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Some things just don't mix. But...

If you want to get used to crackers pretending to do ghetto music, you can start here. Warning: psychological councelling may be needed after 2 or 3 listenings.

Gee, what next? Snoop Dogg playing Sounds of Slashdot?

Not even the NIH which seeds most scientific research in the US will fund a project to completion.

The NIH or at least the National cancer Institute, part of the NIH, funds to completion or at least most of the way. An example is Taxol. Taxol was developed by the NCI from the Pacific Yew tree for the treatment of breast cancer and is being looked at for others as well. The NCI spent more than $50 million to develop it and yet sold the rights for a mere pittance to Bristle Myers Squib, BMS. Though the price of it has gotten down to $.07 per milligram BMS sales it for more than $180 per milligram and has made $Billions from the sales of Taxol. Quite simply both taxpayers and cancer patients are getting ripped off. Here's an article from the Wall Street Journal on it, U.S. Recovers Only $35 Million Of $183 Million Spent on Taxol.

I had a cell phone that was too small in that the buttons were impossible for me to press with my (sausage like) fingers without messing up.

Beep-Beep-Beep - The fingers you've used to dial are too fat. To obtain a special dialing wand, please mash the keypad with your palm now...

- Recorded message in a Simpsons episode when Homer gains too much weight and tries to use the phone.

No. It's not reasonable for them to restrict access to web pages during contract negotiations. But (as has been previously mentioned) this is not censorship. The issue here may very well be breach of contract. If I were a customer of this ISP and I was arbitrarily blocked from any website by ISP policy, I would be looking at my Terms of Service to determine when and where it said they could do that. If it wasn't there, I'd be demanding my money back for every day that they were in breach of the agreement which I paid for. And then there's always small claims court.

But, this is not censorship. This is a service that you pay for and you expect to be delivered to you. Additionally, the union has absolutely no expectation of delivery to customers of that telco. If they did, then services like safeaccess couldn't exist. Every pornographer in the world could run around and demand that parents allow thier children to view porn.

Is this unreasonable? Yes. And it will likely cost them (lost customers, time fighting with annoyed customers, small claims court).

Sorry, but bats aren't blind.

Mod parent -1 Takes-Idioms-Literally.

Ford ripped off Panhard & Levassor, the unoriginal SOB.

Well shucks, every dingbat with a bicycle shop was building cars at some point... hence Chevy, Dodge, Lincoln et al.

Um, I've forgotten what my point was. Oh, yes. France Pwns Ford!!1!

That's an interesting question...and it really depends on the price elasticity of supply and the price elasticity of demand for those products. Elasticity is a very interesting phenomenon in economics. (More info here.) Basically, any change in price can have any one of three outcomes (increase, decrease, or remain the same) for the total revenue of a company, depending on the elasticities of supply and demand. For instance, if the price elasticity of demand for a product is elastic (rather than inelastic or unit elastic), a decrease in price will increase total revenue.

My guess (without knowing the elasticy coefficients for the products and any other factors involved) is that a moderate decrease in price would cause the total revenue for the product to remain the same, as any increase in sales would be offset by people who would pirate the software at any price.

Good point. From this article

Air conditioning and/or electrical loads (headlights, heated back glass, etc.) also result in lower fuel economy (typically less than 1 mpg difference, each 10 Amps takes approximately .4 mpg).

So how are they going to squeeze an extra 4 mpg? Did the judge even check the numbers or verify the claims. I pity the poor kids who actually did their homework and got the math right but were edge out because they did not make wild ass claims.

A someone pointed out above you would need about 150 Amps at 12 Volts to provide a meager level of cooling. So using the above numbers .4 mpg/10 Amps x 150 ~ 6 MPG's. So this system would decrease the mileage significantly.

All this reinforces is the concept that fudging the math and the results can really pay off.

Enjoy your own medicine billy boy!

Bollocks. "While the precise origins of chopsticks are unknown (the first chopsticks may have been twigs used to spear a roast cooked over an open fire) they were definitely in use by the Shang dynasty (1766 BC - 1122 BC)."

Anders Hejlsberg, chief guru at Borland, driving force behind the coolest features of the Delphi language, was lured to Microsoft. As a result, some of C#'s coolest language features like properties look suspiciously like those of Delphi. Really, C# is the result of picking the best bits from Java and Delphi.

http://delphi.about.com/od/delphifornet/a/conspira cydnet_2.htm

So maybe we'll be dethroned as having The most overweight teens because of the global obesity problem

well, what would you rather have a country of obese programmers who die of heart disease at age 40? or some of our smarter more talented people going into teaching kids how to exercise and diet properly, so they can lead longer heathier lives.

I guess gates would rather have the former... and rely on computers to design the medical technology to replace a 'frail' human cardiovascular system ith a 'easily replacable' mechanical system..

"I think you're thinking of washing machines much older than 30 years."

Fair enough, but not that much over 30 years.
Maytag still made residential wringer washers in the 1980s. I've seen wringer washers in use at service stations; they are good for cleaning work overalls and grease rags, particularly in situations where you must drain the wastewater somewhere other than the city sewer. They are efficient because they use much less water, on the order of hundreds of gallons per load.

http://frugalliving.about.com/cs/laundry/a/030700. htm

Plastic can be made from lots of different oils, not just petroleum. George Washington Carver managed to convert peanut oil to plastic.

I work for Disney World IT - here's the non "We're local news so let's see how sensationalist we can make this" story.

The scanners have been used for years (at least for the past six that I remember) for Annual Pass holders, for maybe two years for people who work there, and just recently was expanded to have everyone use it with the introduction of the "Magic Your Way" tickets. It's old technology, and simply looks at the top of fingers for hand geometry, then stores a hash with that unique ticket ID (which comes from the magnetic stripe on the card). The data is stored only until the ticket expires. Anyone who's actually seen the scanners in real life can confirm that there's simply a flat retro-reflective surface that you place your fingers on so the imager above can get a good view of the hand shape.

The system is used to prevent swapping of tickets between people, simply as a replacement for showing some sort of photo-id with your name on it. You don't have to use it - just ask to show a photo ID that matches the name on your ticket instead. The acceptable margin of error is turned very wide in order to keep the system running quickly - maybe 10 out of 100 people could pass as you.

The reason that this hit the news is because the system has been expanded (starting around January, I think) so that now everyone uses it. The reasoning behind this (pushed by finance) is that there's a real problem with people buying and selling multi-day tickets that have unused days on them on eBay and those discount ticket stalls you see in Kissimmee and on I-Drive. The only way to check how many days are left on a pass is to scan it on a reader attached to the Disney ticket system - which only exist on Disney property. People were getting ripped off, buying tickets that the seller swore had days on them, only to find that they've got a useless piece of paper.

Oh, and to those who worry that Disney would use this data to somehow track or follow or gather more data about folks - Disney's like any other big company. Different departments don't talk to each other enough and like to keep their dealings to themselves. I'm not sure ticketing, operations, IE, and finance could actually get their heads together enough to do something evil like everyone's ranting about. I've been in meetings with these folks, they know that if they were actually doing the "evil" things that everyone was ranting about, it wouldn't fly.

How many more Germans died durring the Fire storm than in the bombing of Dresden? than in a single A bome strike on Japan?? Eh?
71,879 at Hiroshima
> 200,000 at Dresden
http://militaryhistory.about.com/cs/worldwar2/a/dr esdenfirestor.htm

It's interesting work. It's a lot like this but the memory feature described in the article makes it very unique. I can't wait for the day I can plug my own personal electronic newspaper into some public outlet to get the newspaper. Better yet, getting this in schools will save a lot of children from back pains.

There's a sequel of sorts to X-COM coming out this summer for the Game Boy Advance. It's made by the same people and it has similar graphics.

It's kind of interesting, really. The old days of gaming haven't gone away, they're just hiding, in handheld land where the machinery is still weak...

If you read the article, you'd know that they use 3 pounds of coffee beans for every pound of pasta. No wonder they're so productive, they never sleep!

Or maybe that the coffee is needed to make up for the pasta?

When Fraunhofer started using other technologies in their development, in 1987, how long did patents last? 17 years. Why would they have had any expectation of retaining their exclusivity on their MP3 patents any longer than that? Because they were motivated to invent, even with those terms of exclusivity. The later patent law term extensions played no part whatsoever in motivating them to invent, and publish their invention under protection. They received their US patent 11/26/96. So they'd have about 8 years left now to exploit it. That certainly seems generous, especially for software, which not only expires in interoperability quickly, but scales up in demand very quickly.

Now it doesn't seem quite so surprising that Six Flags should be having so many problems with their me-too attempt.

-- Louis

http://politicalhumor.about.com/library/multimedia /foolbush.mov

What ever it was... it sounded retarded. ;)

But his "prank" costs tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars.

and not one life.

The empire state building cost $40,948,900
and between 5 and hundreds of lives.

A bit of perspective always helps.

> > I wouldn't be surprised if he got 10 years in the electric chair.

> I believe that you may have a somewhat less than complete understanding of the operation of an electric chair.

No, I think he means that the US has now switched to using Mr. Edison's safer DC electricity for the purposes of punishment..

i'm not sure why cloning in nature comes to us as a surprise at all. all single cellular organisms duplicate themselves (i.e. cloning). we've already known for a long that that many animals in the animal kingdom are known to have asexual reproduction.

from http://biology.about.com/library/weekly/aa090700a. htm

In asexual reproduction, one individual produces offspring that are genetically identical to itself. These offspring are produced by mitosis. There are many invertebrates, including sea stars and sea anemones for example, that produce by asexual reproduction.

"The names "ARMY" and "NAVY" and "MARINES" are so deceptive. No reasonable person could join any of them and think that the organizations had anything to do with military operations!"

Don't forget the Army National Guard. One weekend a month, 2 weeks a year

Umm... no.

1. Catfish are predisposed to growing quite large if given sufficient space.

2. The Mekong Giant Catfish is a sub-species that generally grows to humongous sizes. People catch record setting or near record setting catfish in the Mekong river every year. There's nothing unnatural about it.

The real problem at the moment is that the popularity of these catfish has some worried that they will be fished to extinction.

Pics of Catfish caught
A 140 pound Catfish caught in Texas

The Bush administration announced that the U.S. government will not hand over control of the Internet to any other organisation, a surprise move that could presage an international flap.

Wow ... this means that talking about 'the Internets' might actually become an accurate expression. This is what we pay politicians big bucks for - they're visionaries who shape the future. My support for the administration has risen to new heights.

I was researching this just yesterday so I'm not surprised to see it here. That fish is a whole heckuvva lot larger than the catfish I used to catch and eat as a kid.

There are some great photos here at National Geographic's Article on the fish. My favorite photo is the one with an elderly gent cutting a steak larger than his torso. Dang! At that size I wonder if they taste any good?

Of course, Giant Catfish are the stuff of legends, and usually have a kernal of truth. (Links to other whoppers there as well)

Usually tales of the "big one that got away" or, in this case, "Catfish the size of Volkswagon Bugs" are dismissed, but according to Loren Coleman's "Mysterious America" (March 2004 ed. /My affiliate link), Chapter 10, even Mark Twain claims to have seen one more than six feet long and weighing 250 pounds in the Mississippi River. (How he managed to weigh it is not recorded ^_-). But cryptozoologists still try to hunt them down, even this summer as reported here. Chester Moore, the organizer of the event, claims that preservation is their goal as well as discovery. This is the biggest North American expedition to research cryptid catfish I've heard of, so it will be interesting to see if they get lucky. They'll need to discover the fish first, though, before talking about preservation. ::)

Preservation of giant catfish is part of the WWF's mission, too, in Thailand & Cambodia. Just this month four giant catfish bred in captivity were released into the Mekong. So Giant Catfish are real in the Amazon, Europe, Asia, etc., but cryptozoological here in the States. Would be cool if they weren't, though.

This psuedoreport brought to you by Insomnia(TM)

Closer to home, have you seen the giant cat?

In a few years when Linux global desktop market share reaches 10% (10 x 10!) why will Linux be differnet than Windows? Specifically, other than not (yet!) being targeted by virus/trojan/{spy,mal}ware authors, what makes linux more secure than windows?

Because Linux is a moving target. Take look at DistroWatch sometime, there are more than one hundred distributions out there and you can't write a worm that'll infect them all. Linux might end up in the same situation as Windows but my bet is that even if it does, it'll never, ever become as bad as the situation Windows is in. Think about it, if you find a flaw in Windows then theoretically all Windows boxes will fall. I wouldn't be surprised if a common flaw was discovered that could take down a third, maybe even half of all Linux machines on the net but when it comes to Windows, one flaw could mean every single Windows machine out there. In some ways, thanks to it's dominance, Microsoft and Windows becomes a single point of failure for our infrastructure.

The only single point of failure for Linux systems is what they all have in common, the kernel, but even the kernel can be customized and configured to such an extent that exploiting all Linux machines at once would be very, very difficult (e.g. keep grsecurity, selinux in mind etc.). Not to forget, we also have the BSD's to replace Linux if things got really hairy.

Here are a some interesting links for you explaining this line of reasoning:
http://www.ccianet.org/papers/cyberinsecurity.pdf
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1009_22-5081214.html?ta g=nl
http://netsecurity.about.com/cs/generalsecurity/i/ issue_mono.htm

Yer perpetratin' and Urban Myth.

F*** is from the German.

http://golf.about.com/cs/historyofgolf/a/hist_golf word.htm

http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl-s-word.ht m

Yer perpetratin' and Urban Myth.

F*** is from the German.

http://golf.about.com/cs/historyofgolf/a/hist_golf word.htm

http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl-s-word.ht m

(i.e. A report for work)

Here's another thing that bothers me about common usage. ;-) (Sorry to pick on you.)

The abbreviation "i.e." does not mean "for example."

Repeat after me:
The abbreviation "i.e." does not mean "for example."
The abbreviation "i.e." does not mean "for example."
The abbreviation "i.e." does not mean "for example."

The abbreviation to use if you mean "for example" is "e.g.". The abbreviation "i.e." stands for (the Latin of) "that is."

I.e., "i.e." is used when you are rephrasing, clarifying, etc. what was already said. The sentence "i.e. A report for work", if taken literally, means that the only documents that matter to you are reports for work.

For more information, see, e.g., http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/8707/52862, http://www.planetoid.org/grammar_for_geeks/ie_vs_e g.html, or http://ancienthistory.about.com/od/abbreviations/f /ievseg.htm. (Note the use of "e.g." for "for example.")

(Sorry, I go on this rant periodically. Don't take it personally.)

Come on now, ever ordered food at McDonalds and been offered "fries with that". You can't patent this!! So, what's the deal now - everything that can be done in real life, then done again on the computer can be patented?

We used to have to write letters, now we type them. Why not patent the process of pushing a key on a keyboard?

Christopher Latham Sholes patented the typewriter in 1868 (reference) - though dead, his family could get very very rich soon, as long as the USPTO can keeps this act going.

"Only victims make excuses" - Bob Dunwoody

I think it's been standard knowledge that most, if not all, of AMD's lineup runs cooler and is far cheaper than anything Intel has put out in the last few years.

Demonstrably not true

So you've rebutted the if not all part, but fell far from rebutting the most part. You've taken one chip. Show this is more true then not for the lineup of processors, and you will refuted his point. But from what I've seen, looking at prices and performance, his point stands. Most of the AMD chips perform better, cooler and cheaper than what intel has put out in the last few years.

But now on to the more interesting point. That person in that photo with you.. Wow.. Smoke a lot of pot, do they?

And, here's a good link for getting better night shots:
A bit light, but a good start none the less. Some of your other photos are quite nice.

Actually the War on Drugs costs around $18 billion dollars a year to run.

Our differing figures probably just come from different ways of cutting the data. I believe the federal anti-drug budget is around 20 billion as you mentioned, but including states expenditures raises that dramatically. I don't really have time to find more sources, but here are a few articles from a quick google search that mention the higher figures I was referencing.

http://www.cato.org/dailys/12-02-04.html
http://civilliberty.about.com/od/warondrugs/a/WODB ackground_5.htm
http://www.motherjones.com/news/special_reports/pr isons/investment.html

Agree with everything else you said wholeheartedly.

He did coin a similar phrase though.

"There's an old saying in Tennessee -- I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee -- that says, fool me once, shame on -- shame on you. Fool me -- you can't get fooled again"

As you alluded to, this has often been attributed to Lincoln, although we don't have quite as definitive proof as the above video. I've also seen it attributed as an ancient Chinese proverb, but either way, I'm pretty sure it predates both Bush presidencies.

Not perfect sounds like an understatement.

They can give you pump head

A quick search finds barcodes storing 26.3KB per square inch, much denser than the "small novel" claimed in your source (which would be 38 pages at 1MB). No surprise, the average word is 6 letters long, yet their numbers claim it takes 10 bytes to represent them. Of course, compressing a novel, or a government archive, takes a lot less than 6 bytes per word. And barcodes are far from the densest paper archive that I can think of, and I'm not even in the business. Archiving images of typed paper documents typically compresses 1MB to 35KB, without even using "codebook" encoding to reduce letters to 6bits - the standard 250 word page reduces to about 1KB of text, not 1MB, in binary, which is then compressed, up to 40:1. So we're talking about many orders of magnitude smaller media requirements than those numbers you cited guesstimate. Let's call it 100K:1, and pages have two sides. Now we're talking about 100B pages. Through 2022, which is 17 years. 50K trees, your numbers say, paper 1M "short novels", which would be about 100 pages long, but not A4 sized - let's say 0.5 A4 sheets: 50B sheets. Since 500 sheet reams weigh 6lbs, and 17 trees make a a ton of paper, that's 166.7K sheets per tree. Which is 300K trees. New Hampshire alone accounts for about 100K trees harvested per year, which is 1.7M trees, about six times the trees needed for the maximum archive estimate during its 17 years. And the pages don't have to be trees: US recycling recovers about 50M tons of paper per year, which is 40% of the paper needed.

It's still a lot of paper. But we'll get it back, recycled, when we switch to the online archival storage, rather than the near-line optical scanning. It's also expensive. But the US economy will produce over $600T in the next 17 years. That's almost $2500:MB to be archived. Seems like we can afford it.

You must be a frickin' genius, considering the ASVAB is a percentile score. Unless, that is, you meant 119 on the raw score (range: 80-320), in which case I rescind the "genius" part.

Sincerely,
"99" from Navy boot camp class 92086.

This means that only around 5% or so of the customer base is actually buying UMD movies (and that's assuming that each person only bought one movie). Doesn't this normally constitute a huge failure? Yet the Sony PR company will probably use this to proclaim the sucess of the PSP and UMD.

The results aren't surprising to me considering the serious limitations of the format: same price as a DVD for lower quality and the inablity to be used on anything else but a PSP. Sure it's a nice feature, but it would seem as though a majority of the people really don't care.

Although it would be a lot harder from a technical standpoint, why not create some extra hardware that would allow the PSP to play DVDs? Given Sony's history of building a console and then adding in the neat features later (PS2 HD, Network Card, Multi-tap) they could've made even more money selling people the extra hardware. To me, UMD movies just never made much sense from any point of view.

Ever hear that hindsight is 20/20

Bard and Truman's comments were foresight; only the strategic bombing survey was hindsight.

That is probably what the Undersecretary meant

Why don't you read what he has to say for himself? He was quite clear on his views that Japan was about to surrender; I can get you plenty more documents if you would like. The SBS proved that he was correct.

The Strategic Bombing Survey was also part of that same rivalry

The "the SBS was a fraud to gain more money" argument doesn't hold water, not only because of the conspiratorial nature of it and the lack of a contradictory study by any other department, but because the Air Force not only did stragegic bombing, but was, for a while, our nation's only nuclear force. If the US were to press more toward use of atomic bombs and away from strategic bombing, the air force would have as much to gain as it had to lose. It had no motive, as far as funding goes, to downplay the benefits of nuclear weaponry. But enough of interdepartmental military conspiracies :)

The US did not firebomb it

You know how you brought up the term "fantasy land"? You're back in it. The third wave of bombers was American: several hundred Flying Fortresses and a support contingent of Mustangs. More references available upon request. So eager to cast off any brutality done by us, are you?

It was in the context of bombing Tokyo and Kyoto

It most definitely was not. "Soldiers and sailors are the target, not women and children". "The target will be a purely military one, and we will issue a warning statement". Seriously, how can you be missing over this? Yes, he *also* said we cannot drop the bomb on Tokyo or Kyoto, but that was in a completely different sentence (and in the latter case, a different paragraph). Then, later, he says, in no uncertain terms, "The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians."

How can you misread this? It's plan and obvious language. Seriously - how many times does he have to say, in speeches or to himself, "we're not brutal, we're not going to bomb civilians" for you to accept it? Your concept *directly* contradicts his own statements - in his own diary, of all places!

The only military target that would have been worth dropping...

Please read the targetting committee paper that I already linked. They distinctly ruled out even considering military targets that didn't have sizable civilian populations nearby. Their explicit purpose was to make it as horrific as possible.

According to one source, 280,000 people of Hiroshima's 350,000 population survived the initial blast. In Nagasaki, 200,000 of 270,000 were alive at least one year afterward (I didn't search too hard to find initial casualties).

So, the story is that one person out of the 280,000 who lived through something bad went someplace and was part of the 75% that survived something else bad there. Frankly, I'd be surprised if there weren't hundreds of such stories.

• I am not a crook.
• I do not recall.
• They are seeking weapons of Mass Destruction.

And, there were even some tablets sold with it.

The thing is, many of the tablets sold with it were rebadged WinXP tablets. The "manufacturer" bought these tablets WITH OS (can you say "Windows Tax"?), then wiped them, put Lycoris Tablet on (Lycoris tax), and marked them up so that they could make a profit.

Also, I've heard the OS simply isn't up to snuff for a tablet - HWR sucks, primarily, so you're really restricted to an OSK, and those suck as a rule.

According to About.com, it affects only a small % of discs. Of course, like all digital data, replication is essential to keeping eternal life (despite the best efforts of the MPAA to stop you ;) ). More about the overalarming cries of DVD rot from PC Magazine, Manifest Technologies, and Enterprise Networks and Servers.

Your 20 year old VHS tapes should have suffered significant quality loss by now. It doesn't have to be defective to go bad; VHS slowly goes bad on its own.

Nope. There are metals in some tattoo inks, no way to know for sure without testing.

Various metals used:
http://chemistry.about.com/library/weekly/aa121602 a.htm

Testing done:
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory?id=579345 "we've found a lot of indications of metals."

There are actually many regulations about tattoo's in the military. It differs from branch to branch, and will change from time to time. Typically you cannot have tattoo's on your face, head, and neck. I believe there used to be a prohibition against having them on your hands, but am not sure how that stands any longer. Some branches also have rules about what percentage of your body can be covered with tattoos.

If you wanted to see a few examples of various military regulations here's a few googled links:

Navy:
http://usmilitary.about.com/od/ navy/l/bltattoo.htm
Marines:
http://usmilitary.about.com/od/marines/l/bltattoo. htm
Air Force: (not a copy of actual regs but a few emails)
http://www.beforeyoutattoo.com/tattoos-and-the-mil itary.html

There are actually many regulations about tattoo's in the military. It differs from branch to branch, and will change from time to time. Typically you cannot have tattoo's on your face, head, and neck. I believe there used to be a prohibition against having them on your hands, but am not sure how that stands any longer. Some branches also have rules about what percentage of your body can be covered with tattoos.

If you wanted to see a few examples of various military regulations here's a few googled links:

Navy:
http://usmilitary.about.com/od/ navy/l/bltattoo.htm
Marines:
http://usmilitary.about.com/od/marines/l/bltattoo. htm
Air Force: (not a copy of actual regs but a few emails)
http://www.beforeyoutattoo.com/tattoos-and-the-mil itary.html