Word: dinosaurs
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Civil libertarians argue that the Decency Act, in the name of protecting children, criminalizes everything from safe-sex information to The Catcher in the Rye. Says Shabbir Safdar, co-founder of the activist group Voters' Telecommunications Watch: "They basically want to turn the Internet into Barney the dinosaur." The Clinton Administration opposed earlier versions of the decency bill but refused to hold up the entire telecommunications bill to get rid of it. Pressed on the issue, a defensive Vice President Al Gore told reporters, "We're obligated to administer the law, but we said from the start this particular provision...
...bubble gum and baling wire," says Pete Acadeno, a technician at New York's terminal radar approach control. Such heavily trafficked air centers as New York and Chicago rely on the IBM 9020E, a mainframe computer of 1960s vintage. Unlike modern computers, with their tidy array of microchips, this dinosaur is stuffed with thousands and thousands of feet of wire. "The technicians tell us the wires are so brittle they sometimes break when you just touch them," says Mark Scholl, president of the Chicago Center controllers' union. Wanda Geist, who heads the technicians' union at Chicago Center, says, "This computer...
With Democrats now making their presence on campus felt, some wonder whether Dartmouth's conservative tradition is still vibrant or whether it is as much a dinosaur as the snow stegosaurus erected on the green for the Winter Carnival...
...potential source of prehistoric DNA. Scientists have extracted genetic material from, among other things, a 17 million-year-old magnolia leaf, a 30 million-year-old termite and a 120 million-year-old weevil. Yet no serious biologist believes it will ever be possible to clone a dinosaur from a few bits of DNA. Even so excellent a preservative as amber apparently can't keep DNA from breaking down into fragments that may be scientifically interesting but are biologically inert. That's one reason many researchers doubt the claims of California scientists who announced last year that they had managed...
...must not forget who will pay the bills and suffer the consequences for the decisions made today. Next time you get a paycheck, pay careful attention to how much of your money you never even get to see, due to payroll taxes that are used to pay for dinosaur programs such as Medicare and Social Security. Next time the tax man comes around, pay attention to how much money you are signing over to him--and know that that figure will be much higher if we allow our country to continue to drift into economic oblivion...