>"Venter's counterpart at the Human Genome Project, Francis Collins, told the same audience that "we have
caught a glimpse of an instruction book previously known only to God."
>
> A man involved in one of the more purely secular and scientific research projects of human history, and he is a
creationist?
Belief in God does not imply creationism.
Flip back to the theological discussion in the "Cosmos" thread, and you'll see a lot of stuff about what types of God(s) would be compatible with the practice of science.
Furthermore, just because science does not require the existence of God doesn't mean that it requires the nonexitence of God.
So no, I see no contradiction here.
Or as seen in a.sig somewhere on the net - "Science is the game we play with God to find out what His rules are."
>Islam, as I understand it, uses science to discover more of the wonders...
(BTW, thanks for the numbering system, for preserving the works of the Greeks, and for everything else we "borrowed" from Islam during the Dark Ages;-)
From the Christian side, "The heavens declare thy glory" is merely a religious expression of the same kind of awe Sagan expresses.
I agree wholeheartedly that fundie Christians have completely lost sight of this, and that this is a great pity indeed. (Weak anthropic principle applied to fundies: "but if they had clue, they wouldn't be fundies, would they?";-)
>If the Earth was a planet where the complex interactions weren't balanced 'just right', we wouldn't be
here!
I think Spatch's point about the weak anthropic principle is "so what?"
If the Earth hadn't gotten whacked with an asteroid 65 million years ago, there might be intelligent spacefaring reptiles colonizing the galaxy by now.
You prove Spatch's point when you say:
>if the universe weren't balanced as it is, [...] there wouldn't be ANYONE here to argue about it!
This still doesn't imply design. Consider the probability that all the particles in your cup of coffee will simultaneously jump three feet to the left in accordance with the uncertainty principle. Astoundingly improbable; it'll happen every one-in-a-$FLOATING_POINT_EXCEPTION trillion years.
Now consider the probability that a universe-sized mass with physical constants suitable for the evolution of sentient life will pop out of nothing in the same sort of quantum vacuum fluctuation. Even more stunningly improbable.
But if you've got an infinite amount of time to wait for it to happen, it's not just possible -- it's inevitable.
(The thing I most enjoyed about the HHGTTG is that the bits about improbability physics were remarkably close to the mark:-)
>Sounds like Deism. Deism is the believe that God created the universe in one shining moment, perfectly
constructed to unfold in the manner he wanted, and has not done a damn thing since.
Yeah, I knew I didn't explain "the kinda God I could consider believing in" very well, because I didn't want to spoil the ending of the Rama series.
Spoiler Alert - The Big Secret of Arthur C. Clarke's Rama series revealed
Basically, the thesis in the Rama books is "What if God gave Himself more than one shot at it?" -- that is, an (imperfect) God keeps mucking about in his workshop, creating universes left, right, and center, until he gets something that he finds interesting.
Like I said -- totally useless from a scientific standpoignt; it's all metaphysics. But a neat idea to juggle around with in your head, and the type of God required is a helluvalot more interesting (well, to me) than the ones traditionally worshipped by humans.
(If God made me in his own image, as a compulsive tinkerer, I'm just returning the favor;-)
> I think it indicates awareness at ILM that the
fans are expecting Empire Strikes Back quality to this second prequel -- and that awareness will surely motivate.
Shit, I'd settle for Star Wars quality.
But if you're not gonna up the quality, just spice in a scene with AT-AT's foot turning Jar-Jar Binks into a fine pink film, and I'll pay $8 just to see that.
C'mon, George. Just splice it in. You know the animators at ILM have probably already rendered the scene in their spare time.
I, too, would recommend Demon-Haunted World (along with Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors). Sagan's awe for the universe wasn't limited to astronomy; humans are pretty interesting creatures too.
> It goes to show that science can evoke the kind of deep
meaningful experiences many religons do.
To the extent that I could believe in a God, it'd have to be the type of God who'd design a set of physical constants and behaviors (including all that quantum and stringy stuff we're still trying to understand) and sit Himself back to see what unfolded over a few billion years. The type of God who bangs something out of a cookie cutter in six days and sleeps in on the seventh just doesn't interest me. He's a cheapskate.
For another look at the kind of theism I'm imagining, I recommend the last book in Arthur C. Clarke's Rama series. (But read all the books in the series, in order, for the full effect.)
I'd have loved to have sat down with Sagan and discussed the inter-relationship between awe, religion, and science from an anthropological perspective. Humans seem to have a need for awe, and a need to explore. What a pity most of us use it to follow charlatans instead of digging the real stuff the universe has to offer.
You fundies reading this - don't take my crack about "six days" as being a cheap shot at Judeo-Christianity. Imagine some schmuck in 4,000 BC watching the episode of Cosmos where Sagan walks us through the "modern" creation story by mapping the history of the universe from Big Bang to evolution of Homo Sapiens onto a one-year calendar. Your 4000-BC yokel, who's just mastered writing, might very well end up with something akin to Genesis.
In the interests of fairness, of course, it's much more likely that the author of Genesis just guessed lucky.
But having known some fundies who referred to him as "Sagan the Pagan" back in the 80s, I have very fond memories of doing just that -- sitting one such fundie down in front of that episode and, one hour later, asking "Now, what was that you were saying about basic science being wholly incompatible with your religion?"
> The ironic thing is, when you say "too much trembling awe at the majesty of the heavens," >I think
you forget that Sagan lived and died an aethiest. Don't these two things contradict?
As Sagan himself put it:
How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science
and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The Universe is
much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more
elegant'? Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god,
and I want him to stay that way.' A religion, old or new, that
stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern
science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and
awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.
- Carl Sagan
I see no contradiction whatsoever. You do not need to be a theist to understand awe.
> Not to mention that a large part of the cold war mission of the intelligence community is to prevent foreign industrial espionage, in which case a (more) secure operating system
is directly in line with their goals.
Nitpick: I think you mean post-cold war mission, as well.
> The NSA has a mandate to protect the information security of our government. I believe they would interpret that to include protection of the information security of the
industrial base that supports our country.
I'd go so far as to say that this release shows they have interpreted protection of our industrial base as a national security interest.
Remember the spate of DDOS's we had last year, and the subsequent (almost continual) stream of press releases about how "we must protect ourselves from cyberwarfare"? Looks like the intelligence community really woke up and smelled the coffee.
But this is far beyond press releases - this is amazing stuff.
Our taxpayer dollars - not only at work, but the citizens actually personally getting the benefits.
Mad, mad, mad props to those at NSA who were part of this decision. Keep up the good work.
>You complain that people have received "unsolicited religious, racial or sexual messages, a somewhat
more serious matter."
> > And this is more serious than commercial email... why?
Well-said. Spam is not about content. Never has been. Never will be.
I don't care if you're spamming h0t t33n g1rlz or discounted airline tickets to my favorite destination (Hi, Travelocity! I still remember when you spammed me through mainsleaze spamhaus m0.net! You haven't gotten any business from me ever since, have you?). You spamma my account, I pounda you ballz flat widda wooden mallet.
>Do spammers look through the whois database or something?
Yes. Documented in news.admin.net-abuse.email and searchable through Dejanews.
If that's not scary enough, networksolutions.com - yes, the fsckers that used to own the whois database - has been documented numerous times as spamming based on the contents of that database.
As for mail rules - yeah, I autobounce anything with any uu.net IP address in any Received: line to abuse@uu.net. Doesn't really slow down the amount of spam I get from spewnet, but I haven't had a single false positive in four years.
>I thought the rule was, "Never answer spam. Answering only serves to validate the spammers
database."
Entirely correct.
And the article also appears to suggest mailbombing as a form of retaliation, which is bad juju for two reasons:
First - it's abuse. We're the good guys, goddamnit!
Second - friendly fire. Are you really mailbombing the spammer, or are you mailbombing some poor sucker with his mail address forged in the From: field?
Just read the Received: lines, find the origin of the spam, and launch LARTs to the upstream providers.
>So far,
Spaminator has intercepted over 200 emails since early November.
The funny part is that since Earthlink spams their own customers (I've got several "Please get DSL now!" and a couple of "Get a digital camera free if you buy $PRODUCT from us" mails from them), Spaminator - at least at one point - filtered that out too:-)
That said, ISPs spamming their own customers is more of a customer support issue, rather than a spam issue - Earthlink owns the mail server on which my mail resides, and if they want to load it up with their own spam and alienate me as a customer, they have a right to do so.
Now, uu.net, on the other hand... or rather, their non-port-25-blocked reseller. Fuck uu.net with a wire brush. When Worldcom defaults on its bonds, I'm gonna be first in line to buy a uu.net RADIUS server at ten cents on the dollar, just for the pleasure of smashing it to bits with a wooden mallet.
If you look at the stats, you'll see that uu.net is the single largest source of dialup spammers on the planet, by a factor of ten.
That's right - 90% of the dialup spam comes from one ISP.
I don't give a damn how many rogue resellers they have - uu.net has refused to disclose the identities of these resellers since 1997.
IMNSHO, uu.net is culpable. They are nothing more than a spam support service, and deserve to have their netblocks filtered, BGPd, and otherwise obliterated. Turn spew-spew.net into the world's biggest LAN, and the world will be a better place.
But back to Spaminator -- the reason I don't use it is because I know how to read headers. And for every one of us who knows how to read headers and files abuse reports for every spam, several dozen dialup moles can be whacked per month.
Filters are an OK solution for deleting spam. But I much prefer to delete the spammer.
I was told that we're not sure
whether or not some minor fusion occurs in the Earth's core? Is this something that's been
disproven, or was I just making it up?
As for fusion, nope - nowhere near enough pressure or temperature, plus, no hydrogen there. I don't even think there's enough pressure/temperature to fuse anything (i.e. at the level below that required for a sustained chain reaction, otherwise they'd be stars) in the gas giants. AFAIK, the reason Jupiter puts out more heat than it receives from the sun is continued release of gravitational energy as it slowly falls in on itself.
You (or your science teacher) may be remembering (or was originally thinking) about fission of heavy elements, which would presumably descend to the core. Radioactive heat from decay of heavy elements in the cores of rocky planets is actually pretty significant.
>It certainly beats waiting around 248 years before the planet becomes warm enough to thaw its
atmosphere out again.
I'm glad people have brought this up - as much as I really wanna see what's under Europa's shell, Europa will still be there 5-10 years from now. Pluto's atmosphere won't.
Does anyone know anything about the feasibility of using an ion-engine spacecraft (long-term low-acceleration) to get there quickly, and more importantly, could such a spacecraft decelerate quickly enough (possibly with assistance from conventional thrusters) to be captured by the Pluto/Charon system?
A flyby would be better than nothing, but an orbiter would be awesome, as we could monitor the freezeout as it happens. I doubt the physics (not much mass to capture it, lots of speed to bleed off on approach if we're gonna get there anytime useful) permits an orbiter, but can anyone do some handwaving to convince me otherwise?
> We keep sending missions out looking for water and find nothing...
Obviously a poster who hasn't looked at data from Europa or Ganymede lately.
If solid water's OK, add in the north Martian polar cap. (And possibly a layer of permafrost near some more rugged terrain in the south)
If you're looking for life, that's different. (My bet is "no, we won't in our solar system", but I'd want to see long-term undersea probes of Europa and serious excavation of Mars before I'd be convinced I was right.)
But if you're looking for places that might support life - plenty of those. (Human life, probably only on Mars. Life of any kind, I'll add Europa to that mix.)
> Next they'll start using stegonography to hide their evil bills in otherwise innocent legalese. Oh wait, that would be
illegal, wouldn't it.
I dunno about (1, Funny), I'd have given him (1, Insightful).
This is steganography. Who could oppose the Public Safety Medal of Honor bill? ("No pr0n here, officer, I just have 6 gigabytes of uncompressed.BMPs of clouds! I like clouds! So big fluffy and random!")
And unlike what they propose to do with our stego, their stego is legal.
RIAA did it with the "work for hire" provisions, now it's the FBI's turn to do it.
In response to someone flaming Kopel's article because it also appeared on the conservative-oriented National Review web site, limejuice writes:
> Yeah, why would anyone expect you to read other points of view. That's preposterous! God forbid you be open
minded! Have you ever actually read the National Review, or are you just not reading it because liberalism tells you
that it's bad?
Amen, limejuice.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say that the article's appearance in NR makes this bill an even bigger red flag.
Traditionally (yeah, I'm stereotyping, sue me:-) liberals are expected to raise a stink over stuff like this, and conservatives aren't.
When something comes out that makes even conserviatives quake in their boots, it's a sign that more evil than normal is oozing down from Capitol Hill.
IMHO - H.R. 46 is the "other shoe" we've been waiting to see drop in the Carnivore saga.
For everyone who's ever said "You're paranoid, FBI won't do $EVIL_THING, because that'd be illegal" -- well, H.R. 46 basically makes it legal.
The riders attached to H.R. 46 are evil, pure evil. And they're the kind of evil that doesn't care if you're liberal or conservative.
To the original flamer - as limejuice suggested, don't let the fact that the article appeared on a conservative web site blind you to the reality of what H.R. 46 contained.
If I can figure out where to add a resistor divider to drop VCore on my Asus TX97 motherboard down to 2.2V, I'm thinking of using an AMD K6-III-333 in it. Looks like an AMD overstock, available for $30 at Fry's.
Can you do decent software DVD decoding at 266? (That's the only missing piece in this box; it's always had TV-out.)
(Ah, if only my I-Opener had TV-out... my problems would be solved!)
>There were lots of reasons, all of which combined to take them down.
...but none of which minimize the value of what you and the rest of the Implementors did. Thanks.
(And if my Apple//e still boots, I'm going through the Enchanter/Sorceror/Spellbreaker trilogy over the holidays. Still got the original 5.25" floppies. Woo-hoo!)
> Suspended gets my vote for Infocom's high moment
Hell, yeah. That game scared the living hell out of me. (Those mysterious people walking down the hall... getting ever closer... while I'm still frantically trying to fix things before they get to me, open the door, and turn on (er, out!) the lights.)
(Even after I solved it, and had fun destroying the world while I made the mysterious people chase one of my robots in endless circles, it still scared the hell out of me:-)
Slashdot Mirror
>
> A man involved in one of the more purely secular and scientific research projects of human history, and he is a creationist?
Belief in God does not imply creationism.
Flip back to the theological discussion in the "Cosmos" thread, and you'll see a lot of stuff about what types of God(s) would be compatible with the practice of science.
Furthermore, just because science does not require the existence of God doesn't mean that it requires the nonexitence of God.
So no, I see no contradiction here.
Or as seen in a .sig somewhere on the net - "Science is the game we play with God to find out what His rules are."
The red one or the blue one? ;-)
But he already looks like Bantha shit.
(BTW, thanks for the numbering system, for preserving the works of the Greeks, and for everything else we "borrowed" from Islam during the Dark Ages ;-)
From the Christian side, "The heavens declare thy glory" is merely a religious expression of the same kind of awe Sagan expresses.
I agree wholeheartedly that fundie Christians have completely lost sight of this, and that this is a great pity indeed. (Weak anthropic principle applied to fundies: "but if they had clue, they wouldn't be fundies, would they?" ;-)
I think Spatch's point about the weak anthropic principle is "so what?"
If the Earth hadn't gotten whacked with an asteroid 65 million years ago, there might be intelligent spacefaring reptiles colonizing the galaxy by now.
You prove Spatch's point when you say:
>if the universe weren't balanced as it is, [...] there wouldn't be ANYONE here to argue about it!
This still doesn't imply design. Consider the probability that all the particles in your cup of coffee will simultaneously jump three feet to the left in accordance with the uncertainty principle. Astoundingly improbable; it'll happen every one-in-a-$FLOATING_POINT_EXCEPTION trillion years.
Now consider the probability that a universe-sized mass with physical constants suitable for the evolution of sentient life will pop out of nothing in the same sort of quantum vacuum fluctuation. Even more stunningly improbable.
But if you've got an infinite amount of time to wait for it to happen, it's not just possible -- it's inevitable.
(The thing I most enjoyed about the HHGTTG is that the bits about improbability physics were remarkably close to the mark :-)
Yeah, I knew I didn't explain "the kinda God I could consider believing in" very well, because I didn't want to spoil the ending of the Rama series.
Spoiler Alert - The Big Secret of Arthur C. Clarke's Rama series revealed
Basically, the thesis in the Rama books is "What if God gave Himself more than one shot at it?" -- that is, an (imperfect) God keeps mucking about in his workshop, creating universes left, right, and center, until he gets something that he finds interesting.
Like I said -- totally useless from a scientific standpoignt; it's all metaphysics. But a neat idea to juggle around with in your head, and the type of God required is a helluvalot more interesting (well, to me) than the ones traditionally worshipped by humans.
(If God made me in his own image, as a compulsive tinkerer, I'm just returning the favor ;-)
Shit, I'd settle for Star Wars quality.
But if you're not gonna up the quality, just spice in a scene with AT-AT's foot turning Jar-Jar Binks into a fine pink film, and I'll pay $8 just to see that.
C'mon, George. Just splice it in. You know the animators at ILM have probably already rendered the scene in their spare time.
> It goes to show that science can evoke the kind of deep meaningful experiences many religons do.
To the extent that I could believe in a God, it'd have to be the type of God who'd design a set of physical constants and behaviors (including all that quantum and stringy stuff we're still trying to understand) and sit Himself back to see what unfolded over a few billion years. The type of God who bangs something out of a cookie cutter in six days and sleeps in on the seventh just doesn't interest me. He's a cheapskate.
For another look at the kind of theism I'm imagining, I recommend the last book in Arthur C. Clarke's Rama series. (But read all the books in the series, in order, for the full effect.)
I'd have loved to have sat down with Sagan and discussed the inter-relationship between awe, religion, and science from an anthropological perspective. Humans seem to have a need for awe, and a need to explore. What a pity most of us use it to follow charlatans instead of digging the real stuff the universe has to offer.
You fundies reading this - don't take my crack about "six days" as being a cheap shot at Judeo-Christianity. Imagine some schmuck in 4,000 BC watching the episode of Cosmos where Sagan walks us through the "modern" creation story by mapping the history of the universe from Big Bang to evolution of Homo Sapiens onto a one-year calendar. Your 4000-BC yokel, who's just mastered writing, might very well end up with something akin to Genesis.
In the interests of fairness, of course, it's much more likely that the author of Genesis just guessed lucky.
But having known some fundies who referred to him as "Sagan the Pagan" back in the 80s, I have very fond memories of doing just that -- sitting one such fundie down in front of that episode and, one hour later, asking "Now, what was that you were saying about basic science being wholly incompatible with your religion?"
>I think you forget that Sagan lived and died an aethiest. Don't these two things contradict?
As Sagan himself put it:
I see no contradiction whatsoever. You do not need to be a theist to understand awe.
Nobody said you had to use those packages.
What's new is the underlying security model. If the end-user of the distro is so clueless as to put holes in the system, he deserves what he gets.
Remember - security isn't just software. It's also the guy at the root prompt.
Nitpick: I think you mean post-cold war mission, as well.
I'd go so far as to say that this release shows they have interpreted protection of our industrial base as a national security interest.
Remember the spate of DDOS's we had last year, and the subsequent (almost continual) stream of press releases about how "we must protect ourselves from cyberwarfare"? Looks like the intelligence community really woke up and smelled the coffee.
But this is far beyond press releases - this is amazing stuff.
Our taxpayer dollars - not only at work, but the citizens actually personally getting the benefits.
Mad, mad, mad props to those at NSA who were part of this decision. Keep up the good work.
>
> And this is more serious than commercial email
Well-said. Spam is not about content. Never has been. Never will be.
I don't care if you're spamming h0t t33n g1rlz or discounted airline tickets to my favorite destination (Hi, Travelocity! I still remember when you spammed me through mainsleaze spamhaus m0.net! You haven't gotten any business from me ever since, have you?). You spamma my account, I pounda you ballz flat widda wooden mallet.
Yes. Documented in news.admin.net-abuse.email and searchable through Dejanews.
If that's not scary enough, networksolutions.com - yes, the fsckers that used to own the whois database - has been documented numerous times as spamming based on the contents of that database.
As for mail rules - yeah, I autobounce anything with any uu.net IP address in any Received: line to abuse@uu.net. Doesn't really slow down the amount of spam I get from spewnet, but I haven't had a single false positive in four years.
Entirely correct.
And the article also appears to suggest mailbombing as a form of retaliation, which is bad juju for two reasons:
- First - it's abuse. We're the good guys, goddamnit!
- Second - friendly fire. Are you really mailbombing the spammer, or are you mailbombing some poor sucker with his mail address forged in the From: field?
Just read the Received: lines, find the origin of the spam, and launch LARTs to the upstream providers.The funny part is that since Earthlink spams their own customers (I've got several "Please get DSL now!" and a couple of "Get a digital camera free if you buy $PRODUCT from us" mails from them), Spaminator - at least at one point - filtered that out too :-)
That said, ISPs spamming their own customers is more of a customer support issue, rather than a spam issue - Earthlink owns the mail server on which my mail resides, and if they want to load it up with their own spam and alienate me as a customer, they have a right to do so.
Now, uu.net, on the other hand... or rather, their non-port-25-blocked reseller. Fuck uu.net with a wire brush. When Worldcom defaults on its bonds, I'm gonna be first in line to buy a uu.net RADIUS server at ten cents on the dollar, just for the pleasure of smashing it to bits with a wooden mallet.
If you look at the stats, you'll see that uu.net is the single largest source of dialup spammers on the planet, by a factor of ten.
That's right - 90% of the dialup spam comes from one ISP.
I don't give a damn how many rogue resellers they have - uu.net has refused to disclose the identities of these resellers since 1997.
IMNSHO, uu.net is culpable. They are nothing more than a spam support service, and deserve to have their netblocks filtered, BGPd, and otherwise obliterated. Turn spew-spew.net into the world's biggest LAN, and the world will be a better place.
But back to Spaminator -- the reason I don't use it is because I know how to read headers. And for every one of us who knows how to read headers and files abuse reports for every spam, several dozen dialup moles can be whacked per month.
Filters are an OK solution for deleting spam. But I much prefer to delete the spammer.
As for fusion, nope - nowhere near enough pressure or temperature, plus, no hydrogen there. I don't even think there's enough pressure/temperature to fuse anything (i.e. at the level below that required for a sustained chain reaction, otherwise they'd be stars) in the gas giants. AFAIK, the reason Jupiter puts out more heat than it receives from the sun is continued release of gravitational energy as it slowly falls in on itself.
You (or your science teacher) may be remembering (or was originally thinking) about fission of heavy elements, which would presumably descend to the core. Radioactive heat from decay of heavy elements in the cores of rocky planets is actually pretty significant.
I'm glad people have brought this up - as much as I really wanna see what's under Europa's shell, Europa will still be there 5-10 years from now. Pluto's atmosphere won't.
Does anyone know anything about the feasibility of using an ion-engine spacecraft (long-term low-acceleration) to get there quickly, and more importantly, could such a spacecraft decelerate quickly enough (possibly with assistance from conventional thrusters) to be captured by the Pluto/Charon system?
A flyby would be better than nothing, but an orbiter would be awesome, as we could monitor the freezeout as it happens. I doubt the physics (not much mass to capture it, lots of speed to bleed off on approach if we're gonna get there anytime useful) permits an orbiter, but can anyone do some handwaving to convince me otherwise?
Obviously a poster who hasn't looked at data from Europa or Ganymede lately.
If solid water's OK, add in the north Martian polar cap. (And possibly a layer of permafrost near some more rugged terrain in the south)
If you're looking for life, that's different. (My bet is "no, we won't in our solar system", but I'd want to see long-term undersea probes of Europa and serious excavation of Mars before I'd be convinced I was right.)
But if you're looking for places that might support life - plenty of those. (Human life, probably only on Mars. Life of any kind, I'll add Europa to that mix.)
I dunno about (1, Funny), I'd have given him (1, Insightful).
This is steganography. Who could oppose the Public Safety Medal of Honor bill? ("No pr0n here, officer, I just have 6 gigabytes of uncompressed .BMPs of clouds! I like clouds! So big fluffy and random!")
And unlike what they propose to do with our stego, their stego is legal.
RIAA did it with the "work for hire" provisions, now it's the FBI's turn to do it.
> Yeah, why would anyone expect you to read other points of view. That's preposterous! God forbid you be open minded! Have you ever actually read the National Review, or are you just not reading it because liberalism tells you that it's bad?
Amen, limejuice.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say that the article's appearance in NR makes this bill an even bigger red flag.
Traditionally (yeah, I'm stereotyping, sue me :-) liberals are expected to raise a stink over stuff like this, and conservatives aren't.
When something comes out that makes even conserviatives quake in their boots, it's a sign that more evil than normal is oozing down from Capitol Hill.
IMHO - H.R. 46 is the "other shoe" we've been waiting to see drop in the Carnivore saga. For everyone who's ever said "You're paranoid, FBI won't do $EVIL_THING, because that'd be illegal" -- well, H.R. 46 basically makes it legal.
The riders attached to H.R. 46 are evil, pure evil. And they're the kind of evil that doesn't care if you're liberal or conservative.
To the original flamer - as limejuice suggested, don't let the fact that the article appeared on a conservative web site blind you to the reality of what H.R. 46 contained.
If I can figure out where to add a resistor divider to drop VCore on my Asus TX97 motherboard down to 2.2V, I'm thinking of using an AMD K6-III-333 in it. Looks like an AMD overstock, available for $30 at Fry's.
Can you do decent software DVD decoding at 266? (That's the only missing piece in this box; it's always had TV-out.)
(Ah, if only my I-Opener had TV-out... my problems would be solved!)
(And if my Apple //e still boots, I'm going through the Enchanter/Sorceror/Spellbreaker trilogy over the holidays. Still got the original 5.25" floppies. Woo-hoo!)
Hell, yeah. That game scared the living hell out of me. (Those mysterious people walking down the hall... getting ever closer... while I'm still frantically trying to fix things before they get to me, open the door, and turn on (er, out!) the lights.)
(Even after I solved it, and had fun destroying the world while I made the mysterious people chase one of my robots in endless circles, it still scared the hell out of me :-)
If I want your web site to make noise, I'll lick my finger and rub it on the monitor.
No, I won't turn off my audio, because (you're right) audio feedback is important.
But I will - and have - nuked the .DLL Nutscrape uses for embedded MIDI files on my Windoze box.