Sighted, and here.


As you can see my copy has just arrived, still waiting on the other extras - which I think I've ordered & paid the shipping for.

post a link and it disappears . post it a second time and it stays. What gives?
__________________
Into terror!,  Into valour!
Charge ahead! No! Never turn
Yes, it's into the fire we fly
And the devil will burn!
- Scarlett Pimpernell

JPM morgan's Q&A blows up in it's face.
I won't post the comments, but some of the ones quoted were hilarious.
__________________
Into terror!,  Into valour!
Charge ahead! No! Never turn
Yes, it's into the fire we fly
And the devil will burn!
- Scarlett Pimpernell

Do we live in the Matrix? Do you really want to know?

Quote:In the 1999 sci-fi film classic The Matrix, the
protagonist, Neo, is stunned to see people defying the laws of physics,
running up walls and vanishing suddenly. These superhuman violations of
the rules of the universe are possible because, unbeknownst to him,
Neo’s consciousness is embedded in the Matrix, a virtual-reality
simulation created by sentient machines. 

The action really begins when Neo is given a fateful
choice: Take the blue pill and return to his oblivious, virtual
existence, or take the red pill to learn the truth about the Matrix and
find out “how deep the rabbit hole goes.” 

Physicists can now offer us the same choice, the ability
to test whether we live in our own virtual Matrix, by studying radiation
from space. As fanciful as it sounds, some philosophers have long
argued that we’re actually more likely to be artificial intelligences
trapped in a fake universe than we are organic minds in the “real” one.

Quote:Seth Lloyd, a quantum-mechanical engineer at MIT,
estimated the number of “computer operations” our universe has performed
since the Big Bang — basically, every event that has ever happened. To
repeat them, and generate a perfect facsimile of reality down to the
last atom, would take more energy than the universe has. 

“The computer would have to be bigger than the universe,
and time would tick more slowly in the program than in reality,” says
Lloyd. “So why even bother building it?” 

But others soon realized that making an imperfect copy of
the universe that’s just good enough to fool its inhabitants would take
far less computational power. In such a makeshift cosmos, the fine
details of the microscopic world and the farthest stars might only be
filled in by the programmers on the rare occasions that people study
them with scientific equipment. As soon as no one was looking, they’d
simply vanish. 

In theory, we’d never detect these disappearing features,
however, because each time the simulators noticed we were observing them
again, they’d sketch them back in. 

That realization makes creating virtual universes eerily possible, even for us.

Quote:John D. Barrow, professor of mathematical sciences at
Cambridge University, suggested that an imperfect simulation of reality
would contain detectable glitches. Just like your computer, the
universe’s operating system would need updates to keep working. 
As the simulation degrades, Barrow suggested, we might see
aspects of nature that are supposed to be static — such as the speed of
light or the fine-structure constant that describes the strength of the
electromagnetic force — inexplicably drift from their “constant”
values.

Quote:Most physicists assume that space is smooth and extends
out infinitely. But physicists modeling the early universe cannot easily
re-create a perfectly smooth background to house their atoms, stars and
galaxies. Instead, they build up their simulated space from a lattice,
or grid, just as television images are made up from multiple pixels. 
The team calculated that the motion of particles within
their simulation, and thus their energy, is related to the distance
between the points of the lattice: the smaller the grid size, the higher
the energy particles can have. That means that if our universe is a
simulation, we’ll observe a maximum energy amount for the fastest
particles. And as it happens, astronomers have noticed that cosmic rays,
high-speed particles that originate in far-flung galaxies, always
arrive at Earth with a specific maximum energy of about 1020 electron volts.

A Planing Guide to Taking Over or Obliterating the Earth, published by Dark Osprey a division of Osprey Books
Since I have been buying Osprey Military Books since I was in active service, I'm ordering a copy and see if it's the real deal.
Edit: I have no idea why the links keep on disappearing on me after I posted them.
__________________
Into terror!,  Into valour!
Charge ahead! No! Never turn
Yes, it's into the fire we fly
And the devil will burn!
- Scarlett Pimpernell

This isn't for me; it's for someone I know on the InterWebs. His wife just had emergency surgery - without it, she would have died. They're self-employed, with no insurance. The bill was $69k, but has been discounted by the hospital - to $25k. Even that is more than a year's take-home pay for both of them put together, after their business expenses.

I seem to recall that there's something like kickstarter out there for raising money to pay medical bills. Does anyone know what I'm vaguely remembering, and (more importantly) if it does exist, where to find it?

EDIT: Oh, and let's leave the political discussion about healthcare in the Politics subforum, please.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

We are proud to present...
Namco High!
-----
Stand between the Silver Crystal and the Golden Sea.
"Youngsters these days just have no appreciation for the magnificence of the legendary cucumber."  --Krityan Elder, Tales of Vesperia.

I'm thinking of trying to submit to SJGames for GURPS Furries, and I'm trying to come up with something interesting for a setting.
I'm thinking of a "discopunk AIDS Outbreak" type of setup. As an Infinite Worlds timeline, "Moreau-XX" has a POD sometime in the 1800s, when some epidemiologists think HIV/AIDS split off from a strain that only affected Chimpanzees. Due to rubber science and allowing for the setting set-up, somehow the species jump became teratogenic instead of immunosuppresive. This led to many sightings of "werewolves and such rubbish" and "false missing links" until the mid-20th century. Sort of a take on WildCards and "SCABS" from Bryan Derkson's Tales from the Blind Pig universe. So the setting has "normal" humans and "furries" that are the result of a blood-borne pathogen.
"Discopunk" refers to TL 7+1 gizmoes with a strong 1970s aesthetic, where a lot of our current gadget functionality is tied into blocky plastic boxes with tacky faux woodgrain veneer. CB culture for a rough equivalent to social networking and the internet memepool, based on 1950s TV and Movies. Perhaps strongly influenced by Bakshi's version of R Crumb's "Fritz the Cat."
Stuff like this:
Since one of the things I've noticed in Furry fiction is a degree of focus on "persecution issues," and I needed a source of conflict for "native" adventures... "Furry is the New Black" may well be a sidebar.
''We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat
them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.''

-- James Nicoll

I have an Acer Aspire One - a wonderful little portable machine, with a keyboard and Windows XP (as opposed to a touchscreen and who-knows-what OS). The only problem with it is a distinct lack of memory and disk space.

Memory I can fix - there's only one DDR2 SODIMM slot, but the stick in the slot is only 1GB. Easy fix to upgrade to 2GB.

Disk space is harder - there's only one 2.5-inch SATA bay in the notebook, so I'll need to clone the drive onto the larger HDD. But there's only one 2.5-inch SATA bay in the notebook. How can I clone a hard drive when I can only install one drive at a time? For that matter, how do I clone a drive that has XP installed on it? (I haven't cloned a drive since the days when DOS was king...)
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

Quote:As I remember it, the Democrats on Capitol Hill got the bill they
wanted. They were heady, back in the majority, with a new and popular
president, and they didn’t much care about GOP support. They wanted the
credit: It was their bill. They wrote it in a way no Republican could
support. And they got no Republican support. When Paul Ryan, who had
emerged as the Republican point man, attempted to come forward with
ideas, he was rebuffed.

The new president—and this was a key historic moment—decided not to
act on the accumulated presidential wisdom of the ages, which is: Get
the other party in on all big things. Give them a stake in it, use them
for cover, show you have bipartisan juice, that you are truly national
and not only the leader of one party, show you can wield your mighty
power across the aisles. Get them bragging they passed it, with your
leadership. Make them co-own it so that when certain parts don’t work,
and certain parts won’t, they have deep motives to help you fix it.

Instead, a perfect storm of misjudgment, immaturity and lack of
historical perspective, and a perfect storm of shortsighted selfishness
(it’s all ours, it’s not even a little bit yours) brought forth a perfect storm of a health-care disaster.

Quote:As for Landrieu’s bill, if Republicans can’t successfully argue that
Congress has no constitutional power to compel commerce (the basic point
of the successful — in that vein — challenge to Obamacare under the
Commerce Clause), if they can’t argue that Congress has no power to
compel anyone to sell an insurance plan, or, by extension, to compel a
doctor to see a patient, etc., then we’re in sad shape.

Obamacare made millions of people’s plans illegal. By passing the
Upton bill, House Republicans would be striving to make them legal again
for the next year. If insurers nevertheless choose to stop offering
those plans, it will still be Obamacare that set that trend in motion.
What’s more, the GOP would then be free to criticize those insurers and
remind voters that, over the next decade, Obamacare would funnel a
stunning $1 trillion from American taxpayers, via Washington, to
insurers (according to the Congressional Budget Office). Meanwhile,
Landrieu’s bill is more of the heavy-handed, coercive model of
government that gave us Obamacare to begin with, and Republicans should
say so.

Finally, Landrieu’s bill would undermine the Obamacare exchanges at
least as much as Upton’s bill would. So the Democrats certainly don’t
love it, and it’s highly unlikely they would ever pass it. But if they
did, and if the House and Senate ended up reconciling Upton and Landrieu
in conference, the clear loser would be Obamacare — whose exchange population would just have gotten older, sicker, and costlier.

And then around October 2014, all of those notices about losing your
health plan because of Obamacare would start being mailed out again,
just in time to help voters make an informed choice on November 4.

Quote:Now, I realize that contempt of Congress is and should be the natural order of things. “The best Congress that money can buy.” “The only native American criminal class.” “No man’s life, liberty or property is safe while Congress is in session.” And that’s just Mark Twain and Will Rogers; the rest of us no doubt have even more pungent observations regarding the collective entity known as Congresscritters.

But the notion that “lawmakers” (stop, enough already!) are worried about “careers” at the public trough ought to be contemptible to every taxpayer. And, if Congressthings had any sense of shame, to the Honorables Themselves. But, of course, they don’t. Only someone with a soul as dead as Little Nell, a hide as thick as Joe Biden‘s noggin, and the moral conscience of Bill Clinton has the effrontery to run for Congress these days, and every attempt to “reform” the system — from the disastrous 17th amendment to term limits to McCain-Feingold (nothing like a “reform” to “get money out of politics” written by the “most reprehensible” of the Keating Five) — has resulted in complete failure.

It’s true that not a single Republican voted for Obamacare upon its forced passage. But neither has the appetite for repeal been very strong since. The House can pass all the repeal bills it wants, secure in the knowledge that the Senate will never go along with them, and that the president would veto any such legislation. Moral preening is, after all, one of the attractions of the racket, and “safe” votes are strictly for domestic consumption. Speaker John Boehner’s sandbagging of Senator Ted Cruz said all that needs be said on that subject.

So I say it’s spinach and I say the hell with it. If you think Obamacare is bad now — and it’s very, very bad, a direct assault on the most fundamental freedom Americans used to enjoy, which was the freedom to be left alone by the federal government — wait until the “employer mandate” kicks in. Already illegally “postponed” by Obama, it will destroy, by design, the insurance market in the U.S., send the economy into an even worse tailspin than it’s in now, and disrupt the lives and budgets of untold millions of Americans.

For John Roberts was right: in the law’s practical effect, it is a tax, only a tax, and nothing but a tax — and if you think it’s going to fund “health care” for the lame, the halt and the blind, you’re out of your mind. The gullible, naive and the mendacious may not be able to discriminate between “health care” and “insurance,” but that was exactly what Obama was counting on when he sold — barely — his apparatchiks in Congress on the notion that Barrycare would only add to the sum total of human happiness by taking care of the neediest and blah blah blah your doctor, period. That doesn’t make Roberts’ cowardly decision good — he had a chance to put a stake through the PPACA’s heart once and for all, and he choked. It’s a decision that will live in Supreme Court infamy until the day the act is repealed.

In other words, the entire flimflam was a bright, shining lie all along, made possible by the Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Party and its GOP wing’s continuing complicity in perpetuating the fraud. Remember, “universal health care” has been dream of the Regressives since Bismarck and Woodrow Wilson were pups, and now they have it. Make them own it, and destroy them with it.

We used to think that changing Congress meant changing which party controlled it. Now we know better. Real change can’t begin until the Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Party is gone.