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I started using JustePort for a couple of years ago and it does the job, but given that my primary computing environment is Linux, an Airport Express with JustePort isn't optimal. For example, in order to configure the Airport Express, I have to use Windows.

In my view, a setup such as the one described here is appealing, though without first-hand experience, it's hard to judge.

"corporate" in the sense of group not in the sense of corporation

Three guesses what the "C" in "BBC" stands for.

I consider corporate interest of a news media organization to be a subcategory of reporting bias.

WTF?

And I am not mistaken in this consideration.

Wow. Feeling self-confident today, aren't we?

I don't even see the point of making statements like the above. It doesn't matter what they are "required" to do. Being funded by a particular tax introduces a bias in their outlook that can't be removed with a "requirement".

You seem to have a propositional fallacy.

As an aside, I've googled "BBC bias" and have come up (though trivial effort) with several examples of BBC bias, including favoring "political correctness" and "liberal culture", a tendency to assign racists to the right hand side of the political spectrum, and slanting the coverage of some religious groups.

Way to go. You link to an article by News Corp, the largest, most biased media organisation in the world which jumps at every chance to take a stab at the BBC.
Your other links are to a blog that is fixated on the BBCs coverage of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, despite being the only major western news organisation with an extensive network in Palestine.

But if you think about it, everyone employed at the BBC is paid in large part from a tax. Why wouldn't they be so biased?

People will have a personal opinion, but that needn't influence their work. That's more or lesswhat being objective means.

The BBC is indeed biased as you'd expect of a human organization.

Your assumption of inherent bias is dangerous and simply untrue. When senior figures attack their organisation they do indeed give them adequate coverage, as illustrated by the articles linked earlier on in the thread.

"corporate" in the sense of group not in the sense of corporation

Three guesses what the "C" in "BBC" stands for.

I consider corporate interest of a news media organization to be a subcategory of reporting bias.

WTF?

And I am not mistaken in this consideration.

Wow. Feeling self-confident today, aren't we?

I don't even see the point of making statements like the above. It doesn't matter what they are "required" to do. Being funded by a particular tax introduces a bias in their outlook that can't be removed with a "requirement".

You seem to have a propositional fallacy.

As an aside, I've googled "BBC bias" and have come up (though trivial effort) with several examples of BBC bias, including favoring "political correctness" and "liberal culture", a tendency to assign racists to the right hand side of the political spectrum, and slanting the coverage of some religious groups.

Way to go. You link to an article by News Corp, the largest, most biased media organisation in the world which jumps at every chance to take a stab at the BBC.
Your other links are to a blog that is fixated on the BBCs coverage of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, despite being the only major western news organisation with an extensive network in Palestine.

But if you think about it, everyone employed at the BBC is paid in large part from a tax. Why wouldn't they be so biased?

People will have a personal opinion, but that needn't influence their work. That's more or lesswhat being objective means.

The BBC is indeed biased as you'd expect of a human organization.

Your assumption of inherent bias is dangerous and simply untrue. When senior figures attack their organisation they do indeed give them adequate coverage, as illustrated by the articles linked earlier on in the thread.

You seem to be mistaking reporting bias with corporate interest.

No. I consider corporate interest ("corporate" in the sense of group not in the sense of corporation) of a news media organization to be a subcategory of reporting bias. And I am not mistaken in this consideration.

BBC programs are required to be objective and unbiased, and it seems they live up to that requirement more than most broadcasters.

I don't even see the point of making statements like the above. It doesn't matter what they are "required" to do. Being funded by a particular tax introduces a bias in their outlook that can't be removed with a "requirement". For some reason, I routinely read on Slashdot, smug yet naive boasting about the unbiased nature of the BBC and I just grew tired of it.

As an aside, I've googled "BBC bias" and have come up (though trivial effort) with several examples of BBC bias, including favoring "political correctness" and "liberal culture", a tendency to assign racists to the right hand side of the political spectrum, and slanting the coverage of some religious groups.

This mirrors the stereotypical whining of "liberal bias" often seen in the States. But if you think about it, everyone employed at the BBC is paid in large part from a tax. Why wouldn't they be so biased? Oh yea, that "requirement".

Many of the above cited sources are heavily biased (eg, as you'd expect of a blog that specializes in finding bias, real or otherwise, in the BBC), but they do illustrate the point. The BBC is indeed biased as you'd expect of a human organization. Honestly, the BBC has relatively low bias for a news organization and a government organization, but it is foolish to use the term, "unbiased" and I really wish slashdotters would stop annoying me with that term.

You seem to be mistaking reporting bias with corporate interest.

No. I consider corporate interest ("corporate" in the sense of group not in the sense of corporation) of a news media organization to be a subcategory of reporting bias. And I am not mistaken in this consideration.

BBC programs are required to be objective and unbiased, and it seems they live up to that requirement more than most broadcasters.

I don't even see the point of making statements like the above. It doesn't matter what they are "required" to do. Being funded by a particular tax introduces a bias in their outlook that can't be removed with a "requirement". For some reason, I routinely read on Slashdot, smug yet naive boasting about the unbiased nature of the BBC and I just grew tired of it.

As an aside, I've googled "BBC bias" and have come up (though trivial effort) with several examples of BBC bias, including favoring "political correctness" and "liberal culture", a tendency to assign racists to the right hand side of the political spectrum, and slanting the coverage of some religious groups.

This mirrors the stereotypical whining of "liberal bias" often seen in the States. But if you think about it, everyone employed at the BBC is paid in large part from a tax. Why wouldn't they be so biased? Oh yea, that "requirement".

Many of the above cited sources are heavily biased (eg, as you'd expect of a blog that specializes in finding bias, real or otherwise, in the BBC), but they do illustrate the point. The BBC is indeed biased as you'd expect of a human organization. Honestly, the BBC has relatively low bias for a news organization and a government organization, but it is foolish to use the term, "unbiased" and I really wish slashdotters would stop annoying me with that term.

The standard way to remove setuid requirements from ping is to implement the capabilities API, which was finally done in 2.6.26 even though the basic idea goes back to the 2.1 kernel in 1998. A good intro is available from IBM.

Perfect Illustration of my Papal Fish story: "Pope Benedict XVI's poker-night fish homily to the cardinals is: “Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day; teach a man to fish and he'll stop coming to church. "Dummy," continues B-Dict (the hip–hop nickname that he loves), "You don't want him to be able to feed himself for a lifetime, you want him to always need The Pope. OK?" http://editorialbbq.blogspot.com/

Not entirely accurate.

Google anonymizes data that is older than nine months, unless said data is tied to a Google account.

That's a sane default at least. Never overestimate a large software system...

Here's a piece about traffic lights optimized for furry bicyclists... http://hembrow.blogspot.com/2008/09/default-to-green.html [blogspot.com] ... such as "having a simultaneous green phase for bikes to go in all directions at once."

Ok..I realize we dutch people aren't the most attractive in the world...but calling us furries is a bit over the top to be quite honest. Heck, I get away with shaving twice a week.

And for the record, between my home and work there's 1 traffic light(train crossing). If I were to take the same route in a car there'd be 5 at least.

I have that exact problem too, and I hate it.

None of us would use Javascript if we had a choice, but we don't. So toolkits like JQuery or this release by Google are life savers.

JavaScript the language is actually very nice - the main problems with 'JavaScript' are browser inconsistencies, the DOM, etc. etc.

But if you take JavaScript itself, then yeah it has some problems - it was rushed - but it has good parts: It's a dynamic language, supports closures, first-class functions, convenient object definition syntax (from where we get JSON), etc. Due to its ubiquity, it also has the most secure and fast engines of any dynamic language (except for LuaJIT, but a comparison there is a topic all in itself).

Because of those, JavaScript is being used more and more as a scripting language outside of web browsers, for example in desktop environments, game engines, etc. If you stick to good coding practices in JavaScript, you can write large and robust applications in it.

But, again, to return to the original point, the current state of JavaScript in browsers is very messy. Which is why we need things like jQuery, and maybe this new library from Google as well.

That's a sane default at least. Never overestimate a large software system...

Here's a piece about traffic lights optimized for furry bicyclists... http://hembrow.blogspot.com/2008/09/default-to-green.html ... such as "having a simultaneous green phase for bikes to go in all directions at once."

I assume they have added FreeNX or commercial NX to the mix to get the network performance.

No, they haven't, except for a small number of offsite users working over low-bandwidth connections.

speaking of one packet per character sent instead of hundreds defining every pixel and its shadow

Xft already stores glyphs on the server. The image information is transferred once for each character in each font at a given size, not for every text drawing operation.

Sure the worse article about anything I have ever read. That said here in Brazil we are in the middle of a new plug standard change. This blog post has some pictures.

Bollocks. Largo, Florida runs about 300 users on thin clients over X, with all the latest Linux UI stuff, like GTK and Compiz. Yes, the fancy 3D desktop cube works just fine over networked X11.

I assume they have added FreeNX or commercial NX to the mix to get the network performance. If you do that with Raw X11 then you can watch your network coming to a crawl, been there done that.
NX mostly alters the protocol on the fly and caches font information so that the overhead is reduced significantly (speaking of one packet per character sent instead of hundreds defining every pixel and its shadow)

They do experience piracy. Typically from nations where intellectual property rights are not well respected.

I'd say in the example of drug companies that's simply the cost of doing business. No amount of propaganda or lobbying for copyright legislation (domestic or foreign) is going to give one control over behavior of inDUHviduals in another country. (That's not the way successful legislation works...it is the way fascism works, but that's a different story.)

(BTW, who is Billy Tauzin???? Funny (as in "funny smelling", not as in "funny, ha ha") that he was on the radar of both industries we're talking about here.)

Look at it from another point of view: If what you're doing is "so revolutionary" then how is someone in Brazil knocking off your product in short order? Perhaps it wasn't so revolutinary after all? "Revolutionary"....perhaps that word doesn't mean what you think it means? (revolutionary != we spent a ton of money on it)

I think time to be realistic for drug and music companies: No matter how much you spend/waste on the drugs/artists you're developing, they won't necessarily be profitable or even worth it. Ditto for all the money you spend/waste promoting those drugs/artists.

U.S drug companies and commercial radio are both currently a laughing stock.

I'm going out on a limb here, but perhaps the drug companies should focus more on cures and less on treatments than they do today?

To me, they're ultimately hung up on Gilette's business model. Buy the razor (aka pester your doctor for the perscription) and they sell you new blades for life (aka you get some relief from your symptom, but e.g. your eyes will bleed the whole time). Likewise, music companies perhaps should focus less on what they think we should like/listen to (Clear Channel is an abomination in the truest sense of the word, and only the tip of the industry's iceberg) and more on what we actually like and listen to?

I'd also argue that drug companies make way too much money (yes, it's possible). If that weren't true, they wouldn't have as many problems selling their drugs. (Let's all recall our supply and demand graphs from econ 101....lower prices = more people can afford your product = higher demand) They -- like the music industry -- create their own problems, then do their best to blame others for the results (i.e. lobby the government for special treatment).

On another front....

Print publishing is a more interesting example to me. If they stay with print media (books, paper) they don't have the piracy issue (not really) but as the world moves more and more to digital and print publishing tries to follow, they suffer more and more of the related problems....such as piracy. Thoughts? Personally I still like to pick up a book when I want to read -- it's a very, very good medium -- but I'm going to be called old-fashioned for that before too much longer.

-Matt

My websites and our client's websites have been showing Firefox passing up IE6, IE7, and IE8 combined. IE typically shows around 38%, Firefox shows around 39% and all others (mix of Chrome, Safari, Opera and mobile browsers) make up the difference. It's like it 1997 all over again. I'm kind of excited about the whole thing because now the new crop of standards can come to the front faster (SVG, HTML 5, etc...).

It's about time.

The issue is that the network transparency is utterly useless on modern UIs everything beyound Athena Widgets, or a plain xtern simply clogs your network in no time if you use it from more than one client server connection.
The protocol simply is too low level to scale

Bollocks. Largo, Florida runs about 300 users on thin clients over X, with all the latest Linux UI stuff, like GTK and Compiz. Yes, the fancy 3D desktop cube works just fine over networked X11.

And yet this layer of indirection makes it harder for everyone

No, this layer of indirection is necessary whether or not you want network transparency. All modern OSs, including Windows and OS X, use an IPC mechanism in their graphics subsystem.

Vox Day? The guy who thinks legalizing gay marriage will depopulate the US? Just another faux-libertarian that doesn't use his brain very much.

About eight years ago I read about a line of experiments that measurably increased rodents' performance in a set of memory and learning tasks. I believe the genetic change involved the NMDA receptor, but a quick search doesn't turn up an obvious link to that.

There was a report this September that gene therapy had been used to grant "full" color vision to colorblind monkeys, following on an earlier experiment that did the same thing to rodents. That is, the rodents were given three-color vision where they normally have two color receptor types. (Would that make them transrodents?) Apparently, the brain automatically adapts to having a new receptor type installed in the retina! And the same technique could be used on humans to grant us a fourth receptor type, maybe a UV receptor gotten from parrots or something. I'd volunteer to have this done to one eye. (The first comment on this article presents a dissenting view that just because the monkeys were able to distinguish colors in greater detail than before, that shouldn't be taken as proof that they "have full color vision". All the more reason to try it in a human!)

The rodents could be in combination with cyborg cats though, as seen in this 1995 report of recognizable images read directly from a cat's visual cortex.

I recently wrote an article about my thoughts on filesystems and operating systems by way of a fictional reference OS mentioning ZFS in a positive light for reasons including the dedupe feature mentioned in today's article:

IRON/Cloud — the outline of what a modern OS should be

I link back to the (yes, slashdot) article wherein I first learned about ZFS, and a rundown of the features I like about ZFS.

But no, I checked and our article texts do not hash to the same value, so I do not believe we would be stored at the same location on disk. ;D

(Before modding this post as Offtopic, please read it to the end. It is relevant; you just need to read the whole thing in order to see how it is)

Just in the last 24 hours, on another forum site that I read regularly, I know a guy who has private messaged me about migrating to FreeBSD.

He has done that because, in the past, he was using either Windows, or certain Linux distributions which were heavily GUI oriented and which, for various reasons, had a much less transparent and orthogonal design. He was having a lot of problems with those systems, in terms of both hardware driver and application stability.

He has started, as I mentioned, using FreeBSD, but despite X, he is also now using primarily text-based applications as well. One of his messages to me about this expressed his degree of happiness at having found such a greater level of reliability, speed, and flexibility, and thanking me for gradually causing him to become interested in FreeBSD.

My point, quite simply, is this. Openness, and openness as it specifically applies to UNIX design philosophy, has visible, tangible, practical benefits, and ultimately sells itself.

Corporations and government institutions can say whatever they want; we don't need to worry about it one way or the other. There is a certain demographic of users, who are increasingly becoming more and more derisive of every element of the practice of open source methodolgy, as well. Compilation from source, and use of text-based applications are considered by that group, to be anachronisms from the 1970s.

The point is, that when the proverbial crunch comes, FOSS proves itself, and suddenly the laughing stops; to generally be replaced by mute awe. Whether it's backpackers setting up an emergency c3 system in southeast Asia with gnuSense after the latest tsunami, Helios continuing, day in and day out, to build free PCs with Mint for underpriveleged kids, or a corporate sysadmin with a lone OpenBSD box, who along with his boss, watches Puffy dive into a phone booth and save the day when the local intranet has gone feet first, and business is threatening to grind to a halt entirely.

So if the EU's government have somehow been living in caves for the last two decades, it's not something any of us really need to get upset about. Let them voice whatever skepticism, or even outright condemnation they want.

If they want to find out the actual truth for themselves, however, the web and FTP sites are there, and they can replicate the benefits that other people have derived from FOSS UNIX, for themselves.

how about we start a 'fans' sellaband capital raising for this. I am sure there are more than 1 million fans who would put up $200 to be a part shareholder. If it's good enugh for Public Enemy and their new album why not> http://deancollinsblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/public-enemy-sellaband.html Cheers, dean

You mean like how Vox Day, who is a very big libertarian blogger, has made Paul Krugman look like an utter fool time and again on his blog? Or the way that Maureen Dowd consistently writes stuff that is no better than 90% of the stuff posted daily on the Huffington Post?...

In the US, you can register other people for SMS premium service without their consent, and you can do it remotely.

http://privacylog.blogspot.com/

Actually Venus and balloons do go together.

http://sciencelinks.jp/j-east/article/200210/000020021002A0351950.php
http://futureplanets.blogspot.com/2009/01/asrg-missions-venus-balloon.html

Long-term, what if we built a whole Cloud City up there where the atmosphere's thin-ish and the sulphuric acid rain slowed to a romantic drizzle? Maybe mine stuff from the atmosphere? There'd be one rule: don't look down, and don't breathe in. Two rules. Don't look down, don't breathe in, and don't tease the jellysquids. Three rules. I'll make orbit again.

>>>one of the most respected and most responsible news agencies in the world is the BBC, a government funded news company.

I have no respect for it. It's pro-big-government (and pro-EU) biased. Just read this website for an hour, and you'll see for yourself: http://biased-bbc.blogspot.com/

Or this criticism of the BBC: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_BBC

Or this official report from the BBC itself: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article1942948.ece

"Speaking Truth to Power Dept"??? Knock it off, Slashdot. Not all of your readers are effing braindead; no blogger on the planet is THAT good that they can bring the wheels of government (no matter how small) to a grinding stop. Report the whole story or don't report it at all. Read the blogger's own stuff on this. Oh, and do your website a favor and stay off the BBC bullshit train.

Normally you'd expect the psychology of priming to catch this one: a linear extrapolation is worthless when medical technology continues to change as fast as it does. Diabetes continues to exist in 50 years? On the near side of the apocalypse? I highly doubt it. Excepting curvature, we can thus conclude that women are getting fatter.

Some people see this phase we're in where the genomics/proteomics researchers are discovering that nothing is as simple as we told the investors as evidence that progress in medical science has taken a coffee break. Hardly. For the last century, the foundation of modern medicine has been statistical epidemiology: trying to find a needle in a haystack with a densitometer.

The profit model for the pharmaceutical industry is to spread the benefit of a drug over the largest study population where the effect remains statistically significant. Cholesterol levels too high? Add Lipitor to the water supply. It could be that only 10% of the people who take Lipitor actually benefit. But then, if this were determined, they'd have to charge ten times as much per treatment to maintain existing revenues, and fewer uninsured would be able to pay, and we might have to let some future president actually preside.

We are right now in the heart of the transition to etiology based medicine. Among the problems are how to pay for it without using giant studies designed to implicate everyone. This isn't so different from the transition of observational taxonomy (A and B share the same egg tooth dimple) to taxonomy with a genomics turbo assist. I recall in the early 1980s, this transition was not widely welcomed among traditional taxonomists. Unreliable, they complained. Now you couldn't do taxonomy any other way, and a lot of old arguments are long gone in the rear view mirror. The new bionic taxonomy is better, stronger, faster.

We're in that deceptive interlude after pressing the ignite button on the Saturn V rocket where the flame and rumble have erupted out the bottom, while the rocket itself just kind of shivers there, apparently going nowhere.

The combined propellant flow rate of the five F-1s in the Saturn V was 3,357 US gallons (12,710 l) per second, which would empty a 30,000 US gallons (110,000 l) swimming pool in 8.9 seconds. Each F-1 engine had more thrust than all three space shuttle main engines combined.

A decade or two later, you're praying for center-engine cutoff.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Apollo_8_acceleration.gif
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Genbank/genbankstats.html

Swell time to extrapolate the fate of humanity on a straight line. Besides, I have evidence to the contrary.

It is a bad thing - an extremely bad thing. There are processes for removing councilors who are doing a bad job, acting illegally or who lose the trust of the people who voted for them.

According to the blog they resigned to "rapturous applause" from the citizens. It was one man blogging, apparently leading to lots of face to face discussions. If they could refute the things being said about them I'm sure they could have done so instead of resigning.

So it would seem that they didn't resign because of one man, they resigned because of what many people found out from one man. It was the many that caused them to resign.

from the article

To be fair, looking at his blog (see here) he's not exactly clear about his allegations. Having read his droolings, I firmly believe that people would quit working for a council to avoid having to deal with that paranoid mental case.

The second problem with this FTA, it that fertiliser does not cost $1200 a tonne.

I think 1200 $/tonne is not a bad estimate, see recent quotes. Shipping is expensive so you have to take that into account. Note that the 1200 could be per unit of nutrient, not product. NH3 is 82% N so you must divide by .82 to convert product price into nutrient price. Lots of people were paying $0.60 per lb-N this spring. That's 1323 $/(tonne N).

Fertilizer is nitrogen and phosphorus. Exhaust is carbon and oxygen. Can one pair really be replaced by the other?

"The exhaust gases are believed to stimulate microbial activity and root growth, allowing the plants to more efficiently extract nutrient and moisture from the soil."

What keeps the injected CO2 from leaking back out?

"The system relies on attraction between negatively-charged ions in the gases and the soil’s positively charged alkaline component to hold the gases in the soil, as well as sealing it in."

http://abovecapricorn.blogspot.com/2009/10/soil-carbon-may-come-from-tractor.html

You need to see this: Biased BBC - http://biased-bbc.blogspot.com/ PBS is pretty much the same but on a smaller scale.

And if you refuse to pay the TV tax:
The BBC will use the force of government to compel you.
BBC is in collusion with the government.

Retired engineer John Kelly was one of several thousand who have refused to pay in protest at what they regard as bias in coverage of issues such as the European Union. He and nearly all the other 'refuseniks', including former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, have so far escaped court - despite tens of thousands of prosecutions each year.

He has now received a summons which he believes has been prompted by a flurry of publicity about high-profile figures, including Noel Edmonds and journalist Charles Moore, who is also threatening to rebel. Mr Kelly, who has been ordered to appear at Exeter magistrates' court later this month, said: 'Why are they picking on me now, after all this time? I think the BBC wants to crackdown on some of us to discourage more people from refusing to pay." Kelly and others accuse the BBC of being pro-EU slanted.

You mean the free categorisation of apps into separate sections on the home screen?

Not at all. A bigger heap is still a heap. Cutter that expands to fill multiple desktops is still clutter.

I mean the categorizing apps by function, as well as by any other category the user wants.

Take a look at the menu system of any modern linux distribution. If you are a windows user you will be shocked to learn that the category structure is simple, well organized, and automatically maintained, but still allows users to customize it.

I'm not talking about the graphical layout on the screen. There many ways you can arrange things on the screen IF, and ONLY IF you have some meta data to deal with in the first place. Otherwise its just a heap.

I'm talking about organizing applications into groups so that you can find them when your collection of apps exceeds more than just a few.
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_uGeBM7SoqcQ/SQrgc9tDmNI/AAAAAAAAEQU/gtmLj_XA99c/s1600-h/kmenu.png

My iPhone has 9 pages. It takes forever to find something, and searching does not help if you don't remember the name of a seldom used app.

As a counter weight...

http://zotzbro.blogspot.com/2009/10/new-3-strikes-law-proposals.html

What can you suggest.

(Naturally, it would be best not to have these 3 strikes plays at all...)

all the best,

drew

For example an easy solution to this sort of mess it to establish a central fund for say cleaning up after mining. Every company pays a considerable percentage each year into the fund. If you are a responsible company and clean up your mess to established specifications, then guess what? You get your money back from the fund when you are done! If you go bankrupt or are not responsible, then there is money saved up for the cleanup. In addition the government could use this money in very prudent secure investment to increase the funds available for cleanup.

FWIW, thats basically the situation with Nuclear Power Companies and nuclear waste:

http://neinuclearnotes.blogspot.com/2005/06/dollars-and-nuclear-waste-fund.html
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/42/usc_sec_42_00010222----000-.html

However, we haven't come up with a politically acceptable solution to storing nuclear waste, so the fund actually has about $16 Billion saved up in already.

Did you RTFA from Google? http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/announcing-google-maps-navigation-for.html I'm sure there will be some bugs but it looks like it ticks most of your boxes. Also better pricing? the software itself is FREE, the only down side is carrier charges to access it.

What ethnic cleansing? There's no evidence of that whatsoever.

tell that to those who had their homes destroyed by Bulldozer Sharon. An American protester protecting a home was bulldozed years ago.

What land have they stolen? Gaza strip? West bank? Those are spoils of war. In case you don't remember, Israel was attacked by the combined armies of all their neighbors back in the 60s.

Oh, Palestinians attacked Israelis without provocation? Palestinians not Syrians, Egyptians, or Jordanians?

It's not Israel's fault that the Palestinians don't live in a single, contiguous piece of land. That's just the result of history.

Oh so the lines just appeared on a map of the Middle East as if by magic? No Jews drew them. Ask those British who served in the British Mandate of Palestine during the 1920, '30s, and '40s who the terrorists were. Ask about the Lehi or Stern Gang and others. Members of Lehi were even trained by NAZIs.

All monotheistic religions are bloodthirsty and intolerant. The question is of degree. The Christians haven't as a group been very violent towards "unbelievers" for a few hundred years now.

The Holocaust didn't happen less than 100 years ago? Christians didn't persecute American Indians? If there are any survivor left ask those Indians who were forcibly removed from their parents and sent to Carlisle Indian Industrial School and other boarding schools where they were beaten for speaking their own languages and forced to attend Christian churches.

I don't see any examples of extremely bad group behavior on their part since they had Jesus crucified (regardless of whether he was who he claimed he was, he hadn't really done anything criminal, but they all cried for crucifixion)

Not all Jews cried for Jesus's crucifixion (if such a person lived), it was mainly the Pharisees.

I'm not too worried about Jews or Christians murdering me, but I would have to worry about being murdered by a Muslim today if I were to go to the wrong places.

There are just as radical Christians as there are Muslims. They come under various headings or titles such as Dominionists, Christian Reconstructionists, and others. When Rev. Jerry Falwell wrote an article criticizing Christian Reconstructionism many got upset because he said they "support for laws 'mandating the death penalty for homosexuals and drunkards.'" The leader Rev. Rushdoony wrote back they didn't intend to "put drunkards to death."

Fact is is there are fundamentalist Christians in the US as bad as the worst Taliban. I even suggest googling Christian Taliban and reading some of the results.

http://bentilly.blogspot.com/2009/09/teaching-linear-algebra.html

For older machines I would suggest Kmeleon if you are low on RAM, and Kmeleon CCF ME if you have over 128Mb. Both are built on the Gecko engine and VERY fast, but CCF ME has built in ABP and since it is a standalone also makes an excellent flash drive browser, but if you are below 128Mb I've found the memory footprint of stock Kmeleon can't be beat. And both can be run on Win95 on up according to the FAQ.

A study found people with Rh-neg blood and toxoplasmosis had more accidents. Here's more info:
http://theshermanfoundation.blogspot.com/2009/06/toxoplasma-parasite-may-cause-humans-to.html

That is exactly what Google is doing already since some time. Training its engine with manual translations (they started with something like ONU translations -same text available in multiple languages-). And now they provide tools (using their engine) to help translators (humans !), and then Google make use of these professional translators' translations to improve their own engine... http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/06/google-translator-toolkit.html This is the strength of google. Their huge userbase and the processing power they have at hand...

For 2008, with it's incredible oil boom, those budget figures were true. At the end of 2009 they are not even close. Russia is perilously close to bankrupt again.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/31/world/europe/31russia.html

http://russiatooat.blogspot.com/2009/08/bank-rossii-eases-further-as-russias.html

http://fistfulofeuros.net/afoe/economics-country-briefings/russias-economy-contracts-by-7-in-q1-2009/

For anyone whose interested, the Planet Money blog and podcast is a great place to start. Their reporting and research is done by actual economists rather than ideologues and talking heads

Planet Money is a joke. None of their correspondents are economists. David Kestenbaum is a journalist who happens to have a PhD in physics. Adam Davidson is not an economist; his background is journalism. Davidson clearly has a Milton Friedman bias in his economic reporting; just look at his blog posts on the subject of economic stimulus.

For a critical look at NPR (Nice Polite Republicans) check out the NPR Check blog.

Yes, we need to do a better job at not letting our scientific braniacs slip through the cracks. But we'd be doing a disservice to society by focusing on them to the exclusion of the masses who go on to pursue other careers. Great ideas and technological innovations could fail if people don't understand them, can't intelligently discuss them, or can be easily swayed into fearing them.

We need everyone to be more scientifically literate, regardless of what career path they choose: turn them on to science without necessarily turning them into scientists (or into the same type of scientists). I brought this up a couple of years ago.

The biggest problem of the space transportation industry is its reliance on primitive technologies. We are not going to colonize the moon or the rest of the solar system, let alone the nearest star systems, with a bunch of expensive, cumbersome and dangerous rockets. And it makes no difference whether the rockets are basedf on chemistry or use plasma acceleration powered by on-board nuclear reactions. Any propulsion technology based on old-fashioned Newtonian reactive physics is primitive to the extreme.

But, soon, all that will change. There is cause to suppose that physics is about to undergo a radical paradigm shift that will forever transform the way we travel and generate power. A reevaluation of our understanding of the causality of motion reveals that we are immersed in an immense lattice of energetic particles. We will have vehicles that can go almost anywhere at tremendous speeds and negotiate right angle turns without slowing down and without incurring any damage due to inertial effects. Floating sky cities, earth to Mars in hours, New York to Beijing in minute. That's the future of energy and travel.

My advice to all policy shapers and decision makers in the energy production and global transportation arena is this: take a good look at the writing on the wall and prepare yourselves for the coming changes around the corner.

The Problem with Motion.

This isn't just Google Groups, Blogger is collapsing under spam too.
I myself just wrote about this the other day.

This isn't just Google Groups, Blogger is collapsing under spam too.
I myself just wrote about this the other day.