If Snowden had gone to the NYT they would have folded to government pressure. At a minimum they would have "vetted" the releases with the Feds, and as a result all of the important revelations would not be published. It is more likely the Times would have handed over the raw files and then published a bunch of bland articles that whitewashed the entire situation.
The NTY has been riding the work of Woodward and Bernstein since Watergate. That was a long time ago, and now they are in the pocket of intrenched special interests, just like the rest of US journalism.
It's a sad day when no major new organization in the US can be counted on to stand up to external pressure, whether it be economic or political. It ironic that a newspaper in the UK is doing the heavy lifting in this case, since there is no constitutional protection of the press in England, and there is in the US.
Lexical scoping unifies control flow with variable lifetime definition. It also integral with the modern set of control primitives: if/then/else, for, do/while, do/until, case and try/throw/catch.
Lexical scoping makes analysis easier for both the coder and the compiler.
Before lexical scoping languages like BASIC and FORTRAN were often nightmares of spaghetti code. If you've never experienced this you don't know how horrible it could be. Early C lacked it, but it didn't talk long to extend C to fix this mistake.
Since lexical scoping has become so common, there is no excuse for a language to omit it: I'm pointing at you, PHP and JavaScript. The fact that these two extremely common languages don't have lexical scope indicates a real failure in computing practice.
In some fundamental ways computing has made no progress. I think that this situation relates to the general unreliability of software and the problems that plague software development. When obvious best practice is not adopted, it should be no surprise that the same mistakes keep being made over and over again.
Search "car fire 2013 -race" About 1,740,000 results.
Eliminates motor sports car fires.
Yes, the burning Tesla is on the first page. However, you could spend the rest of your life just watching all the non-Tesla burning car videos for just one year.
The plot is typically topsy-turvy. Whereas in the earlier novel The Space Merchants the world was ruled by advertising agencies, in this novel corporate lawyers, especially the secretive firm of "Green, Charlesworth" have gained a stranglehold on the world. Business Law is an extremely lucrative career, while Criminal Law pays enough to afford some of the luxuries of life but not enough to save for the future.
Success means living in a luxurious automated "bubble home" constructed by "GML", a corporation which is nominally public but whose shares are never traded openly. All work contracts include GML housing as part of the pay scale. Not having a contract job means having to live in a community such as "Belly Rave", originally a post-war suburban development for returning soldiers, now a slum ruled by teenage gangs. Its original name was "Belle Rêve".
For the common people, there are bread-and-circuses entertainments in the form of gladiatorial games of various kinds, with monetary rewards for the winners. Some games pit elderly people against each other armed with padded clubs, but others are more deadly.
In practice, businesses have no meaningful liability for any software failures. And by liability, I mean facing serious consequence, like destroying the business.
Four letters say it all: EULA. You can sell software that bricks a piece of hardware, and the worst you'll have to do is refund the purchase price. Most of the time, all you have to do is issue a credit, so the customer/sucker gives you more money.
Someone breaks into a server farm and steals credit card info and passwords that are stored in a non-encrypted format? Just send out a warning. It's not like you can get sued or anything.
Big defense contractors are leaking classified information like a sieve. It's so bad that the US President had to whine to the Chinese President about cyber spying industrial espionage. Has any defense contractor lost a contract or been fined for these screw ups? Of course not.
Heck, there were images this week from an exposition of Chinese built unmanned aircraft in Beijing, and they had a Predator drone! Not just a look alike, it had the same mounting for the optical sensor pod on the bulging nose, chines, V-tail, etc. It would be completely unsurprised if they stole the plans. Apparently they have the plans for all our major weapons systems. It save then vast effort in R&D, and they can build counter measures that they know will work. If there were any fines or actions against any corporations it was not reported anywhere.
So given that there's no down side to committing corporate software fraud, why is anyone surprised that security is a complete joke.
Looks like the monetization virus has infected Slashdot. I'm seeing a big ass advertizement for Samsung in the upper right corner, and a banner ad at the top of the page. This is new. Previously there was a simple list of jobs at Dice on the right edge.
The box is clicked to disable advertising. I guess using that setting is now an exercise in masturbation.
Dice just wants to make a lot more money off Slashdot. The "new look" is the look of a cash cow. No matter which skin you choose, it will still look like a cash cow. "Backward comparability" is going to be a joke. At some point there will be a "premium" version that you have to pay for. It is going to look and feel like IMDB.
Once the monetization virus strikes It's all over. There is no cure.
Here's the challenge: is anyone going to rebel and re-invent the current Slashdot that we all know and love? It's a measure of what Slashdot means to users. If there is an independent community then there will be people who break away and enough readers to make a new site viable. If not, we deserve what we get: another bloated corporate site dedicated to push advertising.
As the article points out, this is the second military exercise in a row based on the idea of impoverished outsiders invading over economic issues. The previous one had a premise that the Euro economic zone collapsed, and hoards of "refugees from Greece, Spain, Italy, France, and Portugal" were overrunning Swiss borders.
So if you have a relatively homogenous population of Western Europeans, a high standard of living and a major banking sector that is known internationally as a haven for corrupt money, your paranoid fear centers around the idea of someone will invade and take all that money away. It's guilty knowledge: your situation was not fairly earned, it results from bad behavior. Therefore, the guilt is turned outward and ascribed to hypothetical predatory French economic terrorists who plan on looting Switzerland, or refugees overwhelming your homeland.
This should be familiar to anyone listening to US political rhetoric: it's the Republican attitude towards immigration. You know, all those inferior (i.e dark skinned) people who can't do OK on their own, so they are coming here to steal from all the decent hard working people (i.e. white Christians) who made the country great.
To preempt right wing whining, I refer to Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) on Latinos: "there's another 100 out there that weigh 130 pounds and they've got calves the size of cantaloupes because they're hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert." http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57598020/rep-steve-king-stands-by-divisive-immigration-comments/ By the way, this asshat thinks he has a shot as the next Republican President.
Although not quite as blatant, the looming government shutdown over Obamacare/Affordable Care has a similar foul stench. Republicans support Social Security and Medicare for white conservatives (it's not welfare for them), but will wreck the economy to keep them damned minorities from laying their filthy paws on "our government" i.e. federal spending.
That's what the Tea Party types were saying when they spouted "I want my country back." Ask yourself "back from who?" The best response I heard was: "You can't have your country back since the South lost the Civil War."
Ultimately that's what it's about: is the US a country for everyone, or only for white Christian conservatives?
I think the real intent is to force Google to pay taxes in the EU.
Does the definition of "taking data out" include web crawling? That's all it would take.
When I see this sort of thing my cynical sensor goes to eleven. If the situation was reversed, and Google was in France, how would the French react to a similar data tax in the US? They would bitch so loudly that you could hear it standing on the Atlantic coast of Florida.
Gromia sphaerica is a large spherical testate amoeba, a single-celled organism classed among the protists and is the largest in the genus Gromia. It was discovered in 2000, along the Oman margin of the Arabian sea, at depths from 1163 to 1194 meters (3816 to 3917 feet). Specimens range in size from 4.7 to 38 millimeters (0.2 to 1.5 inches) in diameter.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said he didn't exclude running for a fourth term, in a move that would pave the way for him to remain in power until 2024.
The article states that he's 61 years old, so this is more or less "president for life". If he lasts another 10 years he'll just do it again, or not even bother to hold an election.
Russia's slide will continue if this happens. Of course the US has a similar problem with entrenched elites wrecking the economy for their own personal gain.
Military requirements are not the same as civilian requirements. RTFA. They state that they want cheaper launches with quick turn around, and very flexible ground station requirements. The closest civilian match is SpaceShip 2, and that does not have orbital capabilities. Orbital Sciences has an air launch small satellite platform, Pegasus but it only puts 980 Lbs in low earth orbit.
DARPA is not always right, but they are not a bunch of dummies either. The see enough need for a spaceplane that they want to invest resources on it. They obviously disagree with you that "Spaceplanes are hugely wasteful".
Is there any way I can stop being a blackout alcoholic driving without a license after multiple accidents and jail terms and still keep drinking?
The short answer is no. The long answer is that short sighted behavior, greed and stupidity will only result in terrible consequences. Sometimes adult authority is required to keep idiots from choking on their own vomit after binging. By asking that question you show that you are the idiot in question.
What are the chances that this is the only time they screwed up? I expect that this is standard operating procedure, and they only work legally when they know someone is going to show up.
I wonder what would happen if the fine was large and applied to fund more random inspections. I think it would show they are routinely flaunting the law. If there was any effective law enforcement it might even show a criminal conspiracy. Fortunately no one has to worry about that, because the real outcome will be the result of political pressure to stop inspections.
The flip side of obsessive blame avoidance is the drive to find someone and hold them responsible/make them pay.
The attitude is "if I can fault someone else then I'm completely off the hook" along with "I can take out my anger on whoever did this to me and it will be OK".
And before the self righteous conservatives start whining about welfare, I would like to point out that both conservatives and Christians are some of the worst offenders. Just think about every time some self absorbed pulpit pounding asshat preacher says that a natural disaster is the "wrath of god punishing the wicked". He's found someone to blame and clearly approves of the suffering, death and destruction. So much for "Christian charity" and "hate the sin, love the sinner".
And it's not the intrinsically inferior brown skinned immigrants who are to blame for wrecking the US. Rep King from Iowa is doing the racists equivalent of flapping his penis out in public when he says 'for everyone who is a valedictorian, there’s another hundred out there, they weigh 130 pounds and with calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.' Conservatives have taken the blame game to heart and made it their own.
This is business as usual for Tepco, and the entire 'Nuclear Village' in Japan (the combined utility, industry, regulator and government group that controls nuclear energy in the country).
This has been going on since before the plants were built. The reactors were so vulnerable to the earthquake/tsunami because they deliberately ignored the historical record of flooding in that part of Japan. The collective decision was made to ignore the worst case scenario.
After the earthquake, flood and power outage, the upper management was incompetently slow to make decisions because they were unwilling to think about loosing the plants and the likelihood of radioactivity being released. It was only the heroic action of the technical team at the site that averted a disaster worse the Chernobyl. They ultimately had to disobey direct orders to save the situation.
In the period after the so called 'shutdown' the authorities have been maintaining a delusional belief that they are doing an acceptable job and events are under control. Neither is true.
Delusional thinking is supported by not doing obvious monitoring procedures. It's magical thinking: if they don't know how bad it is, then things must be OK.
There is an ongoing failure to monitor radiation at the plant site, in the ocean and on the land. NGOs and international entities have been denied permission to do independent monitoring in the exclusion area and the ocean near the plant. One NGO Safecast has been doing radiation monitoring outside the exclusion zone and making the data available.
Quibbling about whether beta radiation is lethal is an example of delusional thinking. The fact that there are an entire spectrum of recently discovered radioactive water leaks is the critical information. None of these leaks were found in a timely manor. This happening two years after the reactor failure is appalling.
Tepco does not know how bad things are because they don't want to know. The rest of the Nuclear Village is not much better. The Abe government is putting significant effort into trying to restart other closed reactors at the expense of dealing with Fukushima. The Nuclear Regulatory Agency has no credibility, because they have done almost nothing to make Tepco more responsible. Tepco and the NRA have been hiding as much information from the public as they can, so no-one believes anything they say.
The prognosis is bleak. The situation is deteriorating, and two years have been wasted while ignoring the obvious. There does not seem to be any organization in Japan that has the leadership ability to manage the crisis. The likelihood of another very serious radiation leak is going up with time, not down.
It is completely possible that there will be a dramatic failure and an internationally chartered group will take over long term responsibility. This is in effect what happened at Chernobyl. See New Safe Containment.
I know that Slashdot can be a way to waste time, but IMHO this is below the threshold of interest. The guy is a troll not worthy of notice. This should not have made it to a topic. Let's give it the attention it deserves, which is nothing, and don't post any more.
I will do my part by not visiting this topic ever again.
It's a thought experiment: pretend it was the FAA having a big chunk of airspace loose all ability to track aircraft, or NOAA loosing data collection so that weather forecasts are disrupted. (This, or something like it happens from time to time.)
The right wing talking heads on TV would be squealing like stuck pigs. They would be screaming about "gubment" waste and incompetence, and start floating bills to privatize the FAA (or whomever). You'd get the same response on Slashdot as well.
Meanwhile in real life AWS, Google, and NASDAQ have all had dramatic failures in recent weeks. Although NASDAQ got a fair amount of coverage, and Google got some mention, AWS has been pretty much below the radar for the mainstream media. No one is making dramatic statements on TV about how Google is run by a bunch of idiots, or NASDAQ, a quasi-governmental entity, should be nationalized, because when it fails the entire economy is as risk. As far a critical comments, it's the sound of crickets.
Clearly, there is a double standard. When there are problems with technology in the public sector, it's all hostility and table thumping. Similar failures in the private sector are treated like natural disasters completely beyond human control.
According to common rhetoric, the private sector is always better then the public sector. Yet when the private sector fails, no one ever compares it to the well functioning public sector.
There is clearly a lot of hypocrisy in bashing the government. A lot of political power is at stake, and along with that goes a lot of money. This situation makes some people very happy, because they are getting what they want, both in public policy and private profit.
All the Slashdot Pundits say this is clearly a bad idea. It's comforting to know that so many solar power experts, satellite engineers, power engineers, microwave antenna specialists, energy distribution specialists, system engineers, civil engineers, etc, have all been waiting here on Slashdot just for the moment that they can crush this awful idea before anyone takes it seriously.
If only the same Slashdot Pundits had existed in some form before the internet was created they could have shot that down as well. We would then be comfortably free of the internet, and the Slashdot crew could be practicing Morse code in their basements like god intended.
The Earth terminal does not have to be on the ground. That resolves the cloud/atmospheric adsorption problem.
A satellite can be in any convenient orbit near earth to send/receive communication and then relay data to/from an earth station. The last hop can be radio or laser, whatever is most appropriate.
NASA currently has a set of eight satellites in orbit that do exactly this for radio signals, called TDRS. This program has been operational since 1983, and NASA is now working on the third generation of satellites.
Here is a video of two members of the US House asking identically worded questions during a congressional hearing on copyright. Unfortunately the sound volume is very low, so it is a bit hard to hear.
They don't even bother to check the script they are given. It's not even as professional as books on tape or someone blindly reading the news.
They may be elected officials, but they certainly are not working for the public. To make it worse, you know that they sold themselves for next to nothing. A few hundreds of dollars of campaign contributions and an empty promise of fundraising is all it takes. They're not just whores, they're cheap whores.
They might just duck out entirely and skip the subject. Conversely, they could they could cover the evolutionary model and then teach an alternative theory that the results of the computations are due to divine intervention.
Slashdot Mirror
The NTY has been riding the work of Woodward and Bernstein since Watergate. That was a long time ago, and now they are in the pocket of intrenched special interests, just like the rest of US journalism.
It's a sad day when no major new organization in the US can be counted on to stand up to external pressure, whether it be economic or political. It ironic that a newspaper in the UK is doing the heavy lifting in this case, since there is no constitutional protection of the press in England, and there is in the US.
Lexical scoping makes analysis easier for both the coder and the compiler.
Before lexical scoping languages like BASIC and FORTRAN were often nightmares of spaghetti code. If you've never experienced this you don't know how horrible it could be. Early C lacked it, but it didn't talk long to extend C to fix this mistake.
Since lexical scoping has become so common, there is no excuse for a language to omit it: I'm pointing at you, PHP and JavaScript. The fact that these two extremely common languages don't have lexical scope indicates a real failure in computing practice.
In some fundamental ways computing has made no progress. I think that this situation relates to the general unreliability of software and the problems that plague software development. When obvious best practice is not adopted, it should be no surprise that the same mistakes keep being made over and over again.
Search "car fire 2013 -race" About 1,740,000 results.
Eliminates motor sports car fires.
Yes, the burning Tesla is on the first page. However, you could spend the rest of your life just watching all the non-Tesla burning car videos for just one year.
So why is one Tesla on fire such a hot item?
Four letters say it all: EULA. You can sell software that bricks a piece of hardware, and the worst you'll have to do is refund the purchase price. Most of the time, all you have to do is issue a credit, so the customer/sucker gives you more money.
Someone breaks into a server farm and steals credit card info and passwords that are stored in a non-encrypted format? Just send out a warning. It's not like you can get sued or anything.
Big defense contractors are leaking classified information like a sieve. It's so bad that the US President had to whine to the Chinese President about cyber spying industrial espionage. Has any defense contractor lost a contract or been fined for these screw ups? Of course not.
Heck, there were images this week from an exposition of Chinese built unmanned aircraft in Beijing, and they had a Predator drone! Not just a look alike, it had the same mounting for the optical sensor pod on the bulging nose, chines, V-tail, etc. It would be completely unsurprised if they stole the plans. Apparently they have the plans for all our major weapons systems. It save then vast effort in R&D, and they can build counter measures that they know will work. If there were any fines or actions against any corporations it was not reported anywhere.
So given that there's no down side to committing corporate software fraud, why is anyone surprised that security is a complete joke.
The box is clicked to disable advertising. I guess using that setting is now an exercise in masturbation.
Dice just wants to make a lot more money off Slashdot. The "new look" is the look of a cash cow. No matter which skin you choose, it will still look like a cash cow. "Backward comparability" is going to be a joke. At some point there will be a "premium" version that you have to pay for. It is going to look and feel like IMDB.
Once the monetization virus strikes It's all over. There is no cure.
Here's the challenge: is anyone going to rebel and re-invent the current Slashdot that we all know and love? It's a measure of what Slashdot means to users. If there is an independent community then there will be people who break away and enough readers to make a new site viable. If not, we deserve what we get: another bloated corporate site dedicated to push advertising.
I'm ready to jump ship. Anyone else interested?
So if you have a relatively homogenous population of Western Europeans, a high standard of living and a major banking sector that is known internationally as a haven for corrupt money, your paranoid fear centers around the idea of someone will invade and take all that money away. It's guilty knowledge: your situation was not fairly earned, it results from bad behavior. Therefore, the guilt is turned outward and ascribed to hypothetical predatory French economic terrorists who plan on looting Switzerland, or refugees overwhelming your homeland.
This should be familiar to anyone listening to US political rhetoric: it's the Republican attitude towards immigration. You know, all those inferior (i.e dark skinned) people who can't do OK on their own, so they are coming here to steal from all the decent hard working people (i.e. white Christians) who made the country great.
To preempt right wing whining, I refer to Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) on Latinos: "there's another 100 out there that weigh 130 pounds and they've got calves the size of cantaloupes because they're hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert." http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57598020/rep-steve-king-stands-by-divisive-immigration-comments/ By the way, this asshat thinks he has a shot as the next Republican President.
Although not quite as blatant, the looming government shutdown over Obamacare/Affordable Care has a similar foul stench. Republicans support Social Security and Medicare for white conservatives (it's not welfare for them), but will wreck the economy to keep them damned minorities from laying their filthy paws on "our government" i.e. federal spending.
That's what the Tea Party types were saying when they spouted "I want my country back." Ask yourself "back from who?" The best response I heard was: "You can't have your country back since the South lost the Civil War."
Ultimately that's what it's about: is the US a country for everyone, or only for white Christian conservatives?
Does the definition of "taking data out" include web crawling? That's all it would take.
When I see this sort of thing my cynical sensor goes to eleven. If the situation was reversed, and Google was in France, how would the French react to a similar data tax in the US? They would bitch so loudly that you could hear it standing on the Atlantic coast of Florida.
So when the shit hits the fan, and nothing works at all, there will be no question of who is to blame.
Wall Street Journal
The article states that he's 61 years old, so this is more or less "president for life". If he lasts another 10 years he'll just do it again, or not even bother to hold an election.
Russia's slide will continue if this happens. Of course the US has a similar problem with entrenched elites wrecking the economy for their own personal gain.
DARPA is not always right, but they are not a bunch of dummies either. The see enough need for a spaceplane that they want to invest resources on it. They obviously disagree with you that "Spaceplanes are hugely wasteful".
Is there any way I can stop being a blackout alcoholic driving without a license after multiple accidents and jail terms and still keep drinking?
The short answer is no. The long answer is that short sighted behavior, greed and stupidity will only result in terrible consequences. Sometimes adult authority is required to keep idiots from choking on their own vomit after binging. By asking that question you show that you are the idiot in question.
I wonder what would happen if the fine was large and applied to fund more random inspections. I think it would show they are routinely flaunting the law. If there was any effective law enforcement it might even show a criminal conspiracy. Fortunately no one has to worry about that, because the real outcome will be the result of political pressure to stop inspections.
Cars showing that they were "Stolen by Zombies"
I misread it as NHL.
The attitude is "if I can fault someone else then I'm completely off the hook" along with "I can take out my anger on whoever did this to me and it will be OK".
And before the self righteous conservatives start whining about welfare, I would like to point out that both conservatives and Christians are some of the worst offenders. Just think about every time some self absorbed pulpit pounding asshat preacher says that a natural disaster is the "wrath of god punishing the wicked". He's found someone to blame and clearly approves of the suffering, death and destruction. So much for "Christian charity" and "hate the sin, love the sinner".
And it's not the intrinsically inferior brown skinned immigrants who are to blame for wrecking the US. Rep King from Iowa is doing the racists equivalent of flapping his penis out in public when he says 'for everyone who is a valedictorian, there’s another hundred out there, they weigh 130 pounds and with calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.' Conservatives have taken the blame game to heart and made it their own.
Can you say DCMA? Can you say takedown? I knew you could.
This has been going on since before the plants were built. The reactors were so vulnerable to the earthquake/tsunami because they deliberately ignored the historical record of flooding in that part of Japan. The collective decision was made to ignore the worst case scenario.
After the earthquake, flood and power outage, the upper management was incompetently slow to make decisions because they were unwilling to think about loosing the plants and the likelihood of radioactivity being released. It was only the heroic action of the technical team at the site that averted a disaster worse the Chernobyl. They ultimately had to disobey direct orders to save the situation.
In the period after the so called 'shutdown' the authorities have been maintaining a delusional belief that they are doing an acceptable job and events are under control. Neither is true.
Delusional thinking is supported by not doing obvious monitoring procedures. It's magical thinking: if they don't know how bad it is, then things must be OK.
There is an ongoing failure to monitor radiation at the plant site, in the ocean and on the land. NGOs and international entities have been denied permission to do independent monitoring in the exclusion area and the ocean near the plant. One NGO Safecast has been doing radiation monitoring outside the exclusion zone and making the data available.
Quibbling about whether beta radiation is lethal is an example of delusional thinking. The fact that there are an entire spectrum of recently discovered radioactive water leaks is the critical information. None of these leaks were found in a timely manor. This happening two years after the reactor failure is appalling.
Tepco does not know how bad things are because they don't want to know. The rest of the Nuclear Village is not much better. The Abe government is putting significant effort into trying to restart other closed reactors at the expense of dealing with Fukushima. The Nuclear Regulatory Agency has no credibility, because they have done almost nothing to make Tepco more responsible. Tepco and the NRA have been hiding as much information from the public as they can, so no-one believes anything they say.
The prognosis is bleak. The situation is deteriorating, and two years have been wasted while ignoring the obvious. There does not seem to be any organization in Japan that has the leadership ability to manage the crisis. The likelihood of another very serious radiation leak is going up with time, not down.
It is completely possible that there will be a dramatic failure and an internationally chartered group will take over long term responsibility. This is in effect what happened at Chernobyl. See New Safe Containment.
I will do my part by not visiting this topic ever again.
The right wing talking heads on TV would be squealing like stuck pigs. They would be screaming about "gubment" waste and incompetence, and start floating bills to privatize the FAA (or whomever). You'd get the same response on Slashdot as well.
Meanwhile in real life AWS, Google, and NASDAQ have all had dramatic failures in recent weeks. Although NASDAQ got a fair amount of coverage, and Google got some mention, AWS has been pretty much below the radar for the mainstream media. No one is making dramatic statements on TV about how Google is run by a bunch of idiots, or NASDAQ, a quasi-governmental entity, should be nationalized, because when it fails the entire economy is as risk. As far a critical comments, it's the sound of crickets.
Clearly, there is a double standard. When there are problems with technology in the public sector, it's all hostility and table thumping. Similar failures in the private sector are treated like natural disasters completely beyond human control. According to common rhetoric, the private sector is always better then the public sector. Yet when the private sector fails, no one ever compares it to the well functioning public sector.
There is clearly a lot of hypocrisy in bashing the government. A lot of political power is at stake, and along with that goes a lot of money. This situation makes some people very happy, because they are getting what they want, both in public policy and private profit.
If only the same Slashdot Pundits had existed in some form before the internet was created they could have shot that down as well. We would then be comfortably free of the internet, and the Slashdot crew could be practicing Morse code in their basements like god intended.
A satellite can be in any convenient orbit near earth to send/receive communication and then relay data to/from an earth station. The last hop can be radio or laser, whatever is most appropriate.
NASA currently has a set of eight satellites in orbit that do exactly this for radio signals, called TDRS. This program has been operational since 1983, and NASA is now working on the third generation of satellites.
http://youtu.be/JtVbHBIyFKw
They don't even bother to check the script they are given. It's not even as professional as books on tape or someone blindly reading the news.
They may be elected officials, but they certainly are not working for the public. To make it worse, you know that they sold themselves for next to nothing. A few hundreds of dollars of campaign contributions and an empty promise of fundraising is all it takes. They're not just whores, they're cheap whores.
They might just duck out entirely and skip the subject. Conversely, they could they could cover the evolutionary model and then teach an alternative theory that the results of the computations are due to divine intervention.