Hasn't anyone noticed that he's played the Time Lord before in a 2003 BBC web-only Dr. Who special, The Scream of the Shalka? IMDB calls him the ninth doctor! He'd be returning to the role, if that video is canonical.
Some must have this file. Please seed that torrent up!
During the Repubican convention/military garrison last year, police arrested over a thousand people on all sorts of charges. Those arrested on the whole alleged lying on the parts of the police who swore out the complaints. Here's the followup, and it illustrates the point of sousveillance beautifully.
-Remember that all protestors of the prez are subjected to HEAVY intimidation through the use of video cameras.
Dennis Kyne put up such a fight at a political protest last summer, the arresting officer recalled, it took four police officers to haul him down the steps of the New York Public Library and across Fifth Avenue.
"We picked him up and we carried him while he squirmed and screamed," the officer, Matthew Wohl, testified in December. "I had one of his legs because he was kicking and refusing to walk on his own."
Accused of inciting a riot and resisting arrest, Mr. Kyne was the first of the 1,806 people arrested in New York last summer during the Republican National Convention to take his case to a jury. But one day after Officer Wohl testified, and before the defense called a single witness, the prosecutor abruptly dropped all charges.
During a recess, the defense had brought new information to the prosecutor. A videotape shot by a documentary filmmaker showed Mr. Kyne agitated but plainly walking under his own power down the library steps, contradicting the vivid account of Officer Wohl, who was nowhere to be seen in the pictures. Nor was the officer seen taking part in the arrests of four other people at the library against whom he signed complaints.
A sprawling body of visual evidence, made possible by inexpensive, lightweight cameras in the hands of private citizens, volunteer observers and the police themselves, has shifted the debate over precisely what happened on the streets during the week of the convention.
For Mr. Kyne and 400 others arrested that week, video recordings provided evidence that they had not committed a crime or that the charges against them could not be proved, according to defense lawyers and prosecutors.
Among them was Alexander Dunlop, who said he was arrested while going to pick up sushi.
Last week, he discovered that there were two versions of the same police tape: the one that was to be used as evidence in his trial had been edited at two spots, removing images that showed Mr. Dunlop behaving peacefully. When a volunteer film archivist found a more complete version of the tape and gave it to Mr. Dunlop's lawyer, prosecutors immediately dropped the charges and said that a technician had cut the material by mistake.
Seven months after the convention at Madison Square Garden, criminal charges have fallen against all but a handful of people arrested that week. Of the 1,670 cases that have run their full course, 91 percent ended with the charges dismissed or with a verdict of not guilty after trial. Many were dropped without any finding of wrongdoing, but also without any serious inquiry into the circumstances of the arrests, with the Manhattan district attorney's office agreeing that the cases should be "adjourned in contemplation of dismissal."
So far, 162 defendants have either pleaded guilty or were convicted after trial, and videotapes that bolstered the prosecution's case played a role in at least some of those cases, although prosecutors could not provide details.
Besides offering little support or actually undercutting the prosecution of most of the people arrested, the videotapes also highlight another substantial piece of the historical record: the Police Department's tactics in controlling the demonstrations, parades and rallies of hundreds of thousands of people were largely free of explicit violence.
One last thing, afore I go. The major part of the six trillion dollar debt we had going into this mess in 2001 was accumulated during the Reagan/Bush era, caused by his tax cuts. We bought prosperity on the credit plan by not paying for what we bought for over 12 years.
In 2000, we were paying about 17% of our federal tax revenue out to the holders of that debt as interest. Something over 150-250 billion a year, something like that. Add it up. Call it an average of 150 bil a year in interest on the Reagan Prosperity; 12 years; 1.8 trillion dollars. We spent yea about 2 trillion in INTEREST for the miracle; add in the 300 bil or so we spend each year during Bush (and going up fast) and we've blown 3 trillion bucks just to pay the credit card monthly payment on trickle-down tax cuts. As we cut the budget, the debt service will climb as a fraction of tax revenue in the future. How many bridges and moonbases would that have paid for?
The dot-com bust was over a half decade ago -- let it go. We're in new times.
We've run almost THREE TRILLION DOLLARS in the last three years on top of the six trillion debt we were paying off before we went nuts.
That three trillion wasn't from the dot-com bust -- it is caused by taking in less money than we spend. We spend more than we tax. That's it. Dot coms and Clinton have nothing to do with it. Bush and his allies have cut taxes over and over again; just today, the House voted to eliminate the estate tax. That's hundreds of billions less revenue, and we are spending a quarter of a trillion on Iraq (eventually) alone.
The trickle down magic that was supposed to happen hasn't. We're just going bust. A result of believing in the Reagan tax-cut miracle, which never existed. Reagan RAISED taxes, firstly. Secondly, Reagan lucked out big time in 82 when OPEC's pricing structure collapsed utterly. We had a massive injection of cost savings from NOT sending money to oil companies and oil-producing nations. We simply kept our own money for the first time in years!
Bush and Co.'s belief in the tax-cut miracle didn't work. The trickle down didn't happen, as job and wage cuts continued, along with cash going to overseas factories. Paired with the exact opposite situation that Reagan was, OPEC and the oil companies are increasing oil prices enormously . Add the complete breakdown of Iraqi oil shipments to further increase oil prices, we have a situation that cause an inflationary nuke effect.
Add the fact that overseas financiers are not going to keep lending us money indefinitely, dropping the dollar in favor of the euro. Ouch. No way to keep borrowing. Across the board cuts. Goodbye, NASA. Goodbye Shuttle, moonbase, Mars.
As for the tax cuts that are causing the debt: if we are at war, why are we cutting taxes? Aren't we supposed to sacrifice something? Are only military people supposed to lose? during WW2 we increased taxes. If we are incurring special charges for Iraq that are expressible in fractions of a trillion dollars, why the hell don't we tax ourselves to pay the bills? Who the hell is supposed to pay the bill?
This is 9 trillion -- SO FAR. This looks intentional. Debt goes down when dollar collapses, is that it? Is that the big Rovian plan? World currency becomes the euro, the US dollar goes to 1/4 of today's value, the 10 trillion debt becomes 2.5? Oy.
Space travel was my life's passion, and it hurts to watch it all go away because of ideological blindness. If we won't pay our bills, we won't have a future in space. I don't know how a nation with ten trillion or more in debt, spending a quarter of each year's tax income in interest, can effectively do anything in space.
Why is pointing out we-can't-go-'cause-we've-made-ourselves-broke flamebait to any knowledgeable person? It's the simple truth. It's only "flamebait" if you somehow have convinced yourself that we AREN'T taxcutting ourselves broke.
Not "off-topic". I was responding to a post remarking on our inability to pay for a moonbase because we are spending and taxcutting ourselves broke.
It is EXACTLY on topic. Not being able to pay for jack-all is the critical block to the US space program. Tax cuts and revenue diversion into military ventures to conquer other countries IS gutting the space program. NO MONEY, NO SPACE.
Well, there was a Space Treaty, as well as an Antarctic treaty governing ownership, ie, no one owned it, it belongs to all, etc.
We in the U.S. aren't into treaties any more. The number one treaty hatin' conservative is being made into our embassador to the U.N.
Whoever lands on the moon and defends the right to keep it with guns and/or politics will keep it. Same deal with Antarctica.
I don't see the New U.S.A. going very far to keep the Indians or Chinese off the moon, unless some sort of "national security" issue about the possibility that we are In Danger from Terrorists on the High Ground meme gets generated from some future Bush. The U.S. won't recongnize territorial claims, but will be too busy trying to keep itself from shrinking down into a has-been economic disaster zone to worry much about the moon.
I hope someone goes and develops that enormous lump of raw material into solar power satellites, L5 colonies, spaceships and whatever else they can dream up. I don't think the U.S. will care for a while, because it simply doesn't have the collective imagination to see the advantage to industrializing and colonizing the moon and orbital space. We don't have an educational system adequate to develop people who understand the technical, scientific and political issues. Not to mention that the few who do have the right bent read manga and watch "scifi" instead of reading classic hard SF, and won't recognize the military potential of throwing Really Big Rocks:) The U.N. or whomever adjudicates the claims will have the U.S. off its back for a couple of decades, at least.
Five years ago, we had plenty of money, and we were paying down the national debt, to the consternation of the debt holders.
Now we are pumping almost a quarter of our national tax revenues into paying the interest on the exploding debt. The average schmo got $300, the wealthy got hundreds of billions in tax cuts, and we are BROKE. Not an accident; now come the cuts in every guvmint expenditure hated by the right, along with huge increases in defense and surveillance spending.
We aren't going to buy any moon bases:(
We are buying a war machine, an occupation authority with 14 permanent military bases in Iraq, an upcoming invasion and occupation of Iran, economic collapse, and a permanent diversion of 25+ percent and rising of our national tax revenues into the hands of the people lending us the money to go broke.
No moon bases, not ever. A debt society trying to dig out from under the wreckage of the next ten years, for most of this century.
"A car, or every other physical object (patented/copyrighted/whatever or not) is just the right order of atoms and molecules. Do I not have the right to order those atoms however I want, including the reproduction of a Lamborghini, down to the brand badge?"
Yes. You can build, on your own, a replica, down to the atom, of any car you like. Or toaster. Or coffee cup. It is NOT illegal. It doesn't hurt anyone. If someone could actually do it, no doubt the same arguments would be used by Lambourghini as the RIAA, and be equally wrong.
Someday object printers will exist, and all hell will break loose. I'd imagine possession of an unlicensed printer will have more stringent penalties than mass murder...
Post your link to the source of this "news". I can't find it on Google. Link not to a rightist blogger or Freerepublic, but a to a transcript of the comment, WITH CONTEXT, or at least an article from a credible news source referring to this. No, Rush is not acceptable. And he does not provide transcripts, anyway.
And as for Dobbs, he has indeed jumped onto the rightist train and is riding for the sunset, so his attitude as a "journalist" is indeed up for comment. He's dropped the mask of a reporter and has become a right-wing agitator. So it goes.
This "Franken is calling names" stinks of the old Orwellian trick of smearing the enemy with that which your side is most certainly guilty. If you know you can be called on your actions, make a lot of noise establishing "controversey" about those who will call you out, to diminish their stature. Slash, smear, distort, MAKE NOISE, and the enemy's best efforts to expose your actions can be at best summed up as calling the kettle black by those whose knowledge of the discussion is not exactly exhaustive.
Air America Radio,, with Franken as midday host, has done more to clean the rightist clocks in one year than the entire Democratic party has done in twenty.
I imagine the main reason why the Hovitos indians tried so hard to kill Dr. Jones would be the necessity of rolling that ten ton boulder back up the tunnel to reset the trap. Every time you sit down to dinner, some idiot in a fedora sets the trap off again!
As I recall, Exoman was only a TV movie. It never became a series.
But I do remember the concept. It was a cautionary tale for any director of an Iron Man movie: the only way to show facial expressions of Exoman was to pretend the camera was inside the helmet.
But the suiting up process was fasinating. He had a clamshell tanning-bed-like machine that he'd swing himself into, and it'd join the two halves, anterior and posterior, sealing him inside. It was a thought provoking procedure for an armor happy kid like I was; being a paraplegic, he'd have a hard time getting out of that shell if the uncanning cycle failed.
I've been poking about on Google for some time, with little success, searching for any project to build an ebook from off-the-shelf parts.
I'm not in any way knowledgeable in electronics, so I'm not asking about a how-to for myself. I am wondering if anyone has tried it. An LCD screen, a circuit board, a Linux-based OS, a simple means of moving ebooks in and out of the device. It doesn't have to be very complex or expensive. Color isn't necessary. If a builder wanted to be cute, build an ebook into a bound book; the paper and leather would make a nice shock absorber if the unit were dropped.
The big advantage is the flexibility of the device. No DRM. Evolving open source ebook software. Textbooks. Did I mention textbooks?
Federal law slaps a mandatory 5 year sentence for scanning a copyrighted textbook into ebook format, so good luck bringing it to class. Unless you could rig a futuristic set of display spex so that you alone could read the book without someone calling the Feds down on you. A pretty pass it has come to, when we are hiding our books from cops.
Brings me to advocating open source textbooks. A major expense for money-starved American schools is the stranglehold of the textbook industry. Phonics, arithmetic and history aren't changing so much every year that new $100 textbooks for each are required periodically. Make them free and openly available for download, and be done with it. Such projects are already online; we just need a ebook to go along with them. Laptops are overkill for this purpose.
And the censorship of the Texas school system on American textbooks has reached critical mass of late, affecting science and history taught in every part of the country.
I'd like to see every student carry ONE ebook, cheaply made and powered by open sourced software and filled with open sourced textbooks and materials. Not made by Microsoft, not controlled by the publishing industry, and not subject to cultural cleansing by the most rightist school boards in the nation. I'd have killed for such a thing when I was toting 15 books at a time in high school.
Mostly -- I want to not drown in paper books! We can't cut down every tree in the world even if it does bring on the Rapture. Literacy is going up everywhere, and no doubt book publishers are gleeful, but we can't cut down every tree in Canada. The paper-based book is an environmental disaster. Trees ain't corn; cutting them down causes Problems.
Ignore all but the first paragraph if you wish; I want to know about any projects people have heard about or even done in regards to making their own ebooks.
" No. They are energy companies, not just oil companies. For instance, Shell and BP have pretty large solar divisions. They'd like to profit from hybrid cars or solar houses as anything else."
Not really. They buy solar technology and the like. For instance, Exxon-Mobil owns the patents for nickel-metal hydride batteries. They didn't develop the tech, they merely used their infinite money to buy it from the owners.
You may see an oil company bring solar plants online somewhere if they can't build an oil/coal/natural gas-fired plant online. They make obscene profits from petrochemicals -- and it will only get better and better for them as the bell curve drops for oil production. They are going to be able to buy the bloody planet when the price per barrel goes to 60, 70, 80, 100, 120 dollars. They have no incentive to make NMH batteries cheap by investing in mass production, nor will they build powersats, solar plants or any other method of power generation that doesn't give them the profit from out-of-control oil and NG prices. They are not altruists; they are the absolute opposite. There is nearly infinite profit in gasoline powered cars, which is why they have swung their weight into hybrid, rather than electric cars.
And auto companies will go along. GM just trashed all the remaining electric Impacts; those who leased the cars reported cheaper per-mile operation and nearly no maintenance costs. Hybrids are far more complex than electrics or gasoline cars, so maintenance and repair costs will be even higher than those for gasoline cars.
There just isn't the profit in electrics for oil companies that there is in gasoline or hybrid cars. And auto manufacturers' distributors make 50% of their profits in maintenance and repair of cars with many moving parts. A marriage not made in our heaven.
Damn those enlightened college students. With the educational gag laws coming soon to a university near you, we'll soon get rid of that nasty Enlightenment. Coupled with 24/7 rightist worshipfulness on all the U.S. news networks, the next generation will hear none of the satanic liberal theology. Rest easy in your hatred of reality. And God bless Pope George the First, may his enemies drown in their own vomit in pits in Afghanistan. .
Years ago, I saw this coming. It hasn't reached critical mass yet, but the ISPs will be forced to monitor users soon. It'll be years, but the internet will go on lockdown.
Universities, with their exceptionally chickenshit administrators (it's the vicious culture that makes you keep your head covered) are the canaries in this coal mine. They are dropping first.
I can only think that building new, covert, independent networks with simple technologies is the answer. Encrypted wireless mesh networks, with gateways to the internet maintained off-campus ( a rented apartment?). Cheap ethernet cables run where they can't be spotted. Radio relays run from the rooftops, broadcasting from building to building, highly directional. Lasers. Microwave relays. Powerlines. Waterpipes. Mesh cell phone bandwidth somehow for temporary burst-and-go networks. Use meatnets, by using people to move large amounts of data around. Use that cute ethernet-over-flesh trick: someone touches a transmitter, downloads a batch of files to a hardrive in his back pocket, then walks the data over and uploads it elsewhere. The possiblities are limited by how much you really want uncensored communications.
You're the first to go lockdown. The rest of us will be with you soon. It's not just about bittorrent and file sharing. It's about the censorship to come, if things go as bad as I think it will under President Cheney/Rice. Develop tools to communicate, because you're going to need them.
i can't test this, being at work and lacking the ability right now, but i used KaZaa a few months back for.torrent files and found quite a few. give it a shot.
And to the law, and the people of the United States throught their elected representatives.
Corporations are not nations, immune from all considerations other than profit. They are entities licensed to exist by the people of the U.S. and other nations, for the benefit of all. They are our servants, we are not theirs.
this is an old question for me -- how to extract those old aol mail archives. i actually still have the old mail backups from the aol file cabinet, but they are not exactly readable. aol wanted you to use their email and no others, so conversion was not an option.
question is, convert scripts or no, does anyone have documentation covering the old mailboxes for AOL? damn them, they kept such things "secret". altho easily reverse engineered, people didn't post solutions that could get them sued.
there used to be shareware that would convert the old binary mail archives to common text formats, but i really haven't seen any lately. aol certainly doesn't give a damn, never did, about making the customer happy.
In my lifetime, as I remember it, the American Empire started with the invasion of the nation of Panama and the kidnapping of President Manuel Noriega.
It was during the reign of Bush the First, as I recall. Citing the justification that the President of Panama was involved in the drug trade, the United States invaded the nation of Panama, surrounded the Presidential compound, blared rock music at high decibel levels, and eventually dragged the President of Panama back to a hole in the U.S. until someone remembered to charge him with something and convict him some years after.
Americans thought it was rather funny. I don't recall a single newsman questioning our right to invade Panama. The comedians made fun of Noriega's complexion, but said not one word about the slaughter we perpetrated.
Wow. Imagine a south/central American nation involved in the drug trade. Imagine the CIA ever caring. Negroponte, one of Bush the Second's new viceroys, was up to his ass in creating the death squads back in the 80's. Mass murder is okay, drugs are not...
According to REALLY supressed statistics the Panamanians kept, the U.S. killed over 2000 civilians rolling into Panama. Armed forces, I don't know, And I have no idea what the hell they charged Noriega with, what he was convicted of, or who sat in judgement. Nor under what possible set of international laws the U.S. could use to invade, kill, and kidnap the Executive in other nations because someone there ships chemicals some Americans don't want other Americans to use for recreational purposes. Imagine: Iraq eventually invading the U.S., killing about a half million people. Imagine them surrounding the White House with loud speakers blasting calls to prayer to drive the inhabitants insane. Imagine the Iraqi's dragging Bush II back to Iraq in irons to face charges for invading Iraq under false auspices. Imagine Iraq setting up a friendly government in the U.S. so that they could get favorable oil prices forevermore. And they'd have more justification than we had for kidnapping and murdering Panamanians.
After all, the Panama Canal was about to pass into Panamanian control in 1999. There wouldn't be any incentive to keep the locks in a friendly puppet's hand, would there?
And I really don't want to hear about Noriega's evil rule. No American ever gave a bloody damn about evil rulers in Panama, and we never will.
Slashdot Mirror
Darn. I did read the page, but I just woke up. Little mistake, sorry.
Hasn't anyone noticed that he's played the Time Lord before in a 2003 BBC web-only Dr. Who special, The Scream of the Shalka? IMDB calls him the ninth doctor! He'd be returning to the role, if that video is canonical.
Some must have this file. Please seed that torrent up!
The Bushies are out in force today! Whee!
During the Repubican convention/military garrison last year, police arrested over a thousand people on all sorts of charges. Those arrested on the whole alleged lying on the parts of the police who swore out the complaints. Here's the followup, and it illustrates the point of sousveillance beautifully.
.html
-Remember that all protestors of the prez are subjected to HEAVY intimidation through the use of video cameras.
From the front page of the New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/12/nyregion/12vid eo
Videos Challenge Accounts of Convention Unrest
By JIM DWYER
Published: April 12, 2005
Dennis Kyne put up such a fight at a political protest last summer, the arresting officer recalled, it took four police officers to haul him down the steps of the New York Public Library and across Fifth Avenue.
"We picked him up and we carried him while he squirmed and screamed," the officer, Matthew Wohl, testified in December. "I had one of his legs because he was kicking and refusing to walk on his own."
Accused of inciting a riot and resisting arrest, Mr. Kyne was the first of the 1,806 people arrested in New York last summer during the Republican National Convention to take his case to a jury. But one day after Officer Wohl testified, and before the defense called a single witness, the prosecutor abruptly dropped all charges.
During a recess, the defense had brought new information to the prosecutor. A videotape shot by a documentary filmmaker showed Mr. Kyne agitated but plainly walking under his own power down the library steps, contradicting the vivid account of Officer Wohl, who was nowhere to be seen in the pictures. Nor was the officer seen taking part in the arrests of four other people at the library against whom he signed complaints.
A sprawling body of visual evidence, made possible by inexpensive, lightweight cameras in the hands of private citizens, volunteer observers and the police themselves, has shifted the debate over precisely what happened on the streets during the week of the convention.
For Mr. Kyne and 400 others arrested that week, video recordings provided evidence that they had not committed a crime or that the charges against them could not be proved, according to defense lawyers and prosecutors.
Among them was Alexander Dunlop, who said he was arrested while going to pick up sushi.
Last week, he discovered that there were two versions of the same police tape: the one that was to be used as evidence in his trial had been edited at two spots, removing images that showed Mr. Dunlop behaving peacefully. When a volunteer film archivist found a more complete version of the tape and gave it to Mr. Dunlop's lawyer, prosecutors immediately dropped the charges and said that a technician had cut the material by mistake.
Seven months after the convention at Madison Square Garden, criminal charges have fallen against all but a handful of people arrested that week. Of the 1,670 cases that have run their full course, 91 percent ended with the charges dismissed or with a verdict of not guilty after trial. Many were dropped without any finding of wrongdoing, but also without any serious inquiry into the circumstances of the arrests, with the Manhattan district attorney's office agreeing that the cases should be "adjourned in contemplation of dismissal."
So far, 162 defendants have either pleaded guilty or were convicted after trial, and videotapes that bolstered the prosecution's case played a role in at least some of those cases, although prosecutors could not provide details.
Besides offering little support or actually undercutting the prosecution of most of the people arrested, the videotapes also highlight another substantial piece of the historical record: the Police Department's tactics in controlling the demonstrations, parades and rallies of hundreds of thousands of people were largely free of explicit violence.
Throughout the co
One last thing, afore I go. The major part of the six trillion dollar debt we had going into this mess in 2001 was accumulated during the Reagan/Bush era, caused by his tax cuts. We bought prosperity on the credit plan by not paying for what we bought for over 12 years.
In 2000, we were paying about 17% of our federal tax revenue out to the holders of that debt as interest. Something over 150-250 billion a year, something like that. Add it up. Call it an average of 150 bil a year in interest on the Reagan Prosperity; 12 years; 1.8 trillion dollars. We spent yea about 2 trillion in INTEREST for the miracle; add in the 300 bil or so we spend each year during Bush (and going up fast) and we've blown 3 trillion bucks just to pay the credit card monthly payment on trickle-down tax cuts. As we cut the budget, the debt service will climb as a fraction of tax revenue in the future. How many bridges and moonbases would that have paid for?
The dot-com bust was over a half decade ago -- let it go. We're in new times.
We've run almost THREE TRILLION DOLLARS in the last three years on top of the six trillion debt we were paying off before we went nuts.
That three trillion wasn't from the dot-com bust -- it is caused by taking in less money than we spend. We spend more than we tax. That's it. Dot coms and Clinton have nothing to do with it. Bush and his allies have cut taxes over and over again; just today, the House voted to eliminate the estate tax. That's hundreds of billions less revenue, and we are spending a quarter of a trillion on Iraq (eventually) alone.
The trickle down magic that was supposed to happen hasn't. We're just going bust. A result of believing in the Reagan tax-cut miracle, which never existed. Reagan RAISED taxes, firstly. Secondly, Reagan lucked out big time in 82 when OPEC's pricing structure collapsed utterly. We had a massive injection of cost savings from NOT sending money to oil companies and oil-producing nations. We simply kept our own money for the first time in years!
Bush and Co.'s belief in the tax-cut miracle didn't work. The trickle down didn't happen, as job and wage cuts continued, along with cash going to overseas factories. Paired with the exact opposite situation that Reagan was, OPEC and the oil companies are increasing oil prices enormously . Add the complete breakdown of Iraqi oil shipments to further increase oil prices, we have a situation that cause an inflationary nuke effect.
Add the fact that overseas financiers are not going to keep lending us money indefinitely, dropping the dollar in favor of the euro. Ouch. No way to keep borrowing. Across the board cuts. Goodbye, NASA. Goodbye Shuttle, moonbase, Mars.
As for the tax cuts that are causing the debt: if we are at war, why are we cutting taxes? Aren't we supposed to sacrifice something? Are only military people supposed to lose? during WW2 we increased taxes. If we are incurring special charges for Iraq that are expressible in fractions of a trillion dollars, why the hell don't we tax ourselves to pay the bills? Who the hell is supposed to pay the bill?
This is 9 trillion -- SO FAR. This looks intentional. Debt goes down when dollar collapses, is that it? Is that the big Rovian plan? World currency becomes the euro, the US dollar goes to 1/4 of today's value, the 10 trillion debt becomes 2.5? Oy.
Space travel was my life's passion, and it hurts to watch it all go away because of ideological blindness. If we won't pay our bills, we won't have a future in space. I don't know how a nation with ten trillion or more in debt, spending a quarter of each year's tax income in interest, can effectively do anything in space.
They are not "views". The numbers are the numbers. You can have your own opinions, but you can't have your own facts.
Why is pointing out we-can't-go-'cause-we've-made-ourselves-broke flamebait to any knowledgeable person? It's the simple truth. It's only "flamebait" if you somehow have convinced yourself that we AREN'T taxcutting ourselves broke.
We're broke.
Not "off-topic". I was responding to a post remarking on our inability to pay for a moonbase because we are spending and taxcutting ourselves broke.
It is EXACTLY on topic. Not being able to pay for jack-all is the critical block to the US space program. Tax cuts and revenue diversion into military ventures to conquer other countries IS gutting the space program. NO MONEY, NO SPACE.
Well, there was a Space Treaty, as well as an Antarctic treaty governing ownership, ie, no one owned it, it belongs to all, etc.
:) The U.N. or whomever adjudicates the claims will have the U.S. off its back for a couple of decades, at least.
We in the U.S. aren't into treaties any more. The number one treaty hatin' conservative is being made into our embassador to the U.N.
Whoever lands on the moon and defends the right to keep it with guns and/or politics will keep it. Same deal with Antarctica.
I don't see the New U.S.A. going very far to keep the Indians or Chinese off the moon, unless some sort of "national security" issue about the possibility that we are In Danger from Terrorists on the High Ground meme gets generated from some future Bush. The U.S. won't recongnize territorial claims, but will be too busy trying to keep itself from shrinking down into a has-been economic disaster zone to worry much about the moon.
I hope someone goes and develops that enormous lump of raw material into solar power satellites, L5 colonies, spaceships and whatever else they can dream up. I don't think the U.S. will care for a while, because it simply doesn't have the collective imagination to see the advantage to industrializing and colonizing the moon and orbital space. We don't have an educational system adequate to develop people who understand the technical, scientific and political issues. Not to mention that the few who do have the right bent read manga and watch "scifi" instead of reading classic hard SF, and won't recognize the military potential of throwing Really Big Rocks
Five years ago, we had plenty of money, and we were paying down the national debt, to the consternation of the debt holders.
:(
Now we are pumping almost a quarter of our national tax revenues into paying the interest on the exploding debt. The average schmo got $300, the wealthy got hundreds of billions in tax cuts, and we are BROKE. Not an accident; now come the cuts in every guvmint expenditure hated by the right, along with huge increases in defense and surveillance spending.
We aren't going to buy any moon bases
We are buying a war machine, an occupation authority with 14 permanent military bases in Iraq, an upcoming invasion and occupation of Iran, economic collapse, and a permanent diversion of 25+ percent and rising of our national tax revenues into the hands of the people lending us the money to go broke.
No moon bases, not ever. A debt society trying to dig out from under the wreckage of the next ten years, for most of this century.
"A car, or every other physical object (patented/copyrighted/whatever or not) is just the right order of atoms and molecules. Do I not have the right to order those atoms however I want, including the reproduction of a Lamborghini, down to the brand badge?"
Yes. You can build, on your own, a replica, down to the atom, of any car you like. Or toaster. Or coffee cup. It is NOT illegal. It doesn't hurt anyone. If someone could actually do it, no doubt the same arguments would be used by Lambourghini as the RIAA, and be equally wrong.
Someday object printers will exist, and all hell will break loose. I'd imagine possession of an unlicensed printer will have more stringent penalties than mass murder...
Post your link to the source of this "news". I can't find it on Google. Link not to a rightist blogger or Freerepublic, but a to a transcript of the comment, WITH CONTEXT, or at least an article from a credible news source referring to this. No, Rush is not acceptable. And he does not provide transcripts, anyway.
And as for Dobbs, he has indeed jumped onto the rightist train and is riding for the sunset, so his attitude as a "journalist" is indeed up for comment. He's dropped the mask of a reporter and has become a right-wing agitator. So it goes.
At Daily Kos or Talking Points Memo or even Buzzflash, the answer to the Drudge, they exhaustively document and link each reference to an actual news article from a credible source. "Everybody knows" is not credible as a source.
This "Franken is calling names" stinks of the old Orwellian trick of smearing the enemy with that which your side is most certainly guilty. If you know you can be called on your actions, make a lot of noise establishing "controversey" about those who will call you out, to diminish their stature. Slash, smear, distort, MAKE NOISE, and the enemy's best efforts to expose your actions can be at best summed up as calling the kettle black by those whose knowledge of the discussion is not exactly exhaustive.
Air America Radio,, with Franken as midday host, has done more to clean the rightist clocks in one year than the entire Democratic party has done in twenty.
I can't resist saying...
I imagine the main reason why the Hovitos indians tried so hard to kill Dr. Jones would be the necessity of rolling that ten ton boulder back up the tunnel to reset the trap. Every time you sit down to dinner, some idiot in a fedora sets the trap off again!
As I recall, Exoman was only a TV movie. It never became a series.
But I do remember the concept. It was a cautionary tale for any director of an Iron Man movie: the only way to show facial expressions of Exoman was to pretend the camera was inside the helmet.
But the suiting up process was fasinating. He had a clamshell tanning-bed-like machine that he'd swing himself into, and it'd join the two halves, anterior and posterior, sealing him inside. It was a thought provoking procedure for an armor happy kid like I was; being a paraplegic, he'd have a hard time getting out of that shell if the uncanning cycle failed.
I've been poking about on Google for some time, with little success, searching for any project to build an ebook from off-the-shelf parts.
I'm not in any way knowledgeable in electronics, so I'm not asking about a how-to for myself. I am wondering if anyone has tried it. An LCD screen, a circuit board, a Linux-based OS, a simple means of moving ebooks in and out of the device. It doesn't have to be very complex or expensive. Color isn't necessary. If a builder wanted to be cute, build an ebook into a bound book; the paper and leather would make a nice shock absorber if the unit were dropped.
The big advantage is the flexibility of the device. No DRM. Evolving open source ebook software. Textbooks. Did I mention textbooks?
Federal law slaps a mandatory 5 year sentence for scanning a copyrighted textbook into ebook format, so good luck bringing it to class. Unless you could rig a futuristic set of display spex so that you alone could read the book without someone calling the Feds down on you. A pretty pass it has come to, when we are hiding our books from cops.
Brings me to advocating open source textbooks. A major expense for money-starved American schools is the stranglehold of the textbook industry. Phonics, arithmetic and history aren't changing so much every year that new $100 textbooks for each are required periodically. Make them free and openly available for download, and be done with it. Such projects are already online; we just need a ebook to go along with them. Laptops are overkill for this purpose.
And the censorship of the Texas school system on American textbooks has reached critical mass of late, affecting science and history taught in every part of the country.
I'd like to see every student carry ONE ebook, cheaply made and powered by open sourced software and filled with open sourced textbooks and materials. Not made by Microsoft, not controlled by the publishing industry, and not subject to cultural cleansing by the most rightist school boards in the nation. I'd have killed for such a thing when I was toting 15 books at a time in high school.
Mostly -- I want to not drown in paper books! We can't cut down every tree in the world even if it does bring on the Rapture. Literacy is going up everywhere, and no doubt book publishers are gleeful, but we can't cut down every tree in Canada. The paper-based book is an environmental disaster. Trees ain't corn; cutting them down causes Problems.
Ignore all but the first paragraph if you wish; I want to know about any projects people have heard about or even done in regards to making their own ebooks.
" No. They are energy companies, not just oil companies. For instance, Shell and BP have pretty large solar divisions. They'd like to profit from hybrid cars or solar houses as anything else."
Not really. They buy solar technology and the like. For instance, Exxon-Mobil owns the patents for nickel-metal hydride batteries. They didn't develop the tech, they merely used their infinite money to buy it from the owners.
You may see an oil company bring solar plants online somewhere if they can't build an oil/coal/natural gas-fired plant online. They make obscene profits from petrochemicals -- and it will only get better and better for them as the bell curve drops for oil production. They are going to be able to buy the bloody planet when the price per barrel goes to 60, 70, 80, 100, 120 dollars. They have no incentive to make NMH batteries cheap by investing in mass production, nor will they build powersats, solar plants or any other method of power generation that doesn't give them the profit from out-of-control oil and NG prices. They are not altruists; they are the absolute opposite. There is nearly infinite profit in gasoline powered cars, which is why they have swung their weight into hybrid, rather than electric cars.
And auto companies will go along. GM just trashed all the remaining electric Impacts; those who leased the cars reported cheaper per-mile operation and nearly no maintenance costs. Hybrids are far more complex than electrics or gasoline cars, so maintenance and repair costs will be even higher than those for gasoline cars.
There just isn't the profit in electrics for oil companies that there is in gasoline or hybrid cars. And auto manufacturers' distributors make 50% of their profits in maintenance and repair of cars with many moving parts. A marriage not made in our heaven.
Damn those enlightened college students. With the educational gag laws coming soon to a university near you, we'll soon get rid of that nasty Enlightenment. Coupled with 24/7 rightist worshipfulness on all the U.S. news networks, the next generation will hear none of the satanic liberal theology. Rest easy in your hatred of reality. And God bless Pope George the First, may his enemies drown in their own vomit in pits in Afghanistan. .
Years ago, I saw this coming. It hasn't reached critical mass yet, but the ISPs will be forced to monitor users soon. It'll be years, but the internet will go on lockdown.
Universities, with their exceptionally chickenshit administrators (it's the vicious culture that makes you keep your head covered) are the canaries in this coal mine. They are dropping first.
I can only think that building new, covert, independent networks with simple technologies is the answer. Encrypted wireless mesh networks, with gateways to the internet maintained off-campus ( a rented apartment?). Cheap ethernet cables run where they can't be spotted. Radio relays run from the rooftops, broadcasting from building to building, highly directional. Lasers. Microwave relays. Powerlines. Waterpipes. Mesh cell phone bandwidth somehow for temporary burst-and-go networks. Use meatnets, by using people to move large amounts of data around. Use that cute ethernet-over-flesh trick: someone touches a transmitter, downloads a batch of files to a hardrive in his back pocket, then walks the data over and uploads it elsewhere. The possiblities are limited by how much you really want uncensored communications.
You're the first to go lockdown. The rest of us will be with you soon. It's not just about bittorrent and file sharing. It's about the censorship to come, if things go as bad as I think it will under President Cheney/Rice. Develop tools to communicate, because you're going to need them.
i can't test this, being at work and lacking the ability right now, but i used KaZaa a few months back for .torrent files and found quite a few. give it a shot.
"AOL is answerable to its shareholders. "
And to the law, and the people of the United States throught their elected representatives.
Corporations are not nations, immune from all considerations other than profit. They are entities licensed to exist by the people of the U.S. and other nations, for the benefit of all. They are our servants, we are not theirs.
Yep. Also tried asking a polite question on Slashdot.
Oops. My bad.
If no one here can get the torrent, try eDonkey. I kinda know it's out there. Try "Batman - New Times" in the search.
I don't know what's up with the torrent submissions. Can't seem to connect.
this is an old question for me -- how to extract those old aol mail archives. i actually still have the old mail backups from the aol file cabinet, but they are not exactly readable. aol wanted you to use their email and no others, so conversion was not an option.
question is, convert scripts or no, does anyone have documentation covering the old mailboxes for AOL? damn them, they kept such things "secret". altho easily reverse engineered, people didn't post solutions that could get them sued.
there used to be shareware that would convert the old binary mail archives to common text formats, but i really haven't seen any lately. aol certainly doesn't give a damn, never did, about making the customer happy.
any ideas?
In my lifetime, as I remember it, the American Empire started with the invasion of the nation of Panama and the kidnapping of President Manuel Noriega.
It was during the reign of Bush the First, as I recall. Citing the justification that the President of Panama was involved in the drug trade, the United States invaded the nation of Panama, surrounded the Presidential compound, blared rock music at high decibel levels, and eventually dragged the President of Panama back to a hole in the U.S. until someone remembered to charge him with something and convict him some years after.
Americans thought it was rather funny. I don't recall a single newsman questioning our right to invade Panama. The comedians made fun of Noriega's complexion, but said not one word about the slaughter we perpetrated.
Wow. Imagine a south/central American nation involved in the drug trade. Imagine the CIA ever caring. Negroponte, one of Bush the Second's new viceroys, was up to his ass in creating the death squads back in the 80's. Mass murder is okay, drugs are not...
According to REALLY supressed statistics the Panamanians kept, the U.S. killed over 2000 civilians rolling into Panama. Armed forces, I don't know, And I have no idea what the hell they charged Noriega with, what he was convicted of, or who sat in judgement. Nor under what possible set of international laws the U.S. could use to invade, kill, and kidnap the Executive in other nations because someone there ships chemicals some Americans don't want other Americans to use for recreational purposes. Imagine: Iraq eventually invading the U.S., killing about a half million people. Imagine them surrounding the White House with loud speakers blasting calls to prayer to drive the inhabitants insane. Imagine the Iraqi's dragging Bush II back to Iraq in irons to face charges for invading Iraq under false auspices. Imagine Iraq setting up a friendly government in the U.S. so that they could get favorable oil prices forevermore. And they'd have more justification than we had for kidnapping and murdering Panamanians.
After all, the Panama Canal was about to pass into Panamanian control in 1999. There wouldn't be any incentive to keep the locks in a friendly puppet's hand, would there?
And I really don't want to hear about Noriega's evil rule. No American ever gave a bloody damn about evil rulers in Panama, and we never will.