that the planet's orbit be stable over thousands of years

Very low thousands is plenty if the timing is right. If anything say a few thousand years pre-Copernicus contained astronomical accounts that deviated wildly from what we "know" today, we'd put it in the same category as the artwork and accounts of the flat earth resting on the back of a giant turtle.

If you read this paper, you see they settled on a moon the same mass as Kalgash but with the density of Saturn! How could such a system possibly arise?

Gas Dwarfs?
http://blogs.discovermagazine....

As for the how, with 6 suns dancing around, you've got plenty of candidates to provide the required components, and lots of opportunity for freak events, collisions, etc.

Honestly, I think, after you add in 'freak occurrences' we'll eventually find some pretty spectacularly improbable planets.

And Science Fiction is a specialty of Fiction, which is a specialty of Language, which comes from people, who are biological creatures.

See, it all comes around full circle!

Speaking of full circle, when I was a kid, a "physic" was something to help you poop. This may have had something to do with my poor performance in Physics, which I saw as a bunch of shit.

Now, as an old man, I can see the value in physics, both the science and the laxative.

http://dictionary.reference.co...

Ron Paul & his followers in the 2008 election, including Campaign for Liberty?

Tea Partiers don't tend to think so highly of Ron Paul.

For those of you wondering, google is a search engine. It lets you get answers to questions like What the fsck is a Buss Duct?" If you want to be a Karma Whore, you can then pop back here to Slashdot and post what you found, and cross your fingers in hopes that some idiots who don't know what Google is will mod it as "Interesting" or "Informative".

The Infrastructure Crisis is a valid link. The rest of it is borked.

I do know a few right-wingers who discussed the subject even back in Bush days, long before Obama. For example, Matthew Bracken, who wrote "Enemies Foreign and Domestic" (it's basically a right-wing propaganda piece, with central theme being the govt cracking down on gun owners, but it also directly touches on surveillance and police militarization, and the use of terrorism as a pretext to curtail civil liberties; as I recall, it specifically mentions the PATRIOT Act). That book was written in 2003, back when Bush's reign was seen as uncontested, so effectively it targeted that administration.

You can also look at the Pauls. Say what you like about them, but they have been very consistent in arguing against all these things, and Rand at least counts himself as Tea Party affiliated (though many people in that movement would probably dislike him).

OTOH, yes, you also have large quantities of "I'm not racist, but why is he black?" guys there too, for whom it's just the convenient excuse of the day. But they're not all there is to it.

"It might be slightly harder to tell the difference between a video stream and a large file download but by no means impossible. You can do this much with (relatively) inexpensive COTS routing and fire-walling equipment now.

Er, ah, no. You can't.

No, you'd have the key. If you wanted to share the file publicly, then there's no point in keeping it encrypted, so you'd provide the server with the key and it would decrypt, saving you the cost of downloading and reencrypting.

The client just needs one key, the RSA (or equivalent) public key. You'd need to copy this between devices, but it's relatively small (under 1KB). It's small enough to fit in a version 40 QR code quite easily, so you could set up mobile devices by displaying the QR code on your laptop screen and point the mobile device's camera at it, if you don't have any sensible way of transferring files between devices. The client then has to download the file and the associated key, decrypt the key with the locally-stored key, and then decrypt the file, but that's not something that's exposed to the user.

Well, you know, maybe. Considering the nearly incoherent warlike rantings we're getting from John McCain, and the fact that his running mate was a half-bright weathergirl who might have had brain damage from sniffing too much nail polish, we probably made out OK in 2008.

But I'm not so sure any more that boring Mitt Romney would have been much worse than the guy I voted for in 2012. At least when Mitt Romney lies, he looks a little embarrassed and his throat sounds a little tight and he pulls the sides of his eyes back. The press would have caught on to those tells and torn him apart (which is good for keeping them honest). Obama lies smoother than any president I've seen since Reagan. Clinton was also a very good liar, but not in the league of Reagan or Obama.

Or maybe it's me. It's easier to miss lies when you're hearing what you want to hear. Maybe I didn't look for Obama's tells because he was saying all the things I wanted to hear. For example, look how the Tea Party is taking to Ted Cruz. Now go listen to one of his interviews without the picture. Now listen again with the video. The guy is phonier than a 6'2" hooker on Halsted St. after midnight. If Ted Cruz was an insurance salesman in Topeka trying to sell a policy, those same Tea Party types would throw his ass out in a second. Especially the women, who are better at catching out lies.

nearly legal adult

"Nearly legal adult"? Is that like "nearly pregnant"?

Let me suggest that if you bang a thirteen year old girl and tell the judge, "But she looked like a nearly legal adult" that you might have some explaining to do.

And if you say you were following her down an alley because she was wearing a hoodie, you might be considered sort of a creep.

That's an interesting question you bring up. Are there more secrets today or are we finding out about them faster?

Well, one measure is the number of work-product documents of the Executive and Congressional branches that are being classified as secret. And it appears that the number is growing unbelievably fast. In 1996, there were about 5 million documents classified by the Federal Government. By 2006, the number had jumped to about 23 million. By 2009 it had gotten to 54 million and by 2011, we were at 92 million documents classified. Remember, these aren't super-secret nuclear codes or the plans to the underground bunker under the White House. We're talking about simple work product documents. Stuff like EPA regulations. FDA regulations. The minutes from meetings discussing trade agreements. Actual laws that we're not allowed to know about, but must obey. And this is not counting the documents that were marked secret decades ago, whose classification is supposed to sunset but has been extended further into the future, protecting us from knowing what our government is doing.

No, I'm pretty sure our government has become a hell of a lot more secretive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/ind...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Well, you see, there's people and then there's people. Know what I mean?

The Tea Party didn't become "skeptical of PATRIOT Act, NSA surveillance, and all that stuff" until January of 2009. For some reason, having nothing to do with the color of the skin of the guy in the White House, I'm certain.

But the timing is a little suspect, you must admit.

Maybe you can find an example of a Tea Party person showing opposition to those programs prior to 2009. I tried and I could not.

Someone should invent SSL!

Yes. And if you don't have cell phone service, too bad. Again, if you live in an area in the middle of nowhere, too bad. If you don't want to pay to pay to have your phone rooted and have a non google ROM put on, too bad. What was your point again, exactly?