We were considering using Netflix, and somebody told us our library is a good free Netflix. With our property tax money (about the same as a non-optional Netflix account), our library has a great selection of movies, and our request queue can hold about 50 movies at a time, which the library will then mail to us, when it's our turn to get a movie. After we watch, we then have weeks to drop off the movie at one of the library's drop off spots, which are conveniently located all over our city. I searched our library's web site for about 50 movies I wanted to see, and they didn't have 2, which I can easily request, and become the first person to receive when the library acquires the movie. It's pretty hard for the theaters and Hollywood to compete with something that I already pay for as part of my taxes. Considering most people don't like our local government, the local library is definitely doing killer business. I would hope anybody reading this would take a few minutes to find out if their local library has a similar offerings, and make a suggestion if they don't.
Well, the early releases of Ubuntu were based on stable, but I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that they aren't anymore. Ubuntu has made enough changes to their system that haven't been passed into Debian that I don't think they use testing as a base system any more. The best way to prove that though would be to find if there were packages from stable or unstable Debian in the Ubuntu release.
The LTS is a Canonical business distinction that specifies that this version has longer patch and fix support. Regular releases are supported for 18 months from release (so they support the 3 most recent releases at a time), but the LTS is supported for 3 years, which is good for businesses which tend to be more conservative in upgrading. So in two years, besides the 3 most recent releases, HH will still be supported.
This does seem like a bad time to freeze, but the package I was thinking of is OpenOffice.org 3.0, which is scheduled for September, especially when the wait for the next Debian release (based on history) won't be until 2010. That, along with Firefox 3 would really make a great base system. I use testing, and will get OO.o 3 within a week of it being available, and I guess you've got to freeze sometime, but I think you should really look at at major packages like that when you set a date for a distro release.
Well, you wouldn't need the entire date plus an indicator following, because has there ever been two point releases on the same day? You would never see 20080716-1 and 20080716-2, they would come on different days.
I could see using a system where stable kernels have just a year and a letter and number to indicate a stable build. So 2008a00 would indicate the first stable kernel of 2008, with 00 indicating the patch level. Maybe for pre-release, you precede the letter with a dash, like 2008-a01. The only problem with either of these schemes is, when the calendar changes, does the name stick with what the calendar currently reads, or relative to when the kernel development started or was projected to end?
That doesn't give us more choice, because the choices are filtered for us by the media and the parties before most of us get a say.
We need a final election system that is made to work with multiple candidates so that there should be no reason for somebody to vote against their preferred candidate out of fear that there second (or third) preferred candidate will fail to eliminate defeat their least preferred candidate. If we have this electoral system, we could have 5 or six candidates from each party and another dozen from other parties or as independents.
After that, if we still decide we want a primary system, it needs to be a party-less primary, so that nobody is eliminated from contention without the say-so of the entire electorate. The only purpose of the primary should weed out individuals that the majority of the electorate consider clearly out of the running.
This would eliminate the current one side against the other conflict that we have. All candidates would struggle to appeal to the broad middle, by trying to piece together policies that appeal to all people instead of one half of the country or the other, who may only be interested in a couple of issues of one party or the other.
If done for the members of Congress, you could also end up with 3-5 parties who each have different focuses on different issues. The members of each party would then examine the issues out of their focus, and side with or against a party that had a focus on that issue, and make for a much more fluid Congress. For instance, there might be a party that focuses just on adhering the Constitution and strict adherence to it, which might side with the Republicans on certain issues and with the Democrats on others. You might have a party that only focuses on issues concerning parents (education, crime) and another that focuses on elderly issues (medical expenses, Social Security, etc.).
This would reduce the venom in our public discourse, because some popular policies that are currently blocked by our current 50-50 split would probably find more support if there were more than just two parties, who sometimes take a bad policy stance just to keep a minority happy.
Unfortunately, we'll probably never get it approved, because the electorate doesn't understand the need, and the parties in power won't want it.
How ridiculous is it that the judges he would (will?) appoint should he get in office will vote opposite of the stances he took on 2 of the big 5-4 court cases in the last few weeks:
Second Amendment: He supported the SCOTUS decision that gun ownership is an individual right, after he opposed it. Any judge he appoints would probably lean Democrat, and vote against his statement in support of the conservative decision.
Death Penalty for Child Molesters: He supported the death penalty legislation, but Democrats are against it, as the 4 judges he supports sided with Kennedy to prevent the death penalty in this case.
They don't have to be worse intellectually (that is more of a moron) to be worse rulers. Bush might not be the brightest fellow, but at least he's not an economic liberal.
The Democrats had power in Congress non-stop from the 1930s through 1980, and look where the economy ended up by the late 1970s. People seem to think it's bad now, but inflation, interest rates, and unemployment were all sky high 30 years ago with Carter. Obama was rated the most liberal Senator last year, and he's going to try to bring back many of the failed policies of the 1970s.
I never much liked Bush, but he was a much better choice than Gore or Kerry, and I'd probably take him over Obama. The real problem is that we have a two party system where no candidate can appeal to the broad middle of the country, but instead candidates have to appeal to the base to have a shot at the general election.
They won't care since there is nothing in the bible about gravity, while the creation stories at the start of the bible are being interpreted literally as science.
The reason creationism is a big deal is Fundamentalists believe every word of the Bible is literally true. This is because during the Protestant Reformation, Luther had to reject the authority of the Catholic Church, so he said the bible is the ultimate authority on Christianity instead of the Catholic bishops. Now, different Protestants interpret that differently, and the Fundamentalists interpret it to mean that every word is literally true unless somebody was speaking metaphorically. The only way you will ever prove to a Fundamentalist (unless they realize it themselves) that they are wrong is to develop a time machine, take them back in time, and show them that the earth is far older than the bible.
I read a story once about a biology professor that had a bible believing Christian in his class who made a comment about men having fewer ribs than women because God made Eve from a rib of Adam, to which he told her to go count the ribs on the male and female skeletons in his classroom. The story didn't relate if the woman changed her view, or if she realized that a parent losing a body part has no effect on the wholeness of the children, and so the truth of Creationism or Evolution couldn't be proven by the number of ribs that men and women have.
How Fundamentalists get around the fact that in the bible, the sky was blue because it was a dome keeping out the water above the sky (water is the same color as the sky, so it must be water too, right?), which God opened so more water could come in and cause the flood.
Except the Catholic Church doesn't consider sex dirty or evil. Certain sexual practices, and who you do it with might be evil, but sex as practiced between a married man and woman is not evil, but sacred.
The fact of the matter is that some priests are sick individuals who are previously inclined to this sort of action, and choose to become priests because not getting married isn't a sacrifice to them, and this inclination wasn't discovered during their formation (training).
Isn't menopause related to the finite number of eggs that a woman has in her ovaries. As much as I dislike the thought, I suppose it would become SOP to have eggs removed while young, and then replace them later, or use IVF.
I think the much more interesting question is the level of health. Will athletes be able to have longer careers, or will they decline, like now, through their 30s and early 40s and retire at similar ages as now? Will these treatments be banned by sports leagues for similar reasons as the current HGH scandal with baseball? This would of course relate to the health of the general population, so will I be able to do at 80 what I currently can do at 30, or will old age last a century for those who live to be 160?
It's not wealth, it's self-determination. If your priority is being free from the dictates of others, there is nothing stopping anybody. There are plenty of places that you can buy a plot of land to call your own for a reasonable price. It's all about priorities and and choices.
Well, I don't know if you are aware, but if Christianity is true, then we all have an immortal soul, and all deemed worthy by God will have eternal (immortal) life with a resurrected body.
I think, technically by the rules of dns name resolution, there is supposed to be a . after the TLD, but it is ignored by the software we use (so, when your browser requests a dns resolution, it automatically adds a . at the end). So slashdot should be http://slashdot.org./ (Click on it and see and see what happens), which means the slashdot could be http://slash./ (that is, it would be it's own TLD).
While impressive, all the DARPA computers do is run some calculations. They are more complicated versions of the robots that the car companies have working on a factory floor.
That's not AI though, just a sophisticated computer program. Real Intelligence can change the parameters of a problem, or disregard the output if it decides. If the problem has unknown information, Intelligence can guess or figure out a way around the problem. Intelligence can also recognize what can't be done, and develop a procedure or modules to do something new. We do this all the time, AI is nowhere close to being able to accomplish this. In short, a true AI should be able to do something that it wasn't programmed to do. Perhaps the car AI could figure out how to play chess with it's spare CPU cycles?
Frankly, I don't want AI, at least not ones with an emotional component like the Star Wars droids, but I wonder if the ability to have intelligence without emotion is possible, because curiosity and other emotions seem to be significant drivers of intelligence. If it is possible to have an emotionless AI that can be given a request like, "Find me 2 dozen companies that are 90% likely to triple in price the next 5 years," I would find that interesting, but I think it's still decades away from being reality.
AdBlock Plus and NoScript are already updated and working on RC2. I'd like to get Tab Mix Plus, but other than that many of the more popular ones are already up to date.
Why was ridership low? Because it was too expensive? Too slow? Too inconvenient?
If this becomes active, there will be three ways to travel this route for most people, auto, plane, or maglev. People are going to make the decision based on different priorities, but if this is faster than the two alternatives (taking into account waiting to board both the maglev and plane, and convenience to the station/airport), and is cheaper than the alternatives, and has an environmental positive on top of that, it could become the preferred mode of transport. I think what could really help would be that you could essentially make the train long enough to carry 20 times as many people as a single plane and still only have to pay for one crew to actually run the plane. Of course, you have to have enough passengers that administrative overhead doesn't kill your ticket prices.
I hope it succeeds, but I won't be holding my breath.
Don't forget that the earliest settlers of the colonies that became the U.S. were fleeing British religious persecution. There has always been a core of us vs. them between different religions in the U.S. economically, politically, where people live, etc.
It still has meaning for modern politics because every voter has core issues they vote for, and many vote the way they do for religious reasons, and every candidate, in taking the stances they do is trying to cobble a 50%+1 majority by taking the right positions to get enough votes. Over the next six months, we'll see all sorts of slicing and dicing of all sorts of demographics as politicians, statisticians, and the media try to figure out what is going to happen and try to sway the vote. We'll see references to voters' (and politicians) age, race (even if Hillary became the nominee, this would still be the case), religion, background, lifestyle. This allows the candidates to focus there efforts by simplifying the message down to an us vs. them on a dozen issues, and then energizing the people on their side to go vote.
I just did a search, and there was speculation about having a Catholic choosing bishops for the Church of England that would get many British upset. Also, a Catholic fiance of a member of the British royalty had to convert out of the Catholic Church before she could marry, presumably to keep her future husband from losing his place in the line to the throne, so there's still a bit of anti-Catholicism in British politics, although I've previously read speculation that Diana and Elizabeth had both been seeking out Catholic priests for spiritual counseling.
Of course you don't shoot the antimatter in open air. You shoot it in a containment shell (vacuum with some sort (Magnetic?) of isolation field). The detonator turns off the containment field and the anti-matter annihilates the matter of the containment shell. The difficult part would be maintaining power for the containment field. One little glitch in the power and you'll have a chain reaction, that could probably hit every other shell nearby creating a nasty super explosion that could make the H-bomb look tame.
The modern Galactica started as a mini-series for NBC. I don't know how much of the work was done by SciFi employees helping NBC out (since NBC and SciFi are both part of NBC Universal), or if this was all put together by NBC people and SciFi just managed to hold it all together during the transition.
Unfortunately, the only programing worth watching on SciFi other than Galactica are A-list movies that they've bought the rights to air.
If you make the penalties sufficiently harsh for the severity of the crime, and can prosecute the organization and individuals involved, and reduce the number of appeals so the company can't expect to indefinitely delay their punishment, the two responsibilities will align, because lawbreaking would become unprofitable. I'm all for due process, but the appeals system is abused to no end because it's like a whole second chance. More appeals judges need to dismiss frivolous appeals with an increase in penalties so the only appeals will be truly questionable decisions.
The big government/small government really has to do with certain government agencies.
Military, law enforcement, IRS are all things that the the government has to have to protect the citizens and pay the bills. Both parties are in favor of having all of these things, since anarchy or foreign invasion would result if we didn't have these.
The big/small government argument has to do with (optional?) social programs such as Social Security, Welfare, Medicare, Medicaid, things that have mostly been added since the Great Depression during the Democrat's run of dominance from FDR until Nixon took over from Johnson. These are all Democrat programs, voted in (I think) between the start of the Depression and the start of the Nixon administration. The Republican argument against these (when passed) is they are largely wealth redistribution programs that take money from one person to give to another who hasn't done anything of value for the first. The new drug benefit defies reason since it was passed by the Republicans.
I have a Toshiba DVR/DVD recorder. Flagged programs can be recorded and watched, but cannot be burned to DVD.
Of course, this device will not copy programs from commercial DVDs to the machine. I tried to play from another DVD to this machine and it wouldn't record that way either (I was hoping to make DVD backups that could cut the time to start the movie from minutes to seconds).
sfsite.com has a yearly list of books to read for both SF (SciFi) and FF (Fantasty) at http://www.sfsite.com/yearsbest01.htm They also have Industry wide lists, reviews of new releases, interviews, lists of each author's books and a lot more info, but all you really need to get started is the best of the year lists.
I compared the books on the lists to what was available at my local libary and developed a reading list. Here are something things I'm looking to read the next few years (look on wikipedia for the names of individual books in the Hamilton and Reynolds series):
Hamilton, Peter: Night's Dawn Trilogy Reynolds, Alastair: Revelation Space Scalzi, John: Old Man's War; The Ghost Brigades; The Last Colony Sean McMullen: Souls in the Great Machine; The Miocene Arrow; Eyes of the Calculor
Slashdot Mirror
We were considering using Netflix, and somebody told us our library is a good free Netflix. With our property tax money (about the same as a non-optional Netflix account), our library has a great selection of movies, and our request queue can hold about 50 movies at a time, which the library will then mail to us, when it's our turn to get a movie. After we watch, we then have weeks to drop off the movie at one of the library's drop off spots, which are conveniently located all over our city. I searched our library's web site for about 50 movies I wanted to see, and they didn't have 2, which I can easily request, and become the first person to receive when the library acquires the movie. It's pretty hard for the theaters and Hollywood to compete with something that I already pay for as part of my taxes. Considering most people don't like our local government, the local library is definitely doing killer business. I would hope anybody reading this would take a few minutes to find out if their local library has a similar offerings, and make a suggestion if they don't.
Well, the early releases of Ubuntu were based on stable, but I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that they aren't anymore. Ubuntu has made enough changes to their system that haven't been passed into Debian that I don't think they use testing as a base system any more. The best way to prove that though would be to find if there were packages from stable or unstable Debian in the Ubuntu release.
The LTS is a Canonical business distinction that specifies that this version has longer patch and fix support. Regular releases are supported for 18 months from release (so they support the 3 most recent releases at a time), but the LTS is supported for 3 years, which is good for businesses which tend to be more conservative in upgrading. So in two years, besides the 3 most recent releases, HH will still be supported.
This does seem like a bad time to freeze, but the package I was thinking of is OpenOffice.org 3.0, which is scheduled for September, especially when the wait for the next Debian release (based on history) won't be until 2010. That, along with Firefox 3 would really make a great base system. I use testing, and will get OO.o 3 within a week of it being available, and I guess you've got to freeze sometime, but I think you should really look at at major packages like that when you set a date for a distro release.
Well, you wouldn't need the entire date plus an indicator following, because has there ever been two point releases on the same day? You would never see 20080716-1 and 20080716-2, they would come on different days.
I could see using a system where stable kernels have just a year and a letter and number to indicate a stable build. So 2008a00 would indicate the first stable kernel of 2008, with 00 indicating the patch level. Maybe for pre-release, you precede the letter with a dash, like 2008-a01. The only problem with either of these schemes is, when the calendar changes, does the name stick with what the calendar currently reads, or relative to when the kernel development started or was projected to end?
That doesn't give us more choice, because the choices are filtered for us by the media and the parties before most of us get a say.
We need a final election system that is made to work with multiple candidates so that there should be no reason for somebody to vote against their preferred candidate out of fear that there second (or third) preferred candidate will fail to eliminate defeat their least preferred candidate. If we have this electoral system, we could have 5 or six candidates from each party and another dozen from other parties or as independents.
After that, if we still decide we want a primary system, it needs to be a party-less primary, so that nobody is eliminated from contention without the say-so of the entire electorate. The only purpose of the primary should weed out individuals that the majority of the electorate consider clearly out of the running.
This would eliminate the current one side against the other conflict that we have. All candidates would struggle to appeal to the broad middle, by trying to piece together policies that appeal to all people instead of one half of the country or the other, who may only be interested in a couple of issues of one party or the other.
If done for the members of Congress, you could also end up with 3-5 parties who each have different focuses on different issues. The members of each party would then examine the issues out of their focus, and side with or against a party that had a focus on that issue, and make for a much more fluid Congress. For instance, there might be a party that focuses just on adhering the Constitution and strict adherence to it, which might side with the Republicans on certain issues and with the Democrats on others. You might have a party that only focuses on issues concerning parents (education, crime) and another that focuses on elderly issues (medical expenses, Social Security, etc.).
This would reduce the venom in our public discourse, because some popular policies that are currently blocked by our current 50-50 split would probably find more support if there were more than just two parties, who sometimes take a bad policy stance just to keep a minority happy.
Unfortunately, we'll probably never get it approved, because the electorate doesn't understand the need, and the parties in power won't want it.
How ridiculous is it that the judges he would (will?) appoint should he get in office will vote opposite of the stances he took on 2 of the big 5-4 court cases in the last few weeks:
Second Amendment: He supported the SCOTUS decision that gun ownership is an individual right, after he opposed it. Any judge he appoints would probably lean Democrat, and vote against his statement in support of the conservative decision.
Death Penalty for Child Molesters: He supported the death penalty legislation, but Democrats are against it, as the 4 judges he supports sided with Kennedy to prevent the death penalty in this case.
They don't have to be worse intellectually (that is more of a moron) to be worse rulers. Bush might not be the brightest fellow, but at least he's not an economic liberal.
The Democrats had power in Congress non-stop from the 1930s through 1980, and look where the economy ended up by the late 1970s. People seem to think it's bad now, but inflation, interest rates, and unemployment were all sky high 30 years ago with Carter. Obama was rated the most liberal Senator last year, and he's going to try to bring back many of the failed policies of the 1970s.
I never much liked Bush, but he was a much better choice than Gore or Kerry, and I'd probably take him over Obama. The real problem is that we have a two party system where no candidate can appeal to the broad middle of the country, but instead candidates have to appeal to the base to have a shot at the general election.
They won't care since there is nothing in the bible about gravity, while the creation stories at the start of the bible are being interpreted literally as science.
The reason creationism is a big deal is Fundamentalists believe every word of the Bible is literally true. This is because during the Protestant Reformation, Luther had to reject the authority of the Catholic Church, so he said the bible is the ultimate authority on Christianity instead of the Catholic bishops. Now, different Protestants interpret that differently, and the Fundamentalists interpret it to mean that every word is literally true unless somebody was speaking metaphorically. The only way you will ever prove to a Fundamentalist (unless they realize it themselves) that they are wrong is to develop a time machine, take them back in time, and show them that the earth is far older than the bible.
I read a story once about a biology professor that had a bible believing Christian in his class who made a comment about men having fewer ribs than women because God made Eve from a rib of Adam, to which he told her to go count the ribs on the male and female skeletons in his classroom. The story didn't relate if the woman changed her view, or if she realized that a parent losing a body part has no effect on the wholeness of the children, and so the truth of Creationism or Evolution couldn't be proven by the number of ribs that men and women have.
How Fundamentalists get around the fact that in the bible, the sky was blue because it was a dome keeping out the water above the sky (water is the same color as the sky, so it must be water too, right?), which God opened so more water could come in and cause the flood.
Except the Catholic Church doesn't consider sex dirty or evil. Certain sexual practices, and who you do it with might be evil, but sex as practiced between a married man and woman is not evil, but sacred.
The fact of the matter is that some priests are sick individuals who are previously inclined to this sort of action, and choose to become priests because not getting married isn't a sacrifice to them, and this inclination wasn't discovered during their formation (training).
Isn't menopause related to the finite number of eggs that a woman has in her ovaries. As much as I dislike the thought, I suppose it would become SOP to have eggs removed while young, and then replace them later, or use IVF.
I think the much more interesting question is the level of health. Will athletes be able to have longer careers, or will they decline, like now, through their 30s and early 40s and retire at similar ages as now? Will these treatments be banned by sports leagues for similar reasons as the current HGH scandal with baseball? This would of course relate to the health of the general population, so will I be able to do at 80 what I currently can do at 30, or will old age last a century for those who live to be 160?
It's not wealth, it's self-determination. If your priority is being free from the dictates of others, there is nothing stopping anybody. There are plenty of places that you can buy a plot of land to call your own for a reasonable price. It's all about priorities and and choices.
Well, I don't know if you are aware, but if Christianity is true, then we all have an immortal soul, and all deemed worthy by God will have eternal (immortal) life with a resurrected body.
I think, technically by the rules of dns name resolution, there is supposed to be a . after the TLD, but it is ignored by the software we use (so, when your browser requests a dns resolution, it automatically adds a . at the end). So slashdot should be http://slashdot.org./ (Click on it and see and see what happens), which means the slashdot could be http://slash./ (that is, it would be it's own TLD).
While impressive, all the DARPA computers do is run some calculations. They are more complicated versions of the robots that the car companies have working on a factory floor.
That's not AI though, just a sophisticated computer program. Real Intelligence can change the parameters of a problem, or disregard the output if it decides. If the problem has unknown information, Intelligence can guess or figure out a way around the problem. Intelligence can also recognize what can't be done, and develop a procedure or modules to do something new. We do this all the time, AI is nowhere close to being able to accomplish this. In short, a true AI should be able to do something that it wasn't programmed to do. Perhaps the car AI could figure out how to play chess with it's spare CPU cycles?
Frankly, I don't want AI, at least not ones with an emotional component like the Star Wars droids, but I wonder if the ability to have intelligence without emotion is possible, because curiosity and other emotions seem to be significant drivers of intelligence. If it is possible to have an emotionless AI that can be given a request like, "Find me 2 dozen companies that are 90% likely to triple in price the next 5 years," I would find that interesting, but I think it's still decades away from being reality.
AdBlock Plus and NoScript are already updated and working on RC2. I'd like to get Tab Mix Plus, but other than that many of the more popular ones are already up to date.
How about mandatory fingerprints just for working in real estate?
Why was ridership low? Because it was too expensive? Too slow? Too inconvenient?
If this becomes active, there will be three ways to travel this route for most people, auto, plane, or maglev. People are going to make the decision based on different priorities, but if this is faster than the two alternatives (taking into account waiting to board both the maglev and plane, and convenience to the station/airport), and is cheaper than the alternatives, and has an environmental positive on top of that, it could become the preferred mode of transport. I think what could really help would be that you could essentially make the train long enough to carry 20 times as many people as a single plane and still only have to pay for one crew to actually run the plane. Of course, you have to have enough passengers that administrative overhead doesn't kill your ticket prices.
I hope it succeeds, but I won't be holding my breath.
Don't forget that the earliest settlers of the colonies that became the U.S. were fleeing British religious persecution. There has always been a core of us vs. them between different religions in the U.S. economically, politically, where people live, etc.
It still has meaning for modern politics because every voter has core issues they vote for, and many vote the way they do for religious reasons, and every candidate, in taking the stances they do is trying to cobble a 50%+1 majority by taking the right positions to get enough votes. Over the next six months, we'll see all sorts of slicing and dicing of all sorts of demographics as politicians, statisticians, and the media try to figure out what is going to happen and try to sway the vote. We'll see references to voters' (and politicians) age, race (even if Hillary became the nominee, this would still be the case), religion, background, lifestyle. This allows the candidates to focus there efforts by simplifying the message down to an us vs. them on a dozen issues, and then energizing the people on their side to go vote.
I just did a search, and there was speculation about having a Catholic choosing bishops for the Church of England that would get many British upset. Also, a Catholic fiance of a member of the British royalty had to convert out of the Catholic Church before she could marry, presumably to keep her future husband from losing his place in the line to the throne, so there's still a bit of anti-Catholicism in British politics, although I've previously read speculation that Diana and Elizabeth had both been seeking out Catholic priests for spiritual counseling.
Of course you don't shoot the antimatter in open air. You shoot it in a containment shell (vacuum with some sort (Magnetic?) of isolation field). The detonator turns off the containment field and the anti-matter annihilates the matter of the containment shell. The difficult part would be maintaining power for the containment field. One little glitch in the power and you'll have a chain reaction, that could probably hit every other shell nearby creating a nasty super explosion that could make the H-bomb look tame.
The modern Galactica started as a mini-series for NBC. I don't know how much of the work was done by SciFi employees helping NBC out (since NBC and SciFi are both part of NBC Universal), or if this was all put together by NBC people and SciFi just managed to hold it all together during the transition.
Unfortunately, the only programing worth watching on SciFi other than Galactica are A-list movies that they've bought the rights to air.
If you make the penalties sufficiently harsh for the severity of the crime, and can prosecute the organization and individuals involved, and reduce the number of appeals so the company can't expect to indefinitely delay their punishment, the two responsibilities will align, because lawbreaking would become unprofitable. I'm all for due process, but the appeals system is abused to no end because it's like a whole second chance. More appeals judges need to dismiss frivolous appeals with an increase in penalties so the only appeals will be truly questionable decisions.
The big government/small government really has to do with certain government agencies.
Military, law enforcement, IRS are all things that the the government has to have to protect the citizens and pay the bills. Both parties are in favor of having all of these things, since anarchy or foreign invasion would result if we didn't have these.
The big/small government argument has to do with (optional?) social programs such as Social Security, Welfare, Medicare, Medicaid, things that have mostly been added since the Great Depression during the Democrat's run of dominance from FDR until Nixon took over from Johnson. These are all Democrat programs, voted in (I think) between the start of the Depression and the start of the Nixon administration. The Republican argument against these (when passed) is they are largely wealth redistribution programs that take money from one person to give to another who hasn't done anything of value for the first. The new drug benefit defies reason since it was passed by the Republicans.
I have a Toshiba DVR/DVD recorder. Flagged programs can be recorded and watched, but cannot be burned to DVD.
Of course, this device will not copy programs from commercial DVDs to the machine. I tried to play from another DVD to this machine and it wouldn't record that way either (I was hoping to make DVD backups that could cut the time to start the movie from minutes to seconds).
sfsite.com has a yearly list of books to read for both SF (SciFi) and FF (Fantasty) at http://www.sfsite.com/yearsbest01.htm They also have Industry wide lists, reviews of new releases, interviews, lists of each author's books and a lot more info, but all you really need to get started is the best of the year lists.
I compared the books on the lists to what was available at my local libary and developed a reading list. Here are something things I'm looking to read the next few years (look on wikipedia for the names of individual books in the Hamilton and Reynolds series):
Hamilton, Peter: Night's Dawn Trilogy
Reynolds, Alastair: Revelation Space
Scalzi, John: Old Man's War; The Ghost Brigades; The Last Colony
Sean McMullen: Souls in the Great Machine; The Miocene Arrow; Eyes of the Calculor