Because it was the last time we managed to get someone off this rock and onto another one. And it succeeded with a combination of national drive, creativity, risk, and science that I wish we could find among ourselves again.
"I'm not interested unless the end goal is very large numbers of ordinary citizens, not government employees, living, working and making money in space."
Which to me means we first have to get people off this rock and onto another one. I think a lunar base, started very small and expanding onward from there, would be a perfect focus for perfecting the tech and other resources (national/international will) to actually achieve the goals you state. They are my goals too.
And the Apollo program was the last time we pulled that off.
All this lunar base talk makes me want to watch "Space 1999" again.:-)
"These days NASA is full of over-educated monkeys who cringe at their own shadow."
They definitely need to find some middle ground. The incredibly complex shuttle, in all fairness, was driven more by military/national security design constraints. Meanwhile the "faster, cheaper, leaner" approach of the last decade proved to be a bit too fast and loose.
Then again I wonder if they ever really could get back to the Apollo days? That seemed the best balance to me, but would the American public tolerate several astronauts burning up on the pad due to pure pressurized oxygen sparking up the capsule?
Think of the field day the media (and slashdot) would have over a mistake like that today.
Private enterprise *may* be our best hope in finding the proper spot on the cost/risk curve, but then where's the profit in much of the basic space science we'd all want to see done?
"Is this how it is going to be from now on? Any time Apple changes a model, drops a speed, or something it's going to be attributed to Intel?"
Well I guess once they've switched to Intel CPUs that will certainly seem fair.:-)
But yeah, I agree. The single-CPU 1.8GHz model was a lame duck. The 1.8GHz G5 iMac was coming in cheaper, LCD screen included. They had to do something to shore up the bottom end of the PowerMac series regardless.
"Lucas was intentionally making the characters as detached from time, emotion, and recognizable conversation patterns as possible to maintaing the timelessness of the story, making it impossible to date the production."
While I admire your optimism, lets face it - Lucas simply cannot write dialog or develop storylines.
Example: "Romeo and Juliet" is full of time-specific references, emotion, etc. And it's a timeless tale. The prequel trilogies are to storytelling what bologna is to filet mignon. One is cold cuts, the other is something you can sink your teeth into.
"Apple using Intel-compatible motherboards and platforms means that Apple's platform designers are on the way out."
I get the opposite impression - that they'll be busier than ever.
Apple's golden goose is their hardware. They'll keep their MB/platforms as proprietary as they possibly can, and will need to focus extra effort on keeping MacOS X86 tied to their own hardware.
But hey, our speculation and $10 will get us a few cups of coffee.;-) Time will tell.
"Happy Days had few years of good ratings AFTER Fonzie 'jumped the shark'."
Amusing typo but I won't hold you to it.;-)
Do not confuse "good ratings" with "good programming". It sucked after the shark jump. Even as a kid I couldn't watch it. (And besides, Erin Gray was wearing spandex over on "Buck Rogers" - far more interesting.;-) )
"Jump the shark" marks that criticial point when a show (or punditry in this case) has gone so over the top for ratings/attention that nothing further is likely to be of any interest or value. It may drag on a few more seasons, but its all downhill (often steeply) after the shark jump.
And so "Jump the Shark" is a meme that's here to stay. And in the claim of "Intel and Apple to merge" it's a perfect fit.
It's official - The Macintel Speculation Circus has now officially "jumped the shark".
I can only expect that soon Fonzie's long lost nephew will arrive on the scene dressed as Charlie Chaplin, advertising the new "Macintel PC Jr EXTREME".
"For all intents and purposes C++ is a superset of C (ignoring C99). So, how can be C++ more painful to program in?"
If you just want to use C++ to write C, well then yes that's correct. But then why bother with C++ at all in that case?
Speaking as someone who's been scrawling code in C++ ever since that 1st-edition abomination of a manual was written by Stroustrup (gah! 19 years ago?!?), C++ has some great features for implementing OOD. But it also has some incredibly ugly areas as well, add-ons stuck to the side with duct tape and oatmeal.
Rather like taking a perfectly functional wheelbarrow that's ideally suited for its task, and souping it up for drag racing.
Asking how C++ can be more painful than C is like asking how the HomerMobile can be more painful than driving a Civic.
---
"I want a horn here, here, and here.
You can never find a horn when you're mad.
And they should all play `La Cucaracha'." - Homer Simpson
"$1 billion damages? honestly - how do they come up with these figures?"
Apparently NASA and the Pentagon have begun including "embarrassment" as a fiscal line item.
Hey mods, why is the parent post smacked down? It's a darn good question he asks - $1 billion? That's 10x more than the FBI just threw down the toilet after years and years of SAIC development and manpower.
Are they trying to claim that if not for "The Biggest Hacker In The World" ten of those $100 million projects would have actually succeeded?
Or maybe they're charging every firewall/NAT/sysadmin time/etc. to their "If Not For The Biggest Hacker In The World" budget item? Changes which no doubt would be required anyway to keep out, oh I don't know, actual foreign espionage agencies with state support behind them?!?
Because if this guy was getting in, what was stopping the Chinese, Russians, and the Antarctic Penguin Liberation Front from doing the exactly same?
"you've no more expectation of privacy than you do on a CB channel."
Might as well go all PsyOps on their corporate asses then.
Have some outside dummy accounts you can send email to. Send messages full of glowing comments re: boss & company, and others that refer to a mysterious dark conspiracy that haunts your past. Something involving genetic experimentation, a mad European scientist, and a mysterious Brazilian clinic.
Then the week before you quit, start sending mysterious messages encoded in pig-Latin.
$100 million down the drain eh? Heck, I'll bid this next project at a mere $1 million and flail miserably causing the contract to be scuttled in the end just like this one.
Success! Because I'll be saving the FBI $99 million! In fact I think I'll qualify for one of those federal gov't "bounty for saving Uncle Sam costs" contractor bonus plans.
"PPC are far better. Unless we are missing something, this is a downgrade pure and simple."
I fully agree. There's only one scenario I can see making any sense here. Anything else just has me scratching my head, muttering WTF.
How many CPUs do you think IBM will be delivering for PS3 + XBox2 consoles? That's brand-new demand out of their existing fab capacity.
Unless IBM was dramatically ramping up their fab plant output, I could see Apple being worried strategically about getting starved out of the CPU supply line. Or at the very least getting bumped down the priority queue for follow-on features etc.
This step to Intel, while stale bread, is at least better than the risk of starving to death.
"The article also enumerates all those other complaints. "
Yeah, but that's icing-on-the-cake griping at the bottom to flesh out his rant. I guess he had a few more column inches to fill in, the security rant didn't get him there, so he added the "and your dog is ugly too!" stuff.
If Windows was inherently secure, I think this guy would be sticking around WindowsLand and simply buying more reliable hardware.
Though even then I can see his point. My company paid extra for a "business class" machine that cost about the same as a Mac, and while it's proven to be the most reliable Wintel box I've owned (hardware-wise), the floppy went DOA in the first week. Since I rarely use it I don't really care, but it was yet another typical experience for me.
Meanwhile my corral of Macs (including a trusty old PowerMac 7500) keep trucking along. Not even the hard drives have failed after 5+ years (though I don't really trust 'em at that age;-) ).
Mac hardware failures definitely happen, but for whatever reason they happen far less than in the Wintel world.
The article states "because he's fed up with the security issues plaguing Windows-based systems", not that he got fed up with cheap PC components or applications that take shortcuts.
While I find his approach extreme, I can certainly sympathize with his being fed up. Windows "security" has been promised for ages and isn't really forthcoming. So the only alternative is to build a fortress around your network.
And then hope that no user on the network does something stupid. Given enough time, that's unfortunately inevitable as well.
Pardon any ambiguities in my original post, looks like there was some misunderstanding there.
My fear is that even if enough of us agree (on both sides of the aisle), it's hard to stop this kind of erosion once it has begun.:-/
Prime example: The current "nuclear option" by DeLay/Frist/etc. to effectively destroy a few hundred years of tradition that prevents "The Tyranny of the Majority".
What the GOP seems to overlook is that the judicial filibuster has been a very important tool for themselves! The current leadership just cannot grasp the concept that inevitably they will NOT be the majority anymore. They should be guarding that right to filibuster like the crown jewels.
Think the Dems will reinstate that filibuster once they're the majority again? Or any other future majority party? Not a chance. Why on earth can't the the GOP "get" that point?
On most matters I am a conservative, particularly on fiscal and foreign policy, as well as individual rights. I think welfare reform was long overdue. I think deficit spending is irresponsible. I think all elected official are and should be held directly accountable to the people and the law. As a combat veteran, I think war is the absolute last resort, not a "punt on the 3rd down" option.
As a result, I consider the current Administration and its cronies to be nothing more than a front operation of false conservatism. Wave around a little "religious fundamentalism" banner and suddenly the concept of a small, fiscally-responsible federal gov't is something nobody in the GOP seems to remember. Dropped it like a dead squirrel. Amazing.
"Not all conservatives want a police-state buddy."
Then more conservatives damn well better start speaking the hell up, because the GOP which leads the conservative movement is well on its way.
Record deficits, no accountability, the greatest attack on the U.S. Constitution since the Sedition Act, a needless war...
Way to go guys. False conservatives are chumps. If Clinton had presided over the PATRIOT Act you'd all be screaming about the Apocalypse.
"The Constitution prohibits treason ("aid and comfort to the enemy")."
Section 805 is an abomination dripping with the potential for abuse. If you're not concerned about the abuse, read this latest article. 16 year-old girls detained for 6 weeks. No real cause. Released without charges. But the defense lawyer is still under a gag order and can't even discuss the freakin' case.
The problem is when "The Enemy" becomes such a slapdash label that grouping anyone who opposes you into "The Bad Guys" becomes almost an afterthought.
"People and entities that want to harm or destroy the US are the enemy."
Except that the current powers-that-be in Washington D.C. seem not to have much problem extending that to mean "anyone wanting to harm the interests of those in power". If DeLay and crew were so eager to falsely report a "missing plane" to the Dept. of Homeland Security and exploit those assets during a mere political tiff, doesn't that raise the hair on the back of your neck? Because it should.
What if Doctors Without Borders treat a series of casualties somewhere in Africa, and it later turns out some of the patients happened to be with some "officially designated terrorist group".
What if you take on a perl project that someone on the Web has offered up on a contract basis? Quick little contract job. Later turns out the person paying you was with a charity group linked to Hamas?
Far-fetched? Hard to say. But the fact is that there should not even be the potential for such a situation. If the U.S. gov't wants to put you away, they've now got an arsenal of laws in PATRIOT that can do so on the most tenuous of connections.
Once again, if that doesn't make the hair on the back of your neck, maybe you need to reexamine what's been going on.
"Most people don't get past a knee jerk reaction and bother to look at what is really in Patriot beyond the FUD."
And this is just the summary of items scheduled to be repealed automatically. Some of the items that are NOT in the "sunset" clause are equally onerous.
Like the combination of Sections 201 and 805 which creates a net so ridiculously broad that every self-claimed conservative American should be jumping all over it as the gateway to a potential police state.
But no, instead many of these "conservatives" bend over like sheep under the false shiny label of "patriotism".
To which I would remind them all of the following:
"If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy." -James Madison
"That's quite brave, but if they do "call his bluff" and let him go, his reputation will be intact... "
Agreed, and it's definitely working. I don't even know him, but if I was running a company in his line of business I'd bump his resume' near the top based on that alone.
Taking a principled stand against O'Gara's over-the-top shill work and credibility that rivals only the Weekly World News, I've wondered just why the heck LinuxWorld hasn't dumped her years ago.
Number of hits, you say? That's eating your seed corn. Short term hits at the expense of long term credibility isn't a good survival strategy in today's flood of Web-based alternatives.
"I'm missing the interesting strategy on this one. Just sounds like they want us to think that they are being proactive."
Exactly. Hasn't MS in the past tried to get people to sign NDAs re: bugs that a person has discovered? If they can succeed in keeping the knowledge out of the public eye, then by this policy they could bottle it up, avoid announcing it, and still claim they're being proactive.
"Perhaps I am the only one that thinks that Microsoft is evil."
Slashdot Mirror
Because it was the last time we managed to get someone off this rock and onto another one. And it succeeded with a combination of national drive, creativity, risk, and science that I wish we could find among ourselves again.
"I'm not interested unless the end goal is very large numbers of ordinary citizens, not government employees, living, working and making money in space."
Which to me means we first have to get people off this rock and onto another one. I think a lunar base, started very small and expanding onward from there, would be a perfect focus for perfecting the tech and other resources (national/international will) to actually achieve the goals you state. They are my goals too.
And the Apollo program was the last time we pulled that off.
All this lunar base talk makes me want to watch "Space 1999" again. :-)
They definitely need to find some middle ground. The incredibly complex shuttle, in all fairness, was driven more by military/national security design constraints. Meanwhile the "faster, cheaper, leaner" approach of the last decade proved to be a bit too fast and loose.
Then again I wonder if they ever really could get back to the Apollo days? That seemed the best balance to me, but would the American public tolerate several astronauts burning up on the pad due to pure pressurized oxygen sparking up the capsule?
Think of the field day the media (and slashdot) would have over a mistake like that today.
Private enterprise *may* be our best hope in finding the proper spot on the cost/risk curve, but then where's the profit in much of the basic space science we'd all want to see done?
"Is this how it is going to be from now on? Any time Apple changes a model, drops a speed, or something it's going to be attributed to Intel?"
Well I guess once they've switched to Intel CPUs that will certainly seem fair. :-)
But yeah, I agree. The single-CPU 1.8GHz model was a lame duck. The 1.8GHz G5 iMac was coming in cheaper, LCD screen included. They had to do something to shore up the bottom end of the PowerMac series regardless.
"Lucas was intentionally making the characters as detached from time, emotion, and recognizable conversation patterns as possible to maintaing the timelessness of the story, making it impossible to date the production."
While I admire your optimism, lets face it - Lucas simply cannot write dialog or develop storylines.
Example: "Romeo and Juliet" is full of time-specific references, emotion, etc. And it's a timeless tale. The prequel trilogies are to storytelling what bologna is to filet mignon. One is cold cuts, the other is something you can sink your teeth into.
For a sample of how the prequel trilogy could have gone and totally rocked, check out this quick rewrite of the story arc.
"Apple using Intel-compatible motherboards and platforms means that Apple's platform designers are on the way out."
I get the opposite impression - that they'll be busier than ever.
Apple's golden goose is their hardware. They'll keep their MB/platforms as proprietary as they possibly can, and will need to focus extra effort on keeping MacOS X86 tied to their own hardware.
But hey, our speculation and $10 will get us a few cups of coffee. ;-) Time will tell.
"Happy Days had few years of good ratings AFTER Fonzie 'jumped the shark'."
Amusing typo but I won't hold you to it. ;-)
Do not confuse "good ratings" with "good programming". It sucked after the shark jump. Even as a kid I couldn't watch it. (And besides, Erin Gray was wearing spandex over on "Buck Rogers" - far more interesting. ;-) )
"Jump the shark" marks that criticial point when a show (or punditry in this case) has gone so over the top for ratings/attention that nothing further is likely to be of any interest or value. It may drag on a few more seasons, but its all downhill (often steeply) after the shark jump.
And so "Jump the Shark" is a meme that's here to stay. And in the claim of "Intel and Apple to merge" it's a perfect fit.
"Apple and Intel are merging."
It's official - The Macintel Speculation Circus has now officially "jumped the shark".
I can only expect that soon Fonzie's long lost nephew will arrive on the scene dressed as Charlie Chaplin, advertising the new "Macintel PC Jr EXTREME".
"For all intents and purposes C++ is a superset of C (ignoring C99). So, how can be C++ more painful to program in?"
If you just want to use C++ to write C, well then yes that's correct. But then why bother with C++ at all in that case?
Speaking as someone who's been scrawling code in C++ ever since that 1st-edition abomination of a manual was written by Stroustrup (gah! 19 years ago?!?), C++ has some great features for implementing OOD. But it also has some incredibly ugly areas as well, add-ons stuck to the side with duct tape and oatmeal.
Rather like taking a perfectly functional wheelbarrow that's ideally suited for its task, and souping it up for drag racing.
Asking how C++ can be more painful than C is like asking how the HomerMobile can be more painful than driving a Civic.
---
"I want a horn here, here, and here. You can never find a horn when you're mad. And they should all play `La Cucaracha'."
- Homer Simpson
"$1 billion damages? honestly - how do they come up with these figures?"
Apparently NASA and the Pentagon have begun including "embarrassment" as a fiscal line item.
Hey mods, why is the parent post smacked down? It's a darn good question he asks - $1 billion? That's 10x more than the FBI just threw down the toilet after years and years of SAIC development and manpower.
Are they trying to claim that if not for "The Biggest Hacker In The World" ten of those $100 million projects would have actually succeeded?
Or maybe they're charging every firewall/NAT/sysadmin time/etc. to their "If Not For The Biggest Hacker In The World" budget item? Changes which no doubt would be required anyway to keep out, oh I don't know, actual foreign espionage agencies with state support behind them?!?
Because if this guy was getting in, what was stopping the Chinese, Russians, and the Antarctic Penguin Liberation Front from doing the exactly same?
"you've no more expectation of privacy than you do on a CB channel."
Might as well go all PsyOps on their corporate asses then.
Have some outside dummy accounts you can send email to. Send messages full of glowing comments re: boss & company, and others that refer to a mysterious dark conspiracy that haunts your past. Something involving genetic experimentation, a mad European scientist, and a mysterious Brazilian clinic.
Then the week before you quit, start sending mysterious messages encoded in pig-Latin.
"The owls-nay are not as they eem-say."
$100 million down the drain eh? Heck, I'll bid this next project at a mere $1 million and flail miserably causing the contract to be scuttled in the end just like this one.
Success! Because I'll be saving the FBI $99 million! In fact I think I'll qualify for one of those federal gov't "bounty for saving Uncle Sam costs" contractor bonus plans.
Off to the Dilbert Mission Statement Generator.
ROTFL! Why oh why do I always run out of mod points just before the best stuff appears?
"PPC are far better. Unless we are missing something, this is a downgrade pure and simple."
I fully agree. There's only one scenario I can see making any sense here. Anything else just has me scratching my head, muttering WTF.
How many CPUs do you think IBM will be delivering for PS3 + XBox2 consoles? That's brand-new demand out of their existing fab capacity.
Unless IBM was dramatically ramping up their fab plant output, I could see Apple being worried strategically about getting starved out of the CPU supply line. Or at the very least getting bumped down the priority queue for follow-on features etc.
This step to Intel, while stale bread, is at least better than the risk of starving to death.
Yeah, but that's icing-on-the-cake griping at the bottom to flesh out his rant. I guess he had a few more column inches to fill in, the security rant didn't get him there, so he added the "and your dog is ugly too!" stuff.
If Windows was inherently secure, I think this guy would be sticking around WindowsLand and simply buying more reliable hardware.
Though even then I can see his point. My company paid extra for a "business class" machine that cost about the same as a Mac, and while it's proven to be the most reliable Wintel box I've owned (hardware-wise), the floppy went DOA in the first week. Since I rarely use it I don't really care, but it was yet another typical experience for me.
Meanwhile my corral of Macs (including a trusty old PowerMac 7500) keep trucking along. Not even the hard drives have failed after 5+ years (though I don't really trust 'em at that age ;-) ).
Mac hardware failures definitely happen, but for whatever reason they happen far less than in the Wintel world.
The article states "because he's fed up with the security issues plaguing Windows-based systems", not that he got fed up with cheap PC components or applications that take shortcuts.
While I find his approach extreme, I can certainly sympathize with his being fed up. Windows "security" has been promised for ages and isn't really forthcoming. So the only alternative is to build a fortress around your network.
And then hope that no user on the network does something stupid. Given enough time, that's unfortunately inevitable as well.
"Microsoft is waiting for a credible threat until they release Longhorn. The threat is not here yet."
Let me correct a spelling error you made:
Microsoft is waiting for a credible build until they release Longhorn. The build is not here yet.
Immediately creating a kids' grey market of slipping allowances to other kids to wear these shoes on behalf of the targeted couch potato.
$5 per hour's worth of TV time, $15 during Sweeps Week.
Pardon any ambiguities in my original post, looks like there was some misunderstanding there.
My fear is that even if enough of us agree (on both sides of the aisle), it's hard to stop this kind of erosion once it has begun. :-/
Prime example: The current "nuclear option" by DeLay/Frist/etc. to effectively destroy a few hundred years of tradition that prevents "The Tyranny of the Majority".
What the GOP seems to overlook is that the judicial filibuster has been a very important tool for themselves! The current leadership just cannot grasp the concept that inevitably they will NOT be the majority anymore. They should be guarding that right to filibuster like the crown jewels.
Think the Dems will reinstate that filibuster once they're the majority again? Or any other future majority party? Not a chance. Why on earth can't the the GOP "get" that point?
"He's attacking conservatives, +1 insightful!!"
On most matters I am a conservative, particularly on fiscal and foreign policy, as well as individual rights. I think welfare reform was long overdue. I think deficit spending is irresponsible. I think all elected official are and should be held directly accountable to the people and the law. As a combat veteran, I think war is the absolute last resort, not a "punt on the 3rd down" option.
As a result, I consider the current Administration and its cronies to be nothing more than a front operation of false conservatism. Wave around a little "religious fundamentalism" banner and suddenly the concept of a small, fiscally-responsible federal gov't is something nobody in the GOP seems to remember. Dropped it like a dead squirrel. Amazing.
"Not all conservatives want a police-state buddy."Then more conservatives damn well better start speaking the hell up, because the GOP which leads the conservative movement is well on its way.
Record deficits, no accountability, the greatest attack on the U.S. Constitution since the Sedition Act, a needless war...
Way to go guys. False conservatives are chumps. If Clinton had presided over the PATRIOT Act you'd all be screaming about the Apocalypse.
Wake up.
"The Constitution prohibits treason ("aid and comfort to the enemy")."
Section 805 is an abomination dripping with the potential for abuse. If you're not concerned about the abuse, read this latest article. 16 year-old girls detained for 6 weeks. No real cause. Released without charges. But the defense lawyer is still under a gag order and can't even discuss the freakin' case.
The problem is when "The Enemy" becomes such a slapdash label that grouping anyone who opposes you into "The Bad Guys" becomes almost an afterthought.
"People and entities that want to harm or destroy the US are the enemy."
Except that the current powers-that-be in Washington D.C. seem not to have much problem extending that to mean "anyone wanting to harm the interests of those in power". If DeLay and crew were so eager to falsely report a "missing plane" to the Dept. of Homeland Security and exploit those assets during a mere political tiff, doesn't that raise the hair on the back of your neck? Because it should.
What if Doctors Without Borders treat a series of casualties somewhere in Africa, and it later turns out some of the patients happened to be with some "officially designated terrorist group".
What if you take on a perl project that someone on the Web has offered up on a contract basis? Quick little contract job. Later turns out the person paying you was with a charity group linked to Hamas?
Far-fetched? Hard to say. But the fact is that there should not even be the potential for such a situation. If the U.S. gov't wants to put you away, they've now got an arsenal of laws in PATRIOT that can do so on the most tenuous of connections.
Once again, if that doesn't make the hair on the back of your neck, maybe you need to reexamine what's been going on.
"Most people don't get past a knee jerk reaction and bother to look at what is really in Patriot beyond the FUD."
And this is just the summary of items scheduled to be repealed automatically. Some of the items that are NOT in the "sunset" clause are equally onerous.
Like the combination of Sections 201 and 805 which creates a net so ridiculously broad that every self-claimed conservative American should be jumping all over it as the gateway to a potential police state.
But no, instead many of these "conservatives" bend over like sheep under the false shiny label of "patriotism".
To which I would remind them all of the following:
"If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy." -James Madison
Comparing O'Gara trash vs. PJ's response is probably the best meta-summary of the whole debacle.
Agreed, and it's definitely working. I don't even know him, but if I was running a company in his line of business I'd bump his resume' near the top based on that alone.
Taking a principled stand against O'Gara's over-the-top shill work and credibility that rivals only the Weekly World News, I've wondered just why the heck LinuxWorld hasn't dumped her years ago.
Number of hits, you say? That's eating your seed corn. Short term hits at the expense of long term credibility isn't a good survival strategy in today's flood of Web-based alternatives.
"I'm missing the interesting strategy on this one. Just sounds like they want us to think that they are being proactive."
Exactly. Hasn't MS in the past tried to get people to sign NDAs re: bugs that a person has discovered? If they can succeed in keeping the knowledge out of the public eye, then by this policy they could bottle it up, avoid announcing it, and still claim they're being proactive.
"Perhaps I am the only one that thinks that Microsoft is evil."
Not by a long shot.
"He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead"
So this would effectively reveal Dubya as the anti-christ? Yeah, kinda figured.... ;-)
Though I always had him cast as Jar-Jar with Rove as the Sith Lord.