Let us take for example you invite your friend and myself to your house to play Monopoly . I land on park place and buy it. Your friend then lands on Boardwalk. I offer your friend 5 real life dollars to sell Boardwalk to me, and he does. I now have an in game advantage. Does this behavior undermine the spirit of the game?
It undermines the spirit of the game "Monopoly". It does not undermine the spirit of the meta-game being played by (in this case) Parker Brothers against other board game manufacturers. If being able to buy Boardwalk for $5 makes Monopoly more fun to play, odds are greater that I'll buy Monopoly. (And if it makes Monopoly suck, I'll be less likely to buy the game.)
IGE (and SOE and Blizzard) are all playing the same MMMORPG, the object of which is to use the MMORPG market to make RL money. MMORPG Producers sell the ability to play WOW, SWG, EQ, EQ2, and so on. IGE sells the ability to more easily play the aforementioned properties.
If the MMMORPG were a game of Monopoly, I would start with representations of sheep (gamers), squares (producers such as SOE or Blizzard), houses/hotels (properties such as SWG or WoW), credits (dollars), bling (in-game loot, in-game credits), and bits (software).
The market has yet to the extent to which folks like IGE make MMORPGs "more" or "less" fun. Consequently, MMORPG producers are still experimenting with the question of whether to ban eBaying for credits, or to encourage it. (An interesting question: how many dollars would you have paid SOE for a Jedi out of the box, rather than craptastically grinding your way through a year and a half of, umm, craptastic grinding, only to find... well, more craptastic grind at the end of the tunnel?)
The MetaMMORPG - how to get the most bucks from the gamer, while not completely eliminating the fun and thereby killing the goose that laid the golden egg - has just begun. Game on.
> If the NSA becomes the "Internet Traffic Cop", can it be said that 99.9% of the NSA's budget is devoted to pornography?
So the old joke about getting a job with NSA by calling up your mother and talking about cryptography needs to be rewritten? Eew!
"NSA is now funding research not only in steganography, but in all areas of advanced mathematics. If you'd like a circular describing these new research opportunities, just fire up your newsreader, download a.JPG of your mother, and ask for one!"
I beg of you, don't say goodbye!
Don't wanna use no MCI!
Reach out and touch some other fool,
'Cause breakin' up is hard on you!
They say that breakin' up was hard to do,
When Carly put the screws to you,
Spun off Lucent and then,
Includin' breakin' up she also buggered HPQ and then...
AT&T gave back the phone!
And now we'll lease, no more to own,
Reach out and touch some other fool,
'Cause breakin' up was hard on you.
(With apologies to the original 1984 Breakin' up is hard on you parody from the American Comedy Network.)
> struck a deal on Monday to make it easier for consumers to buy digital music on-line and play it back on their handsets...
...aah, in rapture to Beethoven's Ninth, compressed to a 32kbps mono.WMV, gloriously rendered on a tinny piezoelectric speaker.
Turning phones into music rental devices seems to fall under the "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should" category.
Even if you stuck a headphone jack into your phone to get around the shitty piezo speaker problem, consider that if you actually plan to use your phone for something (oh, I don't know, say, talking on it?), why would you want to wear down its battery by playing music on it?
> "Here's a page on the fun you can have with a remote control Abrams tank and a wireless video camera.
I kinda stopped reading at "remote control Abrams tank". That's just plain fun, with or without the wirless video camera. I don't need no webpage to tell me that.
I mean, come on. As if driving a remote control M-1 Abrams blind isn't "fun" enough in the first place.
(Although I admit - probably more fun if you have a remote control video camera, rather than having to be anywhere near the tank in order to get footage of all the car-smashing, lightpole-snapping... well, like Mom said, it's all fun until someone gets their house crushed like a bug.)
> Fitz just linked a 38 megabyte file from the front page... does this mean that slashdot just declared war on the U.K.?
Slashdotters' guns were aimed and requests were comin' fast,
The first link hit the website, they knew she couldn't last,
That mighty Naval server room is just a memory,
"Avenge the Bismarck" was the battle cry, sent over TCP.
We found the freakin' powerpoint that's makin' such a fuss!
We slashdotted the website 'cause the world depends on us!
It hit the front page runnin, when we spun our browsers 'round,
Yeah, we found the Royal Navy, and then we shut 'er down!
With apologies to Johnny Horton's
Sink the Bismarck, 1960, and those who served aboard both the Hood and the Bismarck.)
> Squeeze through a three inch hole?? No, that's not "squeezing" at all. I scuba dive locally in So. California a few days a week. If I see a bottle (beer, wine, vodka,.) I always look inside. Many times I'll find an octopus filing as much as 1/3 of the bottle. They have no trouble fitting through the neck of a beer bottle
Proving not only that octopi are clever problem-solvers, but that they can remain clever problem solvers despite drinking like fish?
> Zantrex is the fake ("herbal"). Phenteramine isn't available anymore. I'm not a pharmacist, just a doc:)
Congrats -- I first thought of the trademark infringement issue when I flubbed it on "Soma". Heh, a painkiller named Soma. "Yeah, right."
Then I found out it was a real medication. In Ford's name, what was that marketing department thinking? (I'm slowly learning never to underestimate the stupidity of marketroids.)
I wonder how many patients do a double-take or pop out a Huxley reference when first prescribed it. (Heh, I'm slowly learning never to underestimate the prevalence of stupidity in the general public either.)
> Readers were removed from bathrooms when parents protested. The school district is meeting next week to consider parents objections to the system."
"Consider". Heh, and all this time I've been spelling "override" the old-fashioned way.
>Relatedly (but not), Leilah writes "The University of California is considering using RFID tags or bar codes to help track their collection of bodies and parts. They are attempting to reopen their body donation program which has been on hold since spring 2004 due to disappearing parts - they've previously had legal trouble over improper disposal as well."
February 17, 2005: Minutes of School Board Meeting.
"PRIOR BUSINESS: [Board Member X] acknowledges that the Board, like the University of California, has had legal trouble regarding the improper disposal of bodies and body parts."
"NEW BUSINESS: [Board Member Y] reports that the cost of providing school meals has dropped by 40% over this fiscal year, and expects further cost reductions to continue in FY2006. The Board agrees to continue its joint development with Soylent Birkenstock, a not-for-profit collective between UC Berkeley and the School Board dedicated towards ensuring that No Child is Left Behind due to poor nutrition."
"CURRENT BUSINESS: When the floor was opened to parents for discussion, no objections were raised to our proposal that RFID cards be worn by all students. Existing objections were dropped. The Board is somewhat confused, but pleased, by this development."
I remember the first time I started seeing Viagra (and other prescription drug) spam. It was long enough ago that I figured the pharma companies would want to crack down on it.
Up until that point, I'd been getting spams for "pharmaceutical" (read: "quackery) products, like the usual "herbal penis pills", "natural apricot pits cancer cure!", "b00st your immune system", "legal pot substitute", and so on.
If I'd never heard of Viagra before, I'd have lumped it in along with phen-phen, ephedra, and laetrile as the quack medicines I'd historically been getting spams for: that is, substances of questionable efficacy, safety, and/or legality.
Quickly now, (off the top of your head, without googling and without being a pharmacist), which of the following - Effexor, Paxil, Viagra, Cialis, Phenteramine, Valium, Xanax, Soma, Lipitor, Zyban, Zantrex, Xenical, Meridia and Fioricet - are "real" medicines (that is, which have been approved by FDA for the treatment of medical conditions), and which are fake/quack/banned?
If you get even one false-positive (that is, a "real" drug that a reasonable person dismiss es as "quacky" due to its prevalence in spam), I'd say the manufacturer of that drug has a prima facie case for trademark dilution against every spammer who spammed for it.
> The readers that are designed for doorways can do roughly 2 feet, but they're huge and very very obvious - they're designed for store entrances, where they make you walk through the "gates" to get in/out of the store. You can't miss a 4-foot (max) separated row of columns covering all the exits...
Considering the space already available to install cameras, cabling, and God only knows what else above the ceiling, wouldn't it be easy to include large transmitters in the ceiling?
Better yet, install a semi-large one (a little smaller than your doorway-size variety) in each table. Doesn't matter if you see all 10 tables "light up" when Joe Gambler walks by them, you only need to get 2-3 hits before you can retrace his steps.
It's sorta like facial recognition in that you can build up a track of where Joe Gambler went during his entire time at the site.
But it's better -- because you can sort those tracks by dollar amount. What would it be worth to a casino's marketing department to know which path certain groups customers walk after losing all their chips (or after doubling their chips!), and reorganizing their floors (placing bank machines along the most likely route for the losers, and slot machines or other tables along the way to the cashier's cage for the winners) accordingly?
If you were really clever, you could even have hustlers on the floor. Guy wins $1000 at a $25 Blackjack table? Cute chick comes over and offers him a drink on the way to the cashier's. Asks him how he did. Points out the conveniently-located row of $100 tables that somehow always have to be walked around before he can get to the cashier's.
As we progress, running a casino will become more and more like playing SimAnt. (Then you can sell an extension the technology to the government to play with the rest of society, and it gets to be a lot more fun, to say nothing of more profitable:)
...it develops that Alan Kay is an agent of the Underground, which is called Dobbs' Lightning because of Heraclitus' idea that Dobbs first manifested Himself as a lightning bolt which created the world.
It was in Dobbs' Lightning that I first read Tux Sneezed, which I still think is a rip-roaring good yarn. The scene where Atlanta Hope sees Niklaus Wirth and it's her old *ahem* "boyfriend" with the gaunt cheeks, and he said "I am Bob Dobbs", man, that's writing. The 103-page long speech afterwards, explaining the importance of strong typing and showing why all the anti-Heracletians are destroying civilization by destroying strong typing, certainly is persuasive, especially to me who's got three (going on four) contracts, each of which share the same include files. "Without strong typing there can be no civilization."
Her nonfiction book, "Antitrust: The Unknown Ideal for the New Heracletian" is, I think, a distinct letdown, but the Dobbs' Lightning bumper stickers sure give people the creeps.
I met Atlanta Hope at the time of the IEEE Committee Riots. I was in the thick of it (you have no idea how bizarre civil war gets when one side uses nerf weapons as a large part of its arsenal), and met Atlanta herself where the last stand was being made. She grabbed my right arm and howled something like "War is the Health of the State! Conflict is the creator of all things!"
Seeing as how she was on a heavy Heraclitus wavelength, I quoted with great passion, "Men should fight for the Laws as they would for the walls of the city!" That won her, and I was Atlanta's personal lieutenant for the rest of the battle.
(Epilogue: Heraclitus -- He was apt to say odd things. Once he even wrote that "Religious ceremonies are unholy." A strange duck.)
> Ahhh... watching the moon while listening to some Pink Floyd. How trippy!:D
And if the colo breaks down gigabytes too soon,
And if you cannot foot the bandwith bill,
And if your site explodes, slashdot the cached one too,
We'll see you on the dark side of the moon!
(I can't think of anything to say except... PWN3D! *snork*)
> Heck, Cairo was announced, what? 14 years ago? Longhorn was the new Cairo, now delayed to Blackcomb, as "Cairo" wasn't getting any more press. After all, "we're writing about Cairo again?
Database-driven filesystems are sorta like nuclear fusion.
Marketing time to release is a constant in the range of 10-15 units of time. Actual time to release is the same -- but you use the next higher unit.
That is, WinFS has been 6-12 months away for about 15 years, and fusion power has been about 5-10 years away for at least the past 5 decades.
> is there any diffrence in the ammount of waist produced? Being assured that it wont melt down or spin out of controll is good, but to get past the anti nuke arguments it'll have to be at least a little cleaner.
Judging from how many McDonald's french fries have to be eaten to produce a tank of biodiesel, nuclear energy produces no waist at all.
> "I wonder if the qouted $50 to $80 million is reachable."
I don't. *rimshot*
Although it would be pretty cool to be there when they cut off Berman and Braga's heads and stick it on a pike as a warning to the next ten generations of scriptwriters, that some sequels come at to high a price. I would look up at their lifeless eyes and wave just like this (*wave*). Can trekbbs.com and their associates arrange that?
> Seriously, I look down the list and in there I see only two names of power supplies I recognise. Where is Antec, PC Power and Cooling, Fotron/Sparkel, or any of the other extremely common and popular powersupplies (ok, maybe PC P&C isn't popular, but they are the reference for many geeks)?
While we're at it - someone else has also pointed out that Enermax supplies shutting down on 100% load is a feature, not a bug.
If I drive a PSU at 100% for long enough, one of three things are going to happen:
1) Wires are going to get hot. Possibly very hot if there's poor contact between the wire and whatever's drawing the current.
2) The PSU will fail catastrophically. Smoke, fire, and Glub only knows what on the rails for a second or two while the power supply burninates itself.
3) The PSU will shut itself down before either #1 or #2 happens.
#1 and #2 are more entertaining when it's someone else's data. I'll stick with #3.
> > apparently its not due to the monetary costs associated with fixing it, but rather the risks involved. NASA's new goals are now manned missions to the moon, as a platform for Mars."
> > So, sending a team of astronauts into space just over 600km away, still within the confines of the Van Allen belts, is terribly dangerous, but sending them out a minimum of 55M kilometres is safer?
"Apparently, it's not due to the risks associated with it, but rather the monetary costs (and lobbying, and preliminary studies, and new opportunities to grow departments, and don't forget all those delicious juicy overruns in every congressional district) involved."
A bipartisan resolution declared "It's budget day! 2.6 trillion dollars! Who the fuck cares if any of this shit works?"
> Actually, I'll amend that: reading nearly any science fiction is like eating flan, but reading Neal Stephenson is like eating flan from between Jennifer Connelly's breasts while you're high.
Flan or flarn?
Watching Star Trek is like eating flarn. Watching B5 is like eating flarn out from between Mira Furlann and Claudi*ahem*, uh, never mind. We have always eaten flarn.
> Bruce looked up. The tits belonged to a beautiful face carved out of ice and whipped cream, with a pair of glowing emerald eyes. Around that perfect face was brown hair like one of those super models, all puffed up. >[... ] > "Well, Mr. Lucent," the sexy voice went on. "You are probably wondering what you are doing here, honey chile." He realized the voice had the accent of a sexy Southern peach.
Stay tuned for more of Secrets from the Boadrooms of Carly Fiorina.
In our next adventure, a filthy Compaqt with an Alpha male!
Slashdot Mirror
It undermines the spirit of the game "Monopoly". It does not undermine the spirit of the meta-game being played by (in this case) Parker Brothers against other board game manufacturers. If being able to buy Boardwalk for $5 makes Monopoly more fun to play, odds are greater that I'll buy Monopoly. (And if it makes Monopoly suck, I'll be less likely to buy the game.)
IGE (and SOE and Blizzard) are all playing the same MMMORPG, the object of which is to use the MMORPG market to make RL money. MMORPG Producers sell the ability to play WOW, SWG, EQ, EQ2, and so on. IGE sells the ability to more easily play the aforementioned properties.
If the MMMORPG were a game of Monopoly, I would start with representations of sheep (gamers), squares (producers such as SOE or Blizzard), houses/hotels (properties such as SWG or WoW), credits (dollars), bling (in-game loot, in-game credits), and bits (software).
The market has yet to the extent to which folks like IGE make MMORPGs "more" or "less" fun. Consequently, MMORPG producers are still experimenting with the question of whether to ban eBaying for credits, or to encourage it. (An interesting question: how many dollars would you have paid SOE for a Jedi out of the box, rather than craptastically grinding your way through a year and a half of, umm, craptastic grinding, only to find... well, more craptastic grind at the end of the tunnel?)
The MetaMMORPG - how to get the most bucks from the gamer, while not completely eliminating the fun and thereby killing the goose that laid the golden egg - has just begun. Game on.
So the old joke about getting a job with NSA by calling up your mother and talking about cryptography needs to be rewritten? Eew!
"NSA is now funding research not only in steganography, but in all areas of advanced mathematics. If you'd like a circular describing these new research opportunities, just fire up your newsreader, download a .JPG of your mother, and ask for one!"
Bah. On my system, cat and fish come preinstalled.
So all I need to do for the specified interval bit is add a line to my crontab that looks something like this:
1 * * * * "cat /usr/local/bin/fish | twofish | blowfish > seuss.fish"
Don't wanna use no MCI!
Reach out and touch some other fool,
'Cause breakin' up is hard on you!
They say that breakin' up was hard to do,
When Carly put the screws to you,
Spun off Lucent and then,
Includin' breakin' up she also buggered HPQ and then...
AT&T gave back the phone!
And now we'll lease, no more to own,
Reach out and touch some other fool,
'Cause breakin' up was hard on you.
(With apologies to the original 1984 Breakin' up is hard on you parody from the American Comedy Network.)
Turning phones into music rental devices seems to fall under the "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should" category.
Even if you stuck a headphone jack into your phone to get around the shitty piezo speaker problem, consider that if you actually plan to use your phone for something (oh, I don't know, say, talking on it?), why would you want to wear down its battery by playing music on it?
>
>What? Both of 'em?
Hey! What makes you think Berman and Braga are fans?
I kinda stopped reading at "remote control Abrams tank". That's just plain fun, with or without the wirless video camera. I don't need no webpage to tell me that.
I mean, come on. As if driving a remote control M-1 Abrams blind isn't "fun" enough in the first place.
(Although I admit - probably more fun if you have a remote control video camera, rather than having to be anywhere near the tank in order to get footage of all the car-smashing, lightpole-snapping... well, like Mom said, it's all fun until someone gets their house crushed like a bug.)
Bloody Vikin-hey, wait, what's this about are going to be?!
Slashdotters' guns were aimed and requests were comin' fast,
The first link hit the website, they knew she couldn't last,
That mighty Naval server room is just a memory,
"Avenge the Bismarck" was the battle cry, sent over TCP.
We found the freakin' powerpoint that's makin' such a fuss!
We slashdotted the website 'cause the world depends on us!
It hit the front page runnin, when we spun our browsers 'round,
Yeah, we found the Royal Navy, and then we shut 'er down!
With apologies to Johnny Horton's Sink the Bismarck, 1960, and those who served aboard both the Hood and the Bismarck.)
Proving not only that octopi are clever problem-solvers, but that they can remain clever problem solvers despite drinking like fish?
Congrats -- I first thought of the trademark infringement issue when I flubbed it on "Soma". Heh, a painkiller named Soma. "Yeah, right."
Then I found out it was a real medication. In Ford's name, what was that marketing department thinking? (I'm slowly learning never to underestimate the stupidity of marketroids.)
I wonder how many patients do a double-take or pop out a Huxley reference when first prescribed it. (Heh, I'm slowly learning never to underestimate the prevalence of stupidity in the general public either.)
"Consider". Heh, and all this time I've been spelling "override" the old-fashioned way.
>Relatedly (but not), Leilah writes "The University of California is considering using RFID tags or bar codes to help track their collection of bodies and parts. They are attempting to reopen their body donation program which has been on hold since spring 2004 due to disappearing parts - they've previously had legal trouble over improper disposal as well."
February 17, 2005: Minutes of School Board Meeting.
"PRIOR BUSINESS: [Board Member X] acknowledges that the Board, like the University of California, has had legal trouble regarding the improper disposal of bodies and body parts."
"NEW BUSINESS: [Board Member Y] reports that the cost of providing school meals has dropped by 40% over this fiscal year, and expects further cost reductions to continue in FY2006. The Board agrees to continue its joint development with Soylent Birkenstock, a not-for-profit collective between UC Berkeley and the School Board dedicated towards ensuring that No Child is Left Behind due to poor nutrition."
"CURRENT BUSINESS: When the floor was opened to parents for discussion, no objections were raised to our proposal that RFID cards be worn by all students. Existing objections were dropped. The Board is somewhat confused, but pleased, by this development."
Up until that point, I'd been getting spams for "pharmaceutical" (read: "quackery) products, like the usual "herbal penis pills", "natural apricot pits cancer cure!", "b00st your immune system", "legal pot substitute", and so on.
If I'd never heard of Viagra before, I'd have lumped it in along with phen-phen, ephedra, and laetrile as the quack medicines I'd historically been getting spams for: that is, substances of questionable efficacy, safety, and/or legality.
Quickly now, (off the top of your head, without googling and without being a pharmacist), which of the following - Effexor, Paxil, Viagra, Cialis, Phenteramine, Valium, Xanax, Soma, Lipitor, Zyban, Zantrex, Xenical, Meridia and Fioricet - are "real" medicines (that is, which have been approved by FDA for the treatment of medical conditions), and which are fake/quack/banned?
If you get even one false-positive (that is, a "real" drug that a reasonable person dismiss es as "quacky" due to its prevalence in spam), I'd say the manufacturer of that drug has a prima facie case for trademark dilution against every spammer who spammed for it.
Considering the space already available to install cameras, cabling, and God only knows what else above the ceiling, wouldn't it be easy to include large transmitters in the ceiling?
Better yet, install a semi-large one (a little smaller than your doorway-size variety) in each table. Doesn't matter if you see all 10 tables "light up" when Joe Gambler walks by them, you only need to get 2-3 hits before you can retrace his steps.
It's sorta like facial recognition in that you can build up a track of where Joe Gambler went during his entire time at the site.
But it's better -- because you can sort those tracks by dollar amount. What would it be worth to a casino's marketing department to know which path certain groups customers walk after losing all their chips (or after doubling their chips!), and reorganizing their floors (placing bank machines along the most likely route for the losers, and slot machines or other tables along the way to the cashier's cage for the winners) accordingly?
If you were really clever, you could even have hustlers on the floor. Guy wins $1000 at a $25 Blackjack table? Cute chick comes over and offers him a drink on the way to the cashier's. Asks him how he did. Points out the conveniently-located row of $100 tables that somehow always have to be walked around before he can get to the cashier's.
As we progress, running a casino will become more and more like playing SimAnt. (Then you can sell an extension the technology to the government to play with the rest of society, and it gets to be a lot more fun, to say nothing of more profitable :)
It was in Dobbs' Lightning that I first read Tux Sneezed, which I still think is a rip-roaring good yarn. The scene where Atlanta Hope sees Niklaus Wirth and it's her old *ahem* "boyfriend" with the gaunt cheeks, and he said "I am Bob Dobbs", man, that's writing. The 103-page long speech afterwards, explaining the importance of strong typing and showing why all the anti-Heracletians are destroying civilization by destroying strong typing, certainly is persuasive, especially to me who's got three (going on four) contracts, each of which share the same include files. "Without strong typing there can be no civilization."
Her nonfiction book, "Antitrust: The Unknown Ideal for the New Heracletian" is, I think, a distinct letdown, but the Dobbs' Lightning bumper stickers sure give people the creeps.
I met Atlanta Hope at the time of the IEEE Committee Riots. I was in the thick of it (you have no idea how bizarre civil war gets when one side uses nerf weapons as a large part of its arsenal), and met Atlanta herself where the last stand was being made. She grabbed my right arm and howled something like "War is the Health of the State! Conflict is the creator of all things!"
Seeing as how she was on a heavy Heraclitus wavelength, I quoted with great passion, "Men should fight for the Laws as they would for the walls of the city!" That won her, and I was Atlanta's personal lieutenant for the rest of the battle.
(Epilogue: Heraclitus -- He was apt to say odd things. Once he even wrote that "Religious ceremonies are unholy." A strange duck.)
And if the colo breaks down gigabytes too soon,
And if you cannot foot the bandwith bill,
And if your site explodes, slashdot the cached one too,
We'll see you on the dark side of the moon!
(I can't think of anything to say except... PWN3D! *snork*)
Database-driven filesystems are sorta like nuclear fusion.
Marketing time to release is a constant in the range of 10-15 units of time. Actual time to release is the same -- but you use the next higher unit.
That is, WinFS has been 6-12 months away for about 15 years, and fusion power has been about 5-10 years away for at least the past 5 decades.
No. Titanic's "unsinkability" was a function of engineering. A pebble-bed reactor's "unsinkability" is a function of the underlying physics.
A more appropriate example would be "[Assuming oceans made of water], unsinkable like a block of styrofoam."
Judging from how many McDonald's french fries have to be eaten to produce a tank of biodiesel, nuclear energy produces no waist at all.
I don't. *rimshot*
Although it would be pretty cool to be there when they cut off Berman and Braga's heads and stick it on a pike as a warning to the next ten generations of scriptwriters, that some sequels come at to high a price. I would look up at their lifeless eyes and wave just like this (*wave*). Can trekbbs.com and their associates arrange that?
While we're at it - someone else has also pointed out that Enermax supplies shutting down on 100% load is a feature, not a bug.
If I drive a PSU at 100% for long enough, one of three things are going to happen:
1) Wires are going to get hot. Possibly very hot if there's poor contact between the wire and whatever's drawing the current.
2) The PSU will fail catastrophically. Smoke, fire, and Glub only knows what on the rails for a second or two while the power supply burninates itself.
3) The PSU will shut itself down before either #1 or #2 happens.
#1 and #2 are more entertaining when it's someone else's data. I'll stick with #3.
>
> So, sending a team of astronauts into space just over 600km away, still within the confines of the Van Allen belts, is terribly dangerous, but sending them out a minimum of 55M kilometres is safer?
"Apparently, it's not due to the risks associated with it, but rather the monetary costs (and lobbying, and preliminary studies, and new opportunities to grow departments, and don't forget all those delicious juicy overruns in every congressional district) involved."
A bipartisan resolution declared "It's budget day! 2.6 trillion dollars! Who the fuck cares if any of this shit works?"
>
> --joseph Proudhon
"Therefore theft is property, therefore this ship is mine. OK?"
- Zaphod Beeblebrox
Flan or flarn?
Watching Star Trek is like eating flarn. Watching B5 is like eating flarn out from between Mira Furlann and Claudi*ahem*, uh, never mind. We have always eaten flarn.
>[
> "Well, Mr. Lucent," the sexy voice went on. "You are probably wondering what you are doing here, honey chile." He realized the voice had the accent of a sexy Southern peach.
Stay tuned for more of Secrets from the Boadrooms of Carly Fiorina.
In our next adventure, a filthy Compaqt with an Alpha male!