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For future reference I'm going to repost my reply here. Feel free to link it whenever somebody whines in favor of Al Gore or against the joke. Instant cluebat.

Here's the reply:

Snopes just doesn't get it, neither do you, even when it's staring them and you right in the face. No, you didn't have to be there, you should be able to understand what happened.

Snopes quotes Al Gore:

"During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system."

Seriously the idiots are those who can not cope with mocking "authority" when it targets someone they feel favorable towards. The idiots are those who take the humble and non-confrontational attitude of their betters (like for example Vint Cerf being extremely diplomatic to the point of upsetting some of his peers) as implicit approval of errors when instead it's simply an act to avoid boring uninteresting drama caused by politicized whores. Because this kind of shit happens all the time, most politicians could not survive without doing it.

It gets worse when their reasoning is based on falsely hurt pride caused by entrenched political groupthink with no semblance to reality or rational thought and which displays above all a total lack of knowledge of the decades of work and development, the multiple thousands of hours of several dozen people most closely involved and the billions of hours spent by other people in order to build and connect the network.

Then after all that and before a lot more two (Two! Not even only Gore!) politicians write a bill, a fucking bill, to make the inevitable "happen", and one of them shoots his mouth off as he does with everything and you can't handle the ridicule?

Gore was invited to the ARPANET anniversary celebration but wisely declined. If I recall correctly better and incomparably crucial people had already passed away from natural causes. He knows what he did and the good news is that he has a sliver of shame, not because he's better than other politicians but because he goofed so badly as to cause a lasting joke being mentioned every time he tries to speak on a related subject (and sometimes when it's unrelated as well as he deserves).

The joke is his badge of shame, it's good if you're not laughing, it's bad if you don't get it.

It was obvious what Gore was trying to do: take an incredible amount of credit he didn't deserve. Him making such statements is fact but the content of the statements are not at all factual because it would have happened anyway (thus he was not "instrumental" anything or "initiative" anything or "initiative to take initiatives" anything) and it could have been any goddamn politicians and I'll repeat myself: it wasn't just him among the politicians but those other people made no such grandiose claims, the co-sponsor didn't, those voting for the bill didn't, the people who voted the representatives into power didn't, even the people who actually "took the initiative in creating the internet" didn't make any such grandiose claims about themselves, does the point get through your skull and the skull of those who defend Gore? Can it?

exec has been relocated to a (usually) always on webserver, so should be available more

also has remote updating from github and remote restarting, which means i can still tinker on my laptop :-)

try this in irc for a list of supported commands that anyone can run:
~list

use ~join #chan if you would like exec to join a channel, and ~part to get it to leave. #test is the only channel that ~part won't work for.

feel free to play/test/pilfer/etc. suggestions are always welcome too.

source code here:
https://github.com/crutchy-/test

more info here:
http://wiki.soylentnews.org/wiki/IRC:exec

Mostly for my own sake: AC comment.

I find NUCLEON interesting in all sorts of ways, one example would be that the resource requirements could be tiny compared to a lot of the other stuff. There's also a sort of a phreak angle to it, phreaking on steroids where it's not "just" about dial tones any more but voices. It feels very tangible (wrong word) or even tactile (even worse word) but then again I really am a weird nut who enjoys listening to my computers sing (relatively new ones, I'm not talking about ancient beasts). If it's warm, humid, and otherwise silent my ears can easily pick up various electrical components chirping etc., I did say weird! XD

I guess that part is a bit similar to the fun that can be had experiencing a beam blast of static electricity from turning on an unused old terminal. Still weird? Okay lol.

The main thing however would be to consider NUCLEON in combination with the digital nature of modern telephone systems. Not even normal landlines are POTS in the original sense of it any more, they might still be called or referenced as POTS but that's mostly just for convenience; the centrals are digital. Although I doubt it I guess the US could still be some weird exception as they often are but in Europe this change happened during the nineties in at least some countries, maybe all. That's roughly twenty years ago and I've gotten the impression that the changes these days are the potential dismantlement of the lines themselves, switching to the competing technologies, however that could be an extreme example: I wouldn't know. Of course in other countries (like in the developing world) it's nearly all mobile infrastructure anyways which was always digital.

What I was getting to is that most people don't know a thing about old telephone systems beyond "cups on a string" and that even with the prevalence of mobile phones (no string) the NUCLEON thing psychologically takes a solid step into "the physical world" in ways that a lot of the other NSA things don't appear to in the same manner. A lot of people still have a different take on telephones than computers and when it comes to actual voices I think it would become even more "real" for many of the ordinary citizens who might have trouble relating to what is going on.

I have no idea why nobody seems to be talking about it. There's a lot of that going around if you ask me, some of it might be information overload.

So, it appears we have quite a community of DF players here at SN, and enough I think to warrent getting a succession game going. For those who are unaware, succession games are when one plays for one year (Spring to Spring traditionally), then passes off the fort to the next player in line. Boatmurdered is perhaps the most famous of the succession games ever done, though there are others, such as Battlefailed, Failcannon, and .

I'm interested in doing this, especially since it requires relatively little in infrastructure to setup. I'd like to do it on SN itself, perhaps either with a shared account as journals, or just creating a new section on the site. Obviously I'm going to have to tweak the codebase to allow images, and it gives a way to help build our community out. So, if we do this, here's what we need to decide:

• What version of DF? 2012, or wait for the new release

• What type of biome?

• Any mods?

And probably some other stuff. I've been playing a fort which is at war with the elves, and I find its quite a bit of fun since you regularly get seiged, and requires that we have a badass military to survive (and there are ways, even in stock, to get military training to work and start churning out Lords and Masters relatively quickly.

I recommend we apply bugfixes to the raws such as elven treecap diplomacy, and human merchants, which seriously helps getting the supplies we need. I've had good look with Accelerated Modest Mod for bug fixes, and preventing FPS death even in crud hardware so its my vote if we just don't go vanilla. I also recommend we also use all the DFHack fixes (the patrol bug one is almost essential).

Post below if you're interested, turn list is first come, first serve, but you can sign up for a second turn after your first (likely necessary since I expect only 5-6 players). Regular updates, and timely turns are a must as well. Beyond that, the sky is the limit.

colored city flags implemented.

haven't completed unit attacking yet, but i've sort of got a placeholder for it in the code that occurs when a unit tries to move into another player unit coord (currently outputs a status indicating foreign unit)
https://github.com/crutchy-/test/blob/master/scripts/irciv.php#L902

also have set unit data for attack/defense strengths, and there's some notes about attacking @ http://wiki.soylentnews.org/wiki/IRCiv#Development_notes

implemented whois-based authentication of internal exec bot administration commands and also alias-specific account lists, and a ~civ-admin alias was added with an account list to allow easier administration tasks in a more secure manner.

administration tasks added as listed here: http://wiki.soylentnews.org/wiki/IRCiv#Administration_commands
will endeavor to document these a little better down the track. at this stage just trying to make sure i document added usage syntax somewhere so its not forgotten.

coming up next... finishing off attacking foreign units

====
pushed latest code to github: https://github.com/crutchy-/test
note: irciv.php and irciv_lib.php contain most of the game functionality and can be found in the scripts directory
latest web map demo here: http://irciv.port119.net/?pid=2

join the #civ channel in soylent irc

more info:
http://wiki.soylentnews.org/wiki/IRCiv
http://wiki.soylentnews.org/wiki/IRC:exec

"The U.S. is a living hell as elementary rights to existence are ruthlessly violated," the state news agency claims. Some countries are accustomed to U.S. reports deploring their human-rights abuses. But on Wednesday, North Korea's state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) retaliated with a human-rights report of its own titled "News Analysis on Poor Human Rights Records in US." In it, KCNA claim that the U.S. is the "world's worst human rights abuser" and a "living hell." Do the agency's claims hold up to scrutiny? Here's a fact-check of the report.

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/05/is-north-korea-right-about-us-human-rights-abuses/361589/

Spurious Correlations finds the hidden, totally pointless connections between everything

Spurious Correlations is the virtual embodiment of a useful rhetorical cudgel: correlation does not equal causation. Sift through its data sets, and you'll find all sorts of statistics that can be mapped onto each other - margarine consumption and the divorce rate, crude oil imports and number of train collision deaths, bee colony growth and the marriage rate. If you ever need to demonstrate that two things can appear connected purely by chance or some entirely separate factor, this is your site. If you need "news of the weird" fodder and are willing to play fast and loose with the facts, the charts are still technically accurate.

http://www.theverge.com/2014/5/11/5706802/spurious -correlations-finds-hidden-totally-pointless-conne ctions

http://www.tylervigen.com/

Managed to kick out the first draft of the bylaws, they're here on the wiki http://wiki.soylentnews.org/wiki/Incorporation/Bylaws for anyone who wishes to take a look. I need to fill out some more paperwork, then submit the entirity of the mess to a lawyer. I got a few recommendations, so mostly now is lawyer shopping.

Before getting into quite why Nicholas Wade's A Troublesome Inheritance-a book which argues, among other things, that Jews possess a genetic "adaptation to capitalism"-is racist, it may be worth thinking back to the summer of 2012. Viewers of the BBC's coverage of the Olympics on August 10 would have been surprised, between heats in the 200 metres, by a short video explaining how the slave trade made black people into better athletes:

http://www.newstatesman.com/future-proof/2014/05/jews-are-adapted-capitalism-and-other-nonsenses-new-scientific-racism

Radioactive kitty litter may have ruined our best hope to store nuclear waste. Billions invested in an underground New Mexico repository could be wasted because of one seemingly innocuous decision.
Some of the most dangerous nuclear waste in the US is currently scattered between 77 locations all over the country, awaiting permanent storage. Until February, many experts suggested that the best place to put it was a facility about 40 miles east of Carlsbad, New Mexico, called the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP). For 15 years, WIPP has operated as the first and only permanent, deep geologic nuclear waste storage facility in the country, holding "low level" radioactive materials - mostly clothing and tools exposed to radiation from nuclear weapons production - in steel barrels more than 2,150 feet below the Earth's surface. But earlier this year two emergencies brought that suggestion - and WIPP's future - into question. And now it seems kitty litter may be to blame.
http://www.theverge.com/2014/5/23/5742800/did-kitty-litter-just-kill-the-most-successful-nuclear-waste-facility