"If I was going to kill you, I'd be stepping over your body right now on my way out the door."

[batskeets]

This is just disturbing. Turning real life into a what is, essentially, a gambling parlour event? We're meant to place wagers on frivolous things like horse races and football games, not on whether or not such-and-such-political-figure DIES in x number of days.

Is this the best strategy that the Pentagon can come up with? Because it's fscking retarded.

I give props to Ron Wyden for speaking out against this, and I'm surpised that more haven't. There are so many better ways that money could have been spent. And of course, I say this as my college tuition goes up, *YET* again.

On a more cheerful note, I MUST SEE BUBBA HO-TEP. I've been wanting to see it since Bruce Campbell himself talked about it at that book signing I went to a couple years ago. I'm totally going up for it on 9/19. :D

Anyway, the meeting was good today. I showed some pages, and it looks like I'm working in the right direction. We discussed and narrowed down some options, too, so that makes matters easier for me on the rest of this. It looks like we basically have our template nailed down, too, so I can start pasting in my code, and actually seeing what the site would look like in all its glory.

I just inquired about a web design/dev job that Hennessy forwarded to the old CIT class from the CS jobs mailing list. I can easily kick the average computer scientist's ass on the design aspect, and I have the necessary back-end skills, so maybe I'll hear something. It sounds more like a contract than a job, per se, but it'd be money and experience. :D

Comments

eep!

[aquatwo.livejournal.com]

j00 are echoing me! lol

Re: eep!

[skeets.livejournal.com]

Yeah, although in fairness, I stole the Yahoo! News link from your post ^_-

[fieryrogue.livejournal.com]

A) Could the world get just a little more STUPID??

B) I saw Bubba Ho-Tep when Bruce was in town in November. OMG, so great! :)

[aniline.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure EVERYONE has to see Bubba Ho-tep. ::excited::

[dakania.livejournal.com]

you do realize that people have already been betting on stuff like that for a long time, and that DARPA just wants to regulate and profit (in terms of both intelligence and money) off of it... people are going to bet on it either way, because people are morons.

::shrugs:: we'll see how this goes... i'm not spending my money on it though :P

[skeets.livejournal.com]

I suppose that's true, but does government money really need to be spent on something like this? I'd rather see my taxpayer dollars, however few they may be, go towards something more constructive. :p

[dakania.livejournal.com]

::nods:: what i mean, though, is that they're trying to make a -profit-...that is, earn money by spending it....

i'm not saying i like it, but i'm just talking from the point of an microeconomicist here.

[http://users.livejournal.com/axiom-/]

O_o Well you see what this really amounts too is a way for the government to buy inteligence... it's terribly complex how futures markets work and they don't pass the test of common sense but none the less... they do work. Crop futures have been doing this for YEARS! What it boils down to in simple terms is if someone has some actionable intel but isn't motivated to really speak up to prevent something bad... or isn't motivated to keep quiet to help make bad things happen... well they allways default to keep quiet. It's easier to do nothing than to randomly decide for action that you are not motivated to take. Hence the futures market comes in... creating a very simple, discreet, motivation. Hell it's anonymous! It's like spitting in a lake... you have no reason to overtly do it and it means nothing if you do... after all it's a lake. However if someone sees you pay a quarter to spit in the lake and thinks you might get a dollar for doing it... someone may be motivated to do the same. What it boils down to is balancing cause and effect relationships and watching the statistical outcome to model predictions. That is a grotesquely simple example... Wyden is wrong for second guessing DARPA like that and turning this into a pollitical battle. Poindexter is many things but an idiot he is not. I will however say this, if Skynet ever gets built it will be by DARPA and under Poindexters watch. The Intel community may look like Willy Wonkas chocolate factory from the outside, full of crazy people and just plain silliness... but behind all the madness is method. "A little nonsense now and then, is cherished by the wisest men"

[aquatwo.livejournal.com]

FYI - it looks like it got canned earlier toda...

[drinkdrano.livejournal.com]

Good luck on the job stuff.

And yeah, I thought that betting thing was a joke. Like something out of The Weekly World News(one of the greatest weekly papers EVER) or something. Though I guess Hunter S. Thompson did win a hundred grand betting on the national election one year.