It's called Deus Ex Machina, and it's a plot device used by sloppy writers ever since the ancient Greeks put on plays, which is why said lame plot device has a Greek name.
"Suddenly, just as the monster was about to bite Our Hero's head off, a God swooped down out of heaven (on a crane, AKA 'machine') and stuck his sword through the monster's heart."
Same as suddenly revealed super-hacker skills or the classic, "and then the little boy woke up," ending.
My wife and I (both 56) are moving into a 55+ mobile home park here in Florida. Before we even bought, my wife helped one of the 80-ish neighbor ladies change a printer ink cartridge. Then she helped another one hook up a new keyboard. Now they're offering to pay her, because they were all paying GeekSquad and similar rip operations $75+ per service call for seriously easy computer tasks. Debbie won't take their money, but I'll tell you... we have some of the nicest home-sewn curtains you ever saw for our new bedroom, and some of these ladies are insanely great bakers.
Without a working computer, how can grandma in Florida carry on webcam conversations with grandchildren and great-grandchildren in Michigan or Indiana? And without a working printer, how can she print out the latest gr-g-kid's drawing and put it on her refrigerator?
Also, a lot of these people are perfectly capable of learning to do most of this on their own if someone is willing to teach them instead of sneering at them for being old.
I live in Manatee County, Floriduh, one of the places Real Estate Madness hit hardest and that has, hence, been hit hardest by its end.
I do not recall seeing a whole lot of poor and/or minority taxpayers pulling mortgage frauds in order to buy little houses for themselves in not-great neighborhoods like East Bradenton.
I do, however, recall seeing lots and lots and lots of speculators and slumlords, the vast majority of them good white Republicans, bidding up the prices on little working-class houses to the point where none of the people who actually do the Real Work (trash collection, policing, teaching, retail sales, etc.) could possibly buy them. And oh weren't those white Republicans just so proud of the Free Market System and big on boasting about how much money they were making and on laughing at the suckers who actually worked at jobs like teaching or writing for newspapers or cleaning the streets or doing carpentry instead of being Investors, as if Investors were the highest possible form of life and should be bowed down to by all others.
'Course then a local mortgage company called Brasota went broke because it was essentially a ponzi scheme -- and shockingly, it was not run by poor and/or minority working liberals but primarily by (I know this is hard to believe) Rich White Republicans, hardly any of whom lived in the neighborhoods where they loaned mucho bucks to "investors" who didn't live in them, either.
And some local banks have failed, and a lot of local businesses, and now all the Rich White Republicans who ran their ponzi schemes and created their silly tulip-bulb bubble, except with houses, are running around blaming Democrats and liberals who thought that, just maybe, it might be a good idea to stop Rich White Republicans from discriminating against poor and/or minority workers when it came to making home loans.
The CRA (Community Reinvestment Act) that is being blamed by the Rich White Republicans for the collapse of their house of cards was all about ending discrimination in mortgages. Those Free Market Rich White Republicans had long had a bad habit of happily approving loans for white people in white neighborhoods while denying loans to black people in black neighborhoods even if the black people happened to have more stable jobs and wanted to borrow less than their white equivalents.
Listen, Rich White Republicans (and libertarians/Somalians and the rest of your crowd), if you want to see who created the current economic crisis, get a mirror and look in it. Don't keep trying to blame your problems on the blacks or the Jews or the liberals or whatever other group you're in the mood to victimize this week. It wasn't a "homosexual agenda" that created the obviously-insane (and unregulated) derivatives market, and it wasn't pro-choice agitators who ran the rating companies that assigned silly-high values to "bundled" mortgages.
Y'all ran our country for a good while, and basically you screwed it up big-time.
Quit whining. You had your chance. A lot of you got rich, and many of you will stay that way.
But don't try to pass your failures off on others. Man up, and face the fact that most of you got most of your money from some sort of scam, and that you have no right to complain now that you've been caught out.
And now, I need to get back to work. No government bailout for the likes of me, y'know.... GM, Ford, Citi, Chrysler and maybe Tesla -- and one can hope perhaps some other innovative car companies and a whole lot of "financial service" operations will get money. My tax money. Sucks, don't it? But otherwise, I suppose things might even be worse.
The idea of an "exit poll" is to talk to voters outside the polling place after they've voted, not to intrude on the sanctity of the polling place itself.
In other words, be on the sidewalk or other 100% public property.
My polling place in Bradenton, Florida, is in the rec room of a large mobile home park, which is private property. Many other polling places around here are on property that belongs to various churches.
As long as you stay on true public property -- that is, places to which the public has unimpeded access, you can film.
One way to tell if you're in a legal spot as opposed to intruding on a polling place is to look at the placement of candidates' signs. There is typically a minimum allowable distance from the polling place for them. Use them as your guide to the "safe" distance. Beyond that, as long as you are on public property and not impeding traffic, neither an election judge nor a police officer has the right to stop you from filming.
I plan to spend Tuesday evening going from one "victory party" to another in Sarasota and Manatee Counties (Florida) with my Canon XH-A1 video camera, then to send all my videos to Channel 10 (local CBS outlet), then post them @ my own site, http://roblimo.com./
You can do the same thing yourself, even if you don't have a hook-up with a local TV station or pro-quality video gear. Grab your cell phone with built-in vidcam, your Flip Video cam, your 1-CCD camcorder -- whatever you have -- and upload your videos to YouTube or other video sites.
You might also want to do your own exit polls. As long as you're on public property, no one has the right to keep you from shooting video.
Nowadays there is no reason to be a passive video consumer instead of a media creator.
Get out there and BE the media instead of sitting on your ass watching people who are no smarter than you TELL YOU what's going on.
I second the tuffmail recommendation. I've used them for several years now, and service has been great. Ditto their spam filters -- very flexible, easy to "train."
- Robin
Re:You can get almost 100 miles from an S10
on
DIY Hybrid Car Kit
·
· Score: 1
I've thought about adding a generator to a golf cart, since I'm in Florida where they're all over the place -- and can now be licensed for limited street use if they have lights and seat belts. Used golf carts go for a thou or so... generator is maybe $600 (and nice for post-hurricane backup power), and.... umm.... that's it. Not something I'd want to take across Alligator Alley, but cool for putting around Bradenton or going to the beach.
"Distributing around the world" means you need to work with both NTSC and PAL in SD, but is not a problem with HDV. For everything except ads on my local cable systems, HDV seems to be fine. Shoot or at least render in QT, 6 Mbps, 24fps, stick to 720p, and any network or station with a fairly modern NLE will be able to use it. Remember to be very conservative with your safe zones, though, due to the dimensional differences between PAL and NTSC. And learn to accept the fact that, no matter what you do, some station/cable tech somewhere *will* screw up your 16X9 masterpiece by sending it out 4:3 -- or vice versa.
Delivery mechanism? Any of the video sharing services that maintain the original files for download. Or ftp, which also works fine.
The "Everybody has QuickTime" statement is not true in Corporate World. A surprising number of company-owned Windows computers do not have QT installed. Like it or not, Flash is the closest-to-universal online video distribution method there is, except among free software purists who treat Ogg Theora as the "one true codec" even though Xvid is just as free and has a much higher clarity:file size ratio than Theora.
If you use Blip, you can upload your videos in multiple formats, and embed the Flash version (with your custom-branded player) in your site and the other formats (QT, Theora, avi, whatever) as optional downloads. Covers all bases, costs nothing for a standard account, $90 a year or so for a "pro" account.
Yes. I tested several of the "unlimited bandwidth" cheapie hosts. Every single one choked and stuttered due to transfer throttling when I had 5 or 6 friends hit a video at the same time. My (Flash) test vids were encoded at 512 KBPS or less, which is slightly better than YouTube but nothing special.
Well... maybe. Our local Hyundai -- http://www.bradentonhyundai.com/ -- has a 100% Flash site. You can't even email a used car listing to a friend due to the lack of discreet page URLs. I know their PR/media/Web guy through some local civic improvement projects we both work on, and I mentioned this to him one day. His response: "Huh?"
Whatever. If they don't care, why should I? After their service department charged my wife $200 to replace an Elantra key fob that needed a $3 battery replacement, we aren't going to buy anything there, anyway, even if they reform their Web site.
I'm not against Flash for video delivery or games. It works fine for me in FF 2.x on Ubuntu 7.10. It'll do for until Sun or someone else come up with a good open source "playerless" online video delivery system. But for entire pages or sites? Stupid. Dumb. Moronic. Shouldn't be done.
It was a fine book when I was 10. Now that I'm 55, it's not so good.
And much though I loved Heinlein's juveniles when I was 10 - 16, today I find them... juvenile.
The first science fiction book I read (and the first all-text "adult" book, too) was A.E. Van Vogt's "The Voyage of the Space Beagle." I was seven.
Douglas Adams is fine for all ages.
Piers Anthony is great when you're 10 - 16, starts to lose it after that.
Orson Scott Card, check.
James Patterson isn't thought of as an SF writer, but his "Maximum Ride" series is excellent juvenile SF -- and not shabby for adults, either.
Just turn kids loose in the library, let them get what they like. It may not be what *you* like, but hey! We each have our own taste in authors and styles.
Oh, I noticed the mistakes. But we tell/warn/promise all Slashdot interviewees that we'll run their answers "verbatim, except for HTML formatting." And that's exactly what we do.
Those mistakes are almost always a guarantee that the person answered the questions without help from a PR department or other launderer, BTW. I'd rather see "real" answers with mistakes than perfect ones that are obviously committee efforts.
In 2000, we ran an interview with Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich, and Timothy got yelled at by many readers for transcribing (this interview was done by phone) all of Lars's swear words and verbal tics. But Lars loved it. The interview captured not only information, but let his personality come through in a way no MSM interview ever would.
I thought the questions were decent and quite thoughtful.
Maj. Gen. Lord worked darn hard on those answers, balancing what he *wanted* to say with what he *could* say. In fact, one of his (civilian) staff members told me that this little project -- simple for most Slashdot readers, but touchy for someone with Gen. Lord's rank and high profile -- ate most of his weekend.
An old expression I learned in the Army: "A General's always on parade."
As others have pointed out, not only are Generals usually remote figures the typical enlisted person never meets, but they have to be very careful about what they say, especially in public, for both security and career reasons.
Trust me: this guy's not dumb. And he reads and writes his own email, and knows at least basic l33tspeak and IM-talk. He's been a CIO (military variety) most of his career, dealing with commo and computers and the people who make them work -- and I assure you, both the civilian DoD contractors and the uniformed personnel who do this stuff for the military are just as strange, in their own way, as their civilian counterparts. And a whole lot of them read Slashdot, too.:)
A Slashdot reader truly interested in the issues you mention can find many statements about them from every candidate. The point here was not to ask questions the candidates have answered (often many times, and often on their own websites), but to ask questions that have not been answered by the candidates in easily-found material published elsewhere.
The answers were prepared by Ron Paul's legislative director, who is the person in most Congressional offices (don't forget - Ron Paul is a sitting Congressman, not just a presidential candidate) who is empowered to speak on behalf of the representative. It's also possible, although we have not been told this, that Rep. Paul himself came up with the answers.
Many years ago, on a certain presidential campaign (which one is not important; he didn't win), if you got a "personal" answer to your letter addressed to the candidate, chances are that I wrote it and "signed" his name with a machine that scrawled "his" signature with a felt-tip pen.
You really can't expect a presidential candidate to personally answer all requests or even all media requests. That task alone takes at least 100 hours per day, which means you need to have a number of people doing it.
Reality = when you vote for almost any office higher than local school board member, you're voting for a team instead of for an individual.
I have learned, over the years, to carefully watch the actions of that team, and its organization or lack thereof, as a useful indicator of how competent that candidate will be in office if he or she is elected.
I may have stories to tell about our attempts to contact various campaigns as the general election gets closer.:)
Actually, you need to be careful about reading observations in "fucking novels" AKA porn, or you will shorten your time to orgasm significantly, thereby proving that the cosmologists' theory applies to sex as much as to dark matter.
(No racial jokes about "dark matter," please. In the unlit box, all of Schroedinger's cats are grey.)
I suspect that along about the 3rd time a Congresscritter needs to fly home in a hurry, and can't, this regulation is going to go away -- assuming it gets through in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
It's called Deus Ex Machina, and it's a plot device used by sloppy writers ever since the ancient Greeks put on plays, which is why said lame plot device has a Greek name.
"Suddenly, just as the monster was about to bite Our Hero's head off, a God swooped down out of heaven (on a crane, AKA 'machine') and stuck his sword through the monster's heart."
Same as suddenly revealed super-hacker skills or the classic, "and then the little boy woke up," ending.
My wife and I (both 56) are moving into a 55+ mobile home park here in Florida. Before we even bought, my wife helped one of the 80-ish neighbor ladies change a printer ink cartridge. Then she helped another one hook up a new keyboard. Now they're offering to pay her, because they were all paying GeekSquad and similar rip operations $75+ per service call for seriously easy computer tasks. Debbie won't take their money, but I'll tell you... we have some of the nicest home-sewn curtains you ever saw for our new bedroom, and some of these ladies are insanely great bakers.
Without a working computer, how can grandma in Florida carry on webcam conversations with grandchildren and great-grandchildren in Michigan or Indiana? And without a working printer, how can she print out the latest gr-g-kid's drawing and put it on her refrigerator?
Also, a lot of these people are perfectly capable of learning to do most of this on their own if someone is willing to teach them instead of sneering at them for being old.
Just being neighborly, you know?
- Robin
I've written three tech books and edited five, all with OpenOffice.org. The publisher's people all used Microsoft Word. No problem.
Write each chapter as a separate file.
Ideally, the publisher will handle the indexing and you won't.
Indexing is best done manually, anyway. It's not that hard. I've done it for several books, working from galleys.
I live in Manatee County, Floriduh, one of the places Real Estate Madness hit hardest and that has, hence, been hit hardest by its end.
I do not recall seeing a whole lot of poor and/or minority taxpayers pulling mortgage frauds in order to buy little houses for themselves in not-great neighborhoods like East Bradenton.
I do, however, recall seeing lots and lots and lots of speculators and slumlords, the vast majority of them good white Republicans, bidding up the prices on little working-class houses to the point where none of the people who actually do the Real Work (trash collection, policing, teaching, retail sales, etc.) could possibly buy them. And oh weren't those white Republicans just so proud of the Free Market System and big on boasting about how much money they were making and on laughing at the suckers who actually worked at jobs like teaching or writing for newspapers or cleaning the streets or doing carpentry instead of being Investors, as if Investors were the highest possible form of life and should be bowed down to by all others.
'Course then a local mortgage company called Brasota went broke because it was essentially a ponzi scheme -- and shockingly, it was not run by poor and/or minority working liberals but primarily by (I know this is hard to believe) Rich White Republicans, hardly any of whom lived in the neighborhoods where they loaned mucho bucks to "investors" who didn't live in them, either.
And some local banks have failed, and a lot of local businesses, and now all the Rich White Republicans who ran their ponzi schemes and created their silly tulip-bulb bubble, except with houses, are running around blaming Democrats and liberals who thought that, just maybe, it might be a good idea to stop Rich White Republicans from discriminating against poor and/or minority workers when it came to making home loans.
The CRA (Community Reinvestment Act) that is being blamed by the Rich White Republicans for the collapse of their house of cards was all about ending discrimination in mortgages. Those Free Market Rich White Republicans had long had a bad habit of happily approving loans for white people in white neighborhoods while denying loans to black people in black neighborhoods even if the black people happened to have more stable jobs and wanted to borrow less than their white equivalents.
Listen, Rich White Republicans (and libertarians/Somalians and the rest of your crowd), if you want to see who created the current economic crisis, get a mirror and look in it. Don't keep trying to blame your problems on the blacks or the Jews or the liberals or whatever other group you're in the mood to victimize this week. It wasn't a "homosexual agenda" that created the obviously-insane (and unregulated) derivatives market, and it wasn't pro-choice agitators who ran the rating companies that assigned silly-high values to "bundled" mortgages.
Y'all ran our country for a good while, and basically you screwed it up big-time.
Quit whining. You had your chance. A lot of you got rich, and many of you will stay that way.
But don't try to pass your failures off on others. Man up, and face the fact that most of you got most of your money from some sort of scam, and that you have no right to complain now that you've been caught out.
And now, I need to get back to work. No government bailout for the likes of me, y'know.... GM, Ford, Citi, Chrysler and maybe Tesla -- and one can hope perhaps some other innovative car companies and a whole lot of "financial service" operations will get money. My tax money. Sucks, don't it? But otherwise, I suppose things might even be worse.
Can't win for losing, can we? (sigh)
The idea of an "exit poll" is to talk to voters outside the polling place after they've voted, not to intrude on the sanctity of the polling place itself.
In other words, be on the sidewalk or other 100% public property.
My polling place in Bradenton, Florida, is in the rec room of a large mobile home park, which is private property. Many other polling places around here are on property that belongs to various churches.
As long as you stay on true public property -- that is, places to which the public has unimpeded access, you can film.
One way to tell if you're in a legal spot as opposed to intruding on a polling place is to look at the placement of candidates' signs. There is typically a minimum allowable distance from the polling place for them. Use them as your guide to the "safe" distance. Beyond that, as long as you are on public property and not impeding traffic, neither an election judge nor a police officer has the right to stop you from filming.
(I, too, have been an election judge.)
I plan to spend Tuesday evening going from one "victory party" to another in Sarasota and Manatee Counties (Florida) with my Canon XH-A1 video camera, then to send all my videos to Channel 10 (local CBS outlet), then post them @ my own site, http://roblimo.com./
You can do the same thing yourself, even if you don't have a hook-up with a local TV station or pro-quality video gear. Grab your cell phone with built-in vidcam, your Flip Video cam, your 1-CCD camcorder -- whatever you have -- and upload your videos to YouTube or other video sites.
You might also want to do your own exit polls. As long as you're on public property, no one has the right to keep you from shooting video.
Nowadays there is no reason to be a passive video consumer instead of a media creator.
Get out there and BE the media instead of sitting on your ass watching people who are no smarter than you TELL YOU what's going on.
- Robin
Some of them might -- if they are asked by someone who asks one question per post, as requested. :)
I second the tuffmail recommendation. I've used them for several years now, and service has been great. Ditto their spam filters -- very flexible, easy to "train."
- Robin
I've thought about adding a generator to a golf cart, since I'm in Florida where they're all over the place -- and can now be licensed for limited street use if they have lights and seat belts. Used golf carts go for a thou or so... generator is maybe $600 (and nice for post-hurricane backup power), and.... umm.... that's it. Not something I'd want to take across Alligator Alley, but cool for putting around Bradenton or going to the beach.
- Robin
"Distributing around the world" means you need to work with both NTSC and PAL in SD, but is not a problem with HDV. For everything except ads on my local cable systems, HDV seems to be fine. Shoot or at least render in QT, 6 Mbps, 24fps, stick to 720p, and any network or station with a fairly modern NLE will be able to use it. Remember to be very conservative with your safe zones, though, due to the dimensional differences between PAL and NTSC. And learn to accept the fact that, no matter what you do, some station/cable tech somewhere *will* screw up your 16X9 masterpiece by sending it out 4:3 -- or vice versa.
Delivery mechanism? Any of the video sharing services that maintain the original files for download. Or ftp, which also works fine.
The "Everybody has QuickTime" statement is not true in Corporate World. A surprising number of company-owned Windows computers do not have QT installed. Like it or not, Flash is the closest-to-universal online video distribution method there is, except among free software purists who treat Ogg Theora as the "one true codec" even though Xvid is just as free and has a much higher clarity:file size ratio than Theora.
If you use Blip, you can upload your videos in multiple formats, and embed the Flash version (with your custom-branded player) in your site and the other formats (QT, Theora, avi, whatever) as optional downloads. Covers all bases, costs nothing for a standard account, $90 a year or so for a "pro" account.
Yes. I tested several of the "unlimited bandwidth" cheapie hosts. Every single one choked and stuttered due to transfer throttling when I had 5 or 6 friends hit a video at the same time. My (Flash) test vids were encoded at 512 KBPS or less, which is slightly better than YouTube but nothing special.
- Robin
There was some sort of comment bug, but only on that story. It'll probably come back once the problem is fixed.
We have never interviewed anyone who thought they were deranged. That would be cruel!
- Robin
PS - Note that we haven't interviewed *you* yet... :)
Well... maybe. Our local Hyundai -- http://www.bradentonhyundai.com/ -- has a 100% Flash site. You can't even email a used car listing to a friend due to the lack of discreet page URLs. I know their PR/media/Web guy through some local civic improvement projects we both work on, and I mentioned this to him one day. His response: "Huh?"
Whatever. If they don't care, why should I? After their service department charged my wife $200 to replace an Elantra key fob that needed a $3 battery replacement, we aren't going to buy anything there, anyway, even if they reform their Web site.
I'm not against Flash for video delivery or games. It works fine for me in FF 2.x on Ubuntu 7.10. It'll do for until Sun or someone else come up with a good open source "playerless" online video delivery system. But for entire pages or sites? Stupid. Dumb. Moronic. Shouldn't be done.
- Robin
It was a fine book when I was 10. Now that I'm 55, it's not so good.
And much though I loved Heinlein's juveniles when I was 10 - 16, today I find them... juvenile.
The first science fiction book I read (and the first all-text "adult" book, too) was A.E. Van Vogt's "The Voyage of the Space Beagle." I was seven.
Douglas Adams is fine for all ages.
Piers Anthony is great when you're 10 - 16, starts to lose it after that.
Orson Scott Card, check.
James Patterson isn't thought of as an SF writer, but his "Maximum Ride" series is excellent juvenile SF -- and not shabby for adults, either.
Just turn kids loose in the library, let them get what they like. It may not be what *you* like, but hey! We each have our own taste in authors and styles.
Oh, I noticed the mistakes. But we tell/warn/promise all Slashdot interviewees that we'll run their answers "verbatim, except for HTML formatting." And that's exactly what we do.
Those mistakes are almost always a guarantee that the person answered the questions without help from a PR department or other launderer, BTW. I'd rather see "real" answers with mistakes than perfect ones that are obviously committee efforts.
In 2000, we ran an interview with Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich, and Timothy got yelled at by many readers for transcribing (this interview was done by phone) all of Lars's swear words and verbal tics. But Lars loved it. The interview captured not only information, but let his personality come through in a way no MSM interview ever would.
And to show you that Timothy's interview skills go well beyond typical Slashdot material, here he is interviewing a boxing coach and some of his fighters.
CNet also owns TV.com -- surely that domain name, too, is of value to CBS.
For extra Maryland local knowledge points, what was the name of the motel that was once in the building now occupied by the Cryptologic Museum?
(Peter Wayner, I'm shocked that you didn't have that in the NYT article. Or did you, and it was edited out?)
- Robin
I thought the questions were decent and quite thoughtful.
:)
Maj. Gen. Lord worked darn hard on those answers, balancing what he *wanted* to say with what he *could* say. In fact, one of his (civilian) staff members told me that this little project -- simple for most Slashdot readers, but touchy for someone with Gen. Lord's rank and high profile -- ate most of his weekend.
An old expression I learned in the Army: "A General's always on parade."
As others have pointed out, not only are Generals usually remote figures the typical enlisted person never meets, but they have to be very careful about what they say, especially in public, for both security and career reasons.
Trust me: this guy's not dumb. And he reads and writes his own email, and knows at least basic l33tspeak and IM-talk. He's been a CIO (military variety) most of his career, dealing with commo and computers and the people who make them work -- and I assure you, both the civilian DoD contractors and the uniformed personnel who do this stuff for the military are just as strange, in their own way, as their civilian counterparts. And a whole lot of them read Slashdot, too.
- Robin
A Slashdot reader truly interested in the issues you mention can find many statements about them from every candidate. The point here was not to ask questions the candidates have answered (often many times, and often on their own websites), but to ask questions that have not been answered by the candidates in easily-found material published elsewhere.
The answers were prepared by Ron Paul's legislative director, who is the person in most Congressional offices (don't forget - Ron Paul is a sitting Congressman, not just a presidential candidate) who is empowered to speak on behalf of the representative. It's also possible, although we have not been told this, that Rep. Paul himself came up with the answers.
:)
Many years ago, on a certain presidential campaign (which one is not important; he didn't win), if you got a "personal" answer to your letter addressed to the candidate, chances are that I wrote it and "signed" his name with a machine that scrawled "his" signature with a felt-tip pen.
You really can't expect a presidential candidate to personally answer all requests or even all media requests. That task alone takes at least 100 hours per day, which means you need to have a number of people doing it.
Reality = when you vote for almost any office higher than local school board member, you're voting for a team instead of for an individual.
I have learned, over the years, to carefully watch the actions of that team, and its organization or lack thereof, as a useful indicator of how competent that candidate will be in office if he or she is elected.
I may have stories to tell about our attempts to contact various campaigns as the general election gets closer.
- Robin
Actually, you need to be careful about reading observations in "fucking novels" AKA porn, or you will shorten your time to orgasm significantly, thereby proving that the cosmologists' theory applies to sex as much as to dark matter.
(No racial jokes about "dark matter," please. In the unlit box, all of Schroedinger's cats are grey.)
I suspect that along about the 3rd time a Congresscritter needs to fly home in a hurry, and can't, this regulation is going to go away -- assuming it gets through in the first place.
- Robin
Same here. I probably just woke up an hour or two before you that morning. :)
- Robin