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People have been executed, and then it was found that others had committed the murders.

Here's a poll that has some interesting stats.

More than 2/3 of those who answered said they believed in the death penalty. At the same time, 95% believe that, at least sometimes, an innocent person is convicted of murder. Most believe that people who are innocent have been executed within the last 5 years of the survey (2006).

Just do a search on how many people have had their convictions reversed because of DNA evidence decades later ... statistically, it's a certainty that at least some of those who received the death penalty would have been similarly exonerated. Here's a list of wrongful convictions in Canada. Here's 200 people who have been wrongfully convicted in California in the last 20 years - some of them sentenced to death.

Even judges agree that innocents have been executed

"In the past decade, substantial evidence has emerged to demonstrate that innocent individuals are sentenced to death, and undoubtedly executed, much more often than previously understood," the judge, Mark L. Wolf of Federal District Court in Boston, wrote in a decision allowing a capital case to proceed to trial.

The judge isn't denying it happens - he's saying it probably happens more often than we think. That's pretty damning.

So, if it is murder to kill someone who is innocent, the executioner is a murderer, to use the judge's words, "more often than previously understood."

It's rather sad that you get modded as a troll for pointing out the fact that the Government (both state, federal and local) makes more off of a gallon of gas than the oil companies do.

It's just to politically convenient to blame them for 'obscene profits' (can I get a definition of 'obscene profits' from someone other than "I'll know it when I see it"? because their profit margin is quite low compared to most other goods people buy) when due to governmental restrictions on drilling (that in effect allow China to drill closer off of the Florida coast (at the invitation of Cuba) than US companies)... the American oil companies have largely been reduced to scapegoated haulers of oil from foreign nations.

I'm not the original posted of the 1/3 number, but I had it in my head too, and I thought I read it someplace reliable. I searched my browser history and tracked it back to this article, which I read a few days ago. It's in the New York Times, but it's an Op-Ed piece and it says "nearly a third" not "one third" as I recalled.

So, I guess this is why it's always best to cite your sources. It's a small but very significant step from "a reliable source said 1/3" to "some op-ed piece in the NYT said 'nearly a third'".

A big deal was made of the natural lighting system at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa when it was built 20 years ago. There's a NY Times article:

The light tumbles in from light monitors lined with Mylar, so it reflects as it bounces down into the gallery, and it is exquisite and constantly changing.

I don't exactly spend my free time hanging out there, but if I was to choose a gallery to hang out in, this would be it.

Regarding consent:

"The United States is opposing efforts at a United Nations treaty-drafting conference to raise the minimum age at which soldiers can be sent into combat under international law"

"The proposal to raise the minimum age for military combat, to 18 years old from 15, is proving to be one of the most contentious issues in negotiations on an international Convention on the Rights of the Child"

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DEFDC1538F932A35751C1A96E948260

Minimum age for military combat is 15. Age of consent for sex in the USA is 16?

The UK isn't that much better:

"The Child Soldiers Global Report, released on Tuesday, identifies the UK Government as the only country in Europe that still recruits 16-year-olds, and routinely sends soldiers as young as 17 into battle. "

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/1383998.stm

So a "child" can give consent to get fucked up but not consent to be fucked ;).

Honestly if a sexy lady (unattached) seduced me and had consensual sex with me (aka "raped" ) back when I was a horny 14 year old, I don't think I'd have been scarred for life, I believe I would have been able to come to terms with it somehow - let's just say more woohoo than boohoo ;).

Now if she got sent to jail for doing that, then I might actually get scarred. I mean think about it - having your girlfriend being prosecuted, sent to jail, and everyone says bad things about her. You might even start believing some of the bad things they say too.

I believe girls are more like to be "scarred" if a guy did that to them when they were young. I admit I don't really know.

BUT, I've seen various surveys about sex, relationships and the results seem to indicate that women tend to lie/misremember about such stuff in one way, and guys tend to lie/misremember in another way... To me that lying/misremembering is indicative of how they would feel later on in life about such things.

What they should be able to control is actually raping a child.

I find some women very attractive, I don't go and rape them.

If governments/people really want to protect the children they should not be focusing on the viewers of child porn. They should _follow_ the money and go after the producers of child porn.

Also one more thing, what I have noticed is if a child falls down for the first time, he often looks at his parents to figure out whether it's something serious or not. If the parents make a huge fuss over it, the child cries. Whereas if the parents look to acknowledge the child has fallen down, maybe say "oops!", and then continue on if it's nothing serious, the child usually picks himself up and goes on to do what he originally wanted to do.

Anyway, yeah "save and protect the children", so that we can send them to die in Iraq.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DEFDC1538F932A35751C1A96E948260

"The United States is opposing efforts at a United Nations treaty-drafting conference to raise the minimum age at which soldiers can be sent into combat under international law"

The current minimum age is 15. Go figure... Good to see the priorities eh?

What's going to happen is that there will be a severe wealth gap (gini coefficient) developing between those who do science and those who don't (aka. the shallow culture). This is already happening (as evidenced by the creative class: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0205.florida.html
and the geek class:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/23/opinion/23brooks.html
  and it will just get worse. There's not really too much to fear if you have a Science degree and a bit of business sense, but if you don't, watch out.

No amount of whining on slashdot, or politician concern will change it. It's a culture that has to change.

No, because they are predominantly cynical pessimists, and good news doesn't actually sell all that well. As humans, they are also subject to confirmation bias just like everyone else (except me of course ;) ). Since they are more likely to be liberal left wing than right wing, and thus truly believe right wing policies are poorly planned, they tend to focus on the negative when there is a conservative president. There is no conspiracy here, just a lot of people making similar decisions.

If you don't believe the media has an impact, check any recent poll. You will find that most people think that the economy is bad, but that their household is doing well. If most people are doing as well or better, then the economy isn't bad, but the reporting always leads off with the opinion about the economy in general. Since opinion of the economy in general is dependent on the media, a slight bias here suffers from feedback.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE2D7143DF93BA35757C0A964958260

I was on my way to high school and could feel/hear the result while driving my car. Lived in NW Houston at the time. Parents later said they thought it was an earthquake, although they knew it was not really possible due to the type of soil in the area. Discussed it with a few friends at school, and we dismissed it as a weird fluke, but found out the cause that evening on the news. We never would have guessed that's what it was.

I have no opinion on Dr. Kundt's theories, but I have anecdotal evidence regarding the gas explosion outside of Houston.

For those that insist the US is NOT in a recession, because numbers "never" lie, well, you are right. The real issue may NOT be a recession as technically defined. The real issue is that America in RELATION to the world is going down at a scary rate. Consider this quote: "OPEC could âoepotentially buy Bank of America in one month worth of production, Apple computers in a week and General Motors in just three days.â The dollar is in skydive, house prices are still skyhigh, oil is soaring, food is soaring, and other commodities are soaring. Soon we will be paying for getting oxygen back into this planet. It won't come cheap.

Sorry here is a link to the second quote and a good article discussing the rental situation in NYC in general.

No, acupuncture works better than placebo. It's more like, hey, I've just been stuck with something sharp, better give off some endorphins. Similar to how when you have a headache, a kick in the nuts will often cure it.

As for the whole pharmaceutical industry cover up of antidepressants, would you consider the New England Journal of Medicine and the New York Times credible?

But in one of those great twists of irony that you couldn't make up, deCODE Genetics of Iceland found that 16% of Watson's genome was likely inherited from an african ancestor, which is 16 times the normal amount for a caucasian and suggests he may have had an african grandparent. DNA Pioneer's Genome Blurs Race Lines - New York Times

You don't even need to use the stress = reduced life expectancy, just add up all the hours people have wasted waiting in line at airports because of the TSA gangstaz.

With ~2000 people dead on 9/11, assuming they all had at least another 50 years of life to go, that's 100,000 hours of life killed that day.
Assuming 600 million passengers each year, each of them averaging 10 extra minutes wasted due to TSA policies, that's 100,000,000 hours of life wasted each year for the last 7 years.

100,000 hours of life lost to terrorism on 9/11
700,000,000 hours of life lost to the government, in airports alone, since then.

Except that Europe is slowly dying. The population on the continent is in sharp, seemingly irreversible decline.

Umm, not according to all the numbers I've seen. Last I saw both the US and Europe were growing in population, both due primarily to immigration. Got a link to back up your assertion?

Ah, the key is "immigration", if there were no immigration in Europe it's population would be declining, the replacement rate of live child births (fertility rate) is 2.1, yet the countries of Europe have a rate that's lower. In Italy, because of it's declining population a village major threatened to levy a tax on singles. Which would have the oppose effect, it would just drive them away. While it's also declining in the US, because some religious communities "multiply", it's population isn't shrink quite as fast.

And like Europe, Japan and some Asian countries also have declining populations. In China it's estimated there will be more elderly than there are workers by 2050. Actually the only places where population isn't declining is Africa and Muslim countries.

It is how it works.
After a long bout with emphysema an employee at Varney's, a family-owned business in Manhattan, Kan., died several years ago. But for Varney's health insurer, her legacy lived on.
The next year, 2002, the insurer raised Varne's premiums by 28 percent â" even though most of the other three dozen employees were significantly younger and healthier than their departed colleague, who had been in her mid-70â(TM)s. And Varney's premiums continued to climb.
âoeIt was as if her medical history stayed on the books for an additional three years,â said Jeff Levin, 46, who runs Varney's with his younger brother. âoeHow can you justify projecting those costs forward?â

If you want to read something on this subject that will turn your head around and maybe tear it right off, check out Peter Singer's essay The Singer Solution to World Poverty and also the book by Peter Unger, Living High and Letting Die referenced within.

"... enormous energy consumption of data centers"

That is one of the few world problems that is already being solved. Intel and AMD and others are working on the next generation of processors, that use less power: Intel Says Chips Will Run Faster, Using Less Power. Intel is currently delivering processors built on 45 nanometer rules. (At that size, there are perhaps 1000 transistors in the width of a human hair.)

They are working on a 32 nanometer process, which has already been demonstrated. The next after that is 22 nanometers and then 16 nanometers and 11 nanometers as the Wikipedia articles say. The smaller conductor width rules use smaller transistors which use less power.

At the same time, they will make processors with wider silicon wafers, 18 inches wide rather than the 12 inch wide wafers they use now. The smaller devices and larger wafers mean that there will be many more processors per wafer, making the costs go down.

What these companies are doing is VERY impressive.

The companies have not been as good at proposing new uses for the greater processing power. Data centers need the greater processing power as well as use of smaller amounts of energy, but where else is more processing power needed? Will grandma's octo-core cell phone of the future not just report the weather, but calculate it? Will games use full ray-tracing?

I suspect that the greater processing power is needed, but all the needs haven't yet been discovered. To me, that's a very interesting problem.

Eating breakfast is essentially a bunch of "free" calories. Since doing so ups your metabolism for the whole day. Or at least that's what I think the evidence suggests.

No matter how you slice it though, there's a huge positive correlation with eating breakfast and losing and maintaining a healthy weight.

See:
Skipping Cereal and Eggs, and Packing on Pounds
Lose Weight: Eat Breakfast

Here in Manhattan people BUY parking spaces for $225K+. Within a quarter mile of my office there are no less than 6 parking lots charging $45 a day and I've even seen a private "luxury lot" that charged $150 a day.

it's way user friendly, & did we mention that it's also an absolutely free alternative to watching everything we're familiar with go/be taken away? let your conscience be yOUR guide. you can be more helpful than you might have imagined. there are still some choices. if they do not suit you, consider the likely results of continuing to follow the corepirate nazi hypenosys story LIEn, whereas anything of relevance is replaced almost instantly with pr ?firm? scriptdead mindphuking propaganda or 'celebrity' trivia 'foam'. meanwhile; don't forget to get a little more oxygen on yOUR brain, & look up in the sky from time to time, starting early in the day. there's lots going on up there.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071229/ap_on_sc/ye_climate_records;_ylt=A0WTcVgednZHP2gB9wms0NUE
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080108/ts_alt_afp/ushealthfrancemortality;_ylt=A9G_RngbRIVHsYAAfCas0NUE
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/31/opinion/31mon1.html?em&ex=1199336400&en=c4b5414371631707&ei=5087%0A

is it time to get real yet? A LOT of energy is being squandered in attempts to keep US in the dark. in the end (give or take a few 1000 years), the creators will prevail (world without end, etc...), as it has always been. the process of gaining yOUR release from the current hostage situation may not be what you might think it is. butt of course, most of US don't know, or care what a precarious/fatal situation we're in. for example; the insidious attempts by the felonious corepirate nazi execrable to block the suns' light, interfering with a requirement (sunlight) for us to stay healthy/alive. it's likely not good for yOUR health/memories 'else they'd be bragging about it? we're intending for the whoreabully deceptive (they'll do ANYTHING for a bit more monIE/power) felons to give up/fail even further, in attempting to control the 'weather', as well as a # of other things/events.

http://video.google.com/videosearch?hl=en&q=video+cloud+spraying

dictator style micro management has never worked (for very long). it's an illness. tie that with life0cidal aggression & softwar gangster style bullying, & what do we have? a greed/fear/ego based recipe for disaster. meanwhile, you can help to stop the bleeding (loss of life & limb);

http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/12/28/vermont.banning.bush.ap/index.html

the bleeding must be stopped before any healing can begin. jailing a couple of corepirate nazi hired goons would send a clear message to the rest of the world from US. any truthful look at the 'scorecard' would reveal that we are a society in decline/deep doo-doo, despite all of the scriptdead pr ?firm? generated drum beating & flag waving propaganda that we are constantly bombarded with. is it time to get real yet? please consider carefully ALL of yOUR other 'options'. the creators will prevail. as it has always been.

corepirate nazi execrable costs outweigh benefits
(Score:-)mynuts won, the king is a fink)
by ourselves on everyday 24/7

as there are no benefits, just more&more death/debt & disruption. fortunately there's an 'army' of light bringers, coming yOUR way. the little ones/innocents must/will be protected. after the big flash, ALL of yOUR imaginary 'borders' may blur a bit? for each of the creators' innocents harmed in any way, there is a debt that must/will be repaid by you/us, as the perpetrators/minions of unprecedented evile, will not be available. 'vote' with (what's left in) yOUR wallet, & by your behaviors. help br

Nuclear can compete with oil. Los Alamos National Laboratory has created a synthetic fuel concept that uses the cooling towers of nuclear reactor to efficiently harvest carbon and then synthesize gasoline. After distribution costs are factored in, the break-even price is around $4.60 a gallon. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/19/science/19carb.html

False evidence examples:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/05/politics/05labs.html Texas.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/03/17/national/main544209.shtml FBI technician Kathleen Lundy

I think of the government as a loose collection of individuals employed by me, paid out of my taxes to run my country. They aren't separate from the citizenry, they are a part of it.

Government is force. It's a bunch of people who will beat you or shoot you if you do not do as they want. This is as true in a "democracy" as in a dictatorship, and is what distinguishes government from "individuals employed by me". The guy I hire to cut my lawn or paint my house does not claim a right to force me into a cage at gunpoint if he doesn't like my actions. The government does.

The government is indeed separate from the citizenry. If three average citizens shot a unarmed man fifty times, they'd go to jail; three government agents do it, it's business as usual. If a couple of average citizens kidnapped, drown, and beat people, they'd go to jail; government agents do it, it's business as usual.

They do not have power over my mind

They certainly do, as demonstrated by your attitude toward them.

The government also does not have a collective will (or a 'mind').

Of course it does. Any organized group has a collective will. It is entirely appropriate to say "the government wants to blah blah blah."

Also I think a major feature of the Panopticon prison was that every cell could be easily seen into. Without cameras in private places that analogy holds no water.

What, turning public space into a jail isn't bad enough?

The Medtronic was originally developed as a tool for brain surgery: by stimulating or slowing down specific regions of the brain, it allowed doctors to monitor the effects of surgery in real time. But it also produced, they noted, strange and unexpected effects on patients' mental functions: one minute they would lose the ability to speak, another minute they would speak easily but would make odd linguistic errors and so on. A number of researchers started to look into the possibilities, but one in particular intrigued Snyder: that people undergoing transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, could suddenly exhibit savant intelligence -- those isolated pockets of geniuslike mental ability that most often appear in autistic people. ...

A series of electromagnetic pulses were being directed into my frontal lobes, but I felt nothing. Snyder instructed me to draw something. ''What would you like to draw?'' he said merrily. ''A cat? You like drawing cats? Cats it is.''

I've seen a million cats in my life, so when I close my eyes, I have no trouble picturing them. But what does a cat really look like, and how do you put it down on paper? I gave it a try but came up with some sort of stick figure, perhaps an insect. ....

While I drew, Snyder continued his lecture. ''You could call this a creativity-amplifying machine. It's a way of altering our states of mind without taking drugs like mescaline. You can make people see the raw data of the world as it is. As it is actually represented in the unconscious mind of all of us.''

Two minutes after I started the first drawing, I was instructed to try again. After another two minutes, I tried a third cat, and then in due course a fourth. Then the experiment was over, and the electrodes were removed. I looked down at my work. The first felines were boxy and stiffly unconvincing. But after I had been subjected to about 10 minutes of transcranial magnetic stimulation, their tails had grown more vibrant, more nervous; their faces were personable and convincing. They were even beginning to wear clever expressions.

I could hardly recognize them as my own drawings, though I had watched myself render each one, in all its loving detail. Somehow over the course of a very few minutes, and with no additional instruction, I had gone from an incompetent draftsman to a very impressive artist of the feline form. ...

As remarkable as the cat-drawing lesson was, it was just a hint of Snyder's work and its implications for the study of cognition. He has used TMS dozens of times on university students, measuring its effect on their ability to draw, to proofread and to perform difficult mathematical functions like identifying prime numbers by sight. Hooked up to the machine, 40 percent of test subjects exhibited extraordinary, and newfound, mental skills. That Snyder was able to induce these remarkable feats in a controlled, repeatable experim

I have three coronary artery stents - which in theory *could* improve bloodflow in the heart of a perfectly healthy person - so, would those people risk the possibility of having their heart stop or worse to perhaps gain a 0.01% increase in their chance of winning a race? Believe me, the procedure is pretty scary! As for having limbs sawn off to stand a chance of winning an event? The risks of embolism alone are simply not worth it.

Just to emphasize the fact that players have only become interested. No one goes and gets Tommy John surgery without needing it.

I'm not sure how reliable the info is, but the examples in this NY Times article seem to disagree:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/20/sports/baseball/20surgery.html

Remember where you are. I think it's safe to say that a *lot* of people around here would. Myself, I'm going to get a souped-up golf cart and cite Casey Martin as a precedent.

As to "telepathic spies," the Army's remote viewing program (a.k.a. STARGATE) shouldn't be regarded as a failure. It's an interesting topic, difficult to research due to an abundance of pseudo-science, but there are valid academic studies which conclude that the phenomenon is real. Oddly, remote-viewing success seems to be related to local sidereal time (pdf). The Telepathy episode of National Geographic's Naked Science examines some of the program's achievements and features Joe McMoneagle, who was agent 001 of the Stargate program, doing a successful demonstration.

DARPA deserves credit for being open-minded about a topic so easy to ridicule.

it is done by the 9th court of appeals the most over turned court in the land.

Because they HANDLE the most cases in the land. Adjusted for case volume, they are NOT overturned more.

from a Federal 9th Circuit judge: In the calendar year 2001, the Ninth Circuit terminated 10,372 cases, and was reversed in 14, with a correction rate of 1.35 per thousand. The Fourth Circuit, reputedly the most conservative circuit and the circuit with the second-largest number of cases reviewed by the Supreme Court, terminated 5,078 cases and was reversed in 7, making a correction rate of 1.38 per thousand.

---

at all times during a warrant less search you always.. always! have the right to stop the search

What??? YOU DO NOT - that's precisely what the court addressed - a border search doesn't require a warrant, so you can't claim they can't search without one. A traveler says "I agree to you searching me" when he presents himself at the U.S. border, and in addition BCP has the right to search you without a warrant. If you refuse, they will search you anyway before denying entry and sending you back to where you came from. I suppose you might count that as 'saying no', but not me.

I agree - stand up for your rights. However, in this case, you don't have any to stand up for. You can protest and say that you should, but that's not the same thing.

h/t: this prior /. posting

not to mention that the guy is a theater executive and has a vested financial interest in de-hyping this movie before it opens. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/10/movies/10indy.html?bl&ex=1210564800&en=3ce1b1dc8e8ec160&ei=5087%0A

media hype:

OMFG there's a negative review of indy 4!

reality:

negative

neutral

neutral

positive

the nyt has the real story: studios are required by law to show movies to exhibitors before they buy films (which is how the party pooper reviewer shogunmaster got to see it), which in today's internet age means that studios (especially control-freak spielberg on this specific issue) are losing the ability to control pre-release media buzz

It's the Chinese government's own figures. They have been widely reported. Here are a couple of links and I am sure Google can provide many more. (That tresriogrande troll might want to check a few before shooting his mouth off next time.)

For instance: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/20/international/asia/20china.html

A paragraph from http://www.cpj.org/Briefings/2006/DA_spring_06/china/china_06.html

didnt you hear ? Limbo/Baptism became old fad too in 2005 http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/28/international/europe/28limbo.html

It's easy to think, "Wow, that's crazy," but then, an atheist doesn't stand a chance in hell of being President of the United States of America. (Pun only slightly intended.) I think that's pretty stupid.

Not saying one's better or worse than the other, just that no country has a monopoly on stupid citizens.

Chinese Web sites remain heavily censored, and a brief flirtation with openness and responsiveness does not mean that China is headed toward Western-style democracy. On the contrary, if China manages to handle a big natural disaster better than the United States handled Hurricane Katrina, the achievement may underscore Beijingâ(TM)s contention that its largely nonideological brand of authoritarianism can deliver good government as well as fast growth.

Of course, Hezbollah is a terrorist group...if you happen to live in a current or former British colony. Outside of that type of person, no other country considers Hezbollah to be such, except for Holland for some reason. They consider it to be representative of the Palestinians who were exiled from Palestine to Lebanon when the Zionists burned down their homes in Palestine and forced them.

But hey, why worry about Javed Iqbal rotting in an American jail when the US can point fingers at the lack of "freedom of speech" in a country under siege by the US and its Zionist neighbor, whom as I said, invaded and occupied part of their country, the Golan Heights.

dallas isn't the first with this idea..nor will they be the last, so long as the technology remains unregulated...

2004 in spring, texas:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/17/technology/17tag.html?ei=5006&en=edeb6cd5169d554b&ex=1101272400&partner=ALTAVISTA1&pagewanted=
alt summary for nyt article: http://www.rfidupdate.com/articles/index.php?id=652

2005 in brittan, california:
http://www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2005/02/66554

later dropped in brittan:
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/16/2341200&from=rss

and just so our good friends over there on the camera-happy isles don't feel left out, here's a test program at an edenthorpe, england school last year:
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/06/2223218&from=rss

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/magazine/13Psychology-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin

The wooshing sound is a load of sarcasm going right over you.

Yeah, I know, but the original post was an example of astounding bad writing. On the net, there's no way to tell if the author is saying something resoundingly stupid as a joke, or if they really are resoundingly stupid -- except, of course, that the high average level of intelligence of slashdot posters makes that seem unlikely.

It might be a good idea to take it easy on the sarcasm button and just say what you mean, you know?

Just for the hell of it, something on-topic, from Paul Krugman: Slow in suburbia

...its darn near a sure bet that its developers never thought it would be around that long.

What would we have if designers were trained and we had infrastructure to PLAN on a program being used for 200 years?

earlier comments to the effect that code is inherently long lived vis a vis hardware is a point well taken and mother nature provides the strongest example. Dinosaurs, dodo birds and Neanderthals are all gone but many "protein subroutines" in their vanished DNA are STILL "conserved" in our very own DNA.

That it hasn't broken in 30 years suggests that it won't break the next 30: http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/copernican-principle/

I don't see that as funny at all. I thought that there was 750 MB in a sperm and 2x of that would make a "human", but these articles http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/science/26DNA.html and http://askville.amazon.com/information-encoded-human-DNA-GB-TB/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=3907491 say that the whole human code is only 750MB.

That will fit on a CD.

To me, thats _really_ impressive.

Then, when you think that we are 98-99% the same genetically as chimpanzees and 90% the same as a rat, and then you look at how different people are that are practically identical codewise.

I dunno, whenever I talk about this, its basically a parse error in my brain.

A goofy friend of mine said that a cum shot is one of the fastest bandwidth that humans can achieve to date. Funny and true at the same time :)