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I had to google your reference but it seems that you're comparing apples to kangaroos.

Let's compare just dimensions for:
  (a) 9/11
  (b) Vick's dog-fighting kennels

1) Severity of incident.
  (a) 2500+ deaths
  (b) >please fill in severity<

2) Number of occurrences from the sample size.
  (a) one out of (at a rough guess) two low-flying passenger-jet incidents in recent history - omg 50% perceived likelihood.
  (b) one out of roughtly 1696 ran dog-fighting kennels lately - omg 0.06% perceived likelihood.

Combining the two factors surely suggests that if one sees a low-flying passenger jet in a city there's a 50% chance of lots of death based on recent experiences...

No, that's the definition of an idiot. A sociopath is a far more complicated animal

There are lot's of links on the net. Here's another one, at the very same site you linked to, which tells us:

Sociopath: One who is affected with a personality disorder marked by antisocial behavior.

Stop being a pedant.

No, that's the definition of an idiot. A sociopath is a far more complicated animal

There are lot's of links on the net. Here's another one, at the very same site you linked to, which tells us:

Sociopath: One who is affected with a personality disorder marked by antisocial behavior.

Stop being a pedant.

No, that's the definition of an idiot. A sociopath is a far more complicated animal

There are lot's of links on the net. Here's another one, at the very same site you linked to, which tells us:

Sociopath: One who is affected with a personality disorder marked by antisocial behavior.

Stop being a pedant.

She showed complete disregard for the well being of anyone else, which is pretty much the definition of a sociopath.

No, that's the definition of an idiot. A sociopath is a far more complicated animal. Sociopaths may not deserve much sympathy, but everybody is an idiot now and then.

Quick clarification, Universal Studios settled with Crispin the day before it was to go to trial - supposedly because they didn't want to reveal their accounting practices. It hasn't been an issue since as "the Screen Actors Guild later rewrote their rules regarding the derivative use of actors' works in films or TV series, setting terms under which to require the studios and networks to give payment and credit to the actors." Citation: http://www.answers.com/topic/back-to-the-future-part-ii#Replacement_of_Crispin_Glover

Multiply your points of failure.

I'm not sure that means what you think it means :)

Personally, I think this sort of lax infrastructure security has become endemic.

I'm pretty sure endemic doesn't mean what he thinks it means either :)

With that said, this (Obama's) plan is for national rail, not intercity rail.

That's inter-city, not intra-city.

With that said, this (Obama's) plan is for national rail, not intercity rail.

That's inter-city, not intra-city.

Educative is apparently a word:

http://www.answers.com/educative
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/educative

Personally, I would go with educational (pedagogical would mean related to teaching, rather than learning, so I don't think it works as well here).

Nope.

I was saying there is no natural way to do it. They do it through dams and flooding (or artificial lakes). They do it, and because of the artificial means, it does work. It'd be nicer to have a mountain top lake and a hydroelectric plant below, but hey, we work with what we have.

    And differential is a valid term. :) See the first noun, definition 3. :)

Are you really that fucking dumb? Your metabolism lowers because your body is shutting down, the definition of starvation: http://www.answers.com/topic/starvation. Your body isn't lowering metabolism magically while it continues on unaffected. That's what too few calories means. Someone getting 1000 / day will gain weight, and is not functioning properly... because the body is storing the energy instead of using it. No laws of physics need be broken for this to happen, and you're still below maintence.

there may be a difference of opinion between what I mean by large quantities of water

The difference of water consumption between an evaporative system and a once-through system is about twenty to one. This site has a good explanation about how both systems work, including some basic equations.

What about fixing the message size bug? And what about proper negotiation of authentication methods? ...
I'm looking forward to Microsoft's new innovations in de-commoditisation of internet protocols and services.

Capitalism abolishing force?! I would list you all the wars that were instigated by, and fought for profit of the military-industrial complex or some other capitalist entity

Yes capitalism and free markets. They are predicated on voluntary exchanges. If force is used there is neither capitalism nor a free market. What you describe is fascism, mercantilism, or something else.

Falcon

Actually, Stanford Research Institute. First marketed by Xerox It wasn't Apple -or- Microsoft!

How many presidents are asked to provide a birth certificate for the public?

This is not a political issue, it's pointless stirring.

How many have been asked to provide it? as the GP said, if he were to provide it (which would probably take all of 15 minutes) it would shut up all those who are currently asking and it would be cheaper than fighting the 10 or so lawsuits that have been started, most (all?) of whom have said that if they can see the Birth Certificate (as opposed to the Certification of Live Birth) they will drop their lawsuits, see here for a details of the differences.

According to the Department of Hawaiian Homelands:

In order to process your application (to verify that you are a genuine native Hawaiian), DHHL utilizes information that is found only on the original Certificate of Live Birth, which is either black or green. This is a more complete record of your birth than the Certification of Live Birth (a computer-generated printout). Submitting the original Certificate of Live Birth will save you time and money since the computer-generated Certification requires additional verification by DHHL.

Aaron Z

Twice in the same thread. In a thread comparing OSX to AIX, you think Solaris is "baroque"? That's like saying the BBQ ricecake is hedonistic compared to the plain ricecake. Whilst bathing in chocolate.

Baroque

Baroque

He does appear to claim ... that Fair Use is a Common Law construct that supersedes the current precedent for Fair Use. ... The legal system simply isn't setup in such a way that anyone can come in and claim that the last hundred years of precedent is completely wrong.

Especially since Common Law is precedent.* Common Law: "The system of laws originated and developed in England and based on court decisions"

Saying that common law supersedes judicial precedent is like saying that the laws of physics supersedes experimental results. We create the laws of physics to match experimental results, and if the orbit of Mercury doesn't match predictions, it's the current laws of physics that are wrong, not the experimental data.**

* Obligatory IANAL disclaimer.

** Of course, any particular experiment can be in error due to a variety of reasons, just like a single case can be mis-decided. But if *all* of your experiments point in one direction and the laws of physics point in another, reality wins out.

Okay, first of all, you can forget about the CO2 in the pressurization: that was collected from the atmosphere, and goes back, net carbon is zero. Similarly, since beer is made from plants, pretty well all the CO2 produced by making beer is absorbed again making next year's beer.

Just for fun, though, let's do a back-of-envelope calculation of how much there is. According to Wikipedia, humans brew about 133 gigaliters of beer a year, and we can assume it's about 5 percent alcohol, so that's (133×0.05)=6.7 gigaliters of alcohol. The specific gravity of ethanol is about 0.8 so that's 5.3 billion kilograms of ethanol per year. One mol Ethanol (CH3CH22OH) masses 45 grammmes. So that's 5600 billion grams of alcohol, 120 billion mols, and it turns out that there's 1 mol of CO2 per mol ethanol.

Thus we get 120 billion mol of CO2, a mol is 44 grammes, about 5.3 million tonnes. According to WikiAnswers, a car produces about 5.2 tonnes of CO2 per year, so all the world's beer production is about equivalent to a million cars.

So if it worries you, buy a couple CFL bulbs or soemthing. It's pretty small.

(PS. This would look better if /. allowed the sub tag.)

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Apparently it is in dispute, but is certainly not bullshit. It is one of many possible origins. Okeh as the Indian word is what I was taught way back in grade school, and is number #2 in this following list. Here is the answers.com page that has all the possibly etymological origins, "OK" has quite the history and could come from any number of original words, or various abbreviations. So take yer pick there, it is pretty interesting there are so many of them.

As to Technocrat, Bruce had posted previously to the takedown that he might have to do that, as it wasn't fitting his idea of what he wanted plus the cost of the site. It wasn't totally unexpected at all.

Plutonium is a non-renewable resource.

Are you sure?

That's what I thought at first (well, not that GP's time isn't worth much, but that GP must spend a lot of time commuting), but presuming that GP is an average cyclist, that's less than an hour commute (one way). I know people who commute by car with longer commute times.

So what you're saying is that because they believe X is true while you believe that X is false, they're hypocrites because they act as though X is true?

I'm saying they are hypocrites because they claim a mandate to protect civil liberties while choosing which rights they deem important enough to consider civil liberties. The definition of civil liberties that I've seen is "Fundamental individual rights, such as freedom of speech and religion, protected by law against unwarranted governmental or other interference." It's hard to see how the 2nd amendment isn't a fundamental individual right.

For those of you who ... I congratulate you, as you are clearly an intelligent audience.

This reads like a really sleazy sales pitch, along the lines of "Did you know that top billionaires take my supplement to boost their brain power?"

Not only that, but I actually went to Rands' blog and read the latest post just to see what could be so amazing about it. In there, I found more stupid marketing / management terminology:

In a good bridge, I see the defiant end result of how some of my favorite engineering stories begin:

• âoeIâ(TM)m sure you can arrange an impressive line of people who say itâ(TM)s impossible. I take personal joy in ignoring those who say no.â
• âoeYes, halfway through this project weâ(TM)ll discover the impossible, but we know how to build through the impossible. Impossible is when we do our best work.â

Nobody "discovers the impossible" but "knows how to build through the impossible." That's not what impossible means. But it sure as hell sounds impressive, and it excites people!

The ability to deal with obstacles, even very difficult obstacles is a very marketable skill. However, when you start talking about overcoming challenges as "doing the impossible" you stop sounding like someone who is actually capable of dealing with problems and starts sounding like a moron salesman. Especially when you later say something stupid like, "Impossible is when we do our best work." It might sound great when your favorite Hollywood hero says that he "laughs in the face of danger," but in real life, when you're managing people, if you dismiss a current challenge by saying, "that's when we do our best work" you'll piss your employees off. They know it's bullshit, they know they'd do better if it was easy and they had more time. You can tell them that you have confidence they can handle the problem, but don't dismiss the problem with levity.

Hell, even in his own example of the Brooklyn Bridge, he says that when they hit the challenges during the building process, the manager got the bends, two employees died, and they decided to let one of the towers rest on compacted sand instead of bedrock. Then he says how amazing it is that it was a good decision, because it "hasn't moved" since. Might have been a good decision, but "the best" outcome obviously would have been no injuries, no deaths, and a foundation that was built exactly according to plan. Clearly, they don't do their best work under "impossible" conditions.

You want some tips on managing programmers and engineers? I don't have all the answers, but I do have one for certain: that type of marketing pitch might work when you're meeting to sell the product, but programmers and engineers aren't like most people in that regard. Exaggerations like that are just likely to piss us off, not impress or motivate us. So you post a summary like that on slashdot, and you get a bunch of angry geeks; you try to manage people like that, and you get a bunch of employees labeling you as a PHB.

Now there's an idea. On a cold winter night in Antarctica you could just collect frozen CO2 and bury it under the ice cap.

people need to start abandoning C/C++

Won't happen anytime soon. Developers can be extremely conservative people (in the traditionalist sense) when it comes to their programming environments.

MECO is around 185,000 feet (35 miles). The start of 'space' is commonly defined as 50 miles. But yes, that's damn high.

The average age for women to have children is 25. I would assume the average age for men to become fathers is higher? This would definitely factor in. The lack of sleep alone is a major factor..

Dearth doesn't really fit with what you said:

http://www.answers.com/dearth

There's a fine selection of animals they can use. And there's some adjectives too.

There's a fine selection of animals they can use. And there's some adjectives too.

I think it's just a matter of the dimwitted not knowing how loud they are shouting (and who they are shouting in front of) when they post on the internet.

KKK members know to wear hoods, even while at "secret meetings." This whole intertube thing is just a little overwhelming to Gomer Pyle and Barney Fife, they really don't "get it" that what they write here they might as well be saying to anyone, anywhere, anytime after it's posted.

If this helps expose even 1% of the corrupt and stupid cops out there - GREAT!

Of course, 98.3% of cops are good people, the problem is that the remaining 13,600 corrupt pigs tend not to get "outed" by their well meaning brethren.

http://www.answers.com/main/ntquery?s=sexy&gwp=13

Dictionary: sexy (sk's) pronunciation

adj., -ier, -iest.

      1. Arousing or tending to arouse sexual desire or interest.
      2. Slang. Highly appealing or interesting; attractive: "The recruiting brochures are getting sexier" (Jack R. Wentworth).

I don't know. You tell me what's with people who are loose with the defintion of lose.

I don't know. You tell me what's with people who are loose with the defintion of lose.

Bicorns do exist. Napoleon's hat was a bicorn.

Sci-Tech Dictionary: bicorn (bkörn)
(mathematics) A plane curve whose equation in cartesian coordinates x and y is (x2 + 2ay - a2)2 = y2(a2 - x2), where a is a constant.

WordNet: bicorn
The noun has one meaning: a cocked hat with the brim turned up to form two points
    Synonym: bicorne

The adjective bicorn has one meaning: having two horns or horn-shaped parts

Let's explore why that is... Here's a clue - England is just a bit smaller than Oregon. The population is much denser. England has 60 million people. Oregon has about 3 million. In the same amount of space. You can set up an infrastructure for the whole country with the same resources that it takes here in America to cover ONE STATE and you can reach far, far more customers doing it.

A null terminated String is a misnomer.

True. It should be "NUL-terminated string".

But the use of the word "string" is correct:

5. A series of similar or related acts, events, or items arranged or falling in or as if in a line. See synonyms at series.

I'm pretty confident nobody on the Internet really cares what you, personally, have bought and why.

You must be new here.

When you breed animals free from genetic issues, you have a much better chance for offspring that are free from genetic issues.

How would you find dogs that are "free of genetic issues"? It's too expensive to routinely sequence the DNA of pets, and we haven't yet identified the genes that code for many rare genetic disorders. If you could find dogs that were free of deleterious alleles, then feel free to mate them with their immediate families.

A healthy individual, be it dog or human, is likely to have several recessive genes that code for rare genetic disorders. Those genes seldom pose a problem unless we mate with someone who happens to carry the same gene. This is one of the reasons why breeding within a small gene pool often leeds to the expression of rare birth defects. I understand why dog breeders are defensive about the problems associated with the founder effect. Nevertheless, it is possible to address a non-scolarly audience without spreading misinformation and abusing terms like hybrid vigor.

Jennie Chen's essay made the point that outbreeding does not guarantee the health of the progeny. She also discussed the issue that dogs do not always carry the same number of genes that code for diseases. She shouldn't have polluted the essay with misleading and false statements.

For all intensive purposes of dog breeding, you assume that the parents are passing on their genes.

For all intensive purposes, huh? I know it's rude to point out spelling, grammatical, an typographical errors, but I think I'm doing you a favor.

Please read the following pages:

Link

Link

Clearly we need to go excavate those fire-crystals.

Blech, I'd forgotten just how nutty those people are. *washes brain*

No, tacit means wordless, silent.

Tacit, adj

3. Archaic. Not speaking. Silent.

If you need a definition of the word archaic, you can look it up yourself. You really should, because it's very important. The non-archaic and perfectly valid use of tacit that is being used in the summary is

2. a. Implied by or inferred from actions or statements

In other words, if it wasn't directly said, but can be inferred from a statement, tacit is still a valid use. Citation here

For example, if there had been 5 Phoenix landers instead of one (five landers incidentally would have cost less than five times the cost of one Phoenix lander), we'd be able to compare the legs of the working vehicles.

You're assuming that any two were within traveling distance of each other after after flying for months and landing via superball.

and submit my pattent for my Moisture Farm invention

http://wpcontent.answers.com/wikipedia/en/thumb/8/83/Luke-Treadwell_close_large.jpg/180px-Luke-Treadwell_close_large.jpg

Considering that a $200 million "film" can be obtained in DVD for USD$20 at most, I am sure that there is no way a Wii game should cost more than that... (currently 50 euro!)

I think you have no concept how much many of these games cost to develop. Here's an 8-year-old chart that shows costs in 2001, and claims that it cost $40 million to create HalfLife 2. I would bet money that WoW has exceeded $200 million in development costs so far, plus Blizzard incurs staggering operating costs hosting and supporting their millions of users.

Plus every game is a huge gamble. Nobody knows for sure if a game is going to sell well. For each Doom 3 that gets released, there are three or four Daikatanas that are stinking up the bargain bin. How would your company do if you invested $40 million in development per game on four games but only one of them was popular? Sorry, trick question: your company would have folded after the failure of the first or second game.

Way, Way, Way back when I had a buddy that was a programmer at Pick Systems (PickOS). I don't remember a lot of the details about the system except that they built it up to running on IBM iron. It was a multi-user, Unix (Dick Pick liked to call it "Eunuchs") competitor back in the 70's and beyond, so there may be some prior art to be discovered.
More about Pick at:
http://www.answers.com/topic/pick-system

Also, Jonathan Sisk wrote extensively about PickOS. He's at http://www.jes.com/

The same reason it doesn't catch their versus they're:
http://www.answers.com/calender