For all his time in federal courtrooms - Mr. Stoller says his companies have been in court 60 times - there is no record within the Lexis database of a federal court decision on "stealth" in his favor.
In other words, the man is a litigious idiot. The fact that he's occasionally managed to get people to license from him says more about the fact that people are terrified of lawsuits than that the law itself is unfair.
People are terrified of the law. I know I am; at any moment I could be sued and even if I win, it'll cost me thousands, with no way to recapture it. (And before a bunch of non-lawyers start demanding "loser pays", remember that "loser pays" just introduces other unfairnesses when the poor can't sue the rich.)
If programmers ran the world, the law would be clear, concise, and unambiguous. Or at least that's what they'd like to think. Anybody who's actually studied law knows that actual human interactions are full of corner cases, and ass-coverings easily outweigh the meat of most contracts.
If there were no litigious idiots, the law would be a lot simpler. Just like email would be lovely if there weren't a mountain of fools who think that "free" means "mine mine mine". Sadly, neither is the case. The courts are another commons, like email, and this jackass is ensuring that no commons it without its tragedy.
Sorry; different modes of communication. I was making a prediction about what is likely to happen, not what I think should happen.
Seniority is not an absolute rule; for all I know he'll appoint somebody who's not even a lawyer. It happens. And in Bush's case his strategy may well be to pick the younger man, to make his influence last longer. But I think the money is on Scalia.
Arguably, one could make it a "right to privacy" amendment, which would be more palatable to some. Strict constructionists have made a big deal out of the lack of an explicit right to privacy in the constitution, even though that's one of they keys upon which Roe was based. They had to find it by a slightly tortured reading of the fourth amendment. I'd support an explicit right to privacy, though that would flood the court with cases overturning existing laws.
I think it's going a bit far to say that the opposite of "constructionist" is "autocratic". Usually the opposite is considered "activist", and that's taken on a pretty pejorative tone. The right of Congress to impeach a judge limits their autocratic powers: the judge can always be removed.
Just to be clear: I'm not suggesting that people with existing PCs buy new ones. I'm just commenting on the article, which talks about connecting PCs to the internet for the first time, which I assume is usually about new PCs.
TLDs are useful for establishing control and resolving disputes. Controlled TLDs let everybody agree that notedame.com could belong to a cathedral, a school, or a porn site, but notredame.edu can only belong to the school. And they're going to resolve any conflicts about it among themselves; that is, just between schools with claims to the name. That makes the discussion a bit more civilized.
Even then it helps to have your TLD sufficiently well publicized. You can get away with.edu, but I'm hard pressed to think of another well-known controlled TLD.
New land-rush TLDs like this, on the other hand, are just stupid. There's nobody to resolve disputes except at an international level, so you might as well pick the well-known.com TLD. If your.com is taken there's no point in seizing.tel, even if you really are a telephone provider, because you're still fighting with porn sites and squatters.
The.net and.org domains would have been nice if they'd been limited to ISPs and nonprofits respectively. But nobody is in charge of them, so they're land-rush, and nobody cares.
(And why did they introduce.museum when.edu was already in place? The Smithsonian uses.edu, and I can't imagine that the museums and the schools couldn't work it out. People have heard of.edu, but not.museum.)
The concern is that if the Koreans and Japanese have converted their infrastructure to IPv6, then they'll be buying their routers from Korean and Japanese countries. When it becomes a crisis in the US, we'll end up buying our infrastructure from them, because it will have been built, installed, and tested.
Right now the US has dominance in these markets. If we let the Koreans and Japanese get their first, we'll be letting competitors get there first.
At least, those are the concerns I've heard. I'm not sure I buy it; shouldn't Cisco et al be selling IPv6 routers to the Koreans right now? I'm hearing it from trade experts, not technology experts, so I'm still trying to figure out my opinion.
NAT doesn't seem to completely solve the addressing problem. According to this report by Cisco to Congress (warning: pdf), we're going to run out of addresses for real somewhere between 2015 and 2025.
Yeah, I know they're a vendor, but this is a really reasonable report. They counter a lot of the hype, but they say we're going to need IPv6 eventually, so let's start now, before the Japanese and Koreans have built all the infrastructure and Americans are left to buy from them.
There are attacks which don't require your help; Sasser in particular goes through an open port rather than through Outlook or IE. There are a few others.
But that's pretty unlikely with a new PC, which presumably comes with the latest service packs. The article is incredibly short on actual data. There's nothing to support their 12-minute average. I get the impression that they chose the scariest headline to support an article which is mostly about phishing attacks, trojans, etc: attacks that require your help.
So for all I know they're talking about the fact that there are enough attackers that if you throw a Windows ME (or even unpatched XP) box on the Internet, yeah, you're hacked. That says a lot, but not about how insecure Windows is. It says that there are still plenty of computers running hacks like Sasser; if you're not protected against it, you're screwed.
That's mostly scaremongering, since unless you're installing a very out-of-date Windows, you're protected. You're not protected against new attacks, nor are you protected against many trojans. They're trying to convince you to buy software for that, which is relevant, by using scary but irrelevant numbers.
We're catching plenty of miscellaneous insurgents and Talibani. That's because there are lots of them and only one Osama bin Laden.
They went out after pirates, and found some. They didn't say how many specific pirates they missed.
And, to echo other posters, it's a lot easier to coordinate with other European countries than it is with the Islamic countries in Asia and/or Africa where they might like to raid.
Not to mention that Osama's life is dedicated to hiding; these guys didn't even realize the FBI was after them. If the FBI had announced a reward on their heads, it would have been a lot harder to catch them.
Basically: some company places an ad with Google and tells Google they'll pay them (for example) $.01 every time somebody clicks on an ad. (That's called cost-per-click advertising. If nobody's interested in your ad, you don't pay.)
Let's steal their money. Google has a service where you can sign up to run ads on your site. Google gives you their ad to display on your web site, and Google pays you (say) $.005 per click. In other words, you get half, and Google gets half.
Now you write a script that clicks on the link as fast as it can... well, if it happens a million times you get $5,000. Free. And the company has paid $10,000 for the privilege.
That's what click fraud is. There are a lot of variations, but that's the gist.
Ah. I was hoping it was some kind of cool new technical term. Your English was so good (better than some of the Americans on Slashdot) that I didn't spot it.
I'm very interested in the concepts of usability, and I have some strong opinions about what makes a web page "lisible".
Sorry I missed your sig; I have signatures turned off.
Changing the producer, change the customer
on
P2P and TV
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
This is true, but as with any product, you have to make it, and that costs money. Making TV shows to attract the products to watch the commercials is their capital expense.
Cyncially, it's not entirely unlike a hunter putting out a salt lick. Well, TV viewers don't get shot. They just get shown commercials. I've known people who would say that the deer are getting off easy.
The upshot (as it were) is that the networks are the middle man, and P2P may represent a way of cutting out the middle man, for TV as it is gradually becoming for music.
As with music, there are still questions to be answered. Middle men exist for a reason: they make transactions easier. TV networks broker the transaction between the artists (TV show actors/directors/writers) and the viewer, extracting their inch of green in the form of commercials. Even if the TV producers could make their shows, getting it advertised and paid for are still unanswered questions. Pay per download, perhaps, with P2P used as "viral marketing"?
There's also, as with music, the question of up-front expense. TV pilots are wildly expensive. Worse, they make significant capital expenses, like sets and effects, which cost a lot but can be re-used if the show is picked up. Think about the Firefly pilot, for example: they had to build a huge set for Serenity. All that is up front expenses, which are spent by networks. There are economic solutions to that problem, but we'll have to see which ones work and which don't.
So having us as the product rather than the customer can change, but it's going to be difficult. It means changing the nature of the seller from the network, who makes its profit by selling your eyeballs, to somebody else who makes a profit elsewhere.
Perhaps a well-funded person who makes 10 TV shows, has one succeed on a pay-per-download basis, and makes enough to do 10 more. Or perhaps there are 100 low-budget movie producers, like Blair Witch, of whom 99 will lose their $20k investment and the others will get enough buzz from somewhere to sell copies online.
Or wackier, perhaps a subscription basis, where they sell shares of a project in progress, the price rising as it gets closer to completion, and the profits shared among the shareholders. I seem to recall a movie being made like that, but I don't recall what happened to it. I'm afraid that speaks badly for the idea.
Or perhaps even an "open source" project, but although writers and actors may do it for love and to share, the guys who sell lumber and costumes usually don't think of their work as open-sourceable.
Either way, if you don't want to be the product, you're going to find a way to be the customer. Customers pay for things.
It took some non-trivial Googling to figure out what "illisible" meant. It seems to be a perfectly common French word, but it's rarely used in English. "Lisibility" seems to be technical English: Google finds only a thousand cites, no definitions, and m-w.com doesn't know it.
Is there a specfic technical meaning beyond "legible"?
Actually I see it every day in my shower, and every few months when I go to buy more. It's cheap and it works.
It's there, but it's basic shaving cream. It's not a gel, and it doesn't require a "system" to use. There's no brush, so you can't even call it retro. But I don't think the can has changed since the fifties.
Oh, its marketing has definitely been far surpassed since then. But boy, how often will you see not just a catchy jingle but a whole style last a half-century?
Sugar beets produce ethanol, not biodiesel. Same gist (non-petroleum fuel) but different engines.
Also: Brazil isn't really a big cocaine producer. Brazil imports its cocaine from Peru. I honestly can't tell you why there isn't a big home-grown cocaine industry in Brazil.
Sorry for being pedantic. Your ultimate point is actually a solid one: "Hey, farmers around the world, maybe you can make more money growing fuel than growing drugs." Wouldn't that be nice? I dunno if it works out economically, but it's certainly worth research.
Firearms dealers are licensed. If you are advertising your firearms as "a great way to make sure mugging victims don't identify you in a lineup!" I'm pretty sure they're going to yank your license, and in all likelihood you've run afoul of some agreement you signed when you got your license. And they may well charge you with conspiracy or with being an accessory.
Software dealers and manufacturers are unlicensed, as are the makers of knives and lengths of pipe, so it's actually a different kettle of fish. But in general participating in a crime, as a consiprator or accessory, though the details vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Specifically advertising your participation in a criminal act is therefore a bad idea.
I don't entirely understand why the FDA doesn't just say all bets are off once you've got less than a month to live. I mean, have some opium; what, you're gonna get addicted? Disconnect the oxygen and have another cigarette.
It's true that they haven't rejected it yet. They usually take the advice of the committee; but they rejected the committee's advice on Plan B a few months ago, so who knows? Besides, with a 7-6-1 committee decision, it was hardly a strong recommendation against (especially since I've seen quotes from several of the "no" voters who were on the fence themselves.)
We aren't talking about bringing back 110 year old people from near death.
In this case, it's precisely what we're talking about. Abiomed was applying for a "humanitarian device exemption", to be used only in cases where the person had less than a month to live. They weren't expecting you to live long on it; just long enough to say a few extra months of goodbyes.
They were rejected anyway. The numbers were just too much against them. Two people out of 17 died almost immediately.
The rejection was narrow, 7-6, and it seems a little unfair to blame those deaths on the procedure since it was only done in people who were about to die anyway. These are not the best candidates for surviving massive surgery.
You can't do it in children, even though their young systems might handle it better, because they'd have to make tiny devices for them, with attendant research issues.
The best choice might be those otherwise healthy middle-agers. I'm not certain why Abiomed hasn't looked into those, except that they're presumably reluctant to try an experimental device on somebody who's a potential candidate for a life-saving heart transplant.
True enough. You have to talk about things like Mars and its weird movement in a geocentric universe, which is hard to observe without taking a lot of time. But the conjunction at least gives you an opportunity to talk about how the measurements are made. It gives you the opportunity to make the planets real, more so than just pointing to one particular point of light and saying, "Hey, that one's Jupiter".
Thing is, the conjunction isn't really all that interesting, scientifically. It's interesting mostly because it's rare, and it's a way to get the vigorously nonscientific to actually watch the planets move across the sky. Go out on two successive nights and you can watch them move relative to each other.
No biggie for your college-educated, Slashdot-reading brain, but a lot of people are bored stiff by science. Turn on Jeopardy some day and watch as the board clears of every category except Science. Not always, but too often.
There's an awful lot of people who don't really get how the planetary orbits work, and probably DO think that they would collide. I bet you know at least some of them. Take them out and show them the conjunction. Take them out on successive nights and describe how we can figure out the heliocentric universe from the observations.
Slashdot Mirror
The most telling sentence in the article:
For all his time in federal courtrooms - Mr. Stoller says his companies have been in court 60 times - there is no record within the Lexis database of a federal court decision on "stealth" in his favor.
In other words, the man is a litigious idiot. The fact that he's occasionally managed to get people to license from him says more about the fact that people are terrified of lawsuits than that the law itself is unfair.
People are terrified of the law. I know I am; at any moment I could be sued and even if I win, it'll cost me thousands, with no way to recapture it. (And before a bunch of non-lawyers start demanding "loser pays", remember that "loser pays" just introduces other unfairnesses when the poor can't sue the rich.)
If programmers ran the world, the law would be clear, concise, and unambiguous. Or at least that's what they'd like to think. Anybody who's actually studied law knows that actual human interactions are full of corner cases, and ass-coverings easily outweigh the meat of most contracts.
If there were no litigious idiots, the law would be a lot simpler. Just like email would be lovely if there weren't a mountain of fools who think that "free" means "mine mine mine". Sadly, neither is the case. The courts are another commons, like email, and this jackass is ensuring that no commons it without its tragedy.
Fucktard.
Too rich for my blood. All I've got is a pair of Foucaults and a Lacan.
Still though... "Wasman's gold-spotted bug". What a wondefully evocative name.
Sorry; different modes of communication. I was making a prediction about what is likely to happen, not what I think should happen.
Seniority is not an absolute rule; for all I know he'll appoint somebody who's not even a lawyer. It happens. And in Bush's case his strategy may well be to pick the younger man, to make his influence last longer. But I think the money is on Scalia.
Arguably, one could make it a "right to privacy" amendment, which would be more palatable to some. Strict constructionists have made a big deal out of the lack of an explicit right to privacy in the constitution, even though that's one of they keys upon which Roe was based. They had to find it by a slightly tortured reading of the fourth amendment. I'd support an explicit right to privacy, though that would flood the court with cases overturning existing laws.
I think it's going a bit far to say that the opposite of "constructionist" is "autocratic". Usually the opposite is considered "activist", and that's taken on a pretty pejorative tone. The right of Congress to impeach a judge limits their autocratic powers: the judge can always be removed.
The term he's looking for is "constructionist", as in "strict constructionist".
Actually, the obvious choice is Scalia; he's got seniority over Thomas. Stevens has even more seniority but he's too liberal for Bush.
Just to be clear: I'm not suggesting that people with existing PCs buy new ones. I'm just commenting on the article, which talks about connecting PCs to the internet for the first time, which I assume is usually about new PCs.
TLDs are useful for establishing control and resolving disputes. Controlled TLDs let everybody agree that notedame.com could belong to a cathedral, a school, or a porn site, but notredame.edu can only belong to the school. And they're going to resolve any conflicts about it among themselves; that is, just between schools with claims to the name. That makes the discussion a bit more civilized.
.edu, but I'm hard pressed to think of another well-known controlled TLD.
.com TLD. If your .com is taken there's no point in seizing .tel, even if you really are a telephone provider, because you're still fighting with porn sites and squatters.
.net and .org domains would have been nice if they'd been limited to ISPs and nonprofits respectively. But nobody is in charge of them, so they're land-rush, and nobody cares.
.museum when .edu was already in place? The Smithsonian uses .edu, and I can't imagine that the museums and the schools couldn't work it out. People have heard of .edu, but not .museum.)
Even then it helps to have your TLD sufficiently well publicized. You can get away with
New land-rush TLDs like this, on the other hand, are just stupid. There's nobody to resolve disputes except at an international level, so you might as well pick the well-known
The
(And why did they introduce
The concern is that if the Koreans and Japanese have converted their infrastructure to IPv6, then they'll be buying their routers from Korean and Japanese countries. When it becomes a crisis in the US, we'll end up buying our infrastructure from them, because it will have been built, installed, and tested.
Right now the US has dominance in these markets. If we let the Koreans and Japanese get their first, we'll be letting competitors get there first.
At least, those are the concerns I've heard. I'm not sure I buy it; shouldn't Cisco et al be selling IPv6 routers to the Koreans right now? I'm hearing it from trade experts, not technology experts, so I'm still trying to figure out my opinion.
NAT doesn't seem to completely solve the addressing problem. According to this report by Cisco to Congress (warning: pdf), we're going to run out of addresses for real somewhere between 2015 and 2025.
Yeah, I know they're a vendor, but this is a really reasonable report. They counter a lot of the hype, but they say we're going to need IPv6 eventually, so let's start now, before the Japanese and Koreans have built all the infrastructure and Americans are left to buy from them.
There are attacks which don't require your help; Sasser in particular goes through an open port rather than through Outlook or IE. There are a few others.
But that's pretty unlikely with a new PC, which presumably comes with the latest service packs. The article is incredibly short on actual data. There's nothing to support their 12-minute average. I get the impression that they chose the scariest headline to support an article which is mostly about phishing attacks, trojans, etc: attacks that require your help.
So for all I know they're talking about the fact that there are enough attackers that if you throw a Windows ME (or even unpatched XP) box on the Internet, yeah, you're hacked. That says a lot, but not about how insecure Windows is. It says that there are still plenty of computers running hacks like Sasser; if you're not protected against it, you're screwed.
That's mostly scaremongering, since unless you're installing a very out-of-date Windows, you're protected. You're not protected against new attacks, nor are you protected against many trojans. They're trying to convince you to buy software for that, which is relevant, by using scary but irrelevant numbers.
We're catching plenty of miscellaneous insurgents and Talibani. That's because there are lots of them and only one Osama bin Laden.
They went out after pirates, and found some. They didn't say how many specific pirates they missed.
And, to echo other posters, it's a lot easier to coordinate with other European countries than it is with the Islamic countries in Asia and/or Africa where they might like to raid.
Not to mention that Osama's life is dedicated to hiding; these guys didn't even realize the FBI was after them. If the FBI had announced a reward on their heads, it would have been a lot harder to catch them.
Wikipedia is your friend
Basically: some company places an ad with Google and tells Google they'll pay them (for example) $.01 every time somebody clicks on an ad. (That's called cost-per-click advertising. If nobody's interested in your ad, you don't pay.)
Let's steal their money. Google has a service where you can sign up to run ads on your site. Google gives you their ad to display on your web site, and Google pays you (say) $.005 per click. In other words, you get half, and Google gets half.
Now you write a script that clicks on the link as fast as it can... well, if it happens a million times you get $5,000. Free. And the company has paid $10,000 for the privilege.
That's what click fraud is. There are a lot of variations, but that's the gist.
Perhaps I need a new electric. I was given one some 20 years ago and it never did a great job. I've heard they've gotten better in the last few years.
Ah. I was hoping it was some kind of cool new technical term. Your English was so good (better than some of the Americans on Slashdot) that I didn't spot it.
I'm very interested in the concepts of usability, and I have some strong opinions about what makes a web page "lisible".
Sorry I missed your sig; I have signatures turned off.
This is true, but as with any product, you have to make it, and that costs money. Making TV shows to attract the products to watch the commercials is their capital expense.
Cyncially, it's not entirely unlike a hunter putting out a salt lick. Well, TV viewers don't get shot. They just get shown commercials. I've known people who would say that the deer are getting off easy.
The upshot (as it were) is that the networks are the middle man, and P2P may represent a way of cutting out the middle man, for TV as it is gradually becoming for music.
As with music, there are still questions to be answered. Middle men exist for a reason: they make transactions easier. TV networks broker the transaction between the artists (TV show actors/directors/writers) and the viewer, extracting their inch of green in the form of commercials. Even if the TV producers could make their shows, getting it advertised and paid for are still unanswered questions. Pay per download, perhaps, with P2P used as "viral marketing"?
There's also, as with music, the question of up-front expense. TV pilots are wildly expensive. Worse, they make significant capital expenses, like sets and effects, which cost a lot but can be re-used if the show is picked up. Think about the Firefly pilot, for example: they had to build a huge set for Serenity. All that is up front expenses, which are spent by networks. There are economic solutions to that problem, but we'll have to see which ones work and which don't.
So having us as the product rather than the customer can change, but it's going to be difficult. It means changing the nature of the seller from the network, who makes its profit by selling your eyeballs, to somebody else who makes a profit elsewhere.
Perhaps a well-funded person who makes 10 TV shows, has one succeed on a pay-per-download basis, and makes enough to do 10 more. Or perhaps there are 100 low-budget movie producers, like Blair Witch, of whom 99 will lose their $20k investment and the others will get enough buzz from somewhere to sell copies online.
Or wackier, perhaps a subscription basis, where they sell shares of a project in progress, the price rising as it gets closer to completion, and the profits shared among the shareholders. I seem to recall a movie being made like that, but I don't recall what happened to it. I'm afraid that speaks badly for the idea.
Or perhaps even an "open source" project, but although writers and actors may do it for love and to share, the guys who sell lumber and costumes usually don't think of their work as open-sourceable.
Either way, if you don't want to be the product, you're going to find a way to be the customer. Customers pay for things.
It took some non-trivial Googling to figure out what "illisible" meant. It seems to be a perfectly common French word, but it's rarely used in English. "Lisibility" seems to be technical English: Google finds only a thousand cites, no definitions, and m-w.com doesn't know it.
Is there a specfic technical meaning beyond "legible"?
Actually I see it every day in my shower, and every few months when I go to buy more. It's cheap and it works.
It's there, but it's basic shaving cream. It's not a gel, and it doesn't require a "system" to use. There's no brush, so you can't even call it retro. But I don't think the can has changed since the fifties.
Oh, its marketing has definitely been far surpassed since then. But boy, how often will you see not just a catchy jingle but a whole style last a half-century?
Sugar beets produce ethanol, not biodiesel. Same gist (non-petroleum fuel) but different engines.
Also: Brazil isn't really a big cocaine producer. Brazil imports its cocaine from Peru. I honestly can't tell you why there isn't a big home-grown cocaine industry in Brazil.
Sorry for being pedantic. Your ultimate point is actually a solid one: "Hey, farmers around the world, maybe you can make more money growing fuel than growing drugs." Wouldn't that be nice? I dunno if it works out economically, but it's certainly worth research.
Firearms dealers are licensed. If you are advertising your firearms as "a great way to make sure mugging victims don't identify you in a lineup!" I'm pretty sure they're going to yank your license, and in all likelihood you've run afoul of some agreement you signed when you got your license. And they may well charge you with conspiracy or with being an accessory.
Software dealers and manufacturers are unlicensed, as are the makers of knives and lengths of pipe, so it's actually a different kettle of fish. But in general participating in a crime, as a consiprator or accessory, though the details vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Specifically advertising your participation in a criminal act is therefore a bad idea.
I don't entirely understand why the FDA doesn't just say all bets are off once you've got less than a month to live. I mean, have some opium; what, you're gonna get addicted? Disconnect the oxygen and have another cigarette.
It's true that they haven't rejected it yet. They usually take the advice of the committee; but they rejected the committee's advice on Plan B a few months ago, so who knows? Besides, with a 7-6-1 committee decision, it was hardly a strong recommendation against (especially since I've seen quotes from several of the "no" voters who were on the fence themselves.)
We aren't talking about bringing back 110 year old people from near death.
In this case, it's precisely what we're talking about. Abiomed was applying for a "humanitarian device exemption", to be used only in cases where the person had less than a month to live. They weren't expecting you to live long on it; just long enough to say a few extra months of goodbyes.
They were rejected anyway. The numbers were just too much against them. Two people out of 17 died almost immediately.
The rejection was narrow, 7-6, and it seems a little unfair to blame those deaths on the procedure since it was only done in people who were about to die anyway. These are not the best candidates for surviving massive surgery.
You can't do it in children, even though their young systems might handle it better, because they'd have to make tiny devices for them, with attendant research issues.
The best choice might be those otherwise healthy middle-agers. I'm not certain why Abiomed hasn't looked into those, except that they're presumably reluctant to try an experimental device on somebody who's a potential candidate for a life-saving heart transplant.
True enough. You have to talk about things like Mars and its weird movement in a geocentric universe, which is hard to observe without taking a lot of time. But the conjunction at least gives you an opportunity to talk about how the measurements are made. It gives you the opportunity to make the planets real, more so than just pointing to one particular point of light and saying, "Hey, that one's Jupiter".
Thing is, the conjunction isn't really all that interesting, scientifically. It's interesting mostly because it's rare, and it's a way to get the vigorously nonscientific to actually watch the planets move across the sky. Go out on two successive nights and you can watch them move relative to each other.
No biggie for your college-educated, Slashdot-reading brain, but a lot of people are bored stiff by science. Turn on Jeopardy some day and watch as the board clears of every category except Science. Not always, but too often.
There's an awful lot of people who don't really get how the planetary orbits work, and probably DO think that they would collide. I bet you know at least some of them. Take them out and show them the conjunction. Take them out on successive nights and describe how we can figure out the heliocentric universe from the observations.