I won't vote for either the GOP or DNC as a protest vote. I get that it is a protest vote and my candidates (I'd vote for Satan if he ran as a third party candidate, barring any 3d party candidates, I vote for my cat) and that my candidate won't win. The best hope I have is to be perceived as a spoiler which _might_ shift a party my direction.

The simple fact is, the GOP and DNC totally agree on all of those issues. We basically have two Republican parties: the one in favor of gay marriage and abortion, and the one against. But if I expect that voting for GOP or DNC candidates will change anything I mentioned above, I would be deluded.

So in fact, we do have people to blame other than ourselves. We can blame the people that own the parties and we can blame the parties for a lack of actual choice. And I suppose we can blame "ourselves" -- or at least those who affiliate with either party -- for thinking there is one ioata of difference between the parties.

Back in the early 90s I had the opportunity of participating on a paleontological expedition to the badlands of Montana. The soil was built up over hundreds of millions of years and flooding cut through the soft soil leaving a stratigraphy that is dramatic and easy to read. You can even see the Chicxulub ejecta, a chocolate brown horizontal line about the width of your hand.

Now whole dinosaur skeletons are a rare find. You can spend a whole season tramping through the badlands and never find two bones that go together. But individual bones are more common, and bone fragments are more common still, and experts can often identify the group of dinosaurs or even the species of dinosaur a bone fragment came from, often a surprisingly small fragment of bone.

What we were doing was assembling a database of species found by layer, which in turn maps to era. What the PI was finding was a shift towards species with anatomical adaptations to deal with heat. His opinion was that there was already a climate driven adaptive stress on the dinosaur population, which turned the aftermath of the Chicxulub impact into a knock-out blow.

So the idea that there was more going on than an asteroid impact is hardly new. People were thinking that way twenty years ago.

One thing every thoughtful fan of the mystery story knows is that in real life, motivation tells you very little about who done what. That's because *most* people, when faced with a problem, don't even consider murder. Murderers are not typical people.

The same goes for hackers. When companies first started putting Internet connections back in the 90s in I would explain that they need to start taking steps to secure their networks, and almost without exception the response was "Why? Why would anyone be interested in hacking *us*?" And I had to explain that the Internet was accessible to *everyone*, including people whose motivations and ways of thinking would make no sense to them.

Motivation may have limited use in perhaps identifying some possible suspects, but it's not probative of anything. You can't rule anyone out or in based on what you think their motivations are or should be. The only way to know that somebody has done something is by following the chain of evidence that leads to some concrete action they've taken.

But now that they denied involvement, I suspect they may be.

Well, there's two reasons why 3D printing makes sense. One is prototyping. You might need to make a half dozen different prototypes that are pretty similar to each other before you find one that really works. The second is replacement. You may need to replace these things on a regular basis. Replacing them is just a matter of sending a file to a printer -- no craft skill needed at all.

Hand crafting something like this falls within the scope of my tinkering abilities. I've worked with fiberglass and epoxy and wood. But it's not for everyone and if someone had to *pay* me to make something like this it would probably cost a thousand dollars a pair.

Something like this would seem to fall into the sweet spot for 3D printing: something you need more than one of, but not *thousands* of identical copies.

That was a dozen years ago. He can't self-publish *now* because he has a contract with Springer.

I have a friend who was a medical entomologist and journal editor before he retired. I ran into him while I was browsing a book table at a conference, and mentioned that I'd like to buy one of the medical entomology textbooks but the $250 price tag was a bit steep.

"Just wait," he said. "I'm about to change that. I'm writing a new textbook that will be a lot cheaper. I want students and public health departments to be able to afford a solid medical entomology reference."

When his book came out the publisher set the priced at $500. It was twice as expensive any of its competitors. Now something like this is never going to sell like a basic calculus book, but it has a considerably larger market than you'd think. His idea was that it would find its way into the syllabus in medical, veterinary and public health schools; and that hospitals and public health agencies would buy copies for their libraries. But his strategy to make that happen by making the book affordable and sell in (relatively) high numbers; the publisher had other plans.

So don't blame authors for high textbook prices. It's publishers who set the price.

9th & 10th Amendments. Unless it's a power granted to the Federal Government, or reserved by a State, it's a right retained by the people.

Unfortunately, the Supreme Court has ruled that even the most tenuous, indirect link to interstate commerce creates Federal jurisdiction, which means only those rights specifically enumerated are actually protected in their eyes.

There's some scary Supreme Court precedent just handed down. The cop can be ignorant of the law, i.e., think you broke a law when you didn't, and then conduct a search, and that search is now legal thanks to a brand new Supreme Court decision. That's right, ignorance of the law is no excuse, except for cops.

Pick your poison:
http://thinkprogress.org/justi...

http://www.foxnews.com/politic...

Of course this is supposed to be limited to "reasonable" ignorance, but look at Smith v. Maryland. A one time, short term, metadata collection on a specific individual where there was certainly probable cause for a warrant if the cops had not been lazy, is today interpreted to mean that all metadata can be collected for every person, for all time, in the absence of probable cause. Or how the Executive branch interprets "imminent" to include "maybe possibly at some point of time in not so near future." This ruling is a free pass for the cops to do whatever the hell they want and claim ignorance of the law. Just give it 30 years.

Your tax dollars at work:

• 13 years of continuous war
• Paying off Wallstreet and banksters to trash the economy
• Massive universal surveillance
• Importing cheap labor and exporting jobs
• The most awesome largest prison industry on the planet
• Mine resistant vehicles for rural sheriff's departments
• Forced subsidization of the for-profit health insurance industry
• Monopolies for Comcast (and its ilk)
• And oh yeah, maybe, if there is anything left over, and after they fall into rivers, bridge repairs

The fact that a small percentage of the tax dollars go to something useful, is like saying that Jeffry Dahmer was nice to puppies so we should forget everything else about him.

Trapped in a walled garden, are we?

You are obviously a part of Satan's cabal, attempting to spread his grip to God-fearing communities through the insanity-inducing devil-weed known as marajawana...

Some people prefer hardware keyboards. I'm not one of them; I prefer to have a slimmer device with a larger screen instead, but I've tried one of the old BB models (one with a trackball) and found that its keyboard was rather good for typing longer messages. I can see the attraction if most of what you do is email and messaging.

What a lot of people (myself included) didn't appreciate is how much people hate having to carry two devices. Where I work, many people had a BB provided by the company as well as a personal cell phone (smart or otherwise). As soon as the company offered corporate email and calendar on personal smartphones, pretty much everyone dropped BB and continued to use their personal device. And pretty much no one choose BB as their personal device either. TFA praises BB for not trying to appeal to the mass market with this device, and instead offer something that does a couple of things really well, but BB need to understand that in the world of bring-your-own-device, the reality is that your device needs to service personal needs as well as business needs. Having a physical keyboard and a great messaging app clearly doesn't cut it anymore.

Adding the ability to run Android apps on modern BB phones is a great move though. That may be exactly what is needed to make them good enough for personal use.

That "word" needs to die a quick and painful death... If you want to use that saying as a verb, just write "have been eating their own dog food".

ISDN, so technically not a modem....