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BTW, This link probably does a better job of explaining how badly many ppl understand our past history. Basically, between Spaniards and Vikings, they decimated what is today US with disease (and war by Spaniards). Had that not happened, USA would never have existed. In fact, had the exodus from Britain, France and Germany happened another 100 years later, it would have been short-lived. As it was, because of the disease, and the constant waring of the Spaniards with the Native Americans (esp. in the western USA), it was possible for White Europe to take USA and Canada.

http://www.cracked.com/article...

"Since most research is taxpayer funded, you're paying for a product and then paying again to actually use it"!!! From TFA:

#6. Negative Results Are Ignored
#5. Scientists Don't Have To Show Their Work
#4. You Have To Pay To Get Published
#3. It's All About Profit "Three publishing companies (Reed Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, and Springer) account for 42 percent of all published articles. This oligopoly has obscenely high profit margins of 30 to 40 percent."
#2. No One Can Share Their Work "When scientists can't get papers from their peers, they have to rely on subscriptions owned by their employer. Because we now know that publishing companies are at "mustache-twirling" on the evil scale, subscription fees are astronomically high. Harvard pays $3.75 million a year"
#1. Predatory Companies Publish Sham Science "Predatory publishers offer to publish any paper, regardless of quality, for a processing fee of only thousands of dollars. Often, this fee is mentioned after the paper has been accepted and the scientist has signed away their copyright, a strategy we'd expect from a shady porn producer, not the world of hard sciences. It's not one or two scummy companies, either -- one librarian has counted several thousand of these journals."

Management, which is pretty much universally a bunch of besuited sleazeball politician-on-the-take types,

I can only guess your limited experience has given you this poorly thought out view. I suggest you read this: http://www.cracked.com/article...

That is called hyperinflation and the only reason it has NOT happened in Greece is because Greece uses the Euro. It happened to several countries in the last couple of centuries.

For a formal explanation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

For a funny explanation (they wipe their asses with money, literally):
http://www.cracked.com/persona...

One could live with someone else who rents

Not where subletting is a crime.

or owns a space

This is renting. In fact, many places have made offering a rental shorter than 30 days a crime. (Source: "5 Ways Your Life Changes When You're (Voluntarily) Homeless" by Adam Tod Brown)

stay in a shelter

Shelters are chronically full. (Source: "7 Things No One Tells You About Being Homeless" by J.F. Sargent and William Bonnie) And setting foot in a full shelter is trespassing, which is a crime.

or relocate.

Relocate where? Setting foot in a different country is a crime. Does elsewhere in the same country also criminalize homelessness?

So we have crime, renting, crime, or crime. By making everything else a crime, governments coerce people into renting.

One could live with someone else who rents

Not where subletting is a crime.

or owns a space

This is renting. In fact, many places have made offering a rental shorter than 30 days a crime. (Source: "5 Ways Your Life Changes When You're (Voluntarily) Homeless" by Adam Tod Brown)

stay in a shelter

Shelters are chronically full. (Source: "7 Things No One Tells You About Being Homeless" by J.F. Sargent and William Bonnie) And setting foot in a full shelter is trespassing, which is a crime.

or relocate.

Relocate where? Setting foot in a different country is a crime. Does elsewhere in the same country also criminalize homelessness?

So we have crime, renting, crime, or crime. By making everything else a crime, governments coerce people into renting.

Raw materials, when mined, are not refined

Realistically lots of recycled materials effectively require a "refining" step. That recycled milk jug comes frequently isn't clean so it has to be processed before the materials can be utilized.

you also have to expend more effort and energy to refine them and turn them into something useful

You have to do the same for recycled materials. The real question is whether less effort and energy (thus less cost) is required to recycle. For some products (like aluminum) the energy to turn ore into ingots is MUCH higher than to recycle. For others (like plastic) the economic advantage of recycling isn't so clear because it's relatively cheap to make the virgin product.

With recycling, you bypass a lot of that, so it should be cheaper and more efficient: instead of going through all these refining steps, you just take some used HDPE, grind it up and/or melt it down, and make more HDPE containers out of it.

Unfortunately it isn't that simple. Recycled materials require that they to be sorted, contaminants have to be removed, it has to be cleaned, it has to be processed into a useable form for processing. These costs are not trivial and the waste stream is definitely not clean and well organized. Furthermore for many materials like plastics or paper the contaminants cannot always be removed or the chemical structure is altered such that they cannot be a perfect substitute for virgin materials.

So if the economics are favoring using virgin raw materials instead of recycling existing refined materials, we're doing something really wrong.

Or it means that it is a more difficult problem than you are presuming. It sounds like it should be easier but unless the energy inputs for the raw materials are very high (like for aluminum) for processing raw materials relative to recycled there is no particular reason to presume that recycling should be more energy or labor efficient than processing from raw materials. It sounds good on paper but that doesn't mean the economics work out nicely in the real world.

The human brain isn't wired this way, it's called the monkeysphere There is a difference between personal relationships, and being constantly watched by strangers. Just ask any of those celebrities that go off the rails...

Cracked has started running something similar in their "X Most Insane Things Happening Right Now" weekly series. It's just a bunch of images with text over them relating some random news from the last week or so. The only difference between this and Cracked is Cracked has traditional ads (including some auto-playing video bullshit on top of their Like/subscribe begging) instead of water-marked ads. As much as I like Cracked, this sounds like a much better deal.

People without a degree tend to earn minimum wage, and people on minimum wage often can't afford rent, community college tuition, and nice food. Dave Ramsey acknowledges this and recommends a rice and beans diet for these people. But not everybody has the same luck with that sort of diet as Mr. Ramsey. Scientology tries the same diet on its Sea Org fleet, and it makes people sick.

Why does one need a PC sitting next to the TV to watch TV? My TV has a tuner.

Does your TV with a tuner also have a device that delays playback of a live program by a few minutes? A buffer for live TV would let you join late, pause the stream while you take a bathroom break, and gradually catch up to live by fast-forwarding through unwanted segments such as waiting for the pitch in Major League Baseball. Or does TiVo still own that idea?

But I don't think people with normal abilities will be trading in their limbs just to be able walk a little longer, run a little faster, or carry more weight.

You might see fighter pilots getting this done in order to avoid blacking out at high g-forces when the blood drains out into the legs. Examples include Sir Douglas Bader, who rejoined the RAF after losing his legs in an accident, and Super NES-era Fox McCloud, who is depicted in an illustration on the cover of Nintendo Power as having metal legs.

But I don't think people with normal abilities will be trading in their limbs just to be able walk a little longer, run a little faster, or carry more weight.

You might see fighter pilots getting this done in order to avoid blacking out at high g-forces when the blood drains out into the legs. Examples include Sir Douglas Bader, who rejoined the RAF after losing his legs in an accident, and Super NES-era Fox McCloud, who is depicted in an illustration on the cover of Nintendo Power as having metal legs.

Perhaps if you learned to hunt better, kitty wouldn't feel the need to drag so much stuff in. See #1 of Matthew Hayden's 6 Adorable Cat Behaviors With Shockingly Evil Explanations.

I've heard that before, but repeating a lie doesn't make it true.

http://www.sciencefocus.com/qa...
http://www.cracked.com/article...

It'd be a real shame if anything happened to that nest.

My point being, which I need to clarify, is that people on welfare are struggling. In my personal experience most of the people who I met who needed public assistance desperately wanted to get a decent job and get out. If you are honest, it is a bad way of life.

see here for a better analysis. http://www.cracked.com/blog/th...

Yeah, I just *hate* haters, don't you? /irony.

You might want to review http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-...

But here's the key: When a Scientologist (or Muslim, or Christian, or yoga enthusiast) says it works for them, this is what they're talking about. The mythology isn't important -- if these rituals have saved your life and later on a teacher says, "Yeah, this technique works because of the ancient thetans that live in your *******," you're going to shrug and say, "Sure, sounds good." If you tell the lady in yoga class that the reason she feels better afterward is because negative spiritual energies tend to pool in the hip joints, you'll get the same reaction.

Then if you, as a cool, rational person, butt in and say, "Actually, yoga is just engaging the endonomic nervous system and reducing cortisol levels," all they're going to hear is you replacing a very easy-to-understand explanation with a very complicated one that sounds like gibberish. If you smirk and roll your eyes at these gullible lemmings, then go grab a mirror and smirk at yourself, partner, because you do it too.

You physically don't have room in your brain to keep track of how everything in your world works (****, you don't even really know how your brain works) so you can feel all superior to a Christian who doesn't believe in evolution, but somewhere there's an engineer who feels superior to you for not knowing how your iPhone works (and you know "endonomic nervous system" is just a nonsense phrase I made up, right?). The reality is that you don't know how your iPhone works because knowing that wouldn't change your day-to-day use of it at all. Likewise, thinking the Earth is only 6,000 years old doesn't make it any harder to have, say, a career-repairing air conditioner. But believing that self-discipline, patience, and hard work are sacred virtues from God definitely makes it easier.

And if you look hard enough, you'll see that this flaw -- favoring what works to the exclusion of everything else -- encompasses everybody. The compulsive liar got to be that way because it works. So did the bully, the racist, and the greedy bastard. And every single cult, hate group, or political party has figured out that you can ensnare people by gluing the weird parts onto a bunch of common sense axioms that nobody can disagree with.

It's the monkeysphere in action. The right will complain about the "evil" government, while the left make the same complaints about "evil" big business. Whether govt or big business, they'll all just groups of people like us. And as you say the bigger they are, the harder they are to manage, and therefore require more internal processes to maintain order, the side effect of which is roadblocks to efficiency.

Unfortunately a full scale simulation of an outbreak in the United States shows that for `realistic' parameters, we are largely doomed.

Critics point to an alternate simulation showing that for realistic parameters, zombies wouldn't last long in real life

Being a millenial, I can attest to the fact that growing up interested in technology and science automagically branded you a nerd.

As someone a little older I can attest to the fact that getting branded as a nerd has very little to do with your specific interests and a whole lot to do with how you interact socially with others. I coach kids from 1st grade through 12th and have for over 20 years. What gets them ostracized pretty much never has anything to do with specific interests. People get ostracized for behaving oddly in combination with having nothing to offer others. Nobody gives a shit about the fact that you are interested in technology. What they DO give a shit about is what you can do for them. Can you help them socially? Are you someone who is kind to them when they need it? Can you help them with their homework? Are you fun to be around? These are things that matter in school.

You were picked on relentlessly, harassed and ostricized socially, and generally spent a lot of time avoiding direct contact with interpersonal engagements that did not pass a battery of personal safety tests. Chess club or magic the gathering at school was considered your Turing test for a friend.

I was on our school chess club and played tons of games both computer and otherwise. I spent lots of my free time in the school computer labs and most of my close friends were rather on the nerdy side. I wore thick glasses, was something of an introvert and was painfully shy around girls. I have a name normally associated with the opposite gender and wasn't the most socially graceful kid ever to put it mildly. HOWEVER, I also was the captain of the cross country and wrestling teams. I also made some effort to be friendly and be interested in what others were doing. Sure I got picked on plenty but I also didn't make myself an easy target. I had something to offer others that was unique to me.

EVERYONE gets picked on. I got beaten up on the playground because of my name and the fact that I was a shy, emotional kid by some thugs a little older than me. You know what? I got over it. Anything that makes you stand out is likely to cause you to get picked on. The only thing you can do about it is to adjust your reaction. You can go sulk in a corner but if you are hoping for pity you will be disappointed. Nobody except maybe your parents gives a shit about you except for what you can do for them. Have something to offer. You will not get a job because you are a nice guy who works hard. You need to have something more than that to offer. Things are no different when you are a child. This is a rather good and frank article about what I'm talking about. Have something to offer the world and you'll find it a much more manageable place to be.

Billy Graham and the moral majority however were convinced you were the devil incarnate for playing the game, which was verboten in many schools despite its keen ability to teach logic and strategy.

I've never seen a school that forbid playing chess and teachers generally only give a shit about other games like MtG when they interfere with classes. Maybe you lived in a place where they were irrational about such things (sadly there are some) but that is certainly not the norm and I've lived in a lot of places around the US. Certainly enough to know that that is not the norm.

I for one wore a lot of black, kept to myself, made excellent grades, and played a lot of doom/heretic.

So you dressed oddly, didn't speak to anyone, didn't have anything to offer anyone else and you wonder why people might have thought you strange and wanted little to do with you? Sounds like you were a real self absorbed buzz-kill.

My prize to claim for having spoken a bit too loudly with friends about a quake match and my affinity fo

The much-maligned UI is actually just the Windows 7 UI with a full-screen Start menu, which I find interrupts my workflow to exactly the same extent that the Windows 7 Start menu does, meaning minimally.

The fact that it's forced full-screen rather than snapped is the problem. At least with the Windows 7 Start menu, I could see a bit of what I was working on in the corner of my screen, which provided some subconscious continuity. In fact, if I had a program snapped to the right side (Windows+Right), I could see all of it while the Start menu was open. But with Windows 8's Start screen, everything is covered up. The full-screen context switch imposes a cognitive burden similar to going through a doorway and forgetting what you came in for. That's why the first thing onto every Windows 8.1 PC that I use regularly is Classic Shell, which reproduces the functionality of Windows 7's Start menu.

The reality is that US defense in the CyberWar already looks like US defense in the War on Terrorism.

We hand pick straw men, set them up as fall guys, and celebrate their defeat when they are captured.

As for CyberWar Games, those will look like CSI on the set of War Games, will be sponsored by Symantec and DeVry Institute, and shown on the "No More Fake BS" Discovery Channel.

You seem to have missed the enormous heaping pile of political commentary in Verhoeven's movie. The movie was practically saturated with it. That you didn't recognize it ought to prompt serious self-examination. He had them wearing nazi uniforms for chrissakes.

So Cialis ads are interrupting your jokes about buttsex which is followed by actual buttsex?

That's called smart product placement.

you can hit the home button, switch to another then home button again and go back to the other.

When you hit the "home" button, the system often purges cached items from memory to make room for the other application, and the application has to go back to the Internet to retrieve them again. If you have cellular data, this costs you money (1 cent per MB is typical for data plans in the USA). If not, and you aren't near Wi-Fi, the application just fails with the error message "You are offline". Besides, the full-screen transition to the home screen and additional full-screen transition to the other application induce an effect analogous to the amnesia that one experiences when passing through doorways. (See #5 in this list.)

It is perfectly possible to copy some text in one app and paste in another for example

True, but that isn't evidence of multitasking. Classic Mac OS had copy and paste from one application to another before it had MultiFinder.

I agree. I never understood tipping someone for just doing their job.

Don't be an asshole.

Being cheap is no excuse for annoying people.

So where should someone who's underemployed come up with the money to pay for all these recurring expenses to keep up with the Joneses? One has to buy a cell phone and cell phone service because voice mail users are annoying, one has to buy a car, insurance, maintenance, and fuel because cyclists are annoying, etc.

"Care to point to the source"

Haha is this wikipedia? I'm telling you things you can google, not applying for a job as your bitch.

You know that statement about extraordinary claims needing extraordinary proof?
Well, ordinary claims just need you to use a search engine, or even just start on wikipedia. You don't get to play skeptic with life, assuming that before you change your precious worldview something has to be tied up and cited. You have the power to google it your goddamned self.

But, fuck it. I'm on vacation.

You can find a TON of first hand accounts of crazy fucking bullshit in North Korea. Here's some who talk on social media after having been there as a tourist:
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/c...
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/c...

Here's one on social media who mentions having taught there, and brings up the "repelled incursions" I referred to, in addition to crazier shit involving netting on cars:
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/c...

Also you can find firsthand accounts all over, not only from social media:
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/c...
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/c... ..but from other media as well
http://www.cracked.com/article...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
http://www.dailylife.com.au/li...

Essentially ALL of these mention that the internet is pretty well shut down and only the North Korean fake version is available- in Pyongyang. You know, their BIG CITY.

Here's a wikipedia link.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...

Some quotes:
"As of late 2014 there are 1,024 IP addresses in the country."
"Despite the incident, many citizens of North Korea may be oblivious to the existence of the internet."

http://qz.com/315969/in-north-...
http://money.cnn.com/2014/12/2...

"Nearly all of the country's Internet traffic is routed through China. Firms that monitor that traffic say it is comparable to only about 1,000 high-speed homes in the United States."

I'd like to repeat my earlier point, however:
You don't need to source a claim to be correct. The world isn't wikipedia.

Aren't there enough statues of him already:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
http://www.cracked.com/article...

The net effect of these ludic-buggy games is that the actual game disk itself is entirely worthless for playing the game. Pretend that while browsing for 8 bit NES games, you finally found a game you wanted- say The Guardian Legend, a truly top-tier title. You grab it for cheap, walk it home... and instead of instantly booting into Miria racing towards Naju, it instead needs an overnight update from a service that hasn't existed in a decade to work properly, or at all.

These bugs are a feature to companies like Ubisoft and EA. The apology is only issued because the launch was truly and shockingly ludicrous- enough to get mocked world wide, in articles such as Cracked's:

http://www.cracked.com/blog/7-...

That are well outside of the normal area of video game journalism / forums / reviews.

>Officer is going to be running towards the gunfire if there's trouble, not away from it like the average youth on the street.

Nope.

Disney sues people for putting a picture of Mickey Mouse on the wall of a day care. LEGO, on the other hand, puts out a movie decrying certain media companies' fanwork ban policy.

If it doesn't come with a Geiger counter, it sucks.

Saying "if X were [easier/better/safer/whatever] we would already be doing X" is vastly overestimating human intelligence and insightfulness. We often fail to recognize the true value of certain inventions or techniques until well after their invention, and often choose to use non-optimal methods for what seemed like good reasons at the time.

A tongue-in-cheek but still insightful article about the subject (#1 and #3 are particularly relevant to this discussion.)
http://www.cracked.com/article...

I read about his Gemini 8 thing on Cracked.com.

I will have to say it's way too hard to forget the "hertz" and the "sun into a strobe light" lines in taking about Gemini 8 in this article (that and the "most lethal math test").

I myself only heard about it from an article making fun of it:

http://www.cracked.com/quick-f...

Thanks, that was downright hilarious. I think the idea posited by cracked that a+ is a gag is likely to be accurate.

I myself only heard about it from an article making fun of it:

http://www.cracked.com/quick-f...

The quote 'Data is the sword of the 21st century, those who wield it the samurai.' is a bad metaphor. I'll let the cracked authors explain why.

http://www.cracked.com/article...

Samurai Were Actually Embarrassed of Their Swords
Oh, come on. This, at least, just has to be bullshit. A quick Google image search of "samurai" returns a gazillion results, 99 percent of which depict the famed warriors with sword in hand. There are drawings about them using swords. There are photos. Hell, pajamas, katanas, and weird hairstyles were their whole thing: Samurai damn well lived by the sword. What else did they have?

Actually ...

Yes, the samurai did have an ancient tradition centered around a weapon. However, it sure as shit wasn't the sword. In fact, ignore every movie and video game about samurai, because they only carried swords as awkward last resort weapons.

Kyuba no michi, "the way of the horse and bow," was there centuries before any semblance of Bushido. It's exactly what it says on the tin: Samurai were all about flinging arrows at peasants from horseback. It makes sense, really -- they were professional soldiers, and in that line of business you quickly learn that only idiots fight the enemy at stabbing distance. Bows were revered over swords to the extent that many Japanese nobles actually downplayed their swordsmanship. After all, pointing out how great your sword skills were was basically announcing that you're a terrible archer. And saying "I'm a terrible archer" was more or less like saying "I'm neither a man nor a warrior."

The introduction of firearms in the 16th century finally killed the samurai supremacy as mounted archers. As they left the battlefield and settled for a new life as bureaucrats and officials, their formerly reviled swords started taking on actual importance as elaborate status symbols. And because bows weren't really an option anymore, the sword became the go-to weapon of the honorable, sword-wielding, bushido following and completely fictional samurai they retroactively invented to feel better about their crummy desk jobs.

Maybe it's an unintentionally good metaphor. Big data is the new useless but symbolic catchphrase that you use to make your company look modern.

...better than this: http://www.cracked.com/blog/3-...

Spider goats In their natural habitat http://cdn-www.cracked.com/articleimages/ob/goats_tall.jpg

It's about corruption in gaming journalism and game journalists constantly slagging off their own readers.

Then tell me, why did it start with false claims of sexual infidelity etc by a raging asshole who got his ass dumped? But hey, if you hate corrupion, why not fight alongside the armies of Sauron in order to root it out.

I'm not sure I understand your point.

Gamergate was all about mysoginy. As has been pointed out, hitching up with the gamergate guys in order to complain about journalist corruption is a bit like marching with the armies of Sauron because you don't like the feudal inheritance of title at Minas Tirith.

http://www.cracked.com/blog/7-...

Gamergate is ans always was primarily abiut mysoginy and harassmet. Anything else has been a poor attempt to legitimise it afterwards.

In particular, they pointed to a claim that a female game developer had had sexual relationships with male game journalists around the same time that they provided positive reviews of or financial backing for her game.

Was that Zoe Quinn? This person has some interesting things to say about that:

http://www.cracked.com/blog/7-...

>This thing is so stupid that even *Cracked* has shown that it's total bullshit from top to bottom.

For my friends who are lazier than me.

7 Reasons "Gamergate" Proves Humanity is Doomed

Soren Bowie of Cracked suggested another way to make Superman interesting: conflict about whom to save at any given moment. But I don't think it'd work in a game with multiple supers.

But that's 72 ugly virgins

I wonder if the depression and anxiety are more side effects of the medications used to treat schizophrenia, or effects of trying to avoid discrimination against people with schizophrenia due to its misrepresentation by Hollywood, as a recent Cracked article suggests.

Here is a 419 (Nigerian scam) back-and-forth. It is quite a bit funnier...

That we need ways to test drinks for date rape drugs shows the state of the world we live in.

But I doubt that this state has changed since most of your parents were born. Date rape drugs have been a thing for at least 70 years. A line in "Baby, It's Cold Outside" (written in 1944 and recorded in 1949) alludes to them, as an article by Ian Fortey points out.