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Just because someone does it and get in an accident doesnt mean my rights should be taken away also.

Driving is a privilege, not a right.
Cell phone use is a privilege, not a right.

Multitasking is a matter of deluding yourself that you can do multiple things at once, and then doing each one some of the time.

iPad sounds like digital Kotex...

NPR actually has a story about this.

Normally, I'd agree with you, but in this case, the Google founders are somewhat unique, and there have been a number of articles discussing that Brin was driving factor in the final decision. Can I see a 36-year old billionaire putting ideals first over a partly couple million? Sure.

The WSJ.com article was the best, but is subscriber-only. Here's one that is open:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122503157

This has bad and far-reaching implications. Just yesterday NPR ran a story about how Monsanto is like the Microsoft of the seed industry because the vast majority of farmers are using seeds with the round-up ready gene and they have complete proprietary control over those seeds (farmers aren't even allowed to harvest seeds from the existing crop and replant them, they have to buy new seed from Monsanto every new crop). And the gene isn't limited to corn; it's being inserted into as many types of crops it can be put into (the NPR story notes soybeans). Who knows how long it'll take to figure out how many other crops with the round-up ready gene have this side-effect, or how fast/well Monsanto's PR department will downplay the studies' results.

An American journalist would've rephrased the marketing blurb on the phone, not tried it out, and welcomed our new invincible mobile overlords, only to be made fun of by Jon Stewart later that night.

It's a bit offtopic but I just heard something about this on NPR recently:

For decades, young reporters would ask themselves, "What would Walter think?" Nowadays, it's not the memory of Walter Cronkite or even Edward R. Murrow that motivates some reporters — it's more often the fear that the stories they put out today might get picked apart by Jon Stewart tomorrow.

Prominent among the wary: NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams, who recently explained in a magazine essay that The Daily Show host "has gone from optional to indispensable" in just a few short years.

I found it odd yet telling that keeping anchors in check is not regulated by role models today but rather the court jester. Indeed, my opinions of both Fox News and CNN have dropped significantly from watching a few shows of Stewarts where he systematically picks apart their idiocy with a montage or just pointing out the obvious. It's like an MST3K recap of the day's news ... except with a bizarre twist: the truth.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=114341718

I'm guessing that 99% of you have never actually seen what a "full body scan" looks like. I'm also guessing that a significant percentage of you believe that the x-ray glasses you see ads for in comic books really work. For some education - instead of hype - you might want to take a look at the NPR piece broadcast this morning about full body scans. This link http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122289282 references a transcript and includes an image of one of the scans.

I suppose some slashdotters might consider this porn. Then again, in 1914 a woman's bare leg was considered porn.

Even NPR scooped Slashdot this time:

From December 14, 2009

I'm glad you are asking for evidence. General evidence:
http://roboticnation.blogspot.com/
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/005926.html

I mentioned robot garbage trucks as an alternative and cited the DARPA grand challenge as evidence such were possible. Just look at US military plans for self-driving vehicles for more predictions by hard-nosed people of what is likely to be around in ten years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driverless_car#History

Just because flying cars did not happen for everyone (there are some prototypes by the way), doesn't mean logically it makes sense to deny self-driving cars won't happen for most people. Safety concerns alone with an aging population who wants to stay mobile will drive their adoption. You can already buy Hondas in the UK that drive themselves on highways.
"Honda Accord ADAS auto-pilot system takes the reins"
http://www.engadget.com/2006/01/30/honda-accord-adas-auto-pilot-system-takes-the-reins/
"We've heard of radar assisted cruise control, that has certain luxury cars running at set speeds on the highway, but slows them down or speeds them up when they get too close to a car in front or behind. Well now Honda UK is taking it to another level with their Advanced Driver Assist System (ADAS) that not only regulates your speed, but manages the turning, allowing you a full auto-pilot system for your Accord when you're out on the freeway. The Adaptive Cruise Control is your regular radar variety, but the Lane Keep Assist System keeps you headed in the right direction by using a camera on the rear-view mirror to watch the white lines and turn accordingly. Honda was quick to point out that their system isn't exactly set up for you to take a nap, since the ADAS system will beep every 10 seconds to make sure you're paying attention, requiring you to touch the steering wheel to inform the car you're still in charge, but we're sure someone is going manage an accident and an ensuing lawsuit or three out of this "convenience"."

So, your skepticism is way behind the reality of these things.

Note that compared to a century ago when many women and children worked in mines, mining is much more pleasant and already heavily automated (including the use of explosives to do the work of many people). Here is an NPR story on that:
"Could Robots Replace Humans in Mines?"
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12637032
"So far, the U.S. mining industry has shown little interest in funding such research. The robots are expensive and mining companies have little incentive to spend money developing and deploying them. Advances in other technology have already reduced the number of miners in the U.S. by more than two-thirds, compared with 40 years ago. Today, only about 100,000 people work in the coal-mining industry. Partly for that reason, and partly because of advances in safety, mining is not nearly as dangerous as it was in the in the past. Since 1990, fatalities have declined by 67 percent, and injuries by 51 percent, according to the National Mining Association."

So, they are not really trying very hard because humans are forced to do the jobs for money. But it could be mostly automated if we wanted to.

As for robotic material handling systems, there are plenty of them.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWsMdN7HMuA

...or at least, there is witness testimony strongly suggesting the bomber had inside help in the airport to get him past normal security, the answer is "No, full body scanners will not stop terrorists." What good is a full body scan if you have people on the inside that can get you past the scanner?

Don't take my word for it, listen to this NPR interview: Attorney witnessed bomber before flight had already bypassed security with no Passport

Thom Yorke, the band's lead singer, explained in an online interview for Wired magazine that Radiohead would never have been able to pull off the stunt without years of support from its former label, Capitol EMI.

"The only reason that we could even get away with this is the fact that we'd actually gone through the whole mill of the business in the first place," Yorke said. "It's not supposed to be a model for anything else. It was simply a response to a situation. We're out of contract. We've spent a huge amount of money on this server. We have our own studio. What the hell else would we do? This is the obvious thing to do."

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122006767

Obscure Music Finds An Outlet On The Web -- an NPR story about people on the Internet playing and/or distributing old, obscure content. In it, a music industry executive rails against it, because those folks aren't going through the right sources, tracking down the people who own the "publishing rights" so they can get their money.

You're right that this is the exception to the rule, but I had to mention this because it immediately came to mind when I read your comment.

The author was on NPR a few days ago [transcript and audio], in case you won't visit PlayBoy or get distracted once you get there :-)

Here came someone with a magic box who provided an easy solution, and the eggheads and their political masters bought it hook, line and sinker. What I find extraordinary is that the NSA was not involved or asked to vet this guy's findings. Billions of dollars and some of the finest brains working there, and no one thought to call them? Looks like even in 2003 inter-agency cooperation wasn't going very well.He was CIAs asset, and they were not going to share.

My conclusion: con man, and he will probably get away with this, because the government can not publicly prosecute him without looking like an Idiot.

And in the UK, we play rugby with similar effect. First thing the US needs to do? Get rid of this fucked up idea that there is any dichotomy between being good at sports and being good academically.

House Hears Testimony On Football, Head Injuries

This is all part of society's "war on men"--trying to make men responsible for everything that could be wrong in the culture. Witness the recent probes on gender bias in college admissions. They wonder why colleges are not admitting the same proportion of women when they get twice as many applications from women as from men. Nevermind the potential for a study to determine if female students apply to more schools than men (thus generating more applications) or whether admitting more women would serve anybody's best interests (including those of women). Any reason to bash on men is fine, regardless of whether they are in the majority or if any actual discrimination is taking place. And it's a worldwide phenomenon. It's no wonder the herbivore movement is taking hold.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113996743
I'm guessing whoever modded my above comment heard the same story on the radio.

Oops, this is a better link, and links to the audio too!
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113996743


Slow Down Cowboy!

Slashdot requires you to wait between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.

It's been 1 minute since you last successfully posted a comment

Uggh, I have to wait 5 minutes? I just want to post a correction. :(

Source? That sounds too awesomely Last Starfighter-esque to be true.

http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=113996743
I heard the radio broadcast, if you can find it, there's a lot more info.

I heard rumors that Chicago actually has software that ties all of the city's thousands of cameras (some privately owned) into one big grid that can be accessed much the same way. I don't know if they have taken it so far to 3-D model everything or not, but this sort of thing I'd expect to see almost everywhere eventually. Monitoring these giant networks of cameras is hard, and monitoring them all simultaneously is impossible. However, if you can have "virtual cops", per se, that can respond to calls instantly to provide eyes on any situation, these big camera grids become much more useful to law enforcement. I will not touch on the civil liberty aspects that seem to drive debate on any surveillance technology on this site, as I'm sure there will be other threads to cover that.

First of all, you cannot train folks to multitask because humans are incapable of doing it. The cops can't do it either. What you call multitasking is actually them selecting attention rapidly between their laptops and driving - if they're even doing that.

And yet, I can play 2 different rhythms on my piano, one with my left hand, and one with my right. It's not easy --- usually I take the easier route of learning the "combined" rhythm --- but it can be learned. But I suppose that is a bit different, as (at least my) brain sort of zooms out to be able to handle the multitasking. Actually, the feeling is not unlike the one I have when driving, where I also have to handle a number of tasks (gears need to be changed, mirrors checked, chat with my wife, check my daughter in the other mirror). And relatively speaking (compared to my wife) I am a poor driver.

First of all, you cannot train folks to multitask because humans are incapable of doing it. The cops can't do it either. What you call multitasking is actually them selecting attention rapidly between their laptops and driving - if they're even doing that.

First) So I'm not multitasking by listening to the radio, talking on the phone, typing this post, thinking about what i'm listening to on the radio, thinking about what i'm talking about on the phone, thinking about what i'm typing here, thinking about my posture, thinking about when i should take my next sip of coffee, etc, etc, etc?

Two, even if it were possible to train folks how to do it, what makes you think that folks will follow their training? People are trained not to tailgate, speed, cut others off, etc...

Everything you've proposed is impossible. The ONLY solution is to ban cell phones in cars. There is absolutely no reason to talk in a car anyway - no exceptions. Got to talk? Pull over.

Two) If people couldn't do what they've been trained and licensed to do, they would fail the training, and thus be unable to pass the licensing examination. They would also drive all over the road in both directions at all times while ignoring all signs and markers. I've seen video of this in 3rd world countries, the USA is 1st world thankfully your ideas don't match reality.

D) Nothing is impossible except banning cell phone usage in cars being the only solution.

**Bonus points to anyone that can spot my Christmas movie reference :)

It's the enforcement. We have really, really high fines here for all sorts of traffic violations, but enforcement is so lacking that it almost seems random. Your chances of getting caught are miniscule, so people learn to ignore the law. If they do get caught, the fines are staggering - but the one in ten thousand chance of getting caught is not a deterrent.

Actually it's not the fines or enforcement. It's training. Every police vehicle I've seen has a laptop mounted on the center console. Every time I see a cop driving around they have one hand on the keyboard and constantly glance back and forth between the road and the computer.

Cell phones and cars aren't going away anytime soon. Instead of punishing the citizens for doing something police are trained to do, train the citizens too. There is no reason that drivers ed. classes shouldn't discuss this and deal with it.

I think the best way to "think of the children" is to teach the children. If you don't want little Lisa to text and drive into a horrible wreck, teach her how to text and drive responsibly. Otherwise take your blanket statements and have every computer removed from police vehicles because otherwise we have an effective working double standard which provides revenue to the police force. Fuck that shit.

First of all, you cannot train folks to multitask because humans are incapable of doing it. The cops can't do it either. What you call multitasking is actually them selecting attention rapidly between their laptops and driving - if they're even doing that.

Two, even if it were possible to train folks how to do it, what makes you think that folks will follow their training? People are trained not to tailgate, speed, cut others off, etc...

Everything you've proposed is impossible. The ONLY solution is to ban cell phones in cars. There is absolutely no reason to talk in a car anyway - no exceptions. Got to talk? Pull over.

The measurements revealed that for all types of tasks, subjects lost time when they had to switch from one task to another, and time costs increased with the complexity of the tasks, so it took significantly longer to switch between more complex tasks. Time costs also were greater when subjects switched to tasks that were relatively unfamiliar. They got "up to speed" faster when they switched to tasks they knew better, an observation that may lead to interfaces designed to help overcome people's innate cognitive limitations.

Or here:

"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. Switching from task to task, you think you're actually paying attention to everything around you at the same time. But you're actually not. You're not paying attention to one or two things simultaneously, but switching between them very rapidly. Think about writing an e-mail and talking on the phone at the same time. Those things are nearly impossible to do at the same time. You cannot focus on one while doing the other. That's because of what's called interference between the two tasks. They both involve communicating via speech or the written word, and so there's a lot of conflict between the two of them."

Researchers say they can actually see the brain struggling. And now they're trying to figure out the details of what's going on.

Regarding music, see Music while you work: the differential distraction of background music on the cognitive test performance of introverts and extraverts, Adrian Furnham, Anna Bradley, Department of Psychology, University College London, UK:

The current study looked at the distracting effects of pop music on introverts' and extraverts' performance on various cognitive tasks. It was predicted that there would be a main effect for music and an interaction effect with introverts performing less well in the presence of music than extraverts. Ten introverts and ten extraverts were given two tests (a memory test with immediate and delayed recall and a reading comprehension test), which were completed, either while being exposed to pop music, or in silence. The results showed that there was a detrimental effect on immediate recall on the memory test for both groups when music was played, and two of the three interactions were significant. After a 6-minute interval the introverts who had memorized the objects in the presence of the pop music had a significantly lower recall than the extraverts in the same condition and the introverts who had observed them in silence. The introverts who completed a reading comprehension task when music was being played also performed significantly less well than these two groups. These findings have implications for the study habits of introverts when needing to retain or process complex information.

Not that I agree with the boss of course; I like listening to music to block out the sound of people talking, which is a bigger distraction. I would imagine that if there were a comparison between working while listening to music, and working in a noisy, talkative environment, you'd find that the latter has worse performance results than the former. And no, I don't have a citation for that :)

No, Google does and always has taken user privacy seriously. But the fact is, and Schmidt is being quite frank, here, they don't have the right to deny requests from law enforcement agencies, and as long as that's true, no company will fail to communicate everything you've ever done to the feds whenever they want to know about it.

Look at it this way: would you expect Balmer to point out that giving Microsoft any information about you would ultimately lead to it being in the hands of the Federal government? No, of course not. Microsoft will quite happily hide that fact from you and make you feel more secure. Google will warn you about it up-front, but they ALREADY LOST THAT CASE IN COURT (yep, Google tried to refuse to hand over search histories).

So, you get to ask yourself: who do you want to do business with: the company that warns you about risks to your privacy so that you can moderate your behavior accordingly or the company that tells you that everything is just fine. Schmidt made me uncomfortable, and that's a good thing.

Don't forget the Garlic Bubble!

GROSS: Many people have made the observation that with more robotics, war becomes like a video game. But you report about how some of the robotics are intentionally designed like video games to take advantage of skills that young soldiers have as a result of having played a lot of video games. Would you describe how some war robotics are designed intentionally like video games?

MR. SINGER: Well, it's interesting. The military quickly figured out that there were two advantages of doing this. For example, the hand-held controllers that most of the ground robotics systems use, they're modeled after the Xbox or the PlayStation. And the reason was two-fold. One, they figured out, okay, these game companies have spent millions of dollars designing systems that are, you know, perfectly suited, where your finger should go and the like, and if they did all the research, why don't we piggyback on that? The second is they figured out, hold it, the video game companies have actually trained up our forces for us already. That is, you know, we're getting kids coming in who've spend the last several years working with these little video game controllers. So why not free-ride off of that as well?

And the result of it is, because of these systems and because they're trained up that way, it's another kind of ripple effect we're seeing, the demographics of war even being reshaped. That is, one of the people that we interviewed was a 19-year-old high school dropout. He's an Army specialist. He's actually, by some consideration, the best drone pilot in the entire force, and it's in part because of video games. And it's an interesting story because he originally wanted to join the Army to be a helicopter mechanic, but because he had failed his English class, he wasn't qualified for that, and instead they said, hey, do you want to be a drone pilot? And he's turned out to be spectacular at it. They sent him off to Iraq, and then he was so good that they brought him back to be an instructor in the training academy. And again, this is someone who's not even an officer yet, and he's in the Army.

Now, take this ripple effect further. This is not a story that people in the Air Force like to hear, and it's spooking out a lot of people, for example, you know, F15 pilots, who spent years and years training, go to college, they're officers, and when they hear, hold it, this 19-year-old video gamer is not just better at these systems than me but actually is out there doing more fighting than me, what's going on here?

For those interested, the Planet Money piece is here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103657301

And so what we find when we look carefully is that the gang organization looks a whole lot like a typical corporate structure, a lot like McDonald's in some sense. And so just like McDonald's, it turns out there's a handful of guys at the top who are very successful who run the gang, who are bringing home, you know, mid to high six-figure salaries, but the 90 percent of the guys who are working in the gang are the young kids who are selling drugs on the street corner that it turns out they're getting paid roughly minimum wage for standing on the street corner and selling the drugs. -- Steven Levitt, NPR Interview

I think EVE Online bears this out, how a loosely coupled group of independent yet incentivised players can collectively make a place for themselves in a larger social space. Those larger groups then snap at each other for domination, and it's all the same "game" be it in virtual worlds, social worlds, or economic worlds.

Except it is happening right now, at least in the deregulated portions of the US electric grid. You see, the the electric distribution company (the people who you pay your bill to each month) buys the energy you use from the wholesale market and sells it to you (what's called an end-use customer) at retail rates. Today, retail rates are locked, but in the next year or so many states are deregulating their retail markets, and the real-time retail rate will become a pass-through of hourly wholesale rates plus transmission cost plus profit adder. The transmission costs are fixed because of what it takes to physically deliver energy to your house, and competition will (in theory) drive the profit adder to zero, because an end-use residential customer could just switch to whatever EDC offers the lowest hourly rate. In reality, most end-use customers never switch, despite lower offerings elsewhere, but that's a different issue...

The hourly wholesale price of electricity is a non-linear supply curve (because of the fuel mix) intersecting the real-time demand for electricity (because the technology does not exist to cheaply store bulk electric system scale power). The most important note: As demand grows, the price grows faster. The current price stack, from least to most, is hydroelectric < nuclear < coal < natural gas < diesel oil < wind < solar.

The economic incentive after deregulation is for the EDC is to get the end-use customers to reduce their demand, thus reducing the non-linear real-time energy price, and what better vehicle to do that than the Smart Meter? It's not a coincidence that Smart Meters appeared just as most of the mid-atlantic and midwest states are beginning retail deregulation. The whole design is that the EDC sends the real-time price to the house (directly or via web), and if you don't want to pay that $/kW, then you reduce your usage. That means less over-all cost to the EDC, and as a byproduct, to the customer. Don't kid yourselves that they're doing this for our benefit -- SmartMeters are just another way for them to cut costs.

As long as no one can be sure that the criminal will not commit other crimes, and as long as recidivism among "cured" criminals is so high, we, the honest people, have the right to know who are the people most likely to commit crimes against us.

Recidivism among murderers is quite low -- the three year rate is that 1.2% of those who've served time for homicide are arrested for a new homicide. (That's "arrested", not "convicted".)

One study in Finland found that all of the repeat murderers in their sample suffered from either schizophrenia or from severe alcoholism combined with personality disorder. So if you want to know who's most likely to commit murder, it might be that knowing who has severe mental health issues would tell you more than knowing who's been to jail.

And if we knew who has severe mental health issues, maybe we could even, you know, treat them. But I guess that would be socialism or something.

Sure, jail isn't perfect, but it's an effective way to keep criminals isolated until they learn how stupid it is to be a criminal

The only thing that people learn in our current prisons system, is how to be better criminals.

It wasn't always this way. NPR had a great story a few months ago about Folsom prison, once a model institution where almost every man got some job training. The majority of inmates never returned.

But that was "coddling" criminals -- and it went against the interests of the prison-industrial complex. Now Folsom is overcrowded to three times its design capacity, there are only a handful of classes with waiting lists more than 1,000 inmates long. And 75% of those released will be back within three years.

Let's take a step back for a minute. Imagine that I don't. Explain to me what a competitive free market it is

A free market "describes a market without economic intervention and regulation by government except to regulate against force or fraud."

and how the competition within it produces companies that provide effective services to their customers.

If those who are in a market do not make a product or provide a service people are willing to pay for somone will introduce competition and do so themselves. That applies whether it is profitable or not. Since the original post is about health insurance, let's use that. During the debate up to the House's vote on their bill there was mention of health co-ops. I didn't know it but not far from me there is a Health insurance coop. Health Partners has existed for almost 50 years.

Being a member, willingly and voluntarily, of 2 coops though neither being a health coop I know how they work. The members, owners, set the policy of the coop. Now there are three main types of coops I know of. One type is the employee or worker owned coop. Basque coops in Spain like the Mondragon Corporation are huge employers. A second type is the supplier owned coop. An example of it in the US is the Organic Valley Coop. The dairy farmers who supply dairy products to the coop are the owners. And the third type is the buyer owned coop such as the two I'm a member of, Lakewinds coop and The Wedge.

All of these types of coops meet the requirements of the free market, a willing and voluntary exchange.

Let's take a step back for a minute. Imagine that I don't. Explain to me what a competitive free market it is

A free market "describes a market without economic intervention and regulation by government except to regulate against force or fraud."

and how the competition within it produces companies that provide effective services to their customers.

If those who are in a market do not make a product or provide a service people are willing to pay for somone will introduce competition and do so themselves. That applies whether it is profitable or not. Since the original post is about health insurance, let's use that. During the debate up to the House's vote on their bill there was mention of health co-ops. I didn't know it but not far from me there is a Health insurance coop. Health Partners has existed for almost 50 years.

Being a member, willingly and voluntarily, of 2 coops though neither being a health coop I know how they work. The members, owners, set the policy of the coop. Now there are three main types of coops I know of. One type is the employee or worker owned coop. Basque coops in Spain like the Mondragon Corporation are huge employers. A second type is the supplier owned coop. An example of it in the US is the Organic Valley Coop. The dairy farmers who supply dairy products to the coop are the owners. And the third type is the buyer owned coop such as the two I'm a member of, Lakewinds coop and The Wedge.

All of these types of coops meet the requirements of the free market, a willing and voluntary exchange.

NPR

N P R

N P R

N P R

I read about a research a while ago (years, sorry no source) that states that acquiring large sums of money creates the same kind of euphoria as for instance using cocaine as it causes the same neurotransmitters to be produced in the brain. Irrational need for more and more money is a real addiction I think and should be treated as such.

Did you mean something like this? http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=111579154 though it's more related to love according to this article.

Researcher Xinyue Zhou, of the department of psychology at Sun Yat-Sen University in China, puts it in very human terms. "We think money works as a substitute for another pain buffer -- love."

And they link to this pdf http://www.csom.umn.edu/assets/127771.pdf
Seems like if you handle money you can endure certain amounts of pain a bit more if the study is correct and you feel more strength.

There is a current case before the supreme court along this line. The argument is there is no constitutional right not to be framed. Oh and the Obama admin backs this stance, along with 28 states.

Scientists have not been able to talk the raw components, which we already have access to, and get them to form a something living, have they?

Not a full on living system, no. However, the components, such as evolving self-replicators (in the form of RNA) have been made in labs. Pretty amazing stuff. (linky linky)

This is one of the things that annoys me about those kinds of creationist/ID arguments. It took nature on the order of 400(+/- 100) million years to go from inorganic geochemistry to free living chemoautotrophs, and yet, they somehow expect scientists to be able to replicate that in the lab in the half-century or so that we've been able to study such things, and state that scientists' inability to do it so far means that it was impossible for nature. I mean, jeez, give 'em at least a million years to run some experiments, eh? It's only fair.

Yes, I realize that if they cared about fairness, then they wouldn't spread deliberate lies about science and specifically about studies of evolution in order to push their agenda.

Agreed. There's other coverage here: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2009/11/murdoch_vs_google.html that includes this quote:

"I think we will [remove our websites from Google's search index] but that's when we start charging," Murdoch said. He added: "The people who simply just pick up everything and run with it -- steal our stories, we say they steal our stories - they just take them. That's Google, that's Microsoft, that's Ask.com, a whole lot of people ... they shouldn't have had it free all the time, and I think we've been asleep."

Even more people (including researchers) don't seem to think about the energy excreted in the feces (or other ways).

I hardly ever see any mention of it in studies related to weight loss, diet etc.

Go check out how many researchers actually take samples and work out how much a subject is excreting.

Then there's was also a study which showed that mice in a bacteria free environment could eat a lot and not put on weight.

See: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95900616

And another which had the bacteria free mice getting gut bacteria from obese mice and ending up fatter than if they got gut bacteria from skinny mice.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6654607

Based on these, it should not be a surprise that some people will actually find it hard to lose weight despite eating and exercising the same as skinny people. Of course, your diet also affects your gut bacteria populations. I bet consuming lots of "sugar water" isn't going to help breed gut bacteria that makes it easier for you to be skinny.

Even more people (including researchers) don't seem to think about the energy excreted in the feces (or other ways).

I hardly ever see any mention of it in studies related to weight loss, diet etc.

Go check out how many researchers actually take samples and work out how much a subject is excreting.

Then there's was also a study which showed that mice in a bacteria free environment could eat a lot and not put on weight.

See: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95900616

And another which had the bacteria free mice getting gut bacteria from obese mice and ending up fatter than if they got gut bacteria from skinny mice.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6654607

Based on these, it should not be a surprise that some people will actually find it hard to lose weight despite eating and exercising the same as skinny people. Of course, your diet also affects your gut bacteria populations. I bet consuming lots of "sugar water" isn't going to help breed gut bacteria that makes it easier for you to be skinny.

I agreed completely until this statement. Mainstream media isn't that oblivious- they simply don't have YOUR best interests at heart.

That's why we need publicly-funded new media, like NPR, so that they aren't beholden to corporate interests and can report on news like this.

Which... they haven't.

Possibly because they're beholden to the government which is what's pushing this through in the first place.

Dammit.

(In case you missed it, there was a recent story on /. suggesting that government-funded media would be the "answer" to the dying newspaper industry. Obviously not.)

Your facts are less correct than they were 50 years ago.

http://www.nytimes.com/pages/national/class/index.html
"The movement of families up and down the economic ladder is the promise that lies at the heart of the American dream. But it does not seem to be happening quite as often as it used to."

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4662456
Eighty percent of Americans still believe it's possible to pull yourself up by the proverbial bootstraps. That's according to a New York Times poll reported last week, but a recent mobility study suggests the American Dream may be more style than substance.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility
Upper nonmanual occupations have the highest level of occupational inheritance. [3]

http://money.cnn.com/2009/02/27/news/companies/lashinsky_hurd.fortune/index.htm?postversion=2009030310
As his father did before him, Hurd attended the Browning School - a prestigious all-boys school where classmate Jamie Dimon, now CEO of J.P. Morgan Chase, remembers seventh-grader Hurd as a good basketball player

The wealthy own the media and push the "you could be wealthy!" idea hard. It helps keep the lower class folks voting against their own self interests. It's why the wizard of wall street pays a lower tax rate on his monumental earnings than his secretary pays on her salary.

There is a tiny chance you will break into the wealthy classes. But, for the most part, they pass the good jobs down to their own. Just look at the way hollywood has been taken over by 2nd and 3rd generation actors. CEO jobs are less obvious but essentially the same.

Any idiot can bankrupt themselves-- but it takes a lot more than simple hard work to get into the executive class.

Stupid slashcode. Link from above: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=114187478&from=mobile

I thought it a bit implausible that NPR had never interviewed Ron Paul. In fact, I was so certain that I knew what the result would be, my only reason for googling it was to make you look dumb.

I was right.

You were wrong.

Link: Ron Paul on All Things Considered .

You can dismiss that as a small thing, but I hope you'll give it a moment's consideration. The whole point of carrying a model of the world around in your head is so that you can make accurate predictions about things when you don't have first-hand experience. If your mental model of NPR leads you to predict that they would never dare let Ron Paul speak, or Rush Limbaugh, or Glenn Beck, or Michael Steele, or climate change denier Richard Lindzen, or former Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr on their airwaves, then clearly your understanding of NPR is crap, and your belief that you know what NPR is about is deluded.

I thought it a bit implausible that NPR had never interviewed Ron Paul. In fact, I was so certain that I knew what the result would be, my only reason for googling it was to make you look dumb.

I was right.

You were wrong.

Link: Ron Paul on All Things Considered .

You can dismiss that as a small thing, but I hope you'll give it a moment's consideration. The whole point of carrying a model of the world around in your head is so that you can make accurate predictions about things when you don't have first-hand experience. If your mental model of NPR leads you to predict that they would never dare let Ron Paul speak, or Rush Limbaugh, or Glenn Beck, or Michael Steele, or climate change denier Richard Lindzen, or former Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr on their airwaves, then clearly your understanding of NPR is crap, and your belief that you know what NPR is about is deluded.

I thought it a bit implausible that NPR had never interviewed Ron Paul. In fact, I was so certain that I knew what the result would be, my only reason for googling it was to make you look dumb.

I was right.

You were wrong.

Link: Ron Paul on All Things Considered .

You can dismiss that as a small thing, but I hope you'll give it a moment's consideration. The whole point of carrying a model of the world around in your head is so that you can make accurate predictions about things when you don't have first-hand experience. If your mental model of NPR leads you to predict that they would never dare let Ron Paul speak, or Rush Limbaugh, or Glenn Beck, or Michael Steele, or climate change denier Richard Lindzen, or former Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr on their airwaves, then clearly your understanding of NPR is crap, and your belief that you know what NPR is about is deluded.

I thought it a bit implausible that NPR had never interviewed Ron Paul. In fact, I was so certain that I knew what the result would be, my only reason for googling it was to make you look dumb.

I was right.

You were wrong.

Link: Ron Paul on All Things Considered .

You can dismiss that as a small thing, but I hope you'll give it a moment's consideration. The whole point of carrying a model of the world around in your head is so that you can make accurate predictions about things when you don't have first-hand experience. If your mental model of NPR leads you to predict that they would never dare let Ron Paul speak, or Rush Limbaugh, or Glenn Beck, or Michael Steele, or climate change denier Richard Lindzen, or former Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr on their airwaves, then clearly your understanding of NPR is crap, and your belief that you know what NPR is about is deluded.

I thought it a bit implausible that NPR had never interviewed Ron Paul. In fact, I was so certain that I knew what the result would be, my only reason for googling it was to make you look dumb.

I was right.

You were wrong.

Link: Ron Paul on All Things Considered .

You can dismiss that as a small thing, but I hope you'll give it a moment's consideration. The whole point of carrying a model of the world around in your head is so that you can make accurate predictions about things when you don't have first-hand experience. If your mental model of NPR leads you to predict that they would never dare let Ron Paul speak, or Rush Limbaugh, or Glenn Beck, or Michael Steele, or climate change denier Richard Lindzen, or former Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr on their airwaves, then clearly your understanding of NPR is crap, and your belief that you know what NPR is about is deluded.