3D printer, bunnies, and other matters Mail 684 20110718

Mail 684 Monday, July 18, 2011

· 3D Printer

· The bunny story

· Borders

·

3D Printer

Some of you have seen this, and others haven’t.

Here’s one of the futures of computing. Very cool!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZboxMsSz5Aw

We saw prototypes at CES this year. Remarkable! Really cool

On bunnies

Dear Dr. Pournelle:

Here’s some more bunny-related idiocy for you to contemplate.

http://biggovernment.com/bmccarty/2011/05/20/family-facing-4-million-in-fines-for-selling-bunnies/

Regards,

Tim Scott=

Actually we have seen this story before but it does no harm to be reminded of it. The program has to cost millions of dollars a year in borrowed money, yet there appears to be no off switch. There just isn’t any way to get rid of silliness like this. It goes on and on, at millions a year, and you can’t stop it.

Birth Certificate Forgery

You’ve probably heard this about five hundred times by now, but they’re referring to the Dan Rather "Texas ANG Memo" scandal, dubbed "Rathergate".

The "birth certificate variable type" is much less convincing. It depends on quibbling over whether a blotchy reproduction of a typed character on a 40-year-old piece of paper is .002" bigger than another.

You say "the people who handled this could have handled it better", but this is like the "9/11 Truth" movement. It doesn’t matter how well you handle it, because the people who want the certificate to be fake will just find other ways to convince themselves it’s fake.

—

Mike T. Powers

It’s a distraction. If that turns out to be a forgery and can be shown to be one, it says a lot about the competence of the forgers, but not much about the birthplace of Barrack Hussein Obama.

Borders left the business:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303661904576454353768550280.html?mod=WSJ_hp_LEFTTopStories

——–

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

First the chains took over the independent book stores, then the big stores drove the chains out of the malls. Now the chains devour each other. The distributors went from a couple of hundred to about 3. The publishing business implodes and concentrates. We watch in fascination or horror. Or both.

Surveillance Grid Goes Green

It took Americans 30 years to figure out that Don King rigs his

fights. How long before they figure this con out?

http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2011/07/18/city-testing-new-technology-aimed-at-reducing-traffic-congestion/

——–

Most Respectfully,

Joshua Jordan, KSC

Probably not a lot longer.

Too Big to Fail

"Any enterprise that is too big to fail should be too big to be allowed to exist."

And at what point does the US government become "too big to fail"?

Karl

Clever

CERN ‘gags’ physicists in cosmic ray climate experiment

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/07/18/cern_cosmic_ray_gag/

CERN ‘gags’ physicists in cosmic ray climate experiment

What do these results mean? Not allowed to tell you

The chief of the world’s leading physics lab at CERN in Geneva has prohibited scientists from drawing conclusions from a major experiment.

= = =

Slide show of Bert Rutan’s designs

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/07/18/rutan_bipod/

Cool!

Money we don’t need

Hello Jerry,

Well, it is official: "All your money and stuff are belong to us!".

The ‘us’ in question being the government. Of course we will be

allowed to keep what we ‘need’, but THEY will be the self-appointed

arbiters of that need.

http://blog.heritage.org/2011/07/13/morning-bell-obama-aims-for-the-money-you-dont-need/

Bob Ludwick

The theory is that government will spend any surplus funds better than those who have the money, and after all, those who have it probably don’t deserve it. I vaguely remember thinking that way when I was an undergraduate. Lyndon Johnson spoke of the haves and how they had to give up some for the have nots who need it so much. It is standard undergraduate socialism. Most undergraduates grew out of it in my time. Not so much now.