It was way, way, way over the line. Oh, you mean the sexualzation? I meant the fact they cast Billy Piper at all.

Yeah and I spent a few weeks working in a town on the border. Its not all Canadians, nor is it actually said a-boot (that was just used to lampoon it, but somehow caught on in pop culture), its more like a-boat, and depending on accent is anywhere between close and very close to way about is pronounced in the States.

It turned out what happened was a $16 breakfast, that among other things included muffins, got recorded as muffins.

http://www.startribune.com/nation/132803818.html

Good thing the public threw a shitfit over that.

As good as steam is, like any other distribution platform it asks for a lot from the developer. In this case, too much for notch.

http://notch.tumblr.com/post/9550850116/why-no-steam-notch

Don't be tempted to create false equivalence in effort to "balance" sides of political matters. Occupy wallstreet has been camping out for many weeks and are now subject to police force. The tea party rallies were permitted, short, and not subject to police force and shared most properties of any other plolitical rally. Most rallies fly under the slashdot radar.

Failblog might want to too, I read it on cracked before then, not to mention hearing various incarnations of it for years.

The Emergency Alert System isn't a security system, it's a System to Alert citizens about Emergencies.

(Bad analogy) Its purpose isn't to reinforce water levees, it is to tell you when they're breached so you know to get the fuck out of town.

The broadcaster doesn't lose technical control over their systems, they are obligated by the FCC to use their systems to relay alerts.

The hardware for the EAS is owned and operated by the broadcaster themselves. In some places, individual broadcasters failed to receive the alert at all due to a failure upstream. In that case failure to transmit it is not on them, but if the upstream did transmit, responsibility is handed to the broadcaster. When I worked at a radio station, basically we had two different upstream radio frequencies to monitor, if there was an alert on either of them that met the criteria for us to retransmit, it was our responsibility for doing so.

Huh, interesting to hear, I was just operating off of assumptions made from observations in market I operated in once upon a time. We observed plenty of other stations not following EAS procedures, heard verbal accounts from consultant engineers we brought in every now and then, and my own shock at how lax some of the EAS requirements were when reading FCC rules. I guess it just worked out that nobody from that area manged to get on the wrong side of the FCC.

Not really.

This test probably just focuses on FEMAs ability to get the message to the PEP (Primary Entry Points) for the EAS network, not the end broadcaster to properly transmit, or even receive from the PEP (thats what weekly tests are for). And once the message gets to the PEP, its going to look an awful lot like every other EAS test anyway.

Its not like its TV stations are going to pop up messages saying "ALERT! EMERGENCY! OH MY GOD! EVERYTHINGS OVER!" with no additional information. Its going to be like the EAS test that happens every single week. Not overriding video is IIRC tolerable under the FCC requirements. The audio message will be there like always.

Its not broken, its just that some people are really, really dumb.

Not only will the actual audio of the alert be there saying that its just a test, there should be no panic at the presence of an alert if it were real. Every broadcast station here is required to activate the alert system for a test once a week and its used for real whenever there is severe weather.

There doesn't need to be a graphic "this is just a test" message, the emergency alerts in our country are audio-based with a bit of textual metadata (which is really only necessary for the broadcaster). The audio recording will say its a test. Some TV stations just have their audio signal overridden and continue displaying program video. Yes, its because they're too cheap for a character generator, but its not really a failure of the system to deliver a message. Perhaps a failure of the FCC's requirements and they should mandate video to be overridden too, but the message is still delivered fine.

No. That is not the story; those are paranoid delusions. Each broadcast station operates their EAS hardware. It can be overridden in many ways, from changing the control setting from "automatically forward messages" to "wait for my cue before forwarding" all the way to removing the electric relay that allows the encoder to inject between the program signal and transmitter.

If we're ever in enough trouble where EAS is used to "take over a media outlet", there will be enough problems going on that no broadcaster will give two shits about the FCC ramifications of not forwarding EAS messages (which are currently pretty weak anyway and not enforced anyway).

Know of any good gps apps for that (terrain-oriented maps)?

Thats where the attack ads come in. You scare the people who would sit at home because they're not pleased with any candidate, into going to the poll to vote for "not the other guy".

Maybe Righthaven just wanted a lower DiBiase number?