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I heard NPR explain this once. Apparently, it is common practice to use the formal President Obama in the first reference of his name, and subsequently to refer to him as Mr. Obama. This is the case with all presidents at least according to NPRs policy. http://www.npr.org/blogs/ombudsman/2009/01/mr_obama_mormons_and_susan_sta_1.html

First off mercenaries (the more politically correct term being "Security Contractors") are more expensive than real soldiers. And he doesn't address the Military Intelligence Complex, even scarier than then Military Industrial Complex since their budget are a "black box", another word for "black hole". See "Frontline" and NPR for an analysis.
Some references:
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/17/paul-plan-would-eliminate-cabinet-departments-to-cut-1-trillion/
http://www.npr.org/2011/09/06/140056904/the-top-secret-america-created-after-9-11
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/warriors/view/

With almost any decent job these days requiring a 4-year college degree, what the hell do you expect? Unless your parents are upper-class or have had the foresight to save up the money (with no intervening crises to eat it up), your only hope to get anything better than slave wages at some manufacturing plant (that's probably going to China at any minute) is to get a highly-competitive scholarship or take out a student loan.

That's simply not true. The "fact" a four-year degree is the only path to a successful life is one of the most pervasive myths in popular western society right now. I am one counter-example and I personally know (and know of) many, many others. Some of them are even famously successful.

So many people have degrees these days that most employers don't even look for it on the resume anymore. All of the jobs I've been offered had "bachelor's in so-and-so or equivalent experience" and I got in on the "or equivalent experience" every time. I wouldn't want to work for an employer that decides to fill a position based on how many boxes were checked off on the application anyway.

There are countless career options that require minimal formal training but can have you making 6 figures within 10-15 years. Yes, a lot of them are technically "blue-collar" jobs. But that's part of the problem, western society sees blue-collar work as less prestigious and desirable than white-collar desk jobs. That shouldn't be. We're edging ever-closer to a 10% nationwide unemployment rate, yet many blue-collar employers, like trucking companies are having a hard time filling positions. The company in the linked article offers free training (about $4000 in value) and guarantees you a $60,000 - $70,000 job. And they still can't get enough people to drive their trucks.

My theory is that Americans (and people in other western countries) have been taught that they deserve to work in whatever field they choose and then scream and shout when suddenly those jobs dry up. That's my biggest problem with the Occupy Whatever folks as well. You don't "deserve" a job, a good life, and unlimited medical benefits. Those are things you have to work for and they don't necessarily require you to be in debt for your entire working life.

NPR just did a piece on this:
Brain Maturity Extends Well Beyond Teen Years

To add to the last post:

Some people can multitask to the point where they can talk on the phone and drive. Some people need a hands-free device to achieve the same result.

A lot less than many people think. Most overestimate their abilities:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95256794

Which is a very American trait, I noticed:
http://desicritics.org/2006/10/20/012720.php

Kind of like how those people who "work" 12 hours a day, brag about it, and lag behind people who work an honest 8 hours a day in productive because they spend most of the time at the watercooler or on the internet. Seriously, when you're driving, please drive - stop overestimating your abilities when they really get reduced by not paying attention. If you don't want to do that, either carpool with someone who doesn't have that problem and is willing to drive, or use mass transit.

But stfu because you can't stop diddling with your smartphone for 30 seconds and want to bullshit the rest of us that you're just as good with it as without it.

Full disc encryption to keep the dick cops out of my phone with their Cellebrite cell phone extraction device.

Then I'll worry about malware from scripts on web pages.

http://www.npr.org/2011/04/21/135610182/aclu-upset-over-cell-phone-extraction-device

Never-mind the side-effects. It might not even work! This article is awfully one-sided. NPR recently had a much more in-depth overview into the debate about resveratrol and aging. Basically no one has been able to reproduce the original study with the same results, the original authors have even lowered their initial claims, and a few articles published in Nature even dispute that resveratrol activates sirtuins (the claimed mechanism that "prevents aging").

Also, lifespans are actually *falling* in many communities (in the US at least). Contrary to what big pharma wants you to believe, well-being also includes healthy lifestyle and nutrition, not just some expensive pills.

NPR has a little blurb on this...

Usually malls are private property. Owners generally have the right to dictate behavior on their property. You have the right to forbid people from taking pictures when you allow them into your own place of residence if you so choose, mall owners have the same right.

Now, standing across the street on the sidewalk, taking a picture of the mall, would likely be a permissible activity from public property. But the law doesn't usually force property owners to allow people on their property to do any specific activity.

There was an interesting story recently about someone who ran into similar problems at the Mall of America, as well.

I've read that factoid too, and it's pure spin. I'm in the top 5%, meaning my family makes a little more than $150k a year. So the spinsters say I have nothing to complain about, as if we live in the lap of luxury. But you know what? I live in the DC Beltway, and our family income puts us in the middle middle class, where we can only afford a modest house and can only afford partial days at daycare for our son and have no idea how we're supposed to afford the second child we want to have.

I consider myself part of the 99% because we work hard just to survive and I sympathize completely with the unfortunate souls sharing their stories personal tragedy on the 99% blog. People who are trying to frame this as an 80% versus 20% thing have no clue what it's like out here in the real world where corporations have engineered the system to take every last fucking dime from honest hard-working Americans while refusing to give anything back to the country that made their success possible.

These kinds of protest were very popular before the Great Depression and spawned all kinds of songs against the banking elites (e.g., JP Morgan). NPR had a nice piece discussing the history of anti-Wall Street protest the other day: http://www.npr.org/2011/10/07/141162196/a-look-at-the-history-of-wall-street-protests

Dude, all these 'evil' patents will expire within the next 20 years. If these 20 years are crucial for the existence of mankind, we made some booboos in the past and we're beyond repair already. Just sayin'.

That's actually a very good point. Right now we're in a rending of garments / gnashing of teeth phase. When Stephenson was growing up, we were in a "Golden Age" - at least as far as the US was concerned. And this is a very US argument. Things go and come. Nobody stays on top forever. If you look at any human history you see waves of 'progress' and waves of, well, something else. All depends on your viewpoint.

Another way to look at the Industrial Age is the historically rapid (and now I'm switching to a geologic time frame) destruction / rearrangement of the entire planet's environment. Maybe that will come crashing down on us, maybe we will figure out how to sustain a couple of billion of Homo industrialis in some sort of long term balance.

Remember, what we call the 'modern world' (rapid innovation, rapid growth of mankind) is only a couple of hundred years old. Just a blink in the eye of time.

The book 1493 covers this nicely.

FWIW, both the US military and the US intelligence community have, in official reports, identified climate change as one of the biggest threats to national security that the US will have to deal with this century.

Perhaps you should look at the timing of the reports in question. As I recall, the US now has a government which both takes AGW seriously and can compel the military to take it seriously as well. In a couple of years, we might have a new administration which doesn't take these issues as seriously. That's the problem with using official interest as an indication of the truth of an assertion.

In the story I linked above, notice that they talk about worst case scenarios, not just stuff that we think we know is going to happen. So I imagine they're considering things like the Gulfstream shutting down or a runaway greenhouse effect, not just the usual predicted slight increases in sea level and global temperature.

The supreme court recently heard arguments that the second amendment only guarantees a collective right to bear arms. To me the obvious question is: what good is a collective right?

...one of those things is do not bring up the topic of Star Trek with him, he hates it.

It only comes down to a question of how determined your ISP/government is to block you. If the ISP's really wanted to, they could keep an active running blacklist of all of all IP's associated with Telecomix and other proxy sites (the way Websense and other blocking software companies do). It would never be perfect, but it would be pretty damned effective for all but the most determined/informed geeks. And, even worse, if the government really wanted to, they could just keep a tally of everyone even trying to access those IP's and kick down your door one night to drag you off to a prison cell somewhere.

Fortunately, this sort of behavior is pretty uncommon in most developed countries, but don't kid yourself. If they *really* wanted to shut you up, they could. All they have to do is throw up enough obstacles and threats. And, as a last resort, they can even just pull the plug altogether (like they did in San Francisco during the BART protests, and in Egypt during the protests there). Most ISP's cave pretty quickly when soldiers show up with rifles and tanks.

NPR did a pretty cool history of that event
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5522133

Essentially, most of the engineering groundwork was laid out during the previous administration, the senate had approved it 89-to-1 before going to Eisenhower (Louisiana sen. didn't want to raise the gas tax from 2c to 3c per gallon), Eisenhower was hospitalized under some kind of intestinal distress when he signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act, and he kinda thought he was enacting something that would build a system more similar to the autobahn in Germany than what we really got.

But cool beans nonetheless.

I think it's important to understand why conservatives are rejecting certain scientific facts. People like me on the left often make fun of them as being ignorant or anti-intellectual, but the reality is that it's very difficult for anyone to accept a fact that conflicts with your worldview. For example, history has turned the lawyer William Jennings Bryan from the famous "Monkey Trial" into a caricature of ignorance of foolishness in the face of scientific fact, but that belittles his motivation for fighting against the teaching of evolution: the textbook in question was pro eugenics and used the theory of evolution to argue that society should breed people the way we breed dogs. The Theory of Evolution was a fact, but the public policies people were proposing from it were an anathema to our human values. The theory of evolution has never recovered from the damage the eugenics movement did to it in the early 1900s.

The same thing is happening now with Global Warming. Whether conservatives know it or not, they are not resisting the Theory of Global Warming, they are resisting the policies that many conclude from it. Publicly accepting the theory and taking a more nuanced position about what we should do about, if we should do anything about it at all, isn't as straightforward as simply running a campaign against the theory itself using the same tactics the Tobacco industry used as recently as 15 years ago to defend smoking against its link to cancer (Yes, 15 years ago. I recently listened to a 1996 Larry King interview with Presidential candidate Bob Dole where they argued about whether smoking was safe or not).

It's a natural human reaction to reject facts that conflict with our vision of the world. That's why I love the term "Inconvenient Truth" to describe an empirical fact that generates cognitive dissonance. Just today I was reminded of one such truth as the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to the discovery that our Universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, a fact I resisted for a decade because it paints such an incredibly bleak picture of our Cosmos where the galaxies will eventually vanish from the night sky as they fly away from us and the Universe eventually freezes at absolute zero. But you have to accept the fact and adapt your worldview to it.

Liberals have their own anti-science views: resistance to GMO Foods goes pretty far into unscientific scaremongering ("Frankenfoods" and anti-corporatism), the idea that smaller classes sizes are the only way to improve student performance (teacher accountability does demonstrate equal results for less money), and anti-vaccination scares come mostly from the left (mostly). The science behind these issues are inconvenient to certain aspects of liberal ideology, so it's easier to go off the anti-science deep end rather than refine their positions. The problem is that we the media finds nuanced debate and finely articulated positions inconvenient to ratings.

There are two logical fallacies in your argument. First, you are presenting a false dichotomy. Second, you are comparing a worst-case scenario (terrorist takes down an airplane, killing hundreds or thousands of people) to a best-case, or nearly best-case, scenario (innocent passenger gets their luggage swabbed).

What we are talking about is risk management. Risk management is not just a matter of comparing scenarios; it is a matter of multiplying risk probabilities to risk weight (i.e., the severity of that risk), then summing all of the results of that operation. For example, a hijacker crashing an airplane into a building is a very severe risk -- it killed over three thousand people ten years ago -- but it has only happened *ONCE* (okay, four flights) in what...fifty? sixty?...years of airline service. That's a really, REALLY low probability times a really, really severe risk weight, which I'd argue results in a moderately low OVERALL risk. There is also the possibility of a hijacker murdering individual passengers until his (her) demands are met. That's happened significantly more often than a 9/11 hijacking (although still rare, in terms of number of hijacked flights vs. number of uneventful flights), but it directly affects (comparatively) fewer people. However, because it is more common, I'd argue that this scenario results in roughly the same OVERALL risk. Then there is the risk of an unruly passenger. That's much more common than the other two risks, but the risk weight is comparatively minor, which again results in an overall low risk.

As far as scenarios you are comparing...if all that happens is a false positive gets the luggage swabbed, then I really couldn't care less. If a false positive gets removed from an airplane, cuffed, locked into a cell, strip-searched and interrogated before finally being determined to be a false positive and released then I have a MAJOR problem with it. Consider it this way: if there were 520 people detained in Gitmo and the error rate for false positives (as assumed in the above thread) is 1%, then that means there were likely at least 5 innocent people detained at Gitmo. THAT is what I meant by "wrecked", and I maintain that's an accurate description. Ms. Hebshi's life may not have been wrecked, but I'd say that it has been severely and negatively impacted.

So, yeah. I do think that the worse error is false positives because the risk probability is significantly higher, and the risk impact is moderate to severe as well, which leads to a much, much greater overall risk than a one-in-twenty-million probability of 9/11, even when multiplied by the impact of the death of 3,000+ people.

*Ahem*
Drone control is already centralized. In Nevada and California. Many of them are fly_by_Sat affairs, and the folks that man the flight control centers can go home at the end of the day and play with their kids. I've seen some news footage of the nice set-ups at "mission control". Biggest issue this brings up is making the whole affair too much like a video game, and killing real people from a nice cozy office thousands of miles from the battle. That, and the fact that these operators aren't getting the benefits that in-the-air combat pilots are getting for flying in a combat zone. Even the Brits are piloting their drones from NV.

Being an RC aircraft guy myself, I hope the utility of having a steady stream of young RC pilots being interested in joining up for miitary service might off-set what this idiot has done in the eyes of the feds when it comes time to evaluate the new rules for RC aircraft.

I think you may have been eluding to a control center being the target of an attack. Not much to worry about there unless the baddies have ICBMs. Some nice info here:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4851765

Here is some video of pilots in action:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZP2AKEqEIU

And an article titled "Point. Click. Kill: Inside The Air Force's Frantic Unmanned Reinvention" :

http://www.popsci.com/drones

http://www.npr.org/series/5163715/-not-my-job

Exactly. The contractor gets paid twice as much, not the employees. In fact, profit motivations of the contractor put pressure on them to pay their employees as little as possible, and since most contracts are written in such a way as to absolve the contractor of responsibility if projects fail, the easiest way to maximize profit is to hire unqualified staff.

This is my firsthand experience. I was government contractor for 10 years. They hired me because I wasn't very qualified to write software (this was on a mission-critical aviation logistics system), but, lucky them, I worked hard and became one of their star programmers. I was the second highest-paid person on staff with our contractor in an organization of over 100 people. I found out from a leaked document that my company was making $150k a year off me after paying my salary. Since most employees were making less than half my salary, the contractor was pulling in about $15 to $20 million a year on our contract since the only overhead they had was covering our health insurance and 401ks (offices, computers, furniture, and other supplies were all provided by the government). That's $15 to $20 million a year to serve as a Human Resource department for 100 employees.

When the contract came up for recompete, the contractor used extremely heavy-handed tactics to try and force me to sign an exclusivity agreement with them, which was pointless in a right to work state. I objected on the grounds that the company provided no added value to the contract and that the employees, most of whom were just warming chairs, would get picked up by whoever won the contract (saw this happen many times over the years). It was a principle thing and I didn't appreciate being bullied. When they continued to pressure me (a manager actually blocked the door to prevent me from leaving without signing the document), I produced the leaked document and told them I would quit without a 10% raise. They let me go without a second thought.

Since I left, the software project I had spent the previous three years working on has completely failed without there being anyone qualified to work on it, but the contractor doesn't care because they get paid no matter what and it's cheaper to hire people with zero programming experience and pay them diddlysquat to struggle through their job than it is to reduce your profits and hire people who are educated software development. I'm not bitter about being let go, but I am bitter about the project failure. I was really dedicated to my job and felt I was making a difference in the organization, but the contractor, who honestly didn't really know anything about my job or the project I was working on (Government employees managed me directly), could only see the dollar signs.

I assure you, this is not about placing "blame." This is all about giving government employees the ability to put checkmarks next to items on their todo list. The department where I worked hired a contractor to build a LIMS for them so they could claim progress on a project the higher-ups were demanding. The government manager who started the project took credit for making progress on it after he got promoted elsewhere, the contractor got $15 million for producing a single webpage with a a phone number field that auto-focused to the next input after you filled it in, and the new government manager killed the project and took credit for eliminating waste.

"You need to go get rid of 250,000 contractors in the Defense Department, where you can really pick up some small change." ~ Former Republican Senator Alan Simpson, February 16, 2011 on balancing the budget (source)

"The problem with Socialism is Socialism, the problem with Capitalism is Capitalists," as William F. Buckley once said. Government contracting combines the worst elements of socialism and capitalism.

These guys should have some for you.

Except that HP doesn't want to be a hardware company anymore.

http://www.npr.org/2011/07/11/137770068/windpipe-grown-from-stem-cells-implanted-in-man

So the fellow in Stockholm, who's name is Paolo Macchiarini, decided to try, first time - he thought the time was ripe to try an experiment in which they would take a scan of his trachea to make sure they had the exact dimensions. A fellow in London has invented this spongy plastic. It's porous. Make a model of his trachea that's exactly the right size. Meanwhile, a company in Massachusetts was making an incubator.

The model and the incubator were flown to Stockholm and the patient was sent there. And they took some of his bone marrow, I think probably from the hip bone. The bone marrow contains stem cells, which can make a variety of different tissues. They combine the fellow's stem cells in this incubator with this model, which sort of serves as a scaffold for the cells to grow on, along with several growth factors that tell the cells what kind of cells to become, namely cartilage, which is what trachea, wind pipes are made of.

And within a couple of days, enough cells have grown in the surface of this thing that they could put it into his - they took out his diseased wind pipe, put this in, stitched him up, and it worked.

1. Register commonly mis-spelled domain names.

2. Make ToS "Any access to this website is prohibited."

3. Report all website accesses to the authorities.

4. Invest in new prison construction.

5. PROFIT.

It may sound far-fetched, but your step four is a well-proven business model. It made a lot of people rich in Arizona. But it didn't turn out so well for this guy.

Actually, when it comes to disposable radio pop, the labels do almost all the work including writing the music and lyrics and generating the buzz. The "artists" are little more than frontmen. So actually, in many cases, it does make sense to let them keep the rights.

(On the flipside, indie artists truly are artists most of the time and pay their dues, and in turn a lot of the new indie labels let the artists keep the rights to their songs.)

NPR did a feature on them and broader patent issues. It's a pretty good listen: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/07/26/138576167/when-patents-attack

>>Hammering your gold coins into leaf yourself and being able to credibly verify its mass, quality, and composition is not practical.

They're actually a fairly easy to handle currency at various libertarian festival type places. Hand someone a potato-chip sized bit of goal leaf, get a sandwich.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/07/05/137534361/breakfast-at-libertarian-summer-camp

Which wouldn't be a problem if wages would increase so that a person could feed himself and his family on the reduced wages.

Alternatively, we could reduce the cost of feeding. Technology, changes to distribution methods, increases in productivity of all kinds have done precisely that:

Americans paid a high price to support this balkanized system for conveying food from farm to table. Food was hugely expensive, relative to wages. The average working-class family in the 1920s devoted one-third of its bud get to groceries, the average farm family even more. Most households spent more to put dinner on the table than for their rent or their mortgage. And for the average house wife, shopping for food consumed a large part of the day. This money, time, and effort bought plenty of calories, but only moderate amounts of nutrition.

http://www.npr.org/books/titles/139761304/the-great-a-p-and-the-struggle-for-small-business-in-america?tab=excerpt#excerpt

According to the interview with the author (which I heard while driving, and cannot find a transcript), the budget fraction for groceries is now somewhere near 5%.

Meanwhile, the standard of living has continued to rise. We talk about our poor, but what do we really mean by "poor?" Consider http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2011/07/what-is-poverty:

As scholar James Q. Wilson has stated, “The poorest Americans today live a better life than all but the richest persons a hundred years ago.”[3] In 2005, the typical household defined as poor by the government had a car and air conditioning. For entertainment, the household had two color televisions, cable or satellite TV, a DVD player, and a VCR. If there were children, especially boys, in the home, the family had a game system, such as an Xbox or a PlayStation.[4] In the kitchen, the household had a refrigerator, an oven and stove, and a microwave. Other household conveniences included a clothes washer, clothes dryer, ceiling fans, a cordless phone, and a coffee maker.

The home of the typical poor family was not overcrowded and was in good repair. In fact, the typical poor American had more living space than the average European. The typical poor American family was also able to obtain medical care when needed. By its own report, the typical family was not hungry and had sufficient funds during the past year to meet all essential needs.

Poor families certainly struggle to make ends meet, but in most cases, they are struggling to pay for air conditioning and the cable TV bill as well as to put food on the table. Their living standards are far different from the images of dire deprivation promoted by activists and the mainstream media.

1. The paper was in English and it was from a lab in Switzerland. Switzerland has French as an official language, but other than that there was nothing French about this. (I'm pretty sure that lab operates in English). 2. You have to train the computer to recognize certain patterns of brainwaves and train the user to make those brainwaves when they wish to do a certain function. Therefore this is not capable of mind reading unless you train the computer to recognize and distinguish between the brain-waves associated with every thought (or thought-fragment) the participant might ever have. People are working on this (sorry, I don't know how to do html tags). http://www.npr.org/2011/05/12/135598390/mind-reading-technology-turns-thought-into-action 3. You should conceptually dissociate the brain-waves from the robot. The voluntary modulation of brain waves can be used to control anything, if that thing can accept (up to 3-d, currently) analog input. One application is a robot. I've seen this used to control robotic arms, wheelchairs, videogames (pong, space invaders, doom), lighting, movies, toys, just about anything you can do with a joystick. Really, all they are doing here is creating a virtual joystick in the computer and having that virtual joystick control the robot. 4. Brain control is currently very slow. When the application has intelligence, then the amount that you can accomplish with the relatively slow brainwave input increases as you relinquish control from the participant to the robot AI. For example, it takes a lot less effort to tell a robot you are thirsty and have the robot move to the fridge, open the fridge, retrieve a beer, close the fridge, open the beer, poor it into a glass, put a straw in the glass, bring the glass to you, and put the straw in your mouth (I skipped a lot of steps) than it is to have the user mentally control the robot while it does all of those tasks. But then what happens when the robot can't find the straws? The same is true if you have a joystick with a 'thirsty' button or if you have a joystick that operates every movement of the robot. 5. The brain isn't really designed for smooth continuous movements. A lot of that comes from other parts of the nervous system, like the brainstem, the cerebellum, and the spinal cord. Intelligent robots might not need smooth continuous input. However, your dreams of nimbly controlling an exoskeleton in outer-space battles might require more than having electrodes in a cap on the outside of your head, it will likely require electrodes inside your head, spine, brainstem or some other amazing technology that doesn't yet exist.

yea, we have seen this stuff before:
http://www.coastalcontractor.net/article/189.html
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113513752
http://www.buoyantfoundation.org/

I guess "buoyant house" would be a better description

although certain examples, like sick shrimp running on treadmills, should be an obvious choice for budget cuts...

Why exactly is that obvious? Because it sounds silly? Apparently it didn't actually cost $500k

"The treadmills were just a small part of it, a way to measure how shrimp respond to changes in water quality. Burnett says the first treadmill was built by a colleague from scraps and was basically free, and the second was fancier and cost about $1,000. The senator's report was misleading, says Burnett, "and it suggests that much money was spent on seeing how long a shrimp can run on a treadmill, which was totally out of context." http://www.npr.org/2011/08/23/139852035/shrimp-on-a-treadmill-the-politics-of-silly-studies

If the claims against the IMF head were a CIA operation, surely the US prosecutor would've actually done his fucking job and brought charges

The goal was never a conviction. The goal was to discredit him long enough to get him booted as IMF head. Look at the timeline if you don't believe me. The prosecutors first admitted that their case was a joke literally TWO DAYS after a new pro-American IMF head was appointed.

Let me help you:

February 11, 2011: Dominque Strauss-Kahn, International Monetary Fund head, makes a speech in Washington calling for the establishment of a new global currency that would devalue the U.S. Dollar

May 14, 2011: Dominque Strauss-Kahn arrested in New York City on rape charges. Prosecutors make him take a very public "perp walk" (with press in tow), and claim an ironclad case.

May 14, 2011: Dominque Strauss-Kahn resigns as IMF chief

June 28, 2011: New pro-American Christine Lagarde appointed IMF chief, with the U.S. cheering her on.

June 30, 2011: Prosecutors meet with Strauss-Kahn attorneys and admit their "ironclad" case is a joke, later drop all charges.

All just coincidences of course, the rantings of a tin-foil hat enthusiast.

We would get arrested if we were shooting lasers into the sky, and one happened to shine into an airplane cockpit.

Or does this "merely" mean that child labor has "shifted paradgms"...

Yes. It means the kids are not in one place thus eliminating exposure to the public eye like say someone in prison.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/05/25/136659787/report-chinese-prisoners-made-to-play-internet-games-for-guards-profit

Google is your friend? It was pretty easy to find:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129528196

Blame NPR for their shitty reporting and worthless web page that doesn't provide a link to the story, but to suggest that it wasn't a real study isn't very credible.

Tracing the researcher named in the NPR article, http://evolution-of-religion.com/team/ is the website for the team exploring the evolutionary consequence/value of religion - a subject I find fascinating and, due to the wide prevalence of religion across all human cultures, compelling.

I don't know about Canada, but the problem here isn't necessarily teacher pay.

When new teachers start at below $35k in most places, whereas "finance" and "business" types start at more than double that, then yes, it is a problem.

especially when you include benefits that far exceed what people in the private sector get

That's actually a lie. Public sector workers are paid at market, or slightly less, even when counting in benefits.

And quite frankly, bitching over "benefits that they get that we don't!" is incredibly immature. The problem is not that teachers get the benefits. The problem is that most US workers didn't fight to keep them when they lost them. The question shouldn't be "Why do they get them?", it should be "Why don't we get them?"

Isn't it cool that we're working on launching an infrared telescope into space, which might discover that there are lots of such things all over the place? Oh wait, congress is suddenly saying that we can't afford it, even though it costs less than the air conditioning budget for 60 days of the Iraq occupation. (link)

According to npr.org:

The average American house size has more than doubled since the 1950s; it now stands at 2,349 square feet.

That was a 2006 story.
citation: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5525283

There were also some other stories I saw that said the average size was very slightly decreasing, in 2009.

This one sounds pretty advanced: "What is different here is that this is a submarine. It has a ballast system. It can go down. This one can only go to a depth of 62 feet, which is not very far and really doesn't give them much of a margin of error. However, if you need to go underwater, you can ride underwater for 18 hours at a clip, and it has a range of 6,800 nautical miles, which is, you know, pretty incredible. " (from http://www.npr.org/2011/04/20/135574444/ecuador-seizes-drug-running-super-sub)

You seem to believe that people are good at multitasking. Read this:

"People can't multitask very well, and when people say they can, they're deluding themselves," said neuroscientist Earl Miller. And, he said, "The brain is very good at deluding itself."

You talk about passing a quiz and possibly a demonstration. The article describes they tested multitasking abilities using more rigorous methods, involving MRI scanners. The conclusion is that while you can switch quickly between tasks, you don't actually do them at the same time, and they can see the brain struggling, it can get overwhelmed quite easily. There's no need to individually test everyone when they already know the answer.

It didn't last for very long though. The process was halted back in June after multiple earthquakes, and the UK is pretty stable geologically - earthquakes strong enough to be felt usually make the national news - so a connection seems highly likely. Coverage at the BBC, FT and Independent.

NPR reported on the same sort of thing happening in Faulkner County, Ark. I think they later stopped the drills for a period to see if it stopped the small quakes and found that the quakes did stop.

In any event, this appears to be Anonymous trying to do something to hurt the U.S. Intelligence community, with the side-effect of raising awareness of data privacy issues.

Oh, ya that higher morality thing that Anonymous has going.. like the time they tried to fill youtube with porn.

    Intellectual Ventures?

Yours In London,
Kilgore Trout

i bet Serkis loves his job because he never leaves the studio, doesn't have to travel around the world all the time and is always there for his kids while making a very nice living and not seeing most of his money go to agents, publicists, accountants and lawyers

Wrong.

According to NPR, motion capture actors now perform on the real set wearing a Lycra bodysuit covered with dots. Both live action and motion capture cameras "capture" the scene.

According to the interview, Serkis doesn't see any difference between motion capture acting and live action acting. They are both acting to him.

And Serkis most definitely has an agent, publicist, a manager and even a web guy.

NPR played a great interview with Andy Serkis last week. He has no trouble with being "typecast", but after hearing that interview I definitely will chase up Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll. Serkis sounded so much like Ian Dury.

And off topic some more, we already know about trying to raise a monkey as a human baby

NPR played a great interview with Andy Serkis last week. He has no trouble with being "typecast", but after hearing that interview I definitely will chase up Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll. Serkis sounded so much like Ian Dury.

And off topic some more, we already know about trying to raise a monkey as a human baby

You are likely right @girl!

First the US blew up earth's magnetic belts with nukes in project Starfish Prime, you know... just to see if they could.

Next... the antimatter belt. I predict project name, Apocalypse.

Zombie Apocalypse if we are all lucky.

What a grandiose scheme, it can't fail!

The man said it best himself.
http://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/99600564995887104

"Simple Logic: Worried that FOX viewers don't know, think, or care about science? That's why COSMOS belongs on FOX."

and he's right. if anyone can spark an interest in science it's Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson.

If you can't bring yourself to tune into Fox
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=139033386
National Geographic Channel will air a same-night encore of the episodes following their broadcast on Fox.