Exactly right! My company-supplied computer is all Microsoft, all legit work; when I take a break for a few minutes (like right now, to check Slashdot) I switch keyboards and switch my monitor to the Linux box next to my desk, and do all my personal work on my personal computer.
Dual-boot wouldn't work so well because it would show me offline every time I take a break, and it would lose several minutes of getting my desktop back every time I reboot. Most of my breaks I take while I'm waiting for some other process to complete at work (a compile, or a download, etc.)
Yup, you're only as invisible as you want to be. I'm in a mid-sized IT company (~1100 employees) and spent the first half of my career (now coming up on 20 years) in tech support as the only remote employee in the department and one of only five remotes at the company. I took calls from customers and colleagues, had weekly meetings with my boss by phone, and made extensive use of email and IM to keep myself in the thick of activities 1000 miles away. Come performance review time, I brought forth evidence from my "fan mail" folder showing how much the customers loved me.
Now I'm on a development team that includes a group working from India. We have Live Meeting conferences twice a week (at 9AM our time, 8PM theirs) and I'm in constant communication with my supervisor via IM and the rest of the group via email. When they took a group photo last week to show the rest of the company at a management meeting, I GIMP'ed myself into the group.
I couldn't even stay invisible if I wanted to. A few years ago when I was making the transition from support to development, I went to our Dallas office to shop around for a new position (my support for the legacy products was no longer needed) and got dragged into a management meeting. I ended up the center of attention as a parade of colleagues came in and described how I had pulled their fat out of the fire over the past 15 years. All this took place with me sitting right next to the CEO, who was always one of the most vocal opponents to telecommuting. So afterwards I told him I had been trying to stay under his radar, and he said he has always known about me because whenever a crisis arose involving our legacy products, someone would say "No problem, DeepEsophagus is on it" or "DeepEsophagus already took care of that."
The important thing is to make sure the impression you leave is a GOOD one.
I also found this article:
http://everything2.com/title/The+Cannabis+Decision+%2528German+Federal+Constitutional+Court%2529 ... describing a 2003 decision overturning a lower court's ruling that the punishment for marijuana possession was disproportionately harsh compared to the punishment for alcohol abuse. No mention of the user's motives for consumption, BUT it did say that the states are not required to prosecute for possession of small amounts, and it was up to the states to decide how much constitutes a "small amount". Key quote: "Ultimately, the effect of the Court's decision has been to create a system in which cannabis has been de facto decriminalised. While each State has its own rules about what constitutes a "small amount" and is presumed to be for "personal consumption," there is, in reality, very little attempt to prosecute people for cannabis possession, sale, or distribution. In general, if a person has less than 6 g (more in some states) of any cannabis product, the most the police can do is confiscate it. "
I did my search first in English (Bundesverfassungsgericht + alcohol + marijuana | cannabis + intoxicated | intoxicating) and in German (Bundesverfassungsgericht + Spiritus + Marihuana | Cannabis | Hanf + Rausch | Berauschend)
I am *so glad* we homeschooled our children in Texas, and continued after we left Texas until they graduated. Now they are more mature than I am (not a real high bar) and arguably smarter as well. They both have their career paths laid out for the next few decades; I still don't know what I want to be if I grow up. Neither has ever been to jail, used drugs, or broken any major body parts on themselves or others. They treat adults and peers equally with respect, play well with others ("Oh, but what about the socialization? If you homeschool they will miss out on all those important developmental interactions!") and contribute to the community.
Man, I wish I had been homeschooled. But at least we kept our spawn from getting ground up in that machinery.
Yes, yes, and yes! People assume -- and many of my Christian friends tend to agree -- that Christians want a Christian-centric government, but even as a conservative evangelical Christian I don't think that's a good idea. Time and time again we've seen perfectly good people get into positions of power and become nutcases that make us all look bad... much like Saul in his later career.
For me, government exists to do that collectively* what lower levels of granularity cannot do for themselves -- so your city government handles local infrastructure, state government handles stuff that the cities and unincorporated areas can't do with their resources, and federal government takes care of issues too big for state governments to handle -- national defense, interstate transportation and the like.
* Of course I wouldn't dare suggest that means "communally", because commune is a bad word. And we know Jesus hated communism because he continually warned the disciples against sharing their resources with others who had less.**
** Irony, for people who think I actually believe that.
Add to that the fact that not all drivers even USE the headrests... I sit up straight, so my head is a bit forward of the headrests at all times. Somebody really did not think this through all the way.
I'd be fascinated to learn what they can glean about my political leanings from my preference for Terry Pratchett, Jasper Fforde and the like. Of course they don't really need to look that far; they only need to see on my personal info page under political preferences where I flat-out say "They are all lying weasels."
That game (and many others like it) is a meme virus, and it exists *solely* for the purpose of getting access to your personal data. The questions themselves aren't at all revealing -- "what is taiwanjohn's favorite color?" "did taiwanjohn take a bath today?" (I'm not kidding, I saw that one come up when I first thought those were real questions with real answers, and allowed the stupid app to access my data so I could read the answers). The point of the exercise is that you don't KNOW what question your friends answered about you unless you follow the bazillion click-throughs to "unlock" their answers, which of course gives the app full license to run rampant across your privacy. If you're gullible enough to do that, you'll also likely obey its demands that you answer an equally meaningless question about one of your friends, just so it can post the bait on their page ("taiwanjohn answered a question about deepesophagus! click here to unlock taiwanjohn's answer!") and the cycle begins anew.
That said, I haven't dared to unlock answers and look at what the app is encouraging people to answer about me in a few years. For all I know they have stopped bothering with innocuous questions and now come right out and ask: "What is taiwanjohn's birthday?" "what was deepesophagus' mother's maiden name?"
Not everyone uses social networking for that purpose. There are family and friends that are interested in changes to one another's health, jobs, interesting activities we've been pursuing, etc. Rather than individually email or phone 50 to 100 people to tell them my daughter's cat ran away or my son graduated from arrrrrrrmy training sir, I can post that on Facebook while limiting the availability of that information to a whitelist of known friends. I'm not seeking popularity any more than I tried to be "popular" by calling these same friends up on the phone -- remember when phones were used as a primitive voice chat interface? -- and asking them how they're doing. I share this information, and read theirs, because we care about one another.
And yes, I have my birthday and anniversary listed there; it's a conscious decision to find safe middle ground between absolute privacy and absolute isolation from the world. I frequently recheck my security settings to make sure FB hasn't decided to arbitrarily give my private data to some new third party and expect me to opt out, I do limit the exposure of that data to friends only, I *only* accept friend requests from people I personally know (with all but three or four, people I have met in the flesh), and I never ever play any game or other FB app because they all require you to expose your privates before you can play them.
With that in mind, I wouldn't even go so far as to say Facebook's implementation of social networking is flawed; it's the way most people use Facebook that is flawed. If everyone kept a tight rein on their data and never played those stupid privacy-defeating games and only shared relevant news with actual known friends, FB would be as safe as... well, as Slashdot. Of course, if everyone did that FB's profits would tank and they'd either shut down or find some new intrusive means of getting our data to advertisers, so I guess the stupid people fund the free access for the smart ones.
When there are six acres between you and your neighbors, nobody gives a crap what patterns you leave in your lawn. Not everybody is a homeowners association jerk who has to compulsively measure each blade of grass to ensure uniform height.
You don't even have to deadhead to those edge cases (heh, in this case literally). When your more organized route takes you to where that odd corner is, go ahead and finish it separately and then return to the main pattern where you left off. At most you'll be wasting the distance from the place where your main pattern joins the corner section and the farthest spot in that corner.
Who didn't see this coming? Breeden commented on it two years ago and pretty much voiced my thoughts too.
Not sure I agree with your other statement though, gweihir. My wife loves using Facebook to quickly keep large groups of friends and relatives updated and share photos, and it's great for that. As a gaming / blogging discussion platform, not so much.
The key is to know what Facebook is good for, and what it is not. As a gaming platform, it's awful - and yet people gladly surrender not only their time but their marketable data and often real money to play idiotic, plotless dreck like Mafia Wars and Farmville.
On the other hand, it's great for quickly disseminating news, vacation photos, etc. that I'd like to share with friends and family (and NO others) all at once, and conversely, find out when friends and family have important news --- someone has graduated, someone is in the hospital, someone got abducted by aliens and is now Elvis' love slave on Europa...
I don't even mind using it as a discussion forum occasionally, although it's ill-suited for that (no way to search past discussions, no threaded replies, etc.) Sometimes a friend will feel strongly enough about some item in the news that he or she will post a rant, and it's interesting to see the various responses from the friends of that friend. I've also been able to crowdsource when I needed ideas quickly to solve a problem.
On the other other hand, hanging on Facebook 24/7 and announcing every time you fart or move from one room to another or what you just ate... give it a rest, guys. Fortunately not many of my friends are that wrapped up in FB or themselves that they need to do so, just a couple of colleagues from work.
And as far as security, you just have to be aware of the flaws and don't do anything that could make you the victim of identity theft (or get you fired). Don't post your home address or phone number; in that spot I tell people to message me privately if they need that and do not have it. Don't announce when you are going to leave the house empty for two weeks at a time. Don't brag about doing something illegal, or against company policy, or whatever. And for the love of all that is binary, don't give stupid apps permission to access your private data, or answer intrusive questions about yourself just because some stupid app wants you to.
Yes! About 20 years ago I was a code monkey for a small engineering firm, and the receptionist was forever having trouble with... oh, I can't remember what computer issue it was. So I took the "teach a man to fish..." concept to heart and tried to explain to her why her computer kept messing up and what she could do to fix it herself, and she interrupted me yelling "I don't want to know what's wrong, I just want it fixed!"
And if I had a byte for every time I heard -- not just from novices but from tech support and developers -- "What would happen if I did this?" I'd have more storage space than Google. TRY IT AND SEE, fer cryin' out loud!
Most (not all) of the Infocom games did a terrific job of blurring the line between story and game, yes. The writing was so good I didn't mind that I had to get help for puzzles, and the puzzles were a great challenge. So yeah, the concept isn't anything new but the technology has improved tremendously.
Citing a report from the UN University, UNEP said that there were now more than 19 million people officially recognized as “persons of concern” – people who are likely to be displaced because of environmental disasters. UNEP said that figure is expected to grow to about 50 million by the end of 2010.
That article clearly demonstrates what's wrong with the UN's science reporting. You can't have it both ways -- expect us to believe what the UN says about climate when we can't prove them wrong, and expect us to ignore their claims when they have been proven wrong. Making outrageous predictions like the above is political grandstanding at its worst, and has no place in science.
Frankly if a saucer landed on the White House lawn to do repairs the MSM would be handed a bulletin telling them to talk about "the new alien movie being filmed today in Washington" and that would be it.
Why does everyone assume visiting aliens would want to, much less know to, head for a political power center? If they have some way of identifying intelligent activity and/or warm bodies from a distance they might hover over a major population center, send a shuttle down to NYC or LA or whatever; or they might specifically seek to avoid population centers until they can do some recon and identify potential threats. Otherwise they'd just make a decision based on geographic features and find someplace easy to land and take off from.
IF intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe and IF they decide to visit and/or happen upon our planet by chance, it's not going to be a blurry, grainy thing that could be interpreted as swamp gas or weather balloons. You can't miss an intergalactic space vehicle landing on your planet any more than you can miss the Hindenberg hitching up to its mooring mast.
That's not to say I think there is any reason to believe these aliens exist. I would never say it's impossible, but I don't buy into "there are so many stars in the universe, odds support at least one of them having intelligent life". There are googillions of grains of sand, too, but large quantities of anything don't automatically force a higher probability of any grain of sand containing intelligent life.
The US military has been to just about every single place on the planet, if anything crashes I have no doubt they would snatch it. will they EVER tell the American people? NOT A CHANCE IN HELL.
See above. They'd have to beat armies of UFO hunters to the site and destroy every land-based and satellite-based photo in existence. Our world, as dictators are finding out the hard way, is too wired to make suppression of information possible any longer.
So... just how accurate can that be if it works on geolocation? As it happens I do not use a single one of those services. I have a facebook account so I can find out how my friends are doing (and let them all know about major events in my life, not what I had for breakfast or what thought passed through my brain as I stared idly off into space) and that's it. I guess I'm invisible to this guy, woohoo!
I almost hate to do this since you were so careful at catching all the other mistakes, but
As in it's time has passed.
should be
As in its time has passed.
"It's" is a contraction of "it is", as in "it's a shame people can no longer communicate effectively." "Its" is the possessive for "it", as in "its time has passed." So, to quote someone who quoted a wise man:
If you're going to correct someone, at least get it right yourself.
I totally agree. Who cares about Jobs and Zuckerberg? On the other hand, I'd be proud to display Woz alongside my Albert Einstein action figure!
B the W, you only need "whom" when it's the *object* of a sentence, not the subject. "I would pay 70 dollars to WHOMever would make a Woz action figure", but "WHOever would pay 70 dollars..." is correct. You do get extra credit for caring enough to try, though.
Are all the docter cringing when they see Dr House ? (probably)
Yes. Polite Dissent is written by a doctor who reviews medical issues as portrayed in House as well as other media (comics, other tv shows, etc -- today's page has him tearing into classic "train to be a nurse at home" ads from a bygone era). He rates the medicinal errors from "major" to "minor" to "nitpicking", and he explains it all in layman's terms so medically illiterate people like me can understand.
What's really galling about Fleischer Studios' attempt is the fact that the Betty Boop character was a direct rip of the look and voice of actual human Helen Kane, right down to the last boop-a-doop. She fought the studio unsuccessfully in court to retain rights her unique style. So suck it up, corporate lawyers for Fleischer, what goes around comes around.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly right! My company-supplied computer is all Microsoft, all legit work; when I take a break for a few minutes (like right now, to check Slashdot) I switch keyboards and switch my monitor to the Linux box next to my desk, and do all my personal work on my personal computer.
Dual-boot wouldn't work so well because it would show me offline every time I take a break, and it would lose several minutes of getting my desktop back every time I reboot. Most of my breaks I take while I'm waiting for some other process to complete at work (a compile, or a download, etc.)
Yup, you're only as invisible as you want to be. I'm in a mid-sized IT company (~1100 employees) and spent the first half of my career (now coming up on 20 years) in tech support as the only remote employee in the department and one of only five remotes at the company. I took calls from customers and colleagues, had weekly meetings with my boss by phone, and made extensive use of email and IM to keep myself in the thick of activities 1000 miles away. Come performance review time, I brought forth evidence from my "fan mail" folder showing how much the customers loved me.
Now I'm on a development team that includes a group working from India. We have Live Meeting conferences twice a week (at 9AM our time, 8PM theirs) and I'm in constant communication with my supervisor via IM and the rest of the group via email. When they took a group photo last week to show the rest of the company at a management meeting, I GIMP'ed myself into the group.
I couldn't even stay invisible if I wanted to. A few years ago when I was making the transition from support to development, I went to our Dallas office to shop around for a new position (my support for the legacy products was no longer needed) and got dragged into a management meeting. I ended up the center of attention as a parade of colleagues came in and described how I had pulled their fat out of the fire over the past 15 years. All this took place with me sitting right next to the CEO, who was always one of the most vocal opponents to telecommuting. So afterwards I told him I had been trying to stay under his radar, and he said he has always known about me because whenever a crisis arose involving our legacy products, someone would say "No problem, DeepEsophagus is on it" or "DeepEsophagus already took care of that."
The important thing is to make sure the impression you leave is a GOOD one.
I wonder what effect this will have on the Doomsday Clock?
Now he can be Pi Monster! "P is for Pi, that's good enough for me!"
I also found this article: http://everything2.com/title/The+Cannabis+Decision+%2528German+Federal+Constitutional+Court%2529
... describing a 2003 decision overturning a lower court's ruling that the punishment for marijuana possession was disproportionately harsh compared to the punishment for alcohol abuse. No mention of the user's motives for consumption, BUT it did say that the states are not required to prosecute for possession of small amounts, and it was up to the states to decide how much constitutes a "small amount". Key quote: "Ultimately, the effect of the Court's decision has been to create a system in which cannabis has been de facto decriminalised. While each State has its own rules about what constitutes a "small amount" and is presumed to be for "personal consumption," there is, in reality, very little attempt to prosecute people for cannabis possession, sale, or distribution. In general, if a person has less than 6 g (more in some states) of any cannabis product, the most the police can do is confiscate it. "
I did my search first in English (Bundesverfassungsgericht + alcohol + marijuana | cannabis + intoxicated | intoxicating) and in German (Bundesverfassungsgericht + Spiritus + Marihuana | Cannabis | Hanf + Rausch | Berauschend)
I am *so glad* we homeschooled our children in Texas, and continued after we left Texas until they graduated. Now they are more mature than I am (not a real high bar) and arguably smarter as well. They both have their career paths laid out for the next few decades; I still don't know what I want to be if I grow up. Neither has ever been to jail, used drugs, or broken any major body parts on themselves or others. They treat adults and peers equally with respect, play well with others ("Oh, but what about the socialization? If you homeschool they will miss out on all those important developmental interactions!") and contribute to the community.
Man, I wish I had been homeschooled. But at least we kept our spawn from getting ground up in that machinery.
Yes, yes, and yes! People assume -- and many of my Christian friends tend to agree -- that Christians want a Christian-centric government, but even as a conservative evangelical Christian I don't think that's a good idea. Time and time again we've seen perfectly good people get into positions of power and become nutcases that make us all look bad... much like Saul in his later career.
For me, government exists to do that collectively* what lower levels of granularity cannot do for themselves -- so your city government handles local infrastructure, state government handles stuff that the cities and unincorporated areas can't do with their resources, and federal government takes care of issues too big for state governments to handle -- national defense, interstate transportation and the like.
* Of course I wouldn't dare suggest that means "communally", because commune is a bad word. And we know Jesus hated communism because he continually warned the disciples against sharing their resources with others who had less.**
** Irony, for people who think I actually believe that.
Add to that the fact that not all drivers even USE the headrests... I sit up straight, so my head is a bit forward of the headrests at all times. Somebody really did not think this through all the way.
I'd be fascinated to learn what they can glean about my political leanings from my preference for Terry Pratchett, Jasper Fforde and the like. Of course they don't really need to look that far; they only need to see on my personal info page under political preferences where I flat-out say "They are all lying weasels."
That game (and many others like it) is a meme virus, and it exists *solely* for the purpose of getting access to your personal data. The questions themselves aren't at all revealing -- "what is taiwanjohn's favorite color?" "did taiwanjohn take a bath today?" (I'm not kidding, I saw that one come up when I first thought those were real questions with real answers, and allowed the stupid app to access my data so I could read the answers). The point of the exercise is that you don't KNOW what question your friends answered about you unless you follow the bazillion click-throughs to "unlock" their answers, which of course gives the app full license to run rampant across your privacy. If you're gullible enough to do that, you'll also likely obey its demands that you answer an equally meaningless question about one of your friends, just so it can post the bait on their page ("taiwanjohn answered a question about deepesophagus! click here to unlock taiwanjohn's answer!") and the cycle begins anew.
That said, I haven't dared to unlock answers and look at what the app is encouraging people to answer about me in a few years. For all I know they have stopped bothering with innocuous questions and now come right out and ask: "What is taiwanjohn's birthday?" "what was deepesophagus' mother's maiden name?"
Not everyone uses social networking for that purpose. There are family and friends that are interested in changes to one another's health, jobs, interesting activities we've been pursuing, etc. Rather than individually email or phone 50 to 100 people to tell them my daughter's cat ran away or my son graduated from arrrrrrrmy training sir, I can post that on Facebook while limiting the availability of that information to a whitelist of known friends. I'm not seeking popularity any more than I tried to be "popular" by calling these same friends up on the phone -- remember when phones were used as a primitive voice chat interface? -- and asking them how they're doing. I share this information, and read theirs, because we care about one another.
And yes, I have my birthday and anniversary listed there; it's a conscious decision to find safe middle ground between absolute privacy and absolute isolation from the world. I frequently recheck my security settings to make sure FB hasn't decided to arbitrarily give my private data to some new third party and expect me to opt out, I do limit the exposure of that data to friends only, I *only* accept friend requests from people I personally know (with all but three or four, people I have met in the flesh), and I never ever play any game or other FB app because they all require you to expose your privates before you can play them.
With that in mind, I wouldn't even go so far as to say Facebook's implementation of social networking is flawed; it's the way most people use Facebook that is flawed. If everyone kept a tight rein on their data and never played those stupid privacy-defeating games and only shared relevant news with actual known friends, FB would be as safe as... well, as Slashdot. Of course, if everyone did that FB's profits would tank and they'd either shut down or find some new intrusive means of getting our data to advertisers, so I guess the stupid people fund the free access for the smart ones.
When there are six acres between you and your neighbors, nobody gives a crap what patterns you leave in your lawn. Not everybody is a homeowners association jerk who has to compulsively measure each blade of grass to ensure uniform height.
You don't even have to deadhead to those edge cases (heh, in this case literally). When your more organized route takes you to where that odd corner is, go ahead and finish it separately and then return to the main pattern where you left off. At most you'll be wasting the distance from the place where your main pattern joins the corner section and the farthest spot in that corner.
Who didn't see this coming? Breeden commented on it two years ago and pretty much voiced my thoughts too.
Not sure I agree with your other statement though, gweihir. My wife loves using Facebook to quickly keep large groups of friends and relatives updated and share photos, and it's great for that. As a gaming / blogging discussion platform, not so much.
The key is to know what Facebook is good for, and what it is not. As a gaming platform, it's awful - and yet people gladly surrender not only their time but their marketable data and often real money to play idiotic, plotless dreck like Mafia Wars and Farmville.
On the other hand, it's great for quickly disseminating news, vacation photos, etc. that I'd like to share with friends and family (and NO others) all at once, and conversely, find out when friends and family have important news --- someone has graduated, someone is in the hospital, someone got abducted by aliens and is now Elvis' love slave on Europa...
I don't even mind using it as a discussion forum occasionally, although it's ill-suited for that (no way to search past discussions, no threaded replies, etc.) Sometimes a friend will feel strongly enough about some item in the news that he or she will post a rant, and it's interesting to see the various responses from the friends of that friend. I've also been able to crowdsource when I needed ideas quickly to solve a problem.
On the other other hand, hanging on Facebook 24/7 and announcing every time you fart or move from one room to another or what you just ate... give it a rest, guys. Fortunately not many of my friends are that wrapped up in FB or themselves that they need to do so, just a couple of colleagues from work.
And as far as security, you just have to be aware of the flaws and don't do anything that could make you the victim of identity theft (or get you fired). Don't post your home address or phone number; in that spot I tell people to message me privately if they need that and do not have it. Don't announce when you are going to leave the house empty for two weeks at a time. Don't brag about doing something illegal, or against company policy, or whatever. And for the love of all that is binary, don't give stupid apps permission to access your private data, or answer intrusive questions about yourself just because some stupid app wants you to.
Yes! About 20 years ago I was a code monkey for a small engineering firm, and the receptionist was forever having trouble with... oh, I can't remember what computer issue it was. So I took the "teach a man to fish..." concept to heart and tried to explain to her why her computer kept messing up and what she could do to fix it herself, and she interrupted me yelling "I don't want to know what's wrong, I just want it fixed!"
And if I had a byte for every time I heard -- not just from novices but from tech support and developers -- "What would happen if I did this?" I'd have more storage space than Google. TRY IT AND SEE, fer cryin' out loud!
Most (not all) of the Infocom games did a terrific job of blurring the line between story and game, yes. The writing was so good I didn't mind that I had to get help for puzzles, and the puzzles were a great challenge. So yeah, the concept isn't anything new but the technology has improved tremendously.
Citing a report from the UN University, UNEP said that there were now more than 19 million people officially recognized as “persons of concern” – people who are likely to be displaced because of environmental disasters. UNEP said that figure is expected to grow to about 50 million by the end of 2010.
That article clearly demonstrates what's wrong with the UN's science reporting. You can't have it both ways -- expect us to believe what the UN says about climate when we can't prove them wrong, and expect us to ignore their claims when they have been proven wrong. Making outrageous predictions like the above is political grandstanding at its worst, and has no place in science.
Frankly if a saucer landed on the White House lawn to do repairs the MSM would be handed a bulletin telling them to talk about "the new alien movie being filmed today in Washington" and that would be it.
Why does everyone assume visiting aliens would want to, much less know to, head for a political power center? If they have some way of identifying intelligent activity and/or warm bodies from a distance they might hover over a major population center, send a shuttle down to NYC or LA or whatever; or they might specifically seek to avoid population centers until they can do some recon and identify potential threats. Otherwise they'd just make a decision based on geographic features and find someplace easy to land and take off from. IF intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe and IF they decide to visit and/or happen upon our planet by chance, it's not going to be a blurry, grainy thing that could be interpreted as swamp gas or weather balloons. You can't miss an intergalactic space vehicle landing on your planet any more than you can miss the Hindenberg hitching up to its mooring mast. That's not to say I think there is any reason to believe these aliens exist. I would never say it's impossible, but I don't buy into "there are so many stars in the universe, odds support at least one of them having intelligent life". There are googillions of grains of sand, too, but large quantities of anything don't automatically force a higher probability of any grain of sand containing intelligent life.
The US military has been to just about every single place on the planet, if anything crashes I have no doubt they would snatch it. will they EVER tell the American people? NOT A CHANCE IN HELL.
See above. They'd have to beat armies of UFO hunters to the site and destroy every land-based and satellite-based photo in existence. Our world, as dictators are finding out the hard way, is too wired to make suppression of information possible any longer.
So... just how accurate can that be if it works on geolocation? As it happens I do not use a single one of those services. I have a facebook account so I can find out how my friends are doing (and let them all know about major events in my life, not what I had for breakfast or what thought passed through my brain as I stared idly off into space) and that's it. I guess I'm invisible to this guy, woohoo!
"Immunize the escutcheon"? Why would anyone want to prevent a coat of arms from getting diseases?
Perhaps you mean "Immanentize the eschaton", which means to hasten the end of the world (literally or figuratively). You probably heard it from someone who read The Illuminatus! Trilogy.
fnord
I almost hate to do this since you were so careful at catching all the other mistakes, but
As in it's time has passed.
should be
As in its time has passed.
"It's" is a contraction of "it is", as in "it's a shame people can no longer communicate effectively." "Its" is the possessive for "it", as in "its time has passed." So, to quote someone who quoted a wise man:
I totally agree. Who cares about Jobs and Zuckerberg? On the other hand, I'd be proud to display Woz alongside my Albert Einstein action figure!
B the W, you only need "whom" when it's the *object* of a sentence, not the subject. "I would pay 70 dollars to WHOMever would make a Woz action figure", but "WHOever would pay 70 dollars..." is correct. You do get extra credit for caring enough to try, though.
Are all the docter cringing when they see Dr House ? (probably)
Yes. Polite Dissent is written by a doctor who reviews medical issues as portrayed in House as well as other media (comics, other tv shows, etc -- today's page has him tearing into classic "train to be a nurse at home" ads from a bygone era). He rates the medicinal errors from "major" to "minor" to "nitpicking", and he explains it all in layman's terms so medically illiterate people like me can understand.
What's really galling about Fleischer Studios' attempt is the fact that the Betty Boop character was a direct rip of the look and voice of actual human Helen Kane, right down to the last boop-a-doop. She fought the studio unsuccessfully in court to retain rights her unique style. So suck it up, corporate lawyers for Fleischer, what goes around comes around.