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Could you seriously justify ending another person's life yourself, if you didn't believe in an afterlife for them?

If that person is trying to kill me? Yes. If necessary in self-defense or the defense of another innocent person, ending an attacker's life is justified. And I teach people how to do it.

I don't believe in an "afterlife" (in the usual sense of that term).

I don't see any relation between these two concepts.

The details shall remain fuzzy as I don't subscribe to the "only offer as much force as is offered you" social idiocy; suffice it to say that it would be impossible for that event to repeat itself in the same fashion with the same characters.

So we are to infer that you crippled or killed people who were not threatening to cripple or kill you?

I have no problem with the legitimate use of force in self-defense -- hell, I teach people to do it -- but if you are using force out of proportion to the threat, you are not engaged in legitimate self-defense.

If that is the case, then you have only proved the point: you were incompetent and turned to force as your first option, misusing your martial arts training. A competent budoka turns to violence only after all other options have been exhausted, and only to the degree required to stop the attack. As the Old Fellow put it,

Weapons are tools of bad omen,
By gentlemen not to be used;
But when it cannot be avoided,
They use them with calm and restraint.
Even in victory's hour
These tools are unlovely to see;
For those who admire them truly
Are men who in murder delight.

As for those who delight to do murder,
It is certain they never can get
From the world what they sought when ambition
Urged them to power and rule.

A multitude slain!- and their death
Is a matter for grief and for tears;
The victory after a conflict
Is a theme for a funeral rite.

None of this, of course, has anything to do with the original Asimov quote, which you must turn on your geek card for not recognizing. You might try reading it in context, which was about war and politics, not individual self-defense.

How do you think American independence was won? What would you have done against Hitler's rise? Written him a sternly-worded letter?

Indian independence was won without war; some have argued that American independence could have been won similarly. I haven't analyzed the issue in depth, so I remain agnostic, but it should be noted that the Founding Fathers envisioned a nation without a standing army, defended by citizen militias. It is interesting that serving in an institution whose existence the Founders saw as anathema is considered a patriotic act these days.

Hitler would not have come to power without the stage being set by WWI. Against his rise I would have suggested 1) not having an age of colonialism and militarism that created a World War; 2) that failing, destroying the German economy and humiliating the German people at the end of the war; 3) that failing, not giving economic and political support to Hitler as he came to power, as in fact many Americans did; 4) that failing, boycotts, limited blockades, and a policy of isolating Germany as it became more militaristic; 5) that failing, as soon as German troops and tanks rolled into Poland, swift but restrained military response, surrounding Germany and the invaded territory, total and complete blockade.

When the time comes, how do you propose we secure our freedom (or the remnants of it) and our very survival?

I propose we cooperate with other human beings as much as we can, with an aim to make us all free and all survive. "Us vs. them" thinking is the root of the problem.

Yes, I know there are nutcases out there; I teach martial arts and self-defense classes, so not only do I believe there is a time to open up a can of whoop-ass, I teach people how to do it. But that option should be way down on the list, and most of our energy should be directed at finding ways to avoid having to open up that can.

The U.S. could cut is military budget in half and still outspend any other nation more than three-to-one. Our military spending is 46.5%, nearly half, of the world's total budget for destruction; China is in second place with 6.6%.

Meanwhile, all U.N. programs equal less than 2% of world military spending. If we put half of our current military budget to work on finding ways to feed, clothe, house, cure, and educate people around the world, we could outspend the U.N. 11-to-1 in promoting peace, security, and human welfare, while still maintaining military might that no other nation could challenge -- certainly much more than adequate for defending the nation.

That we choose not do do this, but instead run a military-industrial complex for the benefit of the investment and political classes, occasionally makes me question our survival potential as a species.

The whole 'gym' mentality is broken. The problem is that people eating less doesn't make anybody rich.

Well, neither does running the trails in a several-year-old pair of Chuck Taylor knock-offs.

You don't need to join a gym to exercise. Second-hand bikes are cheap; if you want to go running, if you shun expensive, injury-producing running shoes it's pretty cheap (and contrary to common practice, you don't actually need an iPod or other music player to go running); walking remains free, as do calisthenics; and you can usually find some sucker in your neighborhood teaching yoga or karate or something along those lines at little above cost.

It's certainly true that our massive caloric intake -- which increased 24.5 percent between 1970 and 2000, and I'm sure has only gone up since then -- tends to swamp weight-loss effects from exercise for many people. You won't burn off an extra 500 calories a day with moderate exercise. But exercise has benefits apart from weight loss; and once caloric intake is down to something more sane, it will help burn off minor excesses.

WWII wasn't worth it, you see, because a genocidal madman taking over half the world and executing everyone he thought of as subhuman is a better outcome.

The European part of WWII would never have happened if it wasn't for the aftermath of WWI. (The Pacific war was a straight-up conflict between two imperialist powers, though U.S. imperialism was somewhat less brutal -- but by no means benign.) WWI was a pointless exercise in militarism and imperialism. If the "violence is bad" meme were more wide-spread, WWI would not have happened, and Hitler would not have been able to come to power.

(If other nations had acted more quickly to put sanctions and a blockade on Hitler, if the U.S. had not allowed American companies to help build the German war machine, Hitler could have been contained. But again, that would require the "violence is bad" meme to be much more powerful, stronger than the "let's make some money and damn the consequences!" or the "dem dang Commie Russians must be stopped!" meme.)

"X is necessary, because without X, you couldn't clean up the mess that X causes" is a rather sad argument, don't you think?

Ending slavery in the United States was bad, too, because things were better off for the slaves.

Of course, if the "violence is bad" meme were more wide-spread, the U.S. would not have accepted slavery in the first place. Again, "we need violence to mop up the results of our past use of violence!"

I'm not 100% opposed to the use of force in 100% of cases; hell, I teach people how to maim and kill in self-defense, if necessary. If violence is the best option, somebody somewhere has fucked up very very badly -- but sometimes the person who has to deal with the situation is not the one who fucked up.

But "just war" theory is a shallow justification that ignores the way that violence almost always begets violence. Only when one can use force while at the same time loving the "enemy" can force work for peace -- a hell of a dilemma to swallow, and one completely incompatible with all forms of militarism.

Want to start a lawn care business? Some states require a license as do some counties and cities.

Which is annoying (trust me, I run two small businesses that require me to have licenses or registrations with Maryland, I know the pain) but not generally fatal.

The only reason to have a regulation requiring me to have a license or be certified is to prevent me from doing lawn care.

Or to collect sales taxes. Or to make sure you're not exploiting employees, or hiring undocumented workers. Or to make sure you're not poisoning the environment with misuse of pesticides or fertilizer. Or to make sure you're aware of local noise ordinances so you don't wake me up at 7am with a gorram gas-powered weed whacker. Or to see to it that you post a bond as insurance that you won't collect a whole season's payment up front and then skip town, or that Mrs. Jones will be reimbursed if you mow down her expensive rosebush.

Is it overkill to make a kid mowing his neighbor's yard get a state license? Probably, I sure didn't have one when I was 15. Is it overkill to make a large landscaping company get a state license of some sort? Probably not. Is it some great conspiracy if the kid gets caught up in the regulations meant for the large landscaping company, some deliberate attempt to keep the kid from mowing lawns? No, it's most likely simple oversight or bad planning, and in most cases I expect the kid and his or her customers will ignore the law without consequence.

The only legitimate excuse for a giant library is if you are an academic researcher or an author. A good writer is a good reader, as they say. I am not a writer so I have no such need to keep things on file like that.

That may be part of it; though I'm a poet, my style is definitely informed by the prose I read. And certainly my book collection has swelled a bit the past few years as I've been doing research for the historical sections of my non-fiction book. Though for that I've also made extensive use of Google Books, the Sacred Texts archive, and Project Gutenberg, as well as some more specialized sites. Nothing like being able to find rare, long out-of-print original sources on-line.

Also many of my books pertain to my "other jobs", references related to martial arts and acupressure and massage. (For the day job, software, I have a few dead trees, but most of them I acquired pre-Web, or at least back in the days of dial-up.)

But I do enjoy just having books around. I prefer "collector" to "hoarder", thank you very much. :-)

I'm gonna go WAY out on a limb here and say... Democrat?

I am a member of no political party, and never have been. If you are limited to thinking in terms of political parties, you might perhaps think of me as a bastard child of a Green and a Libertarian, lost in the forest and raised by wolves. I'm a libertarian socialist, a Zenarchist on good days. I'm a vegan and peace activist who owns guns and teaches people unarmed combat skills. I decline to be put in a box.

...because almost every member of America's military believes in the cause...

So is that because almost every member of America's military was woefully ignorant before they joined and their training and indoctrination did not correct that, or because almost every member of America's military was subject to such strong mental conditioning during their training and indoctrination that their ability to thing clearly was clouded?

I remain completely mystified as to how a war that was approved by the VAST majority of not only the government, but the American people (73%, if I remember correctly) can be considered 'illegal'.

Because the U.S. is signatory to treaties outlawing wars of aggression. Among these is the U.N. charter: "I have indicated it was not in conformity with the UN charter from our point of view, from the charter point of view, it was illegal." -- Kofi Annan

Public approval does not make for legality - that's the basis of constitutional government. It's disappointing - nay, frightening - that this is apparently not understood by everyone in the military.

You have every right to walk all over it and call every preemptive strike an 'illegal action' if you so choose. Personally, if you make a motion like you're going to hit me, you better believe I'm going to tie your ass in a knot whether or not you connected with your first punch.

If you're suggesting that there was any evidence that Iraq was somehow going to "hit" us, you've lost touch with reality so much that further discussion is pointless.

(It may change as soon as November 4th if we end up choosing to switch over to socialism.)

I'm sorry, is there a socialist candidate running from a major party? Most of the media attention has been about the one from the party of the center of the right wing, and the one from the right wing of the center. Who is this socialist candidate?

At the moment, America is absolutely the best place on Earth to be

Well, Rome was the best place to be 2,000 years ago. (At least, in the Western world; China under the Han Dynasty was also an amazing culture.) Does that justify the oppression and slavery that existed in the Roman Empire?

But the claim that "America is absolutely the best place on Earth to be" has to rest on some assumptions about "best place". By many measures, the U.S. lags other nations: our literacy rate is 18th in the world, our infant mortality rate is almost twice that of Japan, our life expectancy ranks 29th. On the Human Development Index, we're 12th. On the Press Freedom Index, we're at a shameful 48th place.

I find it the best place to be because it's my home. America is the best nation to me, in the same way that Baltimore is the best city. That doesn't mean that I find the life of a New Yorker worth less than the life of a Baltimorean, or the life of an I

But if all your punches are normally thrown with heavy padding, I'd worry about punch strength growing faster than bone strength.

This is a problem - many boxers have tremendous power but no idea how to make a fist and shatter their hand when they hit someone without a glove. Happened to Tyson.

It's not so much a matter of bone strength as of technique, and of strength of the intrinsic muscles of the hand. A traditional karate maxim says that it takes three years to learn how to make a fist, three years to learn how to stand, and three more years to put it together and punch.

In the meantime, when I teach self-defense classes I teach striking with the heel of the palm (a favorite of whoever choreographed the fights in ST:TNG and DS9, by the way), the elbow, and the hammerfist.

I can punch through three 1-inch boards (one on top of the other, not spaced); this is a decent but not exceptional punch. I've seen people break piles of concrete pavers (cinder block caps) with a punch.

The texts are too static and do not accommodate teacher needs; allowing the computer to become the active text is incredibly important.

No, it's not important at all. Until AI advances enormously to the point that software is as smart as human teachers, "active text" is a bunch of silicon snake oil, just a higher tech incarnation of programmed text. Haven't heard of programmed text? Think the non-fiction equivalent of a "choose your own adventure" book; after each little lesson you'd answer a question, the correct answer would take you to the next lesson, the wrong answer would take you to a review of the material. Was a fad in the late 1960s. Mostly useless.

The potential usefulness of OLPC is that it can cheaply put a bunch of books (e-copies of textbooks and works of literature) into the hands of many, and that it enables many-to-many communication on a global scale.

We all have ADD

(Rant mode on.) No, we don't. Many of us still retain the ability to actually sit the fsck down and focus our brains for more than five minutes.

Many - quite likely most - kids labeled as ADD also have this ability, but are not socialized to use it. I teach karate, and since "everybody knows" that martial arts training is good for kids with ADD, I've worked with a lot of them over the years. It's amazing how often simply setting boundaries, enforcing consequences, and getting children to get some gorram exercise "cures" "ADD".

Getting them the hell outside is another useful "treatment". The number of kids with an actual neurological problem is dwarfed by those who just need to run around outside and to be taught some behavioral boundaries.

The problem is that kids glued to game consoles or the intarweb are being trained that fast-shiny-jumpy is good, and slow, complex, and still is bad. (Yes, there are exceptions, games and sites and applications that encourage deeper thought. But they are the rare ones.)

I used to sit in a tree and read books. Maybe that's possible with an XO - I just bought one on eBay, I'll have to try that out when it arrives.

(Rant mode off.)

So according to some weird twist of philosophy if you set up shop in a state you OWE YOUR EXISTENCE to it?

Uh, no. I am a person. The state didn't create me by issuing a corporate charter.

If, however, I someday incorporate one of my small businesses, that corporation will exist only because of a charter issued by the State of Maryland; it will owe its existence to an act of government.

Corporations are "artificial persons" created by governments. Amazing how this simple fact is often overlooked by people who talk about "getting government out of business".

If Washington state chose to dissolve Microsoft (never mind that would never happen and is impossible)

Laws are on the books in all 50 states that provide for the revocation of corporate charters. It is indeed possible. (Though I grant, very unlikely).

Also investors are more than gamblers who expect to get paid without working. Investors are your pension, 401K plan, retirement account, mutual funds, and one of the ways our economy is so strong.

If I put money into stocks - whether in retirement accounts, mutual funds, or whatever - I'd be doing so in the hope that someone will buy them later at a higher price. That's a gamble. And I'm doing it without working for the companies involved, without laboring.

Gamblers may of course work very hard at their gambling, studying the odds and whatnot, but that doesn't make it productive labor.

Our economy is a house of cards, so far removed from the realities of making stuff and filling human needs and wants that it's staggering to consider. We abstract labor and materials and other resources into money, then abstract money into investments, then investments into speculative markets, until it reaches a point where everyone can panic and the whole thing fall apart based on the performance of those speculative markets - even though they day after a stock market crash, we have the same labor and materials and other resources we had the day before.

As Alan Watts once noted, "it was just as if someone had come to work on building a house and, on the morning of the Depression, the boss had said, 'Sorry, baby, but we can't build today. No inches.' 'Whaddya mean, no inches? We got wood. We got metal. We even got tape measures.' 'Yeah, but you don't understand business. We been using too many inches and there's just no more to go around.'"

I'm not sure that WoW is actually a bad leadership training ground.

But the claim of those who so very badly want games to be "relevant" somehow is that it's an excellent leadership training ground.

According to the breathless prose of TFA, gamers "naturally think outside the box and possess a unique set of skills that have been developed and honed during hours of game play." Which is hooey: even a MMORPG is a box, and the truly unique skills of computer games are things like rocket jumps, which are not very useful in the real world.

(Of course, TFA also claims that "Strategy is more about vision and less about planning ...more about being creative and intuitive and less about being rational and precise." And that the game America's Army "gives recruits a realistic insight into the business of modern warfare". The authors are clearly not in a close relationship with consensual objective reality.)

Is sitting on your butt interacting via a network a to fulfill arbitrary imaginary goals a better way to learn leadership than helping teach karate classes? Or running a poetry workshop? Or getting a bunch of people together for a charity event? Or even just spending an evening in a bar, listening to random people tell their stories and coming to understand their thoughts?

Games can be fun. You can even learn lessons from them with real-world applications - American political leaders would be well-advised to learn the fundamentals of Go, and come to understand the futility of throwing more resources into a doomed scenario.

But the idea the computer games are the best thing ever, some radical new path to skill and wisdom and understanding, is bunkum of the highest purity.

"let me illustrate a point through an analogy that lets me oh so subtlely and matter of factly mention my athletic or fighting prowess."

Nah, I assure you, my "fighting prowess" is pretty damn low, despite two decades of trying. Which is why when a rare moment like what I mentioned occurs, my conscious reaction (once "I" catch up) is "hey, cool". But do something long enough, and you'll have a few cool moments now and then.

Martial arts examples crop up a lot when talking Zen. Partly for historical reasons related to its adoption by the samurai, partly for practical ones (it was the practical ones that made for its adoption by the samurai in the first place). And partly because they're just more vivid than "so we were jamming and the piano player started modulating back and forth between minor and major keys in the melody line, but without thinking I just went into a progession of suspended chords, and it stayed tight." (I don't even know if that example makes sense, some jazz guy feel free to correct with something meaningful.)

It happens that I have significant first hand experience with the martial arts; should I then draw on somebody else's secondhand reports, rather than my own experience, so that you don't think I'm a "geeky narcissist"? Would it be better if I said, "when a boxer slips a punch and yadda yadda yadda"?

watched U.S. Marines deliver food aid after typhoon Yoyang in 2004. I kept wondering, "where's the aid workers from Japan? Where's the aid from China? Where's the aid from Taiwan? Where's ANY OTHER COUNTRY AT ALL?".

If you were still wondering after you got back to somewhere with net access (I'm assuming that was sparse after such a disaster), a few minutes with Google would have told you that Japan sent money, doctors, and relief workers. China, Singapore, Korea, Belgium, Germany, and the U.S. all provided significant aid.

More recently, Japan has sent one million dollar in food aid for victims of Reming.

As for ongoing aid, here is the JICA page for the Philippines. And here's the Ministry of Foreign Affairs page on Japan-Philippines, chock full of stats and press releases.

Nobody was there except the USA.

Maybe you didn't see anyone there besides American military relief. Maybe that's a function of where you were, maybe you weren't looking very hard, I don't know. But several other nations were there, including Japan.

They did not have this attitude about the U.S., and they were glad she was going to marry an American. This is a fair characterization of attitudes there.

People's attitudes don't change the historical reality. Both the U.S. and Japan have, in the past, done horrible things in the Philippines. The U.S. atrocities were a little longer ago and were less horrific. But they were still atrocities. Both the U.S. and Japan now send significant aid to the Philippines.

If you believe American has victimized the Philippines (for example), and this matters to you (you care), are you willing to help the Philippines?

I generally do my international charitable contributions through the Red Cross. My money's tight now (I'm about to spend the spring in Japan, doing some informal study of the culture behind the martial and healing arts I've studied), but if $20 or so can be leveraged to some good, I could PayPal you or something.

Unlike EVERY other species on the planet, we allow our weak to survive and persist.

But the very question of who's weak is changed by technology.

I was born with some sort of pigeon-toed or club-foot defect. I'm not sure exactly what, because as an infant I wore a brace that twisted my legs back into "normal" position, I have no recollection of it.

Now I'm a karate black belt who can deliver pretty good kicks with those "deformed" legs. So who's "weaker", me or the guy born with perfect legs but who doesn't use them for anything more strenuous for a walk to the fridge for another beer?

I personally do have Adblock installed on my machine here, but I only use turn it on for sites that uses ads in a way that are obtrusive

The only ads that are not obtrusive are text-based. Google got it right smack in the center of the bullseye with that one.

Banner ads suck. (Animated banner ads, of course, go far beyond sucking, and the just damnation that awaits those who use them is terrible to contemplate.) Simple text links that tell me, "this message brought to you by EarthTouch Shiatsu and Catonsville Seido Karate" don't bother me at all and are occasionally (very occasionally) even useful.

I am starting up a new gaming company that will depend on ad revenue on the site to survive.

Then I suggest you take Google's hint.

I'm sorry that the US public school system is so appallingly broken.

The problem in these discussions is that there is not a "U.S. public school system". Each county (or in some places, each town) administers a distinct and largely independent system.

I live in Baltimore County, Maryland. The public schools here seem to still be generally functional, though varying rather widely depending on neighborhood. Twenty years ago, I was a student in Baltimore County public schools, and I received a better education than was available in most local private schools. I think they've declined a bit since then, though; the population and economic status of the county has changed. Still, the schools in Catonsville (my neighborhood) seem ok, based on the kids I see (I teach karate to young'uns as well as adults).

Just a few miles to the east of my house is the Baltimore City line. In the city (a complete separate policitial entity from Baltimore County), the public schools are almost all broken.

A few miles to the west from here in Howard County, one of the richest counties in the U.S. The public schools there are apparently quite good.

(You can see the cross-county rankings here.)

Not surprisingly, school quality tracks average income of a county pretty well.

For fun, recently, I was tasered. I will say this. It hurts fierce, but it didn't keep me from moving at all.

For fun, a few times a month some of us strap on some thin protective pads and hit each other. I will say this: shots that will knock the wind out of one person, leaving them curled up on the floor unable to move, will have no effect on another.

Just like a punch or kick, the impact of a taser varies widely. Dozens of people have have killed by them; others laugh it off.

However, big bad criminal breaks into your house in the middle of the night...Police come in. Now, do you want a nice or a jerk cop?

Never mistake niceness for weakness, or cruelty for strength.

I've never met a healthy vegan yet.

Hi there! Name's Tom, nice to meet you.

I've been vegan since 1990, and am, at the least, healthier than the average American. Made yondan in a fairly tough karate style just this spring (that's me punching through the stack of boards in that photo); do a 5k run about once a week in addition to my karate training; not at all a champion athlete or anything (though vegetarian champion athletes are numerous) but I'll wager my physical condition to be significantly superior to that of the average /. reader.

Come to that, most of the vegetarians I know always seem to have *something* wrong with them, often to do with allergies.

Unfortunately a lot of non-vegan vegetarians, convinced by the animal products that they need a lot of protein in their diet, go heavily for dairy products - which will worsen mucus problems. (And also are very low in iron.) My own allergies (which I've had all my life, since before I went vegetarian) have definitely improved since I went vegan.

It's not that people past 30 can't think, it's just that it's slightly harder for them to learn. It's not that they can't learn either, it's just harder.

I went back to school to study shiatsu ("acupressure massage") when I was 33. This involved a rigorous study of both Western anatomy and the principles of Chinese medicine. This year, at 36, I took my first class in the Japanese language.

I found it easier to learn now than I did when I was in college or graduate school. I had a richer variety of knowledge and experience to which to tie new ideas; I had clearer motivation; and I certainly had better study skills.

I think the idea that older people have difficulty learning comes from observing people who go to school in their youth, then stop any significant learning for many years; and then try to pick it up again.

The ability to learn is like anything else - use it or lose it. Be a lifelong learner. In those years between graduate school and massage school, I'd taught myself C++, PHP, SQL, a bit of Perl, Java, and Javascript, and some more general technical stuff; I continued to study karate and music and poetry and history and politics and philosophy; taught myself to juggle devil sticks, at least enough to impress young kids...I think I kept the grey matter tuned up enough that new learning is no problem.

There are some areas where certain modes of perception can be best shaped while the brain is still young, language and music for example, but it seems that "young" in this case means single digits. There's a big difference between starting to learn a new language at 5 versus 15, but I think little difference between 15 and 35.

"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then - to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn." -- The Once and Future King, T. H. White

I know you said "without attending to classes", but I'd suggest you reconsider. I'm taking a class at the local community college and finding it well worth the time and money. (A class at a community or commuter college may be much better suited to the part-time student - the intro Japanese class at UMCP is six credit hours, which would be difficult to fit into my schedule, while the one I'm taking is only three.)

I was motivated to finally take a class after my second trip to Japan last fall. After meeting one Spanish woman who spoke four langages, and a Polish woman who was there teaching English and studying shodo, I was embarassed that after twenty years of karate training in a Japanese style, and shiatsu training, and two brief trips to Japan, I knew only enough Japanese to say "thank you", "excuse me", and "please bring me a beer". (Well, and "roundhouse kick to the neck", but that's not a phrase that comes up much in polite conversation.)

The class is sociologically interesting, though - a bunch of 18 and 19 year old anime fans, and me at 36.

Depending on how good this material is, a full body suit may be incredibly useful in a hand-to-hand combat situation, for anyone using a "hard" martial art - karate, kickboxing etc.

It would certainly be useful in training.

In striking arts there are three options for sparring without getting seriously hurt:

1. rely on your partner to not stike full force and to limit target areas. However, accidents happen - you move in when your sparring partner doesn't expect it and you walk right into a full force kick. Ouch.
2. wear pads on your hands and feet. (This is the option we usually use.) This limits what techniques can be used but does allow a more realistic training in how to take a blow.
3. wear armor on your target areas, such as the chest protector used in Olympic Tae Kwon Do. I've done karate tournaments that used these, they're rather awkward and you can't bend your body very much while wearing one, but they do allow for a wider variety of techniques to be thrown.

So yeah, I'd love to have a "soft armor" vest that I could move around in but would stiffen up to protect my ribs from getting cracked. If the price were reasonable every karate dojo would buy a couple.

I don't expect to be able to test that after he gets his next few martial arts belts :)

You could sign up and take class with him. It'll help with that extra 40 pounds, and martial arts training is one of the few athletic activities that parents and kids can do together. We have several families where one of the parents trains along with one (or more!) of the kids, and they seem to get a lot out of it.

While some of them are not divided more than Avogadro, thus, by probability, producing a few molecules of the substance in the water, this is meaningless....It is, at best, literally equivilent to handing someone a grain of salt and saying 'Put this in a glass of water and you'll get better'.

No. I don't mean a few molecules, I mean that some contain active ingredients in significant concentrations, of the order of 0.1% or more. Sometimes a lot higher - this, for example, is a 10% extract of arnica that I (quite anecdotally) find useful for bruises. (An occupational hazard.)

A "1X" solution is 10% concentration. If you Google for homeopathic 1X, you'll see many products made with these high-concentration extracts.

That's not to say that do or do not work. I don't consider myself a defender of homeopathic theory in any way. But I'm really disappointed to see self-described "skeptics" continually misrepresent it. Not all homeopathic remedies are extremely dilute.

Nor is it considered, in homeopathic theory, enough to simply create a very dilute tincture, like putting a grain of salt in a glass of water; first a fairly concentrated salt water would be prepared, then that solution diluted, and so on. The solution must be "prepared", shaken in some certain way, at every step. That theory may be absolute bullshit, indeed that's where I'd put my money. But intellectual honesty requires that we criticize it as it is, not set up strawmen.

Spoken like someone who's never known anyone with a mental illness!

Don't tell me who or what I don't know. Among my friends and acquintances are "bipolars", "depressives", at least two "PTSDs", two who could be probably be diagnozed "multiple personality disorders", one sure and one probable "borderline personality disorders", and a few "panic disorders". Oh, and of course a few "addicts", anyone in the Baltimore area knows some former junkies. And a "co-dependant". (Some of these overlap, of course.)

A few of these people are former lovers. I've talked them through panic attacks, PTSD flashbacks, and the really really strong desire to fall off the wagon. Another was a housemate, who I visited several times after she checked herself into the local mental hospital.

And I've had clients and students with various "mental illnesses".

I myself could probably have found someone to diagnose me as "depressive", or perhaps the more trendy "bipolar", at least until a few years ago. My doctor dropped Prozac hints at me on more than one occasion. I'm feeling much better now, thanks.

if you've ever known someone who is actually manic-depressive, or suffers from true clinical depression, you know it's as real as heart disease.

The question is not whether it's real. The problems are very real. The question is whether it's useful to label problematic states of consciousness, ideas, and behaviors as "diseases" or "illnesses", or whether other ways of thinking of them may be more useful.

My frustration with the idea that these problem are disease states comes not from ignorance, but from seeing how unhelpful - indeed, sometimes harmful - the "disease model" has been for most of these people.

And there's a word for something that can improve a subjective experience of health in subjects without any causal relationship. It's "Placebo".

Ah, but who says there's no causal relationship between my toothpaste rubbing and my headache relief? Maybe in my rubbing I'm hitting an acupuressure point that changes blood flow, and the studies used a slightly different rubbing technique. Maybe I've got some rare biochemical quirk where flouride deficiency gives me headaches, and I'm abosorbing trace amounts through my skin. The unknowns are many, the knowns few.

What they don't understand is that Placebos actually work too, and in many cases they work really well, as does prayer and even sheer bloody mindedness, both of which are cheaper than homeopathic remedies.

Well, many homeopathic remedies do indeed contain substantial amounts of active ingredients.

But for those that are (exclusive of the anomalous result discussed in TFA) nothing but inactive ingredients, think of them as the same category as an aid to prayer: prayer beads, Lourdes water, a Kwan Yin statue, whatever. Prayer often involves one of these, and/or going to (and quite probably financially supporting) a local church/synagogue/whatever. Not free.

"Sheer bloody mindedness" is fine too, but is naturally rare. I can help train it if you want to sign up for some classes, but they are not free. (And yeah, it can help. Ooops, I'm being anecdotal again.)

I don't recommend or use those extremely dillute homepathic remedies myself. (I do use some remedies that contain substantial amount of herbal extracts.) But if it's working for someone, hey, whatever gets you through. (Provided there aren't dangers they're unaware of.)

But that's why the baseline for real medicines is "better than placebo", which is a lot higher a baseline than "better than nothing".

Thing is, sometimes, on an individual case-by-case basis, a placebo can be better than "real" medicine; the Demerol doesn't work but the sugar pill does. For that person, in that moment, what is "real" medicine?

My point is just this: if you're trying to answer the question "What will releive symptoms the best in this population?" systematic evidence is very helpful. If you want to answer the question "What will releive this person's symptoms the best", that one person is by defintion anecdotal.

You had someone ask you to not work on any outside code for a CONTRACT position?

Not just no outside code, but according to a strict reading pretty much no outside anything, as I was supposed to direct my "full productive effort" to my corporate masters. As I read that, I couldn't even teach my karate classes in the evenings. It was the contracting company's standard wording.

This was in Annapolis MD, which would generally be part of the D.C. Metro area, in 2000. So neither a backwater nor a bust time, just a stupid contract. (Which I told them wasn't going to fly, and made them change it.)

As far as "shitty contract job[s]", I found contract work to be generally less shitty than "permanent" positions - better pay, less politics and more flexibility. YMMV.

Where do you draw the line? Shouldn't you also avoid tables for the benefit of those still using NCSA Mosaic? What about the small but significant CERN Linemode demographic?

I don't have any Mosaic hits in my logs. I do have Netscape 4 and IE 4 hits - not a lot, but some. If you want the maximum audience for your content, that suggests where to draw the line.

Now that modern, standards-compliant browsers like Firefox exist and are freely available, it's more than about time to knock Netscape 4.7 on the head and tell those still using it to upgrade or be left behind.

Firefox requires a 233Mhz Pentium, and recommends a 500MHz box with 128 MB. Believe it or not, there are still people out there with computers that don't meet the required, much less recommended, spec.

For my personal websites, it's all content, and there's no reason to leave anyone behind for the sake of eye candy.

For the site that pays the bills, our members are antique dealers, and (at least according to the boss) as a whole they are a significantly non-tech-savvy bunch, so suggesting any sort of upgrade is right out. (Maybe antique dealers like using "antique" software and hardware, I dunno.) I pitch it to the lowest common denominator. I keep Javascript to a minimum and don't use the newest features.

I've done a little side work in the computer field, once for a social worker FOAF (now wife-OAF) who was setting up a computer lab in the neighborhood where she worked, once for a former client of a former employer who hired me to do a little extra development.

These days I've doing software for this site part-time, and my side jobs are my shiatsu and massage practice and karate program (which is actully showing potential of moving from an expensive hobby to at least breaking even this year). And I've been talking lately with some folks about doing a little website set-up and hosting.

But back before the PC revolution (yes, young'ns, there was a time before everyone had their own machine), in the late 70s/early 80s my father had a reasonably profitable side job running off mailing labels for organizations.

A church group or a local union chapter could get a discount by sorting their mail by zip code, so my father would get time on the computers at his day-job employer and run off a batch of sorted mailing labels. I remember helping him carry the boxes of punch cards, and getting to go into the machine room with its whirring tape drives, clattering line printer, heavy-duty A/C...ah, geek nostalgia.

it's likely that this particular programmer had greater-than-average privilege to Apple documentation, OS source, engineers who developed the source, and future business plans.

If Apple can show that such inside information was used, they have a case. At best, though, it's a rebuttable presumption, not grounds for automatic seizure of copyright.

More importantly, Apple may decide in the future to partner with Netflix (not saying they were going to, just that it could have been an option). So, if they did, Apple competes with their employee.

Future possibility of competition can't rationally be a criterion. My employer might decide to get into any line of business at some future date. They might buy out a martial arts school someday, does that mean I'm competing with them now?

What would they say? "We didn't have this agreement with Netflix when you released your shareware, but we do now so now we're going to take possession of it."?

In a rational system, they would say, "As of $DATE we will have this agreement, and any further work you do after that on your program would be competition. What you do before $DATE - sell the code to someone (we'll offer $PRICE!), open source it, burn it, whatever - is your choice as a free adult citizen of this great nation of ours."

I'd definitely recommend martial arts training, though you'll have to do your research to find a good school. (E-mail me if you want some specific pointes on what to look for.) Not only will a good style improve your strength, stamina, and flexibility, it will also develop your mind and spirit.

Shameless self promotion: my dojo's web site.