[Non right-wing makey-shitty-uppy citation needed]

I wonder what the Koch brothers are planning, will they still fund the Tea Party in 2 years?

Perhaps, but not nearly as much. It has accomplished its goal, which was to elect Republicans and cow any moderates into full capitulation.

I see your 1970s and raise you the 1950s. I've known a professor or two with boxes of Hollerith cards containing their graduate-school era FORTRAN code.

Also, you wouldn't even have to type anything in, assuming you could find a reader or could afford a student to scan them in and write an imaging code to interpret it. Because, hey, what's more useful than Version 1.0 of the code on which you made your bones?

When I was in graduate school one of my tasks was to read old astronomical CCD images that were written on magnetic tape (and there were a lot of them, since my advisor had been testing CCDs for the Hubble). So for a couple of months I sat in a small workroom with the department's only working Kennedy drive reading tapes.

Because of age and prior use, many of the tapes were shedding oxide, making the drive rock back and forth over many segments in an attempt to retrieve the blocks thereon. After every few tapes I had to wipe the oxide from the read heads. Then, just to make the process a little more tedious, the data itself had to be byte-swapped. As a reward for all of that, I found one image to use in my dissertation.

The data was written to CD-ROM in the late 90s, so I expect there's someone right now trying to figure out how to read the data off of the decade-old, decaying archive. If they're lucky, they'll find the backup DATs in the filing cabinet and the last working drive in the department.

Oil gets subsidized to a certain degree.

Less so than corn? So, when's the last time we invaded a country to protect the flow of ethanol?

Just being able to pronounce the word "nuclear" properly instead of like a fucking inbred is an improvement over the last guy.

Who, I might add, also did not show us his grades.

Weigel's a liberal? Don't tell REASON magazine that, or the person overseeing Republican registration in the District of Columbia.

Have you ever seen a conservative on Olbermann? Not much balance there.

Sure — Dave Weigel. Unless you meant "conservative"-as-in-partisan-Republican, in which case, not regularly.

Have you ever watched Maddow? Nothing but shill.

She used to have Pat Buchanan on there, and and had several interesting discussions with him. Then he went completely batshit crazy (even for him) during the '08 elections and one of them decided they were no longer worth it.

FTFA:

I have put up $20,000 of my own money to help bail Mr. Assange out of jail. [emphasis to aid jackasses who can't fucking read]

But hey, look at me quoting what a person actually says he did instead of trusting the headline written by a Slashdot editor.

Increased water vapor capacity in a warmer atmosphere, coupled with changes in climate patterns due to the increase of solar energy retention, resulting in increases in precipitation?

Well, it's no more bullshit-laden than your question is.

Keanu Reeves is dead?!?!?

Whoa.

Wrong. The canonical number used in galaxy modelling is 20-to-1. That number is inferred from the rotation curves of spiral galaxies, not ellipticals, but that's the ballpark. And then there' this:

"But there’s still plenty of dark matter, too, according to van Dokkum. In fact, the new stars probably won’t change the accounting of dark matter very much."

But hey, look at me being lazy and just quoting the article you cited.

Yes, but the estimates give a ratio of dark-to-visible matter of 20 to 1 or so. Here they only triple the number of stars, and they are all on the low mass end of the scale, resulting in only a minor change in that ratio.

I, for one, would take that over the system of mouse-inspired zombified copyrights we have now.

What were Sonny Bono's last words?
Deh-DAH, deh-DAH
Deh-DAH, deh-DAH

I got yew, babe
Deh-DAH, deh-DAH
Deh-DAH, deh-DAH

I got yew, babe


I.....GOT......YEW......BAAAAAABE.

Lucky for me Scientologists don't believe in Hell.