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is more people like this doofus to make it look hard.

A little googling found the following.

Odds of being...
-killed in school shooting: 1,700,000 to 1 (*1)
-struck by lightning in entire life: 5,000 to 1 (*2)
-a boy sexually abused before adulthood: 6 to 1 (*3)
-a girl being sexually abused before adulthood: 4 to 1 (*3)

Without even delving into it or doing any research at all, you could probably already construe that your child is more likely to be molested by a teacher than struck by lightning or killed in a school shooting. If there are an estimated 50mil school aged children right now, fewer than 30 will be killed in a school shooting, fewer than 10,000 will be struck by lightning (in their *entire* life), and 10mil will be sexually abused.

So even if only one-tenth-of-one-percent (.001) of molestations are ever committed by teachers, that is still 10,000 -- which is more than are struck by lightning in their entire lives and far more than are killed in school shootings.

Sexual abuse is often an issue of proximity. Family, friends, mom's boyfriend, trusted authority figures with opportunity, etc. Far more often than just being abducted and molested by some random stranger in a scary white van.

Now, while exact statistics on sexual molestation done by teachers are hard to come by, the anecdotal evidence is aplenty. And remember that a lot of teachers are never reported or caught. And often when they are, the school district covers it up (you can google plenty of stories where that has happened). And, while sometimes it may be the only single offense, there are plenty of those who have molested MANY times over their careers and either never got caught at all or eventually got caught for just one. Who knows how many they molesed before being caught.

Hell, simply count how many stories you see about a teacher molesting a student in a year versus being hit by lightning. And then remember that everyone is likely to come forward about being struck by lightning, but far fewer will report molestation. Hell, I even new girls who were involved with teachers when I was in school. And even as a young adult, I still knew at least one girl who wasn't even old enough to drive but was involved with a phys-ed teacher in her district. I suspect almost everyone knew of at least one kid in school that was involved with at least one teacher.

You could spend days finding story after story about it. Here's just one drastic example of a teacher who admitted to molesting more than *200* students in ONLY THREE YEARS: http://crime.about.com/b/2006/08/06/teacher-claims-he-molested-200-students.htm

Here's a google search for "teacher accused of sex with student": http://tr.im/uYYk

Go ahead and browse through page after page after page of the 2.5 million results.

(*1) http://www.arsafeschools.com/Files/ProbabilityFactSheet.pdf
(*2) http://www.lightningsafety.noaa.gov/medical.htm
(*3) http://www.darkness2light.org/KnowAbout/statistics_2.asp

Closest answer I have to that is here. As of 2004 it's gone up 30% since 2000 and the growth rate hasn't slowed as far as I can see given that I've lived here since 2001. That might help explain why the government has increased its spending so drastically. I don't see a lot of frivolous programs here, only cities that are grappling with rapid sustained growth.

The issue here is that they need to raise taxes to support their own weight but the conservative party in this state is too stupid to realize it and the other half have no spine to push for what is needed so you end up in a stalemate resulting in even more stupid decision making.

It can have a slight effect. Much of the ice is fresh water which has a slightly lower density than sea water. So a quantity of fresh water melting into a salt ocean will raise it a (very little) bit.

http://geography.about.com/library/misc/ucghyben.htm

I get an awful lot of Spam in Russian and quite a bit in Chinese.

If you use SpamAssessin, there is an solution: It implements language detection. If mail is in a language you can't read anyway, just give it a higher score!

http://email.about.com/cs/spamassassintips/qt/et032504.htm
http://www.yrex.com/spam/spamconfig.php

/sigh

color/colour
honor/honour
herb/herb

Perhaps you need this http://esl.about.com/library/vocabulary/blbritam.htm

Umm, I never said there won't be any issues with Silverlight. In fact I bet there would be. My point is that MS seems to have finally woken up to security threats and is trying to clean up by having proper security audits to avoid many(NOT ALL) security holes. For example: http://cplus.about.com/b/2009/05/15/microsoft-security-and-cc-programming.htm http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/15/152213 This seems to be paying dividends with Vista, most of the security holes discussed over the past few weeks either flat out don't work on Vista or trigger a UAC prompt. Adobe has yet to do something like this. That's my whole point. Now if you argue that I am a (paid) shill, I have nothing to say but point you to this http://linux.slashdot.org/story/09/07/25/1757253/Linus-Calls-Microsoft-Hatred-a-Disease

[...] you can't translate gamerscore into any tangible, real world achievements.

For a while, MS was toying around with the idea if rewarding you for increasing your gamerscore.

http://xbox.about.com/b/2007/02/07/microsoft-announces-gamerscore-rewards.htm

I always thought it would be a good idea to pony up something for the gamerscore (even if it was just MS points, like 100 points for every 1000 or something).

In somewhat related news, 0% of Thanksgiving Turkeys survive getting dropped from above a parking lot.

"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly!"
-- Arthur Carlson, WKRP in Cincinnati

Running an active TCP session for an IM client constantly would light up much more of the iPhone's hardware, and drain the battery that much faster.

Well, not exactly....

An active TCP session is EXACTLY what Apple's Push Notification Service uses.

Its an extended version of ActivSync, Licensed from Microsoft.

It works like this:

You open a TCP connection with an Apple Notification server, and shutdown the radio, leaving the connection open, by never explicitly closing it. With the radio down, the phone is Saving power.

Periodically, you wake up the radio, check if the TCP socket is readable. If so, you read it, and notify the user, and optionally launch that application that the notification was destined for.

If the socket failed, (timed out, network dropped, etc) you reestablish the socket.

Since TCP timeout is usually on the order of 12 minutes or longer, this happens only about 5 times an hour.

Checking socket readability takes just a tiny bit of power for a very very short time. So your radio is on for a few seconds every hour. (Which it is anyway, listening for incoming calls).

Apple's push notification leverages this single socket connection to an unlimited number of applications in the iPhone, by having a single daemon watching the socket, signaling the target app, and notifying the user.

It operates similar to InetD in Linux, other than instead of waiting for new connections, it is watching existing ones. In fact, there is some discussion as to whether ActiveSync is even patentable because it is so obvious.

And to be perfectly pedantic, Antennas do not consume any power when receiving.

Do first thing's first.

Putting a man on Mars, while definitely cool, could easily be just another "been there, done that" vacation from steady progress, like the later Apollo missions were.

Beginning an assessment of lunar resources is the next significant step we can take. What is up there? Anything that we can use as rocket fuel, or as structural material? Can concrete prefabs made of lunar regolith be shipped down to LEO for use in stone space stations at a lower cost than sending exotic materials up from Earth? That's actually likely. Also, while the Moon is very poor in heavy elements in general, it has been collecting meteors for a few billion years: are there any local deposits of iron and nickel that we could use? Something just 0.35% the size of New Jersey (equivalent to the Mesabi Range of Minnesota)? That is a pretty small dot on a lunar map, but just one find like that would provide enough high grade steel for more than a hundred years of spaceship manufacture. How about other minerals? Is there a rich splash of pitchblend nodules near the surface of the regolith in some lunar sea?

We will need the equivalent of several Lewis and Clark expeditions to begin to estimate the potential up there. Much of this will be done by robots, but it makes sense to have many of these robots under the control of lunar explorers, who could easily do first hand inspections of unexpected findings. The explorers would be also experimenting with how to live under conditions that are harsher than Mars in many ways, but also much easier to support from Earth when problems arise.

At the same time we are exploring the Moon, we can be putting more robots on Mars, and sending more satellites to rendezvous with near Earth objects of interest. Perhaps we will find that we can use lunar resources to reduce the costs of these other programs. There are certainly things the Moon experience can teach us that will help make these other probes, and the eventual manned Mars station, more successful.

make lying to a judge a crime.

That single crime would take 50% of all US prison capacity.

The terms confused me for a long time, but the dictionaries are pretty consistent.

Perhaps you are confused, because you obviously haven't looked at them.

Many dictionaries support a range of definitions for atheism, not just those who believe God doesn't exist, but also those who reject belief, disbelieve, with some going so far as to cover anyone lacking belief. There are at least three definitions of "atheism":

* Lack of belief (also called implicit)
* Rejection of belief (also called explicit weak)
* Belief in non-existence (also called explicit strong).

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/40634/atheism - "The varieties of atheism are numerous, but all atheists reject such a set of beliefs."

http://www.answers.com/atheism gives "Disbelief in or denial", and lists that separate to "The doctrine that there is no God or gods"; Philosophy Dictionary says "Either the lack of belief that there exists a god, or the belief that there exists none".

And I don't know of any dictionary that supports your definition of agnosticism. Agnosticism means that you either don't know if God exists, or you claim God's existence is unknowable. See http://www.answers.com/agnosticism : "The belief that there can be no proof either that God exists or that God does not exist." Even if we did only accept the "strong" definition of atheism, it is still completely incorrect to misuse "agnostic" to mean a lack of belief. Instead, we'd just end up with no word for people who didn't believe in God - hardly a useful situation.

Also see http://atheism.about.com/od/aboutagnosticism/a/atheism.htm .

But most people who say they are Atheist are actually Agnostic and are just not using the standard English definitions.

They're not using the definitions that you made up, you mean. In reality, most people who claim they are agnostic are actually atheists, as shown by my dictionary refererences.

But who cares - the point is that they don't believe in God, that's more important than quibbling over definitions. It astonishes me how eager agnostics (at least, I bet you are?) are to criticise people who identify as atheists, and either claim they are using the wrong word, or absurdly claim that they are "in the same boat as the theist". On the contrary, it is agnostics who believe something without evidence (i.e., the claim that God cannot be proven nor disproven).

"Modern operating systems don't protect you from: Oops. Didn't mean to delete that."

Honestly, I've never accidentally deleted something that couldn't be recovered.

"Oops, my wife/kids didn't mean to delete that."

Best solution for that is a second PC. I bought a used 2.4ghz IBM for $65 and a slightly damaged 19" LCD for $50 on Craigslist. That's probably about the same price as the external 1 terabyte drive and far more convenient than taking it off-site, and you could just backup files across the network to that PC.

"A bug in the new release of Gnomovision ate my existing Gnomovision files."

Virtual PC

"Break-ins, electronic or otherwise. Your hard drive eats itself. Fire, flood, etc."

All very rare, but there's always that chance...

Honestly my dream backup solution has always been a low-power PC on a UPS inside a fire-proof cabinet in my attic. Unfortunately I didn't think 802.11g was up to the task with only 54mbps, but now that wireless-N's 300mbps is practically here I think this might be the year.

Right. We don't know where they come from, exactly how high they are, or exactly what they are made of, but we know god damed well they are caused by man made global warming.

Never mind they may be the very thing cooling the earth by reflecting more sunlight/heat into space than their thinness could possibly trap below.

If you ask me, since its seen so rarely, its probably the Big Splash.
http://geology.about.com/od/wildgeotheories/a/aa_smallcomets.htm

Why the non sequitur about some other black inventor? Apparently, Carver only applied for 3 patents, so that line of thought is also a non sequitur:

http://inventors.about.com/od/cstartinventors/a/GWC.htm

Nice Job.

Try telling that to George Washington Carver while you're eating a peanut-butter sandwich. :D

History is a highly mutable thing. (Apparently the inventor of something no longer matters, only who patented it. Is the world ending yet? I want off, but I don't want to miss anything) :P

It's her daughters placenta.

Tasteless!!

Hmmm... I've heard it's actually quite tasty.

There is a multimillion dollar demand in Asian countries for, among other pieces of the tigers, the male tiger penis. It is seen in many Asian cultures as a sacred aphrodisiac.

The thing about a lot of Chinese herbal remedies is that the ones have a big fuss made over them, were the ones recommended for the Emperor and the aristocracy.

You know what's also supposed to be a good medicine for building yang in Chinese medicine? Walnuts. But that's clearly not good enough, not special and unique enough, for some royal bastard. You're an important guy, you have to go have some sentient being killed to prove it. And then because you are an important guy, everyone else wants to follow in your footsteps.

(Of course, the same applies in our culture. Know what's a good treatment for heart disease? A diet based around whole plant foods, exercise, and stress reduction. But that's clearly not good enough, not special and unique enough, for some master-of-the-universe type. You're an important guy, you have to go treat your body like shit until you need the bypass surgery -- despite the fact that its benefits are questionable. But at least with bypass surgery, your death or your case of "pump head" only directly affects you, whereas using tiger penis to treat your impotence has a hell of an impact on the tiger.)

"My youngest cat is not de-clawed as it is a experiment."

Sorry but WTF? where I live de-clawing would be considered abuse of an animal and illegal. Is this a normal procedure somewhere?
Why would anyone de-claw a cat? All cat's can be trained to not claw furniture etc, and I have yet to see a domesticated cat to be dangerous because of their claws.

Top Reasons NOT to Declaw a Cat

Thing is, cats *aren't* domesticated. They only pretend to be when it suits their purposes.

Of course they're domesticated. Don't be an ass.

Domesticated dogs and horses take their instructions from human masters. Cats, as a rule, don't.

Only becase their owners can't be bothered or are too stupid to realize it's quite easy.

I've owned five cats in my life, and three dogs, and as a general rule there's nothing preventing you from training a cat to "take instruction" (although it's possible to find untrainable cats, just like you can find untrainable dogs.)

A dog is a social animal. His whole life is focused around *you*. A cat is altogether a different beast.

No. Cats form sophisticated social structures similar to, but distinct from dogs. They are social creatures. Just because the majority of cat owners are elitist asses who don't want to acknowledge this doesn't make it false.

A cat does what it wants, when it wants. You can try to teach it stuff, but as a rule the cat doesn't cooperate, so you can never really be sure what it's learned and what it hasn't.

*sigh* Could you please provide some scientific backing for your claims?

So, while the proper way for a Berlin native to say "I am a Berliner" is "Ich bin Berliner," the proper way for a non-native to make the same statement metaphorically is precisely what Kennedy said: "Ich bin ein Berliner." In spite of the fact that it's also the correct way to say "I am a jelly donut," no adult German speaker could possibly have misunderstood Kennedy's meaning in context.

The 'C' in NIC stands for 'Controller', not 'Card'.

some people, including 3Com and Cisco, disagree with you.

Stop it! Stop justifying obesity by giving fatties excuses! The general public is dumb enough to actually be grossly overweight in the first place, do you really think they need to repeatedly hear people say things like "well, some lucky bastards are just born with a high metabolism!", "Being large is beautiful!", "Beauty comes form the inside, there is nothing wrong with beeing plus sized"?

Fact is, you CAN'T gain weight if you put less energy into your system than you expend! Finding an online basal metabolic rate calculator isn't very hard either. Now, if you can't be arsed to learn anything about how your body works, spend 5 minutes with Google to find a BMR calculator and pay attention to how much you actually eat... Live a life unable to go to the beach, make people uncomfortable when you undress at the beach, get diabetes type 2 and die of heart complications at age 40.

Just don't force that on your children. If you do, you should be reported for child abuse.

On a somewhat related note.. I live in Norway and I can safely say that even though we are nowhere near USA level of crazy obesity, things are starting to change here as well. 7-8 years ago when I was in highschool, there were <5 overweight people in my entire school of ~300 students. These days, nearly everyone I see between age 15-19 is at least 5-10kg overweight. Hell, even the ones who happen to eat as much as they burn still look out of shape with girls sporting untrained thin thighs and flabby asses and the guys possessing the same level of upper body strength as my little sister! The exceptions are the morbidly obese and the sickly skinny, who seem to make up about the same percentage of the population now as the "10kg too much"-portion did a few years ago. Not "super size me" by any means, but still that is a lot different than a few years back!

Since the dawn of gpm...

Not everybody uses Emacs or VI, and some prefer GVim, which fully supports the mouse.

For some kind of activities, such as the highlighting of square blocks of text, the mouse is faster and more efficient that the keyboard.

Obviously, for everything else you should memorize key shortcuts.

but in CA, it's illegal to use a 'nav system' in a car without it being permanently mounted (IIRC)

not anymore and it was only a ban on windshield mounted devices.

In late September, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law Senate Bill 1567, the GPS Windshield Safety Act, which permits the mounting of portable GPS units in specific areas of vehicle windshields. Windshield mounting was previously illegal in California, and those who ignored the law were sometimes ticketed and fined $108 for "obstructed windshield" violations. California drivers take note: the new law does not take effect until January 1, 2009.

The patent for the first laser was apparently granted in 1959, so if GP was 8 or 9 at the time, it would be before the bonneville in question. Wow... I feel young ;-)

Cheers

They're also working to develop a process that allows the transformation of gold into lead.

Actually, not to surprise bubble... But It has been done via nuclear transmutation in labs since the 1970s.

Before you get your science kits together to make it rich there are three caveats.

One... It requires a nuclear reactor.
Two... It products only a few atoms of gold far less than the cost of energy to make.
Three... The Gold is radioactive.

But if you got a nuclear reactor and plenty of urianium and mercury to burn, go right ahead.

As long as they don't invent a device that opens jars, we're safe. What? NNNOOOoooo!!!

Your ability to rapidly learn new things drops drastically after the age of about 18 months and everything else starts to decay after that.

No one is going to force you.

Yes, they are. The most common incandescent bulbs will be illegal to sell in 5 years.

"If neither of the two is itself illegal, then prima facie the combination is not illegal."

But your Honor !!! Pseudoephedrine is not illegal. Ammonia is not illegal. All these other chemicals the police confiscated are legal too! All did was was combine them! I should be set free immediately! If you don't believe me,just ask any mathematician!

Why do you insist on posting your own fantasies as if they had anything to do with the truth?

Have you told Penn State College of Agricultures Diary and Animal Science you know more than they do yet?

The UMass link you provide says nothing about greenhouses gases. The closest it comes to the word "gas" is "gasketing". And though the other link does us "gas" and "carbon dioxide" it says nothing about whether greenhouse gases, which is not used.

You have provided no links to evidence to support your position but I have, including the Penn State link above which you obviously did not read or you're just acting like a troll. Just in case you're not trolling here are some more links:

• What is the Greenhouse Effect?
• Water Vapor Confirmed as Major Player in Climate Change
• Greenhouse Gases, Climate Change, and Energy
• Greenhouse Gas Emissions
• Greenhouse Gas Emissions in the Everglades: The Role of Hydrologic Conditions

Now unless you provide links to support your position I can only conclude you are trolling. And the 2 links you did provide did not do so.

Falcon

I'm sorry, but you have not sourced your statement at all. You claim that growers add CO2 to greenhourses in order to raise the temperature.

They do not. They add CO2 since it makes the plants grow better.

They do, and I did provide a source, but I guess your selective reading field distorted reality around you because you missed what was said in the Penn State link I provided. Mainly this: "Greenhouse gases are so-called because they act to warm the earth in the same way that a greenhouse warms plants." Also try this, "What Causes the Greenhouse Effect?". Notice where it says:

"Although greenhouse gases make up only about 1 percent of the Earth's atmosphere, they regulate our climate by trapping heat and holding it in a kind of warm-air blanket that surrounds the planet."

"This phenomenon is what scientists call the "greenhouse effect." Without it, scientists estimate that the average temperature on Earth would be colder by approximately 30 degrees Celsius (54 degrees Fahrenheit), far too cold to sustain our current ecosystem.'

Simply greenhouse gases trap heat inside greenhouses raising temperatures.

And while carbon dioxide helps some plants grow faster such as poison ivy [pdf warning] it also slows the growth of other plants.

Falcon

$40k? I know clearances aren't cheap, but even assuming a total overhead rate of 500% and $50k/year that works out to 320 hours worth of work. It's certainly the correct order of magnitude, but I'm willing to bet it costs less than half of that. Furthermore, in my experience, limited to graduate studies at a single university, most engineering professors have held clearances at some point in their lives, and the re-investigation is much cheaper than the first investigation. And several of these clearances were paid for by defense companies that the professors have consulted with at some point in their careers. And just for fun, I googled it: http://usmilitary.about.com/cs/generalinfo/a/security2_4.htm. The cost according to this article, for top secret clearance, is $3-15k.

The contract is clearly worth more than $6k, and the summary clearly states only that the professor was paid $6k. You think the entire contract went to one person? Professors tend to consult at the high level, helping the company determine what approach they will use, checking up on the peons to make sure everything is going well, not getting into the details that less expensive people will attend to. The contract as a whole would almost certainly have been worth at least $50k, and that's at the low end of Phase I research.

Wow.. just Wow. What the fuck has happened to the US? What happened to free speech?

Nothing.

Free speech in American law is rooted in a tradition of unconstrained political debate without fear of government interference.

That is why Norman Rockwell in his "Four Freedoms" series chose the New England town meeting as his model. Freedom of Speech [1943]

The notion that all speech is protected speech has never taken hold.

"Contemporary community standards" is shorthand for saying that society as a whole has the right and the power to set limits.

To decide what it chooses to be and where it chooses to go.

You just unwittingly proved my point while displaying your own ignorance.

Yes, carbon is needed for plant growth, however that does not mean carbon dioxide doesn't need to be pumped into greenhouses for that. Soil and fertilizer does contain carbon. And CO2 is pumped into greenhouses in part to raise temperatures. Perhaps I should have included this link, "What is the Greenhouse Effect? which says:

"Although greenhouse gases make up only about 1 percent of the Earth's atmosphere, they regulate our climate by trapping heat and holding it in a kind of warm-air blanket that surrounds the planet."

"This phenomenon is what scientists call the "greenhouse effect." Without it, scientists estimate that the average temperature on Earth would be colder by approximately 30 degrees Celsius (54 degrees Fahrenheit), far too cold to sustain our current ecosystem."

It is very, very well-known in the science community that the term "greenhouse gas" is a misnomer.

It's well known in greenhouse gardening that greenhouse gases make greenhouses warmer than without them, because they trap heat. This is one way how growers are able to grow tomatoes in greenhouses in Scandinavia where it's too cold to grow them outdoors.

Seriously, just google "greenhouse misnomer" and you'll find many hits that explain it further. I will now accept your apology.

Seriously google greenhouses gases heat as well as greenhouses gases trap heat. Go further, add science From Penn State College of Agricultural Science "However, greenhouse gases trap solar heat in earth's atmosphere, preventing it from being reflected away and causing an overall temperature increase.". Now I'll accept your apology.

Falcon

Growers also pump carbon dioxide into greenhouses to warm them. "What is the Greenhouse Effect?" from About says:

"Although greenhouse gases make up only about 1 percent of the Earth's atmosphere, they regulate our climate by trapping heat and holding it in a kind of warm-air blanket that surrounds the planet."

"This phenomenon is what scientists call the "greenhouse effect." Without it, scientists estimate that the average temperature on Earth would be colder by approximately 30 degrees Celsius (54 degrees Fahrenheit), far too cold to sustain our current ecosystem."

Falcon

I was so disappointed the first day I figured out that one:
http://caloriecount.about.com/calories-ice-creams-vanilla-i19095 - vanilla icecream is 145 "calories" per 72g.
If we assume it's mostly water, and it's at zero degrees - then the definition of a 'calorie' is the amount of energy needed to raise one gram of water by 1 degree. So... zero degrees to 37, 72 grams of 'water' - 2664 calories needed! Ice cream is NEGATIVE energy food.
This of course, ends up way less attractive when you add in the 'k' :)

Oops... I forgot to add that some of them even contain caffeine if you want. And your fruit juice? Those often have more calories than soda. An 8oz serving of OJ is 120 calories, so that's 15 calories per ounce, where a 150 calorie 12oz soda is only 12.5. The juice has more nutrients and is better for your nutrition, but it is NOT in any way a "lite" alternative to soda or other sugary drinks.

Caveat: Your question was essentially time- management-themed. This answer is slightly off-topic: Assuming you just can't drag yourself out there to burn off calories, attack the problem from the other direction.

You're on slashdot. You must have at least some hacker mentality. Take the rules you're stuck with and work around them.

1. No time to exercise
2. Your body needs x calories per day to maintain its weight
3. If you eat more than x, you gain weight
4. If you eat less than x, you lose weight

Go to http://walking.about.com/cs/calories/l/blcalcalc.htm and punch in your stats as "sedentary". The resulting number is your target. Keep a spreadsheet where you track all of the calories you consume. (Get this data from the label or from restaurant Web sites.) Consume fewer than x, or at least no more than x.

You'll be surprised how many calories there are in the foods you eat. Some macro tips:

1. Lots of soluble fiber--makes you feel fuller longer

2. Diet soda only--for obvious reasons

3. Reduce sugar overall--your body's insulin response to sugar can make you feel hungry even when you're not

4. Drink lots of water--makes you feel fuller longer

I have had several jobs with hours that left me too tired or busy to exercise. This method has always worked for me. There are also online calculators to determine how many calories you burned by exercising for x minutes, so factor that into your equilibrium point if you do manage to work out.

"Meanwhile, the average weight for men aged 20-74 years rose dramatically from 166.3 pounds in 1960 to 191 pounds in 2002, while the average weight for women the same age increased from 140.2 pounds in 1960 to 164.3 pounds in 2002."
http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/healthcare/a/tallbutfat.htm

You know what I meant, don't be deliberately obtuse. Edmonton has a million people... most people would agree that that's a "city". The only place further north that comes close to being a major city would be Anchorage at 350k, but that's obviously much further north and off the beaten path, as it were.

Dont' be silly. According to your pseudo-definition of a city being least 1 million people, that would mean that in 1950, there were only 83 cities on the whole planet. And only 12 in 1900. and even today, only 411 in the whole world. http://www.prb.org/Educators/TeachersGuides/HumanPopulation/Urbanization.aspx

Your definition would mean that the US currently has only 9 cities http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population.

I think most of the world would disagree with your definition of a city. Here's a definition for you http://geography.about.com/library/faq/blqzcitytown.htm

Here's the definition of an "urban area" http://geography.about.com/library/weekly/aa060997.htm. Notice how it varies depending on locale.

In Sweden and Denmark, a village of 200 people is counted as an "urban" population but it takes a city of 30,000 in Japan. Most other countries fall somewhere in between. Australia and Canada use 1000, Israel and France use 2000 and the United States and Mexico call a town of 2500 residents urban.

Or this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City#The_difference_between_towns_and_cities - note that NO country uses 1,000,000 as the definition of a city. Many have no formal definition, others vary from as small as 5 people (US) up.

In New Zealand, according to Statistics New Zealand (the government statistics agency), "A city [...] must have a minimum population of 50,000

Brazilian law defines a "city" (cidade) as the urban seat of a municipality and establishes no difference between cities and towns; all it takes for an urban area to be legally called a "city" is to be the seat of a municipality, and some of them are semi-rural settlements with a very small population.

In Canada the granting of city status is handled by the individual provinces and territories, so that the definitions and criteria vary widely across the country. In British Columbia and Saskatchewan towns can become cities after they reach a population of 5,000 people, but in Alberta and Ontario the requirement is 10,000. Nova Scotia has abolished the title of city altogether, In Quebec, there is no legal distinction between a city and a town

There is a formal definition of city in China provided by the Chinese government. For an urban area that can be defined as a city, there should be at least 100,000 non-agricultural population.

Chile's Department of National Statistics defines a city (ciudad in Spanish) as an urban entity with more than 5,000 inhabitants

Venezuela's Department of National Statistics defines a city (ciudad in Spanish) as an urban entity with more than 5,000 inhabitants.

The German word for both "town" and "city" is Stadt, while a city with more than 100,000 inhabitants is called a Großstadt (big city).

Italy: There is no population limit for a city

Norway: The status of "city" is granted by the local authorities if a request for city status has been made and the area has a population of at least 5000

There has traditionally been no formal distinction betw

You know what I meant, don't be deliberately obtuse. Edmonton has a million people... most people would agree that that's a "city". The only place further north that comes close to being a major city would be Anchorage at 350k, but that's obviously much further north and off the beaten path, as it were.

Dont' be silly. According to your pseudo-definition of a city being least 1 million people, that would mean that in 1950, there were only 83 cities on the whole planet. And only 12 in 1900. and even today, only 411 in the whole world. http://www.prb.org/Educators/TeachersGuides/HumanPopulation/Urbanization.aspx

Your definition would mean that the US currently has only 9 cities http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population.

I think most of the world would disagree with your definition of a city. Here's a definition for you http://geography.about.com/library/faq/blqzcitytown.htm

Here's the definition of an "urban area" http://geography.about.com/library/weekly/aa060997.htm. Notice how it varies depending on locale.

In Sweden and Denmark, a village of 200 people is counted as an "urban" population but it takes a city of 30,000 in Japan. Most other countries fall somewhere in between. Australia and Canada use 1000, Israel and France use 2000 and the United States and Mexico call a town of 2500 residents urban.

Or this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City#The_difference_between_towns_and_cities - note that NO country uses 1,000,000 as the definition of a city. Many have no formal definition, others vary from as small as 5 people (US) up.

In New Zealand, according to Statistics New Zealand (the government statistics agency), "A city [...] must have a minimum population of 50,000

Brazilian law defines a "city" (cidade) as the urban seat of a municipality and establishes no difference between cities and towns; all it takes for an urban area to be legally called a "city" is to be the seat of a municipality, and some of them are semi-rural settlements with a very small population.

In Canada the granting of city status is handled by the individual provinces and territories, so that the definitions and criteria vary widely across the country. In British Columbia and Saskatchewan towns can become cities after they reach a population of 5,000 people, but in Alberta and Ontario the requirement is 10,000. Nova Scotia has abolished the title of city altogether, In Quebec, there is no legal distinction between a city and a town

There is a formal definition of city in China provided by the Chinese government. For an urban area that can be defined as a city, there should be at least 100,000 non-agricultural population.

Chile's Department of National Statistics defines a city (ciudad in Spanish) as an urban entity with more than 5,000 inhabitants

Venezuela's Department of National Statistics defines a city (ciudad in Spanish) as an urban entity with more than 5,000 inhabitants.

The German word for both "town" and "city" is Stadt, while a city with more than 100,000 inhabitants is called a Großstadt (big city).

Italy: There is no population limit for a city

Norway: The status of "city" is granted by the local authorities if a request for city status has been made and the area has a population of at least 5000

There has traditionally been no formal distinction betw

The value of those shoes can't be destroyed by the government printing presses.

Yes, but their illiquidity makes them a poor medium of trade.

I don't understand your comment implying parent has no economic understanding. It sounds like his understanding of economics is what is driving his issue with paper currency.

I'm sure you're right, on both counts.

The OP is flat-out wrong regarding the constitution. The word "gold" appears exactly once, prohibiting the states from coining their own money. It's left to congress to "coin money and regulate the value thereof", full stop. Simple words, not scare tactics.

It's impossible to explain even a tiny part of one Econ 101 lecture in a /. comment. Reference material isn't hard to find for anyone interested enough to want to learn.

The value of money, like anything else, is subject to supply and demand. As the economy grows — through population and productivity — the money supply has to growth with it. If it doesn't, the value of money increases, which by definition is deflation. (Even gold bugs have to agree with that proposition because they're always the ones talking about the opposite: "debasing" the money i.e. inflation.)

Deflation is a whole subject its own. The basic problem is that banking stops because interest rates are (again, by definition) negative, and no one will deposit money in an account that pays negative rates. It also means your mortgage payments effectively increase, because the bank has the money and you're selling your crops (or earning your wage) at ever-decreasing rates.

The basic problem with the so-called gold standard is that there's only so much gold. The gold supply can't grow with the economy, forcing deflation and its attendant deleterious effects. That effect is more pronounced the faster the economy grows. In the 19th century the US economy experienced high growth — through both immigration and productivity growth as a function of the Industrial Revolution — and in fact suffered four depressions (culminating of course in the Great Depression early in the 20th). These were all in part attributable to the inability (and lack of understanding for the need) to increase the money supply.

But don't take my word for it. We haven't had a depression since 1937. Living standards have improved, measurably, in many ways. The system has flaws, sure, but it works. By contrast, no country has a gold standard today. That doesn't mean it's untested; it was tested by many countries over many years, including by the US. And was found not to work! A simple, obvious, plain fact the gold bugs choose to ignore.

It might also have to do with your master eye.

Oh, you mean like this?

FTA:

Eye dominance has been shown to have no effect on sporting performance, and articles to the contrary are based on 'urban myth'.

The Lancet survey is bullshit. I saw the methodology they used. Their number is based on "We polled this small group and they all knew somebody who was killed, extrapolating from that to the total population of Iraq we get this humungous number." Overlooking the fact that their sample was unlikely to be representative of Iraq outside of the urban area they chose, they also didn't control for those "somebody who was killed" being the same person in the case of more than one respondent.
This source puts the count at 900,000 Iraqis killed under Saddam Hussein. http://middleeast.about.com/od/usmideastpolicy/a/me090424b.htm

http://geography.about.com/library/weekly/aa021400a.htm

Anyone familiar with Japanese history would understand Japanese poking constant fun of the Russians, their neighbors. Russia is a bit of a sore spot to Japan since they are still disputing sovereignty of mineral rich islands that Russia claimed as a results of Japan losing WWII. It doesn't help that Japanese culture has been known as being a bit on the racist and xenophobic side.

the international banks removed the last vestige of gold standard from the U.S. dollar? (Nixon had done it officially

Before Nixon did, FDR took the US off the gold standard. FDR outlawed private ownership of gold. What Nixon did was end the Bretton Woods system whereby national governments and international organizations could trade gold for dollars.

Without a standard, there is "freedom" to print money pretty much at will.

Fiat money.

In any case, whata it boils down to is that while metal prices might fluctuate, a standard is still necessary. Even metals are a better standard than none at all.

Instead of a standard based on gold or another commodity the standard could be a mix of commodities, such as a blend of precious metals and gems as well as food crops.

Falcon

Bozeman, Montana is now requiring all applicants for city jobs to furnish Internet account information for 'background checking.'

Montana is crazy about background checks. For example, faculty job applicants at University of Montana must agree to a background check even to interview for a job (http://www.umt.edu/jobs/FAC/apfe.html).

Only in Montana can one buy a handgun with no more than a driver's license (http://crime.about.com/od/gunlawsbystate/a/gunlaws_mt.htm), but must go through a full background check to give a talk at the university.