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Or another way to look at it, from Amazon's DVD section, the top sellers for Blu-Ray and HD-DVD.

Both #1 top spots are held by The Departed (preorders):
the Blu-Ray version is #80 in the "DVD" parent category
the HD-DVD version is #63.

Further down the list,
Babel (Blu-Ray) is #915
Babel (HD-DVD) is #440.

At least for multi-format titles sold through Amazon, HD-DVD appears to hold a substantial lead. Also the number 1 position (Departed) sells much more in HD-DVD than Blu-Ray's #1. You could go through each position for a more scientific approach to it, to see if the entire top 25 or 100 sell more in HD-DVD format.

Or another way to look at it, from Amazon's DVD section, the top sellers for Blu-Ray and HD-DVD.

Both #1 top spots are held by The Departed (preorders):
the Blu-Ray version is #80 in the "DVD" parent category
the HD-DVD version is #63.

Further down the list,
Babel (Blu-Ray) is #915
Babel (HD-DVD) is #440.

At least for multi-format titles sold through Amazon, HD-DVD appears to hold a substantial lead. Also the number 1 position (Departed) sells much more in HD-DVD than Blu-Ray's #1. You could go through each position for a more scientific approach to it, to see if the entire top 25 or 100 sell more in HD-DVD format.

Or another way to look at it, from Amazon's DVD section, the top sellers for Blu-Ray and HD-DVD.

Both #1 top spots are held by The Departed (preorders):
the Blu-Ray version is #80 in the "DVD" parent category
the HD-DVD version is #63.

Further down the list,
Babel (Blu-Ray) is #915
Babel (HD-DVD) is #440.

At least for multi-format titles sold through Amazon, HD-DVD appears to hold a substantial lead. Also the number 1 position (Departed) sells much more in HD-DVD than Blu-Ray's #1. You could go through each position for a more scientific approach to it, to see if the entire top 25 or 100 sell more in HD-DVD format.

Or another way to look at it, from Amazon's DVD section, the top sellers for Blu-Ray and HD-DVD.

Both #1 top spots are held by The Departed (preorders):
the Blu-Ray version is #80 in the "DVD" parent category
the HD-DVD version is #63.

Further down the list,
Babel (Blu-Ray) is #915
Babel (HD-DVD) is #440.

At least for multi-format titles sold through Amazon, HD-DVD appears to hold a substantial lead. Also the number 1 position (Departed) sells much more in HD-DVD than Blu-Ray's #1. You could go through each position for a more scientific approach to it, to see if the entire top 25 or 100 sell more in HD-DVD format.

Or another way to look at it, from Amazon's DVD section, the top sellers for Blu-Ray and HD-DVD.

Both #1 top spots are held by The Departed (preorders):
the Blu-Ray version is #80 in the "DVD" parent category
the HD-DVD version is #63.

Further down the list,
Babel (Blu-Ray) is #915
Babel (HD-DVD) is #440.

At least for multi-format titles sold through Amazon, HD-DVD appears to hold a substantial lead. Also the number 1 position (Departed) sells much more in HD-DVD than Blu-Ray's #1. You could go through each position for a more scientific approach to it, to see if the entire top 25 or 100 sell more in HD-DVD format.

Last I checked, bridgeport operating was a specialized skill that actually pays pretty well in my area (Metro Detroit) because it requires some training and experience to actually know what you're doing.

Last I checked, it was called "milling", not "bridgeport operating". And you can go to a community college and gather the requisite skills in a three unit, one-semester class. Frankly milling is not very hard, it's not even slightly hard. The hardest part is remembering which way the table will move when you turn the crank.

In fact it's probably harder to get accurate measurements with which to make your own key than it is to actually make the key.

Frankly you don't even need to take a class. Everything you need to know is in the Machinery's Handbook, which is why it has over 2600 pages. All you need to know about appropriate cutting tools for different materials, feeds and speeds, it's all in there. It gives you the formulas AND the numbers to plug into them. But if you take that route, you will spend more time noodling around and fucking up than if you just take a class. Regardless, I received very little instruction on the vertical mill and was able to turn out some cute little parts that had no particular utility but were within half-a-thousandth tolerances. (We had learned the basics on the lathe. Most of the concepts are the same.)

Companies spying on their own employees seems pretty draconian. But the kind of corporate espionage we're talking about here is commonplace. The book Spooked, by Adam L. Penenberg and Marc Barry, has some good stories about this stuff. You'd be surprised how much espionage went on in the frozen pizza market -- that oven-rising crust was a bigger deal than you realize.

I actually worked for a small graphic design company in San Francisco that tried it. It's pretty common in these kinds of firms for some of the designers to split off and start their own outfits. Those new companies naturally become competitors, and there's often all kinds of bad blood about who may or may not have absconded with whose Rolodex. In one case, my company actually hired a private investigator to pose as a phony potential client of one of these competing companies, with the aim of trying to trick the principals into letting slip that they were using privileged information to win clients. The fact that my company did this was never made widely known. The only reason the rank-and-file employees found out about it was because the private investigator got caught. Word spreads fast in an industry as small as the graphic design biz. And to put it in perspective, we were a company of about 45 employees. The competitor was even smaller.

I have Koto Music of Japan and enjoy it. Is that the kind of thing you're looking for?

Indeed, the intense fear of [a slave] insurrection seems to match the intensity of the collective denial about its cause. This is reminiscent of the countless school shooting plots "uncovered" over the past few years. While the culture continues to blame everything but schools for schoolyard massacres, paranoia increases, zero tolerance policies are applied oftentimes irrationally, and many kids' lives are being [ruined?] due to rumor, fear, or childish boasting of the sort that was once ignored.

Much like today's mainstream rush to blame Hollywood, the NRA, or other fuzzy outsiders for causing rage massacres that occur in offices and schoolyards, Americans, particularly Southerners right up to the late 1850's, blamed any slave unrest or rebellion on "outside agitators," whether on Northern abolitionist extremists or alien Jacobins. And they sincerely believed it. They couldn't even imagine that domestic conditions, that the very institution of slavery, caused slaves to rebel. It didn't make sense to them and those who suggested such a thing simply 'didn't understand.' To suggest that slavery as an institution and the South's culture caused black insurrection and violence was dangerous lunacy, an abolitionists was shunned and marginalized as today's Earth Liberation Front activists. (pg 46)

Short Answer: Lawyers. No Seriously lawyers, and the Patents.

Long Answer: US laws are written by Giant corporations which hope to dissuade competition rather than fostering competition. ANy corporate worth its salt would try to maximise their profits, and since they have been proven to be psychopaths (According to the Corporation Book) http://www.amazon.com/Corporation-Pathological-Pur suit-Profit-Power/dp/0743247469/sr=8-2/qid=1169727 780/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2/105-4470053-8023658?ie=UTF8&s= books.

Our lawmakers publicly are bribed by these corporates under the guise of funding and in return get these laws passed. No wonder US rates last in technology, although we still continue to rate FIRST in innovation (Wii, TiVO, TeslaMotors, to name a few).

25 years in future, expect any new invention to be outlawed automatically unless approved by or invented by a corporate.

Actually it was done.
http://www.amazon.com/Radioactive-Boy-Scout-Fright ening-Homemade/dp/0812966600/sr=8-1/qid=1169721445 /ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/105-4470053-8023658?ie=UTF8&s=boo ks
Unfortunately it was not done by someone stupid. It was done by a brilliant guy, who, today would be "stored" in Gitmo until he confesses.

If you're still about it was http://www.amazon.com/Lincoln-Unmasked-Youre-Suppo sed-Dishonest/dp/030733841X/

Controlling the media to present a picture of fair and rational government has been the aim of almost every government/state/ruler in history and it continues to the present day.

Though, to be sure, one cannot assume that just because governments sometimes manipulate the press, any negative information about a government that eventually comes to light is true. During the reign of Justinian, he had Procopius produce a history of his times which was, of course, laden with remarks to sooth the emperor and avoid ascribing anything negative to the empire's administration. After his death, Procopius' Secret History appeared, purporting to give the "real story" of things, calling the general Belisarius an imcompetent fool and the Empress Theodora an outright whore. Yet, almost no historians believe anything in the secret history, which seems to be a kind of saucy genre of fiction that flourished at the time, and the reliable account is actually in the official production.

What I find at Slashdot is often groupthink that anything from the government is automatically wrong and any gossipy rumours that come from "underground sources" (who are more appreciated the more they try to look victimized) are automatically true. The world isn't that simple.

I see a lot of people here putting down there (mis)conceptions about what makes a good CEO.

The book Good to Great describes the research done by Jim Collins (Built to Last), in which he and his team sorted through a list of 1,435 companies. They focused on the filtered down to the companies that managed to transition from Good companies to Great companies. I'll let the amazon info/reviews give you more detail:
http://www.amazon.com/Good-Great-Companies-Leap-Ot hers/dp/0066620996/

One interesting point in this book is that the CEOs at the good to great companies are very different from the image of the Big Bad CEO that everyone buys into. A lot of the CEOs were quiet, shy, self-deprecating individuals that managed to take these middling companies and make them grow like gangbusters.

P.S. reviews mention silver bullets, which triggers some sort of warm fuzzy feeling in my head. hopefully it's not a hemorrhage.

Last summer I went hiking through the British countryside and managed some 550 miles and 40+ pubs. I came back feeling so good that I started to question why walking isn't a bigger part of urban design in the US. These are the highlights from my reading list -

Edge City - http://www.amazon.com/Edge-City-Life-New-Frontier/ dp/0385424345/sr=8-1/qid=1169657560/ref=pd_bbs_sr_ 1/104-0752558-7489538?ie=UTF8&s=books

You have to get the opposing viewpoint to understand a topic. Its fascinating to get the arguments for sprawl largely to see what they leave out.

Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape - http://www.amazon.com/Geography-Nowhere-Americas-M an-Made-Landscape/dp/0671888250/ref=pd_sim_b_4/104 -0752558-7489538

Many great ideas on the problems of urban sprawl but unfortunately few solutions.

Last summer I went hiking through the British countryside and managed some 550 miles and 40+ pubs. I came back feeling so good that I started to question why walking isn't a bigger part of urban design in the US. These are the highlights from my reading list -

Edge City - http://www.amazon.com/Edge-City-Life-New-Frontier/ dp/0385424345/sr=8-1/qid=1169657560/ref=pd_bbs_sr_ 1/104-0752558-7489538?ie=UTF8&s=books

You have to get the opposing viewpoint to understand a topic. Its fascinating to get the arguments for sprawl largely to see what they leave out.

Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape - http://www.amazon.com/Geography-Nowhere-Americas-M an-Made-Landscape/dp/0671888250/ref=pd_sim_b_4/104 -0752558-7489538

Many great ideas on the problems of urban sprawl but unfortunately few solutions.

"You're fucked if you speak your mind and you know you will..." http://www.amazon.com/gp/music/wma-pop-up/B000J3FB FC001016/ref=mu_sam_wma_001_016/102-2816215-954414 4

Me, I'm waiting for a droud a la Larry Niven's The Ringworld Engineers . Aren't we all waiting to become drooling, grinning wireheads, spending 23 and a half hours a day with current going straight to the pleasure center of our brains.

Well, with the time one spends on Slashdot, maybe there wouldn't be much of a change...

You could call it 'World Book' or 'Brittanica'. The paper encyclopedias that exist differ from Wikipedia in plenty of ways, but if there weren't computers anymore, those differences wouldn't be real important.

Throw in book like this one:

http://www.amazon.com/Back-Basics-Readers-Digest-E ditors/dp/0895779390

(it tells you how to build a structure, make a chair, make a broom, etc)

and I wouldn't worry too much about it. The key feature of Wikipedia is that it is free and open. It might even work as the basis for a print project, but sticking it on paper isn't real important in a 'preservation' sense.

I suspected that it would only be a matter of time before someone alluded to Neil Stephenson's The Diamond Age . It would be nice if we had arrived to such a badass world of nanotech, but I'm a little baffled by how this isn't diamond:

...a material, structurally similar to diamond, made from coal...

If it's made from coal, then it's pure carbon. And if carbon is arranged into a tough state, isn't that diamond by definition? If the carbon molecules fall instead into some other configuration, what's stopping one from making real diamond?

Forty states have laws allowing individuals to do this, and many of them offer subsidies and tax breaks for people who do.

Tell that to the boy scout who tried to build a reactor in his backyard.

Well, though there are obvious exceptions to any rule (your wife apparently claims to be one) there is a lot of evolutionary theory and observational data to support this position. I'd recommend reading The Naked Ape for a good introduction, but basically it comes down to a few things:

a) female humans are primarily concerned with identifying mates that will provide for them, given the extremely high amount of parental investment our species has (it takes a lot to raise a kid vs. a puppy, for example). Men care less (or not at all) about a mate's abilities as a mother, because sperm cost us practically nothing. Quantity of mates is more important than quality. So women judge men primarily based on their social rank and ability to perform tasks. Men don't really judge too much at all, but when they do its just a skin-deep analysis (this women is hot, and thus worth 5 minutes and 100 calories, essentially).

b) Women are traditionally more social in their interactions with others and the environment. Men, from a hunting/gathering standpoint, use sensory (particularly visual) cues to interpret their environment.

Experimentally:

It has been shown over and over that women perform less well in visually-oriented aptitude tests, but are able to multi-task and perform socially at a higher level.

Anecdotally:

Men love porn. Girls don't. Both enjoy sex.

(please don't make me dig up papers to support this... i'm a primatologist/evolutionary biologist by education, if that holds any weight around here).

what the hell is the marketing department doing? Are they *that* ethically challenged?

As a matter of fact, yes they are. Corporations (and therefore their various departments), by definitions, only have in mind the interest of their shareholders, therefore if being unethical furthers their interest and a corporation can get away with it, they will be.

I suggest you watch a documentary called The Corporation: they very clearly demonstrate that the laws governing corporations make then sociopathic by nature.

perhaps a bit off topic, but take a look at this: http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Windows-Ultimate-N umbered-Signature/dp/B000M2WPIQ/sr=1-2/qid=1169476 621/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2/102-5235946-3553706?ie=UTF8&s= software Signed by Bill Gates himself. If this is real, it is quite possibly one of the most comical things I have ever seen microsoft produce since BOB http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_bob

I lost my Munkres and it cost me $100 to replace it.

Books don't just work. Books don't work where there is no light - e.g. inside a car.

You can store the contents of the entire book in flash memory and not have to worry about internet connectivity. Water related problems also occur with paper books. You can buy AA or AAA batteries almost anywhere. If worst comes to worst, there's always the hand crank. Plus, these new readers don't need power to maintain a page on the display - just to change them or other functions.

The only downside I see is that it seems it's more straining on the eye.

I'd also recommend reading Masters of Doom.

there is no 30 gigabyte iPod.

Actually one exists, available in black and white.

Of course it is a funny statement to see coming from Microsoft.

Actually one exists, available in black and white.

Of course it is a funny statement to see coming from Microsoft.

In spite of the rise in spam, you can still keep everything but the stray message or two a day hitting your inbox if you configure SpamAssassin well. Get a guide like McDonalds' SpamAssassin and follow the steps for the usual configuration based on examining headers and referring to Razor. Then, take a massive collection of all sorts of spam, from text pump 'n' dump to image spam, and feed it into sa-learn, SpamAssassin's Bayesian training system. A good setup with extensive Bayesian training will cut out almost everything. And it's not too hard. If you can install a Linux distro, you can configure SpamAssassin.

However, this is obviously only to filter spam coming into your own box. When I am travelling, I try to force myself to leave my laptop behind in order to truly relax, but that means that I have to use my e-mail provider's web interface. And when I see that my Inbox has 500 messages after just 36 hours, then I start to understand the grumbling that SMTP is broken and we need a drastically reformed protocol.

Everyone can use a bit of help making sure they haven't spoiled their ballot, by marking two candidates for the same race, for example. So the Optical Scan machines are designed to spit out a spoiled ballot so the voter can fix it. Which they do, in white districts in Florida. In predominantly black districts, the machines accept spoiled ballots silently, which are then thrown out and not counted later. This is done "to speed things up" which is Floridian for "throw the election to the Repuglicans."

Same machine, different setting. THe voting officials have discretion.

In 2000, over 100,000 votes were not counted, using this cool setting.

Greg Palast wrote about it...
And of course there is always the electronic ballot stuffing option on the machines. Memory cards need to have 0 votes at the start of the election, but that can include 100 votes for bush and -100 votes for gore. One Florida precinct accidentally released interim counts for gore that shrank in 2000 due to such pre-loaded memory cards. Oh, they said it was a hardware failure... but what programmer would allow negative vote counts by mistake?

I estimate that a 42U rack can fit 240 drives. By the end of this year, that means that a company will fit 240TB in 4.75 cu ft.

With the Sun Fire X4500, a 4U server that holds 24 drives, your estimate is exactly right. However, even with 1TB drives, you have to account for redundancy and other overhead (such as database indexes), so the total usable space is probably less than half that. Fitting a 100TB data warehouse into one rack seems feasible in the near future.

Storage services such as Amazon's S3 makes this very cheap and easy.

Of course, if you were looking at this from an engineering perspective, you would realize there is going to be a certain amount of voter fraud in any election, and develop a system where the outcome would not change based on say a 5% or a 10% miscount of votes (or somewhere around the max voter fraud you can do without it being blatently obvious that the election has been rigged). You make the system fault tolerant.

Any system that pretends that there is no voting fraud, and depends on there being no voter fraud to function properly, is like developing a network protocal that catastrophicly fails if so much as a single packet is lost. Part of the trouble with politics is that we have given what are really communications systems (an election IS a communication system), a certain moral content. It is "right" that all votes need to be counted, and "wrong" that some should be lost, so we end up designing a system on a rather arbitrary set of moral beliefs instead of engineering it the same way we would a telephone switching system.

One book that kinda goes into the problem is "WHY MOST THINGS FAIL: Evolution, Extinction and Economics" by Paul Ormerod ( http://www.amazon.com/Most-Things-Fail-Paul-Ormero d/dp/0571220126 )... although the book is more about companies than politics, a lot of the same principles apply.

I fail to see your point. At least three of those tags have Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century as it's top pick in that category. With not one neo-con book in the list. Speaking of neo-com I typed in 'fud' to search the tags and only came across one book, and a search on 'lies' seemed to be Ann (happy widow) Coulter's featured page. Interestingly enough, 'truth' had a similar list as 'lies'. Fairly useless for simple common words, but it does allow people to express themselves, how could that be a bad thing? Eventually I see it as a way to flag certain categories like 'controversial', 'pop-culture' even if those words aren't common tags for the item, as 'controversial' items would often have both 'lies' and 'truth' as tags.

Ah, when I was living in Twickenham, for school, I loved breakfast tea with some sugar and cream. Plus, the Brits. had an easy water boiler to make the hot water. That and all the toast and jam on the table. I enjoyed that.

In the case of radio broadcasting, the radio station did not give you the technology to make the recording. They just made the broadcast.

How about GE? They own NBC and make VCRs.

Same thing, right?

Reminds of the science fiction short story "Deep Safari" by Charles Sheffield (originally printed in Asimov's, reprinted along with Georgia On My Mind), about adventure and romance in a virtual reality controlled nanobot stuck in the brain. At really small scales, quantum effects and the body's own Electromagnetic interference can screw things up.

Reminds of the science fiction short story "Deep Safari" by Charles Sheffield (originally printed in Asimov's, reprinted along with Georgia On My Mind), about adventure and romance in a virtual reality controlled nanobot stuck in the brain. At really small scales, quantum effects and the body's own Electromagnetic interference can screw things up.

There's just too many product types out there to expect any site to track the feedback of, well, the entire market of stuff that's out there. For stuff I've looked for recently, garden equipment and robotic vacuums (ends up there's a bit more than just Roomba out there), I've found specialist forums and even commercial ads to be useful in tracking down details to search further on.

As far as generalist sites - I've found the eclectic community over at Slickdeals.net to be fairly useful in getting a quick grip on what to look for - but forum-goers there are intentionally against bad-mouthing products (thread-crapping), so you have to take a large variety of recommendations there with much due skepticism. Great place for leads though.

Then, of course, there's the Resellerratings-style sites. Once you've scoped product details, it's quite important to get feedback on who you're buying from. Again - due skepticism in all regards will help you in various ways, but large negatives or fake praise for rarely-rated stores can be an important part of an investigation for a large purchase.

If it's not a big purchase though, I'm usually comfortable just hitting Froogle, Amazon, or NewEgg and being done with it.

Ryan Fenton

What is with the brainwashing baloney? ... My main point is that, de facto, using the term communism implies much of what Kerala is NOT.

You have been brainwashed* into believing that communism == Leninism and Maoism and therefore Kerala cannot be communist. In fact however the Leninist and Maoist systems as they have developed historically are misguided aberrations and not at all the only possible communist systems. Many European countries have had communist parties for a long time, and their political programs have little to do with the Soviet Union and China (although it must be said that from 1950 - ca. 1980 the fact that those systems existed at all had a lot of influence on parts of those parties). E.g., several Italian cities. e.g., Rome, have a communist party majority in the city council.

As far as Cuba goes: the Cuban revolution was started by a bunch of intelligent guys with the best intentions, and few would deny that overthrowing the Batista regime was wrong. There are very strong indications that Cuba would have developed nicely if the US hadn't inflicted a continuous state of war on it.

* To deny that the US citizens have been brainwashed about communism since the 1920ies and particularly during the cold war is silly. I won't do your research for you, but look into the development of the socialist/communist parties in the US. I don't have my copy at hand but for example (and IIRC) City of Quartz describes a utopian communist community outside of LA at the beginning of the century.

Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.

http://www.amazon.com/Mote-Gods-Eye-Larry-Niven/dp /0671741926/sr=8-1/qid=1169177193/ref=pd_bbs_1/103 -6417068-1378226?ie=UTF8&s=books

One of the more thought provoking sci-fi books I've read.

Easy:
http://www.amazon.com/Physics-Immortality-Modern-C osmology-Resurrection/dp/0385467990

Besides the usual tag lines of "proving the existence of God" the core of his thesis is more surviving the next big bang.

And as Douglas Adams is fond of pointing out, "some think this has already happened"...

a.

There is always the possibility that it's only our current universe that is 10 billion years old.

Maybe the big bang wasn't a bang at all, but was instead the "bottom" of a black hole from a neighboring universe (A white hole)... their balck hole sucks up a "universe-load" of matter, condenses it, and funnels it down a spout... then all that matter comes out the other end into our universe. No longer under the influence of astronomical gravity the matter quickly expands and cools and, tada, here's a new universe.

Under that scenario the meta-verse could have been around for who knows how many years and could contain umpteen million universes spewing matter around amongst themselves and/or spawning off completely new "spaces". If a civilization could figure out a way to ride through one of these and into a fresh new universe they could potentially persist for billions or trillions of years.

The book Macrolife includes many of these concepts and is an all-around great SF book.

Heh, if you're a fan, you can get the Limited Edition, Bill Gates Signature Version of Vista Ultimate Upgrade. Better hurry. Only available while supplies last! :)

Not the trade center, but a disturbing image of something within the last 4 or 5 years: Legacy of Blood by Jedi Mind Tricks

A single exposure of color polaroid film is about a dollar anyway. That's 20 exposures for seventeen bucks and change and that doesn't include tax and shipping. Unless you're sure that you can make greater-than-one-dollar denominations, it won't save you anything :)

The war on terror is bullshit and 9/11 was carried out by the governments of the United States and Israel.

http://www.amazon.com/Terrorstorm-History-Governme nt-Sponsored-Terrorism/dp/B000HRJLM4/

video.google.com/videosearch?q=terror+storm

History Repeats Itself: How The RIAA Is Like 17th Century French Button-Makers

As regular readers know, I've been working through a series of posts on how economics works when scarcity is removed from some areas. I took a bit of a break over the holidays to catch up on some reading, and to do some further thinking on the subject (along with some interesting discussions with people about the topic). One of the books I picked up was one that I haven't read in well over a decade, but often recommend to others to read if they're interested in learning more about economics, but have no training at all in the subject. It's Robert L. Heilbroner's The Worldly Philosophers. Beyond giving readers a general overview of a variety of different economic theories, the book actually makes them all sound really interesting. It's a good book not necessarily because of the nitty gritty of economics (which it doesn't cover), but because it makes economics interesting, and gives people a good basis to then dig into actual economic theory and not find it boring and meaningless, but see it as a way to better understand what these "philosophers" were discussing.

Reading through an early chapter, though, it struck me how eerily a specific story Heilbroner told about France in 1666 matches up with what's happening today with the way the recording industry has reacted to innovations that have challenged their business models. Just two paragraphs highlight a couple of situations with striking similarities to the world today:

"The question has come up whether a guild master of the weaving industry should be allowed to try an innovation in his product. The verdict: 'If a cloth weaver intends to process a piece according to his own invention, he must not set it on the loom, but should obtain permission from the judges of the town to employ the number and length of threads that he desires, after the question has been considered by four of the oldest merchants and four of the oldest weavers of the guild.' One can imagine how many suggestions for change were tolerated.

Shortly after the matter of cloth weaving has been disposed of, the button makers guild raises a cry of outrage; the tailors are beginning to make buttons out of cloth, an unheard-of thing. The government, indignant that an innovation should threaten a settled industry, imposes a fine on the cloth-button makers. But the wardens of the button guild are not yet satisfied. They demand the right to search people's homes and wardrobes and fine and even arrest them on the streets if they are seen wearing these subversive goods."

Requiring permission to innovate? Feeling entitled to search others' property? Getting the power to act like law enforcement in order to fine or arrest those who are taking part in activities that challenge your business model? Don't these all sound quite familiar? Centuries from now (hopefully much, much sooner), the actions of the RIAA, MPAA and others that match those of the weavers and button-makers of 17th century France will seem just as ridiculous.

Of course, this says nothing at all about whether affirmative action is good; my point is only that under his purported system of morality, both should be equally offensive.

You went further then that; you not only said that both should be equally offensive, but you flat out accused him of willfully disregarding or outright sanctioning that legacy bullshit at Harvard.

Whenever I read works from Jared Diamond, I think to myself "Why does this guy spend two thirds of his time preemptively addressing every possible misrepresentation of his viewpoint? Its not like any halfway reasonable person would make those accusations." When I see accusations like the ones you dish out, I begin to understand.