I also am working on my own CNC project. Where did you get the controllers for your stepper motors? You could etch the boards yourself, and source the components individually, but only for many times the price of the version you can buy. I bought mine from SparkFun Electronics. The fine article says they have 10+ million in revenue. They certainly have a continually expanding number of steadily employed geeks a little way up the road from me. So business-model wise they seem to be doing fine. But if they go away, I can build new controllers, or fix the ones I have, because I have full schematics.
The great thing about OSH is the people who give a shit about it being open still need to buy a physical object. They're going to buy a stepper motor controller from you because it's that or a (more expensive) pile of electronic components from Digikey.
We don't fail to understand that. We just think it sucks.
Maybe it's hard for you to imagine that someone thinks the iWhatever sucks without there being any misunderstanding, but there you have it.
Ever heard of their Malicious software removal tool?
As a matter of fact, no. I run a Linux only household and as long as Microsoft has 90%+ market share, such things have only a minor academic interest for me.
A "minor academic interest" in such things would imply you are slightly interested in gaining knowledge about them, if not for practical reasons. By complaining that Microsoft is bad for not doing what they actually do ( and what the fine article says they do), it would appear you have more of a "religious (dis)interest" in the facts of the case at hand.
"That is impossible in the Closed source model, really."
How is it different in the closed source model? I trust some sources to give me closed source software that won't install malware or break other stuff. These range from companies to indie game developers recommended by particular blogs. Heck, I've got to install closed source based on trust, it's the only option. Of course, when I install open source, I could inspect the source to make sure it was OK, but I never have and never expect to. I trust software based on the track record of the place I'm getting it from, regardless.
I was summarizing just the part I thought was relevant. There is a maximum time they they may wait (presumably to give their customer the chance to file a counter-notice). During this time, Cryptome sent them a response that wasn't a proper counter notice. NS left the site up and replied to Cryptome explaining what they needed for a counter notice, and their options as far as taking down the one file or not. Cryptome then sent them a proper counter notice, which also declared that they would be choosing not to take down the one file. So you are correct, no counter notice is required to take it down; but the only reason to wait before taking it down is to see if their customer wants to take down the one file.
After that, they must put it back up in 10-14 days, unless MS obtains an injuction.
Many posters here seem to assume NS would want to be against Cryptome in this. But the law assumes they may be motivated to be on the side of their customer, which in fact they seem to be.
The DMCA has plenty of bad parts, but this part always struck me as pretty reasonable. If someone will declare something theirs under threat of criminal prosecution if they are obviously wrong, it gets taken down without tying up the courts. If the other guy will declare otherwise under the same threat, the first guy gets a small window to actually take them to court, or it goes back up. Cases with legitimate disagreements wind up in court as they should; neither side can abuse the system very badly without opening themselves to prosecution.
The DMCA is a big multi-faceted law, and some of the facets, in my opinion, suck.
But I don't think this particular part of the DMCA is actually that bad. Both the notice and counter notice require that the person filing make declarations under penalty of perjury.
If someone just wants to harass you by forcing your provider to take down stuff you clearly have the rights to put up, they have to commit a felony every time they do it.
The provider must take down the content within a certain time of receiving a notice. After they receive a counter-notice, the content stays down for 10-14 days, during which the original notifier must file a lawsuit. If they don't, the content goes back up.
Before taking anything down Network Solutions suggested that Cryptome file a counter notice, and pointed out to them how to do it. They pointed out that if Cryptome took down the one file for the 10-14 days, they would not have to take down the rest of the site. Cryptome sent a counter notice which specifically indicated they would not be taking down the file. Upon receipt, Network Solutions took down the site, as they clearly explained they would be required to by law.
I'm not much of a fan of Network Solutions generally, but in this situation, they are not the bad guy. They are impartially following the law. Their letter even goes so far as to helpfully lay out Cryptomes choices. Cryptome made their choice to stand on principle and force the system to shut the whole site down. I assume Cryptome figured the resulting publicity would do more for their fight than taking down the file and keeping their site up, and I also assume they are right.
""I think the best way to do it is to start actually regulating ALL 'medicine' the way we do real medicine. If you claim that your Magic Potion can cure the common flu, then you need to provide a properly designed double-blinded study which demonstrates that effect.. "
In the US, that is essentially the law as it stands.
But, can you put your Magic Potion on a store shelf with documentation that says clearly that you don't claim it does anything in particular, but notes, entirely truthfully, a bit of historical trivia: the Incans believed this cured the flu.
It's pretty hard for a free society to outlaw selling harmless substances or making oblique hints about why you might buy them in any way that is going to actually stop the bad actors and not sweep up more reasonable people.
"You're assuming, quite mistakenly, that those that haven't been tested don't work."
He's assuming, quite reasonably, that those that haven't been tested probably don't work.
The vast majority of those that we have tested don't work. This doesn't tell us anything for sure about the ones we haven't tested, but it does tell us that the probability that something works just based on it's being 'traditional' is quite low.
Basic double-blind efficacy testing is not actually that hard. (i.e. do the people taking it do better than the ones taking sugar pills by a factor greater than the statistical error) That's what you need to do if you want to claim your supplement is does something, rather than just hinting around at what it might do while being curiously disinterested in actually finding out.
What's hard to test, and leads to those FDA recalls and modified recommendations, is precise incidence of low-frequency severe side effects and precise scope of positive effect; e.g. does this drug raise your risk of heart attack by 1 chance in 10,000 or 2 in 10,000? Is that worth it for the chance and amount it will improve whatever it is treating? That's hard. You've got to be awfully sure it probably is worth it before you can give it to enough people to figure out exactly how worth it, because the amount you are wrong by is measured in people you kill.
But supplements have all been deemed safe enough to sell and consume, even with the default assumption that they do nothing. A pretty easy cheap double blind study could take them from "probably does nothing" to "almost certainly helps with X". So if a supplement is at all popular, and nobody is interested in really knowing, you've got to wonder why.
Also note, while most supplements have not been tested, quite a few have. The ones that work have become mainstream medications, and supplement makers will tell you all about them. The much larger number ones that don't, the supplement companies go right on selling. It's not just that they don't go to the expense of finding out what doesn't work, they don't pay any attention when someone else does.
"That's just not true. I don't care how much money you have, you're not likely to get good health care in Zaire."
It's not called Zaire anymore, but in any case, you don't think Kabila gets absolutely first-rate healthcare? Sure, for the extremely rare case of the some-what wealthy person in the DRC, the cheapest way to get better care than the hoi-polloi might be a plane ticket elsewhere. But the really filthy rich can just give that plane ticket to the doctor.
In any case, the DRC isn't a very useful comparison point. We want the industrialized West. The filthy rich who want knee replacements ahead of appendectomies come to the US because line-jumping for money is comparatively cheap here; but it's not impossible even in socialized countries.
In the UK, private health care outside the NHS is certainly available. I haven't heard of that one way or another in Canada, but I don't know wealthy Canadians.
True, but if it's for a job doing.NET programming (for example) a lot of people doing hiring will take the guy with 1 year of.NET experience and nothing else over the guy with 30 years experience in 5 different languages and no.NET. All else being equal, the latter guy will probably be more valuable.
"Although I would also add that it is one of the buggier and more unstable features, since it is highly coupled to a large number of other features and bug fixes."
Only if it's lower priority. Mind you, these days I'm doing product (as opposed to custom) development, so the new features to add to the next version are things somebody wants, but not things they have been promised. Since we do the biggest, highest priority things first, by the time we get near the end of a cycle, the things that are left are easier to push to the next version if they aren't going to make it. Meanwhile, marketing and such mean the priority of the ship date is going up.
So it's only really coupled to bug fixes; which we leave some time in the schedule for.
So, the last 3 releases I've been part of happened within two weeks of the date we picked 6-8 months earlier. Well, OK, every one pushed two weeks back sometime in the last month. For our purposes, that's good enough; I guess we could put an extra two weeks in every schedule, but we'd have to keep it secret. Getting proper testing seems to depend on an imminent threat to ship.
Exactly. Ship date is a feature. It will have lower priority than some features, and higher priority than some other features. I've never seen a team that could estimate, months in advance, when a particular feature set would ship. I've been part of great teams that regularly review progress and have the power to adjust priorities.
"Nowhere does GP mention Sourceforge explicitly. I may be wrong, but GP may be saying that the US law is stupid"
If you were correct, the word "this" in his third sentence would refer to "restricting the export of encryption technology", so he'd be saying only those who would think this would would think this would work. So my interpretation is correct, unless you suggest a slashdot poster might say something silly, or with imperfect grammar; which I refuse to contemplate.
If we assume the purpose was to enlarge government bureaucracy, than it's ineffective because it hasn't much. The compliance burden is all on the developers. Ditto if the purpose is to harass O.S. developers, because it really only causes much problem for commercial encryption software, which is generally closed source.
So the answer to "How is it ineffective?" is pretty much the same whether you assume it's overt purpose, or one of your supposed hidden ones.
The answer to "How is it stupid?" does not depend on its purpose, unless you think its purpose is to make US commercial encryption software makers marginally less competitive, which even your cynicism level does not seem to claim.
"Apparently he judges phones by different standards than I do."
Clearly, he judges portable communications devices by different standard than you do; which is fine.
His criteria sound a lot like mine. If I were to list what I want in such a device, item 9 or 10 might be "Well, if I'm going to carry it around all the time, I guess it better be a phone". But that's after web browser, camera, gps, game console, and bike computer.
The fact that the devices are running his code is, oddly, not really a reason to value his opinion of them.
But, a smart geek says that amongst the various gadgets running his code, he likes a particular one best, and briefly describes what he wants in a such a gadget that motivates this preference. I find that his preferences in such a gadget are substantially similar to my own (in contrast to much of the world).
You think "celebrity worship" is the only reason I would be interested? I'd be just as interested if he were any other smart geek with similar smart-phone feature desires to me. I wouldn't know he was a smart geek without the celebrity, but I don't get the 'worship' bit. He says what he wants in a smart phone, it's the same as me, so I listen. He says what he wants in version control software, it's different, so I don't.
They are complying with the law. Certainly, what they are doing is stupid and will be completely ineffective. But that's hard to avoid when complying with a law that is stupid and completely ineffective.
X tons into orbit on date Y is already available via commercial launch companies. The amount of competition in this market, and it's entanglement with government and politics are not in any sense beyond critique, but basically, if you want to put some mass in a particular orbit, you can get a price for that.
The question here is human space flight. We could say "We need X people put into Low Earth Orbit no later than date Y..." but the problem is that we don't. If we're paying for performance, we should pay for getting a particular job done, and let competitive companies figure out the most cost effective way to do it. But then none of them will use astronauts, because that's a stupid way to get stuff done in LEO.
In addition to subcontractors in key congressional districts, this (rather big) chunk of the NASA budget must be spent using humans in space to do something. It doesn't matter what. That doesn't really make sense, and sensible ways of paying for it don't work.
Humans using spacesuits to do so have spent a lot more money, to much less effect.
"The last statement is an opinion - not a fact. You need to learn the difference between the two"
I humbly apologize; It is my opinion that humans controlling probes have accomplished more exploration of Mars than humans using space suits. As someone who is "actually informed", please do acquaint me with the facts that contradict this opinion. I had "heard elsewhere" that humans using spacesuits have not in fact reached Mars.
"'So then you do another mission.' What part of 'game over' did you find so difficult to understand? Game over means they don't do that mission over."
Hence the word "another"; "Better" & "Different" were meant to be implied. Missions fail, we do more missions; still not a significant fraction of the manned budget.
Which, of course, ignores the various examples where NASA did literally build a spare and do the same mission over on failure (e.g. Mariner 3/4) or a similar follow up on success (e.g. Voyager 1/2). True, I can only name a half dozen or so other examples off the top of my head, but I don't want to subject such an actually informed person as yourself to more of my ignorant hand waving.
"... handwaving and parroting stuff...misinformed idiots like yourself...What part of 'game over' did you find so difficult to understand?... idiots like yourself who mistake their ill informed and ignorant spew for reasoned commentary."
Your desire for reasoned commentary is readily apparent. Clearly you hope to persuade me by laying out your well justified insights.
"Does anyone find it funny that the Republicans want to privatize _everything_, and the Democrats want to government-ize everything"
I find it funny that people still think that after decades of things running mostly the other way.
"Need more Libertarians, damnit."
The Republicans say they want to privatize more but when given the chance radically expand government. So your preference is people who say they want to privatize even more than thet, but who will never be given the chance?
"Stop thinking you're throwing your vote away if you dont vote for a Republicrat" Even though you are. The names of the two political parties in the US have been the same for 150 years. Their ideologies have not. If you want a different ideology to take power, your chances will be better of changing the ideology of a party.
Slashdot Mirror
I also am working on my own CNC project. Where did you get the controllers for your stepper motors? You could etch the boards yourself, and source the components individually, but only for many times the price of the version you can buy. I bought mine from SparkFun Electronics. The fine article says they have 10+ million in revenue. They certainly have a continually expanding number of steadily employed geeks a little way up the road from me. So business-model wise they seem to be doing fine. But if they go away, I can build new controllers, or fix the ones I have, because I have full schematics. The great thing about OSH is the people who give a shit about it being open still need to buy a physical object. They're going to buy a stepper motor controller from you because it's that or a (more expensive) pile of electronic components from Digikey.
We don't fail to understand that. We just think it sucks. Maybe it's hard for you to imagine that someone thinks the iWhatever sucks without there being any misunderstanding, but there you have it.
Ever heard of their Malicious software removal tool?
As a matter of fact, no. I run a Linux only household and as long as Microsoft has 90%+ market share, such things have only a minor academic interest for me.
A "minor academic interest" in such things would imply you are slightly interested in gaining knowledge about them, if not for practical reasons. By complaining that Microsoft is bad for not doing what they actually do ( and what the fine article says they do), it would appear you have more of a "religious (dis)interest" in the facts of the case at hand.
"That is impossible in the Closed source model, really."
How is it different in the closed source model? I trust some sources to give me closed source software that won't install malware or break other stuff. These range from companies to indie game developers recommended by particular blogs. Heck, I've got to install closed source based on trust, it's the only option. Of course, when I install open source, I could inspect the source to make sure it was OK, but I never have and never expect to. I trust software based on the track record of the place I'm getting it from, regardless.
I was summarizing just the part I thought was relevant. There is a maximum time they they may wait (presumably to give their customer the chance to file a counter-notice). During this time, Cryptome sent them a response that wasn't a proper counter notice. NS left the site up and replied to Cryptome explaining what they needed for a counter notice, and their options as far as taking down the one file or not. Cryptome then sent them a proper counter notice, which also declared that they would be choosing not to take down the one file. So you are correct, no counter notice is required to take it down; but the only reason to wait before taking it down is to see if their customer wants to take down the one file.
After that, they must put it back up in 10-14 days, unless MS obtains an injuction.
Many posters here seem to assume NS would want to be against Cryptome in this. But the law assumes they may be motivated to be on the side of their customer, which in fact they seem to be.
The DMCA has plenty of bad parts, but this part always struck me as pretty reasonable. If someone will declare something theirs under threat of criminal prosecution if they are obviously wrong, it gets taken down without tying up the courts. If the other guy will declare otherwise under the same threat, the first guy gets a small window to actually take them to court, or it goes back up. Cases with legitimate disagreements wind up in court as they should; neither side can abuse the system very badly without opening themselves to prosecution.
The DMCA is a big multi-faceted law, and some of the facets, in my opinion, suck.
But I don't think this particular part of the DMCA is actually that bad. Both the notice and counter notice require that the person filing make declarations under penalty of perjury.
If someone just wants to harass you by forcing your provider to take down stuff you clearly have the rights to put up, they have to commit a felony every time they do it.
The provider must take down the content within a certain time of receiving a notice. After they receive a counter-notice, the content stays down for 10-14 days, during which the original notifier must file a lawsuit. If they don't, the content goes back up.
Before taking anything down Network Solutions suggested that Cryptome file a counter notice, and pointed out to them how to do it. They pointed out that if Cryptome took down the one file for the 10-14 days, they would not have to take down the rest of the site. Cryptome sent a counter notice which specifically indicated they would not be taking down the file. Upon receipt, Network Solutions took down the site, as they clearly explained they would be required to by law.
I'm not much of a fan of Network Solutions generally, but in this situation, they are not the bad guy. They are impartially following the law. Their letter even goes so far as to helpfully lay out Cryptomes choices. Cryptome made their choice to stand on principle and force the system to shut the whole site down. I assume Cryptome figured the resulting publicity would do more for their fight than taking down the file and keeping their site up, and I also assume they are right.
""I think the best way to do it is to start actually regulating ALL 'medicine' the way we do real medicine. If you claim that your Magic Potion can cure the common flu, then you need to provide a properly designed double-blinded study which demonstrates that effect.. "
In the US, that is essentially the law as it stands.
But, can you put your Magic Potion on a store shelf with documentation that says clearly that you don't claim it does anything in particular, but notes, entirely truthfully, a bit of historical trivia: the Incans believed this cured the flu.
It's pretty hard for a free society to outlaw selling harmless substances or making oblique hints about why you might buy them in any way that is going to actually stop the bad actors and not sweep up more reasonable people.
"You're assuming, quite mistakenly, that those that haven't been tested don't work."
He's assuming, quite reasonably, that those that haven't been tested probably don't work.
The vast majority of those that we have tested don't work. This doesn't tell us anything for sure about the ones we haven't tested, but it does tell us that the probability that something works just based on it's being 'traditional' is quite low.
Basic double-blind efficacy testing is not actually that hard. (i.e. do the people taking it do better than the ones taking sugar pills by a factor greater than the statistical error) That's what you need to do if you want to claim your supplement is does something, rather than just hinting around at what it might do while being curiously disinterested in actually finding out.
What's hard to test, and leads to those FDA recalls and modified recommendations, is precise incidence of low-frequency severe side effects and precise scope of positive effect; e.g. does this drug raise your risk of heart attack by 1 chance in 10,000 or 2 in 10,000? Is that worth it for the chance and amount it will improve whatever it is treating? That's hard. You've got to be awfully sure it probably is worth it before you can give it to enough people to figure out exactly how worth it, because the amount you are wrong by is measured in people you kill.
But supplements have all been deemed safe enough to sell and consume, even with the default assumption that they do nothing. A pretty easy cheap double blind study could take them from "probably does nothing" to "almost certainly helps with X". So if a supplement is at all popular, and nobody is interested in really knowing, you've got to wonder why.
Also note, while most supplements have not been tested, quite a few have. The ones that work have become mainstream medications, and supplement makers will tell you all about them. The much larger number ones that don't, the supplement companies go right on selling. It's not just that they don't go to the expense of finding out what doesn't work, they don't pay any attention when someone else does.
"That's just not true. I don't care how much money you have, you're not likely to get good health care in Zaire."
It's not called Zaire anymore, but in any case, you don't think Kabila gets absolutely first-rate healthcare? Sure, for the extremely rare case of the some-what wealthy person in the DRC, the cheapest way to get better care than the hoi-polloi might be a plane ticket elsewhere. But the really filthy rich can just give that plane ticket to the doctor.
In any case, the DRC isn't a very useful comparison point. We want the industrialized West. The filthy rich who want knee replacements ahead of appendectomies come to the US because line-jumping for money is comparatively cheap here; but it's not impossible even in socialized countries.
In the UK, private health care outside the NHS is certainly available. I haven't heard of that one way or another in Canada, but I don't know wealthy Canadians.
True, but if it's for a job doing
"Although I would also add that it is one of the buggier and more unstable features, since it is highly coupled to a large number of other features and bug fixes."
Only if it's lower priority. Mind you, these days I'm doing product (as opposed to custom) development, so the new features to add to the next version are things somebody wants, but not things they have been promised. Since we do the biggest, highest priority things first, by the time we get near the end of a cycle, the things that are left are easier to push to the next version if they aren't going to make it. Meanwhile, marketing and such mean the priority of the ship date is going up.
So it's only really coupled to bug fixes; which we leave some time in the schedule for.
So, the last 3 releases I've been part of happened within two weeks of the date we picked 6-8 months earlier. Well, OK, every one pushed two weeks back sometime in the last month. For our purposes, that's good enough; I guess we could put an extra two weeks in every schedule, but we'd have to keep it secret. Getting proper testing seems to depend on an imminent threat to ship.
Exactly. Ship date is a feature. It will have lower priority than some features, and higher priority than some other features.
I've never seen a team that could estimate, months in advance, when a particular feature set would ship.
I've been part of great teams that regularly review progress and have the power to adjust priorities.
"Nowhere does GP mention Sourceforge explicitly. I may be wrong, but GP may be saying that the US law is stupid"
If you were correct, the word "this" in his third sentence would refer to "restricting the export of encryption technology", so he'd be saying only those who would think this would would think this would work. So my interpretation is correct, unless you suggest a slashdot poster might say something silly, or with imperfect grammar; which I refuse to contemplate.
If we assume the purpose was to enlarge government bureaucracy, than it's ineffective because it hasn't much. The compliance burden is all on the developers. Ditto if the purpose is to harass O.S. developers, because it really only causes much problem for commercial encryption software, which is generally closed source.
So the answer to "How is it ineffective?" is pretty much the same whether you assume it's overt purpose, or one of your supposed hidden ones.
The answer to "How is it stupid?" does not depend on its purpose, unless you think its purpose is to make US commercial encryption software makers marginally less competitive, which even your cynicism level does not seem to claim.
So,
- there are architects and builders.
- you need both
- you must not confuse them
Who would you say is the 'architect' of the linux kernel, that drew up the plans for what Linus built?
What next, silly conflation of civil engineering with software in support of outraged but pointless semantic arguments?
"all I want from a phone is a few buttons that let me call people and a very, very long battery life."
You've confused your desires for his. A completely predictable mistake, really.
"All I care about is a phone that has good audio quality so I can understand them and they me, and is small."
You probably shouldn't follow Linus' recommendation then.
"It's a PHONE people!!!"
Precisely. Which isn't what Linus wants.
"Apparently he judges phones by different standards than I do."
Clearly, he judges portable communications devices by different standard than you do; which is fine.
His criteria sound a lot like mine. If I were to list what I want in such a device, item 9 or 10 might be "Well, if I'm going to carry it around all the time, I guess it better be a phone". But that's after web browser, camera, gps, game console, and bike computer.
The fact that the devices are running his code is, oddly, not really a reason to value his opinion of them.
But, a smart geek says that amongst the various gadgets running his code, he likes a particular one best, and briefly describes what he wants in a such a gadget that motivates this preference. I find that his preferences in such a gadget are substantially similar to my own (in contrast to much of the world).
You think "celebrity worship" is the only reason I would be interested? I'd be just as interested if he were any other smart geek with similar smart-phone feature desires to me. I wouldn't know he was a smart geek without the celebrity, but I don't get the 'worship' bit. He says what he wants in a smart phone, it's the same as me, so I listen. He says what he wants in version control software, it's different, so I don't.
I love how smug he is in saying "the fact that it's a phone is secondary"
What a douche.
Telephone call quality and reliability first for me, Galaga and "that pinch-to-zoom thing" second...
So wanting different things than you makes someone a douche? What a douche.
If I'm going to bother carrying the thing around, it may as well be a phone, but that's well beyond second in my feature priority list. YMMV.
They are complying with the law. Certainly, what they are doing is stupid and will be completely ineffective. But that's hard to avoid when complying with a law that is stupid and completely ineffective.
X tons into orbit on date Y is already available via commercial launch companies. The amount of competition in this market, and it's entanglement with government and politics are not in any sense beyond critique, but basically, if you want to put some mass in a particular orbit, you can get a price for that.
The question here is human space flight. We could say "We need X people put into Low Earth Orbit no later than date Y..." but the problem is that we don't. If we're paying for performance, we should pay for getting a particular job done, and let competitive companies figure out the most cost effective way to do it. But then none of them will use astronauts, because that's a stupid way to get stuff done in LEO.
In addition to subcontractors in key congressional districts, this (rather big) chunk of the NASA budget must be spent using humans in space to do something. It doesn't matter what. That doesn't really make sense, and sensible ways of paying for it don't work.
Humans using spacesuits to do so have spent a lot more money, to much less effect.
... idiots like yourself who mistake their ill informed and ignorant spew for reasoned commentary."
"The last statement is an opinion - not a fact. You need to learn the difference between the two"
I humbly apologize; It is my opinion that humans controlling probes have accomplished more exploration of Mars than humans using space suits. As someone who is "actually informed", please do acquaint me with the facts that contradict this opinion. I had "heard elsewhere" that humans using spacesuits have not in fact reached Mars.
"'So then you do another mission.'
What part of 'game over' did you find so difficult to understand? Game over means they don't do that mission over."
Hence the word "another"; "Better" & "Different" were meant to be implied. Missions fail, we do more missions; still not a significant fraction of the manned budget.
Which, of course, ignores the various examples where NASA did literally build a spare and do the same mission over on failure (e.g. Mariner 3/4) or a similar follow up on success (e.g. Voyager 1/2). True, I can only name a half dozen or so other examples off the top of my head, but I don't want to subject such an actually informed person as yourself to more of my ignorant hand waving.
"... handwaving and parroting stuff...misinformed idiots like yourself...What part of 'game over' did you find so difficult to understand?
Your desire for reasoned commentary is readily apparent. Clearly you hope to persuade me by laying out your well justified insights.
"Does anyone find it funny that the Republicans want to privatize _everything_, and the Democrats want to government-ize everything"
I find it funny that people still think that after decades of things running mostly the other way.
"Need more Libertarians, damnit."
The Republicans say they want to privatize more but when given the chance radically expand government. So your preference is people who say they want to privatize even more than thet, but who will never be given the chance?
"Stop thinking you're throwing your vote away if you dont vote for a Republicrat"
Even though you are. The names of the two political parties in the US have been the same for 150 years. Their ideologies have not. If you want a different ideology to take power, your chances will be better of changing the ideology of a party.