The money does not flow into the politician's bank accounts. That's why it's not a bribe. They are not getting wealthy off of it; even the revolving door promises that they'll get a lucrative position after they leave Congress can't really explain it since that is often years or decades away.

The politicians are mostly wealthy to start with, and their income sources are fairly obvious. They make money the old fashioned way, being lawyers and executives with comical salaries, which they spin into even bigger investments. The politicians who start poor tend to remain poor. (Or rather, middle class. It's practically impossible for an actually poor person to be elected. But they're poor compared to the millionaire's club which makes up about half of Congress.)

I don't think I agree with your interpretation of this event. The MPAA discovered that even though they are sympathetic to Democratic lawmakers on most issues, they disagree on the pocketbook issue that makes the MPAA different from the sum of a bunch of Hollywood lefties. Those lefties are probably still supporting Democrats as individuals, but their collective action on financial matters runs to right-wing, pro-business, anti-consumer tactics.

So they're probably fighting against themselves, and donating out of both sides of their pockets. Which actually isn't uncommon for people whose social consciences say one thing but whose livelihoods say another.

They weren't buying the Democrats; they don't want to buy the Republicans. Republicans want to give the MPAA what they want; that's the way they actually believe the world works. So they're going to put money into getting Republicans elected over Democrats. Which is going to have effects on a lot of areas other than IP matters, and I think it's going to make them very unhappy.

Cool. Thanks.

When you talk about the "mindless voters", I'm not sure you're disagreeing with me at all. The voters have the power to fix it, or at least make a change in the individual, and that would create powerful incentives for the one in power to be different.

That is a view and a choice that I can respect, but why should you cheer the possibility that no one be able to choose any other way? That those who want more life be denied it?

Like a lot of the elderly people you mention, I think I too would choose death over prolonged suffering, helplessness, and a lack of ability to accomplish much more than running the bills up for my family. But I don't think I would choose death until that was all I had to look forward to, and I would be happy for any medical advancement that pushes that inevitable time back and that preserves health into those latter years.

And if the generation after me is able to live forever, I will not begrudge them that just because it was too late for me. (Okay, maybe I'll be a tad jealous.) However, I'd oppose any efforts to stop it with what's left of my life.

Isn't that counter to the point? I thought the whole idea of Lego was to be able to buy many instances of a few standardized, interchangeable components and assemble them into anything you want.

If you had a machine that could print custom Lego parts, wouldn't you just skip the Lego entirely and just 3D print whatever the final thing is supposed to be?

Sorry, I didn't play much with Legos and I'm not part of Lego culture. I infer from reading Slashdot that people really enjoy making unlikely things out of them, for the lulz, which is cool. So I apologize for being naive, but I don't understand why you'd want custom Lego parts.

I *do* insist that the problem is with the voters. If the voters were that irate about the politicians, they'd vote them out. Even if the new ones were just as bad, the voters would express their ire by voting them out, too.

Political donations don't buy votes. No politician is going to risk going to jail for taking bribes.

What political donations buy is the election of candidates who are sympathetic to you without having to be paid. They can't give money directly to the candidates anyway. The unlimited funds go to "uncoordinated" separate groups who spend it not on limousines and fact-finding tours to tropical islands but on campaign ads.

That's the point of connection. They're not buying the politicians. They're buying the voters. And they're buying them not with money, but with whatever tools of mental manipulation the ad-makers can dream up. They spend the money to blanket the airwaves.

All the voters have to do is to think, question whether the ads are telling the truth, and wonder why if they can form an objective picture from two biased, manipulated sets of mutually contradictory ads. That doesn't seem like a lot to ask, but the fact that the incumbents are repeatedly returned to office is a strong clue that they're not.

Maybe it would be futile and ineffective to keep turfing out politicians in favor of new ones. But it's not an experiment the voters have tried. If they did, maybe the politicians would change the way they operate; I don't know. I do know that your picture of how the process works is deeply flawed, and most voters seem equally uninterested in actually learning how it does work.

Your outrage at the politicians is too easy. They're doing what the voters tell them to do. If the voters are doing what the money is telling them to do, don't tell it to the politicians, or to me. Tell it to them. If you can figure out how to get them to listen, I'm all for it.

The discovery of pulsars rotating around each other by Hulse and Taylor was a major confirmation of general relativity because of the way they were radiating energy in gravitational waves. Is there any way to use black holes to confirm this even more? Would it be something we could help "point" a gravitational wave detector at?

(Sorry, IANAP, so I apologize if this is a stupid question.)

I'm just saying there ARE a lot of people who really want that. I'm not one of them; I actually kind of prefer things "spoiled". (Hell, if I'd waited until Lost had finished completely, I might have skipped it altogether and had a few dozen hours of my life back.)

I do think it's a real part of culture to discuss TV that's on Right Now. Not my thing, but I can see why a lot of other people are into it. Perhaps fewer than they think; maybe a lot of people would be happier ditching the cable and getting Netflix. I think the cable providers definitely fear that.

But I don't get the hate for DVRs; people time-shift things a few hours or a few days and can still get in on the conversation. Yeah, if you let it go for months you might as well just wait until it's on Netflix (though a LOT of Netflix material is still DVD-only, and I still maintain the mail service).

Thanks! I'd mod you "informative" but obviously... (It's actually giving me a mod drop-down box, but I know it wouldn't really work.)

Also fixed in Lion, according to the link, for those of us still using older Macs.

I thought the point of this contraption was that those were things you could do after the exposure (except perhaps for the "low light performance"). Am I off base?

They had the (dubious) advantage of having already been exposed to whatever was in the local wells. You get the same thing today: go to any third-world country and you'll get sick drinking what the locals drink. After that, your immune system will be primed to whatever they've got.

The worst offenders are the wells contaminated with human waste, which brings you whatever bugs everybody else has. A good well is deep enough to avoid that contamination, and you keep your latrines downstream of it. Still... every once in a while you'd get it really bad, especially in cities, where space for both wells and latrines are limited.

Plus the beer had calories; it was a way of preserving grains in a ready-to-use form. It was more "thin gruel" than "beverage".

It's cheaper because it's giving you second-run content. If you want to talk about the ending of last night's Mad Men or bet with your coworkers about who's going to win whatever reality TV is most popular, you need cable. News and sports are available for free OTA, but your selection is very limited.

Cable gets to charge a premium price, even with commercials, because the traffic will bear it to have that content right now.

If you're willing to wait to know how Lost turned out until a year after everybody else (like I am), Netflix is indeed a bargain compared to cable. Its back catalog makes it even more valuable, though for me at least it didn't take all that long to see everything I wanted to see. Plus the lack of commercials. But if you're like a lot of people, access to current content is worth paying the price.