Well, neither am I. I can admit when I was wrong, and I can take the heat for the things I think are right despite being unpopular ideas.
But that's beside the point. The problem is when I'm not given the opportunity to defend my opinions. Like in the hypothetical "reformed racist" scenario: Someone searching the net to read about him will come across that, and find what he's said... And then shun him, but he'll never find out why. Or maybe he'll get fired, or people come and key his car. What should he do? Post a sign in his front yard that says "I'm no longer a racist, I was wrong, and I'm sorry for the stupid shit I said in the past"?
And when it's the government that's archiving everything I've said, it's way worse. Instead of keying my car, they're going to take provocative things I've said in the past and trump them up to make me look like a terrorist, if they ever think I'm rocking their boat too hard.
Let me start off by saying, I support the idea of IT unions.
Here's the catch: IT isn't a typical blue-collar job. The job requirements are much broader and poorly defined than any manufacturing job.
Here's my IT union nightmare: You want to set up a new computer at someone's desk. The first guy drops off the PC. He's there because the others aren't allowed to lift heavy objects. Then you get a Computer Technician I to come out and cable the thing up. He plugs in most of the stuff local to the computer, but anything that plugs into the wall is for another guy. First you have to have an Electrician come out and plug it in, and then a Network Technician I come out to plug in the network cable. We wouldn't want the Computer Technician to start screwing up the delineated responsibilities, would we? And if you want that PC set up on time, you better have filed the request forms several days in advance so all these guys could be coordinated to show up. What, he accepted the job and is starting tomorrow? Good luck.
This example is not an exaggeration. I've seen this kind of stuff happen *all the time* and to way more ridiculous degrees in industrial construction. The best I've seen yet is where several hundred tons of equipment were disconnected, loaded up on trucks and hauled offsite so that the control panels could be opened up and have 5 minutes of rewiring done, because that was determined to be faster and cheaper than the number of union guys that we'd have had to bring in to do it for us.
And that's for traditional union-type jobs, where a clear delineation can be made.
As an IT guy, I'm expected to handle a huge number of roles. Every sysadmin at times gets to be a hardware engineer, network administrator, programmer, electrician, plumber, HVAC specialist, technical writer, QA tech, and psychologist.
As a network admin, I've had my switches blow a blade at 3 in the morning. You can't reasonably make desktop switches redundant, and even the best brand name gear sometimes just blows up. So there's a choice: Either I go in at 3 AM and swap the blade, or 48 people are going to find themselves without net in the morning while I do it then.
Even for a desktop tech who doesn't have to deal with this, it's nice to simply be able to work an extra hour when you're on a roll with something, and not have to pick it back up in the morning.
I'm totally fine with off-hours work like this, as long as it's the normal, unpreventable stuff that happens when working with technology, or reasonable flex time usage. I always take off time later in the week as compensation. It's clearly different from being systematically exploited to milk me for extra work.
And I think that's why IT people recoil from the idea of IT unions. I would *hate* this job if I had to squabble about job responsibilities and hours all the time the way that I've seen other unions do. It'd make me unbearably inefficient. I don't think it *has* to be this way, but if we ever unionize, these things have to be taken into account, or we'll have a disaster.
That was my first thought. When I was young and naive, I posted to Usenet under my real name. I knew that was for worldwide distribution, but at the time I didn't expect it to be for worldwide *perpetual* distribution. Then DejaNews comes along and brings back a lot of things that I'd expected to fade away like BBS posts used to do.
I'm lucky. There's nothing horribly embarrassing or wildly contradicting my current opinions out there. I'd hate to be, say, a reformed racist who'd posted some crazy stuff out there, and who now gets to have people he meets form their opinions about him based on who he was ten years ago.
These days my real name is a conformist sheep, and I keep my crazy politics to pseudonyms. And even still, I have to think twice about what I say because I know the government is archiving it all for when they want to cherry-pick it to declare me unpatriotic if I embarrass them in some major way. I've accepted that level of exposure, but it's disheartening that the world's superpowers are devolving into this level of totalitarianism.
I do, but what I'm saying is it's not that interesting... It's basic good software engineering.
In other news, your car has an annoyingly limited range, but by placing gas stations everywhere, you can design a system where people can drive anywhere./obcaranalogy
Games and virtual worlds are embarrassingly parallel, in that most of what goes on in them is independent of the other things that are happening. Of the hundreds of thousands of players who are active in World of Warcraft at any one time, only a very small number will be interacting with any particular player.
Except that's really not that hard of a problem to solve. It just takes good basic software engineering to divide this problem up. You create zones, and then a little glue to make sure things happen smoothly at the edges.
The hard problem is when you have huge data sets like that, and *everything* interacts with each other, but you still need to divide the problem into discrete pieces to process in parallel.
I'm "does the maintainers of the system make major changes in every single release and then stop supporting older releases". Under this definition of stable, FreeBSD wins over linux hands down. Especially after the "we can't be bothered to maintain a stable branch of the linux kernel, so we will add new shit in with the old all the time". You might get a dozen exciting new bugs and security fixes when you "upgrade" between 2.6.1114492 and 2.6.1114493. In fact, this was one of the major reasons for me dumping linux in the first place.
But that's not how it works. No one who cares about stability is upgrading their servers with the latest from kernel.org.
You choose Debian, Red Hat Enterprise, Ubuntu LTS, or any of the other distros that have a policy of long term support and stability. When a security fix comes out, they backport it into the kernel that came with the original release, so the APIs and feature sets stay the same.
I've used Debian, RHEL, and FreeBSD in a corporate environment, and all of them take release stability seriously. Debian definitely has a leg up, though - they support a huge range of application software as a part of their release, which means I never have to maintain and patch my own apps like I often did on FreeBSD.
That's not to say Debian doesn't have its own problems, but release stability isn't one of them.
Well, the solution is now within our reach: put everyone of these people on dumb terminals connected to a service like AOL that gives them very limited options so they're not confused. They just plug it in, turn it on, and the user menu--complete with cute tail-wagging puppy--comes up.
It's been tried. We bought my grandmother an iOpener, and to this day it works great and gives her basic email and web without having to deal with the complexities of a general purpose computer.
Unfortunately, the idea bombed, and the company that made them went out of business long ago. It's really hard to sell people on the idea of "less is more" when youtube (Or whatever the next non-html thing is) comes along and they find it doesn't work on their intertoaster.
The claim that the initial "depressurization" would make the crew "incapacitated within seconds" relies on the common perception that exposure to the vacuum of space makes your face explode.... not breathing hasn't been the criteria for "death" since the Middle Ages.
"Incapacitated" isn't a euphemism for dead. Depressurization causes hypoxia, which results in unconsciousness in tens of seconds. They probably died of trauma, but it probably happened after they blacked out.
no works of art... instead designed to capture the moment, and immortalize it from a particular point of view that people in this particular time can appreciate, or at least recognize.
Perhaps it's not beautiful or refined, but I'd say that's art, almost by definition.
Since when is using genuine SI units - probably the most widely adopted technical standard of any kind - "lying"?
512 is a base-10 number. They didn't say "1000000000 base-2 megabytes". And SI units are base-10 multipliers. It makes no sense at all to use a round-base-2 multiplier for a base-10 number.
The faux-SI base-2 units used in computers should never have existed in the first place, but definitely should have been dropped when we passed 16KiB - the last time where the round base-2 number cleanly rounded down to the base-10 number.
I don't generally subscribe to doomsday scenarios so I don't think we'll see complete melt down, at the end of the day, the guys at the top will fiddle the system and magically conjure up some more money from their magical money device as usual.
The goal should be to create greater value for customers through service value (make it easy for me to play my games whenever and wherever I want to)
No, the goal is to increase revenues by decreasing piracy and preventing sale of used games. What is said above is their method of making it palatable to the consumer.
If the goal was *really* to "create greater value" and "make it easy to play games whenever and wherever" the solution would be simple: DON'T USE DRM.
I understand the need to fight piracy, but quit trying to spin it like it's being done for me, or that there's some silver lining.
The initiative is similar to security tags used in clothing retail that spill ink on garments if they're forcibly removed, thereby destroying the item. In such a situation, shoplifting is discouraged by implementing a solution that only the retailer can remove at the point of sale.
But it's not similar at all. Similar would be putting an acetone-filled tag through the hole in the CD that only the retailer can remove, to destroy it if it's shoplifted.
The reason the difference is important is this scheme isn't to fight shoplifting, the theft of a physical item. This is to fight copyright infringement, and it's like fighting people who make cheap knockoffs of designer clothes. Admittedly, this is much easier to do on a large scale than copying a physical item, but the scale of it does not magically make it become theft.
And the other part of where the analogy breaks down? I don't need an internet connection to put on my clothes after the retailer takes off the tag.
a law prof who writes like a comedian (is this a good thing?)
I think so. The world of law is rich with ironies and absurdities. Unfortunately the people on the giving end are too invested in the system to see it, and the people on the receiving end are usually having a bad time, so the humor is rarely appreciated.
Personally, I think this is a response to the problems of being the established army fighting a guerrilla force. The way guerrillas succeed is by driving the invading army slowly crazy by making them live in constant fear (out of self-preservation), until they start lashing out in fear (killing innocents, and recruiting new guerrillas in mass). The same goes for treating noncombatants with dignity and respect: Doing so makes the occupying force less hated, so the noncombatants won't be as willing to support the guerrillas.
So in short, to me this sounds like trying to win, not ethics.
/I.do.this.frequently..(even.with.parenthases).,.because.sometimes.my....backslash..key.is.tired/ /I do this frequently ({even.with.parenthases}), because sometimes my \ (backslash) key is tired/
(The atom is now marked with {}, the () are now literal)
A couple neat things happened: The extra dot after frequently is matching an inline paren. The paren in the PATTERN right next to it starts the mark of an atom, closed by its brother. The comma is because I put one outside the paren (here represented as the dot to the left of the comma) as is my style. Also note the literal backslash, just before you see the word backslash in hidden parenthesis.
Why not add quotes to match the spaces easily? I get a word or two in, and I find I naturally switch to using dots. These are throwaways for single tries through grep. For production code, I hone in carefully on the parts that I'm dead sure I can anchor to, escaped by any means needed, before carefully choosing my atom to match as tightly as possible, so it'll error out if my data has gone wrong.
Even in a simple case like this, half the fun is in explaining it.:)
I don't have any real desire to use solaris on any of my desktop machines until/if it supports full root ZFS on raw disk (not on parts/slices as it is currently implemented)
That's an interesting quibble. Why does this matter to you?
... Is to go about my life, and check the web the next morning to see the results of all the issues I care about. I think treating the whole thing as a giant spectator sport is part of what creates the whole us-vs-them mentality that makes politics so divisive in this country.
If you're just *itching* to know the results, though, why not set up a program to scrape results from CNN, and email your phone when they get called? Everything else on the news in between is just useless prattle.
Hey, don't worry. I posted at 9AM. In a few hours, somebody will respond with something that may fix the problem
With paid support on RHEL, my experience was telling my boss "Don't worry, I opened a ticket at 9 AM. In a few hours, somebody will respond with something that may fix the problem".
It was a very different experience from the job I had before that, at an almost-all-Debian shop (excluding a couple Oracle servers). Passing over the fact that things didn't break nearly as often in the first place, when they did, I could tell my boss "Don't worry, I'm working on it. If I haven't fixed it in a few hours, I'll pay for per-incident support from one of the contractors we have lined up." And in the years I worked there, we *never* had a problem we couldn't fix ourselves.
In my experience, we were always much better off handling things in-house than passing the buck. YMMV.
The next president, senate, and congress need to seriously look at scrapping NASA's manned program and building a new one from scratch, possibly outside of the auspices of NASA.
The way I see it, we already are: Check out SpaceX and the other private space programs.
There are simple driving habits you can do to save some gas.
#1, anticipate when you have to stop. If you're cruising along at 50mph on a country road, and you know there's a stop sign up ahead, get off the gas early, and coast down, so you start applying your brakes at 25mph instead of going straight from cruise to braking. Traffic lights are harder, but if you can anticipate the timing, you'll coast up to the light as it's turning green, instead of going full power up to it and then braking to a stop, and then having to expend all that energy to get moving again. Similarly, slow down early for curves - just coast down, instead of having to use your brakes. Regenerative braking stores and reuses this energy in these situations - without it, you have to not use the energy in the first place.
#2, work with hills, not against them. When going up a hill, don't downshift. Use a max of 75% of your engine's power in high gear, and accept that it's OK to lose a little speed. Reach the top at 35mph, go down the hill and pick your speed back up to 45, and then burn it off again going up the next hill. This lets you keep your engine at efficient lower revs, and reduces energy wasted in braking. It's easier with a stick shift, but in an automatic you can learn how far you can push it without downshifting.
#3, don't bounce the throttle. A lot of people constantly move back and forth between 0% and 50% throttle to regulate their speed, instead of just pushing to 25% and holding there, and letting their speed wander 1 or 2 mph up or down, or gently adjusting the throttle by 5%. Your engine's computer fine-tunes fuel-air ratios best when it's running steady state; when you make lots of fast changes, it has to make lots of guesses about fuel flow, and it errs on the side of too rich (preventing damage to the engine at the expense of wasting gas). This is why cruise control tends to save gas (it makes slow, smooth throttle adjustments), but I've found I'm easily able to do better in many situations, especially combined with #1 and #2 above.
#4, understand your MPG meter. Some people are bothered that they get single-digit gas mileage when they're accelerating, so they accelerate REALLY SLOW to make their mpg always stay above 15 or so. 15 MPG for 30 seconds is actually worse than 5 MPG for 10 seconds (you spend more time in lower gears), and you're screwing up traffic flow when you do it, making everyone behind you waste gas too. Step into it (say, 75% throttle, shifting at 60% of redline in a normal family car), accelerate up to speed quickly but smoothly, and then get into high gear and start reaping your cruise mileage sooner.
In all of these techniques, pay attention to your effect on traffic around you. Big gains can be had with relatively subtle changes. If you're varying your speed around too much, you're obnoxious, dangerous, and wasting everyone else's gas trying to get around you, so stay aware of what you're doing to others.
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Because I'm not afraid to defend my opinion.
Well, neither am I. I can admit when I was wrong, and I can take the heat for the things I think are right despite being unpopular ideas.
But that's beside the point. The problem is when I'm not given the opportunity to defend my opinions. Like in the hypothetical "reformed racist" scenario: Someone searching the net to read about him will come across that, and find what he's said... And then shun him, but he'll never find out why. Or maybe he'll get fired, or people come and key his car. What should he do? Post a sign in his front yard that says "I'm no longer a racist, I was wrong, and I'm sorry for the stupid shit I said in the past"?
And when it's the government that's archiving everything I've said, it's way worse. Instead of keying my car, they're going to take provocative things I've said in the past and trump them up to make me look like a terrorist, if they ever think I'm rocking their boat too hard.
Let me start off by saying, I support the idea of IT unions.
Here's the catch: IT isn't a typical blue-collar job. The job requirements are much broader and poorly defined than any manufacturing job.
Here's my IT union nightmare: You want to set up a new computer at someone's desk. The first guy drops off the PC. He's there because the others aren't allowed to lift heavy objects. Then you get a Computer Technician I to come out and cable the thing up. He plugs in most of the stuff local to the computer, but anything that plugs into the wall is for another guy. First you have to have an Electrician come out and plug it in, and then a Network Technician I come out to plug in the network cable. We wouldn't want the Computer Technician to start screwing up the delineated responsibilities, would we? And if you want that PC set up on time, you better have filed the request forms several days in advance so all these guys could be coordinated to show up. What, he accepted the job and is starting tomorrow? Good luck.
This example is not an exaggeration. I've seen this kind of stuff happen *all the time* and to way more ridiculous degrees in industrial construction. The best I've seen yet is where several hundred tons of equipment were disconnected, loaded up on trucks and hauled offsite so that the control panels could be opened up and have 5 minutes of rewiring done, because that was determined to be faster and cheaper than the number of union guys that we'd have had to bring in to do it for us.
And that's for traditional union-type jobs, where a clear delineation can be made.
As an IT guy, I'm expected to handle a huge number of roles. Every sysadmin at times gets to be a hardware engineer, network administrator, programmer, electrician, plumber, HVAC specialist, technical writer, QA tech, and psychologist.
As a network admin, I've had my switches blow a blade at 3 in the morning. You can't reasonably make desktop switches redundant, and even the best brand name gear sometimes just blows up. So there's a choice: Either I go in at 3 AM and swap the blade, or 48 people are going to find themselves without net in the morning while I do it then.
Even for a desktop tech who doesn't have to deal with this, it's nice to simply be able to work an extra hour when you're on a roll with something, and not have to pick it back up in the morning.
I'm totally fine with off-hours work like this, as long as it's the normal, unpreventable stuff that happens when working with technology, or reasonable flex time usage. I always take off time later in the week as compensation. It's clearly different from being systematically exploited to milk me for extra work.
And I think that's why IT people recoil from the idea of IT unions. I would *hate* this job if I had to squabble about job responsibilities and hours all the time the way that I've seen other unions do. It'd make me unbearably inefficient. I don't think it *has* to be this way, but if we ever unionize, these things have to be taken into account, or we'll have a disaster.
That was my first thought. When I was young and naive, I posted to Usenet under my real name. I knew that was for worldwide distribution, but at the time I didn't expect it to be for worldwide *perpetual* distribution. Then DejaNews comes along and brings back a lot of things that I'd expected to fade away like BBS posts used to do.
I'm lucky. There's nothing horribly embarrassing or wildly contradicting my current opinions out there. I'd hate to be, say, a reformed racist who'd posted some crazy stuff out there, and who now gets to have people he meets form their opinions about him based on who he was ten years ago.
These days my real name is a conformist sheep, and I keep my crazy politics to pseudonyms. And even still, I have to think twice about what I say because I know the government is archiving it all for when they want to cherry-pick it to declare me unpatriotic if I embarrass them in some major way. I've accepted that level of exposure, but it's disheartening that the world's superpowers are devolving into this level of totalitarianism.
Free speech, indeed.
I do, but what I'm saying is it's not that interesting... It's basic good software engineering.
In other news, your car has an annoyingly limited range, but by placing gas stations everywhere, you can design a system where people can drive anywhere. /obcaranalogy
Games and virtual worlds are embarrassingly parallel, in that most of what goes on in them is independent of the other things that are happening. Of the hundreds of thousands of players who are active in World of Warcraft at any one time, only a very small number will be interacting with any particular player.
Except that's really not that hard of a problem to solve. It just takes good basic software engineering to divide this problem up. You create zones, and then a little glue to make sure things happen smoothly at the edges.
The hard problem is when you have huge data sets like that, and *everything* interacts with each other, but you still need to divide the problem into discrete pieces to process in parallel.
I'm "does the maintainers of the system make major changes in every single release and then stop supporting older releases". Under this definition of stable, FreeBSD wins over linux hands down. Especially after the "we can't be bothered to maintain a stable branch of the linux kernel, so we will add new shit in with the old all the time". You might get a dozen exciting new bugs and security fixes when you "upgrade" between 2.6.1114492 and 2.6.1114493. In fact, this was one of the major reasons for me dumping linux in the first place.
But that's not how it works. No one who cares about stability is upgrading their servers with the latest from kernel.org.
You choose Debian, Red Hat Enterprise, Ubuntu LTS, or any of the other distros that have a policy of long term support and stability. When a security fix comes out, they backport it into the kernel that came with the original release, so the APIs and feature sets stay the same.
I've used Debian, RHEL, and FreeBSD in a corporate environment, and all of them take release stability seriously. Debian definitely has a leg up, though - they support a huge range of application software as a part of their release, which means I never have to maintain and patch my own apps like I often did on FreeBSD.
That's not to say Debian doesn't have its own problems, but release stability isn't one of them.
Well, the solution is now within our reach: put everyone of these people on dumb terminals connected to a service like AOL that gives them very limited options so they're not confused. They just plug it in, turn it on, and the user menu--complete with cute tail-wagging puppy--comes up.
It's been tried. We bought my grandmother an iOpener, and to this day it works great and gives her basic email and web without having to deal with the complexities of a general purpose computer.
Unfortunately, the idea bombed, and the company that made them went out of business long ago. It's really hard to sell people on the idea of "less is more" when youtube (Or whatever the next non-html thing is) comes along and they find it doesn't work on their intertoaster.
The claim that the initial "depressurization" would make the crew "incapacitated within seconds" relies on the common perception that exposure to the vacuum of space makes your face explode. ... not breathing hasn't been the criteria for "death" since the Middle Ages.
"Incapacitated" isn't a euphemism for dead. Depressurization causes hypoxia, which results in unconsciousness in tens of seconds. They probably died of trauma, but it probably happened after they blacked out.
no works of art ... instead designed to capture the moment, and immortalize it from a particular point of view that people in this particular time can appreciate, or at least recognize.
Perhaps it's not beautiful or refined, but I'd say that's art, almost by definition.
Since when is using genuine SI units - probably the most widely adopted technical standard of any kind - "lying"?
512 is a base-10 number. They didn't say "1000000000 base-2 megabytes". And SI units are base-10 multipliers. It makes no sense at all to use a round-base-2 multiplier for a base-10 number.
The faux-SI base-2 units used in computers should never have existed in the first place, but definitely should have been dropped when we passed 16KiB - the last time where the round base-2 number cleanly rounded down to the base-10 number.
I don't generally subscribe to doomsday scenarios so I don't think we'll see complete melt down, at the end of the day, the guys at the top will fiddle the system and magically conjure up some more money from their magical money device as usual.
They used to say that in the USSR, too.
The goal should be to create greater value for customers through service value (make it easy for me to play my games whenever and wherever I want to)
No, the goal is to increase revenues by decreasing piracy and preventing sale of used games. What is said above is their method of making it palatable to the consumer.
If the goal was *really* to "create greater value" and "make it easy to play games whenever and wherever" the solution would be simple: DON'T USE DRM.
I understand the need to fight piracy, but quit trying to spin it like it's being done for me, or that there's some silver lining.
The initiative is similar to security tags used in clothing retail that spill ink on garments if they're forcibly removed, thereby destroying the item. In such a situation, shoplifting is discouraged by implementing a solution that only the retailer can remove at the point of sale.
But it's not similar at all. Similar would be putting an acetone-filled tag through the hole in the CD that only the retailer can remove, to destroy it if it's shoplifted.
The reason the difference is important is this scheme isn't to fight shoplifting, the theft of a physical item. This is to fight copyright infringement, and it's like fighting people who make cheap knockoffs of designer clothes. Admittedly, this is much easier to do on a large scale than copying a physical item, but the scale of it does not magically make it become theft.
And the other part of where the analogy breaks down? I don't need an internet connection to put on my clothes after the retailer takes off the tag.
a law prof who writes like a comedian (is this a good thing?)
I think so. The world of law is rich with ironies and absurdities. Unfortunately the people on the giving end are too invested in the system to see it, and the people on the receiving end are usually having a bad time, so the humor is rarely appreciated.
Personally, I think this is a response to the problems of being the established army fighting a guerrilla force. The way guerrillas succeed is by driving the invading army slowly crazy by making them live in constant fear (out of self-preservation), until they start lashing out in fear (killing innocents, and recruiting new guerrillas in mass). The same goes for treating noncombatants with dignity and respect: Doing so makes the occupying force less hated, so the noncombatants won't be as willing to support the guerrillas.
So in short, to me this sounds like trying to win, not ethics.
Let me demonstrate:
(The atom is now marked with {}, the () are now literal)
OK, you asked for stupid tricks, but this one's just plain lazy.
Between bash and grep, there are quite a lot of special characters that you have to escape... Or just ignore with dots!
/I.do.this.frequently..(even.with.parenthases).,.because.sometimes.my....backslash..key.is.tired/
A couple neat things happened: The extra dot after frequently is matching an inline paren. The paren in the PATTERN right next to it starts the mark of an atom, closed by its brother. The comma is because I put one outside the paren (here represented as the dot to the left of the comma) as is my style. Also note the literal backslash, just before you see the word backslash in hidden parenthesis.
Why not add quotes to match the spaces easily? I get a word or two in, and I find I naturally switch to using dots. These are throwaways for single tries through grep. For production code, I hone in carefully on the parts that I'm dead sure I can anchor to, escaped by any means needed, before carefully choosing my atom to match as tightly as possible, so it'll error out if my data has gone wrong.
Even in a simple case like this, half the fun is in explaining it. :)
I submitted too soon. Here's the warez:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parlour_game
http://www.seedsofknowledge.com/parlour-games.html
http://www.funjoint.com/parlour.htm
But the Victorians had the golden era of cooperative gaming.
I don't have any real desire to use solaris on any of my desktop machines until/if it supports full root ZFS on raw disk (not on parts/slices as it is currently implemented)
That's an interesting quibble. Why does this matter to you?
Context for those who need it
... Is to go about my life, and check the web the next morning to see the results of all the issues I care about. I think treating the whole thing as a giant spectator sport is part of what creates the whole us-vs-them mentality that makes politics so divisive in this country.
If you're just *itching* to know the results, though, why not set up a program to scrape results from CNN, and email your phone when they get called? Everything else on the news in between is just useless prattle.
Hey, don't worry. I posted at 9AM. In a few hours, somebody will respond with something that may fix the problem
With paid support on RHEL, my experience was telling my boss "Don't worry, I opened a ticket at 9 AM. In a few hours, somebody will respond with something that may fix the problem".
It was a very different experience from the job I had before that, at an almost-all-Debian shop (excluding a couple Oracle servers). Passing over the fact that things didn't break nearly as often in the first place, when they did, I could tell my boss "Don't worry, I'm working on it. If I haven't fixed it in a few hours, I'll pay for per-incident support from one of the contractors we have lined up." And in the years I worked there, we *never* had a problem we couldn't fix ourselves.
In my experience, we were always much better off handling things in-house than passing the buck. YMMV.
The next president, senate, and congress need to seriously look at scrapping NASA's manned program and building a new one from scratch, possibly outside of the auspices of NASA.
The way I see it, we already are: Check out SpaceX and the other private space programs.
There are simple driving habits you can do to save some gas.
#1, anticipate when you have to stop. If you're cruising along at 50mph on a country road, and you know there's a stop sign up ahead, get off the gas early, and coast down, so you start applying your brakes at 25mph instead of going straight from cruise to braking. Traffic lights are harder, but if you can anticipate the timing, you'll coast up to the light as it's turning green, instead of going full power up to it and then braking to a stop, and then having to expend all that energy to get moving again. Similarly, slow down early for curves - just coast down, instead of having to use your brakes. Regenerative braking stores and reuses this energy in these situations - without it, you have to not use the energy in the first place.
#2, work with hills, not against them. When going up a hill, don't downshift. Use a max of 75% of your engine's power in high gear, and accept that it's OK to lose a little speed. Reach the top at 35mph, go down the hill and pick your speed back up to 45, and then burn it off again going up the next hill. This lets you keep your engine at efficient lower revs, and reduces energy wasted in braking. It's easier with a stick shift, but in an automatic you can learn how far you can push it without downshifting.
#3, don't bounce the throttle. A lot of people constantly move back and forth between 0% and 50% throttle to regulate their speed, instead of just pushing to 25% and holding there, and letting their speed wander 1 or 2 mph up or down, or gently adjusting the throttle by 5%. Your engine's computer fine-tunes fuel-air ratios best when it's running steady state; when you make lots of fast changes, it has to make lots of guesses about fuel flow, and it errs on the side of too rich (preventing damage to the engine at the expense of wasting gas). This is why cruise control tends to save gas (it makes slow, smooth throttle adjustments), but I've found I'm easily able to do better in many situations, especially combined with #1 and #2 above.
#4, understand your MPG meter. Some people are bothered that they get single-digit gas mileage when they're accelerating, so they accelerate REALLY SLOW to make their mpg always stay above 15 or so. 15 MPG for 30 seconds is actually worse than 5 MPG for 10 seconds (you spend more time in lower gears), and you're screwing up traffic flow when you do it, making everyone behind you waste gas too. Step into it (say, 75% throttle, shifting at 60% of redline in a normal family car), accelerate up to speed quickly but smoothly, and then get into high gear and start reaping your cruise mileage sooner.
In all of these techniques, pay attention to your effect on traffic around you. Big gains can be had with relatively subtle changes. If you're varying your speed around too much, you're obnoxious, dangerous, and wasting everyone else's gas trying to get around you, so stay aware of what you're doing to others.