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Definition: Observation - The act of making and recording a measurement

In the case of an electron, it is the means used to measure position or energy that necessarily precludes the ability to know both. If I remember my lay-physics right, it has to do with choosing to measure a wave or a particle. Measure one, and measurements of the other become impossible. (Someone please correct my interpretation.)

beat thoroughly and conclusively in a competition or fight "We licked the other team on Sunday!"

Come apply at the Princeton University, where you can explore all your horizons!

What she allegedly did caused less harm to society than a parking violation, and that is how it should be treated.

Not true in the least. Companies or individuals are always harmed to some degree when people pirate. The problem comes in that each of those people who potentially pirated are then free to repeat; essentially building a tree of potentially unending pirated copies and as such, potentially unending damages. That's always been part of the problem. Its extremely difficult to evaluate the actual harm (damage). For one pirate for a given song, the damages could be catastrophic. While the harm from another pirate might be no more than the devaluation associated with the simple act of copying.

Now keep in mind, we're only talking damages so far. We've not addressed punitive damages, which are absolutely appropriate for malice and/or willful misconduct. Punitive damages are frequently calculated as some multiple of the damages. Their intent is strictly to punish. In theory, a higher degree of malice or willful misconduct deserves higher financial punishments.

Here's the catch. When its a company faced with punitive damages, no one seems to have a problem. When its someone of wealth, no one seems to have a problem. But when its their pet illicit act, suddenly everyone is upset about how broken the system. In fact, you could actually argue that your reaction actually validates the system is "blind" and working properly in this specific detail.

If you've read any of my comments in the past, I absolutely agree the system is broken. I just don't happen to agree this particular element of the system is broken. Its actually working as designed. After all, if she had wanted to avoid this whole situation, all she need do is to not have pirated the songs - and especially not had offered them up to be re-pirated.

At the end of the day, always remember punitive damages are a bitch and exist only to punish. Depending on the crime, punishment may serve as a minor reprimand (small judgment) to making an example (huge judgment). In this particular case, based on the constantly large judgments, its appears the juries want to make an example out of her because they are time and time again acknowledging the massive harm this does to companies, individuals, and society at large. Notice how that's a stark contrast to your entirely trivial and dismissive attitude, which is not in line at at with the severity of the situation.

A Princeton study found some evidence. Here's an article about it:

http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S26/91/22K07/

Explain page 34 of http://www.princeton.edu/~bartels/income.pdf

Vocaloid, the technology behind Mitsuke, is not exactly voice synthesis (much less singing synthesis). It consists of a large database of sound samples of a human performer. These samples are then processed and stitched together by a song's creator.

Ages ago, the members of Soft Cell, an 80's synthpop duo, said they expected that in the future, there would be the capability to synthesize the human singing voice, making even the vocalists unnecessary. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your point of view, that has not yet happened.

For a quick listen at the actual synthesis if the singing voice (quite different from synthesis of spoken voice, which has essentially been mastered), see this fellow's PhD thesis.

Can anyone point to more recent examples of singing synthesis?

If pressed, many logicians will admit that the modern foundation of mathematics (ZFC) is probably inconsistent.
See this article:
http://www.math.princeton.edu/~nelson/papers/warn.pdf

The author discusses an informal survey he took among loogicians on page three.

If someone ever discovers a paradox, we can simply scale back to some other system and keep most of what we know, but still...

Define "capitalism":

an economic system based on private ownership of capital <http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=capitalism>

Capitalism is an economic system in which the means of production are privately owned and operated for a private profit; decisions regarding supply, demand, price, distribution, and investments are made by private actors in the market...; profit is distributed to owners who invest in businesses, and wages are paid to workers employed by businesses. <en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism>

Nothing in there about granting special privileges to "a few individuals". Anyone can accumulate resources, but only by claiming unowned resources—by using them oneself—or by receiving pre-owned resources through voluntary trade. If someone (or some group) wants those resources later they can either obtain them by force, which really would be dictating, or they can trade, in which case both sides get to "dictate" what they'll accept, but neither side can dictate what the other must give up.

Defined as: (n) application, application program, applications programme (a program that gives a computer instructions that provide the user with tools to accomplish a task) "he has tried several different word processing applications"

May be you want to comment upon your CGPA - your 'college biochemistry' doesn't seem quite right!
Here: http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1788586&cid=33594916
or
http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S26/91/22K07/

And not according to these guys either:

http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S26/91/22K07/

(n) liberal (a person who favors an economic theory of laissez-faire and self-regulating markets) http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=liberal Get your facts right. The term "liberal" has been horribly mutilated by modern day American politics.

I figured any software developer worthy of the title had heard the story and understood the details already, so I merely linked to the Wikipedia article for reference. Yes, the full filesystem was the root cause, but the repeated reboots and failure of commands to the rover to go into night-time shutdown arose from a race condition within a critical sequence. If you want a more technical analysis, you'll find many, but one is http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall09/cos109/mars.rover.pdf

Hmm, according to the map of the universe I have hanging on my cube ( http://www.astro.princeton.edu/universe/ ) there are just over a dozen stars closer than 30 light years (~9 parsecs). Yeah, that fact is noted in TFA as well.

Oh, well, it's a start... there are quite a lot of stars in the 100parsec range if they can somehow refine their technique. Or maybe just move the JWST closer to the galactic center?! ;-)

Geeks are the guys in the circus sideshow who bite heads off chickens:

geek
S: (n) geek (a carnival performer who does disgusting acts)
S: (n) eccentric, eccentric person, flake, oddball, geek (a person with an unusual or odd personality)

If it's a live chicken, what do you need cooking for?

That, and we use swear words [wikipedia.org] in our international publicity campaigns.

That's not a fucking swear word, this is a fucking swear word.

The average person's IQ declines with age.

[Citation needed]

I found articles about IQ and race, IQ and sex, IQ and health, but not one dealing with age.

That's because, by definition, IQ controls for age. See the definition of IQ. The denominator in IQ is chronological age, and the point of IQ is to compare one's "mental" age with ones "chronological" age.

GP's comment is therefore nonsensical. Presumably GP meant to claim that one's intelligence declines as a function of age.

Did you read the article? It's crap. That have wild speculation based on an observed pattern in a random event.

Next up, scientists see face of Jesus in toast, must mean the solar system is upside down.

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~ken/Langmuir/langmuir.htm

rad the Davis-Barnes effect.

While scientist are aware of the dangers of mistaking measurement error for a genuine effect, that still make that mistake. That is fine, they are human. The real question is that when shown to be an experimental error, with the say oops, my bad and move on?

That is why peer review and consensus is critical t the scientific method.

When I RTFA, it reminds me a bit of the Davis-Barnes effect, as described by Irving Langmuir's talks on Pathological Science.

Here's a link to the full PDF at the author's page.

personal computer, PC, microcomputer (n): a small digital computer based on a microprocessor and designed to be used by one person at a time.

From HERE

Now, it's OK to be a fanboy. I guess that's cool and all. But seriously, when you say something that incredibly stupid, you really just insult the product you are trolling for. I read a comment like yours and think, "Wow! Mac fans must be morons!" Then I realize that I know many Mac people and some of them are pretty bright. I too have used Mac's and enjoyed the experience. I even owned a Mac once, although I put Yellow Dog Linux on it. I ran much smoother on that old G3 than OSX.

Either way, when you are that big of a moron, it's best to keep your mouth shut. If someone who does not know any Mac people reads your comment, they stand a high chance of thinking that Macs must be crap if their users as so dim.

If you're going to die anyway, why shouldn't you take an untested drug which might kill you or might save your life?

Because you have absolutely no reason to believe it might save you, nor how to distinguish it from a thousand other "medicines" which claim to fix everything wrong with you. And government-employed doctors at HHS can't because of the oath to "do no harm" as they're still charged with protection of its population regardless of what kind of stupid ideas they may have individually.
The more appropriate question is: if you're going to die, would you knowingly take something which is *more* likely to shorten your life than extend it? You wouldn't have the luxury of knowing the drugs you use are most likely safe, having no access to documentation. tests, manufacturing processes, safety measures, etc.. Those fake "dietary supplements" are generally physically harmless, which is the reason they're still around duping the induhviduals. There's a huge moral difference between leaving someone the freedom to do what they want and standing idle while lives are at risk. Letting big pharma reduce testing *just enough* to avoid massive wrongful death lawsuits is just an all-around nonsensical idea when you accept the fact that their boards have no care about negative consequences of their operation if the balance sheet is positive.

Reducing regulation would only serve only to reduce testing cycles to a fraction of current far-from-perfect standards, an explosion of names for the same drug sold under a plethora of brands to the point where it would take even a doctor forever to figure out what to prescribe. Sure it *might* be a little cheaper, but at a cost far too great. There's room to debate making the process more efficient or even less cautious, but you zealots can only manage the complexity of thought with room for a single option: abolishing federal agencies.

BTW, I'm glad to see you didn't deny that pharmaceutical regulation has killed vast numbers of people.

They probably didn't because it's a pointless exercise only a simpleton would require. Even when the pass FDA tests and get approved, bad drugs still kill plenty of people. Tipping the scale in the other way makes sense only if you consider death as simply part of doing business. But there I went and forgot who I was talking to: of course that's acceptable to you. It's not Merck's fault people suffered heart attacks- it was their own damn fault for using Vioxx! It shouldn't even have been removed from the market- people should have all the options and damned be psychology for proving that excess choice has little to do with making good decisions.

Fascism (n) a political theory advocating an authoritarian hierarchical government (as opposed to democracy or liberalism)

From WordNet

I was accused of being a (precursor to a) fascist. I have no interest in holding the authority of the government over the authority of the people at large. I am, however, of the opinion that the public has confidence in the government's ability and need to investigate threats. In fact, the American public voted for the laws that allowed this detainment, according to the legal process we've held for two hundred years.

The limits placed on a law should be based on practicality, liberty, and benefit. Prohibition of alcohol was repealed because it caused more problems than it could possibly solve. Segregation was abolished because it was a clear affront to essential liberties. Countless laws have been rejected for being impractical.

I, for one, believe that the ability to detain incoming travelers at the border, with a reason, is good. The inconvenience is a few hours, and the benefit is a significantly larger pool of intelligence. Once essential liberties get breached, like being detained beyond the limits of the law, or being detained without reason, or being subjected to unreasonable searches, then it is time to reconsider the law.

I do not "put the law above the sky". I put the law above the minor inconvenience of people who work with things that threaten the nation.

That's a rather materialistic view on "the good life".What happened to the value of singing, dancing, telling stories, eating food you enjoyed, having free time, not having someone bossing you around, time for communion with nature and the infinite, doing comprehensible work you enjoyed doing at your own pace, having time to raise children, and so on? The Sahlins article shows how most hunter/gatherers most of the time had no want for food. Would you trade, say, having time for singing and dancing and friendships for some hot water? You can always put hot rocks in a basket of water if you want hot water. And while you don't have hot water on tap, you also don't have property taxes to pay or dioxin in the food supply to digest.

Also, you've overgeneralized the point. There is a big difference between saying there were a lot of good things about a period in human history and saying *everything* about that period was wonderful or that we should just abandon other aspects of our current lives that we enjoy. But clearly, these game developers are not enjoying their lives. So, something is wrong. Looking to the past helps give us some perspective on that.

By the way, life expectancy after age five in hunter/gatherers may have been comparable to today. It is only in the last 100 years that human skeletons are now as tall as they were 10,000 years in the past (because agriculture was a big step backward nutritionally and culturally):
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/6812.html

Some things like sewage treatment are only needed because of high population densities today.

Many people don't have access to medical care, and even when they do, the for-profit medical system harms them compared to simpler approaches (whole foods diet, fasting, sunlight, meditation, good sleep, etc.). Many chronic disease today are caused by eating poorly or not getting enough sunlight (cancer, diabetes, heart disease, mental illness, depression, influenza, autism, etc.)
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
http://www.alternativeratreatments.com/eat-to-live.html
so it is not completely clear how much happier most people are now compared to people 10,000 years ago.

Also people back then did not know what was possible, so someone from now sent back to those times might feel different than people did who grew up then.

And young children in the USA spend more than a decade in prison, so that can't be happy for them compared to back then either:
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/2445404/the_war_on_kids_a_polemic_against_public.html?cat=9

So, sure, there are some good things about today (the internet overall seems to be a wonderful thing). But there is plenty of bad too, so the equation of how different times stack up is not so simple.

A little bit on what America was like before Columbus (describing Haiti):
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncol1.html
"""
"They ... brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells. They willingly traded everything they owned... . They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features.... They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane... . They would make fine servants.... With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want." ... The Indians, Columbus reported, "are so naive and so free with their possessions that no one who

suggest you read up on compressed air storage. You do not build tanks for that! You use salt domes located under ground or other large "HUGE geological structures! I don't think you understand the scale that you need for power storage at all.

I misunderstood how compressed air storage is being used but it's not as problematic as you think. See a recent Princeton report here:
http://www.princeton.edu/pei/energy/publications/texts/SuccarWilliams_PEI_CAES_2008April8.pdf

And you can and do build tanks for compressed air storage, if it's a "small" installation. But, large-scale does need geologic formations, caverns, depleted wells and aquifers but these are hardly rarities in North America.
If those numbers are accurate, the per-kilowatt cost looks pretty darn good.

I am not anti-wind or anti solar. They should be developed but they can not solve our power problems today. And to just blow off real problems with some "well we can just do x" when you have no idea if x will work or what it will cost is dumb.

I've been advocating for better solutions for 30 years and the same "dumb" arguments have been raised - it can't solve our problems today; that's not a real solution, blah, blah.
Here's the thing about the nuclear option - it's not only very expensive but it has a long lead time before you can get a single Joule out of it.
Back in the day, it was a minimum of 10 years to get one built; even today, it's still about 4 - 7 years.
At least with options like wind, you can build piecemeal and get power from the get-go. How much electricity does half a reactor provide?
If a better wind turbine is developed, how difficult is it to upgrade?
And, although you didn't make the case for nuclear being "emissions-free", that's utter crap.
There's plenty of CO2 created in the construction of one although I imagine it's looks pretty good over a long service life but there's still the matter of toxic waste.
The use of breeder reactors or of thorium fuel would make nuclear a more attractive long-term option but the former isn't widely used and the latter is still in development.
Sad to say but the US fucked up large back in '73 - if the country had rallied behind Carter's agenda for alternative energy, it would have become the world's foremost energy superpower.
And, here's another cost of which I have no idea - and likely neither does anyone else:
What has the wasteful use of petroleum cost America?

wiki: Burglary: Burglary (also called breaking and entering[1] and sometimes housebreaking)[2] is a crime, the essence of which is entry into a building for the purposes of committing an offence. Usually that offence will be theft, but most jurisdictions specify others which fall within the ambit of burglary. To commit a burglary is to burgle (in British English) or burglarize (in American English).[3] wordnetweb.princeton.edu (incase you dont trust a wiki) : entering a building unlawfully with intent to commit a felony or to steal valuable property. none of these mention anything "by cover of night" http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=burglarize proof that burglarized is a word (at least according to the university of Princeton) (also wiki lists it as a alternitive to Burglary. and i dont see how posting this ip would help his situation any (most likely it would just make it worse, people contacting the thief, or the thief taking measures to obscure the correct IP), your claim that he is "making shit up" is groundless and without merit. My Point: YOU sir, are a TROLL.

Not only that, but sales of cultural products are radically stochastic. The best research on this is by Salganik and Watts on pop music and Art DeVany of films. thus even more than usual causal inference in any one instance is essentially impossible.

But then, you're left with "A brief history of the universe", and I suppose, tack an exam (of course, abstracting from the math), and you now have a "graduate-level" course.

I humbly submit Feynman 1988 as a counterexample. Therein, the author describes the basics of quantum electrodynamics using what appears to be little more than grade school mathematics.

I write "appears to be" because his presentation amounts to an extremely casual exposition of elementary ideas from rather more advanced mathematics (complex and even functional analysis) in terms of "adding arrows."

This book stands out in my mind as perhaps the best "popular science book" ever written, precisely because Feynman understands, here as elsewhere, the difference between glazing over the mathematics — modulo mathematics, there's not really much "modern theoretical physics" to speak of — and glazing over the inessential (to casual exposition, certainly not to understanding, application, or development of theories!) calculational details.

Incidentally, complex algebra is, in a sense, "the algebra of scaling and rotating little arrows" Feynman describes. Put this way, it comes as no surprise that the things have so many practical applications. Forget "square roots of negative one," rotations often arise in applications, as do "functions of circular (periodic) variables."

"The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'"

To answer your Russian question. I grew up in the 80's and 90's. I remember what I was doing when the East German wall came down. I watched CNN as the old regime attempted a coup-de-tat on the Russian White House. I was hopeful for Russia. I don't know what Russia is now. They seem to have a democratically representative government. But corruption in Russia also seems to be ingrained and so private business is difficult. Russians are a hard people living in hard conditions. They always have. I'm not sure what Medvedev is up to, there are signs of the old republic showing up. (And I'm not just talking about the 11 buffoons in Chicago.)

"Two decades ago, scientific doomsayers were warning of a global ice age."

No, science gets blamed yet again for shit that journalists pull out of their asses. See wikipedia and read out from there. The money quote: "This hypothesis [global cooling] had little support in the scientific community, but gained temporary popular attention due to a combination of press reports that did not accurately reflect the scientific understanding..." Despite little, if any support from scientists at the time, it's over thirty years later and we still hear about this. While some might call it a case in point about scientists doing a poor job at communicating, I'm reminded of a book titled On Bullshit. Global warming is a problem that potentially affects everybody, just not equally. If you're corporation X that produces large quantities of compounds implicated in global warming, there is naturally going to be pressure on you to cut back. That will cut into your profits, and your profits, like for every corporation, are your sole reason to exist. You're pressured by market forces (and probably by some portions of the law as well) to do everything in your power to keep your ox from getting gored. That can mean anything from touting a fully legitimate study that supports your continued CO2 (or whatever) production byproducts, to a quote mine of a global warming paper, to hiring shills to write crap in unrefereed journals. A corporation doesn't care about right or wrong, it cares about profit, and this disregard for or the simple irrelevance of truth is bullshitting. If bullshitting helps corporate profit, corporations bullshit, and that's part of why we still have to deal with bullshit global cooling.

The other points in your post are similar, but I can't resist two. I work on a protein involved in maintaining proper cholesterol levels in animals. Cholesterol is both bad and good for you. If you were to purge your body of all cholesterol, you'd be dead pretty quickly. Cholesterol is involved in several critically important processes. Cholesterol is converted into other sterols which function as signaling molecules (testosterone and estrogen quickly come to mind). Cholesterol is also an important part of the cell membranes of all animals (at least, it's probably pretty darn important for most other critters), in that it is involved with maintaining appropriate levels of viscosity in the cell membrane, allowing protein receptors, ion channels, and whatnot to move around appropriately, and plays a role in the proper ordering of these structures within the membrane as well. However if you're a person you can have too much cholesterol and build up plaques in your arteries from eating too many tasty steaks, prosciutto, hams, yams cooked in bacon, eggs...{drools}...where was I...Oh yes. Build up plaques of cholesterol, have a heart attack and/or stroke and croak. So both overly high and overly low levels of cholesterol can kill you. Which is the same for a lot of things. Ingesting too much water can kill you just as well as too little...both oddly enough will make you hallucinate like a motherfucker along the way though.

The other item is DDT. I've worked on developing new pesticides. DDT is still in use and this is a good thing because some insect-borne diseases are total nightmares. Off the top of my head mosquitoes carry malaria, dengue fever, yellow fever, chikungunya, and several different viruses that cause encephalitis. If you're in an area that either has or is expected to have an outbreak of one of these, your best bet is to control the vector population (mosquitoes), and the most potent means of doing this is to use insecticides. Sadly, that means using DDT (still in use today for this purpose, but banned since 1972 in the US as a crop insecticide) and a horribly limited selection of other compounds, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. DDT will fuck up

Gee, you looked in Wkikpedia and didn't see that Egypt is part of the middle East? Egypt's in Africa.

Gee, you didn't notice that Egypt is both Middle East and Africa!

http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=middle%20east
http://middleeast.about.com/od/middleeast101/f/me080208.htm
http://www.infoplease.com/atlas/middleeast.html

Microsoft supported the Inanium until 2004.

That's because they didn't know that it was asinine.

I enjoy tobacco and don't mind dying younger. They're not doing anything wrong by supplying what I ask of them. They might be abusing dimlows but that does not mean they're abusing me. What they are doing _is_ right.

This is something I wonder about. I do consider tobacco companies an evil force in some sense. They're useful to governments because of taxes so governments certainly don't want to fight them. Let's see, tobacco isn't something that's probably harmful - it has been well proven scientifically that there's tobacco causes health problems. It is also known that it's not causing some minor problems but causes significant problems like cancer, with a statistically significant reduction in life extensiveness. Plus, it's known that tobacco is, because of nicotine, addictive. It seems like a major part of this is that smoking/tobacco use has been around for a while before modern medicine and before definitive proof of its ill effects. Imagine this - I invent a device that, when used, gives you huge, orgasmic physical pleasure. That would be addictive enough psychologically. Now imagine this device also has slight physically addictive effects and, most importantly, gives you an above-normal dose of gamma radiation, high enough so that a significant amount of device users would eventually succumb to cancer or radiation sickness caused by it. Would I really be allowed to market and sell the device? I'm pretty sure I wouldn't, certainly not unless the government would stand to gain very serious revenue from taxes on that, and even then I'm doubtful.

Sure you would be able to. Its called 'high glucose corn syrup'. You can find it in MANY different food products and it causes serious health issues like unhealthy weight gain (they are 'empty' calories). It also causes Diabetes, a life changing and possible fatal health condition. Its even been linked to possible liver scarring. And the best part about this? Its not heavily taxed like cigarettes.

• Define "Arms". Does a knife count? How about a sword? A pistol? A machine gun? A thermonuclear device? Chemical or biological weapons?
• Is the right to keep and bear ammunition included in the right to keep and bear Arms?
• Do you have the right to keep and bear Arms, but not to use them? The definitions of the word bear I found say nothing about using, just having.
• Are you required to belong to a "well regulated militia", as described in the first part of the sentence, in order to keep and bear Arms? [As written, I'd probably say no, that the first part is providing motivation for the second, but you could theoretically argue there's a connection.]
• Does "shall not be infringed" mean that you can never take Arms away from someone? Not even if they have been tried for a crime by a jury of their peers, convicted, and are currently incarcerated?

Again, I'm just taking the Devil's Advocate position.

Wow! What a huge difference! I'm almost convinced he's not like 99% of politicians!

Did I say he wasn't? No. I said he was neither "milquetoast" (sissy, pantywaist, pansy, milksop, Milquetoast (a timid man or boy considered childish or unassertive)) nor "centrist" (centrist, middle of the roader, moderate, moderationist (a person who takes a position in the political center)). Let's take these one at a time.

While Bush catered to big business, Obama has been essentially been playing out a hostile takeover of big business. The end result may be very, very similar to what Bush was doing (the marriage of government and big business), but there is one essential difference: in Obama's vision, he wears the pants in the relationship. That's hardly "milquetoast". It's assertive. You might be able to pin the "milquetoast" label on GWB (and I would argue that his response to 9/11 is very reminiscent of the schoolyard bully, which further supports that argument), but not Obama.

Furthermore, Obama's policies are very, very socialist -- certainly not middle-of-the road, so he's definitely not "centrist". Rather, he leans so far left, he could pick up a ruble without even bending his knees.

Call me when you finish grade school and understand politics with a little more nuance.

Pot...kettle...black? Why don't you call me back when you can do more to rebut arguments than call names?

Wow! What a huge difference! I'm almost convinced he's not like 99% of politicians!

Did I say he wasn't? No. I said he was neither "milquetoast" (sissy, pantywaist, pansy, milksop, Milquetoast (a timid man or boy considered childish or unassertive)) nor "centrist" (centrist, middle of the roader, moderate, moderationist (a person who takes a position in the political center)). Let's take these one at a time.

While Bush catered to big business, Obama has been essentially been playing out a hostile takeover of big business. The end result may be very, very similar to what Bush was doing (the marriage of government and big business), but there is one essential difference: in Obama's vision, he wears the pants in the relationship. That's hardly "milquetoast". It's assertive. You might be able to pin the "milquetoast" label on GWB (and I would argue that his response to 9/11 is very reminiscent of the schoolyard bully, which further supports that argument), but not Obama.

Furthermore, Obama's policies are very, very socialist -- certainly not middle-of-the road, so he's definitely not "centrist". Rather, he leans so far left, he could pick up a ruble without even bending his knees.

Call me when you finish grade school and understand politics with a little more nuance.

Pot...kettle...black? Why don't you call me back when you can do more to rebut arguments than call names?

It is hardly doublespeak to use the word "gaming" to refer to the practice of gambling. Indeed, the first definition of the word "gaming" in every dictionary I check refers specifically to gambling.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gaming

1. (gambling) The business of offering games of chance for money.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gaming

Main Entry: gaming
Function: noun
Date: 1501
1 : the practice of gambling

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/gaming

gaming [gey-ming] Show IPA
–noun
1.
gambling.

http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=gaming

Noun

S: (n) gambling, gaming, play (the act of playing for stakes in the hope of winning (including the payment of a price for a chance to win a prize)) "his gambling cost him a fortune"; "there was heavy play at the blackjack table"

http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S16/13/72E53/index.xml?section=newsreleases

I saw a claim somewhere (I think it was Stephen Jay Gould) that the majority of biomass was subterranean. I can't find a substantiating link, though.

The Princeston WordNet has the same definition, presumably because of its common usage.

Anyway, have a look at http://www.statemaster.com/encyclopedia/Irony#Usage_controversy . Even the modernly accepted version of irony doesn't always follow the pure meaning of the original word.. words change over time, annoying as it is for those of us who know the real meaning behind words and phrases (I usually do, though I was taught the meaning of irony by what is obviously a rather confused world).

I see the numbnuts are out in force. Ever heard of a succinct example? Check out an algorithm book for C and another for Java, perhaps even those from the same author. Then notice the fact that implementations of the same algorithms differ between the books in an identical way that the implementation of swap does.

"digress": It does not mean what you seem to think it means.

I think you meant to say, copyright infringement is not theft. Stealing is not limited to physical property; plagiarism is considered stealing (the credit for) words, for example. Legal definition of 'steal' is irrelevant, if U.S. law defines stealing at all. It does define 'theft'.

Stealing and theft are synonyms. See stealing: S: (n) larceny, theft, thievery, thieving, stealing (the act of taking something from someone unlawfully.

Incorrect, and it is this very assumption that causes this misconception in the first place. Theft is rather a far more limited subset of stealing (relating to the abduction of property).

A dictionary is the wrong way to base this argument. Often they are completely out of tune with modern usage practices, totally overlook standard historical interpretations, or just far too simplified. But even WordNet (one of the worst) gets this one partially correct:

S: (v) steal (take without the owner's consent) "Someone stole my wallet on the train"; "This author stole entire paragraphs from my dissertation"

"Author's credit" is only one common complaint against plagiarism; the other is that the person profits (sometimes immaterially, and always without permission) from the author's work. I have not heard of objection to this belief, and it is my opinion that copyright infringement falls under the same category.

I think you meant to say, copyright infringement is not theft. Stealing is not limited to physical property; plagiarism is considered stealing (the credit for) words, for example. Legal definition of 'steal' is irrelevant, if U.S. law defines stealing at all. It does define 'theft'.

Stealing and theft are synonyms. See stealing: S: (n) larceny, theft, thievery, thieving, stealing (the act of taking something from someone unlawfully.

"Stealing credit" makes sense. It's a more metaphorical application, but you are still *taking* something. "Stealing copyright" could be used similarly, but it would refer to what SCO/Caldera is attempting to do in court, not to some kid downloading a song. He is not taking anything from anyone, at most he is violating a statute that granted someone else a monopoly on reproducion of a particular pattern.

That is my problem with this proposal. It seems reasonable on the surface, but anyone who has sat through CS101 should know that programs can be significantly more complex than they appear (the halting problem et al.). A real world financial model would be extremely easy to insert a depth charge into - the academic research has already been done showing how easy it is to create models that are computationally intractable. And yes, this would make an excellent subject for the underhanded C contest.

http://www.princeton.edu/~aristoff/www/jump.htm

And certainly not better than WSPR. From that site: "The program can decode signals with S/N as low as -28 dB in a 2500 Hz bandwidth." In layman's terms, the program can successfully recover the transmitted data even if the signal is 1/630th as strong as the noise! No human ear can come close to that.

Article on WSPR.

online videos: algebra + calculus
http://justmathtutoring.com/
http://www.mathtutor.ac.uk/
http://www.khanacademy.org/
http://www.graderocket.tv/index.php

Uni Maths Videos
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Mathematics/
http://press.princeton.edu/video/banner/
http://academicearth.org/subjects/mathematics
http://freescienceonline.blogspot.com/2009/01/calculus-video-lectures-bonus-basic.html
http://www.apple.com/education/itunes-u/ (requires iTunes download)

Resources from Universities
http://www.germanna.edu/tutor/helpful_handouts.asp?menuchoice=Helpful%20Handouts (wow)
http://mathforum.org/

Free online books:
http://www.jamesbrennan.org/algebra/systems/solution_set.htm
http://cnx.org/content/m18205/latest/?collection=col10624
http://www.jirka.org/diffyqs/ (Differential eqns)
http://www.purplemath.com/
http://tutorial.math.lamar.edu/

PowerPoints
http://www.online.math.uh.edu/HoustonACT/

Tutoring services
http://www.nutshellmath.com/

Collections of Links
http://math.about.com/od/mathhelpandtutorials/Math_Help_and_Tutorials_by_Subject_and_or_Topic.htm
http://pathstoknowledge.net/

Problems
http://projecteuler.net/

Some computer Resources
http://www.graphmatica.com/
http://archives.math.utk.edu/visual.calculus/

Your information on HFCS and cane sugar causing the same amount of obesity is out of date.

Here ya go.