Reminds me of a story of a writing assignment
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· Score: 5, Funny
Rebecca and Gary English 44A Creative Writing Prof Miller
In-class Assignment for Wednesday
Today we will experiment with a new form called the tandem story. The process is simple. Each person will pair off with the person sitting to his or her immediate right. One of you will then write the first paragraph of a short story. The partner will read the first paragraph and then add another paragraph to the story. The first person will then add a third paragraph, and so on back and forth. Remember to reread what has been written each time in order to keep the story coherent. The story is over when both agree a conclusion has been reached.
* * * * * *
At first, Laurie couldn't decide which kind of tea she wanted. The camomile, which used to be her favorite for lazy evenings at home, now reminded her too much of Carl, who once said, in happier times, that he liked camomile. But she felt she must now, at all costs, keep her mind off Carl. His possessiveness was suffocating, and if she thought about him too much her asthma started acting up again. So camomile was out of the question. -- Meanwhile, Advance Sergeant Carl Harris, leader of the attack squadron now in orbit over Skylon 4, had more important things to think about than the neuroses of an air-headed bimbo named Laurie with whom he had spent one sweaty night over a year ago. "A.S. Harris to Geostation 17," he said into his transgalactic communicator. "Polar orbit established. No sign of resistance so far..." But before he could sign off a bluish particle beam flashed out of nowhere and blasted a hole through his ship's cargo bay. The jolt from the direct hit sent him flying out of his seat and across the cockpit. -- He bumped his head and died almost immediately, but not before he felt one last pang of regret for psychically brutalizing the one woman who had ever had feelings for him. Soon afterwards, Earth stopped its pointless hostilities towards the peaceful farmers of Skylon 4. "Congress Passes Law Permanently Abolishing War and Space Travel," Laurie read in her newspaper one morning. The news simultaneously excited her and bored her. She stared out the window, dreaming of her youth -- when the days had passed unhurriedly and carefree, with no newspapers to read, no television to distract her from her sense of innocent wonder at all the beautiful things around her. "Why must one lose one's innocence to become a woman?" she pondered wistfully. -- Little did she know, but she has less than 10 seconds to live. Thousands of miles above the city, the Anu'udrian mothership launched the first of its lithium fusion missiles. The dim-witted wimpy peaceniks who pushed the Unilateral Aerospace Disarmament Treaty through Congress had left Earth a defenseless target for the hostile alien empires who were determined to destroy the human race. Within two hours after the passage of the treaty the Anu'udrian ships were on course for Earth, carrying enough firepower to pulverize the entire planet. With no one to stop them they swiftly initiated their diabolical plan. The lithium fusion missile entered the atmosphere unimpeded. The President, in his top-secret mobile submarine headquarters on the ocean floor off the coast of Guam, felt the inconceivably massive explosion which vaporized Laurie and 85 million other Americans. The President slammed his fist on the conference table. "We can't allow this! I'm going to veto that treaty! Let's blow 'em out of the sky!" -- This is absurd. I refuse to continue this mockery of literature. My writing partner is a violent, chauvinistic, semi-literate adolescent. -- Yeah? Well, you're a self-centered tedious neurotic whose attempts at writing are the literary equivalent of Valium. -- You total $*&. -- Stupid %&#$!.
Big donors power governor's big dance
By John Sullivan and Rose Ciotta
Inquirer Staff Writers
Gov. Rendell raised more than $2.5 million from about 200 private donors for his inaugural bash, with much of the money flowing from corporations, trade unions, lawyers and professional associations.
Contributors to the big party included many who gave heavily to Rendell's campaign for governor, some who supported his opponents, and others who have earned millions of dollars from state contracts.
There were five categories of donors, with the highest, an elite list of 15, paying $50,000 each to earn "benefactor" status.
Some of the top corporate donors included Comcast, Unisys, Verizon and SAP Public Services.
Organizers of the event, which was estimated to cost more than $3 million, said donors did not earn special access to Rendell. [HAHAHA! yeah, right.]
Actually not all FPGA's use 'switches'. It is true, some FPGAs are based on anti-fuse technology which is essentially is a crosspoint switch. Actel has a several families of these, which are programmed once. These types of FPGAs are actually viewed by many to be the preferred technology for use in some military, high-reliability type environments.
The other basic FPGA technology is SRAM based. Xilinx, Actel, and Lattice all have SRAM based FPGAs which are reprogrammable electronically. The can be reprogrammed tens of thousands of times - since the Logic cells are based on SRAM memory technology. Some of the newer products, such as Lattice FPGAs, have Flash AND SRAM in the FPGA, which allows dynamic reconfigurations of the FPGA (i.e. a new configuration can be loaded into non-volatile Flash while the FPGA is running).
The newest FPGAs can reconfigure in a span of microseconds. That means reconfiguring in a few clocks of a megahertz clock signal. Sure it's not instantaneous, but well within the reset ramps of most chips out there. In this regard, the Lattice chips are pretty much instant-on.
I'd take this news with a little bit of hope, but looking at the long-term picture, it is but a small battle in a eons-old war. And it is a war we have been losing.
MRSA is probably the best DNA and plasmid scavenger on the planet and in terms of resistance to medication it is probably on par with HIV in its ability to mutate to adapt and overcome the hostile environment.
I'd say it won't be too long before staph scavenges and adopts DNA material which makes this 'MRSA-killing bacteria' ineffective. Or, even worse, in the upcoming experiments, this medical firm will introduce plasmids and DNA to staph which aren't normally available in its environment. Perhaps, for example, the MRSA will adapt the plasmids corresponding to effective growth in water pools. Then we'll have staph that is spread through contaminated water supplies.
It gets worse. Our artificial tinkering of antibiotics has introduced a whole new rate of evolution into the microbiological world. We are fools if we don't take the big picture into account.
I suggest everyone here read Dr. Laurie Garrett's excellent book "The Coming Plague" for an in-depth history of our war on microbes, and why we are losing.
Perhaps they raise costs, but if they structure it right then the costs will be shared or mitigated nearly entirely and the environment will benefit. No doubt there are tons of technical and logistal burdens to overcome. But recycling has proven to be workable in other industries like aluminum and paper. My uncle, a former VP at International Paper tells me that they can now recycle paper almost 10 times from initial production of highquality document paper to newsprint and packaging. No doubt it initially was a loss for them. But a company like IP doesn't embark on such a huge recycling effort if in the long run it is bad for their company. Recycling does work, and companies have shown that it can be good for business.
Why not model it after the recyclable can and bottle programs that New England states and other areas have adopted? The consumer pays 5 cents extra per can or bottle, and then is refunded when he returns it to a recycling facility.
Obviously, the scope and content of the program would be different, and more challenging. And the logistics is a lot bigger problem. But with PC prices hitting $500 and less, perhaps a program like that would be feasible.
Since there is so many other less-important things they could be wasting their time on - like stopping terrorists from bombing our cities, finding the scumbags who kidnap little girls from their houses, etc...
For all you non-mechanical engineer types, Pro/Engineer is a 3-d modeling tool. The other big ones out there are SolidWorks (which is hugely popular, mostly due to its lower cost, but similar quality) and at a lower scale, AutoCad Mechanical Desktop/Inventor.
As an aside, Cadence generally doesn't do mechanical modeling software. They do PCB design, schematic entry, simulation and of course IC design and verification.
This is news, but for most Linux users, forget about buying Pro/E. It costs big time - and the companies that use Pro/E already can afford bigtime boxes (Sparcs, etc) to run them on. Now if SolidWorks were to push into the Linux arena, things would start to get interesting...
"The JHDL people claim that people learn it much faster than VHDL, so I was asking you guys for verification of its applicability and ease of use."
Perhaps its easier to learn, but as any programmable logic designer will tell you - it's also about synthesis and what comes after. I'll present to you the normal process flow of a programmable logic part (in this case, an FGPA):
1. VHDL or Verilog design
2. Synthesis through software tool (ie Synplicity, Leonardo, etc).
3. Synthesis results in a netlist
4. Place and Route, usually through vendor-specific tool (Xilinx, Aldec, Altera)
5. Place and route results in a device programming file (usually vendor specific, could be JEDEC format)
Of course, in between these steps are any number of required simulations. You will conduct many re-iterations of functional simulation and post-layout simulation of the design. As you will soon see, and has been mentioned previously, timing is one of the most essential things about a programmable logic design. If your timing is screwed up or your propogation delays too great, then your part is not going to work, and you're going to spend a lot of money in schedule slips and re-designs.
As has been said, there is a WHOLE LOT of details here that are not addressed by simply pointing to this JHDL tool and running with it. I've seen some of the main driving factors in FPGA and CPLD design are the tool--part interoperability and availability. JHDL is all nice and good - until you get to the point for synthesize and place and route (or fit for CPLDs) and discover you're SOL.
I recommend you first define your requirements (in detail), and develop a system level spec. At that point, if a programmable logic component fits the bill (FPGA or CPLD), then pick a language with good industry support (VHDL or Verilog) and move from there. In other words - reinforce success: both VHDL and Verilog have proven track records in the industry, and designers have had many successes using them.
"But we don't need a better system for watching the stars. Nope. Obviously."
Perhaps we do, but does anyone honestly think we could do anything about an asteroid at this point in time. Hollywood movies make it out to be a doable engineering feat to crack an asteroid in two or blow it up in space, but at this point in time, can we really do anything about an asteroid that is predicted to hit the earth in the next 10-15 years?
Perhaps when we have space-based laser, nuclear, or particle beam weapons then we will have a chance. But then again, we have that continual tug of war between 'guns & butter'. Do we invest in education and social security or do we invest in armaments for taking out asteroid threats? As we have seen - there is no free lunch. If you are going to spend a couple hundred billion on a space based system like this, then there WILL BE less for social security and welfare checks - either that or insanely high taxes.
It comes down to priorities. Is the family starving down the street more important than defending against a future possible asteroid hit? At some point, choices will have to be made.
"It bothers me that the very laws of the land underscore the public's acceptance of violent behavior and rejection of sexual behavior."
Interesting point. But at the same time, do you really believe that the laws of the land have actually decreased sexual content in media or in the general public? Sure, there's plenty of laws about sexual content, but aren't they really moot in light of the public's interest in sex? I mean look at the newsstand - almost every magazine within sight has some sexual or suggestive content on the cover. Look at almost every ad or program on tv and you will see SOME sort of sexual content. As a matter of fact, all the laws on the books didn't stop me from downloading the scantily clad pictures of Shakira the other day. Just kidding, but you get the drift.
I'm not condemning anything - just making an observation: the supposed vast amount of legislation against sexual content is really quite irrevelant. Just like laws against stealing horses - modern society has made them irrelevant. Should they be removed from the books? Probably.
"Gaining confidence and mutual trust between the user and system will be challenging to say the least, and ultimately may prove to be the biggest barrier to wide-scale adoption of intelligent wearable devices."
They hit close to the mark here about privacy concerns, but they still miss. It's really not about mutual trust between user and system. It's about the mistrust that users have with the powers that influence the 'system' (ie government). And unforunately, as Carnivore or Digital Angel, or any number of technological wonders have shown, misuse by big government is always a risk.
The polls may proclaim that we have a greater trust in government than ever before - but behind the scenes there is the spectre of Big Brother that just won't go away. And the current administration's actions haven't done anything to alleviate that.
"We don't have horns coming out of our head," said David Cain, the current manager of the Solutia plant in Anniston. "We're not evil people."
Wrong - you are EVIL. Even though you inherited problems from your predecessor company - you are still responsible, both to your company and the community around you. It is part of what a good citizen, a good HUMAN does. Evil can take many forms - and in this case it is an outright rejection of the old fashioned notions of responsibility and accountability.
"so brazenly stupid and blatantly unconstitutional that it calls into serious question its sponsors fitness to hold public office.."
Well guess what Jon - the sponsor is a DEMOCRAT. And guess what Jon, the state is the same one as the illustrious Mr. Lieberman, of the Gore-Lieberman ticket, whose flaws you turned a blind eye to last year (evidently even Mrs. Gore's ranting about censoring records wasn't enough for you).
It is so very interesting when liberals see censorshop they will raise a cry up to high-heaven, unless, of course, it is censorship by Democrats. Interesting, also, that among the forms of censorship, that by the left is the most insidious - in the name of eliminating 'hate speech', they bypass the 1st Amendment quite effectively.
Hence we have cases such as the recent school which celebrated 'Gay Pride' day, yet the same school also threatened suspending a student for wearing a 'Straight Pride' t-shirt - in the name of restricting 'hate speech'. After all, if the media and politicians were to be taken as true, we would all know that 'hate speech' can only be spoken by heterosexual white males, and 'hate crimes' cannot be committed by minorities. Something to think about...
Your figures seem correct, however, you make one unstated assumption which may or may not be true. While there may very well be that much energy stored in compressed air, in order to release ALL the enery you would have to take it to a pressure of 0, that is a vacuum.
Basically, there is no machinary I know of that can harness compressed air with such absolute effeciency. I would say that the energy derived from this setup would be significantly less than 96 trillion joules.
"The public reaction to it was inexcusable, but he is not the type of person you want to rally your banner behind."
You proved my very point. Since Horowitz is obviously a 'racist', then it is okay to steal newspapers that publish his ad. It is okay to silence him, or Laura Schlessinger, or any other person, because they are (in your opinion) racist and 'hatemongerers'.
And that is a double-standard, plain and simple. If you allow Craig Killborn to post "Snipers Wanted" with a video of George Bush in the name of comedic 1st Amendment expression, then to silence Horowitz is a double standard of the highest order.
As for websites, there are websites promoting the molestation and kidnapping of children. Is the left busy condemning them? Of course not, only those 'hate-filled' anti-abortion websites must be silenced.
The point is this: Under the guide of eliminating the 'hate-mongerers' and 'hate-speech' the leftists routinely censor and silence any opposing opinion or speech. Any condemnation of homosexuals is 'hate' against homosexuals. Any condemnation of equal opportunity programs is 'hate' against minorities. The list goes on.
It's BS plain and simple. If the left is so dedicated to 1st Amendment expression rights, then it needs to be more than just expressions that happen to be in agreement with their own.
BTW, Horowitz was marching with African-Americans for civil rights before you were even born. He was the liberal's liberal before you were even in grade school. Your condemnation of him is laughably ignorant of historical facts.
Ah, so the censorship issue raises its head again. <p>
<b>But of course, we all know that a man like Horowitz can publish his opinion on slavery reparations in an advertisement in college newspapers without any threats or censorship whatsoever. Our wonderfully liberal and tolerant colleges and universities certainly allow any opinion to be expressed, even those of Charlton Heston or Wayne LaPierre.<p>
Certainly, anti-abortion websites expressing the authors opinions of abortion and abortion doctors are not censored or ordered removed from listing.<p>
Or are they?
<p>
The most blatant hypocrisy today is that of the modern day liberal, who cries 'censorship' the minute parents start complaining about books in libraries, but silence and censor any contraty opinion under the guise of eliminating 'hate speech'.</b>
Now Microsoft demands that we leave ourselves equally vulnerable in other areas. But defenselessness is not the American Way. In the land of the brave and the free, we defend our freedom with the GNU GPL.
Actually, to better put it in a general sense, we should say this: "In the land of the brave and the free, we defend our freedom with firearms." When it all comes down, the second Amendment is the great guaranteer of all other rights listed in the Bill of Rights.
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Rebecca and Gary
English 44A
Creative Writing
Prof Miller
In-class Assignment for Wednesday
Today we will experiment with a new form called the tandem story. The process is simple. Each person will pair off with the person sitting to his or her immediate right. One of you will then write the first paragraph of a short story. The partner will read the first paragraph and then add another paragraph to the story. The first person will then add a third paragraph, and so on back and forth. Remember to reread what has been written each time in order to keep the story coherent. The story is over when both agree a conclusion has been reached.
* * * * * *
At first, Laurie couldn't decide which kind of tea she wanted. The camomile, which used to be her favorite for lazy evenings at home, now reminded her too much of Carl, who once said, in happier times, that he liked camomile. But she felt she must now, at all costs, keep her mind off Carl. His possessiveness was suffocating, and if she thought about him too much her asthma started acting up again. So camomile was out of the question.
--
Meanwhile, Advance Sergeant Carl Harris, leader of the attack squadron now in orbit over Skylon 4, had more important things to think about than the neuroses of an air-headed bimbo named Laurie with whom he had spent one sweaty night over a year ago. "A.S. Harris to Geostation 17," he said into his transgalactic communicator. "Polar orbit established. No sign of resistance so far..." But before he could sign off a bluish particle beam flashed out of nowhere and blasted a hole through his ship's cargo bay. The jolt from the direct hit sent him flying out of his seat and across the cockpit.
--
He bumped his head and died almost immediately, but not before he felt one last pang of regret for psychically brutalizing the one woman who had ever had feelings for him. Soon afterwards, Earth stopped its pointless hostilities towards the peaceful farmers of Skylon 4. "Congress Passes Law Permanently Abolishing War and Space Travel," Laurie read in her newspaper one morning. The news simultaneously excited her and bored her. She stared out the window, dreaming of her youth -- when the days had passed unhurriedly and carefree, with no newspapers to read, no television to distract her from her sense of innocent wonder at all the beautiful things around her. "Why must one lose one's innocence to become a woman?" she pondered wistfully.
--
Little did she know, but she has less than 10 seconds to live. Thousands of miles above the city, the Anu'udrian mothership launched the first of its lithium fusion missiles. The dim-witted wimpy peaceniks who pushed the Unilateral Aerospace Disarmament Treaty through Congress had left Earth a defenseless target for the hostile alien empires who were determined to destroy the human race. Within two hours after the passage of the treaty the Anu'udrian ships were on course for Earth, carrying enough firepower to pulverize the entire planet. With no one to stop them they swiftly initiated their diabolical plan. The lithium fusion missile entered the atmosphere unimpeded. The President, in his top-secret mobile submarine headquarters on the ocean floor off the coast of Guam, felt the inconceivably massive explosion which vaporized Laurie and 85 million other Americans. The President slammed his fist on the conference table. "We can't allow this! I'm going to veto that treaty! Let's blow 'em out of the sky!"
--
This is absurd. I refuse to continue this mockery of literature. My writing partner is a violent, chauvinistic, semi-literate adolescent.
--
Yeah? Well, you're a self-centered tedious neurotic whose attempts at writing are the literary equivalent of Valium.
--
You total $*&.
--
Stupid %&#$!.
Big donors power governor's big dance
By John Sullivan and Rose Ciotta
Inquirer Staff Writers
Gov. Rendell raised more than $2.5 million from about 200 private donors for his inaugural bash, with much of the money flowing from corporations, trade unions, lawyers and professional associations.
Contributors to the big party included many who gave heavily to Rendell's campaign for governor, some who supported his opponents, and others who have earned millions of dollars from state contracts.
There were five categories of donors, with the highest, an elite list of 15, paying $50,000 each to earn "benefactor" status.
Some of the top corporate donors included Comcast, Unisys, Verizon and SAP Public Services.
Organizers of the event, which was estimated to cost more than $3 million, said donors did not earn special access to Rendell. [HAHAHA! yeah, right.]
The other basic FPGA technology is SRAM based. Xilinx, Actel, and Lattice all have SRAM based FPGAs which are reprogrammable electronically. The can be reprogrammed tens of thousands of times - since the Logic cells are based on SRAM memory technology. Some of the newer products, such as Lattice FPGAs, have Flash AND SRAM in the FPGA, which allows dynamic reconfigurations of the FPGA (i.e. a new configuration can be loaded into non-volatile Flash while the FPGA is running).
The newest FPGAs can reconfigure in a span of microseconds. That means reconfiguring in a few clocks of a megahertz clock signal. Sure it's not instantaneous, but well within the reset ramps of most chips out there. In this regard, the Lattice chips are pretty much instant-on.
MRSA is probably the best DNA and plasmid scavenger on the planet and in terms of resistance to medication it is probably on par with HIV in its ability to mutate to adapt and overcome the hostile environment.
I'd say it won't be too long before staph scavenges and adopts DNA material which makes this 'MRSA-killing bacteria' ineffective. Or, even worse, in the upcoming experiments, this medical firm will introduce plasmids and DNA to staph which aren't normally available in its environment. Perhaps, for example, the MRSA will adapt the plasmids corresponding to effective growth in water pools. Then we'll have staph that is spread through contaminated water supplies.
It gets worse. Our artificial tinkering of antibiotics has introduced a whole new rate of evolution into the microbiological world. We are fools if we don't take the big picture into account.
I suggest everyone here read Dr. Laurie Garrett's excellent book "The Coming Plague" for an in-depth history of our war on microbes, and why we are losing.
Sure there are - how about them Dallas Cowboys?
Surely it is at least worth investigating.
Why not model it after the recyclable can and bottle programs that New England states and other areas have adopted? The consumer pays 5 cents extra per can or bottle, and then is refunded when he returns it to a recycling facility.
Obviously, the scope and content of the program would be different, and more challenging. And the logistics is a lot bigger problem. But with PC prices hitting $500 and less, perhaps a program like that would be feasible.
Since there is so many other less-important things they could be wasting their time on - like stopping terrorists from bombing our cities, finding the scumbags who kidnap little girls from their houses, etc...
For all you non-mechanical engineer types, Pro/Engineer is a 3-d modeling tool. The other big ones out there are SolidWorks (which is hugely popular, mostly due to its lower cost, but similar quality) and at a lower scale, AutoCad Mechanical Desktop/Inventor.
As an aside, Cadence generally doesn't do mechanical modeling software. They do PCB design, schematic entry, simulation and of course IC design and verification.
This is news, but for most Linux users, forget about buying Pro/E. It costs big time - and the companies that use Pro/E already can afford bigtime boxes (Sparcs, etc) to run them on. Now if SolidWorks were to push into the Linux arena, things would start to get interesting...
Perhaps its easier to learn, but as any programmable logic designer will tell you - it's also about synthesis and what comes after. I'll present to you the normal process flow of a programmable logic part (in this case, an FGPA):
1. VHDL or Verilog design
2. Synthesis through software tool (ie Synplicity, Leonardo, etc).
3. Synthesis results in a netlist
4. Place and Route, usually through vendor-specific tool (Xilinx, Aldec, Altera)
5. Place and route results in a device programming file (usually vendor specific, could be JEDEC format)
Of course, in between these steps are any number of required simulations. You will conduct many re-iterations of functional simulation and post-layout simulation of the design. As you will soon see, and has been mentioned previously, timing is one of the most essential things about a programmable logic design. If your timing is screwed up or your propogation delays too great, then your part is not going to work, and you're going to spend a lot of money in schedule slips and re-designs.
As has been said, there is a WHOLE LOT of details here that are not addressed by simply pointing to this JHDL tool and running with it. I've seen some of the main driving factors in FPGA and CPLD design are the tool--part interoperability and availability. JHDL is all nice and good - until you get to the point for synthesize and place and route (or fit for CPLDs) and discover you're SOL.
I recommend you first define your requirements (in detail), and develop a system level spec. At that point, if a programmable logic component fits the bill (FPGA or CPLD), then pick a language with good industry support (VHDL or Verilog) and move from there. In other words - reinforce success: both VHDL and Verilog have proven track records in the industry, and designers have had many successes using them.
Perhaps we do, but does anyone honestly think we could do anything about an asteroid at this point in time. Hollywood movies make it out to be a doable engineering feat to crack an asteroid in two or blow it up in space, but at this point in time, can we really do anything about an asteroid that is predicted to hit the earth in the next 10-15 years?
Perhaps when we have space-based laser, nuclear, or particle beam weapons then we will have a chance. But then again, we have that continual tug of war between 'guns & butter'. Do we invest in education and social security or do we invest in armaments for taking out asteroid threats? As we have seen - there is no free lunch. If you are going to spend a couple hundred billion on a space based system like this, then there WILL BE less for social security and welfare checks - either that or insanely high taxes.
It comes down to priorities. Is the family starving down the street more important than defending against a future possible asteroid hit? At some point, choices will have to be made.
Interesting point. But at the same time, do you really believe that the laws of the land have actually decreased sexual content in media or in the general public? Sure, there's plenty of laws about sexual content, but aren't they really moot in light of the public's interest in sex? I mean look at the newsstand - almost every magazine within sight has some sexual or suggestive content on the cover. Look at almost every ad or program on tv and you will see SOME sort of sexual content. As a matter of fact, all the laws on the books didn't stop me from downloading the scantily clad pictures of Shakira the other day. Just kidding, but you get the drift.
I'm not condemning anything - just making an observation: the supposed vast amount of legislation against sexual content is really quite irrevelant. Just like laws against stealing horses - modern society has made them irrelevant. Should they be removed from the books? Probably.
Hats off to Cisco's engineers for putting this into hardware - with the emerging IEEE standard, hopefully there will be others.
They hit close to the mark here about privacy concerns, but they still miss. It's really not about mutual trust between user and system. It's about the mistrust that users have with the powers that influence the 'system' (ie government). And unforunately, as Carnivore or Digital Angel, or any number of technological wonders have shown, misuse by big government is always a risk.
The polls may proclaim that we have a greater trust in government than ever before - but behind the scenes there is the spectre of Big Brother that just won't go away. And the current administration's actions haven't done anything to alleviate that.
Wrong - you are EVIL. Even though you inherited problems from your predecessor company - you are still responsible, both to your company and the community around you. It is part of what a good citizen, a good HUMAN does. Evil can take many forms - and in this case it is an outright rejection of the old fashioned notions of responsibility and accountability.
Well guess what Jon - the sponsor is a DEMOCRAT. And guess what Jon, the state is the same one as the illustrious Mr. Lieberman, of the Gore-Lieberman ticket, whose flaws you turned a blind eye to last year (evidently even Mrs. Gore's ranting about censoring records wasn't enough for you).
It is so very interesting when liberals see censorshop they will raise a cry up to high-heaven, unless, of course, it is censorship by Democrats. Interesting, also, that among the forms of censorship, that by the left is the most insidious - in the name of eliminating 'hate speech', they bypass the 1st Amendment quite effectively.
Hence we have cases such as the recent school which celebrated 'Gay Pride' day, yet the same school also threatened suspending a student for wearing a 'Straight Pride' t-shirt - in the name of restricting 'hate speech'. After all, if the media and politicians were to be taken as true, we would all know that 'hate speech' can only be spoken by heterosexual white males, and 'hate crimes' cannot be committed by minorities. Something to think about...
Basically, there is no machinary I know of that can harness compressed air with such absolute effeciency. I would say that the energy derived from this setup would be significantly less than 96 trillion joules.
You proved my very point. Since Horowitz is obviously a 'racist', then it is okay to steal newspapers that publish his ad. It is okay to silence him, or Laura Schlessinger, or any other person, because they are (in your opinion) racist and 'hatemongerers'.
And that is a double-standard, plain and simple. If you allow Craig Killborn to post "Snipers Wanted" with a video of George Bush in the name of comedic 1st Amendment expression, then to silence Horowitz is a double standard of the highest order.
As for websites, there are websites promoting the molestation and kidnapping of children. Is the left busy condemning them? Of course not, only those 'hate-filled' anti-abortion websites must be silenced.
The point is this: Under the guide of eliminating the 'hate-mongerers' and 'hate-speech' the leftists routinely censor and silence any opposing opinion or speech. Any condemnation of homosexuals is 'hate' against homosexuals. Any condemnation of equal opportunity programs is 'hate' against minorities. The list goes on.
It's BS plain and simple. If the left is so dedicated to 1st Amendment expression rights, then it needs to be more than just expressions that happen to be in agreement with their own.
BTW, Horowitz was marching with African-Americans for civil rights before you were even born. He was the liberal's liberal before you were even in grade school. Your condemnation of him is laughably ignorant of historical facts.
Ah, so the censorship issue raises its head again. <p>
<b>But of course, we all know that a man like Horowitz can publish his opinion on slavery reparations in an advertisement in college newspapers without any threats or censorship whatsoever. Our wonderfully liberal and tolerant colleges and universities certainly allow any opinion to be expressed, even those of Charlton Heston or Wayne LaPierre.<p>
Certainly, anti-abortion websites expressing the authors opinions of abortion and abortion doctors are not censored or ordered removed from listing.<p>
Or are they?
<p>
The most blatant hypocrisy today is that of the modern day liberal, who cries 'censorship' the minute parents start complaining about books in libraries, but silence and censor any contraty opinion under the guise of eliminating 'hate speech'.</b>
Actually, to better put it in a general sense, we should say this: "In the land of the brave and the free, we defend our freedom with firearms." When it all comes down, the second Amendment is the great guaranteer of all other rights listed in the Bill of Rights.