> I can't even file my income taxes without the aid of a computer program and a book. It's the same story with the earmarked discretionary spending in transportation bills. None of the representatives could read the entire bill even if they wanted to, and so "pork" is jammed through and the tax payers are left soaked.
If the bill is too complicated for ordinary individuals to understand, you still have to comply with it. To the extent that politicians choose to comply with laws, any underlying complexity doesn't matter -- because they can simply use your money to pay other people to understand it for them.
> The lesson is: if the bill is too complicated for ordinary individuals to understand, it's too complicated period.
No, the lesson is: Law is for the little people to follow.
Corollary:...for we are no longer a nation governed by laws, but by men.
So fess up. Which one of us h4x0r3d the Utah Legislature's vote-counting system? Because it's either that, or we're faced with a bigger problem -- namely who are the aliens who invaded Great Salt Lake, and what did they do with Utah?
> They never intended to get rid of it, they just gave it a name change so the media would stop asking questions.
In United Soviet States of America, old bureaucracies keep changing names, but never die.
In Soviet Union... old bureaucracies never die, they just keep changing names.
Under Dzerzhinsky, you was the Cheka.
In the 20s, Cheka was reorganized as the GPU/OGPU.
In the 30s, OGPU became part of the NKVD.
After WW2, NKVD and NKGB were renamed to MVD and MGB.
Under Beria, MVD and MGB were merged to form the MVD.
After Beria's execution, MVD was split into MVD and KGB.
After the failed coup against Gorbachev, the KGB (where Putin worked) was dissolved.
Under Putin, the Cheka, GPU, OGPU, NKVD, MVD, and KGB are dead... long live the FSB.
> Aren't you glad your new US passport has a trackable RFID in it, Citizen Comrade?
Hey, freedom can't be on the march without spiffy uniforms and shiny black boots!
> What's the big deal here? The paint is conductive. The conductivity cannot be switched on and off, but by reading between the lines of TFA, they have an antenna inside the faraday cage which can selectively provide connectivity to the outside world. You can do the same thing with copper mesh (and I have, to make ultra-quiet recordings of microvolt biological signals) to create an entire room that is a faraday cage.
In other words, all this hype about nanotube copper paint is just a TEMPEST in a teapot.
A few years ago, someone described SCO as having gone "completely mad" and asked "what the fuck".
I'll skip a bit - and basically cut and paste the core of my response, which was to say they'd gone far past "completely utterly loony" and "what the fucking fuck fuck", and that the proper question was...
Is SCO completely, utterly, apeshit, goatshit and batshit, 649-megabytes-short-of-a-Debian-ISO, stark, slavering, buggo?!? Fuck! Are the fucking
fuckers fucking well fucked? What the fuck? What the fucking fuck fuck?
What the figgety fucking fuckity fuck fuck?
In addition to receiving the award for The Most Gratuitous Use of the Word "Fuck" in a Slashdot Posting, I now hereby ask for the individual who described the Grand Canyon as a "ditch" to step aside and yield the Understatement of the Century award.
> > There are a number of influential legislators who believe you evolved from an ape," Buttars said following the vote. "I didn't."
> >
I don't the apes would want to claim Buttars as a descendant, either.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western United States lies a small unregarded salt pond. Adjacent to this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight is an utterly insignificant little state whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think creationism is a pretty neat idea.
> > "Rep. Stephen Urquhart, R-St. George, led the charge to defeat the bill, saying he didn't understand how science contradicted faith." Urquhart successfully gutted the bill, leaving only one bland sentence that read: "The State Board of Education shall establish curriculum requirements relating to scientific instruction." Then the House defeated even that as a way of stopping the Senate from reviving the issue.
In deference to one million years of human evolution, Rep. Urquhart did not try to pick fleas off Senator Buttars. Utahns are not proud of their ancestry and never invite them around for dinner.
> The only thing they could really say was theft was bandwidth, since it is the only thing that can really be monitarily quantified. CPU cycles? How many were used, and how much is one CPU cycle worth? Disk space? It wasn't stolen, the closest crime I can think of is littering.
Google "theft by conversion", "criminal conversion", or "trespass to chattel".
In brief - if you take someone's bike while they're at work, and put it back before they get off work - and the cops find you, you don't get out of jail by saying you were only "borrowing" it because the guy wasn't using his bike anyways.
Similarly, even if I leave my door unlocked while I'm at work, anybody who comes into my house - even if they take nothing - if the cops find you, you're going to have a miserable day.
> For those of us who don't feel like wading a 100 page discussion transcript in legalese, can someone link to a concise summary of the changes being made?
"Please stop calling it the GPLv3. It's GNU/PLv3!"
IMO, the only thing missing from Google Maps is the concept of waypoints when making directions.
By default, you probably want the fastest (hourly) route from A to B.
Sometimes, you want to take the scenic route.
If there's a city on the scenic route, it's often too small to appear in Google's database of place names, and/or you'll have to Google for the ZIP code for East Bumfuck, Mississippi.
Furthermore, the more miles you want to log on the scenic route, the more likely it is that even if you are able to find city/ZIP combinations that correspond to places on the scenic route, the direction-guessing software will still suggest that to drive the 60 miles of scenic winding road between "East Bumfuck, MS" to "West Bumfuck, MS", for example, is to backtrack 5 miles, get on the Interstate, drive 50 miles at 60 mph, until you're 5 miles past your destination, where you backtrack to your destination. (Because 70 miles, 60 of which are at highway speeds, takes less time than 60 miles, all of which are at 25-30 mph.)
So - waypoints. A UI feature in "Directions" to say "add waypoint", such that directions from A to B are be calculated such that you pass through each (arbitrarily) selected waypoint in between.
> I saw plenty of nudie pics and porn as a child and I'm pretty well-adjusted as an adult. Yes, seriously. I'm getting pretty sick of government types thinking they can run our lives better than we can.
You do realize, that by identifying yourself as being "pretty sick of government types thinking they can run our lives better than we can", you just defined yourself as poorly-adjusted in the eyes of the DoJ.
At the moment, the Republican wing of the Party is in charge, which means you'll be jailed as an atheist pervert a'la Larry Flynn or some other pr0n producer.
When the Democrat wing of the Party is in charge, you'll be jailed as a fundamentalist pervert a'la Koresh or Phelps.
> > we're not trying to be offici.ous
> >
Clippy sez: "Did you mean officio.us [officio.us]?"
Yeah, but now that you mention it, Clippy, I'd like to:
Register officio.us for domainsquatting purposes
Live just long enough to be there when they cut off the heads of the GoDaddy.com marketing department and stick them on pikes, as a reminder to the next ten generations that some 30-second spots come at too high a price.
And whisper into their lifeless ears... "don't show me that commercial again!"
> Designtechnica has published their 2006 Best of Web 2.0 list. Some of the sites include Flicker.com,
Attention! Article submitter is guilty of W2C (Web 2.0 Consortium) standards violation. "Flickr", not "Flicker". If a domain doesn't end in ".us" and spell an English word, you must drop a vowel.
We realize you correctly linked to flickr.com, and we're not trying to be offici.ous; we're just asking that you use a Web-2.0-compliant spelling-checkr.
> The biggest thing I sensed from the review of this book is that it's definately Buzzword 2.0 Compliant.
The word "Blog" didn't appear, nor did "Web 2.0", nor was there any URL linking to a ".us" domain that spelled an English word when the dots were removed.
> The number of power cycles, 128, is too neat (2^7) to have been random. It's more likely to be a bug in the software than someone actually flipping the switch that many times.
When asked to explain the appearance of 8192 newly-registered voters in every precinct, President Mitnick declined comment...
> Now all we need is guys driving 4x4s with gun racks, Confederate Flags, Calvin pissing on a [automotive brand] logo, and an X-Prize stencil on or around the back window.
Close, no cigar. Back on Earth, would break out the Photoshop, make cut-paste thing.
- Lunar buggy.
- Way too much air in right-hand-side tires.
- Mass driver.
- "Free Luna!" flag.
- Cartoon Burt Rutan pissing on a NASA logo.
- Drive clockwise around crater rim.
> (seriously, the I think the X-Prize is an incredibly awesome thing... this idea just made me chuckle.)
Mycroft wonders if chuckle is funny-once or funny-all-the-time. Crazy thing.
(Luna ain't only harsh mistress around here. Should see Moondot moderators someday.)
> This article points out the obvious fact that we are insanely addicted to technology.
Keeping America competitive requires affordable technology. And here we have a serious problem: America is addicted to technology, which is often outsourced to spicy-food-eating parts of the world. The best way to break this addiction is through oil. Since 2001, venture capitalists have blown nearly $10 trillion to develop faster, cheaper, and more reliable technology sources -- and the guy who throws chairs at people for a living says we are on the threshold of incredible advances...
Preamble: We want oil because there are some things you can't do with nuclear energy. Chief among these: - High-density energy storage for vehicles. (hydrogen produced by electrolysis of water... sucks. Ethanol produced by using hydrocarbon-sourced fertilizer to raise and ferment corn... sucks only marginally less.) - Plastics and other hydrocarbon products. (which are a real bitch to synthesize from nothing but the hydrogen half of electrolyzed water, and, umm... coal.)
> I'll use oil as an example. >[... ] > Certain fields almost spit it out, and then you have things like oil shale, where you have to really work at it. So it might cost $2 a barrel to extract from a Saudi Oil field, while it costs $60 a barrel to extract from Canada's oil shale fields.
Nitpick: Canada's tar sands aren't the same as the US's shale fields. (Don't feel bad - the confusion arises because they both require massive energy input to extract or refine useful oils - hence, both have about a $60/bbl cost.)
But the nitpick doesn't matter. The original poster's essentially correct: if you want to get oil out of these icky, high-energy-cost sources, you need to put energy in. The interesting big? That energy is usually in the form of heat, and that heat is usually in the form of steam used as part of the production process.
So the poster's very much on the right track, but hasn't carried his own argument to its proper conclusion. That "$60/bbl" figure he cites is basically correct, but the "OMGWTFBBQ you burn more than a barrel of oil to get a barrel of oil out of the ground OMG peak oilz!" conclusion that many clueless n00bs draw from it is based on the assumption you're burning oil to extact tar sands and/or shale oil.
The short version (for Republicans): Build a nuke on the site of the tar sands. By 2010, North America can tell the fucking ragheads - shit, we can tell the rest of the world to quite literally, "go pound sand".
Amendment (for Democrats): "Tell the fucking ragheads to go pound sand" is merely "Stop interfering in their culture" translated into Republican. Republicans and Democrats are asking for the same thing, just using different words.:)
OK - the long version (for Engineers): Build a nuclear power plant on the site of the tar sands (or a shale oil deposit). Atomic pile superheats water into which nasty stuff might leak in the event of catastrophic failure. Potentially-nasty water passes through heat exchanger, superheats clean water.
Instead of using that power to boil water and run a bunch of lossy steam turbines hooked up to lossy generators, to generate the electricity (another huge proportion of which is lost in the thousands of miles of transmission lines), you use the nuke to generate the steam you use to extract the oil.
I'll bet a breeder reactor on either a tar sands deposit or an oil shale deposit could cut that $60/bbl cost in half.
> It's just that you might have to accept $500/kg uranium rather than $40/kg as it was as of the survey. This would translat to a few more cents per kw/hour of electricity. Fuel for a nuclear plant is actually one of the smallest expenses. Labor is the largest. Going with breeder reactors would, of course reduce the fuel cost.
YES! (Thank you!)
And that leads me to the final version - for the people who matter - the financiers: You finance the whole thing by short selling a metric assload of 2010 oil futures at ~$50-60/bbl, and by buying a similarly-sized assload of uranium futures as, umm, I'm too lazy to look up a quote.
You use $10/bbl of what you sold your 2010 oil to buy enough US lobbysists to buy enough Congressmen to pass a law that scraps all regulation and authorizes construction of your nuke plant atop the shale fields (or enough Members of Parliament to authorize construction of the same plant in Alberta's tar sands
> > How come when the property of regular citizens is siezed for investigation of a piracy or drug-related crime, you always hear the term "raid."
> >That's because regular citizens "loot" these materials, while Microsoft "find" tax loopholes;)
I am erotic. You are kinky. They are perverts.
We protect. Our allies enforce. Our enemies oppress.
Congress appropriates. Microsoft lobbies. Citizens steal.
With apologies to Calvin and Hobbes - if you think verbing weirds language, wait'll you try conjugation!
Slashdot Mirror
China is the beta release. It serves as the testbed for all the new 'net-related surveillance technologies.
We're the production version.
If the bill is too complicated for ordinary individuals to understand, you still have to comply with it. To the extent that politicians choose to comply with laws, any underlying complexity doesn't matter -- because they can simply use your money to pay other people to understand it for them.
> The lesson is: if the bill is too complicated for ordinary individuals to understand, it's too complicated period.
No, the lesson is: Law is for the little people to follow.
Corollary: ...for we are no longer a nation governed by laws, but by men.
Today, Utah Games/Porn Law Fails.
That's too much common sense to be for real.
So fess up. Which one of us h4x0r3d the Utah Legislature's vote-counting system? Because it's either that, or we're faced with a bigger problem -- namely who are the aliens who invaded Great Salt Lake, and what did they do with Utah?
In United Soviet States of America, old bureaucracies keep changing names, but never die.
In Soviet Union... old bureaucracies never die, they just keep changing names.
Under Dzerzhinsky, you was the Cheka.
In the 20s, Cheka was reorganized as the GPU/OGPU.
In the 30s, OGPU became part of the NKVD.
After WW2, NKVD and NKGB were renamed to MVD and MGB.
Under Beria, MVD and MGB were merged to form the MVD.
After Beria's execution, MVD was split into MVD and KGB.
After the failed coup against Gorbachev, the KGB (where Putin worked) was dissolved.
Under Putin, the Cheka, GPU, OGPU, NKVD, MVD, and KGB are dead... long live the FSB.
> Aren't you glad your new US passport has a trackable RFID in it, Citizen Comrade?
Hey, freedom can't be on the march without spiffy uniforms and shiny black boots!
In other words, all this hype about nanotube copper paint is just a TEMPEST in a teapot.
I'll skip a bit - and basically cut and paste the core of my response, which was to say they'd gone far past "completely utterly loony" and "what the fucking fuck fuck", and that the proper question was...
In addition to receiving the award for The Most Gratuitous Use of the Word "Fuck" in a Slashdot Posting, I now hereby ask for the individual who described the Grand Canyon as a "ditch" to step aside and yield the Understatement of the Century award.
I rule. Me, unincorporated.
>
> I don't the apes would want to claim Buttars as a descendant, either.
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western United States lies a small unregarded salt pond. Adjacent to this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight is an utterly insignificant little state whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think creationism is a pretty neat idea.
> > "Rep. Stephen Urquhart, R-St. George, led the charge to defeat the bill, saying he didn't understand how science contradicted faith." Urquhart successfully gutted the bill, leaving only one bland sentence that read: "The State Board of Education shall establish curriculum requirements relating to scientific instruction." Then the House defeated even that as a way of stopping the Senate from reviving the issue.
In deference to one million years of human evolution, Rep. Urquhart did not try to pick fleas off Senator Buttars. Utahns are not proud of their ancestry and never invite them around for dinner.
What, this isn't the FBI trying to recapture the (fabulous, baby!) glory days of J. Edgar Hoover.
This is NSA doing the surveillance. If you want the list of people targeted, you gotta call these guys!
Google "theft by conversion", "criminal conversion", or "trespass to chattel".
In brief - if you take someone's bike while they're at work, and put it back before they get off work - and the cops find you, you don't get out of jail by saying you were only "borrowing" it because the guy wasn't using his bike anyways.
Similarly, even if I leave my door unlocked while I'm at work, anybody who comes into my house - even if they take nothing - if the cops find you, you're going to have a miserable day.
"Please stop calling it the GPLv3. It's GNU/PLv3!"
By default, you probably want the fastest (hourly) route from A to B.
Sometimes, you want to take the scenic route.
If there's a city on the scenic route, it's often too small to appear in Google's database of place names, and/or you'll have to Google for the ZIP code for East Bumfuck, Mississippi.
Furthermore, the more miles you want to log on the scenic route, the more likely it is that even if you are able to find city/ZIP combinations that correspond to places on the scenic route, the direction-guessing software will still suggest that to drive the 60 miles of scenic winding road between "East Bumfuck, MS" to "West Bumfuck, MS", for example, is to backtrack 5 miles, get on the Interstate, drive 50 miles at 60 mph, until you're 5 miles past your destination, where you backtrack to your destination. (Because 70 miles, 60 of which are at highway speeds, takes less time than 60 miles, all of which are at 25-30 mph.)
So - waypoints. A UI feature in "Directions" to say "add waypoint", such that directions from A to B are be calculated such that you pass through each (arbitrarily) selected waypoint in between.
You do realize, that by identifying yourself as being "pretty sick of government types thinking they can run our lives better than we can", you just defined yourself as poorly-adjusted in the eyes of the DoJ.
At the moment, the Republican wing of the Party is in charge, which means you'll be jailed as an atheist pervert a'la Larry Flynn or some other pr0n producer.
When the Democrat wing of the Party is in charge, you'll be jailed as a fundamentalist pervert a'la Koresh or Phelps.
Either way, you're boned.
>
> Clippy sez: "Did you mean officio.us [officio.us]?"
Yeah, but now that you mention it, Clippy, I'd like to:
Attention! Article submitter is guilty of W2C (Web 2.0 Consortium) standards violation. "Flickr", not "Flicker". If a domain doesn't end in ".us" and spell an English word, you must drop a vowel.
We realize you correctly linked to flickr.com, and we're not trying to be offici.ous; we're just asking that you use a Web-2.0-compliant spelling-checkr.
- UK
"We're number two! We try harder!"
- USSA
"In former Soviet Russia, being number three means not trying at all!"
- CIS
The word "Blog" didn't appear, nor did "Web 2.0", nor was there any URL linking to a ".us" domain that spelled an English word when the dots were removed.
That's buzzword 1.0 compliance at best.
I'm going to fucking fold that guy! *fling*
When asked to explain the appearance of 8192 newly-registered voters in every precinct, President Mitnick declined comment...
- John Smedley, Information Minister, Sony Online Entertainment.
Hey, if counterfactual computing works in the quantum world, why not use it in SWG?
Close, no cigar. Back on Earth, would break out the Photoshop, make cut-paste thing.
- Lunar buggy.
- Way too much air in right-hand-side tires.
- Mass driver.
- "Free Luna!" flag.
- Cartoon Burt Rutan pissing on a NASA logo.
- Drive clockwise around crater rim.
> (seriously, the I think the X-Prize is an incredibly awesome thing... this idea just made me chuckle.)
Mycroft wonders if chuckle is funny-once or funny-all-the-time. Crazy thing. (Luna ain't only harsh mistress around here. Should see Moondot moderators someday.)
Keeping America competitive requires affordable technology. And here we have a serious problem: America is addicted to technology, which is often outsourced to spicy-food-eating parts of the world. The best way to break this addiction is through oil. Since 2001, venture capitalists have blown nearly $10 trillion to develop faster, cheaper, and more reliable technology sources -- and the guy who throws chairs at people for a living says we are on the threshold of incredible advances...
- High-density energy storage for vehicles. (hydrogen produced by electrolysis of water... sucks. Ethanol produced by using hydrocarbon-sourced fertilizer to raise and ferment corn... sucks only marginally less.)
- Plastics and other hydrocarbon products. (which are a real bitch to synthesize from nothing but the hydrogen half of electrolyzed water, and, umm... coal.)
> I'll use oil as an example. ... ]
>[
> Certain fields almost spit it out, and then you have things like oil shale, where you have to really work at it. So it might cost $2 a barrel to extract from a Saudi Oil field, while it costs $60 a barrel to extract from Canada's oil shale fields.
Nitpick: Canada's tar sands aren't the same as the US's shale fields. (Don't feel bad - the confusion arises because they both require massive energy input to extract or refine useful oils - hence, both have about a $60/bbl cost.)
But the nitpick doesn't matter. The original poster's essentially correct: if you want to get oil out of these icky, high-energy-cost sources, you need to put energy in. The interesting big? That energy is usually in the form of heat, and that heat is usually in the form of steam used as part of the production process.
So the poster's very much on the right track, but hasn't carried his own argument to its proper conclusion. That "$60/bbl" figure he cites is basically correct, but the "OMGWTFBBQ you burn more than a barrel of oil to get a barrel of oil out of the ground OMG peak oilz!" conclusion that many clueless n00bs draw from it is based on the assumption you're burning oil to extact tar sands and/or shale oil.
The short version (for Republicans): Build a nuke on the site of the tar sands. By 2010, North America can tell the fucking ragheads - shit, we can tell the rest of the world to quite literally, "go pound sand".
Amendment (for Democrats): "Tell the fucking ragheads to go pound sand" is merely "Stop interfering in their culture" translated into Republican. Republicans and Democrats are asking for the same thing, just using different words. :)
OK - the long version (for Engineers): Build a nuclear power plant on the site of the tar sands (or a shale oil deposit). Atomic pile superheats water into which nasty stuff might leak in the event of catastrophic failure. Potentially-nasty water passes through heat exchanger, superheats clean water.
Instead of using that power to boil water and run a bunch of lossy steam turbines hooked up to lossy generators, to generate the electricity (another huge proportion of which is lost in the thousands of miles of transmission lines), you use the nuke to generate the steam you use to extract the oil.
I'll bet a breeder reactor on either a tar sands deposit or an oil shale deposit could cut that $60/bbl cost in half.
> It's just that you might have to accept $500/kg uranium rather than $40/kg as it was as of the survey. This would translat to a few more cents per kw/hour of electricity. Fuel for a nuclear plant is actually one of the smallest expenses. Labor is the largest. Going with breeder reactors would, of course reduce the fuel cost.
YES! (Thank you!)
And that leads me to the final version - for the people who matter - the financiers: You finance the whole thing by short selling a metric assload of 2010 oil futures at ~$50-60/bbl, and by buying a similarly-sized assload of uranium futures as, umm, I'm too lazy to look up a quote.
You use $10/bbl of what you sold your 2010 oil to buy enough US lobbysists to buy enough Congressmen to pass a law that scraps all regulation and authorizes construction of your nuke plant atop the shale fields (or enough Members of Parliament to authorize construction of the same plant in Alberta's tar sands
> the entire supply of Immodium for the state of Utah is missing.
Immodium AD: When you're know you're full of shit, and you desperately, desperately, want to keep it that way.
>
>That's because regular citizens "loot" these materials, while Microsoft "find" tax loopholes
I am erotic. You are kinky. They are perverts.
We protect. Our allies enforce. Our enemies oppress.
Congress appropriates. Microsoft lobbies. Citizens steal.
With apologies to Calvin and Hobbes - if you think verbing weirds language, wait'll you try conjugation!
It looks like you are trying to contend with MS Office. Would you like some notoriety?