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One of the many books I've read on the subject - I believe it was O -The Intimate History of the Orgasm actually stated that in studies rape lead to a higher fertilization rate than consensual relations. I won't get into the theory of why, because it will potentially piss off feminists. I'll just say it is documented and statistically significant.

The examples all use the Retrieval pricing:
http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/faqs/

Not having ever used AWS, I'm wondering what is the difference between a "Transfer Out" and a "Retrieval"?

This: http://www.amazon.com/Sony-ICD-SX712-Digital-Flash-Recorder/dp/B004M8ST2W/ref=sr_1_6?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1345567928&sr=1-6 paired with Dragon Naturally speaking and no one needs to write up minutes and that person can actually contribute to the meeting instead of concentrating on a task. There will still be some document editing involved though.

http://www.amazon.com/Marantz-PMD580-Rack-Mount-CompactFlash-Recorder/dp/B0017OM6JQ

we install them all the time.

And yes it's the only real solution, if they balk at the price, they really dont want to do what you are asking, hook up a Laptop and press record if they are too cheap to buy the real tool for the job.

Looks like you can just ship drives to them for the whole 'truck load of drives' bandwidth effect: http://aws.amazon.com/importexport/

And for those that missed the toilet humor check out Packing For Mars by Mary Roach. A very excellent book on the nitty gritty of space travel.

Here's an extreme example:
Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 (16GB, Deep Grey)

Amazon US: $499.99

Amazon DE: EUR 716,77 ($890.87)
Note that the German price include VAT.

Really? That's the first I've heard of Apple supporting USB 3.0.

You really should not doubt something so easily verified by a website...

Even the AC who listed Thunderbolt-compatible peripherals only came up with RAID enclosures

Not sure why since what I would get first is this compact SATA adaptor, yes it's expensive but the speed and compactness are perfect for large-capacity external media anywhere (I use SATA docks all the time now, I'd never used another closed enclosure as long as I live).

First off, no one is going to use a laptop for serious video work. Even if they did, the 768GB max configurable storage space for the MBPR (which will add another $500 to the price, so it's now a $3500 laptop) ensures that no one would do serious video work with the MBPR at all.

Wrong on both counts.

The retina display means you can do serious video work, seeing a 1080p final view in a window with controls and other video feeds all around it!

As for the max storage space, well - that's why they have Thunderbolt! Then you can use any 6Gb/s SATA drive at full speed from your laptop.

How funny it is that in one breath you scoff at offering Thunderbolt, and then in the next claim the storage is too small/slow...

There are LOTS of people doing serious video editing on laptops these days.

Secondly, just because Safari supports retinal, doesn't mean websites do.

That only matters for images, but I mostly visit websites for text - all of the text is rendered using the full display resolution, so it's easier to read.

So that leaves you with what, the file system view in high-res?

Mail, iBooks Author, iPhoto, Aperture, Final Cut X, iWork, Safari, and as noted many third party apps have added support since all they have to do is re-compile and mark it as supporting the display.

But no specifics, I see.

Never heard of Diablo 3?

  1) why bother recompiling something that works?

I can see you've never sold software for a living, since obviously the simply re-compile which takes a minute, could result in many sales from people with the displays.

2) why bother offering support for something that a tiny fraction of your user base can even use?

Millions have been sold already, why would you not want even a million potential customers. You seem to have NO idea the volume of laptops that Apple ships now.

Especially when it will cost you $3000 to test to make sure there are no bugs in retinal mode

Once again, your ineptness at using this thing we call the "internet" makes you look like a buffoon - base price for the Retina is $2200, not $3k.

Also, there are ways to test without having the retina display.

So you can't even use that "amazing" resolution to display anything other than effectively 1440x900.

You get as I said the full resolution for the whole OS and all of the first party apps, plus a number of third party apps. I don't see why it is so hard for you to grasp that the actual resolution is 2880x1800. Why would you want to lower it? You can enable accessibility if you need to zoom in for some reason.

Just because you cannot see the need for high-DPI displays does not mean there are not many professionals glad that at last we have this many pixels in a portable device...

I'll let you have the last response since you seem to be rather dense about this whole thing and unwilling to search for even the most basic of facts (like USB 3.0 or basic price figures). You are all about baseless conjecture and false data, so why would anyone waste time reading what you have to say? I certainly will not. You should really work on putting more thought into your posts going forward, and frankly were I you I'd get a new user ID as this one is permanently tainted now by your post.

no this is the best example of astroturfing ;-) http://www.amazon.com/Very-Best-David-Hasselhoff/dp/B00005Q8UG/

For a mere $2200 bucks they can double their storage. Ok so they might need to spend 500 bucks more for a case to contain the drives.

Drives: http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Barracuda-3-5-Inch-Internal-ST320005N4A1AS-RK-Retail/dp/B002AQSVDA/ref=sr_1_13?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1345488036&sr=1-13&keywords=hard+drive

Case: http://www.mountainmods.com/extended-ascension-cyo-custom-computer-case-p-493.html?osCsid=lobk16afmjb8rq8kt13ns7bsc3

Now that I've solved the DEA's problems, I'm not sure what to do with the rest of my day.

Am I allowed to pup up and point out the obvious that the two Terabytes needed to store this information can be purchased from Seagate via Amazon for $139 bucks?

A single disk drive is not someplace to store data you want to keep. .

If you are going to quote me in order to pontificate on the obvious, at least quote the first TWO paragraphs.

I didn't include the second paragraph because it doesn't change my point:

DEA: Buy two drives. One for yourselves, one for discovery. You can take it out of the taxes I paid last year. Pay me back when you collect reasonable discovery charges [cooley.com].

When drive #1 suffers a head crash and massive corruption, how do you recover your data when drive #2 starts developing random block errors?

Without RAID and constant consistency check with automatic rebuild, two independent drives are only marginally better than one.

Am I allowed to pup up and point out the obvious that the two Terabytes needed to store this information can be purchased from Seagate via Amazon for $139 bucks?

A single disk drive is not someplace to store data you want to keep. .

If you are going to quote me in order to pontificate on the obvious, at least quote the first TWO paragraphs.

Am I allowed to pup up and point out the obvious that the two Terabytes needed to store this information can be purchased from Seagate via Amazon for $139 bucks?

A single disk drive is not someplace to store data you want to keep. It should at a minimum be on a RAID array that does automatic scrubbing for data errors, and is backed up offsite (either through tape or live replication).

But still, that shouldn't bring the cost beyond a few thousand dollars - which seems a small price to pay to keep a 5 year old case alive.

Am I allowed to pup up and point out the obvious that the two Terabytes needed to store this information can be purchased from Seagate via Amazon for $139 bucks?

DEA: Buy two drives. One for yourselves, one for discovery. You can take it out of the taxes I paid last year. Pay me back when you collect reasonable discovery charges.

The trifling cost aside, this seems to suggest that the DEA is aware that their case is fatally weak, and relies on sifting mountains of data that no jury on earth is capable of understanding in the hope of finding some faint pattern in the data that suggests intent. If there were obvious infractions, it would be easy to prove by pointing out 20 or 30 of them and call it a day. If it is so subtle that you need two terabytes to prove it, you probably don't have much of a case anyway.

Even if the Goods Doctor (see what I did there?) was guilty as hell, and the DEA is worried that purging some evidence and concentrating on specific acts might give grounds for appeal due to hiding evidence, the simple precaution of copying it to cheap off line storage should be sufficient.

Something is rotten about this whole story, and I suspect its a huge smoke screen for some other operation, or perhaps proceeding with the case would put methods or undercover operatives at risk, or require personnel that are current not available. Or maybe they know the Doctor is on his death bed or will soon contract some fatal disease, at which will make the whole point moot. Or maybe the doctor is singing like a canary these days.

But like many hacks, notable for being interesting rather than useful, since cops who need to restrain a lot of people at once use plastic ties, not handcuffs. For an applicable hack see the lastest episode of Breaking Bad.

I went through security wearing all black, a black leather duster, a black hat and tabi and security hardly glanced at me. My bag was selected at random for a bomb screening though, so while the security lady was waiting for a result, I asked her why no one bothered me, looking as I did. She said something to the effect of I was far too attention-getting to be a potential security problem. Anyone intending foul play would have dressed down.

run a free Amazon EC2 Micro Instance for a year, while also leveraging a free usage tier for Amazon S3, Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon Elastic Load Balancing, and AWS data transfer. AWS’s free usage tier can be used for anything you want to run in the cloud: launch new applications, test existing applications in the cloud, or simply gain hands-on experience with AWS.

I only found 1 PDF with problems, and that was a color-intensive full magazine. If you read black-and-white content, Kindle DX hasn't caused me problems. I mostly had used PDFs from Project Gutenberg, or PDFs made up of JPEG content. Those work great.

The magazine was a true PDF using most of the detailed layout functionality. It's not great for those. But the technical/reference books should work without issue. It does have a dictionary.

Bookmarks, annotations, and such are possible as well. Text to speech, audio books, and random MP3 files too. I turned all internet connectivity off, but it does have a web browser.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=200375680

This is a bunch of rubbish. Guess what: in the U.S., a minimum wage job is not enough to keep a single, reasonably healthy individual a roof over their head. Never mind someone who is malnourished (like many minimum wage earners are), has chronic health problems (also likely, even in case of people under 30!), or, $DEITY forbid, is crazy enough to have children. Read Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America and stop spewing crap.

An example of Astroturfing on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/The-Twelfth-Cliburn-Piano-Competition/product-reviews/B000BZ8IA8/ref=cm_cr_pr_btm_link_4?ie=UTF8&filterBy=addFiveStar&pageNumber=4&showViewpoints=0

Of the 35 five star reviews, about 30 were posted in a 1 week period by people who have no other reviews. Of course, each of those reviewers carefully voted up all the previous other 5 star reviews to promote them in the review rankings (so

Have you ever seen one?

It wouldn't matter if I've seen 500 of them or if I've seen not a single one. That's pure anecdote and proves nothing. The fact that it is believed by some to have outsold the iPhone is a much stronger testament to its popularity and relevance. Also note it's current number one status on Amazon which is a huge smartphone sales channel.

I probably have slight ADD. One of the reasons could be that my mother ate lots of licorice when she was pregnant with me and there are studies that hint to a link between slight ADD - something that would today be called a disease, in other times a talent - to being a sweet tooth and pregnant women eating the stuff.

Slight or partial symptoms of ADD are called by some a genetic disposition that has solid advantages in certain societies but solid disadvantages in others, like ours today. A hunter in a gatherers world basically, to some theories go. Some experts say that ADD is an invented disease.

I curse my concentration problems that definitely are due to my brain chemistry and certain childhood conditions and maybe a few habitual other things. However, the emotional independance and the high frustration tolerance that comes with it are a gift. Its a very special talent that makes it very difficult to blend in and, for instance, find a regular job (a problem I'm having right now), on the other hand it does give you the agressiveness required to turn down a shitty job even if you're broke and your options are running out. It's, if you will, a bit of a moderated-risk-taker condition. I wouldn't be like that if I didn't have these problems, the social situations that occur due to them and the coping mechanisims I've developed to handle them. All that together give me an edge, I just have to use it correctly and avoid situations where I don't function.

It's the basic mental condition emperors or simular people (think 'the Steve Jobs Type') have. They either are bums, drunk and stoned loosers sitting on the curb, or in a small room toying around with some big dream or they are at the helm of a big empire or - nowadays - a large corporation.

If everyone were like me or even more so, the world would go to hell. But without people like me, it would aswell. People who compensate their desire for poetry and meaning due so either using poetry (Duh!) or some other form of art, philosophy or the turn to alcohol and drugs as a substitute. ... I wouldn't want the world filled with boring unimaginative bland characters. I'd rather have the one or other struggle with their demons and have society develop methods of helping each other out.

Bottom line: I think it's to early for humans to decide what kind of personality actually is benefitial to society or not. We're simply not intelligent enough to do that yet. Maybe in a thousand years, if there isn't a giant setback. ... But it's just a few decades ago that a few societies started to accept that women do have a soul and are 100% just as worthy humans as men - it's to early to judge unborn by their genetic disposition and not run the risk of doing serious long term harm to humanity.

My 2 cents.

"HisSQL", with a nod to Kitty Kelley.

"HisSQL", with a nod to Kitty Kelley.

So shell out the extra $37 and get one of these instead. I don't understand the draw to Raspberry Pi. It's severely underpowered for doing anything, even at $35. I don't even count the $25 version as an option because it doesn't have ethernet (or any form of networking), rendering it utterly worthless.

Specs rundown between the two:

Raspberry Pi version "B"
ARM11 CPU @ 700MHz
256MB RAM
VideoCore IV GPU
USB 2.0 port x 2
SD card slot
Ethernet
$35 USD

Mini MK802
ARM Cortex-A8 CPU @ 1.5GHz
1GB RAM
Mali 400 GPU
USB 2.0 OTG port x 2 (one standard and one mini)
microSD slot
Wifi 802.11b/g/n
$72 USD

So they send analog signals over USB?

One of my previous cellphones (a Motorola) used the USB connection for a headset that was analog. You could even buy adapters. So yes, analog over the USB connection.

You mean this thing? "This item is NOT compatible with ANY LG or SAMSUNG Phones! Will ONLY work with Motorola Micro-USB Phones!" - I smell a non-standard USB.

Obligatory link:

http://www.amazon.com/Passion-Natural-Water-Based-Lubricant-Gallon/dp/B005MR3IVO

Imagine if a page from, say, Going Rogue ended up encoding a protein that was highly toxic to humans and a DNA library containing it accidentally shared some of its corpus with, say, an influenza strain.

Can we use something orthogonal to DNA, please? Something incompatible with our biology.

I completely disagree that a USB controller and supporting chipset isn't an option, a quick pop into Wal-Mart will show you any number of ridiculously cheap USB devices. Hey, forget Wal-mart, here's an $8 USB keyboard: http://www.amazon.com/107-Key-Windows-Keyboard-Black-USB/dp/B0038M3YM8 (do you think the most expensive part of the $8 cost is the USB chipset?)

So, ruling USB back in, the obvious solution is the micro-USB connector.

* Line in is a standard USB protocol, likewise line out (hence those USB headsets you can get.)

* Volume likewise can be implemented by supporting HID - Volume up and down have been standard keystrokes for a while on virtually every multimedia keyboard.

* Power is a standard part of the micro-USB connector, we can charge using it.

* Video out is supported by MHL, which is fast becoming a standard in the Android world.

* And finally, controlling playback is also supported by HID, again Play/Pause/Rewind/Fastforward are part of every modern keyboard, using standardized keystrokes.

FWIIW micro-USB connectors also have an annoying tendency to break the little plastic tab inside the socket which effectively bricks your device.

Yeah, it's not like they sell a similar adapter for $9

I completely disagree that a USB controller and supporting chipset isn't an option, a quick pop into Wal-Mart will show you any number of ridiculously cheap USB devices. Hey, forget Wal-mart, here's an $8 USB keyboard: http://www.amazon.com/107-Key-Windows-Keyboard-Black-USB/dp/B0038M3YM8 (do you think the most expensive part of the $8 cost is the USB chipset?)

So, ruling USB back in, the obvious solution is the micro-USB connector.

* Line in is a standard USB protocol, likewise line out (hence those USB headsets you can get.)
* Volume likewise can be implemented by supporting HID - Volume up and down have been standard keystrokes for a while on virtually every multimedia keyboard.
* Power is a standard part of the micro-USB connector, we can charge using it.
* Video out is supported by MHL, which is fast becoming a standard in the Android world.
* And finally, controlling playback is also supported by HID, again Play/Pause/Rewind/Fastforward are part of every modern keyboard, using standardized keystrokes.

Sleep deprivation, tied in a straight jacket, pumped full of drugs...naaah, that's not tortue. Waterboarding is torture, of course only third world banana republics do something like that, right? And why would Assange be afraid of just getting on a plane right? surely that means he's up to something. Welcome to the USSA, where the only free men are the rich men.

Sorry but if you think this is about rape? I have some magic beans you may be interested in. Assange asked REPEATEDLY if they wanted him for questioning before he left, they said "No the matter is closed" and then several USA politicians start making noise about how he needed to be put on trial and NOW, now they want him? Oh and one of the "rapes" left him sleeping the sleep of the well fucked in HER bed and then when she left she....bought him breakfast? And screwed him for another week?

To quote Mel brooks "Bullshit bullshit aaaaaannnnddd bullshit". this is about dragging Assange to Gitmo, simple as that. The USA, which frankly is quickly becoming the USSA, wants to make an example of Assange to show anyone else what happens when they open their mouths. if it was about rape then why would they give a shit about waiving extradiction to the USA? because his ass wouldn't have even gotten off the plane, he would have gotten a rendition ride and frankly I'd be amazed if it even sat down in Sweden, most likely it would have been diverted in the air straight to the USA and from there to gitmo.

The next Safehold book, Midst Trial and Tribulation, is due out 18 Sept in the US.
I'm personally waiting for the next Hedren War book myself...

Hmm, generally your books' ratings on Amazon are not exactly stellar, so Microsoft may not be panicking just yet. That said, any book is better than the 0 I have written, and I have not yet tried Windows 8. I'll try to download Win 8 RTM and install it in a VM soon. I thought I had heard Windows actively resisted that configuration, so I hadn't tried it until now.

It helps if you close the control panel, because it hides all but 18 of the most used buttons.

Here is a control panel in English.

I love these things. No more abrasive or toilet-clogging toilet paper, no more klingons/dingleberries, and no more rashes when liquids come out the solids hole. (Sorry about the TMI.)

Yeah, just what the developing world needs! A toilet that is so expensive ($1700!) that it actually makes more sense to buy a flush toilet that costs $50 and spend the 20 bucks or so a year it will cost in water bills for the rest of your life, even if that 20 bucks is more money than you will make in a month.

BRILLIANT!

We already "reinvented" the toilet. It's called the composting toilet. You can buy it on amazon, or find plans on google and make one yourself. Now, if more people would buy them, mass production could get the cost down. The SunMar one must be assembled by hand or something, with the price as high as it is.

We already "reinvented" the toilet. It's called the composting toilet. You can buy it on amazon, or find plans on google and make one yourself. Now, if more people would buy them, mass production could get the cost down. The SunMar one must be assembled by hand or something, with the price as high as it is.

Thanks for the link, I just read all the depressioncomix stuff - it's brilliant. Spot on. I'd recommend it to people who've never been depressed as a way of gaining some understanding of depression. Or least the understanding that it's not the same thing as being "sad", and it's not something that the depressed person is capable of overcoming on their own. I don't agree with the artist's depiction of people who are trying to help "just not understanding" - yeah, maybe they don't understand, but much as you don't want to hear it, they're right when they say you should come outside in the sunshine, smile and get some exercise. When I was suicidally depressed a few years ago, I was offended by people telling me I should just "snap out of it" (the depressive's typical response: "if I knew how to do that, don't you think I would have done it by now?!"), but I've now got a no-nonsense kind of girlfriend, and I'm convinced that as a depressive, what you need is to have someone who will dismiss your attempts to feel sorry for yourself and force you to get out and do things. Someone who will cheerfully and supportively tell you to shut up your whinging and drag you out of the house. Someone who can give you some perspective and show you how life should be done. It may not have helped me when I was depressed (I don't know, I didn't know her then) but it's sure as hell stopping me from getting depressed now.

While I was depressed I took SSRIs for a few months - they didn't do a damned thing for me, positive or negative. My step-dad was depressed a long time in the past and took tricyclics. For him, it was like flicking a switch from suicidal to super-happy and motivated. So much so that the realisation that his "personality" was the result of a bunch of biochemicals (and always had been) scared the bejesus out of him. He stopped taking antidepressants in fairly short order after that, but they gave him a perspective on his depression that allowed him to overcome it.

IANAMD, but I would recommend you talk to your MD about getting on antidepressants RIGHT NOW (it'll be at least a month before they kick in, in any case) just so you can see if they work for you. If they don't, change to a different type to see if that works. Then, once they have kicked in and you're capable of functioning again have a read of this book. Don't read it before you're out of the depression, as it probably won't help get you out of it - it made me feel even more hopeless when I was depressed - but it should help with getting some perspective on the patterns of thinking of the depressed. Once I had dragged myself out of the pit, it helped me to stop beating myself up over everything, all the time, quite so much.

Good luck, dude. Don't give up hope. It really does get better, and one day you'll be able to look back on how you were and think: "Thank god I'm out of that! I never, ever, want to go back!"

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness, has a book chapter coming out that addresses this danger. Prof. Teleb's draft chapter on Medicine, Convexity, and Opacity from his upcoming book, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, can be found at:

http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/medicine.pdf

While the entire chapter is worth a read, at page 389 he observes:

The “do you have evidence” fallacy, mistaking evidence of no harm for no evidence of harm, is similar to the one of misinterpreting NED (no evidence of disease) for evidence of no disease. This is the same error as mistaking absence of evidence for evidence of absence, the one that tends to affect smart and educated people, as if education made people more confirmatory in their responses and more liable to fall into simple logical errors.

That may have been the case here. That is, for years no evidence of harm was mistaken for evidence of no harm.

More generally, Prof. Taleb argues at page 376:

Simple, quite simple decision rules and heuristics emerge from this chapter. Via negativa, of course (by removal of the unnatural): resort to medical techniques when the health payoff is very large (say, saving a life) and visibly exceeds its potential harm, such as incontrovertibly needed surgery or lifesaving medicine (penicillin). It is the same as with government intervention. This is squarely Thalesian, not Aristotelian (that is, decision making based on payoffs, not knowledge). For in these cases medicine has positive asymmetries —convexity effects— and the outcome will be less likely to produce fragility. Otherwise, in situations in which the benefits of a particular medicine, procedure, or nutritional or lifestyle modification appear small—say, those aiming for comfort—we have a large potential sucker problem (hence putting us on the wrong side of convexity effects).

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness, has a book chapter coming out that addresses this danger. Prof. Teleb's draft chapter on Medicine, Convexity, and Opacity from his upcoming book, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, can be found at:

http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/medicine.pdf

While the entire chapter is worth a read, at page 389 he observes:

The “do you have evidence” fallacy, mistaking evidence of no harm for no evidence of harm, is similar to the one of misinterpreting NED (no evidence of disease) for evidence of no disease. This is the same error as mistaking absence of evidence for evidence of absence, the one that tends to affect smart and educated people, as if education made people more confirmatory in their responses and more liable to fall into simple logical errors.

That may have been the case here. That is, for years no evidence of harm was mistaken for evidence of no harm.

More generally, Prof. Taleb argues at page 376:

Simple, quite simple decision rules and heuristics emerge from this chapter. Via negativa, of course (by removal of the unnatural): resort to medical techniques when the health payoff is very large (say, saving a life) and visibly exceeds its potential harm, such as incontrovertibly needed surgery or lifesaving medicine (penicillin). It is the same as with government intervention. This is squarely Thalesian, not Aristotelian (that is, decision making based on payoffs, not knowledge). For in these cases medicine has positive asymmetries —convexity effects— and the outcome will be less likely to produce fragility. Otherwise, in situations in which the benefits of a particular medicine, procedure, or nutritional or lifestyle modification appear small—say, those aiming for comfort—we have a large potential sucker problem (hence putting us on the wrong side of convexity effects).

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness, has a book chapter coming out that addresses this danger. Prof. Teleb's draft chapter on Medicine, Convexity, and Opacity from his upcoming book, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, can be found at:

http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/medicine.pdf

While the entire chapter is worth a read, at page 389 he observes:

The “do you have evidence” fallacy, mistaking evidence of no harm for no evidence of harm, is similar to the one of misinterpreting NED (no evidence of disease) for evidence of no disease. This is the same error as mistaking absence of evidence for evidence of absence, the one that tends to affect smart and educated people, as if education made people more confirmatory in their responses and more liable to fall into simple logical errors.

That may have been the case here. That is, for years no evidence of harm was mistaken for evidence of no harm.

More generally, Prof. Taleb argues at page 376:

Simple, quite simple decision rules and heuristics emerge from this chapter. Via negativa, of course (by removal of the unnatural): resort to medical techniques when the health payoff is very large (say, saving a life) and visibly exceeds its potential harm, such as incontrovertibly needed surgery or lifesaving medicine (penicillin). It is the same as with government intervention. This is squarely Thalesian, not Aristotelian (that is, decision making based on payoffs, not knowledge). For in these cases medicine has positive asymmetries —convexity effects— and the outcome will be less likely to produce fragility. Otherwise, in situations in which the benefits of a particular medicine, procedure, or nutritional or lifestyle modification appear small—say, those aiming for comfort—we have a large potential sucker problem (hence putting us on the wrong side of convexity effects).

Seligman also believed (and his research supported) the theory of Learned Helplessness, which was later countered by experiments which showed that 'normal' people have a tendency to overestimate the degree to which they can control the world around them. People who have learned to cope with depression, on the other hand, show a greater tendency to realistically assess their circumstance and the degree to which they are in control. See: A First Rate Madness in which the author, Nassir Ghaemi, discusses the possible advantages that so-called mental illness or abnormal personality traits may confer on those who serve as leaders in times of crises.

I'm not so sure I believe that pills and the thrills of therapy (manipulated conformity) should be dictated to everyone who appears 'abnormal' solely because they engage in behavior which someone correlates to possible depression. What if depression is a normal response to a broken society and we're just trying to force people to accept a broken world rather than explore the possible remedies to an unhealthy existence?

Furthermore the following quote from TFA in Scientific American sounds like someone hired Orwell's ghost to write an encore.

An intervention as simple as tracking internet use may allow depression, a prevalent and dangerous illness, to be discovered and treated earlier, more effectively, and for more people.

The path out of depression has been well documented in Dr. Martin Seligman's book Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life. He has spent 30 years of his life in the field of positive psychology and has multiple case studies showing how people can get over "learned helplessness" in all three realms of personal, pervasive and permanent.

http://www.amazon.com/Learned-Optimism-Change-Your-Mind/dp/1400078393/

He has a talk on Ted:
http://www.ted.com/talks/martin_seligman_on_the_state_of_psychology.html

And a website with some questionnaires:
http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/Default.aspx

To use Chris Farley, who unfortunately committed suicide due to depression, as an example I provide three typical phrases that he would use in his work:
Personal: I suck!
Pervasive: Everything sucks!
Permanent: It will always suck!

Please note that motivational speakers are typically all optimists and people who are unmotivated go to them for a "motivational fix" which lasts for about two weeks without optimism to back it. See also the typical person who starts a diet, exercise regimen or other self improvement plan.

Yep, there are noticeable changes in the brain from depression, and the more depressive periods you have the worse off you are long-term. A great book on depression is Peter Kramer's Against Depression, which summarizes a lot of the current research on the mechanisms of depression and the effect it has on the physical structure of the brain: http://www.amazon.com/Against-Depression-Peter-D-Kramer/dp/0143036963/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1344986854&sr=8-1&keywords=peter+kramer Highly recommended.

The Verse by the Side of the Road

there was a significant concern about a standing army running around North America with the potential to stage a coup d'état

Your attention is drawn to Six Frigates. Back in the day when the government served the people, (i.e. prior to our Progressive reversal) there was genuine disdain about standing forces because:

• they cost so flipping much,
• bureaucracy breeds bureaucracy, and
• the Team America: World Police concept just wasn't there.

These come in variants with the various Cherry keys, and also without the keypad, which is very good if (1) you don't use a keypad and (2) you're right handed and don't want the mouse too far away. Here - anyone tried them? I haven't. Tempted though.

OT, but since song of the south was *banned* by disney, you could only get a copy if you went to where pirates hang out.

Or, you could, you know, just get the original.

Think you need this...