Everybody at DHS and TSA -- heck, everybody in the government or who votes for somebody in the government -- should read Wasp, by Eric Frank Russell.

http://www.amazon.com/Wasp-Eric-Frank-Russell/dp/0575070951

It's about a spy whose job is to do exactly what Al Qaeda is doing to us. If people read it and discussed it, maybe they'd see how this sort of thing is supposed to work, and exactly how perfectly we're falling for it.

So, what would be the easiest way to detect when such a device has been attached to your vehicle? And what sort of things could you do with it once found so you could re-purpose it for your own uses? (Assuming you don't just stick it to a garbage truck, or to a private vehicle belonging to the Chief of Police.)

[W]asn't Provine one of the Federation leaders in the episode where Avon is rescuing the planet from a self-destruct device at one of the ice-capped poles?

Yes, yes it was. And in all the years I've been on Slashdot, you are the very first person ever to connect that.

Actually, it's the plot from the first few episodes of "Blake's 7", in which an anti-government agitator is set up to be tried as a child molester and put away for life.

LaTeX uses ~ for "nonbreaking space", so you can just type "Mr.~Smith", and it won't break the line between "Mr." and "Smith", and it'll avoid putting extra space there while justifying the line.

But we, the consumers would lose. Without a healthy competition, there is no pressure to lower prices. And, there is no pressure to innovate on the existing iPad for Apple. So, yes, I would love to see many tablets - some with an Apple OS, some with Windows, and some with Android. What could be better than having the choice?

Microsoft produces really interesting stuff (such as Surface), and they've made good programs, but they seem to have quality only in small things. When they go to building large systems, layers of execs get involved and turn an interesting idea into a shoddy product.

If MS was writing iPad and AndroidTablet apps, items that were small enough to escape attention from all the Dilbert-like pointy-haired-bosses, and put together teams of 5 or 6 people to work on said projects, they'd probably make a lot of interesting things that worked and bring in some money.

But with Ballmer saying "Our new tablet is a huge deal and needs to be an iPad killer!", what that means is that every manager who wants to be an Important Person is going to stick his fingers in it somewhere, and they'll end up a confused mishmash.

Here's a real example of that happening: http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-crapfest.html

And here's a comic look at how things at MS can start great and end up with too many cooks spoiling the broth: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeXAcwriid0

I guess what I'm getting at is that Microsoft is more likely to produce something worth using, and thus more likely to contribute to healthy competition, if small teams are building apps for other platforms. If they're trying to build a platform on their own, that'll be a Very Big Deal down at Corporate HW, and the first dozen revisions will have Clippy-like abominations in them, or be Vista-like bloated disasters, or just be Windows95,98,ME-like bugfests.

Download the game, tell him this one comes with the programs that make it work, compile it, and play it. Let him play it. See if there's a to-do list for things they want done to the game, and do one or two. Let him participate by testing your changes.

The state has the absolutely responsibility to protect the children's right to a decent education, and not be at the mercy of whack-job parents.

Don't parents have a responsibility to protect their kids from a whack-job state?

In my view, this works out to "Germany demands right to indoctrinate all children with state-approved education." And I'm supposed to think that nothing could possibly go wrong with that.

Well the difference is that in Germany you don't get hillbilly teachers trying to explain to you that the earth is just 5000 years old.

For now. What if the political winds go the other way and Germany pulls a Texas, deciding to drop evolution, or to include Intelligent Design? State-run schools have taught, and continue to teach, all manner of nonsense.

and yes, going to school is a law, you have to. You can't just say, no I don't want to. In Austria it is called "Schulpflicht".

And if you don't trust the government, then what? You get sent off for re-education?

I don't know exactly what you do, but if you have any files for download you can put them up in ODT and PDF format, and then have a link which says "These files are available in PDF format and ODT format. Many computers have software which can read PDF files; if yours does not, you can download it from Adobe (throw in a link). ODT files can be opened using many programs which are also available for free, including AbiWord, OpenOffice.org, and which can be downloaded from here. All of these programs can be used in Microsoft Windows, Apple's OS X, Linux, and BSD.

Another thing you might do is have a "compatibility page", in which you have FAQ-type stuff of the form "Q: If I want to send you an electronic file, what format should I use? A: We use OpenOffice.org, which can read files in many formats, including the standard ODT format as well as things such as Microsoft Word format."

Dunno if any of that helps you or not.

t's just that your particular value system only permits one possible answer, but not everyone shares that system precisely. Disagree if you must, but at the very least you have to agree that in Germany, the german people should be allowed to make their laws as they see fit.

How far does "make their laws" go? Wolfgang Werlé and Manfred Lauber killed an actor, someone in the public eye. What if there's a biography of that actor published in 1995 or so? Does the publisher have recall and destroy every copy? Do libraries have to destroy it? What about newspaper archives? Would you have to go to all the microfilm copies and change them? Maybe their victim was famous enough to have an entry in a printed encyclopedia; would copies of those have to be destroyed?

If Mr Werlé and Mr Lauber don't like notoriety, maybe they should have murdered somebody obscure. Or, and I know this is extreme, maybe they shouldn't have murdered anybody at all.

And, of course, they shouldn't have tripped the Streisand Effect; at this rate there's going to be a TV-movie about them and they'll end up in the IMDB and have their own Wikipedia pages.

He doesn't have to try, but just think of all the billable hours that go with filing suits in a foreign country. In this way, a lawyer's like a bookie: whether you win or lose, he makes money.

To claim something is impossible when someone else has said it is means you are the smartest person on the planet.

Oh, rubbish. I never said it was physically impossible; I said getting all the materials would cost too much. It won't happen, ever, because they'll never get enough people who want to pay for it. If they ever do build it, I'll be happy to admit I was wrong.

Look, I don't know what you think you're doing, but you're not winning a debate (nobody is still reading this but us), and I'm totally unimpressed by your mischaracterization of what I wrote. Who are you posting for, exactly?

As long as we're talking about "reading again", you might review the statement you quoted originally: "Unless Congress passes a law stating that nobody else in the USA can have any concrete until the Houston Dome is finished, the only way to lock up the entire supply is to outbid everybody else put together." Nothing you have said contradicts that statement, in either your first reply or the second.

As for stretching the time out to 20 years, that would make no practical difference (it's not like they can lock up half the supply of concrete in any easy way), and doesn't change my overall point.

So, if we're talking about someone who's as stupid as rock, you flaming on about nits which make no practical difference, and failing to dispute the truth of the statement you actually quoted, pretty well settles it for me.

Do you honestly believe that you can get the taxpayers of Houston to spend 20 years paying to stockpile concrete for such a project?

This isn't like a bridge, which costs a lot of money but can be finished in a few years and then used for decades afterwards. You can issue a government bond to pay for construction, and then pay off the bonds with tolls over the bridge. A dome over Houston, per your suggestion, would take 20 years before you even started. And unless you plan to charge a toll for everybody who goes in or comes out, the only way to pay for it is with tax money.

If my property taxes went up that much for a project that wouldn't even be started for 20 years, I would move away and not pay it. Any businesses operating in Houston would almost certainly leave the city if their costs would go up so much. Companies are expected to file quarterly reports on how the company is doing. They can't afford to blow cash for 20 years on something that doesn't help the bottom line. If you don't pay property taxes, maybe the problem doesn't seem so immediate to you. But you would pay, anyhow. If the supermarket where you shop finds itself owing an extra $5million a year in property tax, where do you think they'll get the extra $100K per week? They'll get it by jacking up the prices they charge their customers.

Sci-fi ideas make great fiction, but in world where you have limited budgets, and where there are no replicators so anything you build costs actual money, we're never going to have a dome over Houston. The concrete we're talking about is $86billion just for the cement, saying nothing about the aggregate, rebar, capital costs for equipment (we have to dig the circular trench), fuel costs, or labor. If we figure the total cost of the foundation ring is 10 times the cost of the cement, we get $860billion. Divided equally by the 2.2million people in Houston, that's ~$400K each; for a family of 4, it works out to $1.6million. Spread out over 20 years, that works out to $80k per year in extra property taxes for a family of 4. Does your household budget have room in it for spending an extra $80k in taxes every year?