> (although listing a "direct marketer" as a spammer is not exactly libelous)
Y'know, I was just about to say that calling "the gigantic slimy turd I just shat out this morning" as a spammer would certainly be libel - against the innocent bacteria that make up a goodly portion of the mass of aforementioned fecal mass.
And then I realized that even if I'm right - so are you. Calling a "direct marketer" a spammer, hell, that ain't libel at all, because truth is a defence.
WASHINGTON, APRIL 1, 2007 (GNUP): Santa Cruz, CA and Occupied Clearwater, FL are targeted with orbital-based virtual pair induction beams in a desperate attempt to prevent a planetwide disaster as armies of lawyers from the Cult of Scientology and the Santa Cruz Operation deliver so many subpoenas to each other that both cities are threatened with imminent gravitational collapse.
President Stallman, in an emergency press conference, announced that he regrets the loss of civilian life, but that he "told y'all you should have been calling it GNU/Linux all along, but did anybody listen? Noooooooooo!"
> Saving paper is a pretty bad reason to give college kids laptops. There are good reasons, but saving paper isn't one of them.
If I'm in a room where someone's talking and scribbling equations on a blackboard, I can do a much better job of recording what's important with pencil and paper than I could ever fantasize about punching into a laptop, and I'm a touch typist.
I've played with everything from Word or TeX, and I don't know any way of entering a differential equation or a matrix into a computer that's faster than just scribbling it down with a layer of graphite on a dead tree. (Besides, how the hell could I hear the professor with all the damn click-clicking of 100 keyboards?:-)
I believe in using the best tool for the job. Laptops are a good tool for many applications, but taking notes in class ain't one of them.
> SPEND LESS! My income is not going up proportionatly to rate of increase in taxation and
inflation. At what point will they consider that we just can't AFFORD to pay them any more?
That point lies somewhere between North Korea, (which hasn't reached that point yet), and the former USSR, (which did).
Bottom line - you really don't want to know the answer. Because if you knew the answer, so would Gov. Davis. And your tax rates would rise accordingly.
> However, it is hard to ignore where the Church's Chicken, cell phone and pager, auto title loan, paycheck loan, bail loan, and shiney wheel cover stores are... > >Why is it that the people with the least spending power often end up spending all their money on generally useless things instead of their children's education or maintaining good credit or maintaining existing investments (car, house, etc.)?
On a related note, why is it that people who spend their money on generally useless things instead of their children's education or maintaining good credit or maintaining existing investments, tend to end up with the least spending power?:)
> The state legislature aggravated the problem quite a bit recently by passing legislation requiring any business with more than 25 employees to provide six months paid maternity/paternity leave to both spouses in the event of a birth.
Has CA legalized gay marriage?
P.
This could be a killer racket for a lesbian couple with a pregnancy fetish. ("OK, honey, your turn to get knocked up, my six months are almost up! I can't believe the voters are dumb enough to elect politicians to pay us to do this!";-)
> Doesn't California have a state income tax? Why isn't it enough that the state makes money on
the income of the business that is able to make the sale? I've never understood this. How many
different ways does the government have to tax the exact same transaction before it becomes too much?
*applause*
Let's see - we have a two-year boom in capital gains tax collections (oh yeah, you non-Californians probably don't know that we pay an extra 9.3% state tax on top of the 20% federal rate for long term capital gains), so we jack up spending by 40%+ over a term.
Then, when boom turns to bust, we're shocked - shocked, I tell you! - that revenues have fallen. But there's an election coming up, so we keep spending.
And taxing. Mandatory health insurance? Sure, why not fuck over the few remaining businesses in the state, they've got money! Jack up the taxes on employers for extension of maternity leave, too! Money grew on trees during the dot-com boom, the private sector obviously has an infinite supply of the stuff, so what's another 1-2% of that infinite supply when there's prole votes to be bought?
In answer to your question, "n+1", where "n" is the number of ways a given transaction is taxed in the preceding election cycle.
In Nevada, there's no state income tax, and there are places where you can walk down the street with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
In California, you pay the highest taxes in the nation - higher than most of Canada - and soon, you'll need proof of age-21 to purchase dangerous foods like cigarettes, beer, and now Oreo cookies.
> The same protocol that says Country A can sell it's excess credits to country B who is in need of credits. > > Kyoto isn't about cleaning the air, it's about creating a trading market.
But not a free market.
Kyoto is about wealth transfer, not pollution transfer.
Let me clarify: Kyoto isn't about cleaning the air or creating a trading market. It's about creating an artificial imposition on economies that will ensure a continual drain of wealth from the 5-10 countries in group "B" to the 100 or so countries in group "A". (Or the 5-10 countries in group "B" cutting the standard of living for their own citizens.)
Smart countries in group "B" say "Fuck that" and walk away. Dumb countries in group "B" say "let's get all the As and Bs together, and vote!".
If western "democracy" is three foxes and a sheep voting on what's for dinner, you can think of Kyoto as 10000 fire ants and three foxes voting on what's for dinner.
> David Webber this time, (not the only, or the first I would bet... but,) from his popular Honor Harrington series, one planet used this "primitive" form of genetic engineering to harden the population against heavy metals.
> The only problem was that a gene that was manipulated by this gene-altered-cold virus also happened to cause an abnormal number of male-embryos to be miscarried. (8 out of 9 failed mail pregnancies or something like that) blah blah blah, read the books for more info.
So... gene-hacking results in a planet with 20 babes for every guy, and not only that, the chicks have a tolerance for heavy metal.
From where I stand, that sounds like a pretty nice planet.
Teergrubing is a good idea, but it dates back from the days when open relays, not open proxies, were sending the emails. One spammer (with dialup) would hit you from one relay (with broadband) from the spammer's own (dialup) connection, and the goal was to slow down the open relay so that the open relay wouldn't be able to spew as many emails. Eventually, the admin of the open relay would wonder why his outbound queue was so huge, or why Sendmail fell over and died because/var/spool got full, and secure his server. In the old environment (spammer has narrowband, must hunt down broadband by finding open relays to steal from), one teergrube could "fix" one open relay at best, and at worst, would at least prevent delivery of several hundred thousand spams.
Doesn't really work as well in a world with millions of open broadband proxies. The spammer no longer cares if any individual open proxy hits a teergrube, because there's plenty more bandwidth where that came from. (And because open proxy luzers tend to be clueless twits, they're less likely to notice even if their machine crashes.) In today's environment (plenty of bandwidth on both the spammer's end, and plenty of proxies to steal bandwidth from), teergrubing in its original form is somewhat less effective.
> People who want to continue to receive messages from mailing lists, online banking, etc, will have to add these sources to their whitelist.
Problem is, you don't know what that email is necessarily going to be.
I ordered something from foo.com and got order number 12345.
A few seconds later, I got a confirmation mail from confirm-12345@foo.com telling me what I bought and when to expect delivery. (Or worse, from order-12345@foo.com telling me there was a problem, and that I needed to fix something!)
If challenge-response becomes widespread, foo.com will say "Now you must whitelist the address confirm-12345@foo.com" when processing the order. (Or switch their order-processing back-end software to use something more sane, like "confirm@foo.com" and put the damn "Order 12345" in the Subject: header where it belongs!)
Problem is, until then, some vendors and some users using challenge-response are gonna be up the proverbial estuary without a utensil for propulsion.
If foo.com is disreputable, of course, challenge-response solves the donkey pr0n spam problem, but not the mainsleaze part of the spam problem. A mainsleazer at foo.com will simply start spamming his customer list with a From: of "confirm@foo.com" - Subject: "New Dealz from foo.com!" *sigh*)
Instead of challenge-response (putting the burden onto the end user), why not put the burden on the inbound mailserver?
A residential broadband customer mailing through his ISP's mail server is whitelisted (most stuff from that server is nonspam). An rr.com luzer with an open proxy is tarpitted into oblivion (everything else in 24.0.0.0/8 is spam). Yes, Joe Linux running (non-relaying) Sendmail on his Linux box is also tarpitted, but he's not trying to send a million mails a day. So he's not hurtin'.
I can see a scaling problem in that you'd have to run some sort of adaptive filtering process on the receiving end, which might be prohibitive CPU-wise. OTOH, if you only scanned 1% of all inbound mails for "spamminess", you'd still rapidly figure out that for a US ISP, 24.0.0.0/8 is an ocean of spam with a few islands of real email, and 200.0.0.0/7 is a shitstorm of spam. You don't need to analyze every inbound mail - you only need a statistically-valid sampling of the inbound mail queue to figure out which netblocks are teh sux0r.
Having it be adaptive would be cool - because a South American ISP (which probably has less of a problem with 200.0.0.0/7 than, say, Earthlink does, because they have legitimate users emailing each other from within those netblocks). So an ISP in.mx would end up with a different set of teergrubing weights. They might end up letting most of 200.0.0.0/7 in, only tarpitting the worst/24s, and teergrubing all 24.0.0.0/8 because so few of their users get anything but spam from rr.com netblocks.
Think of it as combining the best part of SPEWS (naughty netblocks are noticed semi-automatically), without as much collateral damage (if you're an ISP, a 10 second delay to anyone emailing one of your customers from a naughty netblock will never be noticed, but it'll *kill* some dirtball trying to spam to 10000 of your users through an open proxy.)
> Yeah, and things like changing oil and spark plugs fit the bill. However, unless you yourself are an expert, next time your car needs the head gasket replaced, you're taking it in. That's all there is to it.
True.
Somewhat-OT rant: I'd love to have an option to pay a mechanic or utility guy an extra $20/hour or whatever to put up with a clueless n00b who asks lots of silly questions. (or even $10/hour to have a nice cup of STFU and just watch:)
My computer's a part of me. I wouldn't do anything other than DIY/whitebox. For most people, their computer is just a tool to them, so they "take it in" to "get fixed" at CompUseless or whathever.
I just can't wrap my head around that. Honestly, my car's just a tool to me. But even so, taking my car in to be fixed isn't nearly as satisfying as learning how it's fixed.
Start with the basics and work your way up - Look at that filthy oil, and this clean oil. Look at that nice cluster of particles on the magnet in your transmission fluid pan. See that wear on the inside of your tires giving you a heads-up on an alignment problem? See how these markers tell you where the cam is in relation to the belt, and how, and this strobe light can be used to tell you whether you got the belt back on correctly, and now you know why why, if the belt breaks, you have to take the head off to check the cylinders for damage?
> I don't think Troed's haphazard collection of web sites can kep up w/ the facts, thank you:)
Nicely done, Tackhead.
Thanks - but credit really goes to the guy who was compiling the stats. I don't have the time to keep up with the facts either, but I like the way the author of the "Historical Atlas" presents all viewpoints, explains how he got his derivation, and most importantly for debating purposes, leaves the politics out of it:)
> The media really like to cause more panic than needed. "kills humans well?" Not really--If you catch it when you're healthy, most likely you'll survive. According to this link [stgeorges.bc.ca], [as much as] "90% of the individuals diagnosed with SARS begin to show signs of recovery after 6-7 days, while 10% or less of the cases succumb to the disease".
Yes, but unlike many diseases (e.g. influenza), SARS appears to be as deadly to young, healthy, economically productive workers as it is to the immunocompromised and aged.
Anything capable of killing 5% of the workforce in a western industrialized nation has the potential for a major economic impact.
For the record - I'm one of those Reaganite/Thatcherite free marketeers. I support patents for medications and treatments - a 13-year monopoly ought to be plenty enough time to make a decent return on your multibillion dollar research investment that will improve the lives of hundreds of thousands. (As opposed to, say, 75 years plus life of creator plus 25 year extension every 25 years, to gouge the public over a fucking cartoon mouse.)
I oppose patents on discoveries such as genome sequences found to exist in nature. The sequence for the SARS virus belongs to everyone (let's just hope I'm only right in the metaphorical sense), any drugs you build based on knowing it belong to you. You can patent your internal combustion engine, but patenting SARS is like patenting oxidation.
This kind of shit was "cute" when we were talking about Amazon. By slowing SARS research, patent lawyers are now a threat to the lives of tens of millions and the health of billions.
And since that doesn't matter to anyone who matters, let me rephrase that in language that lawyers and politicians will understand:
By slowing SARS research, patent lawyers could
reduce GDP by several points. Such an economic catastrophe will ensure that you will not be re-elected, no matter what party you're running for.
> Can you tell me why on earth Kissinger got a nobel *peace* prize? This may seem unrelated, but it is quite clear that in this case, there were a lot of lies, practically a system of thought. Come on the guy is light-eons away from peace.
Speaking of Nobel Peace Prize candidates light-eons away from peace, how about doddering-but-evil old fart Yasser "Push Jews Into The Sea" Arafat (poor guy, he only got to push one Jew into the sea) and doddering-but-senile old fart Jimmuh "Give nukes to North Korea foah peace" Cahtuh. (Castro, Chavez, Kim, he never met a Stalinist dictator he didn't like.)
Anyways, thanks for Kissinger. I needed at least one right-winger to round out my "What The Fuck Was Nobel Peace Prize Committee Smoking" set:)
> This Canadian comment in the report is just some temporary pettiness between long term mates. Mates sometimes fight, don't worry. You guys will kiss and make up.
Eew!
Could we please set it up so that we have Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and President Condoleeza Rice when that happens?
> I'm sure the CIA and military haven't been snooping before -- since it was against the law and all.
Intelligence agencies and military organizations tend not to care about your use of Kazaa, what you might be ingesting on the weekends, or what sorts of filthy things you might be doing with consenting adults before, during, or after said ingestion.
By contrast, law enforcement agencies can, do, and often must. They may choose not to for periods of time, but they're required to care, and if it's becomes apparent that there's a political payback for caring about the right sorts of things, they can change their minds about what they care about very quickly.
To take a ludicrous example, a college student could walk up the military recruiting booth at any campus job fair in the country with a CD-ROM full of MP3z, and say "Hi guys! I got this stuff off Kazaa for the troops! Have a copy! You can listen to anything you want, downloadin' from Alice's MP3 share!"
If just one person did that, he'd be looked at pretty strangely, but I guarantee you he'd be allowed to walk away. (And if there's two of 'em, they'll think they're both faggots and they won't take either of 'em. And if three people do it, just three people, why then they might think it's a conspiracy. But if fifty people, can you imagine, fifty people, walkin' up to the Army recruitin' booth and said "Hi, we're geeks who'd flunk our physicals, but we'd like our troops to know that they can listen to whatever they want, downloadin' from Alice's MP3 share", they just might think it's a movement... whups, wrong thread, it's nowhere near Thanksgivin'!)
To be perfectly clear, they'd probably get away with it at the FBI booth too.
But there's a world of difference between "definitely" and "probably". It's sad, but no matter how dumb and contrived I've made this example (and my example is about as contrived as it gets!), I still couldn't convince myself to type "the FBI does not care, and never will care, about the victimless crimes that 90% of us have probably committed at one time or another."
(No disrespect to tha [G-]Man when he's out hunting for terrorist azz, but I'd have CIA and NSA sniffin' my packets than you guys. If it's any consolation, I blame Hilary Rosen, Jack Valenti and Sonny Bono for being such complete and utter dipshits, not you guys. Sucks that you're forced to waste time and money protecting their obsolete business model against music consumers instead of protecting us from the world's badazzez, but hey, the law's the law.:)
> However I would suspect that B&B do not have the creativity to make it work.
No argument here. New writers could turn Trek into something decent. Trek's current team could turn anything into mush. If I see Berman's name on any new series, I'm not even gonna tune in to MST3K the pilot.
> As viewers will learn, this is a preemptive strike by an alien race known as the Xindi (that?s Zin-dee), who have obtained knowledge that Earth will destroy their home world 400 years in the future.
Oh, crap. Spoiler for a Star Trek movie that hasn't even been written yet. Way to go, Berman!
Slashdot Mirror
Y'know, I was just about to say that calling "the gigantic slimy turd I just shat out this morning" as a spammer would certainly be libel - against the innocent bacteria that make up a goodly portion of the mass of aforementioned fecal mass.
And then I realized that even if I'm right - so are you. Calling a "direct marketer" a spammer, hell, that ain't libel at all, because truth is a defence.
> Xinu
> Is
> Not
> Unix
WASHINGTON, APRIL 1, 2007 (GNUP): Santa Cruz, CA and Occupied Clearwater, FL are targeted with orbital-based virtual pair induction beams in a desperate attempt to prevent a planetwide disaster as armies of lawyers from the Cult of Scientology and the Santa Cruz Operation deliver so many subpoenas to each other that both cities are threatened with imminent gravitational collapse.
President Stallman, in an emergency press conference, announced that he regrets the loss of civilian life, but that he "told y'all you should have been calling it GNU/Linux all along, but did anybody listen? Noooooooooo!"
If I'm in a room where someone's talking and scribbling equations on a blackboard, I can do a much better job of recording what's important with pencil and paper than I could ever fantasize about punching into a laptop, and I'm a touch typist.
I've played with everything from Word or TeX, and I don't know any way of entering a differential equation or a matrix into a computer that's faster than just scribbling it down with a layer of graphite on a dead tree. (Besides, how the hell could I hear the professor with all the damn click-clicking of 100 keyboards? :-)
I believe in using the best tool for the job. Laptops are a good tool for many applications, but taking notes in class ain't one of them.
That point lies somewhere between North Korea, (which hasn't reached that point yet), and the former USSR, (which did).
Bottom line - you really don't want to know the answer. Because if you knew the answer, so would Gov. Davis. And your tax rates would rise accordingly.
>
>Why is it that the people with the least spending power often end up spending all their money on generally useless things instead of their children's education or maintaining good credit or maintaining existing investments (car, house, etc.)?
On a related note, why is it that people who spend their money on generally useless things instead of their children's education or maintaining good credit or maintaining existing investments, tend to end up with the least spending power? :)
Has CA legalized gay marriage? P. This could be a killer racket for a lesbian couple with a pregnancy fetish. ("OK, honey, your turn to get knocked up, my six months are almost up! I can't believe the voters are dumb enough to elect politicians to pay us to do this!" ;-)
>
> So
By putting more people out of work, causing them to draw CA unemployment benefits, and making them eligible for MediCal and other CA state benefits.
Remember, the deeper the fiscal hole, and the higher the spending, the more votes the Democrat gets when Davis' second term expires!
Oh, you seem to think it's supposed to be about you, don't you? :)
*applause*
Let's see - we have a two-year boom in capital gains tax collections (oh yeah, you non-Californians probably don't know that we pay an extra 9.3% state tax on top of the 20% federal rate for long term capital gains), so we jack up spending by 40%+ over a term.
Then, when boom turns to bust, we're shocked - shocked, I tell you! - that revenues have fallen. But there's an election coming up, so we keep spending.
And taxing. Mandatory health insurance? Sure, why not fuck over the few remaining businesses in the state, they've got money! Jack up the taxes on employers for extension of maternity leave, too! Money grew on trees during the dot-com boom, the private sector obviously has an infinite supply of the stuff, so what's another 1-2% of that infinite supply when there's prole votes to be bought?
In answer to your question, "n+1", where "n" is the number of ways a given transaction is taxed in the preceding election cycle.
In Nevada, there's no state income tax, and there are places where you can walk down the street with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
In California, you pay the highest taxes in the nation - higher than most of Canada - and soon, you'll need proof of age-21 to purchase dangerous foods like cigarettes, beer, and now Oreo cookies.
Atlas, if you're listening, it's time to shrug.
>
> Kyoto isn't about cleaning the air, it's about creating a trading market.
But not a free market.
Kyoto is about wealth transfer, not pollution transfer.
Let me clarify: Kyoto isn't about cleaning the air or creating a trading market. It's about creating an artificial imposition on economies that will ensure a continual drain of wealth from the 5-10 countries in group "B" to the 100 or so countries in group "A". (Or the 5-10 countries in group "B" cutting the standard of living for their own citizens.)
Smart countries in group "B" say "Fuck that" and walk away. Dumb countries in group "B" say "let's get all the As and Bs together, and vote!".
If western "democracy" is three foxes and a sheep voting on what's for dinner, you can think of Kyoto as 10000 fire ants and three foxes voting on what's for dinner.
> The only problem was that a gene that was manipulated by this gene-altered-cold virus also happened to cause an abnormal number of male-embryos to be miscarried. (8 out of 9 failed mail pregnancies or something like that) blah blah blah, read the books for more info.
So... gene-hacking results in a planet with 20 babes for every guy, and not only that, the chicks have a tolerance for heavy metal.
From where I stand, that sounds like a pretty nice planet.
ROFLMAO.
"teergrube" - German word for "tarpit".
Teergrubing FAQ
Teergrubing is a good idea, but it dates back from the days when open relays, not open proxies, were sending the emails. One spammer (with dialup) would hit you from one relay (with broadband) from the spammer's own (dialup) connection, and the goal was to slow down the open relay so that the open relay wouldn't be able to spew as many emails. Eventually, the admin of the open relay would wonder why his outbound queue was so huge, or why Sendmail fell over and died because /var/spool got full, and secure his server. In the old environment (spammer has narrowband, must hunt down broadband by finding open relays to steal from), one teergrube could "fix" one open relay at best, and at worst, would at least prevent delivery of several hundred thousand spams.
Doesn't really work as well in a world with millions of open broadband proxies. The spammer no longer cares if any individual open proxy hits a teergrube, because there's plenty more bandwidth where that came from. (And because open proxy luzers tend to be clueless twits, they're less likely to notice even if their machine crashes.) In today's environment (plenty of bandwidth on both the spammer's end, and plenty of proxies to steal bandwidth from), teergrubing in its original form is somewhat less effective.
Problem is, you don't know what that email is necessarily going to be.
I ordered something from foo.com and got order number 12345.
A few seconds later, I got a confirmation mail from confirm-12345@foo.com telling me what I bought and when to expect delivery. (Or worse, from order-12345@foo.com telling me there was a problem, and that I needed to fix something!)
If challenge-response becomes widespread, foo.com will say "Now you must whitelist the address confirm-12345@foo.com" when processing the order. (Or switch their order-processing back-end software to use something more sane, like "confirm@foo.com" and put the damn "Order 12345" in the Subject: header where it belongs!)
Problem is, until then, some vendors and some users using challenge-response are gonna be up the proverbial estuary without a utensil for propulsion.
If foo.com is disreputable, of course, challenge-response solves the donkey pr0n spam problem, but not the mainsleaze part of the spam problem. A mainsleazer at foo.com will simply start spamming his customer list with a From: of "confirm@foo.com" - Subject: "New Dealz from foo.com!" *sigh*)
A residential broadband customer mailing through his ISP's mail server is whitelisted (most stuff from that server is nonspam). An rr.com luzer with an open proxy is tarpitted into oblivion (everything else in 24.0.0.0/8 is spam). Yes, Joe Linux running (non-relaying) Sendmail on his Linux box is also tarpitted, but he's not trying to send a million mails a day. So he's not hurtin'.
I can see a scaling problem in that you'd have to run some sort of adaptive filtering process on the receiving end, which might be prohibitive CPU-wise. OTOH, if you only scanned 1% of all inbound mails for "spamminess", you'd still rapidly figure out that for a US ISP, 24.0.0.0/8 is an ocean of spam with a few islands of real email, and 200.0.0.0/7 is a shitstorm of spam. You don't need to analyze every inbound mail - you only need a statistically-valid sampling of the inbound mail queue to figure out which netblocks are teh sux0r.
Having it be adaptive would be cool - because a South American ISP (which probably has less of a problem with 200.0.0.0/7 than, say, Earthlink does, because they have legitimate users emailing each other from within those netblocks). So an ISP in .mx would end up with a different set of teergrubing weights. They might end up letting most of 200.0.0.0/7 in, only tarpitting the worst /24s, and teergrubing all 24.0.0.0/8 because so few of their users get anything but spam from rr.com netblocks.
Think of it as combining the best part of SPEWS (naughty netblocks are noticed semi-automatically), without as much collateral damage (if you're an ISP, a 10 second delay to anyone emailing one of your customers from a naughty netblock will never be noticed, but it'll *kill* some dirtball trying to spam to 10000 of your users through an open proxy.)
True.
Somewhat-OT rant: I'd love to have an option to pay a mechanic or utility guy an extra $20/hour or whatever to put up with a clueless n00b who asks lots of silly questions. (or even $10/hour to have a nice cup of STFU and just watch :)
My computer's a part of me. I wouldn't do anything other than DIY/whitebox. For most people, their computer is just a tool to them, so they "take it in" to "get fixed" at CompUseless or whathever.
I just can't wrap my head around that. Honestly, my car's just a tool to me. But even so, taking my car in to be fixed isn't nearly as satisfying as learning how it's fixed.
Start with the basics and work your way up - Look at that filthy oil, and this clean oil. Look at that nice cluster of particles on the magnet in your transmission fluid pan. See that wear on the inside of your tires giving you a heads-up on an alignment problem? See how these markers tell you where the cam is in relation to the belt, and how, and this strobe light can be used to tell you whether you got the belt back on correctly, and now you know why why, if the belt breaks, you have to take the head off to check the cylinders for damage?
Thanks - but credit really goes to the guy who was compiling the stats. I don't have the time to keep up with the facts either, but I like the way the author of the "Historical Atlas" presents all viewpoints, explains how he got his derivation, and most importantly for debating purposes, leaves the politics out of it :)
Yes, but unlike many diseases (e.g. influenza), SARS appears to be as deadly to young, healthy, economically productive workers as it is to the immunocompromised and aged.
Anything capable of killing 5% of the workforce in a western industrialized nation has the potential for a major economic impact.
For the record - I'm one of those Reaganite/Thatcherite free marketeers. I support patents for medications and treatments - a 13-year monopoly ought to be plenty enough time to make a decent return on your multibillion dollar research investment that will improve the lives of hundreds of thousands. (As opposed to, say, 75 years plus life of creator plus 25 year extension every 25 years, to gouge the public over a fucking cartoon mouse.)
I oppose patents on discoveries such as genome sequences found to exist in nature. The sequence for the SARS virus belongs to everyone (let's just hope I'm only right in the metaphorical sense), any drugs you build based on knowing it belong to you. You can patent your internal combustion engine, but patenting SARS is like patenting oxidation.
This kind of shit was "cute" when we were talking about Amazon. By slowing SARS research, patent lawyers are now a threat to the lives of tens of millions and the health of billions.
And since that doesn't matter to anyone who matters, let me rephrase that in language that lawyers and politicians will understand:
So count. Rack 'em up.
You're still going to be hard pressed to beat Mao's 40M and Stalin's 30M non-WW2 score (guesstimates vary from 15M to 50M).
If you wanna give Stalin points for WW2, give him another 10M. (Give Hitler 15M, Tojo 15M. The Allies barely crack 2M.)
(If you wanna pick and choose client states, there's even a handy Alphabetical Index of high scorers. Go nuts :)
Speaking of Nobel Peace Prize candidates light-eons away from peace, how about doddering-but-evil old fart Yasser "Push Jews Into The Sea" Arafat (poor guy, he only got to push one Jew into the sea) and doddering-but-senile old fart Jimmuh "Give nukes to North Korea foah peace" Cahtuh. (Castro, Chavez, Kim, he never met a Stalinist dictator he didn't like.)
Anyways, thanks for Kissinger. I needed at least one right-winger to round out my "What The Fuck Was Nobel Peace Prize Committee Smoking" set :)
Eew!
Could we please set it up so that we have Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and President Condoleeza Rice when that happens?
Intelligence agencies and military organizations tend not to care about your use of Kazaa, what you might be ingesting on the weekends, or what sorts of filthy things you might be doing with consenting adults before, during, or after said ingestion.
By contrast, law enforcement agencies can, do, and often must. They may choose not to for periods of time, but they're required to care, and if it's becomes apparent that there's a political payback for caring about the right sorts of things, they can change their minds about what they care about very quickly.
To take a ludicrous example, a college student could walk up the military recruiting booth at any campus job fair in the country with a CD-ROM full of MP3z, and say "Hi guys! I got this stuff off Kazaa for the troops! Have a copy! You can listen to anything you want, downloadin' from Alice's MP3 share!"
If just one person did that, he'd be looked at pretty strangely, but I guarantee you he'd be allowed to walk away. (And if there's two of 'em, they'll think they're both faggots and they won't take either of 'em. And if three people do it, just three people, why then they might think it's a conspiracy. But if fifty people, can you imagine, fifty people, walkin' up to the Army recruitin' booth and said "Hi, we're geeks who'd flunk our physicals, but we'd like our troops to know that they can listen to whatever they want, downloadin' from Alice's MP3 share", they just might think it's a movement... whups, wrong thread, it's nowhere near Thanksgivin'!)
To be perfectly clear, they'd probably get away with it at the FBI booth too.
But there's a world of difference between "definitely" and "probably". It's sad, but no matter how dumb and contrived I've made this example (and my example is about as contrived as it gets!), I still couldn't convince myself to type "the FBI does not care, and never will care, about the victimless crimes that 90% of us have probably committed at one time or another."
(No disrespect to tha [G-]Man when he's out hunting for terrorist azz, but I'd have CIA and NSA sniffin' my packets than you guys. If it's any consolation, I blame Hilary Rosen, Jack Valenti and Sonny Bono for being such complete and utter dipshits, not you guys. Sucks that you're forced to waste time and money protecting their obsolete business model against music consumers instead of protecting us from the world's badazzez, but hey, the law's the law. :)
And they travel in pairs!
No argument here. New writers could turn Trek into something decent. Trek's current team could turn anything into mush. If I see Berman's name on any new series, I'm not even gonna tune in to MST3K the pilot.
Oh, crap. Spoiler for a Star Trek movie that hasn't even been written yet. Way to go, Berman!
Just in case "It's dead, Jim" didn't quite cover it :)