That's one advantage of mostly cooperative board games where there might be a hidden "traitor" among the players who wins if the group loses (e.g. Shadows Over Camelot, Battlestar Galactica). With that possibility on the table, players can't just trust somebody else to make decisions and have to pay attention to what everyone else is doing (usually in these games, exposing the traitor has some reward, at least insofar as it curtails his ability to continue undermining the group).

"Epson used to make printers that used pigment based inks....."

Used to?

http://www.epson.com/cgi-bin/S...

For the home market, they might not use their new UltraChrome HDR inks, but for the semi-pro and pro markets, they do. We have a 4900 here in the lab; amazing is a fair word to describe the output.

That's a nice idea, but the majority has been brainwashed into believing that any vote that's not D or R is "wasted". Ridiculous, but that's what happened.

Sadly, even the 3rd parties don't give some of us much to work with. I generally like Libertarian ideals, but the reality is that if they got everything they want we would end up with a government by and for the corporations. Which is basically what we have now, other than that they wouldn't bother to try to hide it. Greens would do basically the same, but only for corporations that support environmental causes. Those are the ones with the most support. Constitution party might be good, but are relatively unknown.

The first thing we need is term limits across the board. All the way down to local government.

Then we need to do away with the ridiculous idea that corporations have rights other than those we specifically give them. Corporate personhood needs to be abolished.

Asset forfeiture needs to be abolished as well. I don't mind the idea that you can seize property, but it needs to be in the punishment phase of a trial, not before someone is charged with a crime. And any proceeds from such seizures must not be directly available to enforcement agencies. That's an obvious conflict of interest and they were insane to allow it in the first place.

So, any parties that support such notions? The Pirate party sounds closest.. Not sure that's a good thing.. :)

Obviously they need access to the PUBLIC keys in order to encrypt messages to the designated recipient. The whole point of public-key cryptography is that revealing the public key doesn't compromise security.

"secret 3G/4G reception inside of the CPU"

Ruh roh! I'd better put my CPU in the middle of a metal box or something....

"You're a complete fucking idiot if you think your well regulated militia (which you ignore anyway) armed with assault weapons is any match for the government's military-spec hardware."

Funny.
The Russians thought the same thing about Simo Hayha: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

Never underestimate the power of one man defending what he believes in.

" this is just about money and control."

It always was.

But Electrolytes are what plants crave, not humans!

" Letting them contract the disease and then tell them why they can't be cured of it, and may die, might have a much larger impact. Sucks that it has to put the rest of us at risk first though."

This.

I've presented on vaccination (well, it was the Pharma industry in general, but vaccines are certainly part of that) when I had anti-vaccination folks in the group. Logic is out. Reason is out. I've had this one tossed at me: "You don't really think they took all of the mercury out of the vaccines, do you? They're just lying about it still being there". Or this gem: "Vaccination never worked. The diseases died out due to better hygiene and medicine". Scientific fact is in trouble when faced with "truth" like that.

So, sadly, it's going to take the undoing of the most significant public health victory in history to re-do what we knew 50 years ago. Legislation, insurance losses, fines...all good ideas. They don't do a damn thing in the face of "Well, I have a friend......"

As someone said, it's not exactly new. LAL testing has been boilerplate standard for better than 20 years now.

From a lab tech's point of view, LAL testing is brilliant. Mix 10mL of some sample that's supposedly "clean" into a premade LAL test kit. Snap the lid shut. Shake. Incubate for a day. If it changes color, it's positive for endotoxins. If it stays clear, it's negative. Simple as that. And being that the sensitivity is picograms/mL, it's great. Knowing the backstory is neat, too, from the tech's view. Which I am.

"If you walk into a Best Buy or any other retail store and head over to the TV section, what immediately hits you is the brightness of most of the LCD sets and the comparatively subdued brightness coming from any (remaining) plasma sets still on the floor. In the unscientific forced side-by-side comparison environment of a brightly lit store, the LCD panels just show better."

This is why.

I just (as in: 3 weeks ago) brought home a Panasonic TCP55VT60 plasma. I knew which model I was purcasing long before I walked into the store, but for giggles (and yes, this could be classified as me being a prick, but it was interesting), I walked into the Best Buy, was accosted by a salesman, and said simply that I was interested in a 55" TV that had terrific color rendition. He showed me every TV they had in 55" EXCEPT the plasma. When I asked about the TV we skipped over, he said (I roughly quote) "Nah, that's a Plasma. They are heavy, run hot, and the screens burn in after a few years, and they're just not as bright or as good." When asked why they have one, the answer: "Well, some people still like them, but everyone else has moved on", implying I'd be an idiot for even looking at it.

I realize that was just one salesman at one store, but it's that exact mindset that killed it. It's not price competitive, they are hot, and they do show like crap in the store. The 65VT60 they had in the store was set in Normal mode, and I noticed that more than a few of the LCD's were set to either Vivid or Showroom modes, really blasting the color out. Nevermind that the VT50's and 60's (and the ZT's, which are even a little better) are beating the very best of the Pioneer Kuro sets, long regarded as *the* gold standard in TV's, and getting them to display to 90% of their potential is a single setting away, no professional calibration or screwing around needed.

It's a unfortunate time for the few of us who give a shit about colour accuracy and black levels. I hope the OLED's are able to cover the gap pretty soon.

Oh, and I told Best Buy to fuck itself and bought the TV from a local chain for less, and with a salesman who wasn't a complete dipshit. And, as a completely unsolicited review, if you're considering one....yes, they are that good. In a brightly lit room, they're ok. In a dark room, they're jaw-dropping good.

"Or you could use the abortion which is XP64, which has shit driver support and compatibility issues."

XP64 wasn't quite as bad as an abortion. You wanna talk about abortive messes? Say hello to Windows ME. Nah, XP x64 was.....misunderstood.

It really was Server 2003 rebadged without the server bits. So driver support was easy....pull the drivers for Server 2003, and everything just worked. Sure, it would bitch that the driver wasn't signed right, but let it complain. I had half a dozen systems in my care that were XPx64....had driver trouble with exactly one of them, and even that took about an hour of screwing around before it worked.

It was a great OS, in a lot of ways. All the squishy goodness we get from an x64 system, the old familiar feeling of XP, and none of the horseshit that was Vista.

"Notably, the fact that E-ZPasses will be used as a tracking device outside of toll payment, is not disclosed anywhere that I could see in the terms and conditions. "

In NJ, buried in the fine print, is a line that reads something like "other information may be obtained by the the Consortium at their discretion", which easily translates to: "We're going to use this to monitor traffic flow, and by doing that, we're monitoring you".

If you're driving on the Parkway (a New Jersey toll highway), there are plenty of places where you can see EZPass pickups buried in the road surface that are nowhere near the toll sites.

I visited that Park. A lot Grew up about 45 minutes away from there. Had friends who "lifeguarded" there.

A little bit of background for everyone: the park was located in Vernon, New Jersey (USA), built into the side of a small mountain, hence it's successor's name being Mountain Creek. It was a combination water park / Ski resort, depending on the time of the year.

Perhaps one of the best ways to think about this place is to imagine your favourite water park, saying to yourself "Gee, that ride is great, but I wish I could do...blah...which is prohibited by the rules and the lifeguards would throw me out.". Now imagine that same situation, except that there was no getting thrown out and no one cared about the rules. It was the inmates running the asylum a lot of times. Sure, it made it a metric ton of fun, but the injuries were often severe. Broken legs, dislocated everything, electrocutions....the ambulance was in very frequent use in that place. Some of it was the ride design, as the safeguards and engineering just weren't there. The rest....well, for insance, they had a "Cliff Dive". It was just that....a rocky outcropping about 35' above the main pool. They had weight restrictions, height restrictions, warnings about this and that....and it was all roundly ignored. The lifeguards were supposed to keep the landing area clear, but sometimes they screwed up and damn near had one person landing on another. Oh, and they warned you not to straight dive in, as you could theoretically hit the bottom. Theory, my ass. You could do it pretty easily. As I said....the engineering wasn't. They ran that park cheap, charged a decent amount for admission, and smiled all the way to the bank.

But, as bad as it was, there were hundreds of thousands of folks who came though there with little more than a smile and some sunburn. For a grabasstic teenager, it was a Paradise.