Apples and oranges.

Extraterrestrial intelligence, if it exists, is not (necessarily) supernatural.

Agreed 100%. We live in a society where adjectives like "educated" and "intellectual" are used as epithets rather than compliments.

The long-term prognosis for such a society is grim, to say the least.

...but I'm going to join the chorus of voices here.

Saying that something in the natural sciences is "just a theory" or "still a theory" belies a certain misunderstanding about the scientific method. It suggests a belief in a mythical finish line that an idea can cross, thereby making the transition from "theory" to "law". Natural science does not work in this way. Natural science is not in the business of "proving" anything. If you're interested in proof, you should become a mathematician.

Put another way, a physicist with a baseball in his hand does not say "If I throw this ball up in the air, I shall prove that it will return to the ground." Rather, he (or she) says "If I throw this ball up in the air, I *predict* that it will return to the ground."

You see, that is what natural science is about: theories and predictions. A scientific theory rises and falls on the basis of how well it explains past and present phenomena and how well it predicts future phenomena. If it fails to do this, it is amended, tinkered with, or (in some cases) outright discarded. But from a scientific perspective, there is never a point where scientists declare victory and make the claim that they have discovered universal, unswerving truth.

...is that Colbert's audience is in on the joke.

Both men are playing characters, but (by and large) only one of their audiences has picked up on that fact.

I remember occasionally hearing Beck's radio show on the weekend several years ago (before he got his nightly program on CNN/HLN). It was mainly stream-of-consciousness ranting and skits, and most of it was not even overtly political. And in his early days at CNN, it was more of the same. But then a funny thing happened. Beck gradually discovered that as he made exploratory leaps into the realm of right-wing paranoia, he generated more buzz (e.g., message boards and link aggregation sites on the Internet) and got higher ratings.

And so in the mid-2000s, the character that Beck plays on TV slowly evolved into what it is today. And much like primeval hominids making the leap from the trees onto the savanna, Beck's move from CNN to Fox News coincided with him turning up the right-wing crazy to 11 and ripping off the knob.

I don't know what Beck's personal politics are. For all we know, he may be a raging liberal in his private life. But he's not dumb -- he knows what side his bread is buttered on, he is acutely aware of the fear, prejudice, and (yes) ignorance of his core audience, he plays them like a piano, and he's laughing all the way to the bank. Under normal circumstances, I'd say more power to him. Unfortunately, he's also fostering an environment of alarming rancor and derangement in American society -- and that's something that he's going to have to live with long after he's gone off the air.

Part of the problem is that anybody who proposes DoD cuts is immediately labeled a dangerous agitator who wants to embolden our enemies and put American lives at risk. There's a large and well-funded industry that's dedicated to perpetuating this myth, and they're frighteningly effective at their job. If we're to ever get the deficit situation under control, it will require a certain degree of maturity from the electorate -- along with the realization that there's enough pork in the defense budget to make a bacon replica of the Hoover Dam.

We also need a certain degree of maturity and a solidly-grounded perspective on taxes, as well -- but that's neither here nor there.

I guess with my sewer-mouth, I won't need to apply for an astronaut post anywhere.

Well, you could have always flown with Pete Conrad.

I'd have to agree with Quiet_Desperation on this -- gaming is really subjective.

Personally, I loved Fallout 3. The typical response to this is "Yeah, well, that's because you didn't play the original games." While I didn't play Fallout 2, I did play the original Fallout, and I also played the hell out of Wasteland a full decade before that (I suspect that relatively few people can make this claim). So I'm not lacking for "classic Fallout cred". While Fallout 3 was not a perfect game (no game is), it was still one of the most immersive and enjoyable experiences I've had in a game for quite some time.

I mean, seriously -- at one point you're raiding the National Air and Space Museum to retrieve the S-band transmitter from the Apollo lunar lander so that you can hang it off of the top of the Washington Monument to get a pirate radio station back on the air. How can you not have fun doing that?

I'd agree that New Vegas (also a terrific game) was a bit closer to the spirit of the original Fallout; it went back to the traditional desert setting, it brought back things like character traits that provided both bonuses and impediments, and more of the choices that you made during your adventure affected the eventual outcome of the game (and even that was not absent from Fallout 3, despite what others have said). But that doesn't mean that Fallout 3 wasn't a truly great game (Game of the Year, as it were).

To me, "Oblivion with guns" is not an insult at all -- it's a compliment. Hell, elsewhere in this thread there are highly-rated comments stating that truly great sequels cannot simply be MOTS (more of the same), and yet many of the people who disparage Fallout 3 do so on the basis that it's a departure from the formula of the first two games. Make up your mind, folks.

Speaking of ego and nostalgia, I was also reminded of the story about how Jerry Pournelle got kicked off of the ARPAnet.

No reference to Jerry Pournelle is complete without this classic from rec.humor.funny (originally posted on BIX by Edmund X. DeJesus):

Usees Column by
Gerry Pourwelle

When we finally got home from the monthly Rambling Writers Conference (this time in Djemaa-el-Fna), we found Fractal Manor's main hall shoulder deep in brand-new state-of-the-art totally free computer hardware and software for me to check out. Drat. I'll never get around to most of it, of course, and probably will end up dumpstering 90% or more. What I really need to properly handle all of the wonderful things companies send me absolutely free to review and enjoy with no obligation whatsoever on my part, is a trash compactor.

I thought I'd start by reconfiguring my main computer, the Hyena 986SXDXMCMXCIV. Right now the sectors on the hard disk run clockwise, but I heard a rumor that you can squeeze 0.2% more throughput by running them counterclockwise. It's worth the effort. Recommended.

I slid the shrink-wrap off version 7.126 of DiskMember Gold (I know, you thought I'd never upgrade from version 4.79, especially after all my bad-mouthing of versions 5.33 and 6.02, but what can I say? Only a Corinthian drinks kevis in a Veronese cantola.) and fired it up. No joy. I reread the documentation to no avail, then scanned the whole manual in, OCRed it, spell- checked the file and uploaded it to BIX with a question mark appended.

While I waited for a response, I tried the software out on the TriskaDeck 1313. This is the machine Bill Gibson uses when we collaborate. It loaded fine and ran fine, but it seems to have automatically moved every hard disk sector to a random location and erased all the File Allocation Tables. Luckily I had backed up the entire hard disk to a CD-ROM with the new BitByter 7000 CD-ROM Mastering Deck (only $40,000 and worth every penny. Recommended.) so in only 6 more hours I was back where I started.

While the disk was humming, I checked BIX with the Niebelungen Valkyrie we keep in a corner for when Sandy Solzhenitsyn is here writing. No answers yet.

On the chance that he might have some insight, I buzzed Bill Gates. He mumbled something about it probably being a hardware problem before excusing himself. That seemed plausible.

I called Jan Toady, president of Hyena, who indicated that a helicopter of ground-assault technical assistants was hovering near Fractal Manor 24 hours a day and that all I had to do was give the word and they'd parachute in. (Based on my own experience, I think Hyena offers the best service in the business, and not just because I mention their products every month in my column which millions of avid computer buyers read either. I bet you'd get the same service I do. Recommended.) I chuckled and said I'd try to puzzle it out a little more myself. He said okay and then talked me into accepting a free laptop with holographic display and telepathic mouse. A nice guy.

I also got Mike Spindler, Lou Gerstner and Ross Perot on a conference call, but except for a few offers on tractor trailers full of new equipment they couldn't help me.

My wife Svetlana (whose reading program can teach anyone with a $3000 computer how to read, and which is now available for PC-compatibles, Apples, Macintoshes and the Cray XMP for only $49.95 plus shipping and sales tax where applicable, have your MasterCard or VISA card ready and call 1-800-555-1212, operators standing by 24 hours a day) stuck her head in to say Hi.

That gave me the idea to try calling my sons for help. Number one son Bud is now Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but when I called him he was busy in the War Room with the Secretary of Defense and some darn nerve gas missile crisis. It's always something with those civilians. Second son Robbie was in the middle of performing emergency brain surgery on the President, but promised to get back to me when he had a breather. Chip was arguing a landmark civil rights case before the Supreme Court when he answered my beeper message, but he seemed to think it was hardware. That would confirm Bill Gates's idea, if you'll recall. It could be true. On the other hand, it could be false. On the gripping hand, it could be some combination of hardware and non-hardware. A tough call, any way you looked at it.

I must have caught youngest son Ernie in an aerobics class in his college dorm room, because he seemed to be having trouble breathing when I called, and I could hear a husky female voice in the background saying, "Don't stop." He only said, "Check the plug, Dad" and hung up. His comment started me thinking.

The Hyena has this long black wire sticking out the back that terminates in a plug-like connector. The plug has two parallel flat metal prongs, and a third round prong about half an inch below the midpoint of a line segment joining the two flat metal prongs, if you follow me. A little searching behind the desk where Jack Updike likes to work when he visits revealed an outlet in the wall with a corresponding arrangement of holes. It seemed too good to be true. I tried inserting the plug in the outlet. No joy. A quick call to Steve Hawking suggested that it was a space symmetry problem, and I rotated the plug 180 degrees and tried again. It slid home perfectly.

Well, I'm about out of room here now. Next month I hope to get to this big red switch located on the side of the Hyena. Close study of the manuals suggests that it is somehow related to the functioning of the plug in the outlet. I'll have the whole story for you in the next column, along with a report on the Jet- Setting Pen-Wielders Seminar in Montevideo.

This month's favorite game is still Checkers. There is something both deceptively simple and enticingly complex about this game that I have yet to master. Highly recommended.

The book of the month is Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, on CD-ROM with clips from Hercules Meets Godzilla. It's like being there.

Continent of the month is Australia. Give it a look.

Instead of pony, package contained bobcat. Would not buy again.

There was once a COBOL programmer in the mid to late 1990s. For the sake of this story, we'll call him Jack. After years of being taken for granted and treated as a technological dinosaur by all the UNIX programmers and Client/Server programmers and website developers, Jack was finally getting some respect. He'd become a private consultant specializing in Year 2000 conversions. He was working short-term assignments for prestige companies, traveling all over the world on different assignments. He was working 70 and 80 and even 90 hour weeks, but it was worth it.

Several years of this relentless, mind-numbing work had taken its toll on Jack. He had problems sleeping and began having anxiety dreams about the Year 2000. It had reached a point where even the thought of the year 2000 made him nearly violent. He must have suffered some sort of breakdown, because all he could think about was how he could avoid the year 2000 and all that came with it.

Jack decided to contact a company that specialized in cryogenics. He made a deal to have himself frozen until March 15th, 2000. This was a very expensive process and totally automated. He was thrilled. The next thing he would know is he'd wake up in the year 2000; after the New Year celebrations and computer debacles; after the leap day. Nothing else to worry about except getting on with his life.

He was put into his cryogenic receptacle, the technicians set the revive date, he was given injections to slow his heartbeat to a bare minimum, and that was that. The next thing that Jack saw was an enormous and very modern room filled with excited people. They were all shouting "I can't believe it " and "It's a miracle" and "He's alive ". There were cameras (unlike any he'd ever seen) and equipment that looked like it came out of a science fiction movie.

Someone who was obviously a spokesperson for the group stepped forward. Jack couldn't contain his enthusiasm. "It is over?" he asked. "Is 2000 already here? Are all the millennial parties and promotions and crises all over and done with?"

The spokesman explained that there had been a problem with the programming of the timer on Jack's cryogenic receptacle, it hadn't been year 2000 compliant. It was actually eight thousand years later, not the year 2000. But the spokesman told Jack that he shouldn't get excited; someone important wanted to speak to him.

Suddenly a wall-sized projection screen displayed the image of a man that looked very much like Bill Gates. This man was Prime Minister of Earth. He told Jack not to be upset. That this was a wonderful time to be alive. That there was world peace and no more starvation. That the space program had been reinstated and there were colonies on the moon and on Mars. That technology had advanced to such a degree that everyone had virtual reality interfaces which allowed them to contact anyone else on the planet, or to watch any entertainment, or to hear any music recorded anywhere.

"That sounds terrific," said Jack. "But I'm curious. Why is everybody so interested in me?"

"Well," said the Prime Minister. "The year 10000 is just around the corner, and it says in your files that you know COBOL".

(copypasta)

Having the maturity to realize that taxes are a necessary part of living in a modern, safe, and orderly society does not make one a "big-government cheerleader". Yes, it would be great if everybody's tax rate was zero percent and all of the things that define the First World standard of living magically appeared ex nihilo. Unfortunately, this is not the case -- and it's the reason that the whole "government is robbing me at gunpoint" schtick never fails to elicit involuntary eye-rolling from folks who are more grounded in reality.

This is because Anonymous is DDoSing you.

I've never forgiven him for that piece of shit "Informer" song.

(a licky boom-boom down)

Who's freedom?

I'm freedom, that's who.