Ralph Ellison's book is "Invisible Man". It's hard to take seriously the literary lamentations of someone who biffs something as basic as the titles of the books being lamented.

"You can have my DNA when you suck it out of my dick."

Schneier will _not_ be testifying. Sorry, nerdlingers.

We were notified last week that Those Who Run The Machine are throwing in the towel on Panasas and are securing a Lustre-based farm for Cielo.

If the Cray architecture selected for Blue Waters is akin to that of Cielo then UIUC is going to rue -- RUE! -- the day they got in bed with these Cray con-men. The uptime and filesystem stability of Cielo is an absolute dog (as in, at least 2 FS rebuilds per week with data loss accompanying 2 in 5).

Well, that's just bullshit. Go play your children's games somewhere else. The Left has been howling with rage at Obama's civil liberties failures: continuation of Gitmo, expansion of the TSA, refusal to pursue prosecution of Bush torturers, etc.

The idea that a man's very name can be placed under legal protections this sweeping is utterly absurd and I think that's what has so many people in a tizzy.

I have no problem with laws allowing the Tolkien estate to prevent someone from publishing "Gutter Sluts by JRR Tolkien" and using the 4-letter symbol on the cover. Being able to deny someone the privilege of even USING the name in another context? That's wack, yo.

For what it's worth, when I clicked "Submit" the site was reporting exactly zero comments on the article. 20 minutes after, it was still reporting exactly zero comments. All I can figure is the site is suffering from the Self Effect.

The dogma of the Immaculate Conception has nothing to do with the Virgin Birth of Christ. The Immaculate Conception was the conception of Mary without the taint of Original Sin.

We have a tendency to anthropomorphize our gadgets, especially gadgets that move around and do stuff. How many times have we read about "the plucky rover" or "the rover that wouldn't quit" or "the rover that slept with my now-ex-girlfriend, the whore" ?

They're machines. They were designed to do a job for a specific period of time with the expectation that we'd continue to use them until they finally broke down. Spirit has pretty much broken down. It's been a great run and we've gotten a shit-ton of data from it, but it's time to hit the Off switch and release the staff to other projects ... like prepping for the next rover mission.

Came here for a Felice Landry reference. Leaving satisfied.

It sure is. Or something.

Apparently someone forgot to tell NASA that they're a government agency and not some kind of mass-media Nielsen-dependent agency that relies on "scoops" and "special announcements". When they find something, they should announce it immediately. Suppose they'd found these tapes on July 21...would they have thought it appropriate to sit on them until July 20, 2019, just to have something special to go with the 50th anniversary?