JamesSavik

"Outing" people is, under most circumstances, traumatic and potentially destructive. It can even be dangerous to people. It should only be done only under certain exceptional circumstances. Examples follow and then guidelines. Reverend Ted Haggard, millionaire leader of a mega-church, was a highly influential, outspoken critic of gay people and gay rights. He counseled parents to send their gay kids to pray-the-gay-away camp. He was caught with a hustler and crystal meth. More info: http://en.wikipedia....iki/Ted_Haggard OUT THE BASTARD Rep. Mark Foley never saw a piece of ridiculously anti-gay legislation that he didn't like. He also voted for and authored many bills that created severe penalties for illegal use of a minor. He was caught sending sexy texts to under-aged male pages. He requested that they take pictures of their junk and send it to him.' More info: http://en.wikipedia....l_page_incident OUT THE BASTARD Senator Larry Craig was had one of the senates most anti-gay voting records. He was caught soliciting sex from a police officer in a airport mens room. For more info: http://en.wikipedia....y_Craig_scandal OUT THE BASTARD This is Dr. George Rekers(left). He wrote many of the basic scientific papers used by anti-gay hate groups to justify their bigotry. He did a study (federally funded) utilizing negative feedback (aversion therapy) to turn an effeminate male child "masculine". He touted his research with his test subject Craig as a big success. Problem was that Craig was a broken adult and committed suicide just shy of his 35th birthday after a long battle with drug and alcohol addiction and depression. Rekers was a board member of NARTH (National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality) and co-founder of the Family Research Council. Dr. George as he was affectionately called by the board of directors of the Family Research Council (FRC) was the face of scientific credibility for their severely biased anti-gay propaganda. He was caught vacationing with a pretty young twink he met on rentboy.com He claimed to have a bad back and paid the poor deviant boy $5000 to accompany him on vacation so that he could minister to him. The rent-boy(right) didn't really know who Dr. George was. When he found out, he blew the whistle on Reker's lies. It turns out that sex doesn't count as ministering. The quack George Alan Rekers wrote many books including the steaming piece of crap below. There's no telling how many children have been tortured because they didn't fit Reker's or their parents image of masculinity. Both the FRC and NARTH continue to use Reker's work. More info: http://liftmyluggage.org Reker's unethical human experimentation: http://www.towleroad...troyed-a-m.html Once again: OUT THE BASTARD! A Good General Rule of Thumb: Never ever under ANY circumstances out a minor. Never out a private citizen. They way they live their life and handle their affairs is nobodies business but their own. HOWEVER- Celebrities and people in power, especially hypocrites that use that power to harm other GLBT people, ALL BETS ARE OFF. It's sort of a public service to out ass-hats like this.

I think I'm in both groups.

I am more into Macro-aggression. If I have a problem with you, you'll know it. The passive-aggressive petty sniping we see entirely too much makes me tired and cranky. I blame Jerry Springer.

Good stuff WL

I have these posters around my house. Having the originals would be wild- they are worth more than the state I live in. I wonder what sort of art others here have/like. Van Gogh's Starry Night Van Gogh's Irises Hokusai's The Great Wave at Kanagawa Hokusai's Boy in Front of Fiji

This is a mystery far beyond relativity or quantum physics. I don't even think the mathematics to define the problem have even been invented. If men are from Mars, Women are from NGC 1300. Mars is a simple little world: NGC 1300 is a huge, complex galaxy.

< Hiss.

boxers usually, gym shorts sometimes

There is a shadowy intelligence agency that I keep running across but know next to nothing about. Does anybody know anything about an intelligence group/agency out of the UK called Barrier? I think they are part of MI6 but something about that is just not right. From what I've seen, they're too independent. Sixers are NOT. Maybe they are a European collaboration? Maybe NATO... They have big time interests in counter-terrorism and proliferation issues.

ridiculous FAST network technology powered by friendly magical gnomes.

Scientists Build First Working Quantum Network By Damon Poeter April 12, 2012 09:21am EST PC Magazine http://www.pcmag.com...,2402931,00.asp Scientists at the Quantum Dynamics division of the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (MPQ) in Garching, Germany announced Wednesday that they have built the very first, elementary quantum network comprised of a pair of entangled atoms that transmit information to each other via single photons. That and a couple of bucks will get you a cup of coffee, plus anything from a perfectly secure data exchange system to the massive scaling via distributed processing of the already mind-bogglingly powerful, if theoretical, potential of a standalone quantum computer. These are indeed heady days for the pioneers of quantum computing, with each news cycle seemingly bringing forth a major breakthrough in a subatomic frontier that appears poised to revolutionize how our calculating machines deliver us everything from satellite mapping to LOLcats. It's also a daunting time for those of us who have barely just sussed out the mechanics of old-fashioned, silicon-based computer chips–only to be confronted with this new science of computing, a full understanding of which requires one to be not just an advanced electrical engineer, but a quantum physicist to boot. All of which is to say that, yes, the bright individuals who are trying to harness the computational power of stuff so small and weird, it can only be described mathematically, are at it again. Years in the Making The accomplishment was the result of years of work, according to Scientific Computing. Lead researcher Prof. Gerhard Rempe and his colleagues had to figure out a means of exercising "perfect control" over all the components in their quantum network, which first meant getting the two atoms that make up the network's receptor nodes to somehow stay stationary, because a couple of free-floating atoms wouldn't be able to communicate with the photons relaying information between the two very efficiently. "This approach to quantum networking is particularly promising because it provides a clear perspective for scalability," Rempe told the journal. His colleague and leader of the experiment, Dr. Stephan Ritter, added, "We were able to prove that the quantum states can be transferred much better than possible with any classical network." The team was able to fix their atoms in optical cavities, basically a couple of highly reflective mirrors a short distance from each other, by means of fine-tuned laser beams. Why mirrors? Photons entering the cavity bounce around the mirrors "several thousand times," which actually enhances the atom-photon interaction and enables the network node atoms to absorb the photon-based data packets "coherently and with high efficiency," according to the scientists. The use of optical cavities for a quantum network was proposed by Prof. Ignacio Cirac, an MPQ directory and head of its Theory division. "In fact, we demonstrate the feasibility of the theoretical approach developed by Prof. Cirac," Ritter said. After trapping and stabilizing the atoms that would serve as the system's network nodes, the scientists had to get the atoms to emit single photons encoded with information in a controlled way and transfer that information onto a second photon. Then, to demonstrate an actual networking effect, the team connected two such systems "and quantum information was exchanged between them with high efficiency and fidelity," Scientific Computing reported. The two systems were connected by a roughly 180-foot-long fiber optic cable and hosted in separate labs about 60 feet apart from each other. So basically, walking down the hall and just telling the guys in the other lab what was on the photon would have been about as effective, but the point of the exercise was to show the network performing as designed and to worry about scaling it out to purposefulness later. Weird and Weirder Science Quantum networking is the practical application of experimental quantum cryptography, like the "blind quantum computing" demonstration by another team of researchers at the University of Vienna's Center for Quantum Science and Technology earlier this year, which involved transmitting an algorithm to a computer, running it, and receiving it back without the computer's operator being able to snoop on those operations. Like its cousin, quantum computing, quantum networking takes advantage of the fact that subatomic particles of matter can exist in multiple states–such as "on" and "off" to reference the binary process by which digital computing operates–at the same time. Again, this is exceedingly difficult stuff to wrap one's head around, but suffice to say that these properties enable the quantum bits, or qubits, that power quantum computers and the single-photon data packets developed for the MPQ team's quantum network to perform their duties much more powerfully and securely than the non-quantum parts used in currently available PC chips and network infrastructure devices. Of course, all of this is still very much in the realm of conjecture. Quantum computing is still highly theoretical, with demonstrations like the MPQ team's limited to laboratory settings. There are no practical quantum computers,just experimental ones. For one thing, scientists have yet to actually scale out their quantum computers and quantum networks to the point that they can actually out-perform their digital counterparts. For another, the cost of doing so appears to be, for the time being anyway, prohibitive. But clearly, a boffin poking around in the subatomic, algorithmic ether can dare to dream.

Plot bunny needs to have a litter under my computer.

< Clowns to the left of me Jokers to the right > Stuck in the middle with you (Gary Johnson, Libertarian) I'm sorry but I can't tell the difference no more It's just a competition to find the biggest whore. It doesn't really matter who wins, We we all lose... Stuck in the middle of a broken two-party system that is completely out of control.

politics fools to the left of me Jokers to the right Stuck in the middle with you...

Duke was a surprise to me. They are usually in it. I like the NCAA because you get to see the small schools that are bad-ass but never get TV time like Xavier (and a few others) that raise hell in the middle of the tourney but eventually get out muscled. Its fun to see the little schools upset those highly ranked schools from the power conferences. PS- I quit watching the SEC tourney. Everybody was playing so poorly, I got disgusted with it.

Doves Kingdom of Rust I hear a sound, a sound above my head Distant sound of thunder, moving out on the moor Blackbirds flew in and to the cooling towers I'll pack my bags Thinking of one of those hours With you, waiting for you My God, it takes an ocean of trust In the Kingdom of Rust I long to feel some beauty in my heart As I go searching, right to the start Hmmm The road back to Preston Was jutted out in snow As I went looking for that stolen heart For you, waiting for you My God, it takes an ocean of trust Takes an effort it does My god, it takes an ocean of trust It's in the Kingdom of Rust Oooow in the Kingdom of Rust I long to feel that wince in my heart As I went looking I couldn't stop Now I'm waiting for you Ooohh ............. I know it takes an ocean of trust In the Kingdom of Rust

There was very little drama in the NCAA tournament. Kentucky was picked number one last fall, picked to win the SEC, Won the SEC, won the SEC tournament and was favored to win the NCAA tournament. They just kept rolling on. Obviously they are a great team. The pressure on front-runners sorts out the contenders from the pretenders.

The War Inside Stardate 43887.3 Dr. Walter Ingalls, Starfleet Medical Personal log. At the request of the Angosian government, Star Fleet has dispatched a team of doctors and other specialist to help rehabilitate veteran's of the Tarsian War. When I first got this assignment, I thought that we would make quick and easy progress. Nothing could be further from the truth. What I first thought were symptoms of severe Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is a much more complicated condition created by conditioning, drugs, genetic engineering and nano-technology. This may well be a case where we can not think in terms of a cure per see but manage the condition to improve the patients quality of life. This interview is typical of the patients that we have seen at the Luna V facility. Subject 378- Rayner Zale Ingalls- I specifically asked to speak with you because you have had nothing to do with Roga Danar's insurrection and have expressed no interest in therapy or to live anywhere but the Luna V facility. I wanted to understand your reasoning. Zale- There's simply no point in it. What I have become, what we are, we're not Angosians anymore. We're something else. Something horrible that frightens those of us who were conditioned to be soldiers most of all. Ingalls- So you consider the conditioning program irreversible? Zale- They can remove the drugs, disable the implants, reverse the genetic alterations but... how do you get rid of the faces? I personally have killed over three hundred Tarsians. My enhanced memory allows me to remember each and every face in exacting detail. Can we get rid of that? You can take the soldier out of the war doctor. It's much more difficult to take the war out of the soldier. Ingalls- Perhaps we can help. We have treated many Federation veterans of the Dominion War. I'm certain that we can help. Zale- Maybe you can. I will see how it goes with the others before I commit. Ingalls- No good soldier commits to action without intelligence or reconnaissance. Zale- (laughs) You sound like a soldier yourself. Ingalls- I fought in the Cardassian War and the Dominion War. Zale- It's good to talk to a fellow soldier. Most of the Doctor's are nice young people who have no idea... Ingalls- Yes. Tell me your story. Zale- (sighs) It's fairly typical tale. I will tell it in trade. Your story for mine. Ingalls- That's only fair. Zale- I was young when the war started. I was in my first year at university studying architecture. The war was going very badly at first. Angosians aren't naturally a warlike people. Many of our first generation soldiers hesitated. We suffered defeat after defeat. The Tarsians were... brutal, almost animalistic. We soon discovered that the Breen were backing the Tarsians in a bid to destabilize the area around Romulan space. Both sides were pawns in a much bigger game. I volunteered when our home world was bombarded and several of our cities were leveled. We asked for help. Not from the Romulans of course. The Federation wouldn't get involved. We were able to secure key defense technologies through third parties that made our military at least competitive. With Klingon disrupters, Romulan shields and old Federation warp drives, Angosia was able to build a small, formidable fleet that was able to stop the Tarsians cold and turn the tide of the war in our favor. But... I'm getting ahead of myself. I joined our military in the third year of the war. After basic training and testing, I was asked to join a special unit. We were warned that it was dangerous and that many didn't survive but being young and patriotic, I volunteered. It was nothing like the training that I had previously had. Rather than Subadons (Angosian equivalent of a drill instructor), we had counselors. We were enhanced by biological engineering, drugs and nanotechnology. Most importantly, we were conditioned not to be like other Angosians. Ingalls: What do you mean? Zale: When it came time to kill, we were conditioned not to hesitate. I was there for the our first assignment: to retake Angosia VI. The Tarsians had captured one of the planets in our home system and we had to remove them. Angosia VI is a cold desert world with low gravity. It can barely sustain life. The military called it Operation Mystic Winter. Those of us that went called it hell. We launched on four troop transports with twenty-five hundred men each and equipment. One transport was destroyed in space. One crashed landed. The two that did land were badly off course. The first day we lost thirty men to the cold. It took us days to move into position to strike the Tarsians and they had air superiority until the very end. Finally we were able to hit their defensive perimeter and our programming kicked in. I didn't even know that it was possible to move that fast. I would look around and the hands and feet of my fellow soldiers were just a blur. We fought until we were completely out of ammunition. Then we used knives, clubs, rocks and even our bare hands. We won the battle. When it was all over there were only twenty-seven hundred of us left. Historians call it the turning point. To me it's just another one of a score of nightmares that keeps coming back over and over. Ingalls: By all accounts, the Battle for Angosia VI was the turning point. Zale: And I have the campaign ribbon, the Angosian star and... a lot of dead friends to remember it by. Ingalls: That's the part you never get used to. Burying your friends. Zale: The conditioning lets you turn it off. Ingalls: What do you mean by turn it off? Zale: Part of the conditioning allows you to turn off emotions. The only problem is that they don't go away. They don't stay turned off forever. Just long enough to keep you from being distracted from your mission. Ingalls: You were promoted after Angosia VI. Zale: Yes. That's when it got so much worse. It's one thing to be a soldier. To be responsible for the lives of others... that's hard. I was given command a platoon (24) of soldiers that had just completed the conditioning program. We fought in a number of minor skirmishes and did extremely well. We were in the first wave of the invasion of Kavis Alpha. I lost eight of those kids. I can still call them all by name. Enhanced memory is very difficult when you want to forget. Ingalls: That battle forced the Tarsians to the peace table. Zale: It was a great shock to the Tarsians. Angosians that could snap their necks like twigs and didn't shy away from striking killing blows. That's the battle that scared them. They couldn't handle us at all and they knew it. The war dragged on another year and a half but they had gone from swaggering militarists to skulking cowards that hid in bunkers. Ingalls: You seem to still have a lot of anger towards the Tarsians. Zale: You're damned right I do. I'm angry at all of the lives they took. And for what? To gain another star system? To be acknowledged as a regional power? No. We know the Tarsians all too well. They were just bullies with more weapons than sense and stopping them made it all worthwhile. Ingalls: You consider the sacrifices that you and others had to make worth while? Zale: Honestly, I didn't expect to survive the war. Ask our soldiers an most of them will tell you the same. Ingalls: Don't you ever want to leave the Luna V facility? Zale: No. To win that war, I had to become a monster. I am still that monster. I can still snap a mans neck or jam his nose cartilage into his brain in a split second. There lies the problem. We had to learn how to act without thinking- to not hesitate to kill. That is an absolute necessity in war but it has no place in peace. I am no longer fit to be a part of any civil society. I am a weapon that must be locked away until it is needed again. For me the war never really ended. I see, I smell it and I feel it every time I close my eyes. I am no longer in a war. The war is in me. _____________________________________________________________________________________ Angosia III ( http://en.memory-alp...iki/Angosia_III ) was a world visited by the Enterprise-D under Jean-Luc Picard on Stardate 43489 ( http://en.memory-alp...d_%28episode%29 ) The Tarsian Wars were a protracted conflict in which the Angosians were forced to create super soldiers to survive and eventually win the war. What does a peaceful society do with super-soldiers once the war is over and they are no longer needed?

Now lets see Starcraft drag

The old man and sir.

We'll need nachos...

PC Games? That's where the classics are. We'll start with the Civilization series games. See their website at: http://www.civilization.com/ War Games on the PC go to Shrapnel Games. They have the rights to the Steel Panthers franchise and offer a WWII and modern version of the classic game. They also have a number of other games. See their site at: http://www.shrapnelgames.com/ Another classic game series is Harpoon ( http://www.advancedgaming.biz/products/hce.html ). It's been around 20 years + One of the bigger collections of various types of games can be found at http://www.matrixgames.com

The maximum stable mass limit for a white dwarf is a sum call the Chandrasekhar limit. This number is about 1.38 solar masses. Alpha Centuri weighs in at 1.1 solar masses, Beta Centuri at .907 solar masses. Proxima Centauri is a distant companion weighing in at only .125 solar masses. Furthermore, Proxima is an M5.5 dwarf. It's a low luminosity red dwarf that is so faint that it can't be seen by the naked eye despite being the closest star to our planet. It would take millions of years and a lot of help to get any one of those objects to its Chandrasekhar limit. There are some ~1875 stars within 50 light years of earth. Most of them are dwarfs of type K, M and are less massive than our sun- very much like Proxima Centauri. On the average, of each 1000 main sequence stars in the sun's neighborhood, there are... 1 star of spectral type B (along with O type stars which are quite rare) massive blue giants are your most likely candidate to go SN Type II (core collapse)- the most devastating kind of explosion. There are actually blue and white dwarfs of type B and O but they are weird and rare and none of them in the neighborhood. Their color is influenced more by their heat than size. 7 stars of spectral type A 27 stars of spectral type F 65 stars of spectral type G 126 stars of spectral type K 774 stars of spectral type M These numbers come from an obscure branch of astronomy called stellar population studies. And no- not all populations are the same. We live in a very placid neighborhood without many bullies or thugs. Type I supernova are all very predictable. They are used as a "standard candle" for determining distances to far away galaxies. They all blow with the same energy, spectra and light curve. Type II SN vary considerably. They can be very, very energetic and bright. There are a number of sub-types and the core collapse might even be non-concentric or warped leading to strange shapes and irregular distribution of matter and shockwaves. This picture of SN 1987A was taken ~10 years after the initial outburst. The "string of pearls" is gas that has been disturbed by the shock wave. This picture was taken around ~2003. The theory is that the core of the progenitor star did no collapse symmetrically which causes weird effects as the supernova ages- like the double ring structure. This is a typical light curve for a type I supernova. It peaks quickly, drops several orders of magnitude and thn does a long, slow fade. The type II SN is much more energetic. It peaks and stays hot longer and fades slower than a type I. When a type II SN explodes, it creates a hell of a lot of radioactive isotopes, exotic stuff that has very short half lifes. This material decays quickly adding to the radiation output of the event. Within this radioactive furnace, new heavy elements are being forged by r-process (rapid) and s-process (slow) nuclear decay. As the elements age, they become more and more stable and are recycled by the galaxy and used to create new stars and planets. There is something very Zen about type II SN- it is creation and annihilation in the same event.

When a supernova goes off, quite a lot of the energy is consumed by a huge neutrino surge. We actually detected some of them when the supernova blew in 1987. Neutrinos are fairly innocuous particles. They don't usually interact with other matter. It takes a huge surge of them for us to detect them at all. They travel very fast because the neutrino surge and SN1987A light were seen within seconds of each other.

The problem with radiation is that its power fades with the square of the distance. The really hot part of a supernova in the gamma and x-ray ranges drop off rather quickly. The shock wave behaves like Newtons law- it isn't diminished until its acted on by another force. It eventually gets soaked up in the interstellar medium over millions of years and hundreds of light years.