Well I watch MSNBC for MY news. And I know Barak Obama was born in the good old US of Mars and that the war in Iraq was not fought over Islam or Weapons of Mass Deception but over states rights!
So there, take that Fox.
The President's appearance in media would be more appropriate in "Jackass 4: The Movie" rather than "Myth Busters (The Myth Busted For the Third Time).
James Lovelock is himself producing quite a few greenhouse gases, so if we suspend him (i.e. put him in suspended animation, involuntarily of course since democracy is a "bad thing") then that seems like a pretty good start. At least he'd be made to own up to the implications of his own wrong headed opinions and green house gases would drop, albeit a very small amount.
There seem to be quite a few comments here that say basically "What's wrong with being positively ID'd?) That's not actually the real problem. The problem is reducing a person to a number. Regardless of what is "promised", as soon a a person can be identified with a number, everything about that person will be accumulated under that number, including how many calories you eat in a day, how many miles you drive and what kind of vehicle is used, what you write, how many times you breath, whether or not you have an STD, and how many times you bought cold medicine that just happens to contains psuedophedrine, etc. Is this really the business of Big Brother? And when you want to speak against the excesses of Big Brother, do you even begin to understand how difficult that will be without some modicum of anonymity?!?! You are dangerously naive if you think this is a good idea. I am a human, I am NOT a number, derived or randomly assigned. As I have said previously, this is quickly becoming an Imperial State where our inalienable rights are being alienated at a frightening pace.
The United States of America as it was constituted in 1787, and as properly amended thereafter, will no longer exist once the Health Care Bill and its companion "fix-it" bill is signed into law. We now live under an Imperial Government, with an Imperial Retribution System (IRS) that will take whatever the Imperial Congress and Emperor Obama deem desirable. That's change I can revolt against!
Welcome to 1984. You really have only two choices: 1) Create a persona, an alter ego, that isn't really you, and maximized it's visibility to advertisers, aggregators and data miners, or 2) Go completely off the GRID. You will find option 2 very onerous but the most safe option. Option 1 is not too hard as long as you can play that role all the time and with everyone. I suppose the real bender with this option is realizing at some point you become your alter ego and then what? Did I mention this here red pill in my hand?
Besides pointing out a real problem with "science" and its take on origins, I would submit that it has been Dewey and his successors that have rewritten history, politics, etc into a secular cast that was originally and legitimately Christian. Sorry guys, but it appears that what the Texas school board is doing is just trying to restore the perspective to what it was before it was brazenly rewritten by a bunch of modernists whose outlook was so bankrupt that it devolved into the cynicism that is postmodern thought.
Thank you John D. Cook!! I think you hit that right on the head. Writing a lot of sloppy code (or insanely terse code for that matter) is MUCH worse in the long run then thinking about it a bit and writing good solid, well documented (i.e. Self documenting) code.
One of my first big coding jobs was for the best boss I've ever had. He was not an ubergeek. In fact, he was an Agriculture major from Texas A&M. He had the idea that code productivity was like building widgets; x widgets will be built in y days at the rate of x/y. Now I educated him a little bit and told him in advance that it would take me 90% of my time to build the engine that the rest of the code would use and then in the remaining 10% of my time, the rest of the functionality would be done. Though he didn't know me too well, a fellow programmer whom he did know (and who wrote code by the bucket load) convinced him to let me try it my way.
Everyday he would come in and ask for a "percentage done". I would tell him what I had worked on but also reminded him that it wouldn't look like much progress. To make a long story short, he just about lost it waiting for me to get the 10% done as I had said would get done in the first 90% of the time I had to do it. But I delivered just as I said and built a most useful product for him. I went from "10%" done (in terms of functionality and lines of code) to complete in one week (this was a several month project). Because of the way I had built my engine, I was also able to accommodate several additional feature requests that I received when I was working on the first 10%, and which would not have been able to be built at all if I had done it his way. I never had trouble with him trusting me after that and I didn't let him down.
Of course this was many years ago and probably wouldn't work with today's Agile methods too well. But the point carries that automation is basically a front loaded investment and there is a balance between risk mitigation and long term viability. Version 1.0 might take me longer to engineer but by the time we've gotten to 2.0 I've caught up with you and by 3.0 you can't even see my dust trail. Its a luxury I don't always get (at least not up front) but I work pretty hard to educate my management and there's nothing quite as convincing as success... that is if both you and your boss can survive the onslaught of "Get It Done Now".
You know, this is one of those ideas that sounds good the first time you hear it but requires a "shoe on the other foot" perspective to see just how bad it is. Lets say for a moment, that it was your whole life opened for every tom, dick and harry to see. Would you like every one of your emails, receipts, bank records, blog entries, facebook submissions, etc all laid out for everyone to see. Suppose you did absolutely nothing wrong at all. How much of your time to do think would be required to answer the lame ass public who didn't understand that late night run to Taco Bell, your penchant for overpriced Starbucks coffee, or the need to have a flat screen TV in your bathroom. Ah, but you say, I haven't received taxpayer money like AIG. Really? No school loans, no unemployment, no subsidized food products. How about that tax rebate we all got in 2008 to help stimulate the economy. We taxpayers would like to know EXACTLY how YOU spent that money? So are you willing to let the entire globe, or at least the American public see that?
I definitely think AIG, Fanny Mae, Freddy Mac, blah, blah, etc, etc, should pay back the money, and if they can't do that in a reasonable time, let the pros investigate them, the people who actually have a clue about what are appropriate business practices and what are not, rather than some joe six pack who sucks off the government teet themselves.
Wow,
Gratz to the submitter of this article. This is one of the most rabid and foolish examples of "going green" I've seen. PHP is certainly not the most efficient language in terms of run time resources. But you have to count the resources required to develop and maintain C++ code with all its pointer foulups and memory leaks versus PHP which is relatively simple and straightforward to develop and runs in a very stable manner on either a LAMP or WAMP stack. Sure servers eat up a lot of energy. But so do programmer armies who have to commute or log in or fill out timesheets by the forest, all to chase memory leaks, buffer overflows and the like. Oh yeah, and lets not forget the number of EXTRA servers you're going to have to put online to make up for the ones that need rebooted every few hours because some high school script kiddie doesn't bother to sufficiently check for memory leaks that chew through the server like a teen athelete on steroids. Maintainability is a HUGE factor in overall cost in terms of both $$$ and other resources. Use C++ or Assembler or whatever low level, low resource hogging language on a FEW critical sections, written by l337 coders, and let the pock faced script kiddie army churn out the mountains of PHP,.Net, JavaScript, etc that is at least garbage collected in their own VMs.
You're going to get a whole lot of "modern" advice to your question on this forum I am sure. I am a Software Engineer with a BA (and a genius IQ) and my wife is a Research Scientist with an Earned PhD. The key to your wonderful and happy marriage is the same as it would be for the jock/cheerleader stereotypes that you mention. Beyond a selfless dedication to one another you will find that your wife's highest need is security. She needs to know that you're love is unconditional and you devotion to her will be demonstrated by your finding ways to show that you cherish her. Do that and you will find out that she will put up with an awful lot of your geek-driven activities.
OTOH, what you need most is respect and admiration from her. If she will be extra thoughtful to show that admiration by listening to your struggles with work, tech, etc. and mention that you are handsome and smart, etc. you will find yourself having nearly unbounded energy to find ways to do things that mean something special to her. My wife likes flowers, but never when she is mad at me (which is pretty rare). BTW, learn to be the one who apologizes first. Also the answer is ALWAYS "no that doesn't make you look fat" period. Tell her often you love her and if she ever asks you whether you still do, that is never the time for diliberation. The right answer is "yes, with all my heart". You'd be surprised how that will make her truly beautiful in your sight. Also, never fall for the "oh don't get me anything for my birthday, anniversary, etc.". They always want you to do things because you love them, not because they compelled you to do it. Start there and you'll be just fine, Geek or not.
I believe there is a special place in hell just for the domain name cybersquatter. Were it not illegal and immoral to inflict slow torture, I'd be all for that as a response. What I wouldn't do is EVER purchase the domain name from them. Think of the unique brands that have come from alternates, like 'flickr' for instance. I can not conceive of a brand so important as to reward these vermin. As an owner of dozens of domains, I can understand reserving a brand that you may or may not develop in the future and if not, either letting them expire or put them up on auction to recoup past registration fees and a reasonably good idea that you just don't have the drive to commercially develop. But to own thousands just so others will have to pay you a premium is to provide absolutely no value whatsoever while demanding exhorbatant fees for the privilege.
The government can't find its own navel with a mirror, 500,000 pages of regulation, a constellation of GPS satelites, Echelon, and an Army Divison. What makes anyone think they can handle the cybersecurity for themselves much less every little mom and pop organization. Oh yes, they are only talking about critical privately held assets now, but this is a slippery slope to grab control of every computer on the planet. I have "free" anti-virus software installed on all my systems at home because I take classes at a local community college and of course they don't want a virus getting into the network from my house. So far it's voluntary. But sooner or later even individual personal computers will be spotlighted as the hole in the dike that still needs plugging. And when that happens, we'll all have mandatory hardware based security built in and controllable by the Government. After that, when NIST is telling us what a "virus" is, sooner or later, any "unproductive" or "harmful" speech that doesn't serve the common good will be the virus that needs squashed. At that point its just a matter of time before Stalin shuts me down for such speech, or they create a master AI program (SkyNet) who decides that the only leak still needing plugged is the pesky Carbon Based Life forms that pollute the planet and introduce viruses into the otherwise virtual perfection that the Internet has become.
Don't worry about going green, worry about getting a life. Honestly, who blasted stupid can you be to worry about whether beer is going to doom our planet because of its CO2 footprint. Much more damage is done by 6 Billion people farting than through Alcohol production, much less the tragedy of those addicted to the stuff. So either go have a beer or six or go stick your head in a toilet!!
So what do you supposed it does when you pick your nose.... Oh, yeah, that's right, it browses microsoft.com!
Nerds, The New TV Heros
on
American Nerd
·
· Score: 1
There are a lot of TV shows that have come out recently that have very Anti-Typical Heros (as in no strong chin, great looks, football player etc.) that are Nerds. I'm talking about shows like Chuck, Life, The Mentalist, Heros, Ugly Betty. All of these include brainy, if not somewhat eccentric and socially awkward nerds as the central character. It might be true that the image portrayed doesn't always spell out the Nerdier side of Nerdness (real words?) but these are nonetheless, heros rather than the side kick or foil of the main character. Chuck is interesting though in that both the main character and some of his sidekicks are nerds with the hero being portrayed as the nerd who evolved some social skillz while some of his side kicks definitely didn't.
Well I was a nerd before it became cool, am one now, and will likely remain one even if our new found acceptance dims.
Obama's a socialist, Bush is a fool,
if you are a democrat, you are a tool.
McCain is no better, throwing cash out the door,
the banks are a scramblin, like a Manhattan whore.
Sounds kinda nasty and if you think I am rude,
Just tellin' the truth, "Hey brother we're screwed!"
Didn't you know that "BT" stands for "Behind the Times?"
OTOH, If you insist on IPv6 you get to do lots of tunneling since almost no one else is on it either. Just goes to show you what happens to innovation in the presence of a large userbase and expensive infrastructure.
I've been in this business (IT that is) for 34 years and have worked for a variety of business, organizations and the government. IT generally does not live for its own benefit, it is there to make a business successful and to forget that is build your own little empire of ingrates. OTOH, business that wields IT with the understanding of a cave man is using a bazooka to swat a fly. We need to understand what the business is about and support it intelligently and business needs to quit asking for the shiniest new IT thing because the other guy has it, or making unreasonable and contrary demands without understanding the implications for their bottom line and our sanity.
I've stopped buying games that I really wanted, like Mass Effect, because of onerous DRM. I wasn't really planning on buying Spore but this definitely caps it. I won't EVER buy Spore even if they remove the DRM. The same with the aforementioned Mass Effect. I buy about $500 in games every year per platform (PC, PS2, PSP, XBox, Wii). So if you want to honk off your best buyers, just go ahead and keep amping up the DRM!
This is a REALLY bad idea! If you want to show your support for a candidate on your OWN blog, then all the more power to you. I own and run a lot of my own blogs and I will probably support McCain in some of those.
But if oodles of McCainiacs suddenly hit partisan sites like DailyKOS, it will be rightly counted as comment spam. You aren't going to change anyone's mind there. It will just look you look like an army of slack-jawed droids.
So, if you want to support a candidate, McCain or otherwise, do so on your OWN blog, where you can make your best arguments for their candidacy. Who knows, if you actually have something relevant and persuasive to say, you might have KOSites comment spamming you:-)
Land is for growing FOOD and materials for SHELTER. That already covers the two greatest and ever increasing needs we humans have. If we triple book the land so that we depend on its surface area for energy as well, we are ALL SCREWED! Its just not going to work in the long term. Period. If we want to expand our populations, economies and/or quality of life we will either need to get one of our top three needs (Food, Shelter, Energy) from below ground such as oil, coal or uranium, or from a renewable energy source such as solar.
Haven't we already learned what happens when we try to use corn as a panacea? And switchgrass is no silver bullet either. Currently switchgrass based ethanol is much more expensive to produce than oil, we don't know how well it will scale, and sooner or later, food producing lands will be in strong contention for ethanol producing ones.
Thus biofuels are a BAD idea unless of course you are talking about the resuse of excess biomatter (e.g. garbage, waiste oil and the like). But even in this scenario, we won't be able to scale it up because the earth's future biomass (like you and me, the cow and the grass she eats) is dependent on its own recycle of bio matter.
So, lets be a little more creative eh.
The metaphysical question that has not been posed is "If the Universe is so fragile that mere observation will bring it to an untimely end, is it worth observing at all?"
That oughta fry your noodle.
But really, if the Universe produces observers, who will in the natural course of their existence, hasten the destruction of that same Universe, then Something Has Already Gone Terribly Wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
DON'T!!
Well I watch MSNBC for MY news. And I know Barak Obama was born in the good old US of Mars and that the war in Iraq was not fought over Islam or Weapons of Mass Deception but over states rights! So there, take that Fox.
The President's appearance in media would be more appropriate in "Jackass 4: The Movie" rather than "Myth Busters (The Myth Busted For the Third Time).
James Lovelock is himself producing quite a few greenhouse gases, so if we suspend him (i.e. put him in suspended animation, involuntarily of course since democracy is a "bad thing") then that seems like a pretty good start. At least he'd be made to own up to the implications of his own wrong headed opinions and green house gases would drop, albeit a very small amount.
There seem to be quite a few comments here that say basically "What's wrong with being positively ID'd?) That's not actually the real problem. The problem is reducing a person to a number. Regardless of what is "promised", as soon a a person can be identified with a number, everything about that person will be accumulated under that number, including how many calories you eat in a day, how many miles you drive and what kind of vehicle is used, what you write, how many times you breath, whether or not you have an STD, and how many times you bought cold medicine that just happens to contains psuedophedrine, etc. Is this really the business of Big Brother? And when you want to speak against the excesses of Big Brother, do you even begin to understand how difficult that will be without some modicum of anonymity?!?! You are dangerously naive if you think this is a good idea. I am a human, I am NOT a number, derived or randomly assigned. As I have said previously, this is quickly becoming an Imperial State where our inalienable rights are being alienated at a frightening pace.
The United States of America as it was constituted in 1787, and as properly amended thereafter, will no longer exist once the Health Care Bill and its companion "fix-it" bill is signed into law. We now live under an Imperial Government, with an Imperial Retribution System (IRS) that will take whatever the Imperial Congress and Emperor Obama deem desirable. That's change I can revolt against!
I'm waiting for the magic Pi Day of All Pi Day's in this millenium... that's right March 14, 2015 (3.1415)!
Welcome to 1984. You really have only two choices: 1) Create a persona, an alter ego, that isn't really you, and maximized it's visibility to advertisers, aggregators and data miners, or 2) Go completely off the GRID. You will find option 2 very onerous but the most safe option. Option 1 is not too hard as long as you can play that role all the time and with everyone. I suppose the real bender with this option is realizing at some point you become your alter ego and then what? Did I mention this here red pill in my hand?
Besides pointing out a real problem with "science" and its take on origins, I would submit that it has been Dewey and his successors that have rewritten history, politics, etc into a secular cast that was originally and legitimately Christian. Sorry guys, but it appears that what the Texas school board is doing is just trying to restore the perspective to what it was before it was brazenly rewritten by a bunch of modernists whose outlook was so bankrupt that it devolved into the cynicism that is postmodern thought.
Thank you John D. Cook!! I think you hit that right on the head. Writing a lot of sloppy code (or insanely terse code for that matter) is MUCH worse in the long run then thinking about it a bit and writing good solid, well documented (i.e. Self documenting) code. One of my first big coding jobs was for the best boss I've ever had. He was not an ubergeek. In fact, he was an Agriculture major from Texas A&M. He had the idea that code productivity was like building widgets; x widgets will be built in y days at the rate of x/y. Now I educated him a little bit and told him in advance that it would take me 90% of my time to build the engine that the rest of the code would use and then in the remaining 10% of my time, the rest of the functionality would be done. Though he didn't know me too well, a fellow programmer whom he did know (and who wrote code by the bucket load) convinced him to let me try it my way. Everyday he would come in and ask for a "percentage done". I would tell him what I had worked on but also reminded him that it wouldn't look like much progress. To make a long story short, he just about lost it waiting for me to get the 10% done as I had said would get done in the first 90% of the time I had to do it. But I delivered just as I said and built a most useful product for him. I went from "10%" done (in terms of functionality and lines of code) to complete in one week (this was a several month project). Because of the way I had built my engine, I was also able to accommodate several additional feature requests that I received when I was working on the first 10%, and which would not have been able to be built at all if I had done it his way. I never had trouble with him trusting me after that and I didn't let him down. Of course this was many years ago and probably wouldn't work with today's Agile methods too well. But the point carries that automation is basically a front loaded investment and there is a balance between risk mitigation and long term viability. Version 1.0 might take me longer to engineer but by the time we've gotten to 2.0 I've caught up with you and by 3.0 you can't even see my dust trail. Its a luxury I don't always get (at least not up front) but I work pretty hard to educate my management and there's nothing quite as convincing as success... that is if both you and your boss can survive the onslaught of "Get It Done Now".
You know, this is one of those ideas that sounds good the first time you hear it but requires a "shoe on the other foot" perspective to see just how bad it is. Lets say for a moment, that it was your whole life opened for every tom, dick and harry to see. Would you like every one of your emails, receipts, bank records, blog entries, facebook submissions, etc all laid out for everyone to see. Suppose you did absolutely nothing wrong at all. How much of your time to do think would be required to answer the lame ass public who didn't understand that late night run to Taco Bell, your penchant for overpriced Starbucks coffee, or the need to have a flat screen TV in your bathroom. Ah, but you say, I haven't received taxpayer money like AIG. Really? No school loans, no unemployment, no subsidized food products. How about that tax rebate we all got in 2008 to help stimulate the economy. We taxpayers would like to know EXACTLY how YOU spent that money? So are you willing to let the entire globe, or at least the American public see that? I definitely think AIG, Fanny Mae, Freddy Mac, blah, blah, etc, etc, should pay back the money, and if they can't do that in a reasonable time, let the pros investigate them, the people who actually have a clue about what are appropriate business practices and what are not, rather than some joe six pack who sucks off the government teet themselves.
Wow, Gratz to the submitter of this article. This is one of the most rabid and foolish examples of "going green" I've seen. PHP is certainly not the most efficient language in terms of run time resources. But you have to count the resources required to develop and maintain C++ code with all its pointer foulups and memory leaks versus PHP which is relatively simple and straightforward to develop and runs in a very stable manner on either a LAMP or WAMP stack. Sure servers eat up a lot of energy. But so do programmer armies who have to commute or log in or fill out timesheets by the forest, all to chase memory leaks, buffer overflows and the like. Oh yeah, and lets not forget the number of EXTRA servers you're going to have to put online to make up for the ones that need rebooted every few hours because some high school script kiddie doesn't bother to sufficiently check for memory leaks that chew through the server like a teen athelete on steroids. Maintainability is a HUGE factor in overall cost in terms of both $$$ and other resources. Use C++ or Assembler or whatever low level, low resource hogging language on a FEW critical sections, written by l337 coders, and let the pock faced script kiddie army churn out the mountains of PHP, .Net, JavaScript, etc that is at least garbage collected in their own VMs.
You're going to get a whole lot of "modern" advice to your question on this forum I am sure. I am a Software Engineer with a BA (and a genius IQ) and my wife is a Research Scientist with an Earned PhD. The key to your wonderful and happy marriage is the same as it would be for the jock/cheerleader stereotypes that you mention. Beyond a selfless dedication to one another you will find that your wife's highest need is security. She needs to know that you're love is unconditional and you devotion to her will be demonstrated by your finding ways to show that you cherish her. Do that and you will find out that she will put up with an awful lot of your geek-driven activities. OTOH, what you need most is respect and admiration from her. If she will be extra thoughtful to show that admiration by listening to your struggles with work, tech, etc. and mention that you are handsome and smart, etc. you will find yourself having nearly unbounded energy to find ways to do things that mean something special to her. My wife likes flowers, but never when she is mad at me (which is pretty rare). BTW, learn to be the one who apologizes first. Also the answer is ALWAYS "no that doesn't make you look fat" period. Tell her often you love her and if she ever asks you whether you still do, that is never the time for diliberation. The right answer is "yes, with all my heart". You'd be surprised how that will make her truly beautiful in your sight. Also, never fall for the "oh don't get me anything for my birthday, anniversary, etc.". They always want you to do things because you love them, not because they compelled you to do it. Start there and you'll be just fine, Geek or not.
I believe there is a special place in hell just for the domain name cybersquatter. Were it not illegal and immoral to inflict slow torture, I'd be all for that as a response. What I wouldn't do is EVER purchase the domain name from them. Think of the unique brands that have come from alternates, like 'flickr' for instance. I can not conceive of a brand so important as to reward these vermin. As an owner of dozens of domains, I can understand reserving a brand that you may or may not develop in the future and if not, either letting them expire or put them up on auction to recoup past registration fees and a reasonably good idea that you just don't have the drive to commercially develop. But to own thousands just so others will have to pay you a premium is to provide absolutely no value whatsoever while demanding exhorbatant fees for the privilege.
The government can't find its own navel with a mirror, 500,000 pages of regulation, a constellation of GPS satelites, Echelon, and an Army Divison. What makes anyone think they can handle the cybersecurity for themselves much less every little mom and pop organization. Oh yes, they are only talking about critical privately held assets now, but this is a slippery slope to grab control of every computer on the planet. I have "free" anti-virus software installed on all my systems at home because I take classes at a local community college and of course they don't want a virus getting into the network from my house. So far it's voluntary. But sooner or later even individual personal computers will be spotlighted as the hole in the dike that still needs plugging. And when that happens, we'll all have mandatory hardware based security built in and controllable by the Government. After that, when NIST is telling us what a "virus" is, sooner or later, any "unproductive" or "harmful" speech that doesn't serve the common good will be the virus that needs squashed. At that point its just a matter of time before Stalin shuts me down for such speech, or they create a master AI program (SkyNet) who decides that the only leak still needing plugged is the pesky Carbon Based Life forms that pollute the planet and introduce viruses into the otherwise virtual perfection that the Internet has become.
Don't worry about going green, worry about getting a life. Honestly, who blasted stupid can you be to worry about whether beer is going to doom our planet because of its CO2 footprint. Much more damage is done by 6 Billion people farting than through Alcohol production, much less the tragedy of those addicted to the stuff. So either go have a beer or six or go stick your head in a toilet!!
So what do you supposed it does when you pick your nose.... Oh, yeah, that's right, it browses microsoft.com!
There are a lot of TV shows that have come out recently that have very Anti-Typical Heros (as in no strong chin, great looks, football player etc.) that are Nerds. I'm talking about shows like Chuck, Life, The Mentalist, Heros, Ugly Betty. All of these include brainy, if not somewhat eccentric and socially awkward nerds as the central character. It might be true that the image portrayed doesn't always spell out the Nerdier side of Nerdness (real words?) but these are nonetheless, heros rather than the side kick or foil of the main character. Chuck is interesting though in that both the main character and some of his sidekicks are nerds with the hero being portrayed as the nerd who evolved some social skillz while some of his side kicks definitely didn't. Well I was a nerd before it became cool, am one now, and will likely remain one even if our new found acceptance dims.
Obama's a socialist, Bush is a fool, if you are a democrat, you are a tool. McCain is no better, throwing cash out the door, the banks are a scramblin, like a Manhattan whore. Sounds kinda nasty and if you think I am rude, Just tellin' the truth, "Hey brother we're screwed!"
Didn't you know that "BT" stands for "Behind the Times?" OTOH, If you insist on IPv6 you get to do lots of tunneling since almost no one else is on it either. Just goes to show you what happens to innovation in the presence of a large userbase and expensive infrastructure.
I've been in this business (IT that is) for 34 years and have worked for a variety of business, organizations and the government. IT generally does not live for its own benefit, it is there to make a business successful and to forget that is build your own little empire of ingrates. OTOH, business that wields IT with the understanding of a cave man is using a bazooka to swat a fly. We need to understand what the business is about and support it intelligently and business needs to quit asking for the shiniest new IT thing because the other guy has it, or making unreasonable and contrary demands without understanding the implications for their bottom line and our sanity.
I've stopped buying games that I really wanted, like Mass Effect, because of onerous DRM. I wasn't really planning on buying Spore but this definitely caps it. I won't EVER buy Spore even if they remove the DRM. The same with the aforementioned Mass Effect. I buy about $500 in games every year per platform (PC, PS2, PSP, XBox, Wii). So if you want to honk off your best buyers, just go ahead and keep amping up the DRM!
This is a REALLY bad idea! If you want to show your support for a candidate on your OWN blog, then all the more power to you. I own and run a lot of my own blogs and I will probably support McCain in some of those. But if oodles of McCainiacs suddenly hit partisan sites like DailyKOS, it will be rightly counted as comment spam. You aren't going to change anyone's mind there. It will just look you look like an army of slack-jawed droids. So, if you want to support a candidate, McCain or otherwise, do so on your OWN blog, where you can make your best arguments for their candidacy. Who knows, if you actually have something relevant and persuasive to say, you might have KOSites comment spamming you :-)
Land is for growing FOOD and materials for SHELTER. That already covers the two greatest and ever increasing needs we humans have. If we triple book the land so that we depend on its surface area for energy as well, we are ALL SCREWED! Its just not going to work in the long term. Period. If we want to expand our populations, economies and/or quality of life we will either need to get one of our top three needs (Food, Shelter, Energy) from below ground such as oil, coal or uranium, or from a renewable energy source such as solar. Haven't we already learned what happens when we try to use corn as a panacea? And switchgrass is no silver bullet either. Currently switchgrass based ethanol is much more expensive to produce than oil, we don't know how well it will scale, and sooner or later, food producing lands will be in strong contention for ethanol producing ones. Thus biofuels are a BAD idea unless of course you are talking about the resuse of excess biomatter (e.g. garbage, waiste oil and the like). But even in this scenario, we won't be able to scale it up because the earth's future biomass (like you and me, the cow and the grass she eats) is dependent on its own recycle of bio matter. So, lets be a little more creative eh.
The metaphysical question that has not been posed is "If the Universe is so fragile that mere observation will bring it to an untimely end, is it worth observing at all?" That oughta fry your noodle. But really, if the Universe produces observers, who will in the natural course of their existence, hasten the destruction of that same Universe, then Something Has Already Gone Terribly Wrong.