" just as the company is for "its share". I do not remember what they did when a company went out of business before paying their share; probably go after the officers or debtholders.
> Who are the most likely buyers with huge amounts of money at their disposal?
Maybe, Hugo Chavez, himself? It's not like he cannot afford it, especially since he can reasonably state that the purpose is to maintain his nation's security, and so use the national treasury, all filled up from windfall profits (if Exxon has them, they must be a windfall for Chavez, too).
This shuts off the leak for 3 years. This also gives him three years to figure who was the leaker, and to arrange for that person and his leaks to be "managed" without any annoying interference, if he decides to manage the problem violently, rather than co-opting the source (as British Intelligence supposedly did with most German agents, at least until the D-Day invasion made their services no longer necessary).
> CIA anyone? white house? anyone interested in trying to build a puppet regime in Venezuela maybe?
Anything wikileaks gets is likely old news at the Agency. They, like any other national intelligence agency, have been paying (often well) for information since time immemorial.
Slashdot Mirror
> "Mostly Harmless" seemed a deliberate effort by Adams to kill the series.
A worse railroad drive off a bridge than was "Sherlock Holmes' Final Case" with the the deaths at Reichenbach Falls. It only succeeded in poisoning the previous novels of the series in retrospect. It probably should have been retitled "I'll Show You All Why You Shouldn't Ask For Sequels!!!"
> Without his work, we would have The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings - nothing else at all
No, we wouldn't even have that. Only he, and his family, and a few friends to whom JRRT told bedtime stories about elves and gnomes, would have had any of it. It was only when Christopher began correcting JRRT, reminding Daddy that he told it differently the last time, that JRRT started putting anything on paper, just to be consistent. Without that, he would never have produced anything more that Farmer Giles and Ham (at least that non-professional philologists would read).
> Please, tax me more, and repair the roads/network infrastructure/health care in America.
You know that you can give more to the federal government than they tax from you? I think that it is called the Deficit Reduction Fund, or something like that. It might even be a line on the 1040; there is an equivalent fund for my state government that is. Just give all you want, that way. You can increase your taxes as high as you want.
I do not know if contributions to that are deductible (on next year's form, of course :-) .
And you are under the mistaken impression that welfare benefits are paid to the poor, rather than to sociologists and social workers as salaries, who then administer a much smaller total amount going to the "official" recipients. The administrative costs are so high that a charity with those expense rates would have its officers sent to jail for fraud.
> For those of you who have seen the movie the fifth element be scared, be very scared.
Why? Is this the start of filming a sequel?
Now THAT would be scary.
> Wasn't NASA funded using US tax dollars when these patents were granted ?
And now it will return money to the government coffers. NASA, as an agency of the government, can no more keep its revenue than could the IRS or the Customs Service.
If they *are* permitted to keep the money in NASA accounts, then their appropriation will go down until the accounts are exhausted.
> to enhance NASA's funding and decreasing the amount of funding that comes from tax dollars.
Except that it doesn't increase the funding. If the Congress wants NIH to have $28 billion (the 2003 figure, per Wikipedia) and NIH made $3 billion the previous year, they will include the expectation of $3 billion into the process and just allocate $25 billion. Thus, the NIH probably asks less for the licenses than it could get, and expects the licensees to come testify to Congress, whenever the appropriations come up, that NIH *really* needs $38 billion (so they can license even more patents for less than they are worth).
If NASA gets from the patents sale an amount equal to its yearly appropriation (not likely, but a simple example), then the money will either go directly into the general fund, or else the appropriations will be reduced for years to come, because NASA would be expected to live off its nest egg.
Do you think that the IRS, or US Customs Services (which was the biggest income producer until the income tax was ameded into the Constitution), were ever self-supporting?
> What "landslide" is this you speak of? The one that's
> currently in negative territory, making it an antilandslide?
You forget. These are the people who really DID believe that the selected exit polls that showed a Kerry victory MUST be better than the real elections watched over by Democratic Party operatives. If they had been voters in 1968, they would have agreed with Michael Stivic (aka, Meathead, from All In The Family) that he cannot believe that the country didn't elect Eldridge Cleaver over Nixon OR Humphrey.
Since they don't know anyone who says they will vote for McCain, nobody must be. QED.
> for example, this Washington Post - ABC News poll records an
> 18 point swing among white women after Palin was selected by
> McCain (I'm surprised, because Clinton and Palin are almost
> 180 degrees apart on so many issues.)
Ignoring the Elizabeth Bathory Before St. Francis voters, what probably happens is that Hillaryites become Undecideds, Undecideds become Palin/McCain voters, and Wouldn't Bother Voting For McCain conservative women are now voting for him because he selected a conservative (and conservative woman is even better, for them).
Very few hard-line Hillary supporters will vote for McCain, but the extremes are always the smallest part of the pie. They just make all the noise, and contribute a lot of the money. Since parties and party organizations have had their power stripped, the extremists can effectively take over, like the extremists in the Rump Parliament, who wanted Charles I of England dead, kept driving off the less committed.
> Clearly we need to find terrorists and deliver better recording equipment to them
We TRIED to equip them with cell phones, but someone leaked that. We would LOVE to equip them with the latest video equipment, but he has to sign for it. Wouldn't want to snuff^H^H^H^Hend it to the wrong person.
> Umm, Gates is the product being pitched.
Agreed. These are the equivalent of the "home movies" of John D. Rockefeller that were shown, after his retirement, during the newsreel segment of a motion picture show, to "prove" that the old monopolist was just another grandpa, just like everyone else's, and not some terrible person. I would not be surprised if Stalin didn't do the same thing, too.
. (italics added)
I believe that you wanted "harebrained" there?
> The theories that are currently in favor say that T. Rex was not a predator at all, but a scavenger.
This is a false dichotomy. All real predators eat carrion when they find it, and climax predators like lions spend as much time stealing prey from smaller predators as they do hunting, because prey stealing is easier when you are the biggest. Vultures will also kill helpless animals that haven't had the decency to die before the they arrived.
> And that is why today's young'uns all love Velociraptor.
No, they all love Utahraptor (sp?), the velociraptor look-alike that actually is as large as Spielberg's raptors were. Real velociraptors were the size of chickens to turkeys, and are no more scary, by themselves, than a single piranna. That they *call* it a veliciraptor explains why I do not pay attention to the opinions of small children in matters of, well, anything, but especially paleontology.
> As a person interested in seasteading I am quite
> concerned over paying royalties to Google over
> running a server in my future home.
Only if you power it via wave or tidal action, and have your seastead flagged in a country that recognizes this patent.
Frankly, I think that if you want to power a data center consisting of more than a few microcontrollers, you had better locate it in the Bay of Fundy or mouth of the Amazon to get those 6 foot or higher tidal bores, or near a fault which you manipulate to produce regular tsumanis (which probably violates the "Don't Be Evil" mantra).
This patent is possibly the Google equivalent of an April 1 RFC.
Or at least switch to Chiat-Day, Apple's firm, previously famous for airing the Mac 1984 ad ONCE, and letting the networks replay it for weeks.
I saw it last night, and I didn't even realize that it was a MS ad; I thought it might be for something else that Seinfeld has done. In any case, it was the least interesting ad since feminine hygiene products started appearing in commercials. Unless ad number 2 is much better, MS should fire their agency, fast.
> Sometimes policies like this are just stupid.
Or diabolically clever. Anything big, but not on the list -> US wants you to THINK that it is a spy satellite, whatever it really is. Imagine the terrorists in their camp, taking cover from every communications satellite, while the real recon birds have fired rockets to new orbits and are using their side-looking cameras to catch them when they come out from their hideouts. And who BUT terrorists would hide from suspected spy satellites?
The 13th Warrior had a line roughly like "Anyone can calculate strength; now he has to calculate what he doesn't know." to describe faking one's weaknesses. In this case, that the policy is *just* stupid.
> Dragonfly fossils with 70 cm wingspans have been found.
Contemporaneous with dinosaurs, or in the Carboniferous Period?
If they weren't around when the dinosaurs were, then they had no more effect than cavemen had.
> however, men /can/ change their names when they get married
Men can change their names at any time, for any reason, the same as with women. Women just tend to do it on a particular occasion.
They can also live under an assumed name, so long as no fraud is intended. John Wayne never legally changed his name from Marion Morrison, for instance; he just stopped using it.
All of which is irrelevant to accusations of domain squatting, given that it has been his name since whenever.
Tell it to the MacDonald brothers, who were successfully sued by Macdonald's after they started another burger joint with that name, when they had sold their original to Ray Kroc. If he sells his domain, he can never have another like it, whether in .us, .me, or .sickporn, or they will have trademark infringement grounds.
Anyway, they are registered in the Netherlands, only, and he has the TLA version. He can sue them for defamation if they do anything untowards, especially if he had his, first. If they were registered in every country BUT the USA, they still wouldn't have a leg to stand upon.
Which, unless they are Shell Oil or Rutger Hauer, they aren't. Even if it is just a family or school nickname, or an old D&D character, his priority beats theirs. If they wanted to be global or have a global internet presence, they should have registered it here, first.
_
OTOH, no need to be a dick about it, unless they try calling in the liars, excuse me, lawyers, to do more than just make sure of every dotted I and crossed T after the OP agrees. And have his own lawyer look at it, with respect to US, Netherlands, and EU laws, in general, so that the OP knows what he shouldn't try, anymore, such as samedomain.us (firstname_samedomain.com would probably work, though -- maybe they can pay for its registration in perpetuity from a well-established registration company).
> I believe UTC is not affected by DST, whereas GMT is.
No, it isn't. UTC==GMT, at least until they redefine UTC. It is UTC because no one at Greenwich was on GMT during WWII, and the name became a bit silly. And the French didn't like it, either.
> I know sun spots are a different temp than the sun overall
> - has this had an effect on the energy output of the sun?
Paradoxically, the fewer sunspots, the quieter the Sun, and the lower the received radiation, and so the Earth cools. More sunspots (which are cooler than the rest of the almost perfect vacuum of the photosphere) implies that the Sun is hotter, so we get hotter.
> We have to show everyone that global warming is caused by a lack of sunspots
Sorry. Global Warming is ameliorated by a lack of sunspots. Sunspots, although cooler than the main disk, are an indication that the Sun is putting out more energy, not less. There were far fewer sunspots during the Little Ice Age than just before it or in its early stages, when they had been discovered.
> After all, the Earth is about be destroyed in the Rapture anyways, so why do we care?
Well, first you have to believe that the Rapture is really supposed to occur before the Time of Tribulation, which even a cursory read of Revelations demonstrates is NOT what is predicted, by any stretch. Therefore, an inerrant Bible implies that there will be no easy way out, like that. Furthermore, everyone moving things along towards Armageddon works for the other side, so probably you shouldn't help, unless Eternal Damnation is your idea of fun.
> And one point you need to remember; people my age have
> been paying INTO Social Security since the 50s;
> applying a means test seems hardly the way to encourage
> voluntary compliance.
I thought that was why the government had men with guns and liens. The last that I heard, paying into Social Security was no more voluntary than paying sales tax. If your employer doesn't pay, you are still liable for "your share" just as the company is for "its share". I do not remember what they did when a company went out of business before paying their share; probably go after the officers or debtholders.
> The UK paper is the only one that is "The Times", since it is the original.
> --
> Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
No, the original was Martinus Padwei's Romana Tempora, or Roman Times, founded in the early Ostrogothic State ...
OOPS. Wrong probability world.
Never mind.
> Who are the most likely buyers with huge amounts of money at their disposal?
Maybe, Hugo Chavez, himself? It's not like he cannot afford it, especially since he can reasonably state that the purpose is to maintain his nation's security, and so use the national treasury, all filled up from windfall profits (if Exxon has them, they must be a windfall for Chavez, too).
This shuts off the leak for 3 years. This also gives him three years to figure who was the leaker, and to arrange for that person and his leaks to be "managed" without any annoying interference, if he decides to manage the problem violently, rather than co-opting the source (as British Intelligence supposedly did with most German agents, at least until the D-Day invasion made their services no longer necessary).
> CIA anyone? white house? anyone interested in trying to build a puppet regime in Venezuela maybe?
Anything wikileaks gets is likely old news at the Agency. They, like any other national intelligence agency, have been paying (often well) for information since time immemorial.