I was at DragonCon in Atlanta a few weeks ago. And let me tell you, if you weren't there (I have this suspicion that many/.'ers probably were) -- the lines to see Wash and River (or Alan Tudyk and Summer Glau) were so long that people queued up three and four hours in advance. And stood there for even longer waiting to get to the head of the line, just to meet them and get their autographs.
They were competing with Star Wars cast, Star Trek cast, BSG cast and Stargate, and who knows who else, and every single one of those franchises had seen more airtime and more hours filmed than the entire Firefly universe, but those two were the most popular people by an outrageous margin. I would say an entire order of magnitutde.
Now consider how financially successful Star Treks and Star Warses have been and how hard to you have to slap FOX executives up one side and down the other for intentionally strangling this wonderful series so cruelly that the creator cannot even rationally consider attempting to bring it back to life?
Just one interesting paragraph that jumped out at me:
"There was a cemetery where the names on the tombstones were registered and voted," he recalls. "I remember a house. It was completely gutted. There was nobody there. But there were 56 votes for Kennedy in that house."
Emphasis mine.
My problem with the statement is, how would he know who the votes were for? U.S. elections are conducted by secret ballot. I'm not saying 56 registered voters in a single house is not stinking of fraud -- but he had to add this detail that he knew they voted for Kennedy and the reality is he could have known no such thing. Makes the rest of his story less compelling.
Which is why Detroit is busting so bad. Our free-market healthcare system (which is anything but free) is a large part of what's killing our labor market and causing jobs to flee overseas . . . and even if they come back they come back at Wal-Mart.
There is no free market as long as the government exercises the authority to tax in any manner and for any legislated-moraility reason, other than a flat basis and for Constitutionally mandated purposes (and there ain't many). It's only "kind of free", as in on-the-surface.
You're confusing "free market" with "free government." Democracy costs money. Taxation is the fee. Lest you imagine that tyrrany was cheaper, remember that in the Good Ole Days, the taxman took whatever the hell he wanted to from you, and you had no (publically-funded) courts in which to appeal this extortion. Nor did you have (publically funded) roads to drive to court, or (publically funded) legislatures who could, after you voted for them, stand up to the extortion of your taxman. It was all privately-owned and operated. Fief of the local lord.
Oil companies claim the backers of Prop 87, some of them venture capitalists, would profit from state money flowing into the alternative-energy projects they are funding.
And this causes us to get out our little tiny violins? And they have the nerve to cry about this after record profits over the summer of 2006?. Give me a FUCKING BREAK, people! After decades of gaming the American political system and economy and treating us all like their little crack whores, Big Oil is crying in their bag of money that we're going to tax them to get out of the technological hole they've dug for us!! I am currently rolling something between my forefinger and thumb, and it's not the world's smallest violin playing "my heart bleeds for Lee Raymond." It's Just. A. Booger.
And middle managers, hairdressers, and the like. And a 'B' ark to put them on. And shoot their asses into space. Whereupon we will all die from a disease contracted from a dirty telephone.
Another 1%, and I'd count the ballots myself. It might take a few weeks, or even months, to get the result, but...
What's funny is the electronic devices are sold to us on the premise that "paper ballots take too long to count, are confusing, etc." and yet, here we are where the electronic system is wildly underperforming previous systems. I know that prior to 2000 we had elections called the same night they were held. It's not like we've had a massive population explosion since the 1990's.
So when the Republican Nannies got "The Reagans" yanked from airwave broadcast and moved to Showtime, what was that, there? As compared to ABC basically getting yelled at for broadcasting $40 million worth of free heavily biased propaganda right in the middle of an election cycle and in fact "getting away" with it? Which one of these was censored? And which was flagrant abuse of the public airwaves?
AB test would be blind testing the output from the vinyl vs. the CD. With a relatively clean copy of the vinyl, I believe that in most cases of these tests people can't tell the difference, and tend to prefer the CD. I don't know how CD's got "sterile" but I think it's because people got used to the hum and rumble of the turntable. On the other hand, I remember hearing Steve Howe of Yes complain that the record that appeared in the stores was always a major disapointment to him because the "whirling junk" that got caught on the record drowned out much of the subtlety of the music.
There are not really very many good technical reasons why vinyl would be preferable to CD.
Most human ears are incapable of telling the difference between analog and good digital sound. The highest possible frequency, about 22kHz, is only audible to your dog. The dynamic range, which is what most audiophiles claim is "sterile" contains a range of 65535 values. Considering that most people can barely tell the difference between one decibel and the next, and the full dynamic range of hearing is zero to 130 decibels, I'd say 65,535 gradations of sound volume are quite enough. Especially if you've ever done any musical recording and seen how much music is compressed into a thin dynamic range to begin with.
The only thing you might possibly be missing is the soft distortion that one can get by pushing analog equipment to its dynamic limits. And considering that most audiophile equipment manufacturers in the pre-digital age used to boast about their low THD (total harmonic distortion) I find it interesting that it appears to be the one aspect of sound reproduction audiophiles now appear to miss.
At any rate, the point is if you ever really compared your vinyl to a CD on equal terms, you'd discover that there was no qualitative difference. The only real reason I'd welcome a return of vinyl would be the revitalization of cover art, which has withered considerably during the CD era. But I love the fact that I can take a CD and rip a perfect copy of it and archive it on my hard drive for all time, and the CD can get scratched and not be lost to me forever. I have vinyl records that I sure wish had not sat in some wrong place for too long.
Would you pay $6/gallon for gas to support the taxes required for all those socialist services?
Yep. Sure would. I don't need to have a big car to augment my penis. I'm pretty secure about that, thanks. The only reason I drive to work is there is no reasonable alternative right now. My city ranks below the bottom 50 for public transportation, I think. If it were available I'd take it. I would still own a car, but it would be one car, and it would be used for cross-country trips and the like. And of course if gas were $6 a gallon, we wouldn't see Hummers cluttering up our streets, either.
Phased in gradually, a gas tax taking us to $6 a gallon wouldn't cause much undue economic pain, either. If a goal was set to getting it there over a period of, say, 15 years most people wouldn't even notice. Of course tax breaks could be given to people who buy more fuel-efficient cars to offset the pain, as well. It's all a matter of planning a course. The course that's being planned for us currently benefits the needs of a few wealthy oil company owners, and they've connived with our government to make us think that we'll be in a world of hurt if they aren't given the run of our economy, but that's not true, and the existence of other nations where Big Oil can't get a personal, private meeting with the government to work out energy policy proves it so.
What we are talking about here is evesdropping, nothing more. Doing something with the data collected is another matter entirely
Stop right there. Because I did. As long as the data being collected cannot be reviewed, and its source cannot be determined, it is outside of the very carefully designed restrictions established by our Framers to prevent: bullying, intimidation, bills of attainder, and all of the other tyrranical behavior against which they fought a Revolution.
Personally, I don't see how someone listening in on my conversations overseas as violating any of my rights, since I have no idea it is happening, it really doesn't have any effect on my life whatsoever.
Then, excuse me, you're a fucking sheep. I thought I was talking to a citizen in a free democracy.
I just listened to an interview with someone on NPR, a British citizen who spent 3 years at gitmo with no trial, who was tortured, and denied contact with the outside world. Why would I be paranoid about a government that would do that? Except that it's MY government, not some two-bit third-world tinpot dictator's government.
I find it ironic that you are complaining that you have lost every right while you criticize the government who you claim is taking those rights. There seems to be a lot of talk about repression around here by those who, evidently, are not very repressed.
The laws in question allow selective enforcement. Basically, if you catch the eye of the authorities, you can become somebody's bitch without having any legal justification. Just because they aren't repressing all of us does not mean that repression isn't happening, or cannot happen. The fact that evidence can be kept under wraps, and people have been held without trial for years and years and years, means that we don't really know what's going on, only that certain people are being pulled into the system and disappeared, and their rights to an open process are denied. And in a truly free society, repression against one does mean repression against all. Are you going to wait like Pastor Niemoller, until there is no one left to speak for you?
The President is tasked in a time of war to protect the country as he/she sees fit, and guess what we are at war. Our enemy has said that they are at war with us.
Congress can declare war. There is NOTHING in the Constitution that says our country's laws are dispensed of at the pleasure of the President whenever a crisis erupts.
Fascist behavior like a members of Congress basically threating ABC to have their FCC license revoked for broadcasting free propaganda, and an ex-President also calling the ABC president asking for a movie to pulled because it slanderously portrayed entirely fictional episodes that shifted historical blame from a sitting president to an ex-president. . . .
Such as an atmospheric detonation of a nuclear device setting the atmosphere on fire, creating a chain reaction that would destroy all life.
It's funny you pick that one. I am pretty sure I recall that the person who worried about that one was one of the scientists working on the project.
Also funny that you pick that one because of the relative lack of actual progress to come out of the development of nuclear weapons. Aside from diverting our species' resources into decades of proxy wars and scaring the hell out of all of us, nuclear weapons haven't contributed to anyone's notion of progress at all. We coulda done without 'em.
That was not at all difficult. And I've encountered his story before, and after about 10 seconds it becomes very uninteresting. About as interesting as Nostrodamus, who is only interesting if you're really ignorant and gullible.
Republicans weren't conservatives in 1860. Democrats were. The two parties have pretty much exchanged positions on everything significant in the interim.
His actions such as the "Malaise Speech," locking himself up in the Whitehouse because of the Iranian hostage crisis, and other acts convinced me that he was doing his best to destroy the country.
So staying on the job and telling people things they didn't want to hear (which were nonetheless true) qualify as destroying the country. Whereas falling asleep at the switch for 9/11 and Katrina, failing to catch Osama Bin Laden, burning lives and credibility and money in fighting the wrong enemy, shredding the Constitution in the name of defending our freedoms, literally walking all over the flag, handing important political appointments to useless cronies like Michael Brown and Harriet Meiers, defaming the patriotism of credible critics, deliberately dividing the country between mindless supporters and "traitors" (anyone who disagrees with him) -- those things are comparable to, let me look at it again: a speech, and staying on the job during a crisis. Yeah. That's pretty fucking destructive.
You'll have to try harder than that. Worst President Ever takes an awful lot of fucking up, and Carter just didn't put his heart into it like he oughta.
He has done jack shit about the situation since then. NOLA's population, a YEAR after the hurricane, is down by well over half, and of those, less than half have reliable electricity. The same is true of the gaping hole in the ground where the WTC is. NOTHING has been done that isn't a quickie photo op.
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They were competing with Star Wars cast, Star Trek cast, BSG cast and Stargate, and who knows who else, and every single one of those franchises had seen more airtime and more hours filmed than the entire Firefly universe, but those two were the most popular people by an outrageous margin. I would say an entire order of magnitutde.
Now consider how financially successful Star Treks and Star Warses have been and how hard to you have to slap FOX executives up one side and down the other for intentionally strangling this wonderful series so cruelly that the creator cannot even rationally consider attempting to bring it back to life?
Which is why Detroit is busting so bad. Our free-market healthcare system (which is anything but free) is a large part of what's killing our labor market and causing jobs to flee overseas . . . and even if they come back they come back at Wal-Mart.
You got mod points on Slashdot? Who'da thunk it?
You're confusing "free market" with "free government." Democracy costs money. Taxation is the fee. Lest you imagine that tyrrany was cheaper, remember that in the Good Ole Days, the taxman took whatever the hell he wanted to from you, and you had no (publically-funded) courts in which to appeal this extortion. Nor did you have (publically funded) roads to drive to court, or (publically funded) legislatures who could, after you voted for them, stand up to the extortion of your taxman. It was all privately-owned and operated. Fief of the local lord.
And this causes us to get out our little tiny violins? And they have the nerve to cry about this after record profits over the summer of 2006?. Give me a FUCKING BREAK, people! After decades of gaming the American political system and economy and treating us all like their little crack whores, Big Oil is crying in their bag of money that we're going to tax them to get out of the technological hole they've dug for us!! I am currently rolling something between my forefinger and thumb, and it's not the world's smallest violin playing "my heart bleeds for Lee Raymond." It's Just. A. Booger.
And middle managers, hairdressers, and the like. And a 'B' ark to put them on. And shoot their asses into space. Whereupon we will all die from a disease contracted from a dirty telephone.
Just a nitpick: how come he didn't use them to save his reign?
I like getting modded down when I'm right. It means I really am getting on someone's nerves. Thanks for confirming that I had a point, there.
What's funny is the electronic devices are sold to us on the premise that "paper ballots take too long to count, are confusing, etc." and yet, here we are where the electronic system is wildly underperforming previous systems. I know that prior to 2000 we had elections called the same night they were held. It's not like we've had a massive population explosion since the 1990's.
So when the Republican Nannies got "The Reagans" yanked from airwave broadcast and moved to Showtime, what was that, there? As compared to ABC basically getting yelled at for broadcasting $40 million worth of free heavily biased propaganda right in the middle of an election cycle and in fact "getting away" with it? Which one of these was censored? And which was flagrant abuse of the public airwaves?
There are not really very many good technical reasons why vinyl would be preferable to CD.
Most human ears are incapable of telling the difference between analog and good digital sound. The highest possible frequency, about 22kHz, is only audible to your dog. The dynamic range, which is what most audiophiles claim is "sterile" contains a range of 65535 values. Considering that most people can barely tell the difference between one decibel and the next, and the full dynamic range of hearing is zero to 130 decibels, I'd say 65,535 gradations of sound volume are quite enough. Especially if you've ever done any musical recording and seen how much music is compressed into a thin dynamic range to begin with.
The only thing you might possibly be missing is the soft distortion that one can get by pushing analog equipment to its dynamic limits. And considering that most audiophile equipment manufacturers in the pre-digital age used to boast about their low THD (total harmonic distortion) I find it interesting that it appears to be the one aspect of sound reproduction audiophiles now appear to miss.
At any rate, the point is if you ever really compared your vinyl to a CD on equal terms, you'd discover that there was no qualitative difference. The only real reason I'd welcome a return of vinyl would be the revitalization of cover art, which has withered considerably during the CD era. But I love the fact that I can take a CD and rip a perfect copy of it and archive it on my hard drive for all time, and the CD can get scratched and not be lost to me forever. I have vinyl records that I sure wish had not sat in some wrong place for too long.
Yep. Sure would. I don't need to have a big car to augment my penis. I'm pretty secure about that, thanks. The only reason I drive to work is there is no reasonable alternative right now. My city ranks below the bottom 50 for public transportation, I think. If it were available I'd take it. I would still own a car, but it would be one car, and it would be used for cross-country trips and the like. And of course if gas were $6 a gallon, we wouldn't see Hummers cluttering up our streets, either.
Phased in gradually, a gas tax taking us to $6 a gallon wouldn't cause much undue economic pain, either. If a goal was set to getting it there over a period of, say, 15 years most people wouldn't even notice. Of course tax breaks could be given to people who buy more fuel-efficient cars to offset the pain, as well. It's all a matter of planning a course. The course that's being planned for us currently benefits the needs of a few wealthy oil company owners, and they've connived with our government to make us think that we'll be in a world of hurt if they aren't given the run of our economy, but that's not true, and the existence of other nations where Big Oil can't get a personal, private meeting with the government to work out energy policy proves it so.
Stop right there. Because I did. As long as the data being collected cannot be reviewed, and its source cannot be determined, it is outside of the very carefully designed restrictions established by our Framers to prevent: bullying, intimidation, bills of attainder, and all of the other tyrranical behavior against which they fought a Revolution.
Personally, I don't see how someone listening in on my conversations overseas as violating any of my rights, since I have no idea it is happening, it really doesn't have any effect on my life whatsoever.
Then, excuse me, you're a fucking sheep. I thought I was talking to a citizen in a free democracy.
You're too stupid to argue with. So I won't.
I just listened to an interview with someone on NPR, a British citizen who spent 3 years at gitmo with no trial, who was tortured, and denied contact with the outside world. Why would I be paranoid about a government that would do that? Except that it's MY government, not some two-bit third-world tinpot dictator's government.
You're more at risk of dying of the flu. Get a sense of perspective.
The laws in question allow selective enforcement. Basically, if you catch the eye of the authorities, you can become somebody's bitch without having any legal justification. Just because they aren't repressing all of us does not mean that repression isn't happening, or cannot happen. The fact that evidence can be kept under wraps, and people have been held without trial for years and years and years, means that we don't really know what's going on, only that certain people are being pulled into the system and disappeared, and their rights to an open process are denied. And in a truly free society, repression against one does mean repression against all. Are you going to wait like Pastor Niemoller, until there is no one left to speak for you?
Congress can declare war. There is NOTHING in the Constitution that says our country's laws are dispensed of at the pleasure of the President whenever a crisis erupts.
It's funny you pick that one. I am pretty sure I recall that the person who worried about that one was one of the scientists working on the project.
Also funny that you pick that one because of the relative lack of actual progress to come out of the development of nuclear weapons. Aside from diverting our species' resources into decades of proxy wars and scaring the hell out of all of us, nuclear weapons haven't contributed to anyone's notion of progress at all. We coulda done without 'em.
That was not at all difficult. And I've encountered his story before, and after about 10 seconds it becomes very uninteresting. About as interesting as Nostrodamus, who is only interesting if you're really ignorant and gullible.
Republicans weren't conservatives in 1860. Democrats were. The two parties have pretty much exchanged positions on everything significant in the interim.
So staying on the job and telling people things they didn't want to hear (which were nonetheless true) qualify as destroying the country. Whereas falling asleep at the switch for 9/11 and Katrina, failing to catch Osama Bin Laden, burning lives and credibility and money in fighting the wrong enemy, shredding the Constitution in the name of defending our freedoms, literally walking all over the flag, handing important political appointments to useless cronies like Michael Brown and Harriet Meiers, defaming the patriotism of credible critics, deliberately dividing the country between mindless supporters and "traitors" (anyone who disagrees with him) -- those things are comparable to, let me look at it again: a speech, and staying on the job during a crisis. Yeah. That's pretty fucking destructive.
You'll have to try harder than that. Worst President Ever takes an awful lot of fucking up, and Carter just didn't put his heart into it like he oughta.
He has done jack shit about the situation since then. NOLA's population, a YEAR after the hurricane, is down by well over half, and of those, less than half have reliable electricity. The same is true of the gaping hole in the ground where the WTC is. NOTHING has been done that isn't a quickie photo op.