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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System

http://www.youtube.com/user/UnitedLaunchAlliance

This is the future:

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/04/smaller-quicker-secret-space/all/1

And by the way — if you believe the principles and ideals the US and the West stand for have any value whatsoever, then those principles are still worth defending against those who don't share them, and would desire to project their own...

We are not perfect, but before there is a chorus of responses decrying how the US is somehow "oppressing" its people, I genuinely hope those who believe that never see actual oppression...

I haven't! The NY Times review is pretty gripping, though, and it sounds like it has a lot of great anecdotes buried in it. I'll see if I can pick it up some time.

Generally I try to avoid using the word 'environment' in these sorts of discussions, because it often brings to mind images of a static forest or workplace or something—I prefer 'experience,' since that can also encompass personal revelations. Undoubtedly your "genes * environment" formula is what I'd generally endorse. Genetic factors will always necessarily impact human intelligence; as a trivial proof of this, consider that the gene HAR1F is one of the major differences between humans and chimpanzees, and is expressed in the brain. Hereditary mental disorders also attest to this.

That being said, it's almost certain that because of assortative mating, at least some of our expectations about intelligence being tied directly to the influence of genes is rubbish; people in the dating pool segregate themselves according to intelligence much like they segregate themselves according to income (and possibly with some correlation), so right there you have many confounding factors about approaches to child-rearing, social environment, and so on. Go back to the middle ages, or even just the beginning of the century (all of the participants in this study were born in the UK or Norway in the 20s and 30s—nice work, guys) and the meaningless correlation is even more prominent. Wikipedia is quick to provide a citation for 'IQ scores have been shown to be associated with [...] parental social status'.

Sometimes I feel like bioinformatics is a really unintelligent field for this very reason: just as their biologist mentors once looked for a single gene that could explain everything about a chemical pathway, we now look for a set of genes that can explain everything about human behaviour. It's staggeringly irresponsible and a colossal waste of money, especially in the hands of behavioural psychologists.

...anyway.

Too little emphasis is placed on personal drive, ambition, and desire, and I'm happy to hear that Shenk focused on this. I found it a little shocking that the Times reviewer felt it was necessary to point out that many people lack the ability to motivate themselves to this extent. I think the major cause of this shortage of motivation might be a consequence of over-socialization in childhood: if you never have to think for yourself, it's going to be harder to learn how. Mob mentality seems like an easy enough scapegoat.

Another bit that's recently been ruffling things up is the discovery that the genome in brain cells is unstable. Were Shenk's book a couple of years newer, it undoubtedly would have mentioned this, at least in passing. In a strange way (that cheats the semantics of the question) the 'nature' of the brain itself may very well be able to change due to 'nurture.' The changes, however, can't be passed on, so it's not really the same thing.

Are there no cell phones there? Can't someone start an anonymous tip line? If this happened in the US we'd have detectives so far up everybody's ass that the ACLU would be foaming at the mouth.

You assume that the locals
1) Are against this
2) Trust the authorities

Obviously there's a fair few in group 1, otherwise they wouldn't permit their daughters to go to school, however I wouldn't be in group 2.

There's also the issue that the taliban, like Kim Jong Un, tend not to like cell phones.
http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/24/taliban-cuts-cellphone-service-in-helmand/

March 28 article mentions rolling blackouts

March 16 article the projected power shortfall is around 9.3%

There is a bunch of older articles that talk about the shortages, and increased prices last summer and that mention the summer of 2012 is likely to be worse. Chicken little would be proud.

March 28 article mentions rolling blackouts

March 16 article the projected power shortfall is around 9.3%

There is a bunch of older articles that talk about the shortages, and increased prices last summer and that mention the summer of 2012 is likely to be worse. Chicken little would be proud.

But but but, I've been told by my superiors that intelligence is a social construct devised by the white man to keep down the proletariat, and has no biological basis whatsoever.

Don't worry, they just won't be allowed to publish the correlation with racial groups. I think most researchers got the message after the DNA pioneer James Watson had to retire after suggesting a correlation . Of course even if there is a correlation that is no excuse to treat individuals differently because of their racial group, that would be like saying that a white guy could not play basketball because his race is not so good at it.

The book is "The Wave":

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/books/review/Morris-t.html?pagewanted=all

Go into the settings and disable autocorrect: how to disable autocorrect.

NYT article with quote. Remember, "net participation" is not profits. I don't even think studios keep an accounting of which movies make a "profit" in the clean sense, their model is based around renting facilities to independent producers, who get most of their money through hedge funds, government tax credits and special purpose finance vehicles. "Making a movie" is a multi-part process that involves many different economic actors, many of which are related in many different ways.

Asking if Forrest Gump made a profit is almost like asking if a factory's 2nd floor makes a profit -- it's so intertwined and dependent on the other parts that you could only define "profit" by drawing a bunch of arbitrary lines.

The closest you can get to answering this question is when an LLC is created strictly for the purpose of producing a single film, but in those cases the LLC is always wrapped-up as soon as costs are covered because tax laws only allow the costs of the film to carry over so many years. A movie simply isn't a "going concern," it's not a business, businesses make them, but they themselves are not severable ventures. And therefore, a film cannot "profit," it can only pay "proceeds."

I think if that were restated as being here on work visas, then there's a whole different point. Of course, you can also point to wonderful upstanding companies like Infosys and know that they aren't the only ones operating in this fashion to quickly deduce that there's something smelly going on in IT that's not occurring in any other industry. Landscaping, food service, and construction generally have issues with undocumented workers, not workers on visas that take US jobs for less than their US counterparts all with a wink wink nod smile from your friendly immigration office.

Science is not a panacea; see: http://www.disciplined-minds.com/

"When we have a nontrivial portion of the population who does not believe that humanity resulted from evolution by natural selection, and that the universe is less than ten thousand years old, did we really expect people to accept science that something bad is going to happen if they do not change their behavior?"

Despite having been in a PhD program in Ecology and Evolution, I can entertain the possibility that this world may have been a simulation only running for about 6000 virtual years for some purpose by a creator (or creators) of it and that there may have been extensive design involved with creating that (including either falsifying the fossil record or having run the universe from scratch only once and then running the last 6000 years multiple times from a checkpoint save file like with VirtualBox). See also: http://www.simulation-argument.com/

On a practical basis, the theory of evolution probably gets us further in understanding and succeeding in the world (like understanding how insects become resistant to pesticides, or how antibiotic-resistent bacteria emerge). Although maybe not always? :-)
http://evolution-of-religion.com/
http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/04/13/211201/magical-thinking-is-good-for-you

Anyway, science is so often not so cut and dried. A big issue is that, as Einstein said, science can tell you what is, but it can't tell you what you should value or prioritize or assume or study.
http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm

Similarly, there are huge areas of real human experience like consciousness that science has little practical to say about and which can lead to "materialistic scientism" which denies that which it cannot prove (rather that just not having a firm opinion), like Charles Tart talks about:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G67CqHPXJDE

Still, I would readily agree that when a lot of money is riding on denying externalities, it may be beneficial for certain financial interests to discourage or confuse any kind of rational thinking based on seemingly sound premises.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

I just read someone's sig elsewhere ("Shannow") that said "Figuring things out for yourself is the only real freedom that you have.". Sounds like a lot of truth to me, even if other scientists say (and I also agree) arguing may have evolved as a collective process to get closer to useful truths:
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/researcher-responds-to-arguments-over-his-theory-of-arguing/

I think many people in the USA look around and realize materialism has not actually brought that much more happiness in many ways (compared to community, not that they have to be exclusive), so maybe that rational observation leads to other blowback towards the scientific and technical professions? Even if a lot of that is really about politics of science and technology?

In the case of global warming, there are other problems involved. Global warming is a "tragedy of the commons" type problem, and our US society has trouble dealing with problems like that (including systematic risk). Also, the approaches towards dealing with global warming are often very negative. Why not deal with global warming by investing in research in hot or cold fusion energy, solar panels, or space habitats, in an optimistic way, rather that link that to some kind of green doomsterism as many do? Maybe people cor

"Was he really naive enough to think that these were the actions of some rogue managers and that the company would be thrilled to have him put it all in writing?", crazyjj

"It has been 17 months since Jack B. Palmer first made a quiet complaint through internal channels at Infosys, the giant Indian outsourcing company he works for, saying he suspected some managers were committing visa fraud" link

Do Chinese leaders feel no guilt?

No. They feel fear. Losing power means destruction in an authoritarian regime. You are either in power or you are subjugated by those who are. You don't lose an election and reinvent yourself. You lose your immunity from prosecution, your wealth, possibly your freedom and even your life.

Those realities leave precious little room for subtleties like "guilt."

I find it a bit disturbing that EU and US leaders are saying China is a good model to follow.

That view appears among statists from time to time when liberal democracies fail to cooperate. The most vital contemporary source of support for authoritarianism has emerged among global warming alarmists.

Let's say to an equivalently bucolic setting, like Wisconsin outside Madison, or Dubuque Iowa.

One reason that the UK is still superior to the US, despite being blighted by The City, and laws made by silk breeches, and omnipresent camera vision.

In America, this story would have ended in a tasering, or pepper-spray: like that poor fellow who's MediLert malfunctioned.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/06/nyregion/fatal-shooting-of-ex-marine-by-white-plains-police-raises-questions.html?_r=2

If there was no gun, he wouldn't have died.

That's an untested hypothesis. Here in Australia, the highest recorded murder rate was after our gun laws were introduced, although it has since fallen. However, our murder rate was already falling before the gun laws were introduced nationwide and all the mass killings that prompted their introduction happened in states that already had similar laws. Now the most common murder weapon is knives. What makes you so sure that the person who killed your friend would have been unwilling to use a knife? And you didn't originally object to gun laws but to the strength of self defense laws, which operate independently of the weapon used. Did your friend's murderer get let off or not and what self defense laws were in place at the time?

By the time they realized what was going on, six people were dead.

That's a problem of situational awareness, not a failure of gun ownership. If you are armed you ought not walk around oblivious of your surroundings. Well, you shouldn't walk around oblivious of your surroundings even unarmed. This article claims that "everyone hit the ground" after the first shot, which was apparently from a very short distance. Unsurprisingly, if you lie down and make a passive victim of yourself, carrying a weapon won't help you. Even if they were all unarmed if they had rushed him it is unlikely that he could have killed 6 people. It's not that those armed people couldn't have stopped him, they decided not to stop him. In a panic, sure, but a decision nonetheless.

There are a few rare cases in which somebody with a gun did or might have stopped a shooter, but they're far outweighed by cases like this in which two people got into a fight, somebody died because of the presence of a gun, and nobody would have died if there was no gun.

Have violent crime rates gone up or down in American states that have liberalized their gun laws? It is my understanding that violent crime rates have gone down, but if you have evidence to the contrary please let me know.

The other side of the coin is that if you kill somebody with a gun, and the shooting wasn't legally justified, you can go to jail for a long time.

I agree that this is as it should be, but it should be so regardless of what weapon was used. Why should you get of easy for killing with a knife? Murder is murder, no matter how it is done.

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/12/university-of-pittsburgh-police-make-arrest-but-bomb-threats-continue/

Even if it was a few calls, it wasn't just CCAC or Pitt.

Threats were also received at The Western Pennsylvania School for the Blind in Pittsburgh, Point Park University and California University of Pennsylvania.

What kinda sick fuck makes a bomb threat to a school for the blind? Seriously. It's almost enough to make me want to believe in hell just so the asshole responsible can burn in it.

The sad thing is they arrested someone but that did not stop the calls. And after that shit that went down at Western Psych, the community's nerves are pretty rattled already.

It's not just one day's work from a BSOD. If someone was incompetent or malicious enough to deploy Windows in a mission critical environment, it can make a mess that takes thousands (or more) man-hours to clean up. With multiple people depending on a system, one BSOD can take a bite out of many days.

Having insurance does not help either. See this story in NYT

We know how well this went last time somebody wanted a photo shoot.

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/air-force-one-backup-rattles-new-york-nerve/

Create a nation of terrorized went-panty self-entitled anti-intellectuals and you get what you get.

One of the rules of earning a patent are that it is simply an improvement on an existing thing. So wouldn't it make sense for HTC for example to patent their entire HTC one x, that will soon be released? Then all the item s in that phone are no longer patent protected from the software to chips , because the act of putting them all together in the configuration that the HTC one x, did is a clear improvement on them as pieces. Is it not an improvement of the 3g chip or the java software when they are put together to create the phone? I think it would hold up, I remember reading this article http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/business/15schumer.html?pagewanted=all [nytimes.com] And the main villain in it Claudio Ballard said the following, ot justify his patents “I didn’t invent the scanner; I didn’t invent networking, or computers or software,” he said. “But I am an expert at systems integration, and I created this complete end-to-end solution” for digital check processing.

I think a fair price of a Leaf today would be about $10-12K - not $35K as it appears to be.

According to this:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/04/04/business/the-cost-of-higher-fuel-economy.html?ref=energy-environment
a Leaf is ~$28k vs ~$18k for a comparable car from the same mfg (Versa). The Leaf will take ~9 years to pay for the difference in gas savings. So $10-12k is a bit low I'd say.
Really, the Prius, at 49 mpg & $23k seems like the sensible choice today. Even if you were choosing between it & the Fiesta, you'd break even in about 13 years, and the Prius is nicer & will have a higher resale value if you sell it before that point.

Your last comment comment about China is interesting:

The villain in the remake of Red Dawn was actually switched from China (realistic) to North Korea (ridiculous) in order to not upset China (and its movie audiences). I guess the producers figured that "vaguely Asian-looking" actors could just as easily be viewed by American audiences as Korean.

There is "sand" involved here, though: heads are nestled deeply in it.

It's interesting that you and the parent AC believe this is somehow a "war on the academic sector". There is indeed a war, but it's not coming from within. First, a backdrop, beginning with the fact that China is on track to exceed US military spending by 2025:

Chinese Insider Offers Rare Glimpse of U.S.-China Frictions
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/world/asia/chinese-insider-offers-rare-glimpse-of-us-china-frictions.html

"The senior leadership of the Chinese government increasingly views the competition between the United States and China as a zero-sum game, with China the likely long-range winner if the American economy and domestic political system continue to stumble, according to an influential Chinese policy analyst. China views the United States as a declining power, but at the same time believes that Washington is trying to fight back to undermine, and even disrupt, the economic and military growth that point to China’s becoming the world’s most powerful country."

Asia's balance of power: China’s military rise
http://www.economist.com/node/21552212

"NO MATTER how often China has emphasised the idea of a peaceful rise, the pace and nature of its military modernisation inevitably cause alarm. As America and the big European powers reduce their defence spending, China looks likely to maintain the past decade’s increases of about 12% a year. Even though its defence budget is less than a quarter the size of America’s today, China’s generals are ambitious. The country is on course to become the world’s largest military spender in just 20 years or so."

China’s military rise: The dragon’s new teeth
http://www.economist.com/node/21552193

And now on to what's happening every day in US academic and business environments:

How China Steals Our Secrets
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/opinion/how-china-steals-our-secrets.html

China's Cyber Thievery Is National Policy—And Must Be Challenged
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052970203718504577178832338032176-lMyQjAxMTAyMDAwOTEwNDkyWj.html

FBI Traces Trail of Spy Ring to China
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052970203961204577266892884130620-lMyQjAxMTAyMDAwNzEwNDcyWj.html

NSA: China is Destroying U.S. Economy Via Security Hacks
http://www.dailytech.com/NSA+China+is+Destroying+US+Economy+Via+Security+Hacks/article24328.htm

Former cybersecurity czar: Every major U.S. company has been hacked by China
http://www.itworld.com/security/262616/former-cybersecurity-czar-every-major-us-company-has-been-hacked-china

China Att

Your last comment comment about China is interesting:

The villain in the remake of Red Dawn was actually switched from China (realistic) to North Korea (ridiculous) in order to not upset China (and its movie audiences). I guess the producers figured that "vaguely Asian-looking" actors could just as easily be viewed by American audiences as Korean.

There is "sand" involved here, though: heads are nestled deeply in it.

It's interesting that you and the parent AC believe this is somehow a "war on the academic sector". There is indeed a war, but it's not coming from within. First, a backdrop, beginning with the fact that China is on track to exceed US military spending by 2025:

Chinese Insider Offers Rare Glimpse of U.S.-China Frictions
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/world/asia/chinese-insider-offers-rare-glimpse-of-us-china-frictions.html

"The senior leadership of the Chinese government increasingly views the competition between the United States and China as a zero-sum game, with China the likely long-range winner if the American economy and domestic political system continue to stumble, according to an influential Chinese policy analyst. China views the United States as a declining power, but at the same time believes that Washington is trying to fight back to undermine, and even disrupt, the economic and military growth that point to China’s becoming the world’s most powerful country."

Asia's balance of power: China’s military rise
http://www.economist.com/node/21552212

"NO MATTER how often China has emphasised the idea of a peaceful rise, the pace and nature of its military modernisation inevitably cause alarm. As America and the big European powers reduce their defence spending, China looks likely to maintain the past decade’s increases of about 12% a year. Even though its defence budget is less than a quarter the size of America’s today, China’s generals are ambitious. The country is on course to become the world’s largest military spender in just 20 years or so."

China’s military rise: The dragon’s new teeth
http://www.economist.com/node/21552193

And now on to what's happening every day in US academic and business environments:

How China Steals Our Secrets
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/opinion/how-china-steals-our-secrets.html

China's Cyber Thievery Is National Policy—And Must Be Challenged
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052970203718504577178832338032176-lMyQjAxMTAyMDAwOTEwNDkyWj.html

FBI Traces Trail of Spy Ring to China
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052970203961204577266892884130620-lMyQjAxMTAyMDAwNzEwNDcyWj.html

NSA: China is Destroying U.S. Economy Via Security Hacks
http://www.dailytech.com/NSA+China+is+Destroying+US+Economy+Via+Security+Hacks/article24328.htm

Former cybersecurity czar: Every major U.S. company has been hacked by China
http://www.itworld.com/security/262616/former-cybersecurity-czar-every-major-us-company-has-been-hacked-china

China Att

Anyway, one of the rules of earning a patent are that it is simply an improvment on an existing thing. So wouldnt it make sense for HTC for example to patent their entire HTC one x, that will soon be released? Then all the item s in that phone are no longer patent protected from the software to chips , because the act of putting them all together in the configuration that the HTC one x, did is a clear improvement on them as pieces.

Is it not an improvement of the 3g chip or the java software when they are put together to create the phone?

I think it would hold up, I remember reading this article http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/business/15schumer.html?pagewanted=all And the main villain in it Claudio Ballard said the following, ot justify his patents “I didn’t invent the scanner; I didn’t invent networking, or computers or software,” he said. “But I am an expert at systems integration, and I created this complete end-to-end solution” for digital check processing.

Quite literally, yes. The oil companies got over $4 billion in tax breaks last year, and unlike NPR and PBS, these are for-profit companies already make quite a handsome profit.

We can benchmark climate models to a good standard...the actual climate.

You do realize that we don't need models to demonstrate global warming, right? That's an actual measurement.

Come back when you have a bare minimum of technical prowess, and have studied something besides humanities, political science, or some other such soft study for right brained types like yourself.

Hey Einstein: 10,000 years ago New York City was under the polar ice cap.

Not only that temperatures have been rising steadily since about 1600 or so - the end of the Little Ice Age. Just a few more decades and we might be as warm as the Medieval Warm period about 1,000 years ago.

But I bet you keep telling yourself how fucking smart you are.

Go ahead, tell yourself you're smarter then Freeman Dyson:

The Civil Heretic

IT WAS FOUR YEARS AGO that Dyson began publicly stating his doubts about climate change. Speaking at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University, Dyson announced that “all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated.” Since then he has only heated up his misgivings, declaring in a 2007 interview with Salon.com that “the fact that the climate is getting warmer doesn’t scare me at all” and writing in an essay for The New York Review of Books, the left-leaning publication that is to gravitas what the Beagle was to Darwin, that climate change has become an “obsession” — the primary article of faith for “a worldwide secular religion” known as environmentalism. Among those he considers true believers, Dyson has been particularly dismissive of Al Gore, whom Dyson calls climate change’s “chief propagandist,” and James Hansen, the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and an adviser to Gore’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth.” Dyson accuses them of relying too heavily on computer-generated climate models that foresee a Grand Guignol of imminent world devastation as icecaps melt, oceans rise and storms and plagues sweep the earth, and he blames the pair’s “lousy science” for “distracting public attention” from “more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet.”

But yeah, you go ahead and claim to be smarter than Freeman Dyson.

You fucking fool.

Kool-Aid guzzling fucking fool.

The cost difference between a regular gas sedan and a hybrid of the same size is generally not offset by the savings in fuel costs for driving it. Why do it again if it didn't work the first time?

It depends on the car, it depends on how long you own it, and it depends on the cost of gas in the future, which we can't predict. It also depends on how many miles you drive per year, and on how your local cost of gas differs from the price of gas elsewhere. The NY Times has a nice chart showing how long it takes for various hybrids to pay for themselves, compared to the similar gas-only model, assuming gas at $3.85/gal. For example, they compare a Toyota Prius (which I own) against a Toyota Camry, and find that it only took my family 1.8 years before our purchase of the Prius paid for itself.

(Totally disregarding the fact that NPR is tax exempt which eliminates corporate taxes which amount to about 34% of income according to Wikipedia).

True, but lets extend that accuracy a bit... U.S. Corporations are "world leaders in tax avoidance". A Government Accountability Office study released in 2008 found that 55 percent of United States companies paid no federal income taxes during at least one year in a seven-year period it studied.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/03/business/economy/03rates.html

I know of no religion that denies science. Hell, even the Pope recognises and acknowledges that evolution is real.

You can't be serious. While some religions do officialy acknowledge parts of science, there are many branches and offshoots that deny parts or all of it. What kind of alien being are you, if you never heard of this? Or this? Or this, or this? Or, heck, how can you not have heard of this?

Nah, they're just installing the smart meters so they can jack up everyone's electric bill, and then just claim "Well these are more accurate, it just means you were being undercharged before!".

Did the Personal Data Protection and Breach Accountability Act of 2011 ever get through? It would be highly amusing to see the government in court after breaching one of their own laws.

Of Samsung's $5.1B profits for the first quarter, $4B was from Android handsets alone.

Really?! That doesn't sound right to me. Samsung is a huge and massively diverse company, for example they manufacture and sell container ships that are worth several hundred million dollars just for one ship.

I guess their smartphone business is hugely profitable, and the rest of the corporation is struggling or loosing money.

Also ALL of the things you list are nationally beloved monuments to the respective countries they are in, meaning there is money from a whole nation to take care of each of those national treasures.

I think he was talking about these:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/16/nyregion/liberty-statue-in-las-vegas-stands-among-many-replicas.html

http://3dpariseiffeltower.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Eiffel-Tower-In-Las-Vegas.jpg

http://www.finehomeslv.com/blog/project-city-center-las-vegas-towers-resemble-leaning-tower-of-pisa/ (there is actually no Pisa Tower replica in Las Vegas, it's more of a leaning high-rise)

Of Samsung's $5.1B profits for the first quarter, $4B was from Android handsets alone.

For comparison, all of HP earned income of $1.47B for the quarter before (we don't have HP Q1 figures yet, but the holiday quarter is typically high). This is not just for client devices, but all of HP: Servers, storage, networking, services, thin clients, software and so on. This means that for the three months Samsung's Android devices business alone likely provided them more profits than the entire client PC OEM industry earned over Christmas. That's a lot of cabbage.

Now other Android device makers had profits too - though not as much. Android is shaping up to be be a major force in tech.

Of course as the article notes, Apple made several times more too - and will remain a major force. But other OEMs don't have the option to make iOS devices so they have to do what they can to survive the transition to mobile, and that means Android.

I stopped reading at "sugar is a poison".

It is, in the same way that alcohol is a poison. Alcohol can be burned for energy, and in moderation it even has health benefits, but it has to be processed by the liver as a poison.

Sugar consists of glucose and fructose. Fructose is processed by the liver much like alcohol, but the brain isn't affected by fructose so you don't feel the same effects.

Before modern agriculture made sugar so cheap, we primarily got fructose from fruit, which also contained fiber to fill us up and other nutrients. Now sugar is cheap and abundant, and the amount Americans eat per year is staggering, and it almost certainly is the cause of the twin epidemics of diabetes and obesity.

Is Sugar Toxic?

....probably focusing on condensed matter physics....

Well now. You're prepared for a seven figure career on Wall Street..

Sonny, don't waste your life in academia! You'll be 50 before you do anything worthwhile. And in the meantime, you'll be teaching an ever dwindling group of people who want to learn your subject or worse - engineering students.

On Wall Street, you'll be a god! You'll rake in the big bucks, great cars, great women, great math, and people will be impressed!

Condensed Matter? They'll ask, "You mean like my condensed orange juice? Or condensed milk - in a can?"

Yeah, get laid describing that! OTOH, "I work on Wall Street! I also have disposable Porches. Well, not disposable. I donate them to poor slob doctors.'

"Oooooooo! Take me back to your place now!"

See? And when you make it big, retire with your money and finance your own research - no need to publish or perish, no bullshit classes to teach - no engineers, no begging for funding - unless Tropicana wants help, and best of all, fucking young chicks won't get you fired! It'll get you promoted!

Come with me to the Darkside! UNLIMITED POWER! POOOWWWWWWWWEEEEEERRR!

Also, read this: http://www.nytimes.com/1990/09/18/science/carbon-dioxide-rise-may-alter-plant-life-researchers-say.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

The amount of carbon in the air right now is stupid small to what it was when plants evolved and there does not exist a plant that can't handle 10 or perhaps even 100 the carbon in the atmosphere right now.

No offense, but I don't think you know anything about this stuff. I'll listen though if you think you do: convince me.

I have no problem with context sensitive ads. Google displays ads for Chrome on OS X when I browse from a Mac and Chrome for Linux when I browse from a Linux box; that's fine with me. It's also more efficient than Microsoft displaying ads for IE9 when I'm browsing from a Linux box.

When I read an article about electric cars, an ad for a car would not be out of place. Of course that ad would be wasted if I don't want to drive a car, cannot afford a car or just bought a new car. So the car company would be willing to pay more to Google to show the ad only to people who are in the market for a new car. However, to deliver that service Google has to create a much larger context than what the HTTP request by itself provides. They could get that information by looking at which other pages I visited, what I searched for, what I wrote in e-mails, what items I bought. However, this is where it gets creepy: when they follow me around everywhere and build a profile of my entire life. When a person does that, we call it stalking.

Google could be satisfied with selling ads based on limited context information. It wouldn't be as profitable per ad, but with the huge volume they have it should be enough to keep the company afloat. Instead, they want to provide higher value ads, like Facebook can. But I don't think there is a way to be like Facebook without being creepy. The only thing they can do about it is being less overt, as you say, but faking lower targeting accuracy (such as Target putting lawn mowers next to diapers) doesn't help if you want people to believe your "don't be evil" motto.

You mean the way Einstein predicted things that "fit after the fact"? Just last year we found at least one more of his predictions was true. He's just like Nostradamus, right?

A model gets proposed, then tested. The ones that are closest to reality are proven correct, the ones that don't are proven incorrect. You are saying that this person's credibility is strained because a lot of other people were wrong? If that is how we measure credibility, then how is anyone supposed to be credible?

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/05/science/space/05gravity.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss

There was a 2007 story about this, but from what I can tell the experiment didn't conclude until 2011.

These findings are no surprise to those who have been following medical science and research for the past decades. See for example what Dr John Ioannidis has to say about the consistency, accuracy and honesty (or lack thereof) of medical science in general: "as much as 90 percent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed","There was plenty of published research, but much of it was remarkably unscientific, based largely on observations of a small number of cases", "he was struck by how many findings of all types were refuted by later findings" - and not just in epidemiological (statistical) studies, but also in randomized, double-blind clinical trials: "Baffled, he started looking for the specific ways in which studies were going wrong. And before long he discovered that the range of errors being committed was astonishing: from what questions researchers posed, to how they set up the studies, to which patients they recruited for the studies, to which measurements they took, to how they analyzed the data, to how they presented their results, to how particular studies came to be published in medical journals ... 80 percent of non-randomized studies (by far the most common type) turn out to be wrong, as do 25 percent of supposedly gold-standard randomized trials, and as much as 10 percent of the platinum-standard large randomized trials."

Gary Taubes too denounced this accumulation of bias back in 2007: compliance bias, information bias, confirmation bias, etc. routinely introduce non-uniform effects that can be bigger than what you try to measure. And you cannot compensate for them because you cannot quantify them.

As Sander Greenland, one of the editor/authors of Modern Epidemiology, wrote in chapter 19 "Bias Analysis":

Conventional methods assume all errors are random and that any modeling assumptions (such as homogeneity) are correct. With these assumptions, all uncertainty about the impact of errors on estimates is subsumed within conventional standard deviations for the estimates (standard errors), such as those given in earlier chapters (which assume no measurement error), and any discrepancy between an observed association and the target effect may be attributed to chance alone. When the assumptions are incorrect, however, the logical foundation for conventional statistical methods is absent, and those methods may yield highly misleading inferences. Epidemiologists recognize the possibility of incorrect assumptions in conventional analyses when they talk of residual confounding (from nonrandom exposure assignment), selection bias (from nonrandom subject selection), and information bias (from imperfect measurement). These biases rarely receive quantitative analysis, a situation that is understandable given that the analysis requires specifying values (such as amount of selection bias) for which little or no data may be available. An unfortunate consequence of this lack of quantification is the switch in focus to those aspects of error that are more readily quantified, namely the random components.

Systematic errors can be and often are larger than random errors, and failure to appreciate their impact is potentially disastrous. The problem is magnified in large studies and pooling projects, for in those studies the large size reduces the amount of random error, and as a result the random error may be but a small component of total error. In such studies, a focus on “statistical significance” or even on confidence limits may amount to nothing more than a decision to focus on artifacts of systematic error as if they reflected a real causal effect.

Two important corrections:

* Trayvon was not a "stranger randomly wandering down the street"; he was a guest of someone in the neighborhood and he was walking home. Sure, Zimmerman may not have recognized him, but do you suppose he recognizes everyone who lives in the entire gated community? What do you suppose made him suspicious of this particular person...? I wonder.

* It was not an "early morning hour." It was at about 7PM.

See: http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2012-04-02/news/os-trayvon-martin-qa3-20120402_1_civil-rights-gated-community-robert-zimmerman

Nevertheless, yes, you're right that there are a number of ways this could have unfolded in which Zimmerman could have been acting reasonably, and I think it's good for everyone to be reminded of that. I'm suspicious myself for a few reasons: the stories coming from Zimmerman's family are not consistent, Zimmerman appears at most slightly injured in the police video, and the voice calling for help on the 911 tape is apparently not Zimmerman (according to some independent analysis: http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2012-03-31/news/os-trayvon-martin-george-zimmerman-911-20120331_1_voice-identification-expert-reasonable-scientific-certainty). I think it also looks pretty unlikely that Martin was shot anywhere near Zimmermen's truck. Trayvon was shot in an area that was not directly accessible by vehicles (see the map here: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/04/02/us/the-events-leading-to-the-shooting-of-trayvon-martin.html), so I don't think the "he was confronted at his truck" theory holds up.

But I do think it's helpful to be reminded of what we don't know.

Many studies have found that technology has helped individual classrooms, schools or districts. For instance, researchers found that writing scores improved for eighth-graders in Maine after they were all issued laptops in 2002. The same researchers, from the University of Southern Maine, found that math performance picked up among seventh- and eighth-graders after teachers in the state were trained in using the laptops to teach. A question plaguing many education researchers is how to draw broader inferences from such case studies, which can have serious limitations. For instance, in the Maine math study, it is hard to separate the effect of the laptops from the effect of the teacher training.

The whole article is worth reading if you have the time but a few take away comments include:

Some classroom studies show that math scores rise among students using instructional software, while others show that scores actually fall....

One broad analysis of laptop programs like the one in Maine, for example, found that such programs are not a major factor in student performance.

“Rather than being a cure-all or silver bullet, one-to-one laptop programs may simply amplify what’s already occurring — for better or worse,”

A review by the Education Department in 2009 of research on online courses — which more than one million K-12 students are taking — found that few rigorous studies had been done and that policy makers “lack scientific evidence” of their effectiveness.. A division of the Education Department that rates classroom curriculums has found that much educational software is not an improvement over textbooks.

Belated long story short – the evidence is contradictory and more study is needed.

You're dead wrong.

"The Supreme Court on Monday ruled by a 5-to-4 vote that officials may strip-search people arrested for any offense, however minor, before admitting them to jails even if the officials have no reason to suspect the presence of contraband."

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/us/justices-approve-strip-searches-for-any-offense.html?_r=1&ref=politics

Also, jails are where innocent, yet charged, people go. Prisons are where convicted people go.

we do pay for our healthcare, through taxes.

Apparently in the USA many poor and sick people sit in ER till they are sick enough to get treatment. Who pays for that and how? The poor certainly don't - they have no money.

I doubt that's a good way of providing healthcare to the poor. The not-as-poor should be well aware that it also costs them in longer queues, fewer ERs and possibly poorer care: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/18/health/18hospital.html

All the richer people in the USA who say they don't need healthcare reform and they shouldn't be forced to pay for the poor and sick are pretty stupid - they are very likely already paying for the poor and sick. It's just poorly done.

Perhaps he just read that the US Supreme court just ruled that you can be strip searched for ANY arrest.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/03/us/justices-approve-strip-searches-for-any-offense.html

Makes you a little more paranoid about police powers.

eBay. Or at least that's where NASA went when they found themselves needing to buy 8086s, which were key components in circa-1981 Space Shuttle diagnostic equipment, in 2002.

not really at all. read this as to why the iPhone isn`t made in the USA

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and-a-squeezed-middle-class.html?_r=3&hp=&pagewanted=all

employee costs are far less important than the availability of labor to quick ramping up of production and proximity to parts suppliers.

Access the NY Times article without having to register with this link.

The article is, as is typical of the Times, full of detail about the story in question. Some salient points:

1. Norman Spinrad - who wrote the original script in question - requested Gene Roddenberry not to make the episode, after the comedy he wrote was re-written into what he called "a very unfunny comedy" by Gene L. Coon (TOS producer), and Roddenberry complied with his wishes.
2. Spinrad himself comments on this sequence of events on his blog
3. ST Phase II has already produced an episode based on an unused script from the ST:TNG era called "Blood and Fire" by David "The Trouble with Tribbles" Gerrold (which Gerrold himself directed) without any dissent from CBS.
4. The Star Trek script is called "He Walked Among Us". It should not be confused, however, with Spinrad's non-ST science fiction novel of the same name, which is available in RTF format as shareware.

Spinrad, who's 71 now, was an enfant terrible of SF back in the 1960's. His novels "Bug Jack Barron" and "The Men in the Jungle" broke what at the time was new ground (the former for its use of vulgarity, the latter for its subject matter). He's been one of the most consistently interesting SF writers ever since, and I can't recommend his work highly enough.

Ah, I see now. So you're discounting WWII (and to a lesser extent the WPA and other Depression-era spending pre-1937; you know, when the economy crashed again due to ZOMG-it's-a-deficit budget balancing) as Keynesian stimuli. Which, you know, worked.

And you're discounting the success of Iceland (the un-Austerian country) as compared to the austerity-driven remainder of the world? Or the comparative success of the US relative to Britain (which would be stronger if it weren't for all the states with Republican governors laying off thousands of workers)?

For every case you can give me of purported failure of stimulus, I can provide a broader context; largely, what you would call a failure is because either a) deficit spending was misapplied (it's only necessary in a liquidity trap) or b) it was insufficient to propel a full recovery.

So, in sum, my one-sided tiny mental bubble is comprised of largely evidence-based assessments of global financial track records in previous periods of liquidity-trap crisis. Is yours?

And ad-hominem does wonders for your point.

Currently,the United States views copyright infringement as a form of theft, but as Stuart Green points out

From its earliest days, the crime of theft has been understood to involve the misappropriation of things real and tangible. For Caveman Bob to “steal” from Caveman Joe meant that Bob had taken something of value from Joe — say, his favorite club — and that Joe, crucially, no longer had it. Everyone recognized, at least intuitively, that theft constituted what can loosely be defined as a zero-sum game: what Bob gained, Joe lost.

Copyright infringement can be understood as a "theft" of a monopoly-- the monopoly is destroyed,but that's stretching things a bit.
But here, the artists are prevented from exercising their rights to publish. Not only are they prevented from enjoying the fruits of a monopoly, they cannot even exploit their own property under less monopolistic conditions. The thief now has something of value, which the original artists do not.

If you understand copyright as a form of trespass, and fair use as a kind of stipulation that others have the freedom to roam and that man traps are illegal, the misappropriation of copyright can be understood as someone forcing you off your land, at gunpoint, and erecting an electrified fence to keep you out.