I have far from the lowest /. ID, even in this article's comments, but I'm pretty early. Have loved the site since I first stumbled upon it way back when.

My little private company, NiEstu, has the distinction of being one of the first few advertisers to submit banner ads to Slashdot after the (very controversial at the time) decision was made to start posting them. Due to a screwup in the rotation software, my ads got way more impressions than I'd paid for. After a week or so of that, Rob sent me an angry email pointing it out and demanding that I pay for what I had (mistakenly) received. I wrote back, and as I recall I asked him to stop hatin', and to tell me how much extra he though I owed, so we could talk specifics. We went back and forth a couple times like that; after a while he said, ahh screwit, our ad system is all hosed, just forget about it. I always thought that was mighty big of him, and boded well for his future.

So congratulations on your successes, Rob, and may you have many more in the future!

Astronomer Mike Brown is tweeting his observations of the fire (from the "9th floor of Caltech Lib w/AC and comfy chair") on a very regular basis during daytime hours, in case anyone wants an eyewitness account from fairly close by. Just follow @plutokiller for his updates.

I'm a huge fan of Drs. Tyson and Kaku, as mentioned elsewhere. I'd suggest looking at some of the newer popularizers for your own younglings. People like Richard Wiseman, Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait, the colorful crew at Deep Sea News, and probably any number of other blogs linked from the above.

Get the little nibblers interested from the start! We can use all the scientists (or at least science-literate) that we can get.

That's all well and good. But the mplayer docs tell you how to make it work. The xine docs don't. I've tried six ways from Sunday (including the mysterious and undocumented "subtitles.closedcaption.enabled" option) and still cannot see CC in xine. If you find somewhere in the mplayer comments how to make them actually work under xine, please do tell me! :)

Apparently VLC 1.0 supports them now, and since I heard about it only today, I was unaware of that support.

Xine may support them, but it's not mentioned in the docs at all. I did find that line in the xine config file, and changed it to "1", but that seemed to have no effect. None of the subtitle streams I select have the CC data on them. So if you know how to make it work, please tell me!

So what you're telling me is, this latest version of VLC now supports CC? Cool, once it shows up in Debian, I'll give it a try.

Thanks for the info!

I like VLC, I really do. For that matter, I like xine too. But neither one, as far as I can tell, can do one thing that mplayer does: Display closed captioning. No, that's not DVD subtitles. It's purely a US American thing, so is routinely ignored, or at least misunderstood, by the international communities that maintain these products.

I watched a thread on a VLC (or was it xine?) discussion forum where somebody asked about closed captioning support. After about twelve messages, they finally determined that no, it really wasn't the same as subtitles (some participants never were convinced of that fact), but was "some American thing", at which point amidst a lot of tongue clucking and regrets, the thread fizzled out.

So until a media player can display closed captions, I'm not really able to use it. But nice try, guys, and keep up the good work.

(Yes, I am sure I could dive into the mplayer code, locate the closed-captioning bits, extract them, and submit them to both VLC and xine as patches. I'll get right on that, mmm-hmmm!)

I can think of no better time to quote J. Michael Straczynski, using the voice of Commander Jeffrey Sinclair, talking about why humans go to space:

I can't improve on that.

That's right up there next to the question "Why spend any money on space at all when we have so many problems that need solving right here on Earth?" I can't buy into either viewpoint. Manned spaceflight has its place, and I'll fight any effort to terminate it.

Now this I can totally get behind. Goals are good, and a lack of them, or more accurately a continuous redefining of them, has crippled the US space program for decades.

Sounds like your answers would be "No" and "Profit". The whole "pay-off" bit is a club that has been used to beat the space program repeatedly over the years. "What's in it for me? What's the return on my investment?" As with other forms of research and exploration, it's nearly always impossible to give firm answers to these questions. But experience has shown that the real answer usually is, "Far beyond expectations."

Ad astra per aspera!

That would have been my first guess, given that there's a very vocal cadre who look for every opportunity to quash manned spaceflight, but TFA doesn't seem slanted in that direction. Could just be lip service, but I'm hoping it is what it says it is: A study to re-examine what we want to do, cross-index that with what we think we can do, and use that to create some concrete plans.

Then again, if the Obama administration turns NASA into the US Space Force, civil space pursuits at the national level may dry up entirely, leaving only military and private space efforts. Not sure I like the sound of that.

Well, I guess I can't argue with that. But it's sorta like saying that human beings are the human gene's way of making more genes. Yes, demand "creates" jobs, in the sense that more demand leads to more jobs, but I don't think that's what the stimulus packages are thinking of.

Good point. I was thinking of Roosevelt, but you're right, those other "stimulus" programs had an enormous beneficial effect. And from everything BHO has said, that's the model he's hoping to use, too.

I cannot agree more. In the past, how the government did things usually left something to be desired. Let's hope that's about to change.

From your lips ...

This sounds a lot like "trickle-down economics". That is, give rich people money and they'll build factories and stores which will create new jobs. Fact is, most taxpayers don't create jobs, they just have them. Or not, in increasing numbers.

I do agree that shoveling taxpayer money directly into the economy hasn't worked very well in the past, not since the 1930s at least, and we have little reason to think it will work now. So what do you suggest we do? Just let things work themselves out? Let the Invisible Hand of the Market make everything better?

Can I ask, do you have a job right now? I don't. It got sent to Bangalore. I suspect our answers to the above questions would be quite different.

On a side note, I hope the poor bastard in India who got my job isn't hating it as much as I did near the end. :)

Bias alert: Huge fan of Obama's promises. Skeptical about his ability to implement them through the filter of the ponderous leviathan that is the US government.

As a US programmer whose job was recently sent overseas, I'd love to have some new opportunities present themselves. But years of evidence make me worry that a government job would be like government cheese: not of the highest quality.

Nevertheless, I remain optimistic! (You may all now line up to call me a fool.)