The flying car that everyone was promised (or for many of us here.. that their parents were promised) won't be safe to use unless the following happen:

1.) Anti-gravity technology in a compact scale can be mass produced. (good luck with that one)

2.) It would need an auto-navigation with backups systems for the backup systems (you don't want every tom,dick and harry flying cars above your head just because they can pass a vision test)

3.) Might as well thow in shield technology... might just end up like a bumper car madness in the cities.

4.) Ejection seats with winggliding parachutes are provided (auto deployed by your nanobots in your body if ejected.)

>> ^BoneyD:
What are you talking about? The link describes how clean up began fairly soon after the collapse, where they used thermite to cut the remaining columns. It could very well have been all over the place ...
... What I think is happening with conspiracy theorists is that they can't accept that the "simple people" of the Middle East are as smart and as resourceful as any westerner. It is hubris to assume that they are lesser people to be pittied and unable to comprehend what the West has been doing to them. America is a fantastic nation and has accomplished some truly amazing things in its history, but it really has to get this superiority chip off its shoulder and learn a little humility.


I do not see the people of the Middle East as "simple", and I resent your implication that I would be so ignorant.
I am also not American, so please stop throwing generalisations and hypothetical accusations at me.

Please look at the facts presented in the video, rather than basing your argument on opinions you have formed prior to watching it.


I can't speak for anyone else but I am not trying to assign blame to anyone here, neither to the American government nor to Al-Qaeda.

What I am saying is that planes striking the towers the way they did being the cause of the towers falling in such a clean and compact manner is highly unlikely, if not impossible.

Thermate was found to be throughout the dust from the collapse, covering several blocks, including in rooms four stories up. This is not localised thermate residue from the clean up of the site, there would be no need to cut any steel that far away.

The idea that two towers can fall cleanly into their own footprint from two plane strikes, and a third that was not struck also fall in the same manner, is incredible.
When combined with the information that Thermate, a material used in controlled demolition of buildings with steel structures, has been found all over a wide area in and around the site then the idea that only the planes caused the collapse seems ridiculous.

I would be just as happy if the government said that they agreed the terrorists appear to have used more than just the planes to bring down the towers and that they were going to commence an investigation of how they could have got the thermate and other explosives onto the site.

When you run around without precautions,
you'll get diseases, need abortions.
Up till now, no vaccination
to give you back your reputation.

And 'cranial abattoir' (from FFF on Compact Disc) is enough on it's own to warrant a sift. If I couldn't use Ween's boognish as my avatar, I'd use PiL's pill symbol for sure.

Sorry I was late.

Oh btw.. speaking of history... The Federal Reserve finally re-activated their Online US Currency Exhibit after pulling it "temporary offline" for a year however, they have severely reduced the size of all the dollar bill images so that you can no longer read in detail what is on the bills anymore.

I assume that the fat cat bankers didn't like people being able to easily see what it really meant to be on the gold standard. The reason I say this is that it was a beautiful site with highly detailed images showing the great artwork and text on the bills. The most profound part of it was being able to see the writings on a silver certificate dollar. Now you cannot read this information because to enlarge it would pixellate the image and look all blurry since they thumbnailed all the images without links to the full size image now.

I would expect some of you to think that they might have done this to save on space. I reject this notion because .jpg images are extremely compact. Only if they were bitmap images would size be an issue.
Just look at this.. this size is rediculous:
http://www.frbsf.org/currency/industrial/legal/thumbs/533fr.jpg

It's still a good site but you won't be able to read the currency images well unless you're looking at some of the old Colonial notes.

Currency Index:
http://www.frbsf.org/currency/bills.html

"Future Currency" (they don't give much detail about this actually...)
http://www.frbsf.org/currency/world/future/index.html

This is a little off-topic of this thread so I'll set up a new blog on this soon.

"Last night at approximately 7:30pm I was arrested as part of a mass arrest at 15th & Court and charged with disrupting a permitted assembly and blocking public streets. A third charge - throwing rocks and missiles - was listed on my pre-printed ticket, but then crossed out.

At the time I was not protesting. I was acting as an observer for the People's Law Project, and was dressed in a button shirt and a neon-green baseball cap stating that I was acting as a representative of the National Lawyers Guild. I followed the protestors out of Civic Center Park, but remained on the sidewalk until pushed by riot police into the street. At no time during the abortive march did any legal observer, or any marcher that I have spoken to, observe any destruction of property, any thrown objects, or ANY ORDER TO DISPERSE BY THE POLICE.

At some point during my visit to Gitmo on the Platte, the compact flash card I had been carrying that contained photographic documentation of the protest disappeared. This included pictures of the badges of some of the officers involved, images of a marcher OBEYING police orders being shot with pepper spray point-blank in the eyes while trying to retreat (when I was hauled away he was sitting with a street medic, and I could hear him sobbing again and again, "I can't see..."), and photographs of a second protestor who was shot three times by what appeared to be three separate officers with bean-bag guns while KNEELING, motionless, 15 FEET AWAY, hands outstretched as if in prayer, and wearing nothing but a pair of POCKETLESS shorts."

-Nathan Acks' experience. Read full story here.

It's a neat idea but it doesn't quite seem feasible to me. There are some big issues-
It's computationally and thus $$$ expensive to render all of that stuff.
It's expensive to pay for all the bandwidth, especially if you want it to be high-definition. At best a player will have to live with low-res graphics and compression artifacts.
And the biggest show-stopper is the latency. You can't have any form of client side prediction which hides latency in online games. Your latency is increased by having to go through a video compression step. Best case I imagine 1 second of latency and that just isn't fun to play with.

Online games just don't seem like a good application for thin-clients. It's so much faster and cheaper to send a compact description of the world state instead of sending an entire visualization. Mobile phones could be an exception, since they are low-res and have limited graphics acceleration, but they also have limited and expensive network bandwidth.

Yeah, I agree with Rotty. I'm not suggesting getting rid of it.. just make it bigger:

A VS members page would cool. Call it "Community" or something.

-- You could have the full ranking of the site on it plus other stats like most votes this week, fastest rising member of the month, highest rated comments, expanded donors list, users online etc...


You should tighten up the real estate on the front page. The front page should be ALL about attracting visitors and being user friendly to the light users of the site. Think FUN!

--Trim up the front page. I know the donor part is important, but one list is enough plus the donate button, and more could be put on the "community" page :😉:
--Only the Top Users of the Week should be on the front and the Top 15 well... would be on the "community" page along with everyone else.


--It would be nice to move things around on the side to fit how we use it.. drag and drop sort of thing
OR
--Instead of scrolling down down down to see everything on the side, you could have it wrap up neat and compact under videos.

Oh and HUGE YES on being able to add comments in a drop down w/o having to open a new window. Quicker commenting would be more fun.

--Along with the quicker commenting, a jump arrow to the bottom and top of the page would be very handy. We check on these long threads all the time and we scroooolll

>> ^xgabex:
Am I the only one who uses a good number of the functions on my cell phone? Amongst other things, it serves as a quick and dirty camera, mp3 player (it's one of those Walkman-branded Sony Ericsson ones, so that's kind of its purpose, but I digress), alarm, calendar, I use text messages as well as the occasional picture message, and so on.


You've probably named the most commonly used aspects of mobile phones, but there are just so many more that are crammed on nowadays that I would doubt 5% of consumers use.

I find the issue is, people inevitably assume that a multi-faceted electronics device is as good as the individual components bought seperately, which is really just not the case. Camera on phones are far better nowadays, mostly due to the fall in price of digital cameras, but when they initially appeared they were truly absymal. Nowadays you see every Nokia/Motorola/S-E and their dog pushing their integrated digital audio players, but compared to dedicated units they again sound pretty deplorable. I mean, try using anything other than earbuds with them, or slightly less efficient higher ohm rated headphones, they'll just sound crippled.

Not to mention much of the time they'll charge you more for all the features combined as opposed to buying seperately, mostly due to the looks premium. I mean you could probably argue that some would prefer a compact unit, but when the additionally functionality crammed on is sub-standard, that's a bit rich.

Then again, mobile phones are after all fashion accessories anyway, much of what I say above is pretty negligence but I just hate to see this insidious up-selling. It's kind of like department stores pedalling off 2,000/3,000 dollar desktop PCs to consumers for word processing and basic internet/email use. Hell, I'm sure I could easily track down new individual components and a monitor that would perfectly capable for that job at $500 or less.

Anyway /rant off.

Agreed.

Disney was a nutjob anti-semite. His corporation is postumously responsible for the further eroding of children's creativity.

Edison, while quite talented, was brutally protective to his own interests to the point when you consider the contributions of Tesla, you realize that Edison's politically powerful attempts to keep better technology away from production solely for the agrandizement of his own name bring into question whether we should be worshipping him. Ironically, many of Tesla's inventions are now slowly taking over where Edison left off... the compact flourecent light for example, which will hopefully put to pasture edison's more expensive, and less environmentally favorable model..

snoozedoctor - you've got my point exactly. I was even about to make a comment about going to a job interview naked.

I don't want to censor any comments anywhere on the site (except for spam), and I don't think we have anything to be ashamed of (for the most part). But, the featured comment is a first impression for a lot of passers-by. It's not that I think some of the comments there are inappropriate in any way, rather that I want to offer potential new users a more complete picture, a context in which they can see why this place is better. I don't think the current implementation does that very well at all.

I agree that implementing a featured thread box would be harder. The design I have in mind is probably way too much work. I imagined a compact scrollable (maybe auto-scrolling) box with the entire thread in it. I'd also like to see it line up with the main column, but maybe that's just a personal preference. And I'd also prefer to see it remain more automated, but only because I think it would often get stale if left to user selection.

blankfist - I think you're right about bloating the site with features, especially when some older functionality isn't working properly. But if we're going to have something like this at all, then I say we make it as useful and good looking as it can be.

Yeah I actually read a magazine by candlelight and some of my old manga. It's funny how much electricity we use just for sitting down an relaxing. On the up side I found a lightbulb that was not compact fluorescent so that was fixed asap.

well, the overall design, and especially the foregrip, are clearly based on existing models like the P-90, and i recently left a comment there, about bullpup designs, etc.

shame they don't have a working model yet.

Thanks, I'm not the worlds greatest speller by any means

In reply to this comment by my15minutes:
^ it is. big time.

masterpiece of engineering, really.
this, and the steyr aug (in the full assault rifle category) are both exceptional designs, with many of the same qualities.
like ambidextrous use, composite materials, ergonomics, and pathetically easy fieldstripping, with little or no tools.

but especially, both share a bullpup design.

ps. heap? it's spelled 't r u l y'.

Without having watched the whole bit: The car itself is a 997 911 "Erlkönig", that's a test car built by the manufacturer before the new model is released. Usually they are more or less disguised (less as the introduction of the model comes closer). It seems Porsche has given this one to an austrian artist who crushes it to create a sculpture named "Kompression". This word in German is used both for the act of compression taking place in a running engine as well as for the act of compaction (as with the car in the compactor).

In my opinion a terrible waste of money.

Hitchens disembowels that moronic Romney speech in the most delightful way here - http://www.slate.com/id/2179404/

Once you get beyond the inherent strangeness of the Book of Mormon, though, Romney has very few political negatives, a very good organization, and the ability to mold his public image like Play-Doh. Scary.

I am still pinning my hopes on Bloomberg running as an Independent. Sorry, Church of Ron Paul @ VS.

Freedom ultimately requires a perverse sort of faith in the social compact that is more secular humanist than Southern Baptist, or Mormon, or Roman Catholic, or Scientological . . .