On Los Angeles's local rock station, KROQ, the morning show has been done by two guys named Kevin Ryder and Gene (Bean) Baxter for about 11 or 12 years now. They've got a few cohosts (Lisa May, traffic; Ralph Garman, entertainmnet news; Money, sports; Doc, news), but for the most part, Kevin and Bean do most of the talking.
Three or four years ago, Bean moved to Seattle from Los Angeles. He made a deal with the station where he would set up a broadcasting booth in his house, and continue working the show from there. Kevin and Bean have never been secretive about it; they bring it up all the time (mostly to make fun of Bean and his numerous pets). And Bean does sometimes come down to L.A. for special events and is actually in the studio. But a new listener who wasn't aware of this might go on for some weeks without clueing in to the fact that Bean's not actually in the studio, but is in reality 1,200 miles away in Seattle. There's no deliberate misrepresentation going on here, but I thought it was at least somewhat relevant.
(The other tricky part is that Kevin and Bean sound almost exactly alike, so that can be a bit confusing.)
Do posts with phrases like "I'm sure to lose karma" or "I'm sure I'll be modded down for this, but..." ever actually get modded down?
Well, we can test the theory. Of course, anyone reading this post will know that we're just testing it, so that could affect their moderation, but who knows? Anyway, here we go:
I'll probably get modded down for this, since I'm going against public opinion here. Call me crazy, but women voters? What planet are we on? Beam me back up to the mothership.
I do something that's probably relatively rare: I run two SEPARATE instances of Mozilla, one for browsing and one for mail, under different profiles. I could just use Firebird and Thunderbird, sure, but neither one has exactly all the features that I want -- yet. I'm sure some day I'll just switch over.
But when the browser (occasionally) crashes, it doesn't take mail with it. Not that relaunching them both exactly requires a great deal of effort... but the point is, you don't need to *necessarily* use FB/TB in order to avoid the dual-crashing problem:)
Do you realize just how immensely expensive it is to design, build, and develop spacecraft? The standards and tolerances have to be so high and so accurate, the components of such a high quality, the people running the mission so thoroughly trained and educated, that it ends up costing hundreds of millions to billions of dollars in order to put together a project like this.
No doubt, as with most human endeavors, there is some amount of waste that could be excised; but even in the best-case scenario, you can't send a fleet of people to the moon for a billion dollars. It just isn't realistic.
Waiting for some mythical "true believer" to create perfect space program will result in waiting forever.
Well, I never said we shouldn't support the program, just that I'm not going to vote for Bush.
I definitely support the idea of a permanent moonbase and a manned mission to Mars -- and any politician who supports those programs will have that support factored into my decision to support them. It'd be treated as just one of many factors when deciding whether I would vote for that politician.
In Bush's case, I dislike him so much due to his past actions that I have trouble even thinking of any action he could perform that would convince me to vote for him. Even if I were convinced that his reasons for this announcement were utterly selfless, that would not come close to convincing me to vote for him.
But I'm not going to look at a politician, ignore everything else, and say, "Because he supports the moonbase, I'll vote for him."
Hooray, if it happens. As many people pointed out when this announcement was, er, announced a couple weeks ago, this is basically a no-lose proposition for Dubya. Even if he actually does approve a massive increase in NASA's budget this term, and even if he does win a second term as President, there's no guarantee that the subsequent administrations (or Congresses) won't reduce NASA's budget or otherwise do something to kill the project.
So Bush gets to look good to everyone who like space exploration -- which is most people -- without having to necessarily live up to his promise. Given Bush's track record as president and as a human being, I'm inclined to believe that he doesn't personally give a rat's ass whether we get back to the moon or Mars -- he knows that this is a simple campaigning trick (make a fantastic promise that you can't be held accountable for).
Yeah, I hope it does happen -- but I'm still not voting for the guy.
"Kathy Sarvak of Burlington, Vt., points out that European Space Agency's "Beagle 2," named in honor of Charles Darwin's vessel, failed at Mars while NASA's "Spirit," with its quasi-religious name, succeeded. "God's sense of humor is a wonderful thing," she declares."
Apparently God also thinks that the names "Apollo," "SOHO," "Voyager," "Galileo," and "Viking" are hilarious, but frowns upon the names "Mars Polar Surveyor," "Challenger," and "Columbia."
In the future I suggest that NASA name their probes along the lines of "Adaptive Radiation," "Punctuated Equilibrium," and "Darwin Owns Your Ass" just to shut up creationist dipshits like Kathy Sarvak of Burlington, VT.
it seems like all you'd have to do is for the government to claim artistic copyright on a bill
17 USC 105 prohibits the government from retaining copyright on anything it creates. Anything produced by the government is automatically in the public domain:
Sec. 105. - Subject matter of copyright: United States Government works
Copyright protection under this title is not available for any work of the United States Government, but the United States Government is not precluded from receiving and holding copyrights transferred to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise.
So one way to (presumably, I don't know whether this would actually work) end-run around that restriction would be to have a private organization design the bill, and then assign the copyright to the government.
Although the idea that stealing a physical item is somehow drastically different is not one I agree with.
Both sides of that debate can be argued very well.
But you seem content not to make any kind of argument; you just state that they're not drastically different, as if it's self-evident. How about providing an actual argument? Because the argument that information and matter should be treated differently is a very, very strong (and well-known) one. There don't seem to be any well-known arguments as to why they should be treated the same.
"pronoun actor": an actor who is familiar but lacking a name (like Brian Dennehy). Carmen Caridi has been in a shitload of movies and I can't find a photo of him anywhere.
Actually, there's already a term for this: Hey! It's That Guy! (i.e. HITG). So-named because you will see one of the actors who falls into this category, one of those faces you've seen a zillion times but never bothered to learn the name of, and you immediately say to everyone in the vicinity, "Hey! It's that guy!"
You should go here and read about the over 100 separate cases where electronic voting has had problems, and in many cases those problems led to election reversals. (There's links on the right side to the chapters of the book they wrote; chapter 2 has quite a number of examples in it.)
The point is, it's not just Florida. Florida just got the attention in 2000 because the entire state's electoral votes were delivered to Bush instead of Gore due to voting hijinks (or so the theory goes). The handful of companies that supply the bulk of electronic voting machines for the U.S. have a terrible track record. Plus, the machines' inner workings are kept secret, meaning that there's absolutely no way for voters to be sure that the elections are being carried out fairly.
Voter enters the booth, booth closes and locks. The booth will not re-open until the person has voted properly or if they page a pollworker to let them out. If the latter occurs, the pollworker can give them additional instructions or let them out and note the incident for any subsequent legal challenges to the election.
Such a thing would probably be cost-prohibitive. At the very least it would be extremely expensive (and paid for with taxes) to implement. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of these things would need to be built for and bought by local and state governments, and that would be tens, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars that would not necessarily improve anything (you did not demonstrate how or whether such a type of booth would improve the voting process).
Even if it did, cries of "No amount is too much to spend to make sure voting is valid!" aren't helpful. We could easily spend the entire GNP making sure that voting is secure and accurate -- obviously that's not feasible, so how much should we be willing to spend?
In reality, what's needed is three things:
Changes to election laws in order to establish as fool-proof, accurate, and reliable an election system as is feasible;
Voter education to make sure that people understand how the voting process works, and why (as well as why voting is important);
Enforcement of the system to make sure that people aren't abusing it (since no voting system, no matter what voting machine manufacturers may tell you, will ever be immune to abuse).
There's a common saying among computer security professionals: Security is a process, not a product. You can't just install an excellent security device and expect to be safe; you need to also monitor and police the area that the device is designed to protect, because the device is just a machine and can only deal with a subset of all the possible methods of violating security.
Another relevant saying: "Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom." You cannot maintain your rights and freedoms if there isn't anyone (either you or someone else) continually protecting those rights and freedoms.
There is such a thing as an overcommitment to the validity of truth in science -- i.e. so that existing scientific theory becomes ossified and dogmatic, leading to ad hoc theoretical additions, rather than the continual scrutiny of theory needed for advancement.
This is, of course, a behavior present to one degree or another in all humans (excepting the rare person who never succumbs to pride). The advantage science has is that it eventually, inevitably overcomes such dogma -- eventually the weight of evidence piles up and crushes whatever ossified dogmatic bones have accumulated.:) Postmodernism (and, of course, religion) do not deal with evidence or the testability of hypotheses, so nothing can ever be disproven -- the state of those fields can never improve.
Why does Cliff repeatedly use the word "infamous" (a synonym of "notorious") to describe nifty things, like a supercomputer. He did it earlier today with the article about the Internet Archive.
Cliff didn't write "infamous" in either this case or the one you linked to. In both cases the word "infamous" was written by the person who submitted the story, not by Cliff.
unless your doing something illegal, what reason would you have to hide it?
This excuse has been used by tyrants for centuries to justify spying and intrusion into peoples' private lives. Just because something isn't illegal doesn't mean you want everyone to know that you do it or are doing it. Once you understand why you wouldn't want random people you don't know watching you take a crap in the bathroom, having sex with your wife, or singing embarrassing '80s karaoke tunes, you'll understand why privacy is important to people.
NEW VIRTUAL VIAGRA!
Paint left side of penis blue, paint right side of penis red.
Penis Now Appears Erect!
I don't know... that would just make me think that my penis was moving to the left at the speed of light. Which is probably a lot less fun than it sounds.
Slashdot Mirror
On Los Angeles's local rock station, KROQ, the morning show has been done by two guys named Kevin Ryder and Gene (Bean) Baxter for about 11 or 12 years now. They've got a few cohosts (Lisa May, traffic; Ralph Garman, entertainmnet news; Money, sports; Doc, news), but for the most part, Kevin and Bean do most of the talking.
Three or four years ago, Bean moved to Seattle from Los Angeles. He made a deal with the station where he would set up a broadcasting booth in his house, and continue working the show from there. Kevin and Bean have never been secretive about it; they bring it up all the time (mostly to make fun of Bean and his numerous pets). And Bean does sometimes come down to L.A. for special events and is actually in the studio. But a new listener who wasn't aware of this might go on for some weeks without clueing in to the fact that Bean's not actually in the studio, but is in reality 1,200 miles away in Seattle. There's no deliberate misrepresentation going on here, but I thought it was at least somewhat relevant.
(The other tricky part is that Kevin and Bean sound almost exactly alike, so that can be a bit confusing.)
I'll probably get modded down for this, since I'm going against public opinion here. Call me crazy, but women voters? What planet are we on? Beam me back up to the mothership.
Can you point me to where you got those numbers? I've been looking for data on the overturn rates for the various circuits. Thanks.
I do something that's probably relatively rare: I run two SEPARATE instances of Mozilla, one for browsing and one for mail, under different profiles. I could just use Firebird and Thunderbird, sure, but neither one has exactly all the features that I want -- yet. I'm sure some day I'll just switch over.
:)
But when the browser (occasionally) crashes, it doesn't take mail with it. Not that relaunching them both exactly requires a great deal of effort... but the point is, you don't need to *necessarily* use FB/TB in order to avoid the dual-crashing problem
Do you realize just how immensely expensive it is to design, build, and develop spacecraft? The standards and tolerances have to be so high and so accurate, the components of such a high quality, the people running the mission so thoroughly trained and educated, that it ends up costing hundreds of millions to billions of dollars in order to put together a project like this.
No doubt, as with most human endeavors, there is some amount of waste that could be excised; but even in the best-case scenario, you can't send a fleet of people to the moon for a billion dollars. It just isn't realistic.
I definitely support the idea of a permanent moonbase and a manned mission to Mars -- and any politician who supports those programs will have that support factored into my decision to support them. It'd be treated as just one of many factors when deciding whether I would vote for that politician.
In Bush's case, I dislike him so much due to his past actions that I have trouble even thinking of any action he could perform that would convince me to vote for him. Even if I were convinced that his reasons for this announcement were utterly selfless, that would not come close to convincing me to vote for him.
But I'm not going to look at a politician, ignore everything else, and say, "Because he supports the moonbase, I'll vote for him."
Hooray, if it happens. As many people pointed out when this announcement was, er, announced a couple weeks ago, this is basically a no-lose proposition for Dubya. Even if he actually does approve a massive increase in NASA's budget this term, and even if he does win a second term as President, there's no guarantee that the subsequent administrations (or Congresses) won't reduce NASA's budget or otherwise do something to kill the project.
So Bush gets to look good to everyone who like space exploration -- which is most people -- without having to necessarily live up to his promise. Given Bush's track record as president and as a human being, I'm inclined to believe that he doesn't personally give a rat's ass whether we get back to the moon or Mars -- he knows that this is a simple campaigning trick (make a fantastic promise that you can't be held accountable for).
Yeah, I hope it does happen -- but I'm still not voting for the guy.
In the future I suggest that NASA name their probes along the lines of "Adaptive Radiation," "Punctuated Equilibrium," and "Darwin Owns Your Ass" just to shut up creationist dipshits like Kathy Sarvak of Burlington, VT.
"Gullible" is, though.
You should go here and read about the over 100 separate cases where electronic voting has had problems, and in many cases those problems led to election reversals. (There's links on the right side to the chapters of the book they wrote; chapter 2 has quite a number of examples in it.)
The point is, it's not just Florida. Florida just got the attention in 2000 because the entire state's electoral votes were delivered to Bush instead of Gore due to voting hijinks (or so the theory goes). The handful of companies that supply the bulk of electronic voting machines for the U.S. have a terrible track record. Plus, the machines' inner workings are kept secret, meaning that there's absolutely no way for voters to be sure that the elections are being carried out fairly.
Even if it did, cries of "No amount is too much to spend to make sure voting is valid!" aren't helpful. We could easily spend the entire GNP making sure that voting is secure and accurate -- obviously that's not feasible, so how much should we be willing to spend?
In reality, what's needed is three things:
- Changes to election laws in order to establish as fool-proof, accurate, and reliable an election system as is feasible;
- Voter education to make sure that people understand how the voting process works, and why (as well as why voting is important);
- Enforcement of the system to make sure that people aren't abusing it (since no voting system, no matter what voting machine manufacturers may tell you, will ever be immune to abuse).
There's a common saying among computer security professionals: Security is a process, not a product. You can't just install an excellent security device and expect to be safe; you need to also monitor and police the area that the device is designed to protect, because the device is just a machine and can only deal with a subset of all the possible methods of violating security.Another relevant saying: "Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom." You cannot maintain your rights and freedoms if there isn't anyone (either you or someone else) continually protecting those rights and freedoms.
For those who believe in the Moon, but think it may be up to no good:
Citizens' Association to Blow Up the Moon.