In certain circumstances I might be *more* likely to bite particular people if they had garlic around their neck, but then I'm not a Democrat.

Now, Ron. Don't go making me wish I'd voted for you.

Oh, wait... Actually yes, please do!

Especially "Happiness is a 10 gauge shotgun." Though I guess I'd amend it to "Happiness is a double-barreled 10 gauge shotgun." I mean, come on. In case of liberal zombie attack, you're gonna need that second shot.

It's amazing how much fun can be had just by turning pithy arguments inside-out. :-)

Note that I'm not against copyright, but against the abuse of copyright. That is, i think Lessig has it right.

Copyright law was not intended as a shield for those who censor, irrespective of the motive.

Fair use! Fair use!

[runs away to find a pro bono lawyer]

PS: Actually I don't really much care one way or the other about Beatles or their fans, it was just funny. Plus I could combine karma whoring and tuesday trolling in one pithy post. I feel dirty if it helps.

This appears to be a re-hash of Google Wave, which the big G already abandoned.

But their fans are thick and ordinary.

I love that magazine! It's like Slashdot, only with less fair use!

So we just need to file a bug report...

But you do apply the razor when evaluating whether or not someone is actively concealing data.

There were hundreds of thousands of digital cameras in range of this event, and there's not one image from another angle that clearly shows a rocket launch instead of an aircraft contrail which has been posted to flickr. Is it simpler to think that all such images have been suppressed, or that there simply never were any?

Regarding the motion, did you notice the rapid acceleration? The staging events? The motor burnout after a couple minutes?

No?

Well good, because they weren't there. These are all characteristics of big solid boosters. A shuttle SRB burns for around two minutes with no staging; a Trident for about 170 seconds, with two staging events. Any solid rocket will accelerate rapidly; it has more-or-less constant thrust while the vehicle mass drops quickly as its fuel is expended as exhaust.

The cameraman said he tracked this object for ten minutes. There is no solid booster anyone knows about that is big enough and slow enough to have been visible to him for that long.

Correct.

For example, a Trident II D5 SLBM is a large solid-fuel rocket. It has three stages; the first and second last 65 seconds each, the third lasts 40 seconds. The Shuttle SRB - one of the largest ever solid motors - burns out in about two minutes.

There's no staging events visible in the plume, so we'd be talking about a solid rocket that burns five times as long as the largest known, yet moves so slowly as to be visible the whole time, and indeed appears to move at a pretty constant velocity instead of accelerating. (At constant thrust a solid rocket should accelerate rapidly as its fuel mass is expended.)

I'll grant it sure LOOKS like a solid rocket. But it ain't.

"The Navy did not act like the source of the missile was unknown to them."

Actually.... no. The dog did bark a bit.

There's a pretty robust and well-known set of small commercial and high-energy hobby rocketry groups. If a launch unknown to the military was suspected to have occured, one would expect the military to start asking around these groups to find out if they (or anyone they knew) had launched such a thing.

I lurk a mailing list in which these people* chat with each other candidly. I have it from multiple primary sources on that list that the military was making such inquiries. The US military seems sure enough that they didn't launch anything that they're willing to ask questions.

But given the other evidence at hand, I think this signifies due dilligence rather than evidence that a launch actually occured.

[*: And I'm talking the safety officer from XCOR, team leaders and members for all of the Lunar Lander Challenge winners, and other notable personas all writing under their real names.]