Preach brother.

If you wanna see the Mouse's attitude, go look at a Disney DVD. Every other studio puts a (C) year on there, denoting the year of Copyright, with the implication someone might want to know the year to know if it has expired. Not the House of Mouse, they just say Copyright without a year because as far as they are concerned it ain't ever going into the public domain if they can help it.

Except the local NBC weatherman was going "Huh?" since the odds of rain when they accounced the change were only 30% and more likely to drop than increase. In fact by today's forcast there was no chance of rain in the forecast. If they really were afraid of the chance of a little summer rain they never would have planned to do it outdoors in the summer. No, the move was because they were afraid they couldn't fill it and didn't want video of empty seats going viral.

> If something goes wrong on an unmanned mission, you can scrap it and try again and still get away with spending less.

Your argument works, but only to a certain point. A robotic mission requires zero defects and perfect foresight since, software excepted in some conditions, you have what you have and can't change it. The longer and more complicated the mission the lower the odds of achieving that go, which seems to be the crux of the problem with Mars missions. Even if each part/stage beats the fabled five nines of reliability, if you chain enough of those you get almost certain failure. Eventually you need the ability to fix things, adapt to the actual conditions you find yourself in, etc. That means people and as soon as you get beyond the Earth/Moon system the propagation delays make waldos impractical so the humans need to be in the same general area. If we had good enough waldos we might keep the humans in Mars orbit during the early stages.

Ok, didn't reply to this last night because I didn't want the main topic going off sideways. I only troll useless articles and try to keep the politics in articles with a political bent already. Around an election it seems every thread gets political but I won't contribute to that in a real News for Nerds article like this one.

I mean the Democratic Party in the US. It has become anathma to the ideals of the Revolution and is utterly incompatible with any republican (small r) form of government the Founders would recognize as related. Thus, like Cato the Elder I realize one will eventually destroy the other and I am making it plain that I have a preference. The Democrat Party (they hate that phrasing for some reason, so of course I use it) must be purged from all positions of authority down to the last city council member in San Francisco and the very last college president. Getting there will require a reawakening of political discourse not seen since the guns fell silent in the original Revolutionary War but everybody needs a goal, and that is mine.

Go look at eBay. There is a US based vendor selling a replacement for an iPhone 4 for 6.25. They claim OEM part and new but even if lying about the original equip part they are selling a battery, with free shipping, for cheap enough that it is a certainty that Apple could deliver them to their stores at a low enough cost they could sell them for $10 and make a profit.

And this is why robots aren't going replace people anytime soon. One little thing goes wrong with an unmanned mission and either a major subsystem is written off or the entire mission is a failure. People are able to do thigs robots aren't going to be able to do for quite a while longer. And it gets even worse as soon as you go beyond full duplex radio range. If you have to send a command, wait for a result, try something else, repeat until you scream, things get really slow the second you aren't executing preplanned directions without errors.

And people can perform physical actions we have yet to build a robot to do reliably. Sure they can put thousands of bolt on one after another on an assembly line but how many could deal with this one stuck bolt? None. Now try to build one that can open up a panel and troubleshoot wiring or plumbing.

> apple provide a service where they replace the battery for around $100.

Oh hell yea! Replace a $10 battery marked up to $25 to allow for the insanely great Apple margins and then lets turn up the screwing to 11 and charge an even hundie for it after the labor fee. The ignorant masses will just go Moo! and line up while the Faithful like Norpy here will tell us all it is a great thing.

Only way that makes sense if your statement about ditching em the second the contract expires is the game plan. In other words, disposable product. So now admit I was right, Apple is intentionally not-green and is therefore lame.

> So it's not great, but on par with the midrange iPhone.

If being as bad as an iPhone is the target, that is probably about as good as Nokia can probably manage these days. Any device without an SD slot of some sort is instantly off my list of interesting devices. I can sympathize with a design that doesn't lend itself to a visible slot but if you can't even manage to cram one under the battery hatch you just aren't trying... or don't want to. Some people love the lockin that comes from forcing everything to stream from them.... but then the carriers cap bandwidth. Of course you still can't turn on the boob tube without seeing an ad showing some hipster douche streaming all kinds of crap on the hot new product on the advertiser's network that is being touted as oh so fscking fast. Humbug I say.

And if you don't have a battery hatch (oh yea I'm really giving you the stink eye here Apple) then you just suck ass. Ain't no excuse for leaving a battery hatch out considering the very limited lifetime of lithium batteries. Not many normals going to get a heat gun out just to swap the battery. Green company my left nut. Building disposable products is lame.

> But "video game inspired" is still correct.

Except the weapon in the game wasn't called a Gauss Rifle and the one in Traveller was. So it tells me the guy knew exactly where his idea actually came from but wanted the increased pageviews from a videogame tie in. Sometimes it helps to read the article. :)

And this is why all centralized power is dangerous. Eventually an idiot WILL be put in charge. If it were one hospital, insurance provider, pharma company, whatever it is bad but survivable. But when it is a government with a virtual monopoly on something important like medicine and a real monopoly on the use of force to back it up, shit gets serious.

Hmm. Do we want a puppet of the Mormon Church or do we keep the puppet of Bill Ayers and George Soros we have now. Considering that if Obama were hellbent on destroying the country his actions would be indistinguishable from his current policies I'll roll the dice. Romneybot 2.0 wasn't my first choice in the primaries. Hell, he was pretty much at the bottom but above Laup Nor. I'd have taken Cain over Romney and Cain is f*ckin' nuts. (Ok, I'd probably take Romney over Bachman but she was never a viable candidate anyway.) But my side lost that fight and now the only choices are Obama, Romney or wasting a vote on a third party candidate who will e lucky to break 1/2% in the general.

In the end Mormons don't really scare me all that much because I just can't see em getting a large enough blok to wield much power outside Utah. Communists on the other hand have proven very dangerous throughout the 20th Century, and this mofo has to go.

Seriously, go grab a copy of the book I referenced above. It is one of those rare life changing books, after you read it nothing is quite the same anymore. Stuff you assumed was so all your life suddenly ain't so anymore and you end up wondering just how much else you take for granted as true is also bunk. The winners wrote the history books and since they still control the 'commanding heights of the culture' they still keep most people from questioning their official version. But there really isn't much doubt left that it is bunk. Seriously, if they can cover this sort of thing up ya start wondering if they really could cover up a dead f*cking alien or some crap like that.

Most folks never even knew the Senate threw all of the records under a fifty year seal and fewer still even noticed when it expired. Wouldn't you think that event would have received a little press coverage, even if just to flog the ghost of McCarthy and do a standard issue rerun of the ritiual flogging of all Republicans as 'McCarthyites? But nope, went unremarked except for a few who did notice the date and quietly went to the archives and looked at the original source documents that were behind the whole mess. His targets were almost all actual commies. What he didn't have the imagination to realize was just how many more there were, even higher up he chain of command, including the Senate itself. Sons of bitches nearly won without firing a shot.

Um, I know it doesn't fit your narrative and all, but you did know that we know the truth of the McCarthy matter now and his only real sin was not realizing just how far the rabbit hole actually went, right? Or perhaps you don't know and don't want to know.

But if you are actually curious you might want to put yourself some knowledge on. The fifty year seal on the Senate records is expired and combined with the opening of the Verona decrypts and the access some scholars got to the old Soviet records the truth ain't pretty for the standard version of those events. Might I suggest skipping Ann Coulter's polemic, which while it does get most of the basic historical facts right is in the end an Ann Coulter book, and go for the much more scholarly work by M. Stanton Evans entitled _Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies_. Instead of just references and footnotes (which it also has in quantity) it has reproductions of many original source documents and leaves little doubt as to just how bad things were in that era.

Ok, then the moderation rules seem to have changed from what they were in past years. After making a plummet from excellent to terrible in a single afternoon things changed; or the plummet was because things had changed. Now if I have excellent karma it seems one downmod drops it to good and it doesn't take many more to get to negative, while it takes a lot of +5 comments to get it back up again. Perhaps I have simply become a lightning rod and am attracting the dedicated attention of a few downmodders but looking at the posting history doesn't support that explantion. At the end of a day more posts can be modded up than down and karma status can be worse than the morning, which was why I formed the theory that I had been placed into a status where downmods were counting off more than upmods were.

But as long as it is still a halfway fair fight I'll stay in the fight and help 'yall generate the all important page views. :)

I wouldn't say that. The party machinery was darn sure trying to ram Romney down our throats but we almost stopped them. A few more grass roots objectors could have swung the primary. Of course the fact most of the other candidates were about as flawed as RomneyBot 2.0 didn't help. But expecting perfect candidates isn't realistic. Lets just say my preferred candidate didn't win the primary and no, it wasn't Laup Nor, it was somebody who actually had a snowball's chance in hell.