I barely missed the first one a couple of times although I have only heard good things about it.
My sig is actually a reference to an old Slashdot meme (hot grits), which has mutated over time to include Natalie Portman and "naked and petrified". I also reference the command line found in SCUMM games.
Wikipedia mentions this and the Urban Dictionary gives a more detailed backstory.
If USA owes this foolish amount of money, but no-one dares to ask for it back because of the military and economic power - then USA effectively owns the world, and might as well just declare itself debt free, and carry on living off the backs of its slaves.
The rest of us aren't going to do anything about it.
Depends. If the US economy is broken and the local economy is stable and not completely dependant on the USA you might as well nuke the financial markets, accept the temporary negative effects and then use your still-standing economy to take up trade with more reliable partners and/or dictate new terms to the United States. It would hurt a lot for a few years but might end up showing real long-term gains.
Now think about places like China where the politicians can afford thinking more than four years ahead.
Remember that the EU is a bigger market than the US are. China and India are finally getting their asses into gear and are getting more important. China wouldn't stop trading with the US overnight but they certainly could switch most of their trade over to other partners as well as change the way they do trade.
The United States aren't the single important trading parter nobody can do without anymore. And if they don't get their act together they might find themselves in a position where they can't get back into that position again.
Thta's true but the grandparent wasn't most people. I do't recommend LaTeX to everone but it is my default recommendation when someone complains about exactly those bad habits of WYSIWYG word processors LaTeX explicitly doesn't have (unpredictability, "helpful" random reformatting of text etc.).
Some people simply aren't compatible with WYSIWYG word processors; to them it'd be easier to code a document in HTML+CSS or LaTeX than to coax Word into displaying something somewhat alike to what they envision.
Actually, this is how it would really be like if the majority of all people were atheists:
ATHEIST KID: I'm flying to planet Zebulon to fuck a hooker. Because we atheists can fly. Through space.
ATHEIST MOM: Okay, ATHEIST SON.
ATHEIST KID: Afterwards I'm going to smoke rolled up plastic foil with my friends because our super-lungs can handle any kind of toxic smoke and we want to rub it in the Christian guys' faces.
ATHEIST MOM: Okay, son. Don't accidentally kill too many innocent bystanders.
The atheist kid leaves the room. The father comes home from work several minutes later.
ATHEIST DAD: Hey!
ATHEIST MOM: Hi, ATHEIST DAD! I'm pregnant again becauce our super-gametes were too super for both the condom and the pill.
ATHEIST DAD: No problem; like always we'll abort by going back in time and zapping the ovum with the X-ray laser vision all us atheists have, which I'm pointing out for no reason at all.
ATHEIST MOM: Oh, and don't go into the bedroom.
ATHEIST DAD: Why not?
ATHEIST MOM: Superman and Batman are making out in there. Again.
ATHEIST DAD: You really should produce your movies elsewhere.
Suddenly, their neighbor runs into the house.
ATHEIST NEIGHBOR: Come quick, there's a Christian outside!
ATHEIST MOM: We'll be right there!
The atheists quickly put on a couple of black spandex outfits with an "A" logo. Then they exit the house and fly into the street where a twenty meter tall heavily armored combat Christian is tearing up the neighbourhood with its shoulder-mounted "Stigmatizer" nailgun. The atheists combine their powers to emit a deadly laser beam that vaporizes the Christian in a huge cross-shaped explosion.
RANDOM ATHEIST: Damn you, Christian! We claim to be tolerant of all religions. But we really hate yours! That's because we atheists really got the short end of the stick by only getting immortality, flight, time travel, X-ray laser vision, telepathy, telkinesis, super-charisma, untold riches, dashing good looks and the ability to understand British English while you got nailguns and dyslexia! Die, Christian!
But really, can we really say how bad this tool is by it not catching somewhat out of date drivers? Where exactly can a bot get the filename for the specific driver you need? nVidia, ATI, and Intels websites are rather hard to find drivers IF you screen-scrape.
This problem has already been solved. The Sparkle library provides easy standardized self-updating functionality to OS X apps. How does it check for updates? It simply accesses an appcast, an RSS 2.0 feed that has one item per update with an <enclosure> tag pointing to the download. The technology is neither Sparkle-specific (although the particular format Sparkle uses is), nor is it complicated. People just have to use it.
Yeah, scraping ever-changing site layouts to determine software versions is bad but the problem is trivially solved through the use of a standardized (even if ad-hoc) interface. Microsoft could easily just add an appcast client to WU and have programs register their appcasts with WU on first launch. If the <enclosure> tag doesn't point to a Microsoft certificate for the file the update is marked as "uncertified" and if the tag points to a certificate that doesn't match the file after both have been downloaded the update failes with a security warning and the user is advised to wait a few days for news from the vendor and update manually if necessary. It's essentially a decentralized, limited version of a package manager requiring very little work from MS.
Then they just need to add querying capabilities to WU (available to Administrator-level accounts) and repair software can actually try to determine whether the drivers are up to date.
I am reasonably computer-savy, but if I have to do anything more complicated than typing a really simple letter, Word drives me up the wall. It constantly feels like I have to work against it, instead of having it do work for me.
Do yourself a favor and learn LaTeX. Yes, it has a learning curve and you need lots of documentation and/or an internet connection to know which packages you need but at least it provides consistent results, doesn't reformat half of your text on a whim and isn't nearly as frustratingly annoying as any Word-like program.
Legalizing prostitution would not reduce it, it probably would increase it. However it would reduce crime and the prison population. The same with drugs. With less prisons taxpayers would be able to keep more of their money, then drug users and prostitutes could be paying taxes as well.
Ah, taxes. Another very important advantage I forgot to mention: Prostitutes now pay taxes. Granted, that doesn't help them but it does help everyone.
I didn't know prostitution was illegal in Germany, other than during the 1930s when the NAZIs were in power. Prostitution was legal when I was there in 1983, there were even magazine like publications that listed prostitutes with photos listing what acts they would accept money for and how to contact them to set up an appointment.
Yeah, "illegal" is the wrong term. "Against public policy" fits better: Officially prostitution was not a real job and you couldn't, for example, sue a suitor for not paying. This was changed and prostitution is now recognized as a regular job in the service sector. However, "legalized" is more convenient to say than "no longer against public policy".
No, they've thought this through. They will make the display 3.5" wide so you can comfortably hold the TV in your hand. It won't play HD but it will be very convenient. I think the working title is "iPhone", but that strikes me as rather weird for a portable TV.
It portrays Japanese culture as it appears in the media. Because, you know, it is a medium.
Don't underestimate the relevancy of the media. Not only do they reflect the society's opinions, they also influence them. As someone has pointed out in another thread, Mythbusters has done a lot to make science more appealing to viewers. Not everyone is a tinkerer, even though the show clearly depicts two of them. But the two tinkerers the show depicts help associate tinkering and experiments with fun.
The fact that one of the main characters of a rather popular manga/anime series happens to be extremely intelligent means that at least some people were influenced at least slightly to regard intelligence as something good to have - and that at least the author thought the same. It doesn't mean much on its own, but if taken together with other evidence it might be possible to extrapolate a trend.
The question is whether intelligence automatically implies elitism. If it does you get to choose between leaders who are either inept because they're stupid or inept because they don't represent the people.
Have a physics competition show. Something like a crossover between Brainiac, The Incredible Machine and Jackass. Participants get some raw materials and are asked, for example, to make their contraption hurl a bowling ball as far as possible or to fix and fine-tune a light gas gun for use in trap shooting. Of course you'd need lots of disclaimers and "Don't do this at home"s, but that'd be a show that rewards math and science knowledge while at the same time providing lots of property destruction and big explosions.
I'm still going to rank political speech higher than commercial speech... that's where people really get oppressed. I agree that copyright is a form of censorship, and I would like to see it reformed drastically - but it's not the same as throwing people in jail because they are critical of the people in power.
Yes, some of the UN member states are't too keen on free speech, but then again the United States government isn't, either. Granted, you're not quite on the same level as the worst ones but things like the DHS, Gitmo, unwarranted searches, free speech zones etc. aren't exactly painting the USA as the paragon of freedom of expression -- or even freedom at all. I get to choose between a committe of nations, some of which don't value human rights as highly as they should, or a single nation that doesn't value human rights as highly as it should.
If the USA want to be able to claim moral high ground on human rights issues again they're going to have to behave extremely well for at least a decade. Currently their credibility is severely damaged.
By the way, with "they don't care about separating government and big business" I didn't mean that the government imposes on business but the other way around. I meant plain old corruption (or extortion in some cases). The increasing eccentricity of American tech and IP laws really makes it look like you guys have the best politicians money can buy.
I dont hate the USA or anything (was there twice; nice people, quaint architecture), but currently they're like a drunk guy with a broken bottle you encounter while bar-hopping: Much better armed than you are, mostly unpredictable and unlikely to be nice. In short, they're scary.
Second, the UN has no actual power to do anything outside of the security council. These committees and such all simply advise the security counsel. If someone were to get out of line, you'd need the security council to actually take action. With Russia and China as veto-wielding members, no action would ever come on issues of free speech.
Do you really think the US government gives a shit about free speech elsewhere? Assume they're at pseudo-war* with another country. A logical thing to do would be to shut off that country's ccTLD, causing economical damage and hindering civilian information flow. What happens if someone complains? Will the US say "Oh sorry, we didn't think France would get angry!" or would they say "Our root zone, our rules."?
But mostly, you are dead-on about it not being all that critical. DNS is mirrored all over the place, and if the US ever went bat-shit nuts the rest of the world could just run their own mirrors.
Actually, a fragmented root would have the potential to cause some havoc. If Europe gets pissed off at the States enough to switch over to independent-mode ORSN wholesale people will have to make sure their stuff is in two DNS networks instead of just one. Asia might follow suit and suddenly we have three. If those roots diverge we end up with a mess of colliding or incompatible TLDs or even identical domains that resolve differently based on region.
It's not OMG! The End Of The Internet!, but we should avoid it nonetheless.
* The weird kind of war-without-a-declaration-only-it-isn't-really-war we saw in the last couple years.
There are places with legal prostitution. Are there fewer prostitution cases? I would think so (though maybe there are more of other kinds of cases? Good question).
I don't know why legalizing prostitution would reduce it, but we've had some positive effects since it was legalized here in Germany. Prostitutes now can get proper health insurance and have legal recourse against pimps (as pimping still is illegal). We didn't legalize prostitution to keep people from going to prostitutes; we legalized prostitution to improve the situation of the prostitutes. As far as I know it helped.
As for legalizing hemp: Yup, I agree there. Legalization would reduce most issues: It wouldn't be as much of an entry drug because you wouldn't buy it from dealers anymore. Hemp consumption wouldn't mean automatically providing money to criminals anymore. Legalization would allow regulation, which would lead to quality controls and thus better quality for the consumers*. Long-term studies would be easier. The situation for addicts would improve as there would be less social and legal danger involved in getting professional help.
Of course it's still a War On Something so we can't expect it to ever end.
* Wow, a sentence where I use the word "consumer" without feeling dirty.
The question is who to give it to. The United States are just as ineligible, seeing as they don't care about separating government and big business or keeping the government's powers in check. And I'm not in favor of giving a nation control over an international resource simply because it was deployed there first. That'd be like ultimately deferring to France in all aviation matters because of the Montgolfier brothers.
Really, who should get the root zone file? Nobody is eligible so we either give it to nobody or adjust our standards so someine is. The question is, do we accept a multinational body where any attempt at tampering might get vetoed by other members or do we accept a single nation where that isn't the case?
The UN seem like the safer choice because of more oversight. (Also, let's not forget that any bloc that feels left out can simply start their own root server network or switch over to one already running, thus it's not a wise idea to bind the one most of us currently use too much to a single nation.)
Along with making sure that people stay scared about using electronic devices in plains.
I am careful with my devices around plains. White has an awful lot of artifact-breaking spells. Of course Red is even worse, which is why I'd never take a notebook anywhere near a mountain.
The votes aren't really changed; it's their effect that changes. My idea separates real votes from effective votes, the latter one being a virtual vote count with sanctions applied. Of course that's just semantics.
Of course if one doesn't want to tamper with vote counts (even virtual ones) in any way there's a much simpler and probably entirely constitutional method. Unfortunately it's also less smooth. Any such action will be counted as vote fraud and the law says that if the president's party is found to have engaged in such fraud (even if it's discovered three years later) the president will be immediately impeached.
The result is a massive embarassment and a huge blow to the president's reputation (as well as that of his party) in the case of a president being impeached that way. However, the impeachment would also be disruptive to a lot of things. Also, the American people might become unsettled if they have to elect a new president without a nine-month multi-billion dollar media extravaganza beforehand.
To be fair, material physics has to work with quantum physics, which wasn't built to spec so it can be "faster". It's no wonder we get glitches all the time. I hear that's also the reason for the heat death of the universe.
DDR is outdated. I want QDR - one operation on the uptick, one operation on the downtick and both one operation between the uptick and the downtick and between the downtick and the uptick.
Of course that's just a stopgap solution until we move to tickless RAM.
If you think fjords are easy you never had to tweak a star's chemistry to get the protuberances just right. That's not to say a good fjord doesn't deserve recognition, though.
I think there should be sanctions for this kind of behavior. If anything can be traced back to one party (and there should be an honest effort to do so, after all the fate of the country is decided by the vote) that party should receive a deduction from the vote total as they have already proven they're not trustworthy.
And if that means the Greens win with 2% of the votes because both major party get deductions until they come out with -40%... Well, it can't be that much worse than what America usually gets and it will teach the other guys a valuable lesson about being corrupt douchebags. (That lesson is: Being a corrupt douchebag is A-okay if you don't get caught. Also, reform the election laws once you're back in power.)
Now that's just mean. I happen to be a star developer and I tell you it's hard work. If you don't balance mass vs. density, hydrogen vs. deuterium vs. tritium vs. helium etc. just right you end up with something that blows up or goes brown dwarf in a couple dozen myriads alredy. Developing a solid (ha!) star that keeps burning for millions of years (without the spectral lines creeping out of spec, to boot) is pretty difficult, really.
Star development really should become an engineering job and I don't think that Microsoft will be happy with talent they just pick up from the street. That's just going to lead to mediocrity at best.
Slashdot Mirror
I barely missed the first one a couple of times although I have only heard good things about it.
My sig is actually a reference to an old Slashdot meme (hot grits), which has mutated over time to include Natalie Portman and "naked and petrified". I also reference the command line found in SCUMM games.
Wikipedia mentions this and the Urban Dictionary gives a more detailed backstory.
Depends. If the US economy is broken and the local economy is stable and not completely dependant on the USA you might as well nuke the financial markets, accept the temporary negative effects and then use your still-standing economy to take up trade with more reliable partners and/or dictate new terms to the United States. It would hurt a lot for a few years but might end up showing real long-term gains.
Now think about places like China where the politicians can afford thinking more than four years ahead.
I'll take "Reasons not to immigrate" for 500,000,000.
Remember that the EU is a bigger market than the US are. China and India are finally getting their asses into gear and are getting more important. China wouldn't stop trading with the US overnight but they certainly could switch most of their trade over to other partners as well as change the way they do trade.
The United States aren't the single important trading parter nobody can do without anymore. And if they don't get their act together they might find themselves in a position where they can't get back into that position again.
Thta's true but the grandparent wasn't most people. I do't recommend LaTeX to everone but it is my default recommendation when someone complains about exactly those bad habits of WYSIWYG word processors LaTeX explicitly doesn't have (unpredictability, "helpful" random reformatting of text etc.).
Some people simply aren't compatible with WYSIWYG word processors; to them it'd be easier to code a document in HTML+CSS or LaTeX than to coax Word into displaying something somewhat alike to what they envision.
Actually, this is how it would really be like if the majority of all people were atheists:
ATHEIST KID: I'm flying to planet Zebulon to fuck a hooker. Because we atheists can fly. Through space.
ATHEIST MOM: Okay, ATHEIST SON.
ATHEIST KID: Afterwards I'm going to smoke rolled up plastic foil with my friends because our super-lungs can handle any kind of toxic smoke and we want to rub it in the Christian guys' faces.
ATHEIST MOM: Okay, son. Don't accidentally kill too many innocent bystanders.
The atheist kid leaves the room. The father comes home from work several minutes later.
ATHEIST DAD: Hey!
ATHEIST MOM: Hi, ATHEIST DAD! I'm pregnant again becauce our super-gametes were too super for both the condom and the pill.
ATHEIST DAD: No problem; like always we'll abort by going back in time and zapping the ovum with the X-ray laser vision all us atheists have, which I'm pointing out for no reason at all.
ATHEIST MOM: Oh, and don't go into the bedroom.
ATHEIST DAD: Why not?
ATHEIST MOM: Superman and Batman are making out in there. Again.
ATHEIST DAD: You really should produce your movies elsewhere.
Suddenly, their neighbor runs into the house.
ATHEIST NEIGHBOR: Come quick, there's a Christian outside!
ATHEIST MOM: We'll be right there!
The atheists quickly put on a couple of black spandex outfits with an "A" logo. Then they exit the house and fly into the street where a twenty meter tall heavily armored combat Christian is tearing up the neighbourhood with its shoulder-mounted "Stigmatizer" nailgun. The atheists combine their powers to emit a deadly laser beam that vaporizes the Christian in a huge cross-shaped explosion.
RANDOM ATHEIST: Damn you, Christian! We claim to be tolerant of all religions. But we really hate yours! That's because we atheists really got the short end of the stick by only getting immortality, flight, time travel, X-ray laser vision, telepathy, telkinesis, super-charisma, untold riches, dashing good looks and the ability to understand British English while you got nailguns and dyslexia! Die, Christian!
THE END
Super-scary, isn't it?
This problem has already been solved. The Sparkle library provides easy standardized self-updating functionality to OS X apps. How does it check for updates? It simply accesses an appcast, an RSS 2.0 feed that has one item per update with an <enclosure> tag pointing to the download. The technology is neither Sparkle-specific (although the particular format Sparkle uses is), nor is it complicated. People just have to use it.
Yeah, scraping ever-changing site layouts to determine software versions is bad but the problem is trivially solved through the use of a standardized (even if ad-hoc) interface. Microsoft could easily just add an appcast client to WU and have programs register their appcasts with WU on first launch. If the <enclosure> tag doesn't point to a Microsoft certificate for the file the update is marked as "uncertified" and if the tag points to a certificate that doesn't match the file after both have been downloaded the update failes with a security warning and the user is advised to wait a few days for news from the vendor and update manually if necessary. It's essentially a decentralized, limited version of a package manager requiring very little work from MS.
Then they just need to add querying capabilities to WU (available to Administrator-level accounts) and repair software can actually try to determine whether the drivers are up to date.
Do yourself a favor and learn LaTeX. Yes, it has a learning curve and you need lots of documentation and/or an internet connection to know which packages you need but at least it provides consistent results, doesn't reformat half of your text on a whim and isn't nearly as frustratingly annoying as any Word-like program.
Ah, taxes. Another very important advantage I forgot to mention: Prostitutes now pay taxes. Granted, that doesn't help them but it does help everyone.
Yeah, "illegal" is the wrong term. "Against public policy" fits better: Officially prostitution was not a real job and you couldn't, for example, sue a suitor for not paying. This was changed and prostitution is now recognized as a regular job in the service sector. However, "legalized" is more convenient to say than "no longer against public policy".
No, they've thought this through. They will make the display 3.5" wide so you can comfortably hold the TV in your hand. It won't play HD but it will be very convenient. I think the working title is "iPhone", but that strikes me as rather weird for a portable TV.
Adolf Hitler lived from 1889 to 1954.
Oh wait, I think Godwin's Law only applies to comparisons. Steve Jobs is most likely taller than Adolf Hitler was.
There. Totally aced the Hitler comparison.
It portrays Japanese culture as it appears in the media. Because, you know, it is a medium.
Don't underestimate the relevancy of the media. Not only do they reflect the society's opinions, they also influence them. As someone has pointed out in another thread, Mythbusters has done a lot to make science more appealing to viewers. Not everyone is a tinkerer, even though the show clearly depicts two of them. But the two tinkerers the show depicts help associate tinkering and experiments with fun.
The fact that one of the main characters of a rather popular manga/anime series happens to be extremely intelligent means that at least some people were influenced at least slightly to regard intelligence as something good to have - and that at least the author thought the same. It doesn't mean much on its own, but if taken together with other evidence it might be possible to extrapolate a trend.
The question is whether intelligence automatically implies elitism. If it does you get to choose between leaders who are either inept because they're stupid or inept because they don't represent the people.
Have a physics competition show. Something like a crossover between Brainiac, The Incredible Machine and Jackass. Participants get some raw materials and are asked, for example, to make their contraption hurl a bowling ball as far as possible or to fix and fine-tune a light gas gun for use in trap shooting. Of course you'd need lots of disclaimers and "Don't do this at home"s, but that'd be a show that rewards math and science knowledge while at the same time providing lots of property destruction and big explosions.
Yes, some of the UN member states are't too keen on free speech, but then again the United States government isn't, either. Granted, you're not quite on the same level as the worst ones but things like the DHS, Gitmo, unwarranted searches, free speech zones etc. aren't exactly painting the USA as the paragon of freedom of expression -- or even freedom at all. I get to choose between a committe of nations, some of which don't value human rights as highly as they should, or a single nation that doesn't value human rights as highly as it should.
If the USA want to be able to claim moral high ground on human rights issues again they're going to have to behave extremely well for at least a decade. Currently their credibility is severely damaged.
By the way, with "they don't care about separating government and big business" I didn't mean that the government imposes on business but the other way around. I meant plain old corruption (or extortion in some cases). The increasing eccentricity of American tech and IP laws really makes it look like you guys have the best politicians money can buy.
I dont hate the USA or anything (was there twice; nice people, quaint architecture), but currently they're like a drunk guy with a broken bottle you encounter while bar-hopping: Much better armed than you are, mostly unpredictable and unlikely to be nice. In short, they're scary.
Do you really think the US government gives a shit about free speech elsewhere? Assume they're at pseudo-war* with another country. A logical thing to do would be to shut off that country's ccTLD, causing economical damage and hindering civilian information flow. What happens if someone complains? Will the US say "Oh sorry, we didn't think France would get angry!" or would they say "Our root zone, our rules."?
Actually, a fragmented root would have the potential to cause some havoc. If Europe gets pissed off at the States enough to switch over to independent-mode ORSN wholesale people will have to make sure their stuff is in two DNS networks instead of just one. Asia might follow suit and suddenly we have three. If those roots diverge we end up with a mess of colliding or incompatible TLDs or even identical domains that resolve differently based on region.
It's not OMG! The End Of The Internet!, but we should avoid it nonetheless.
* The weird kind of war-without-a-declaration-only-it-isn't-really-war we saw in the last couple years.
Yeah, but some of us actually happen to like Unix-like OSes.
I don't know why legalizing prostitution would reduce it, but we've had some positive effects since it was legalized here in Germany. Prostitutes now can get proper health insurance and have legal recourse against pimps (as pimping still is illegal). We didn't legalize prostitution to keep people from going to prostitutes; we legalized prostitution to improve the situation of the prostitutes. As far as I know it helped.
As for legalizing hemp: Yup, I agree there. Legalization would reduce most issues: It wouldn't be as much of an entry drug because you wouldn't buy it from dealers anymore. Hemp consumption wouldn't mean automatically providing money to criminals anymore. Legalization would allow regulation, which would lead to quality controls and thus better quality for the consumers*. Long-term studies would be easier. The situation for addicts would improve as there would be less social and legal danger involved in getting professional help.
Of course it's still a War On Something so we can't expect it to ever end.
* Wow, a sentence where I use the word "consumer" without feeling dirty.
The question is who to give it to. The United States are just as ineligible, seeing as they don't care about separating government and big business or keeping the government's powers in check. And I'm not in favor of giving a nation control over an international resource simply because it was deployed there first. That'd be like ultimately deferring to France in all aviation matters because of the Montgolfier brothers.
Really, who should get the root zone file? Nobody is eligible so we either give it to nobody or adjust our standards so someine is. The question is, do we accept a multinational body where any attempt at tampering might get vetoed by other members or do we accept a single nation where that isn't the case?
The UN seem like the safer choice because of more oversight. (Also, let's not forget that any bloc that feels left out can simply start their own root server network or switch over to one already running, thus it's not a wise idea to bind the one most of us currently use too much to a single nation.)
I am careful with my devices around plains. White has an awful lot of artifact-breaking spells. Of course Red is even worse, which is why I'd never take a notebook anywhere near a mountain.
The votes aren't really changed; it's their effect that changes. My idea separates real votes from effective votes, the latter one being a virtual vote count with sanctions applied. Of course that's just semantics.
Of course if one doesn't want to tamper with vote counts (even virtual ones) in any way there's a much simpler and probably entirely constitutional method. Unfortunately it's also less smooth. Any such action will be counted as vote fraud and the law says that if the president's party is found to have engaged in such fraud (even if it's discovered three years later) the president will be immediately impeached.
The result is a massive embarassment and a huge blow to the president's reputation (as well as that of his party) in the case of a president being impeached that way. However, the impeachment would also be disruptive to a lot of things. Also, the American people might become unsettled if they have to elect a new president without a nine-month multi-billion dollar media extravaganza beforehand.
To be fair, material physics has to work with quantum physics, which wasn't built to spec so it can be "faster". It's no wonder we get glitches all the time. I hear that's also the reason for the heat death of the universe.
DDR is outdated. I want QDR - one operation on the uptick, one operation on the downtick and both one operation between the uptick and the downtick and between the downtick and the uptick.
Of course that's just a stopgap solution until we move to tickless RAM.
If you think fjords are easy you never had to tweak a star's chemistry to get the protuberances just right. That's not to say a good fjord doesn't deserve recognition, though.
I think there should be sanctions for this kind of behavior. If anything can be traced back to one party (and there should be an honest effort to do so, after all the fate of the country is decided by the vote) that party should receive a deduction from the vote total as they have already proven they're not trustworthy.
And if that means the Greens win with 2% of the votes because both major party get deductions until they come out with -40%... Well, it can't be that much worse than what America usually gets and it will teach the other guys a valuable lesson about being corrupt douchebags. (That lesson is: Being a corrupt douchebag is A-okay if you don't get caught. Also, reform the election laws once you're back in power.)
Now that's just mean. I happen to be a star developer and I tell you it's hard work. If you don't balance mass vs. density, hydrogen vs. deuterium vs. tritium vs. helium etc. just right you end up with something that blows up or goes brown dwarf in a couple dozen myriads alredy. Developing a solid (ha!) star that keeps burning for millions of years (without the spectral lines creeping out of spec, to boot) is pretty difficult, really.
Star development really should become an engineering job and I don't think that Microsoft will be happy with talent they just pick up from the street. That's just going to lead to mediocrity at best.