The people who watch Fox News already agree with everything that's being said on Fox News. They watch Fox News because it doesn't challenge their assumptions about the world, which might upset them. They watch Fox News because you don't have to think hard to determine how you are supposed to feel about an issue, it's spoon fed to you (e.g. O'Reilly Factor - here's the smart, hard-hitting conservative, and the weeniest liberal we could find to "debate" him in an edited, but of course "non-partisan", forum where all points the liberal makes will be cut out!).
I want the news to challenge my assumptions. I want investigative reporting uncovering causes and correlations that I didn't know existed before. I want open-minded reporting that doesn't bash reasonable perspectives on both sides of the political spectrum. I don't really see why the politics of the owner have to be so flagrantly reflected in the reporting - CNN was owned by Ted Turner for many years, who has many radical positions I don't agree with, but while not perfect, I've certainly never seen that kind of flagrant bias on CNN (about an equal number of people seem to accuse CNN of overly liberal and overly conservative bias as far as I can tell).
There should never be a law passed that is so super-secret the law itself can't be discussed or debated in an open forum, such as a court. The concept is anathema to democracy - and Republicans used to have the nerve to say that Democrats supported a "Nanny State" - note how you don't hear that attack so often any more - after their revered leader, Dubya, created a Nanny State for all of us. I am all for reasonable security measures as a New Yorker, but I'm not sure I see how asking for ID and checking it against a super-secret terrorist watch list really makes us safer (the same watch list they put Ted Kennedy on apparently, which took him months to get taken off of).
Anybody who's lived in New York for a while knows that there are about 20 thousand dudes named Mohammed Ibrahim or Mohammed Mohammed driving cabs around the city. Just having a generic Arab name on a watch list is far more likely to flag a cabbie than it is a terrorist. I'm not saying I wouldn't search every Arab looking fellow who got on a plane extra carefully, but I don't think even 5 or 10 guys with knives would be able to hijack a plane in the US, post September 11th.
Well, it's interesting. It seems like you'd have to be a nutcase to agree with some of those statements. I show up as -1.88 and -3.38. In other words, pretty moderate economically and fairly strongly libertarian socially. This is fairly accurate actually, based on my own self-assessment.
While I don't see any problem with the fact that lots of the statements are logical fallacies (this isn't a right/wrong test, it's to measure your responses to the statements, even when logical fallacies), I just don't see how some of them are really either right or left socially or economically. Is the concept of "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" really a politically conservative concept, or a religious expression of the human desire for revenge? Is optional classroom attendance for minors really a libertarian point of view? Is eugenics politically conservative, or just a bit nutty? If you like to keep busy with cheerful things when you are troubled, does that make you a social liberal (or conservative? I can't even figure this one out)?
The problem is that people just care less about Karma than they used to, when you weren't maxed out at 50, and you could actually see your Karma, not just "Excellent", "Good", etc. I guess the point of this was to reduce Karma whoring. I don't know if this was a good or bad change to/. though. Re-emphasizing Karma in the way you describe would be difficult without going back to a numeric system and other changes.
Personally I would prefer this, but I don't think it's going to happen since the editors have made it pretty clear they don't care much for the Karma system they created in the first place, I think mostly because they want to encourage participation by casual visitors to/. who bring in advertising dollars by virtue of their eyeball numbers over the regular, highly moderated posters and contributers who actually make the content here worth viewing. Oh well, I appreciate that it's a tough balance to walk, and you want to keep everybody happy and coming back for more.
The key point here is that politics has been here all along. The editors have always taken a mixed view of this - on the one hand, there is Michael, the most overtly political of the current editors, and there was Jon Katz, who was blatantly political (that's NOT why we hated him editors, it was because of his whininess and rage-filled, massive rants - if his writings were halfway intelligent, they would have at least been given a fair audience).
And as you point out Garcia, politics have been part of not only the editorializing but also the comments and moderation system since day 1 (which for you was even before me, with your 4-digit UID). Slashdot was never really just News for Nerds, it was also Stuff that Matters, and to an even moderately educated nerd, politics does matter, even outside of DRM and Your Rights Online.
I think the admission by the editors that there is a desire for a politics category is a positive thing. I generally think the idea you propose, however, which is eliminating Karma effects of moderation is not a positive step. With no consequences, the amount of trolling and flamebait posts you will see will increase substantially. Respectful rational argumentation does occur here, but it's easy for discussions to degenerate, and your proposal won't help.
While I agree that sometimes posts are moderated specifically for their political views, it's more often the case that they get moderated for the way they express their radical political views. We should stick to the same standards of civilized discussion you'd expect with a gathering of real people in the real world. I'd rather deal with blatantly political down-moderation in meta-mod and add a facility there to tackle this problem. As for the problem of people getting modded up for expressing popular political points of view (nerd populism?), I don't think there's any problem with it, and there's even less that can be done about it.
Agreed. What current display units natively support it at this point? Basically just old fashioned CRT projection TVs. All the new DLP and LCD projection TVs are natively 720p and spatially downconvert/deinterlace 1080i (including my Sony Grand Wega 60", which is absolutely beautiful, by the way, if you're in the market for a large screen HD set). I think the HD plasmas are all 720p as well, for those who want to blow some serious cash. Same goes for the smaller LCD TVs. I'm not really sure why you'd want a CRT projection set these days, but then again in my Manhattan apartment the square footage it would waste costs at least 10 times the difference in price of the sets.
I guess the non-projection HD CRTs (the mostly sub-1000 dollar units) do native 1080i still, and people must be buying these since I see a lot of them at Best Buy/CC. Mostly I just find it annoying that nobody has standardized, even on an inferior standard. At least then it would be possible to get one set that displayed all of the content well, as opposed to the mess of trade-off decisions involved in getting a decent HD setup right now.
The MP3+ is great in theory. The drivers suck though - the SPDIF in port doesn't work except for recording. No mixer support, so you can't hear what's coming in over the SPDIF line. This annoyance basically makes it worthless to me, since the whole reason I bought the damned thing was so I had a working TOSLink/SPDIF input port to pipe digital sound out from my XM PCR satellite radio (the analog noise with the XM PCR and my built in sound on the IDEQ 200N is beyond grating on the ears, I can't use it - dunno if it's the DAC on the PCR or the ADC on the IDEQ). Oh and the IDEQ 200N misrepresented its capabilities when I bought it - the SPDIF in port doesn't work either, apparently both SPDIF ports are output only.
So I have an Audigy 2 NX on order now. Hopefully this solves my sound woes. Getting decent digital sound into my computer shouldn't have been this difficult or this expensive.
Seems most people have missed a big reason to go external with a TV tuner. Like any RF equipment, these suckers can get serious interference when installed in a PC. I don't know, maybe you people haven't experienced this, but I have an old btX78-based card (I don't even remember which one it is exactly, haven't used it in ages), and I noticed a non-negligible amount of noise when it was installed in my SFF IDEQ 200N PC. I found it somewhat annoying to watch (the fact that it can only get basic cable channels also makes it moderately useless without a digital cable box and IR controller). Anyway, I recently had a similar problem with the built-in audio Line In on my IDEQ - too much hiss noise, and the solution was to get an external USB Sound Blaster device. Works like a charm.
So don't diss on external USB devices - I agree, generally it's nice to have everything internal, but sometimes it's not possible.
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that I support making death threats to people for their company's products. By mocking this situation, I was just expressing my sincerest desire that companies would realize that social responsibility holds as much in the realm of data, bits and bytes as it does in the real world. This is a more general commentary really, it has little to do with the situation of this one guy and his company.
In fact, while this service seems like it would be prone to abuse, I can think of plenty of companies that have done far more socially repugnant things. Again, death threats are not cool, but if SCO employees and management (for example, a company we can all pretty much agree on as "socially repugnant" and a deserved pariah) suffered more of a social stigma for what they are doing, perhaps the people involved would think twice before going down that path.
I offered an obnoxious, socially irresponsible service and people got angry at me! Waaaaaah!
What a bitch. If this happened more often, we wouldn't have companies like SCO and others going on with their obnoxious, socially reprehensible behavior in the name of shareholder value. Don't get me wrong, I'm a capitalist, but that doesn't mean that a company has the right to shit all over everybody. We're all part of something called society, and we have laws and social norms that you must obey, and unfortunately sometimes the law doesn't completely reflect the reality of socially acceptable behavior. Just because it's legal or technically possible doesn't mean the people should bend over and accept it.
NG tube removal is bad, but not THAT bad (hopefully you got to have a few hits of morphine, fentanyl or some other opiate before they yanked it). My mother had an NG tube inserted once sans anesthesia (to relieve acute pressure from an intestinal blockage) - that was very painful. However, she has also had interventional radiology procedures similar to this, where they inserted tubes to drain an infected abscess in her liver with only mild painkiller, no anesthesia. By her account, having a large tube poked into your body cavity slowly (over the course of about half an hour to make sure it's positioned correctly), and then having it done 2 or three times in a row for each abscess, was far more painful than the NG tube incident.
Though memory does weird things to pain - sometimes it's hard to accurately compare painful incidents separated in time by several years.
Prove it how? I've never been in an accident, that's proof enough for me. I don't have a problem with fast driving as much as I do with reckless, careless driving.
And no, big brother isn't worth the dollars. Besides which, I don't understand how people can even imagine bitching about auto insurance rates. I pay 1200 bucks a year for car insurance, it's nothing. Decent health insurance costs me over 5000 a year by comparison, and I'm a healthy, single 25 year old male. At least that's the ratio in Massachusetts if you want a decent PPO plan (and I refuse to deal with freaking HMO plans, almost as bad as having no coverage).
In any case, I'm not going to complain about the fact that I pay for more than I use of either - that's the whole point of pooled risk.
No, what we need to do to get insurance costs under control is regulate the lawsuit business. The problem is all the lawsuits in the world haven't improved the quality of health care one bit - just increased the cost of malpractice insurance immensely, which gets passed onto us as health insurance premiums, uncovered procedures, and high copayment percentages. I'm all for the fact that if a doctor screws something up seriously, there should be consequences, but I think the dollar amounts need to be limited for the greater good of society, to make health care affordable again.
The reason they can roll FTTH in Japan is because of the fact that most people live in very highley densely populated apartment buildings and their is companies who are willing to spend billions of dollars to implement it, which could turn out to be a huge waste of money. US companies generally play it safe, especially with the current economic and 'homeland security' policies.
Obviously, but we took tons of other big risks here in the US that nobody would take in other countries. Some of these paid off well, some didn't. So your argument that US companies play it safe seems off base.
And you obviously didn't read my post because I *AM* talking about densely populated areas like Manhattan where everybody DOES live in densely packed apartment buildings. I don't expect that FTTH would be economical out in the burbs.
Do you honestly think that they are purposefully stopping you using a cable modem and cutting off revenue?! You sir, are insane if you think that.
No, I never suggested that. I just think that the big broadband companies (i.e. the telcos and cable companies) jumped the gun investing in crappy technology like DSL and were unwilling to invest in new infrastructure once they got that rolled out. Instead, they pumped money into advertising, and started cutting back the quality of service. This has been documented all over the place - oversubscribing their bandwidth to neighborhoods, putting in ex-post-facto changes to user agreements and terminating service for people who use their "unlimited" bandwidth too much.
And I think the New York market has been severely hurt by the weird way cable service works around here (building by building monopolies - each building is usually an RCN, Time Warner, Liberty Cable, etc. monopoly) so it's a ridiculous patchwork. This does not make for a functioning "free market" in the positive sense of the word.
I'm tired of this population density argument. I live in New York City (upper west side Manhattan) and Cambridge, MA (right in Harvard Square). Not rural or suburban areas by any stretch of the imagination. Certainly not Manhattan. And in fact Manhattan took far longer to get decent broadband than Cambridge! We were stuck with first gen. DSL here for ages - only in the last couple of years has cable become a viable option, and it's been blamed here on the antiquated cable infrastructure.
These fuckers can find excuses anywhere. When it comes down to it, they just took their dandy-ass time in rolling shit out. In fact, the first places to get new broadband were usually suburban communities that serve as testbeds to work out the kinks before they will even bother rolling them out to major metropolitan areas.
What I want is not the bullshit excuses, but to know WHY American companies seem to be unable to do what other countries can do just fine? Why could they roll out fiber-to-your-door in Tokyo but not NYC, and give people ultra high-speed broadband for 35 bucks a piece when I pay 50 or more a month for mediocre DSL or capped cable service with atrocious user agreements and other impediments?
Don't give yourself too much credit - I was skeptical in my first post, I didn't blindly accept what you were saying solely because of your low UID. I just said your tone appeared serious, not obviously funny, so I wasn't sure if you were joking or not, and I was willing to give you the benefit of the doubt because of your UID.
My assertion that you are were being a prick stands - if you wanted to be funny you need to be _slightly_ more obvious. Of course the "I took the second derivative and there it was!" sounds pretty ridiculous, but as you said yourself, you tried to make it sound vaguely credible, not just funny. The last sentence about the name of the file was easily ignored since clicking on the file link led to nothing at the time since the server was dead, and it appears only those of us who paid attention to the filename immediately saw that this was a joke. The rest of us were led to wonder whether you were a pure troll, a tinfoil hat nutjob, just seeing some strange spurious data or something else. I only feel bad now for being so generally nice in my original post despite my expressed skepticism.
Never mind, I was suspicious of the post of course (thus my preface, the "assumption"), but I gave it some creedence due to the low user ID. Last time I'll make that mistake.
Can we nominate the original post for lowest user ID troll ever? I mean this guy knew we'd think he might actually be credible and used this to get us all stirred up into a frenzy. What a prick.
with my Treo 600. I've never been more productive while on-the-go in my life prior to this. The few things I feel are missing (noteably built-in Bluetooth, and hopefully somewhat better data battery life) ought to be addressed in the updated Treo Ace/650 coming out soon.
You can get a GPS module for it which some people rave about, say it's very nice. The only other thing missing is wi-fi, which I admit would be nice for higher speed transmission and surfing in hotspots. And a higher res (320x320) screen would be nice too. The default software bundle isn't ideal - Palm ships a mediocre email program and web browser, but the strong Palm developer community keeps cranking out excellent alternatives, and there are lots of choices of apps with varying feature sets and focus to meet your particular set of exact needs.
In general, I find Palm both simple enough and powerful enough for all my palmtop computing needs as a platform. And the Treo 600 is a very nice compromise between phone and PDA/handheld.
I am assuming your post is for real, in which case it certainly sounds interesting. I can't duplicate the procedure you're describing since the site is currently quite dead. I haven't given this much thought so I'm not going to bother trying to poke holes in your theory, and I don't have any knowledge of what the data actually is so it would be a waste of time anyway. Have you considered emailing the results of your analysis to the SETI folks for their thoughts?
They aren't suing for the parody in the usual sense (with respect to copyrighted material), they are suing for trademark infringement. Parody is an affirmative defense for trademark infringement, but it's apparently very narrow in scope, more so than the copyright infringement defense.
This isn't such a clear cut case - are they really trying to parody Mystery Science Theater 3000 or are they trying to sell tickets to their live show which uses a similar format and trade off of the MS3TK brand name?
So as far as I can tell, as long as they don't use a name that is deceptively similar to "Mystery Science Theater 3000" or "MST3K" they are probably fine. "Mister Sinus" or "Mister Sinus Theater" is probably still deceptively similar. Nobody is trying to stop them from doing their show under some other name. So... they would have to convince a judge that they are really making a parody of MST3K itself, AND that what they do does not carry a substantial chance of being confused with the original (i.e. something endorsed by the original company), AND that their use of adult material does not run a substantial risk of harming the business of the MST3K people.
Alright, now back to our normal business of feeling sorry for people who steal music.
Wait a second, I already said it was impossible that the AC posting previously had actually been a delegate. Stop pretending to disagree with me when we are saying the same thing. All I said is that there are quite a few of them and it's not impossible for one, a general unspecified individual, to become a delegate if one has the right connections and role in one's local party.
Whatever, the guy was too inarticulate to distinguish between a delegate and a member, I realize it was either a lie or a stupid joke.
But some states have well over a hundred delegates. If you have a friend on the state party oommittee it's certainly not impossible that you could be chosen as a delegate (obviously, if you're not an active Republican, you're not going to be chosen).
Well, he can't write a story submission without a link to his blog because he is spamming Slashdot for ad impressions. And yes, he's an asshat, a terrible writer, a rehasher of stupid stories that are not informative, and he seems to have some strange relationship with the Slashdot editors (kickbacks?) that they keep posting his submissions, on a daily basis no less, without at least clipping out the damn links to his stupid blog.
He means a delegate seat at the Republican National Convention, the RNC in this context, NOT the Republican National Committee (which is what people usually refer to as the RNC). There are thousands of delegates for both party's conventions and the role is mostly ceremonial, so I believe that somebody's friend could get them a seat.
Slashdot Mirror
I want the news to challenge my assumptions. I want investigative reporting uncovering causes and correlations that I didn't know existed before. I want open-minded reporting that doesn't bash reasonable perspectives on both sides of the political spectrum. I don't really see why the politics of the owner have to be so flagrantly reflected in the reporting - CNN was owned by Ted Turner for many years, who has many radical positions I don't agree with, but while not perfect, I've certainly never seen that kind of flagrant bias on CNN (about an equal number of people seem to accuse CNN of overly liberal and overly conservative bias as far as I can tell).
Anybody who's lived in New York for a while knows that there are about 20 thousand dudes named Mohammed Ibrahim or Mohammed Mohammed driving cabs around the city. Just having a generic Arab name on a watch list is far more likely to flag a cabbie than it is a terrorist. I'm not saying I wouldn't search every Arab looking fellow who got on a plane extra carefully, but I don't think even 5 or 10 guys with knives would be able to hijack a plane in the US, post September 11th.
While I don't see any problem with the fact that lots of the statements are logical fallacies (this isn't a right/wrong test, it's to measure your responses to the statements, even when logical fallacies), I just don't see how some of them are really either right or left socially or economically. Is the concept of "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" really a politically conservative concept, or a religious expression of the human desire for revenge? Is optional classroom attendance for minors really a libertarian point of view? Is eugenics politically conservative, or just a bit nutty? If you like to keep busy with cheerful things when you are troubled, does that make you a social liberal (or conservative? I can't even figure this one out)?
Personally I would prefer this, but I don't think it's going to happen since the editors have made it pretty clear they don't care much for the Karma system they created in the first place, I think mostly because they want to encourage participation by casual visitors to
And as you point out Garcia, politics have been part of not only the editorializing but also the comments and moderation system since day 1 (which for you was even before me, with your 4-digit UID). Slashdot was never really just News for Nerds, it was also Stuff that Matters, and to an even moderately educated nerd, politics does matter, even outside of DRM and Your Rights Online.
I think the admission by the editors that there is a desire for a politics category is a positive thing. I generally think the idea you propose, however, which is eliminating Karma effects of moderation is not a positive step. With no consequences, the amount of trolling and flamebait posts you will see will increase substantially. Respectful rational argumentation does occur here, but it's easy for discussions to degenerate, and your proposal won't help.
While I agree that sometimes posts are moderated specifically for their political views, it's more often the case that they get moderated for the way they express their radical political views. We should stick to the same standards of civilized discussion you'd expect with a gathering of real people in the real world. I'd rather deal with blatantly political down-moderation in meta-mod and add a facility there to tackle this problem. As for the problem of people getting modded up for expressing popular political points of view (nerd populism?), I don't think there's any problem with it, and there's even less that can be done about it.
I guess the non-projection HD CRTs (the mostly sub-1000 dollar units) do native 1080i still, and people must be buying these since I see a lot of them at Best Buy/CC. Mostly I just find it annoying that nobody has standardized, even on an inferior standard. At least then it would be possible to get one set that displayed all of the content well, as opposed to the mess of trade-off decisions involved in getting a decent HD setup right now.
So I have an Audigy 2 NX on order now. Hopefully this solves my sound woes. Getting decent digital sound into my computer shouldn't have been this difficult or this expensive.
So don't diss on external USB devices - I agree, generally it's nice to have everything internal, but sometimes it's not possible.
In fact, while this service seems like it would be prone to abuse, I can think of plenty of companies that have done far more socially repugnant things. Again, death threats are not cool, but if SCO employees and management (for example, a company we can all pretty much agree on as "socially repugnant" and a deserved pariah) suffered more of a social stigma for what they are doing, perhaps the people involved would think twice before going down that path.
What a bitch. If this happened more often, we wouldn't have companies like SCO and others going on with their obnoxious, socially reprehensible behavior in the name of shareholder value. Don't get me wrong, I'm a capitalist, but that doesn't mean that a company has the right to shit all over everybody. We're all part of something called society, and we have laws and social norms that you must obey, and unfortunately sometimes the law doesn't completely reflect the reality of socially acceptable behavior. Just because it's legal or technically possible doesn't mean the people should bend over and accept it.
Though memory does weird things to pain - sometimes it's hard to accurately compare painful incidents separated in time by several years.
And no, big brother isn't worth the dollars. Besides which, I don't understand how people can even imagine bitching about auto insurance rates. I pay 1200 bucks a year for car insurance, it's nothing. Decent health insurance costs me over 5000 a year by comparison, and I'm a healthy, single 25 year old male. At least that's the ratio in Massachusetts if you want a decent PPO plan (and I refuse to deal with freaking HMO plans, almost as bad as having no coverage).
In any case, I'm not going to complain about the fact that I pay for more than I use of either - that's the whole point of pooled risk.
No, what we need to do to get insurance costs under control is regulate the lawsuit business. The problem is all the lawsuits in the world haven't improved the quality of health care one bit - just increased the cost of malpractice insurance immensely, which gets passed onto us as health insurance premiums, uncovered procedures, and high copayment percentages. I'm all for the fact that if a doctor screws something up seriously, there should be consequences, but I think the dollar amounts need to be limited for the greater good of society, to make health care affordable again.
Obviously, but we took tons of other big risks here in the US that nobody would take in other countries. Some of these paid off well, some didn't. So your argument that US companies play it safe seems off base.
And you obviously didn't read my post because I *AM* talking about densely populated areas like Manhattan where everybody DOES live in densely packed apartment buildings. I don't expect that FTTH would be economical out in the burbs.
Do you honestly think that they are purposefully stopping you using a cable modem and cutting off revenue?! You sir, are insane if you think that.
No, I never suggested that. I just think that the big broadband companies (i.e. the telcos and cable companies) jumped the gun investing in crappy technology like DSL and were unwilling to invest in new infrastructure once they got that rolled out. Instead, they pumped money into advertising, and started cutting back the quality of service. This has been documented all over the place - oversubscribing their bandwidth to neighborhoods, putting in ex-post-facto changes to user agreements and terminating service for people who use their "unlimited" bandwidth too much.
And I think the New York market has been severely hurt by the weird way cable service works around here (building by building monopolies - each building is usually an RCN, Time Warner, Liberty Cable, etc. monopoly) so it's a ridiculous patchwork. This does not make for a functioning "free market" in the positive sense of the word.
When the getting was good, I was busy raising capital and starting another company.
These fuckers can find excuses anywhere. When it comes down to it, they just took their dandy-ass time in rolling shit out. In fact, the first places to get new broadband were usually suburban communities that serve as testbeds to work out the kinks before they will even bother rolling them out to major metropolitan areas.
What I want is not the bullshit excuses, but to know WHY American companies seem to be unable to do what other countries can do just fine? Why could they roll out fiber-to-your-door in Tokyo but not NYC, and give people ultra high-speed broadband for 35 bucks a piece when I pay 50 or more a month for mediocre DSL or capped cable service with atrocious user agreements and other impediments?
My assertion that you are were being a prick stands - if you wanted to be funny you need to be _slightly_ more obvious. Of course the "I took the second derivative and there it was!" sounds pretty ridiculous, but as you said yourself, you tried to make it sound vaguely credible, not just funny. The last sentence about the name of the file was easily ignored since clicking on the file link led to nothing at the time since the server was dead, and it appears only those of us who paid attention to the filename immediately saw that this was a joke. The rest of us were led to wonder whether you were a pure troll, a tinfoil hat nutjob, just seeing some strange spurious data or something else. I only feel bad now for being so generally nice in my original post despite my expressed skepticism.
Never mind, I was suspicious of the post of course (thus my preface, the "assumption"), but I gave it some creedence due to the low user ID. Last time I'll make that mistake.
Can we nominate the original post for lowest user ID troll ever? I mean this guy knew we'd think he might actually be credible and used this to get us all stirred up into a frenzy. What a prick.
You can get a GPS module for it which some people rave about, say it's very nice. The only other thing missing is wi-fi, which I admit would be nice for higher speed transmission and surfing in hotspots. And a higher res (320x320) screen would be nice too. The default software bundle isn't ideal - Palm ships a mediocre email program and web browser, but the strong Palm developer community keeps cranking out excellent alternatives, and there are lots of choices of apps with varying feature sets and focus to meet your particular set of exact needs.
In general, I find Palm both simple enough and powerful enough for all my palmtop computing needs as a platform. And the Treo 600 is a very nice compromise between phone and PDA/handheld.
I am assuming your post is for real, in which case it certainly sounds interesting. I can't duplicate the procedure you're describing since the site is currently quite dead. I haven't given this much thought so I'm not going to bother trying to poke holes in your theory, and I don't have any knowledge of what the data actually is so it would be a waste of time anyway. Have you considered emailing the results of your analysis to the SETI folks for their thoughts?
This isn't such a clear cut case - are they really trying to parody Mystery Science Theater 3000 or are they trying to sell tickets to their live show which uses a similar format and trade off of the MS3TK brand name?
So as far as I can tell, as long as they don't use a name that is deceptively similar to "Mystery Science Theater 3000" or "MST3K" they are probably fine. "Mister Sinus" or "Mister Sinus Theater" is probably still deceptively similar. Nobody is trying to stop them from doing their show under some other name. So... they would have to convince a judge that they are really making a parody of MST3K itself, AND that what they do does not carry a substantial chance of being confused with the original (i.e. something endorsed by the original company), AND that their use of adult material does not run a substantial risk of harming the business of the MST3K people.
Alright, now back to our normal business of feeling sorry for people who steal music.
Wait a second, I already said it was impossible that the AC posting previously had actually been a delegate. Stop pretending to disagree with me when we are saying the same thing. All I said is that there are quite a few of them and it's not impossible for one, a general unspecified individual, to become a delegate if one has the right connections and role in one's local party.
But some states have well over a hundred delegates. If you have a friend on the state party oommittee it's certainly not impossible that you could be chosen as a delegate (obviously, if you're not an active Republican, you're not going to be chosen).
Well, he can't write a story submission without a link to his blog because he is spamming Slashdot for ad impressions. And yes, he's an asshat, a terrible writer, a rehasher of stupid stories that are not informative, and he seems to have some strange relationship with the Slashdot editors (kickbacks?) that they keep posting his submissions, on a daily basis no less, without at least clipping out the damn links to his stupid blog.
He means a delegate seat at the Republican National Convention, the RNC in this context, NOT the Republican National Committee (which is what people usually refer to as the RNC). There are thousands of delegates for both party's conventions and the role is mostly ceremonial, so I believe that somebody's friend could get them a seat.