Not to rub it in or anything, but seeing a shuttle launch in person is fucking amazing.
My mom was on contract to NASA developing a data management system for the Shuttle's payload telemetry up/downlink. For the first flight of the Shuttle with the new software, the engineers who worked on it were invited out to the forward press bleachers to watch the launch. I got to tag along, and it also happened to be the last time those particular bleachers were populated during a launch. (Ground Safety determined that they were too close, ya know, in the event of a 'failure')
Anyway... clear your mind and imagine that you're sitting on some hard, old, worn wooden bleachers. You're excited and packed tight with a bunch of programmers and engineers who are also excited and talking in excruciating detail about the thing you're about to witness. You've been sitting there for three hours.
The countdown finally hits T -10 seconds and suddenly you and everyone around you is on their feet, answering some unspoken urge to strain upward. You're close enough that you can see the American flag and the name "Columbia" clearly on the wing of the orbiter. About a hundred yards in front of you is a wide creek that is so still and black that you can see a perfect reflection of everything. A long legged bird wades slowly, ponderously through the vegetation on the edge of the bank.
A loud voice calls out "T minus 9..." and it feels like a damn eternity has passed. Everything is vivid and sharp. You can feel the warm, moist, salt-laden air prickle against your skin, the heat and straining muscles of the people pressing in on you, the electric anticipation of something monumental.
People are chanting. "EIGHT!" "SEVEN!" "SIX!" and you realize you're yelling these numbers at the top of your lungs.
"FIVE!"
And there is this thump, and some sparks start shooting out from under the Shuttle. Someone yells something about engines but your ears are ringing from the rushing of your own blood and this spectacle that now includes these cones of fire is happening in utter silence.
There is a loud woosh and the air turns cold. The pad cooling system has come on and millions of gallons of water are being pumped in at high speed to keep everything from just melting.
"THREE!" "TWO!"
Oh god
"ONE!"
And the whole fucking world just stops.
There is a collective intake of breath.
The long legged bird takes one more ponderous step in painful slow motion.
There is a rumbling, low, felt more than heard, just on the edge of your perception.
A flash, two pillars of fire rise from the base of the pad, and on top, a squat, ulgy, orange slug.
You can only hear your own heart hammering away in your chest.
It is magical and ethereal and the closest I've ever been to a religious experience.
Then, from the corner of your eye you notice the stillness of the water is broken. The long legged bird squawks in alarm then takes to shaky flight.
The bow front of the shock waving coming from the pad has passed over the water and turned in instantly to churning foam. The bleachers are suddenly swaying, rolling, shuddering, and then the wave breaks over your body.
Your lungs are a bass drum beaten by a hyperactive maniac, throbbing in time to this crazy juju dance of solid ammonium perchlorate converting 1:1 into Holy Fuck! There is no world, no you, no nothing but the noise, the raw fury of millions upon millions of pounds of thrust being delivered straight to your soul via every nerve in your body. The bleachers are too close. They are going to collapse. The air temperature spikes and your slow mammal brain realizes that all the fire in the world
IS
RIGHT
FUCKING
THERE.
As this glorious moment fades you're left with this deep sense of longing and regret. All that fire and sound made you whole, one vibrating particle at the resonance frequency of the entire universe, and all you can see is the hind end of that impossibly tiny speck carr
I would disagree with you about WoW being influential. Much like you suggested with Starcraft (and Warcraft by proxy) WoW polished an already existing game mode and added nothing ground breaking to the game play discussion. Nor, in my opinion, did it eliminate any of the grind. The grind was pushed out to the end-game phase rather than the newbie phase.
If you want an MMO that actually had some ground breaking innovations, check out EVE. While it does have a learning curve that some people have described as a cliff, it is one of the few MMOs that has a persistent world on a single shard, a mostly player based economy, skill training that isn't based on grind, and an absolutely brutal punishment for failure.
I'm not sure I want to trust my vote security to a company named after a character from the Dune series of books that was able to change his appearance at will and was an intergalactic espionage agent.
This is assuming that the device you sends can be repaired by a human. As long as the device you're sending down there is repair-friendly, you're good to go. If it is a maze of wave soldered bits and pieces and hard-wired do-dads, it is essentially disposable.
Oh sure, the drone can spot you, call for help, and loiter around as long as it can to reassure you that, yes, someone is coming. I bet the drone could even have some supplies attached to a hard point, maybe a capsule with a life raft and five man-days worth of supplies suitable to the area.
Hell, I bet the drone could even act as a WiFi hotspot or wireless repeater. You wouldn't get pulled out of the water right away, but you could sure as hell post all about it on Facebook.
Per wikipedia:
"To create a FEL, a beam of electrons is accelerated to almost light speed. The beam passes through an FEL oscillator in the form of a periodic, transverse magnetic field, produced by arranging magnets with alternating poles within a laser cavity along the beam path. This array of magnets is sometimes called an undulator, or a "wiggler", because it forces the electrons in the beam to follow a sinusoidal path."
And we're going to mount this on Naval ships.
Laser weapons that fire beams of light stimulated by an undulation of electrons, or in other words, some sort of wave motion gun...
Not only is our foreign policy in the Middle East partly based on propping up Israel for the coming of the End Times(tm), but the endgame of that particular situation requires that all Jews convert to Christianity, or die. Preferably in Israel, but hey, I'm sure that's negotiable.
Lucky for rational people everywhere, that's only a smallish group who wields a pretty inordinate amount of power over current US politics. Lucky too that their bat-shit-foot-loops doomsday scenario is pretty well bullshit.
Once they die off, or abuse themselves out of power we can to back 100% to our normal Middle East policy, which is "Take Their Oil First." At least with that we have a technical solution.
I've got a few friends of friends who like posting pictures of themselves with huge bags of weed, bottles of pills, and on a few occasions, face down over a couple of lines of powder with straws up their noses. The accompanying comments are the real gems though, tagging their dealers, friends, and then the obligatory comment about how fucked up they were.
I want to say that these kids need to wise up and realize that what gets posted on the internet stays on the internet, but after some thought, I wish them the best in their self-incrimination.
The great keepers of Unix lore are stirring from their hammocks, putting down their mai-tais, and shooing the mice out of their beards. This is what they have said to me.
When I log into my Xenix system with my 110 baud teletype, both vi
*and* Emacs are just too damn slow. They print useless messages like,
'C-h for help' and '"foo" File is read only'. So I use the editor
that doesn't waste my VALUABLE time.
Ed, man! !man ed
ED(1) UNIX Programmer's Manual ED(1)
NAME
ed - text editor
SYNOPSIS
ed [ - ] [ -x ] [ name ]
DESCRIPTION
Ed is the standard text editor.
---
Computer Scientists love ed, not just because it comes first
alphabetically, but because it's the standard. Everyone else loves ed
because it's ED!
"Ed is the standard text editor."
And ed doesn't waste space on my Timex Sinclair. Just look:
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root 24 Oct 29 1929/bin/ed
-rwxr-xr-t 4 root 1310720 Jan 1 1970/usr/ucb/vi
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root 5.89824e37 Oct 22 1990/usr/bin/emacs
Of course, on the system *I* administrate, vi is symlinked to ed.
Emacs has been replaced by a shell script which 1) Generates a syslog
message at level LOG_EMERG; 2) reduces the user's disk quota by 100K;
and 3) RUNS ED!!!!!!
"Ed is the standard text editor."
Let's look at a typical novice's session with the mighty ed:
---
Note the consistent user interface and error reportage. Ed is
generous enough to flag errors, yet prudent enough not to overwhelm
the novice with verbosity.
"Ed is the standard text editor."
Ed, the greatest WYGIWYG editor of all.
ED IS THE TRUE PATH TO NIRVANA! ED HAS BEEN THE CHOICE OF EDUCATED
AND IGNORANT ALIKE FOR CENTURIES! ED WILL NOT CORRUPT YOUR PRECIOUS
BODILY FLUIDS!! ED IS THE STANDARD TEXT EDITOR! ED MAKES THE SUN
SHINE AND THE BIRDS SING AND THE GRASS GREEN!!
When I use an editor, I don't want eight extra KILOBYTES of worthless
help screens and cursor positioning code! I just want an EDitor!!
Not a "viitor". Not a "emacsitor". Those aren't even WORDS!!!! ED!
ED! ED IS THE STANDARD!!!
TEXT EDITOR.
When IBM, in its ever-present omnipotence, needed to base their
"edlin" on a UNIX standard, did they mimic vi? No. Emacs? Surely
you jest. They chose the most karmic editor of all. The standard.
Ed is for those who can *remember* what they are working on. If you
are an idiot, you should use Emacs. If you are an Emacs, you should
not be vi. If you use ED, you are on THE PATH TO REDEMPTION. THE
SO-CALLED "VISUAL" EDITORS HAVE BEEN PLACED HERE BY ED TO TEMPT THE
FAITHLESS. DO NOT GIVE IN!!! THE MIGHTY ED HAS SPOKEN!!!
Warning: Long Winded, and more about personal catharsis than insightful commentary.
My mom worked at DEC and the DEC portions of Compaq and HP for a little over 20 years. She was one of the first women to be a field engineer in the company and she always made it a point to let everyone know that at DEC she was treated like an Engineer, not a pair of tits that knew how to program.
Growing up, there was always a terminal and a few microcomputers in the house. My very first e-mail address was a digital! address and the highlight of many a day was getting to log in on the VT220 for my allotted hour to check messages, play ADVENT, and dick around in my little shell account.
It seemed like my mom was always at work, and because she was a single mother I spent maybe 30 hours a week in the office with her, raiding the supply closet for mechanical pencils and post-it notes, and playing directly on the console. One time, I e-mailed her boss complaining that she wasn't home enough and if I was going to be in the office so much they needed to put some better games on Skippy (the host name of the VAX where the handful of games were kept). I knew his first name was Ken, and went to do a wildcard search for last names in the directory, but ended up mailing every Ken in the company, including Ken Olsen.
When she started getting replies to the effect of "Why the hell is your kid mailing me and Ken Olsen about your working hours, and why the hell does he have access in the first place" she rightly freaked out and started looking for another job. About a week after that, I'm in the office, banned from touching anything even remotely resembling a computer, when...the call... came. Ken Olsen himself called my mom, talked to her for about 30 minutes. Then he asked to speak with me. I remember he sounded like my grandfather, very gentle and kind, but with that air of wisdom and authority. He asked me why I mailed, how many hours I spent in the office, and some general questions about Star Wars and computers. He told me that I needed to be careful when e-mailing and that he hoped I would remember to be a careful programmer, comment my code, and be extra nice to my mother.
The end result is that she got a week off of work, paid, and the next time I got to log in to Skippy there were about two dozen new games.
So many memories of that place.
My mom passed away about 6 years ago, still working for HP. She was giving a presentation, and what I heard is that she complained of a pain in her chest but finished her Powerpoint, took her seat, and left. I only bring this up, because her funeral had several enormous flower arrangements, with one coming from HP. After the funeral, as I was taking them down, I noticed that someone had tucked a vase in to the arrangement. It was maroon with the familiar DIGITAL logo and it held a faded blue silk rose printed with the IBM logo. The vase was a give-away that DEC used to tweak IBM trade show folks. As you walked in to a conference IBM people would stand at the door giving away blue silk IBM roses, the DEC people would stand right behind them and hand you a DIGITAL vase.
When this story broke, I got a giddy little thrill, and not just because of the sex applications either. I was more excited that a paper to which I contributed was cited as a reference for this work.
Forward the Tentacle Revolution!
GOOFUS is a regular at the pawn shop, can't afford to get the breaks repaired on his motorcycle, and eats fewer calories than 90% of the students in his 200 level class.
GALLANT has gout and paid no tax last year because his CPA is that good.
GOOFUS can't even get his University to approve travel expenses that they themselves forced him to incur.
GALLANT's flights are paid for with your taxes.
GOOFUS wrote 13 peer reviewed papers, 6 grant proposals, over 3000 status reports last year.
GALLANT took the credit for every single one of them.
Saddly, all of these things and more apply to my buddy James who is a real scientist.
Give you a concrete example of how the Patriot Act had made my life harder?
No problem. I'm a field engineer for a large company. I fly everywhere all the time. My teammate and I live in the same city and take the same flights everywhere we go. I'm overweight and he's a second generation American with Arab Israeli grandparents.
We both get harassed, stopped, searched, and detained EVERY TIME WE FLY. Just because his name sounds a little too much like a terrorists, and just because, as one security screener said, I look like I "could be packing anything under that belly."
THAT is how the Patriot Act has specifically affected me.
Does this do more than mildly annoy me? You bet your sweet ass it does. I spent an extra 6-8 hours a week in the airport dealing with this crap. A whole extra workday away from my wife and kids just because some stuffed suit politician who wouldn't know security if it crawled up and bit the inside of his ass has decided that this nice little illusion of "safe air travel" can get him re-elected.
IT doesn't stop there either. Some friends of mine were eating in a cafe, sitting at an outdoor table, when a group of federal agents decided they resembled two suspects they were tailing. Never mind they were each right in the middle of a burger, never mind that they barely matched the description of the suspects.. no, they had M-16 muzzles shoved in their faces, they were forced to the ground, and they were searched, cuffed, and detained with no probable cause. When one of the friends, himself a former police officer, asked what exactly they had done and why assault rifles were being pointed at their faces; the response was "Fuck you, I'm a federal agent, I can do what I want." Two hours later, the real suspects were caught 45 miles away, and the federal agents left. No apologies. No nothing.
A buddy of mine wrote a great article after we got preached at by a small heard of Christian Fundies outside a symposium on Evolutionary Theory, the Fossil Record, and Soft Bodied Mollusks.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to rub it in or anything, but seeing a shuttle launch in person is fucking amazing.
My mom was on contract to NASA developing a data management system for the Shuttle's payload telemetry up/downlink. For the first flight of the Shuttle with the new software, the engineers who worked on it were invited out to the forward press bleachers to watch the launch. I got to tag along, and it also happened to be the last time those particular bleachers were populated during a launch. (Ground Safety determined that they were too close, ya know, in the event of a 'failure')
Anyway... clear your mind and imagine that you're sitting on some hard, old, worn wooden bleachers. You're excited and packed tight with a bunch of programmers and engineers who are also excited and talking in excruciating detail about the thing you're about to witness. You've been sitting there for three hours.
The countdown finally hits T -10 seconds and suddenly you and everyone around you is on their feet, answering some unspoken urge to strain upward. You're close enough that you can see the American flag and the name "Columbia" clearly on the wing of the orbiter. About a hundred yards in front of you is a wide creek that is so still and black that you can see a perfect reflection of everything. A long legged bird wades slowly, ponderously through the vegetation on the edge of the bank.
A loud voice calls out "T minus 9..." and it feels like a damn eternity has passed. Everything is vivid and sharp. You can feel the warm, moist, salt-laden air prickle against your skin, the heat and straining muscles of the people pressing in on you, the electric anticipation of something monumental.
People are chanting. "EIGHT!" "SEVEN!" "SIX!" and you realize you're yelling these numbers at the top of your lungs.
"FIVE!"
And there is this thump, and some sparks start shooting out from under the Shuttle. Someone yells something about engines but your ears are ringing from the rushing of your own blood and this spectacle that now includes these cones of fire is happening in utter silence.
There is a loud woosh and the air turns cold. The pad cooling system has come on and millions of gallons of water are being pumped in at high speed to keep everything from just melting.
"THREE!" "TWO!"
Oh god
"ONE!"
And the whole fucking world just stops.
There is a collective intake of breath.
The long legged bird takes one more ponderous step in painful slow motion.
There is a rumbling, low, felt more than heard, just on the edge of your perception.
A flash, two pillars of fire rise from the base of the pad, and on top, a squat, ulgy, orange slug.
You can only hear your own heart hammering away in your chest.
It is magical and ethereal and the closest I've ever been to a religious experience.
Then, from the corner of your eye you notice the stillness of the water is broken. The long legged bird squawks in alarm then takes to shaky flight.
The bow front of the shock waving coming from the pad has passed over the water and turned in instantly to churning foam. The bleachers are suddenly swaying, rolling, shuddering, and then the wave breaks over your body.
Your lungs are a bass drum beaten by a hyperactive maniac, throbbing in time to this crazy juju dance of solid ammonium perchlorate converting 1:1 into Holy Fuck! There is no world, no you, no nothing but the noise, the raw fury of millions upon millions of pounds of thrust being delivered straight to your soul via every nerve in your body. The bleachers are too close. They are going to collapse. The air temperature spikes and your slow mammal brain realizes that all the fire in the world
IS
RIGHT
FUCKING
THERE.
As this glorious moment fades you're left with this deep sense of longing and regret. All that fire and sound made you whole, one vibrating particle at the resonance frequency of the entire universe, and all you can see is the hind end of that impossibly tiny speck carr
I would disagree with you about WoW being influential. Much like you suggested with Starcraft (and Warcraft by proxy) WoW polished an already existing game mode and added nothing ground breaking to the game play discussion. Nor, in my opinion, did it eliminate any of the grind. The grind was pushed out to the end-game phase rather than the newbie phase.
If you want an MMO that actually had some ground breaking innovations, check out EVE. While it does have a learning curve that some people have described as a cliff, it is one of the few MMOs that has a persistent world on a single shard, a mostly player based economy, skill training that isn't based on grind, and an absolutely brutal punishment for failure.
Serious?
I'm not sure I want to trust my vote security to a company named after a character from the Dune series of books that was able to change his appearance at will and was an intergalactic espionage agent.
This is assuming that the device you sends can be repaired by a human. As long as the device you're sending down there is repair-friendly, you're good to go. If it is a maze of wave soldered bits and pieces and hard-wired do-dads, it is essentially disposable.
Oh sure, the drone can spot you, call for help, and loiter around as long as it can to reassure you that, yes, someone is coming. I bet the drone could even have some supplies attached to a hard point, maybe a capsule with a life raft and five man-days worth of supplies suitable to the area.
Hell, I bet the drone could even act as a WiFi hotspot or wireless repeater. You wouldn't get pulled out of the water right away, but you could sure as hell post all about it on Facebook.
I can't believe I'm the only one seeing this...
Per wikipedia: "To create a FEL, a beam of electrons is accelerated to almost light speed. The beam passes through an FEL oscillator in the form of a periodic, transverse magnetic field, produced by arranging magnets with alternating poles within a laser cavity along the beam path. This array of magnets is sometimes called an undulator, or a "wiggler", because it forces the electrons in the beam to follow a sinusoidal path."
And we're going to mount this on Naval ships.
Laser weapons that fire beams of light stimulated by an undulation of electrons, or in other words, some sort of wave motion gun...
And yet, the O'Reilly TCP/IP book has a crab on the front.
Scary isn't it?
Not only is our foreign policy in the Middle East partly based on propping up Israel for the coming of the End Times(tm), but the endgame of that particular situation requires that all Jews convert to Christianity, or die. Preferably in Israel, but hey, I'm sure that's negotiable.
Lucky for rational people everywhere, that's only a smallish group who wields a pretty inordinate amount of power over current US politics. Lucky too that their bat-shit-foot-loops doomsday scenario is pretty well bullshit.
Once they die off, or abuse themselves out of power we can to back 100% to our normal Middle East policy, which is "Take Their Oil First." At least with that we have a technical solution.
Kids these days, right?
I've got a few friends of friends who like posting pictures of themselves with huge bags of weed, bottles of pills, and on a few occasions, face down over a couple of lines of powder with straws up their noses. The accompanying comments are the real gems though, tagging their dealers, friends, and then the obligatory comment about how fucked up they were.
I want to say that these kids need to wise up and realize that what gets posted on the internet stays on the internet, but after some thought, I wish them the best in their self-incrimination.
The great keepers of Unix lore are stirring from their hammocks, putting down their mai-tais, and shooing the mice out of their beards. This is what they have said to me.
When I log into my Xenix system with my 110 baud teletype, both vi
*and* Emacs are just too damn slow. They print useless messages like,
'C-h for help' and '"foo" File is read only'. So I use the editor
that doesn't waste my VALUABLE time.
Ed, man! !man ed
ED(1) UNIX Programmer's Manual ED(1)
NAME
ed - text editor
SYNOPSIS
ed [ - ] [ -x ] [ name ]
DESCRIPTION
Ed is the standard text editor.
---
Computer Scientists love ed, not just because it comes first
alphabetically, but because it's the standard. Everyone else loves ed
because it's ED!
"Ed is the standard text editor."
And ed doesn't waste space on my Timex Sinclair. Just look:
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root 24 Oct 29 1929 /bin/ed /usr/ucb/vi /usr/bin/emacs
-rwxr-xr-t 4 root 1310720 Jan 1 1970
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root 5.89824e37 Oct 22 1990
Of course, on the system *I* administrate, vi is symlinked to ed.
Emacs has been replaced by a shell script which 1) Generates a syslog
message at level LOG_EMERG; 2) reduces the user's disk quota by 100K;
and 3) RUNS ED!!!!!!
"Ed is the standard text editor."
Let's look at a typical novice's session with the mighty ed:
golem> ed
?
help
?
?
?
quit
?
exit
?
bye
?
hello?
?
eat flaming death
?
^C
?
^C
?
^D
?
---
Note the consistent user interface and error reportage. Ed is
generous enough to flag errors, yet prudent enough not to overwhelm
the novice with verbosity.
"Ed is the standard text editor."
Ed, the greatest WYGIWYG editor of all.
ED IS THE TRUE PATH TO NIRVANA! ED HAS BEEN THE CHOICE OF EDUCATED
AND IGNORANT ALIKE FOR CENTURIES! ED WILL NOT CORRUPT YOUR PRECIOUS
BODILY FLUIDS!! ED IS THE STANDARD TEXT EDITOR! ED MAKES THE SUN
SHINE AND THE BIRDS SING AND THE GRASS GREEN!!
When I use an editor, I don't want eight extra KILOBYTES of worthless
help screens and cursor positioning code! I just want an EDitor!!
Not a "viitor". Not a "emacsitor". Those aren't even WORDS!!!! ED!
ED! ED IS THE STANDARD!!!
TEXT EDITOR.
When IBM, in its ever-present omnipotence, needed to base their
"edlin" on a UNIX standard, did they mimic vi? No. Emacs? Surely
you jest. They chose the most karmic editor of all. The standard.
Ed is for those who can *remember* what they are working on. If you
are an idiot, you should use Emacs. If you are an Emacs, you should
not be vi. If you use ED, you are on THE PATH TO REDEMPTION. THE
SO-CALLED "VISUAL" EDITORS HAVE BEEN PLACED HERE BY ED TO TEMPT THE
FAITHLESS. DO NOT GIVE IN!!! THE MIGHTY ED HAS SPOKEN!!!
?
This conversation is about you, not me.
I'll be sure to inform my son, who is in a Girl Scout troop.
Didjaknow?(tm) The Girl Scouts allow boys to join.
What the hell happened to all of my whitespace?
Warning: Long Winded, and more about personal catharsis than insightful commentary. My mom worked at DEC and the DEC portions of Compaq and HP for a little over 20 years. She was one of the first women to be a field engineer in the company and she always made it a point to let everyone know that at DEC she was treated like an Engineer, not a pair of tits that knew how to program. Growing up, there was always a terminal and a few microcomputers in the house. My very first e-mail address was a digital! address and the highlight of many a day was getting to log in on the VT220 for my allotted hour to check messages, play ADVENT, and dick around in my little shell account. It seemed like my mom was always at work, and because she was a single mother I spent maybe 30 hours a week in the office with her, raiding the supply closet for mechanical pencils and post-it notes, and playing directly on the console. One time, I e-mailed her boss complaining that she wasn't home enough and if I was going to be in the office so much they needed to put some better games on Skippy (the host name of the VAX where the handful of games were kept). I knew his first name was Ken, and went to do a wildcard search for last names in the directory, but ended up mailing every Ken in the company, including Ken Olsen. When she started getting replies to the effect of "Why the hell is your kid mailing me and Ken Olsen about your working hours, and why the hell does he have access in the first place" she rightly freaked out and started looking for another job. About a week after that, I'm in the office, banned from touching anything even remotely resembling a computer, when ...the call... came. Ken Olsen himself called my mom, talked to her for about 30 minutes. Then he asked to speak with me. I remember he sounded like my grandfather, very gentle and kind, but with that air of wisdom and authority. He asked me why I mailed, how many hours I spent in the office, and some general questions about Star Wars and computers. He told me that I needed to be careful when e-mailing and that he hoped I would remember to be a careful programmer, comment my code, and be extra nice to my mother.
The end result is that she got a week off of work, paid, and the next time I got to log in to Skippy there were about two dozen new games.
So many memories of that place.
My mom passed away about 6 years ago, still working for HP. She was giving a presentation, and what I heard is that she complained of a pain in her chest but finished her Powerpoint, took her seat, and left. I only bring this up, because her funeral had several enormous flower arrangements, with one coming from HP. After the funeral, as I was taking them down, I noticed that someone had tucked a vase in to the arrangement. It was maroon with the familiar DIGITAL logo and it held a faded blue silk rose printed with the IBM logo. The vase was a give-away that DEC used to tweak IBM trade show folks. As you walked in to a conference IBM people would stand at the door giving away blue silk IBM roses, the DEC people would stand right behind them and hand you a DIGITAL vase.
When this story broke, I got a giddy little thrill, and not just because of the sex applications either. I was more excited that a paper to which I contributed was cited as a reference for this work. Forward the Tentacle Revolution!
GOOFUS is a regular at the pawn shop, can't afford to get the breaks repaired on his motorcycle, and eats fewer calories than 90% of the students in his 200 level class.
GALLANT has gout and paid no tax last year because his CPA is that good.
GOOFUS can't even get his University to approve travel expenses that they themselves forced him to incur.
GALLANT's flights are paid for with your taxes.
GOOFUS wrote 13 peer reviewed papers, 6 grant proposals, over 3000 status reports last year.
GALLANT took the credit for every single one of them.
Saddly, all of these things and more apply to my buddy James who is a real scientist.
Give you a concrete example of how the Patriot Act had made my life harder?
No problem. I'm a field engineer for a large company. I fly everywhere all the time. My teammate and I live in the same city and take the same flights everywhere we go. I'm overweight and he's a second generation American with Arab Israeli grandparents.
We both get harassed, stopped, searched, and detained EVERY TIME WE FLY. Just because his name sounds a little too much like a terrorists, and just because, as one security screener said, I look like I "could be packing anything under that belly."
THAT is how the Patriot Act has specifically affected me.
Does this do more than mildly annoy me? You bet your sweet ass it does. I spent an extra 6-8 hours a week in the airport dealing with this crap. A whole extra workday away from my wife and kids just because some stuffed suit politician who wouldn't know security if it crawled up and bit the inside of his ass has decided that this nice little illusion of "safe air travel" can get him re-elected.
IT doesn't stop there either. Some friends of mine were eating in a cafe, sitting at an outdoor table, when a group of federal agents decided they resembled two suspects they were tailing. Never mind they were each right in the middle of a burger, never mind that they barely matched the description of the suspects.. no, they had M-16 muzzles shoved in their faces, they were forced to the ground, and they were searched, cuffed, and detained with no probable cause. When one of the friends, himself a former police officer, asked what exactly they had done and why assault rifles were being pointed at their faces; the response was "Fuck you, I'm a federal agent, I can do what I want." Two hours later, the real suspects were caught 45 miles away, and the federal agents left. No apologies. No nothing.
Personally that scares the shit out of me.
A buddy of mine wrote a great article after we got preached at by a small heard of Christian Fundies outside a symposium on Evolutionary Theory, the Fossil Record, and Soft Bodied Mollusks.
If you're interested in a quick, funny read, here is a copy:
http://eddie.mit.edu/~jc/humor/Squid.html
There is another, more indepth article about the problems with the vertibrate eye, that can be summed up with a nice simple catch phrase...
"If the creationists are right, God is a Sqiud."