funny i was going to say that about the right... then they start mentioning the second amendment in a menacing way... does wonders for an open dialog.

The land is managed by the BLM.

i know this is slashdot where talking out of your ass gets you modded as insightful but this is just too stupid to pass by.

you've clearly never been to the event and have no appreciation of its history. i grew up in reno i went for the first time in 1996. at that time there were only 8,000 people (at least according to wikipedia) last year there were 49,500. there's absolutely no way you can scale that without changing the rules. i remember talking to people that we upset that there was no more drive by shooting range. there was a rave camp a mile from central camp and everyone drove their cars around. and that year three people in a tent got run over by a car, so the next year only art cars were allowed and a speed limit imposed.

they don't make rules just to make rules. the rules are either: a) responses to clear problems to keeping the ever increasing number of people from killing each other b) imposed by the counties (washoe and pershing) or blm in order to obtain the permits.

I've got a Heathkit H19 dumb terminal on my desk that's hooked up to my MacMini via serial-to-USB converter.

I don't do a lot of "work" with it but I wrote a Ruby script for it to talk to iTunes via AppleScript and grab the album art then pass that through ImageMagick to bump the contrast then convert it to ASCII text using jp2a.

You can see some pictures: http://www.flickr.com/photos/drewish/tags/h19/
Or checkout the Ruby script: http://github.com/drewish/textFlow/tree/master

"Over here, we (at least we did) believe in personal resposibility, the individual, and taking care of your own."

I had to laugh at that. For the last sixty years the idea seems to have been take credit for the successes and blame the failures on bad luck then ask for a bailout.

I think you'd have a hard time finding an example of "good" colonizers but you seemed to have picked up the wrong end of 3.5 stripe's comment. You're looking at their profit while he's looking at the effects on the people in the countries where those profits were generated.

Admiral Adama never would have let that happen on his ship.