That's me standing at the bottom of the tower that leads to the crows nest, and yes I did climb it, the wireless CAT5e cable runs all the way up to the top for maximum range.
I love that wireless Cat5e! It's almost as good as wireless Cat6!
When I tell women that I'm a mathematician, they give me an obligatory "ooh" or something along like that before starting to tell me about how much they suck at math or hate math or didn't understand math. That's pretty much where the conversation ends.
Yes, all women! Even the ones who are into math! Oh, wait.
But stereotyping aside: you should read this node. I particularly like the assertion that being "bad at math" is fine, but claiming to be illiterate just gets you blank stares (and, fifty years ago, no ballot!)
Righto. Where's that paperless office we were promised? Once we have a paperless office, and flying cars, then I might believe there's a chance of email being obsoleted.
There is a winner: the consumer. The breakup of such an anticompetitive relationship is an example of the "invisible hand" of the marketplace restoring free-market capitalism to where it belongs. The end result is that prices and amount of items sold both move toward an equilibrium established by what people are willing to pay and what suppliers and stores are willing to charge.
That's the big picture. It's nice to see a market that isn't so dominated by monopolies (yet: Wal-Mart is scary) acting in jerky but understandable ways.
My Hotmail account still only has 2MB of storage - and every time I leave it alone for more than two days, it fills up with spam. I checked the site pretty carefully for any expansion offers, but it looks like either the poster lied or was one of a select few to get an offer that's unavailable (for free).
They kind of had to. You see, the code that was stolen composed most of the core of the game; and they had to find and arrest the thief so they could get their code back. Only once the stolen property is returned to its owner can the development continue.
I don't claim to know anything about biology - at least, nothing more than I learned in an AP class some three years ago.
And nobody on Slashdot knows from these brief summaries the full story behind the case. For instance, when the police say they think bacteria have nothing to do with the death, are they only saying that because they're legally compelled not to accuse someone? Or do they really think that bioterror is an essentially implausible option and this fellow is just an activist a little too extreme to let slide? (His emotional state re: having a wife suddenly die is, apparently, not terribly important especially if he might have done it.)
Still, from the summaries alone - and this is a big caveat - the bioterror thing strikes me as a very familiar kind of alarmist angle used and supported by people that don't know any better. It's the kind of attitude that kept Kevin Mitnick (according to John Markoff of the New York Times an FBI Most Wanted List star, although he can't prove it) in solitary confinement for some eight months. Otherwise, a judge was convinced, he might start global thermonuclear war by whistling at NORAD through a payphone.
In the war against terrorism (can you wage war on a method?), letting our own ignorance make us deathly afraid of one another is tantamount to conceding defeat.
Slightly offtopic but coincides with this thread: that was (as we could guess) a hoax. Ix-nay on the +4 formative-innay. Viral marketing like the "Beta-7.com" campaign is SO FSCKING ANNOYING.
You can picture these balding, gray-suited marketing executives sitting around the Table of the Round going "hey! having an Internet site about our product will make people buy it!". In fact all they manage to do is remind us that nothing you read on the Interweb is trustworthy - which is a fine postmodernist lesson - but I don't appreciate being treated as a commodity.
Like the/. sig says, we're citizens, not consumers, and I'm a little disappointed that people would reward such a company for finely polished attempts at mind control like the ones it satirized by buying into their product.
Was there a huge uproar when the Act was introduced?
Well, yes and no. 26 October 2001 was the day President Bush signed the PATRIOT Act into law, and as the poster above has mentioned it followed the anthrax scare that began around 4 October 2001 (not to mention the 11 September World Trade Center attacks), used by Bush to political advantage in his signatory speech:
The changes, effective today, will help counter a threat like no other our nation has ever faced. We've seen the enemy, and the murder of thousands of innocent, unsuspecting people. They recognize no barrier of morality. They have no conscience. The terrorists cannot be reasoned with. Witness the recent anthrax attacks through our Postal Service.
Our country is grateful for the courage the Postal Service has shown during these difficult times. We mourn the loss of the lives of Thomas Morris and Joseph Curseen; postal workers who died in the line of duty. And our prayers go to their loved ones.
I want to assure postal workers that our government is testing more than 200 postal facilities along the entire Eastern corridor that may have been impacted. And we will move quickly to treat and protect workers where positive exposures are found.
But one thing is for certain: These terrorists must be pursued, they must be defeated, and they must be brought to justice. (Applause.) And that is the purpose of this legislation. Since the 11th of September, the men and women of our intelligence and law enforcement agencies have been relentless in their response to new and sudden challenges.
We have seen the horrors terrorists can inflict.
Most disturbing is that most supporters of the PATRIOT Act accept the possibility that it might infringe (it does) on citizens' liberties with the reasoning that the government will only go after terrorists who don't deserve rights anyway; that FBI agents will only issue writs - erm, letters - of "national security" (one-page forms that require a court clerk to okay a warrant to search someone's home or workplace and that issue a gag order so that no one can tell the target they've been searched) against terrorists; that the government is never wrong; and that, after all, even if they do monitor people's Internet traffic, they'll only do it to the real threats (which in this case might mean "people conversing in Arabic on the Internet").
The reason there's little opposition from some quarters is that most people think the Act doesn't affect them much; others' civil liberties simply don't come into consideration, particularly when those others constitute a significant minority of the population (say, Arab-Americans, hundreds of whom under provisions of the PATRIOT Act have been detained without access to legal counsel or their families or the outside world for up to a year and released with no remuneration except a "sorry about that" letter from the State Department; and nobody-knows-how-many more of whom remain incarcerated indefinitely). Our legislative system is one where fifty-one percent can pass a bill. (Well, it might possibly require more than that in the Senate because of filibusters and cloture votes and the possibility of Presidential veto - but we definitely operate on a majority rather than a unanimity system for reasons of expediency.) The effect is that the inalienable rights of a minority can be, well, alienated by even a well-intentioned majority only seeking to preserve its own interests.
The fact that you haven't seen much public outcry about the PATRIOT Act (notwithstanding the hundreds of villages and townships that have passed resolutions at least symbolically refusing to cooperate with its provisions, and ignoring the national tour that John Ashcroft had to make - abandoning his duties as Attorney General for a PR campaign - to try to boost the Act) means that many people simply don't care bec
Hey, I heard a worm variant was released that attacks www.sco.com!
Linux hackers hateSCO; we all know that.
Come on, people! Read between the lines. The Linux hackers are being just as bad criminals as the people they seek. The aforementioned entities have a hard time already being on the moral side, and this just makes it worse.
Now I understand why people get frustrated with people talking loudly on cell phones, so the better question is, why haven't the mic's improved?
The microphones on most modern phones work perfectly fine if you speak into them it a conversational level or even below what you'd normally use. They adjust to too-loud shouting, or you adjust by moving your ear away from the phone at the other end or by turning your own phone's volume down so low that they have to shout to be heard in future calls. In the latter case it's a self-reinforcing feedback loop: stupid, inconsiderate phone behavior produces more of the same.
I would challenge the moderators of the above comment to explain what could possibly constitute "flamebait". The lack of technical specifications for this vehicle might be explained by the fact that it's an enormous practical joke - a little late for April Fool's, perhaps, but a joke nonetheless.
Consider that from the above linked article and personal experience, in Japan anime is cartoons. The best anime - Akira might be up there - is still a cartoon movie and not of a genre which is overall taken seriously. Compare the American popular success of Scooby Doo 2 to any serious animated work and it becomes clear that just like in America, anime is not revered by the Japanese people, the expected consumers of the linked "product".
You might be able to buy a giant tree house or a Space Ghost desk and chair or an Ed, Edd, n Eddy gumball machine if you have enough money to burn in America, but no rational person does this because these are more important things to spend one's money on - like, say, anything but cartoon accessories. No rational adult would buy a Hello Kitty motorcycle.
In this regard, anyone who takes anime seriously is disregarding and disrespecting the Japanese attitude towards the media and, in effect, displaying a bizarrely childlike fixation on things that are neither very deep nor very significant.
One could argue that perhaps vehicle enthusiasts (car, bicycle, or motorcycle) are pursuing blindly a childlike desire to drive. Culturally speaking, though, there is a precedent for this fascination with the vehicle, and to demean people who are truly interested in the mechanics of their motorcycle (as opposed to, say, buying a Harley because it looks cool) is by corollary to demean people who are truly interested in how their computer works (as opposed to, say, buying an Alienware PC because it looks cool).
If the above comment was moderated down because the linked article challenges your notion of what does and doesn't constitute fine art and demand great respect in Japanese culture - well, it took me by surprise too. Educating yourself is an integral component of developing a meaningful cultural awareness; the lack of such a competent understanding is certainly a foundation of the anti-American sentiment with which some three hundred million US citizens (Slashdot is US-centric:/) must cope. Rather than blithe submission to Japanophilia, consider that this motorcycle is either an elaborate prank or a supreme waste of money on a puerile object.
Dude, it's a bike that replicates something people saw in a cartoon. It's for overgrown adult-children; there isn't a lot of crossover with the hardcore motorcycling community.
Agreed re: 1) and 5). I'm trying to find a way to say tactfully and nontrollfully that there's a bizarre element of doublethink going on here.
Slashdot posts about one "gee, that's a silly patent" story per week. There's usually a good mix (I read at +4, +3 for that brief time that the server was too slow to hand out enough mod points) of comments saying "the patent isn't so broad as the submitter made it out, and really this is perfectly legitimate" or "I know how to make money! I'll patent the use of cookies as incentives...in a porable media player!" or "This is another example of why the patent system is seriously messed up and needs to be reformed" or "I found prior art!" or "This patent is frivolous because algorithms are copyrightable speech, not patentable inventions" or "This patent is utter nonsense because it's common sense" or something else.
This time reading at +3/4 I see only vocal supporters of Apple. After reading the list of claims that seem pretty broad on something kind of intuitive - reading an MP3 file...on a portable media player! And correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't these claims cumulative rather than limiting? That's quite a lot to assert.
It seems like for whatever reason Apple gets the benefit of the doubt a lot more often than other companies; I'm not sure why. Every corporation seeks to maximize its profits.
Re:But the point is...?
on
Melting Europa
·
· Score: 2, Funny
landing a spacecraft on Europa, where we have little knowledge of its atmospheric conditions, will be a formidable challenge.
Like killer aliens terraforming the universe? I swear those eggheads can't read:
ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE USE THEM TOGETHER USE THEM IN PEACE
If it's an especially popular film, it might show up on the weekly/monthly Google Zeitgeist. An aggressive marketing campaign, even targetted at people who use Google, probably wouldn't stand much of a chance, though; archived data shows that people's interests are rather pop-culturey (cf. Sex and the City near its final episode) or holiday-based ("love poems" in week ending Feb. 16).
Is that the answer you were looking for?
(And no, on a personal note, I don't think people will buy it at all. There's now a whole genre of sites that look real and act real but are really stupid movie promotions. (not that I can find any of them now) Also, Will Smith is not quite so convincing as Orson Welles.
Right on, brother. Slashdot herself has offered proof of this hypothesis.
It amazes me that so many allegedly "educated" people have fallen so quickly and so hard for a fraudulent fabrication of such laughable proportions. The very idea that a gigantic ball of rock happens to orbit our planet, showing itself in neat, four-week cycles -- with the same side facing us all the time -- is ludicrous. Furthermore, it is an insult to common sense and a damnable affront to intellectual honesty and integrity. That people actually believe it is evidence that the liberals have wrested the last vestiges of control of our public school system from decent, God-fearing Americans (as if any further evidence was needed! Daddy's Roommate? God Almighty!)
Documentaries such as Enemy of the State have accurately portrayed the elaborate, byzantine network of surveillance satellites that the liberals have sent into space to spy on law-abiding Americans. Equipped with technology developed by Handgun Control, Inc., these satellites have the ability to detect firearms from hundreds of kilometers up. That's right, neighbors.. the next time you're out in the backyard exercising your Second Amendment rights, the liberals will see it! These satellites are sensitive enough to tell the difference between a Colt.45 and a.38 Special! And when they detect you with a firearm, their computers cross-reference the address to figure out your name, and then an enormous database housed at Berkeley is updated with information about you.
Of course, this all works fine during the day, but what about at night? Even the liberals can't control the rotation of the Earth to prevent nightfall from setting in (only Joshua was able to ask for that particular favor!) That's where the "moon" comes in. Powered by nuclear reactors, the "moon" is nothing more than an enormous balloon, emitting trillions of candlepower of gun-revealing light. Piloted by key members of the liberal community, the "moon" is strategically moved across the country, pointing out those who dare to make use of their God-given rights at night!
Yes, I know this probably sounds paranoid and preposterous, but consider this. Despite what the revisionist historians tell you, there is no mention of the "moon" anywhere in literature or historical documents -- anywhere -- before 1950. That is when it was initially launched. When President Josef Kennedy, at the State of the Union address, proclaimed "We choose to go to the moon", he may as well have said "We choose to go to the weather balloon." The subsequent faking of a "moon" landing on national TV was the first step in a long history of the erosion of our constitutional rights by leftists in this country. No longer can we hide from our government when the sun goes down.
It's a common misconception that "haiku" means "5-7-5". This misconception is readilycleared up - see the second paragraph of the Wikipedia article in particular for a discussion, or the "How do you write a haiku?" part of the e2 writeup, which goes into detail in the distiction between Japanese haiku and English haiku and describes the innumerable subtle variations of the form.
That said, one of the best English haiku ever kind of abuses the system:
I told her and she
Was like, "oh, my god," and I
Was like, "oh, my god."
Slashdot Mirror
get a life, addicts
That's me standing at the bottom of the tower that leads to the crows nest, and yes I did climb it, the wireless CAT5e cable runs all the way up to the top for maximum range.
I love that wireless Cat5e! It's almost as good as wireless Cat6!
When I tell women that I'm a mathematician, they give me an obligatory "ooh" or something along like that before starting to tell me about how much they suck at math or hate math or didn't understand math. That's pretty much where the conversation ends.
Yes, all women! Even the ones who are into math! Oh, wait.
But stereotyping aside: you should read this node. I particularly like the assertion that being "bad at math" is fine, but claiming to be illiterate just gets you blank stares (and, fifty years ago, no ballot!)
Righto. Where's that paperless office we were promised? Once we have a paperless office, and flying cars, then I might believe there's a chance of email being obsoleted.
But it's no gopher.
There is a winner: the consumer. The breakup of such an anticompetitive relationship is an example of the "invisible hand" of the marketplace restoring free-market capitalism to where it belongs. The end result is that prices and amount of items sold both move toward an equilibrium established by what people are willing to pay and what suppliers and stores are willing to charge.
That's the big picture. It's nice to see a market that isn't so dominated by monopolies (yet: Wal-Mart is scary) acting in jerky but understandable ways.
My Hotmail account still only has 2MB of storage - and every time I leave it alone for more than two days, it fills up with spam. I checked the site pretty carefully for any expansion offers, but it looks like either the poster lied or was one of a select few to get an offer that's unavailable (for free).
They kind of had to. You see, the code that was stolen composed most of the core of the game; and they had to find and arrest the thief so they could get their code back. Only once the stolen property is returned to its owner can the development continue.
I don't claim to know anything about biology - at least, nothing more than I learned in an AP class some three years ago.
And nobody on Slashdot knows from these brief summaries the full story behind the case. For instance, when the police say they think bacteria have nothing to do with the death, are they only saying that because they're legally compelled not to accuse someone? Or do they really think that bioterror is an essentially implausible option and this fellow is just an activist a little too extreme to let slide? (His emotional state re: having a wife suddenly die is, apparently, not terribly important especially if he might have done it.)
Still, from the summaries alone - and this is a big caveat - the bioterror thing strikes me as a very familiar kind of alarmist angle used and supported by people that don't know any better. It's the kind of attitude that kept Kevin Mitnick (according to John Markoff of the New York Times an FBI Most Wanted List star, although he can't prove it) in solitary confinement for some eight months. Otherwise, a judge was convinced, he might start global thermonuclear war by whistling at NORAD through a payphone.
In the war against terrorism (can you wage war on a method?), letting our own ignorance make us deathly afraid of one another is tantamount to conceding defeat.
Everything has been patented. Sort of.
My 512 GB PNY brand (not the same one in the article) has it on the cap!
Yeah, that does sound pretty awful. I'd be willing to take that useless 512GB drive off your hands for, say, price of shipping?
And the baby is Caldera's! And Steve Ballmer and Steve Jobs are stuck in the well while their evil twins go about their daily lives!
Find out the exciting conclusion on the next episode of As the Slash Dots!
Slightly offtopic but coincides with this thread: that was (as we could guess) a hoax. Ix-nay on the +4 formative-innay. /. sig says, we're citizens, not consumers, and I'm a little disappointed that people would reward such a company for finely polished attempts at mind control like the ones it satirized by buying into their product.
Viral marketing like the "Beta-7.com" campaign is SO FSCKING ANNOYING.
You can picture these balding, gray-suited marketing executives sitting around the Table of the Round going "hey! having an Internet site about our product will make people buy it!". In fact all they manage to do is remind us that nothing you read on the Interweb is trustworthy - which is a fine postmodernist lesson - but I don't appreciate being treated as a commodity.
Like the
Was there a huge uproar when the Act was introduced?
Well, yes and no. 26 October 2001 was the day President Bush signed the PATRIOT Act into law, and as the poster above has mentioned it followed the anthrax scare that began around 4 October 2001 (not to mention the 11 September World Trade Center attacks), used by Bush to political advantage in his signatory speech:
Most disturbing is that most supporters of the PATRIOT Act accept the possibility that it might infringe (it does) on citizens' liberties with the reasoning that the government will only go after terrorists who don't deserve rights anyway; that FBI agents will only issue writs - erm, letters - of "national security" (one-page forms that require a court clerk to okay a warrant to search someone's home or workplace and that issue a gag order so that no one can tell the target they've been searched) against terrorists; that the government is never wrong; and that, after all, even if they do monitor people's Internet traffic, they'll only do it to the real threats (which in this case might mean "people conversing in Arabic on the Internet").
The reason there's little opposition from some quarters is that most people think the Act doesn't affect them much; others' civil liberties simply don't come into consideration, particularly when those others constitute a significant minority of the population (say, Arab-Americans, hundreds of whom under provisions of the PATRIOT Act have been detained without access to legal counsel or their families or the outside world for up to a year and released with no remuneration except a "sorry about that" letter from the State Department; and nobody-knows-how-many more of whom remain incarcerated indefinitely). Our legislative system is one where fifty-one percent can pass a bill. (Well, it might possibly require more than that in the Senate because of filibusters and cloture votes and the possibility of Presidential veto - but we definitely operate on a majority rather than a unanimity system for reasons of expediency.) The effect is that the inalienable rights of a minority can be, well, alienated by even a well-intentioned majority only seeking to preserve its own interests.
The fact that you haven't seen much public outcry about the PATRIOT Act (notwithstanding the hundreds of villages and townships that have passed resolutions at least symbolically refusing to cooperate with its provisions, and ignoring the national tour that John Ashcroft had to make - abandoning his duties as Attorney General for a PR campaign - to try to boost the Act) means that many people simply don't care bec
Wow, six years ago today. Happy 4/20 Bill!
No, I don't remember that. Can you explain or provide a link?
Hey, I heard a worm variant was released that attacks www.sco.com!
Linux hackers hateSCO; we all know that.
Come on, people! Read between the lines. The Linux hackers are being just as bad criminals as the people they seek. The aforementioned entities have a hard time already being on the moral side, and this just makes it worse.
Now I understand why people get frustrated with people talking loudly on cell phones, so the better question is, why haven't the mic's improved?
The microphones on most modern phones work perfectly fine if you speak into them it a conversational level or even below what you'd normally use. They adjust to too-loud shouting, or you adjust by moving your ear away from the phone at the other end or by turning your own phone's volume down so low that they have to shout to be heard in future calls. In the latter case it's a self-reinforcing feedback loop: stupid, inconsiderate phone behavior produces more of the same.
I would challenge the moderators of the above comment to explain what could possibly constitute "flamebait". The lack of technical specifications for this vehicle might be explained by the fact that it's an enormous practical joke - a little late for April Fool's, perhaps, but a joke nonetheless.
Consider that from the above linked article and personal experience, in Japan anime is cartoons. The best anime - Akira might be up there - is still a cartoon movie and not of a genre which is overall taken seriously. Compare the American popular success of Scooby Doo 2 to any serious animated work and it becomes clear that just like in America, anime is not revered by the Japanese people, the expected consumers of the linked "product".
You might be able to buy a giant tree house or a Space Ghost desk and chair or an Ed, Edd, n Eddy gumball machine if you have enough money to burn in America, but no rational person does this because these are more important things to spend one's money on - like, say, anything but cartoon accessories. No rational adult would buy a Hello Kitty motorcycle.
In this regard, anyone who takes anime seriously is disregarding and disrespecting the Japanese attitude towards the media and, in effect, displaying a bizarrely childlike fixation on things that are neither very deep nor very significant.
One could argue that perhaps vehicle enthusiasts (car, bicycle, or motorcycle) are pursuing blindly a childlike desire to drive. Culturally speaking, though, there is a precedent for this fascination with the vehicle, and to demean people who are truly interested in the mechanics of their motorcycle (as opposed to, say, buying a Harley because it looks cool) is by corollary to demean people who are truly interested in how their computer works (as opposed to, say, buying an Alienware PC because it looks cool).
If the above comment was moderated down because the linked article challenges your notion of what does and doesn't constitute fine art and demand great respect in Japanese culture - well, it took me by surprise too. Educating yourself is an integral component of developing a meaningful cultural awareness; the lack of such a competent understanding is certainly a foundation of the anti-American sentiment with which some three hundred million US citizens (Slashdot is US-centric :/) must cope. Rather than blithe submission to Japanophilia, consider that this motorcycle is either an elaborate prank or a supreme waste of money on a puerile object.
Dude, it's a bike that replicates something people saw in a cartoon. It's for overgrown adult-children; there isn't a lot of crossover with the hardcore motorcycling community.
Uh, are you sure it wasn't 3Susan?
And check your back. (Hideo does it in the dark. Zen. It's the way he practices.)
Agreed re: 1) and 5). I'm trying to find a way to say tactfully and nontrollfully that there's a bizarre element of doublethink going on here.
Slashdot posts about one "gee, that's a silly patent" story per week. There's usually a good mix (I read at +4, +3 for that brief time that the server was too slow to hand out enough mod points) of comments saying "the patent isn't so broad as the submitter made it out, and really this is perfectly legitimate" or "I know how to make money! I'll patent the use of cookies as incentives...in a porable media player!" or "This is another example of why the patent system is seriously messed up and needs to be reformed" or "I found prior art!" or "This patent is frivolous because algorithms are copyrightable speech, not patentable inventions" or "This patent is utter nonsense because it's common sense" or something else.
This time reading at +3/4 I see only vocal supporters of Apple. After reading the list of claims that seem pretty broad on something kind of intuitive - reading an MP3 file...on a portable media player! And correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't these claims cumulative rather than limiting? That's quite a lot to assert.
It seems like for whatever reason Apple gets the benefit of the doubt a lot more often than other companies; I'm not sure why. Every corporation seeks to maximize its profits.
landing a spacecraft on Europa, where we have little knowledge of its atmospheric conditions, will be a formidable challenge.
Like killer aliens terraforming the universe? I swear those eggheads can't read:
If it's an especially popular film, it might show up on the weekly/monthly Google Zeitgeist. An aggressive marketing campaign, even targetted at people who use Google, probably wouldn't stand much of a chance, though; archived data shows that people's interests are rather pop-culturey (cf. Sex and the City near its final episode) or holiday-based ("love poems" in week ending Feb. 16).
Is that the answer you were looking for?
(And no, on a personal note, I don't think people will buy it at all. There's now a whole genre of sites that look real and act real but are really stupid movie promotions. (not that I can find any of them now) Also, Will Smith is not quite so convincing as Orson Welles.
It amazes me that so many allegedly "educated" people have fallen so quickly and so hard for a fraudulent fabrication of such laughable proportions. The very idea that a gigantic ball of rock happens to orbit our planet, showing itself in neat, four-week cycles -- with the same side facing us all the time -- is ludicrous. Furthermore, it is an insult to common sense and a damnable affront to intellectual honesty and integrity. That people actually believe it is evidence that the liberals have wrested the last vestiges of control of our public school system from decent, God-fearing Americans (as if any further evidence was needed! Daddy's Roommate? God Almighty!)
Documentaries such as Enemy of the State have accurately portrayed the elaborate, byzantine network of surveillance satellites that the liberals have sent into space to spy on law-abiding Americans. Equipped with technology developed by Handgun Control, Inc., these satellites have the ability to detect firearms from hundreds of kilometers up. That's right, neighbors .. the next time you're out in the backyard exercising your Second Amendment rights, the liberals will see it! These satellites are sensitive enough to tell the difference between a Colt .45 and a .38 Special! And when they detect you with a firearm, their computers cross-reference the address to figure out your name, and then an enormous database housed at Berkeley is updated with information about you.
Of course, this all works fine during the day, but what about at night? Even the liberals can't control the rotation of the Earth to prevent nightfall from setting in (only Joshua was able to ask for that particular favor!) That's where the "moon" comes in. Powered by nuclear reactors, the "moon" is nothing more than an enormous balloon, emitting trillions of candlepower of gun-revealing light. Piloted by key members of the liberal community, the "moon" is strategically moved across the country, pointing out those who dare to make use of their God-given rights at night!
Yes, I know this probably sounds paranoid and preposterous, but consider this. Despite what the revisionist historians tell you, there is no mention of the "moon" anywhere in literature or historical documents -- anywhere -- before 1950. That is when it was initially launched. When President Josef Kennedy, at the State of the Union address, proclaimed "We choose to go to the moon", he may as well have said "We choose to go to the weather balloon." The subsequent faking of a "moon" landing on national TV was the first step in a long history of the erosion of our constitutional rights by leftists in this country. No longer can we hide from our government when the sun goes down.
It's a common misconception that "haiku" means "5-7-5". This misconception is readily cleared up - see the second paragraph of the Wikipedia article in particular for a discussion, or the "How do you write a haiku?" part of the e2 writeup, which goes into detail in the distiction between Japanese haiku and English haiku and describes the innumerable subtle variations of the form.
That said, one of the best English haiku ever kind of abuses the system:
I told her and sheWas like, "oh, my god," and I
Was like, "oh, my god."