I spoke to scientists David Grinspoon and Geoff Landis about Venus exploration: why, when and how.

To Nick Saban:
You can tell your team all you want that they "don't need a trophy to know they're the best" -- your team isn't the best. You got beat by a better team 42-35.

To the SEC Fans:
Your "the SEC is invincible" narrative, primary fed to you by the talking heads on ESPN (which owns the SEC Network), has been shattered. Your top teams all LOST. The so-called mini-NFL, the SEC West, was 2-5 in Bowl Season.

Ohio State beat Alabama, Wisconsin beat Auburn, TCU beat Ole Miss, Georgia Tech whipped Mississippi State, and NOTRE DAME beat LSU. That's right, LSU lost to Notre freaking Dame. You know, SEC, when your signature bowl win is against Louisville, you need to drink a nice, tall glass of warm STFU.

To Mark May of ESPN: Mark, I saw you on TV still not admitting that Ohio State deserved to be in the National Title tournament even after they handed Alabama their asses. Still think the 2014 National Champions didn't belong there?

And who was that asswipe on Fox Sports who stupidly claimed that if Ohio State played Alabama next week that OSU would lose? Butthurt much? Who's to say Alabama would even beat Wisconsin or Sparty next week much less the 2014 National Champions?

Besides, Alabama had their shot at Ohio State in the Sugar Bowl.

Ohio State 42, Alabama 35

To the fans of TCU, who thought they should have been in over Ohio State or Florida State: Dude, seriously? Win that piece of shit overrated conference you call the Big 12, then maybe we'll talk. Besides, the team that had a better argument (not a good argument, just a better one than yours) was your conference Champions, which leads me to...

To the Fans Baylor of who thought they should have been in over Ohio State or Florida State: You lost to Sparty at the Cotton Bowl, a stadium that's about 90 minutes from your home field. Any team that plays in a shitty conference that loses essentially at home TO MICHIGAN STATE has no business trying to claim that they deserve to be in the National Championship Tournament. Yeah, you were a 1 loss team who won a conference that was marginally better than the MAC this year. Big f'n deal. Seriously Baylor, the Toledo Rockets would give you all you wanted in a Bowl Game. The Big 12 completely sucked this year, and went 2-4 in bowl games thanks to TCU drumming an overrated SEC team and Oklahoma State beating Washington, a Pac-12 patsy team. Big Whoop.

Finally...

To the Big 10 Haters:
2014 National Champion Ohio State 42, Oregon 20
Ohio State 42, Alabama 35
Michigan State 42, Baylor 41
Wisconsin 34, Auburn 31

My prediction: Ohio State 35, Oregon 17

The reality: Ohio State 42, Oregon 20.

But the end result is the same -- the 2014 National Champions are THE Ohio State Buckeyes.

YES!!!

Urban Meyer is taking his 12 Gauge and going Duck Hunting.

My Prediction: Ohio State 35, Oregon 17

http://www.etymonline.com/ this site has cause me more learning than any other site besides wikipedia. about time i started learning what the words really mean right right?

Maybe.

Finally got TFA working on my home system. Trying to SSH into the box will require the PIN and the password. This will only present a problem when I'm using an SSH client from my phone.

Does anyone have personal experiences with this sort of thing? (I have professional experience with it, but this is the first time I've done anything like this at home.)

Ah yes, we've just completed the boring off-year political cycle, which means it's time for the billion dollar roller coaster ride that is the quadrennial US presidential contest.

Except that, thanks to the right-wing retards, all the excitement has been well and truly drained out of what used to be one of my favourite pastimes. Their race to the bottom, still unchecked, means that Hillary Rodham Clinton is your next Oval Office Occupant. How the fuck am I supposed to enjoy the ups and downs of what used to be way more of an "Any Given Sunday" situation when the results are so predictable?

"Bu...but...but", I hear you say.

Oh fine, I'll humour your delusional asses.

HILLARY CAN BE PRIMARIED FROM THE LEFT. "It happened before! Liberals aren't fond of hawks!" And who the fuck is gonna primary her? Biden? Warren? Cuomo? Don't make me laugh.

A LOT CAN HAPPEN IN 2 YEARS! Sure it can. But apart form the fact that that argument cuts all kinds of ways and is thus useless, the "something" that's going to need to happen for HRC not to be elected Prez is going to have to be Extinction-Level Event sized. You go ahead and count your black swans before they hatch, see what that gets you.

PEOPLE JUST DON'T LIKE HER. Well yeah, if you're Railgunner. Meanwhile, to ordinary people, she's just a high-visibility politician.

YEAH BUT $REPUBLICAN CONTENDER CAN TAKE HER! Really? Let's see who's currently in the lineup:

Rick Perry: Either he's burnishing his stock to improve his post-political career earnings, or one of his advisers thinks they've ironed out all those glitches that made him a laughingstock even to members of his own party. The only way he makes it past Super Tuesday is because he has a nice smile.

Scott Walker: The stunning thing about the Wisconsin Governor is that he's somehow managed to convince donors that winning over white people in a medium-size state as well as surviving a recall election makes him both unstoppable on the way to the White House, and secretly the most amazing potential president EVAR. I really hope he does run, watching the 'electability' bloom come off that rose will be fun to read about.

Jeb Bush: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. The base won't even touch him with a ten foot pole, and the general electorate, faced with two different versions of recycled crap, will always vote for the one they remember more fondly.

Chris Christie: Oooooh, a Republican even Democrats could vote for! Yeah, maybe 10 or 20 years ago. Anyway, forgetting the millions of problems that would hound a Christie run, I suspect his biggest will be he doesn't' have the stomach or the endurance to really go the distance. In fact, I think he's also smart enough to know not to run, which is sad, because he'd be the only one with any moderate cred, and non-crazy Republicans are already feeling pretty unloved these days.

Rand Paul: Never thought I'd see the day when a presidential candidate came along that would make Ron Paul look sane. I guess crazy is contagious.

Ted Cruz: Let's pretend for a minute that Ted isn't the poster child for everything that's wrong about the GOP these days, the US electorate will never overwhelmingly vote for a Canadian with a whiny voice.

Paul Ryan: Remember Sarah Palin? You don't? There you go.

Marco Rubio: Theoretically, he's almost perfect. And in a non-insane world, he would be the man to beat this cycle. And even then, a disciplined Clinton machine could still keep him 5 points away.

Someone wake me for 2024. maybe things will get interesting again.

okay since the idps box has been running the wasted bandwidth went down sharply. but a new issue has surfaced, devices have stopped working online especially at evening hours. not every device certain windows machines always boot and work fine, with a few small exceptions. outages that are small. my linux laptop is one of the machines that has trouble using the network. my neighbors box has trouble streaming at night time if it was used that day. yet my custom built windows 7 box never has an issue. my linux laptop is less likely to have issues if i power it off at night.

oh and the tablets are sporatic in working/not working, with no real rhyme or reason behind it. they also have issues with bluetooth keyboards. torrents of linux isos almost always download with no issues, but i may have to switch which pc i am using to get the functionality of downloading. my connection was slower, before but was always reliable. i have considered trying a different linux flavor of linux for the idps and i generally keep it up to date with apt. i have considered letting the neighbor use my dual channel wifi stick, to see if that helps but it is almost like she is on a rolling bandwidth plan or some machine is throtling her streaming at night time. yet i have unlimited consumer cable internet so the only tracking possibility is in the packets formed on her machine eg super cookies... i haven't tried removing the idps box because the whole point of it is to protect the network, by identifying the threats so i don't have to. sigh. and yes i realize i am running a mixed network of windows and linux machines, but plenty of other people do this and my attempts to get my parents off the microsoft teat were unsuccesful, and when i got back into computers i made the call to use a windows machine again.

i realize some of you guys think i should get every machine under my control off windows. linux works great for me, but there almost always is a problem that crops up which is why i tradiationally had a dual boot laptop when i mostly stopped using windows at home, but wasn't keeping up to date on modern hardware. blah keeping up to date is overrated some days i feel like selling off everything but the laptop and make it a dual boot... but i don't know if i would really like booting to windows to do blurays and booting linux for everything else. especially since that would leave me with 4 windows machines on the local network and i wouldn't be keeping up on my windows skills.

So I'm seeing a bunch of wailing and caterwauling from the Left about how the riots hurt minority owned businesses...

Hey liberals -- why do you care? According to you: they didn't build that, someone else made that happen.

A Douglas Adams Roundtable. Sorry about Nicholas Joll's terrible audio, but I believe you can make out what he's saying.
I have to say, Skype conferences are not great for podcasting.

The Wow! Signal podcast finally covers the August 1977 event it is named after, with guest Bob Dixon, who was instrumental in bringing the Ohio State Big Ear radio telescope to bear on SETI. We also learn about Argus, which if built full scale could potentially detect many such signals.

Told You So

And then I went further.

Now I'm going to tell you the rest:

The protests are nothing more than an attempt at a Reichstag fire, an effort to give Chairman Zero reason to declare martial law - for "social justice" (which of course, is not justice).

Any question of whether Chairman Zero was on the side of justice or mob rule was answered last night during his press conference. His body language and visible anger spoke volumes. He is on the side of the unruly howling mob (but, if you've been paying attention, you knew that already.)

Justice for Michael Brown?

He strongarm robbed a convenience store then assaulted a police officer. It's really a shame he wasn't able to survive his wounds, justice for him would have been 10 years in prison.

Anyone still lurking around this place? I see several people are still active here.... quite a huge pile of names I have not seen in a long long time.

okay so i built a diy intrusion detection box for my network, even though i now know the infection came from inside the network. suddenly my network went from 1.0-2.0 MB/s to 4.0-7.5MB/s. we are paying for 7.5MB/s but due to wireless limitations only one wireless box has 1300 mbit dual channel wireless n/ac. that one gets the full speed connection, the rest get what their laptop wifi does. except the ones using ethernet over powerline. someone told me that it was probably line noise because of the number of devices we have, which doesn't make sense to me, but ok. also the diy box has squid transparent proxy enabled, another reason could be multicast, the wifi router is a decent one but consumer grade was putting a real cpu (quad core) that big a difference in ability to multicast and cache data efficiently?

the cpu was the cheapest low watt cpu i could find, but the box still idles at 26 watts (inline power consumption measuring device) which i know is a lot for just an idps box. still it was cheap but is only as well configured as i know how to which isn't much knowledge at all, i tried about 7 different distros before picking one. it is amazing it made that big a difference in network performance though.

the only other reason i can think of for the bandwidth is a botnet is being blocked by the new firewall that the old router didn't fix/block.