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A 250lb JDAM dropped from a MQ-9 is treated completely differently (in the press) than the exact same 250lb JDAM dropped from an F-16.

Because the US president treats it differently too.
He doesn't consider using them an act of war requiring approval from Congress:
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_nature/2011/06/koh_is_my_god_pilot.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/she-the-people/wp/2012/12/10/the-threat-of-drones-ushering-in-invisible-wars/

So, you admit that people are going to try to wound each other, sometimes on a grand scale, even when guns aren't available, and then you say “well, they'll do it less if we don't give them guns to do it with”, but only after declaring that it's not a mental illness that causes people to do this, it's guns?Let me try:

The mental illness is not the problem.
There are mentally ill people all over the world. They don't go around stabbing up classrooms and theaters.
The KNIFE is the problem.
Recently a mentally ill woman in Rhode Island went on a car rampage. She drove her car into another car belonging to a woman who claimed to have a romantic relationship with her husband died. No one died. Horrible crime. But no one died (at least from what I read)
If she had had a knife, there would have been 1 dead (or more, gasp!).
The KNIFE is the problem.
Less knives - less knife violence. Pretty simple.

There, I spewed my rhetoric, balanced it atop a strawman for support, suggested a hyperbolic hypothetical situation for which we can never know the result, and then reiterated my base stance in the form of a tautology. I still don't feel any better about you or myself though. :(

This article is interesting and states that the high point for mass killings is actually 1929: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/335739/facts-about-mass-shootings-john-fund

This one points out that fire was a quite effective method of killing large amounts of people prior to automatic weapons: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2012/07/aurora_shooting_how_did_people_commit_mass_murder_before_automatic_weapons_.html

Finally, I leave you with the fact that there have been quite a few horrible things pulled off in the last twenty years with little more that trucks full of fertilizer and knowledge of chemistry, or if you'd rather, box cutters and a few lessions as a flight school.

Guns aren't the problem. The problem is that your reality doesn't have enough bubble wrap on it.

There is an article in slate written by a parent of a child with Asperger's (now autism) expressing the same sentiments that the condition has nothing to do with the motivation for shooting. ( http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2012/12/17/asperger_s_and_newtown_school_shooting_autistic_does_not_mean_violent.html )

Roughy 500 kids go permanently missing each year in the USA and are presumed dead.

Where did you get this number? About 800,000 kids go missing annually in the USA, but nearly all of those are runaways, intra-family abductions, etc. When I looked for actual figures the best I could find was a Slate Magazine report that found only 115 kidnappings by strangers where the kid was held over 24 hours. Presumably only a small number of those were killed. So I think the actual number is far far below 500.

Pot smokers are everyone. But since 49% of the US lives on some sort of government assistance, it isn't too much of a stretch of the imagination to imagine that only a few percent of the affluent don't smoke pot, thereby pushing pot users into the >50% range, and hence a majority.

Don't kid yourself, the toll can vary.

Going Postal, Pre-Pistol - How did mass murderers operate before the advent of modern weapons?

Hundreds of other mass murderers have perpetrated their crimes without automatic firearms. Frenchman Pierre Riviere killed his mother, sister, and brother with a bill hook in 1835. In 1932, Julian Marcelino, a Filipino immigrant of relatively small stature, managed to kill six and wound 15 on a Seattle street using only a pair of blades. In 1915, Monroe Phillips shot seven dead and wounded 32 with a shotgun in Georgia.

Guns aren’t even the most lethal mass murder weapon. According to data compiled by Grant Duwe of the Minnesota Department of Corrections, guns killed an average of 4.92 victims per mass murder in the United States during the 20th century, just edging out knives, blunt objects, and bare hands, which killed 4.52 people per incident. Fire killed 6.82 people per mass murder, while explosives far outpaced the other options at 20.82. Of the 25 deadliest mass murders in the 20th century, only 52 percent involved guns.

The U.S. mass murder rate does not seem to rise or fall with the availability of automatic weapons. It reached its highest level in 1929, when fully automatic firearms were expensive and mostly limited to soldiers and organized criminals. The rate dipped in the mid-1930s, staying relatively low before surging again in the 1970s through 1990s. Some criminologists attribute the late-century spike to the potential for instant notoriety: Beginning with Charles Whitman’s 1966 shooting spree from atop a University of Texas tower, mass murderers became household names. Others point out that the mass murder rate fairly closely tracks the overall homicide rate. In the 2000s, for example, both the mass murder and the homicide rates dropped to their lowest levels since the 1960s.

A mass murderer’s weapon of choice depends somewhat on his victims. Attacks with guns, fire, knives, and bare hands are far more likely to be directed against family and acquaintances than total strangers, while mass murderers prefer to use explosives against people they don’t know. Also of note: Those who use firearms in a killing spree turn the gun on themselves 34 percent of the time, while only 9 percent of mass-murdering arsonists take their own lives.

Did you know that motorists violate the right of way of pedestrians more often than the other way around?

Hitchens on Mother Teresa; Mommie Dearest.

Nah, those were just illustrative dots where samples were taken!

http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2012/11/29/hoax_site_says_nasa_s_curiosity_rover_found_plastic_beads_on_mars.html

I don't know that we should be calling it a suicide mission though. It's a "return trip to earth in your lifetime is very unlikely" mission.

In the novel, the protagonist Winston Smith's television watched him just as he was watching it.

Interestingly, Apple has three relevant patents. The first involves concealing the camera behind a panel. These cameras could still be detected by disassembling the device and inspecting its contents, and as such will appear in any disassembly article. The second involves actually hiding the camera behind the display itself, requiring a specially-modified display panel and backlight. And finally, the real piece de resistance, and actually not the latest of these patents: A display whose image sensing elements are distributed throughout. And of course, through gaming, Microsoft has gotten in on the action too. (I didn't want anyone to think I was going to leave them out, or single Apple out...)

http://www.space.com/15310-nasa-budget-future-space-exploration.html
http://thechrissanchez.com/journal/2012/3/11/the-reality-of-american-space-exploration-why-we-should-imme.htm
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense

A third rate hack who pimps his blogs... that's all Phil Plait is.

Well, as a regular reader, I'd say he's more "A first-rate hack who pimps his informative, entertaining (though over-focussed on AGW zealotry) blogs."

If you don't learn anything from his blog, and aren't simply blown away by the galactic imagery he links to, then you're simply dead inside.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy.html

/frank

http://mobile.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/11/itunes_11_it_s_time_for_apple_s_horrible_bloated_program_to_die.html

Te hoped that writing a paper saying so would reassure Microsoft's critics in the technical community that Redmond wasn't planning to lock down the PC in order to satisfy Hollywood. And by making it clear that the people behind Microsoft's "trusted computing" push were not fans of DRM, Biddle hoped he could persuade the technical community to consider other, more benign applications of the technology he was building.

snip

It didn't work out that way. "I almost got fired over the paper," Biddle told Ars. "It was extremely controversial." Biddle tried to get buy-in from senior Microsoft executives prior to releasing the paper. But he says they didn't really understand the paper's implications—and particularly how it could strain relationships with content companies—until after it was released. Once the paper was released, Microsoft's got stuck in bureaucratic paralysis. Redmond neither repudiated Biddle's paper nor allowed him to publicly defend it.

At the same time, "the community we thought would draw a connection never drew the connection," Biddle said, referring to anti-DRM activists. "Microsoft was taking so much heat around security and trustworthy computing, that I was not allowed to go out and talk about any of this stuff publicly. I couldn't explain 'guys, we're totally on your side. What we want is a program that's open.'"

The so called "community" is and was rabidly anti-Microsoft regardless of the actual merits of the case. There are umpteen journalists(eg. Farhad Manjoo of Slate), who railed endlessly against Palladium, but when Apple implemented the Palladium spec to the letter in the iPhone and iPad, locked out developers and users from their own machines, the exact same people went "OOH SHINY" were falling all over themselves singing its praises.

See http://www.salon.com/2002/07/11/palladium/ and http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/03/new_ipad_how_apple_s_tablet_strategy_parallels_its_unbeatable_ipod_success_.html

Now we have the slow decimation of user and developer freedom led over the past 5 years by the iPhone, iPad, Kindle Fire, Nook,locked bootloaders on Android phones like the Droid, tablets etc., Windows Phone and now Windows RT. As they say, the first cut is the deepest, the war was lost when the public started buying iDevices in droves and they *still* can't keep them in stock. Now everyone can say if it's okay for the market leader Apple to do it, so can we. This is the harm with the "raise hell if it's MS, ignore and pump it if it's Apple etc." attitude of the community and Slashdot is no different for the most part. If, instead of playing fanboys and haters, if pundits and tech folks actually stood for openness like RMS did, we might have had a different future today.

The cat is out of the bag though. Apple charging 30% of even the services offered through apps is just the tip of the iceberg.

And being big enough that they can get by without even making a profit.

Wall Street is on board with an Amazon business strategy that doesn't require it to actually make profits as long as it increases sales volumes. And if you're in any line of business where you compete with Amazon--and Amazon is in a lot of businesses, and seems to get into new ones each year--that should terrify you.

FWIW, folks, I wrote this up on my blog with a little love sent /. way. http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2012/11/29/hoax_site_says_nasa_s_curiosity_rover_found_plastic_beads_on_mars.html

If you think that's bad, the slashdot article last week that claimed that NASA was about to announce some big discovery on mars was also fake, or at least really REALLY exaggerated.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2012/11/27/nasa_mars_discovery_misunderstanding_mission_leader_excited_about_entire.html

You know whats sad, is the submitter commented that this article was fake before samzenpus moved it to the front page. Apparently some editors don't read the comments either. I'd say it more resembles digg.

The President doesn't have the AUTHORITY to change the tax structure

I totally agree with you, the executive doesn't have the constitutional authority to change taxes or issue budgets. So I wonder, why is the Speaker of the House begging Obama to do all of the hard work for his caucus?

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/11/09/days-after-victory-obama-faces-fiscal-cliff-as-budget-office-warns-recession/

House Speaker John Boehner on Friday put the ball in President Obama's court over the so-called "fiscal cliff," calling on the president to step up with a solution to avert the double-whammy of spending cuts and tax hikes that threatens to trigger another recession.

---

the same electorate returned who returned Obama also returned a Republican majority in the all important House of Representatives.

As others have mentioned, many state legislatures gerrymandered the ever loving shit out of state districts, packing as many Democrats as possible into a single district that is usually won in excess of 70%, and then spreading the rest of the Democrats thinly enough in other districts that the Republicans will still win.

For example, Obama absolutely crushed Romney in PA, yet only 5 of the 18 districts went for Democrats. Obama also won Ohio, not by as much but he still won, and yet Democrats only won 4 of the 16 districts.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2012/11/07/how_ridiculous_gerrymanders_saved_the_house_republican_majority.html

In fact, more people voted for Democratic representatives in the House than Republican representatives. The actual popular vote figure across the country is 48.8% Democrat, 48.5% Republican - and yet the GOP still has a 30+ advantage.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2012/11/09/democratic-house-candidates-winning-the-popular-vote-despite-big-gop-majority/

How about all the money that the developed world is pouring into renewable energy, both directly and via subsidy and loan guarantees? For example, Germany sunk $130 billion into solar power subsidies in recent years. The US stimulus bill from 2009 dumped $80 billion into renewable energy. That's big money right there.

There's also big money to be had in the carbon trade markets. $180 billion worth of carbon dioxide emission credits were outstanding in 2011. If the cap credits is restricted more than the very generous amounts today and remains "hard" (that is, no expansion of emission credits at any price), then there's a lot of opportunity for vast profits. This alone has the potential to dwarf the profits to be had from fossil fuels. But it requires societies willing to harm their economies in order to prop up carbon emission credit prices and trader profits. That's where AGW hysteria becomes very profitable to support.

Then there's the politicians who benefit from the power and money flow of engorged regulatory bureaucracies supporting new carbon emission regulations and renewable energy production. No similar bureaucratic motherlode exists for fossil fuel development.

Senator Barack Obama in 2008:

What I've said to them is that I believe that God created the universe and that the six days in the Bible may not be six days as we understand it... it may not be 24-hour days, and that's what I believe. I know there's always a debate between those who read the Bible literally and those who don't, and I think it's a legitimate debate within the Christian community of which I'm a part. My belief is that the story that the Bible tells about God creating this magnificent Earth on which we live—that is essentially true, that is fundamentally true. Now, whether it happened exactly as we might understand it reading the text of the Bible: That, I don't presume to know.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2012/11/rubio_and_obama_and_the_age_of_earth_politicians_hedge_about_whether_universe.html

These guys are politicians. Part of being a politician is to not annoy anyone who might vote for you, unless you have a really good reason. Privately, both Rubio and Obama might well believe the science is settled and that the literal word of the Bible is just wrong... but why would they say so? Why not just give a non-answer that annoys the fewest number of people?

So, is it stupid and wrong when Rubio does it, but okay when Obama does it? If you have that kind of double standard, then shame on you.

There is a separate provision of U.S. copyright law that prohibits the importation into the United States, “without the authority of the owner of copyright,” of copies of a work “acquired outside the United States.” – Slate

The law is unambiguous:

(1) Importation.—Importation into the United States, without the authority of the owner of copyright under this title, of copies or phonorecords of a work that have been acquired outside the United States is an infringement of the exclusive right to distribute copies or phonorecords under section 106, actionable under section 501. – Importation and Exportation, US Copyright Law

The case is still open, but basically one side is arguing that what ever you own, you don't own it once you take it to USA. After that point you are just a licencee. And it the US copyright owner does not approve you buying the stuff from abroad, you are violating the licence. I recommend you read the article linked at the top to get the picture.

First, the libertarian / conservative approach would be to de-fund public education. In this case, all schools would be private and could therefore censor to their owners' content.

Second, here's an example of right-leaning censorship at a state school.

That said, it is just one example and doesn't prove a trend. Proving a trend such as this is hard. In the 1960's the US government was foisting conscription for an unpopular war onto college-age students. Extreme racism was also still pretty pervasive, including government-supported, in certain parts of the US. Since these things are not happening now, the level of protest should be different. If the level of discontent stays the same regardless of the actual seriousness of the causes, something else is going on.

The BBB is a racket. Don't bother. http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_customer/2010/12/busted_watchdog.html

In California, we just voted to get rid of mandatory three-strikes sentencing for non-violent, non-serious offenders. I'm not uncomfortable to giving someone life for, say, their third rape sentence. I'm extremely happy that we collectively decided to no longer give someone life for shoplifting a loaf of bread.

Don't believe me? Read this

I'll just leave this here:

Obama is a moderate republican

and if the affair was with a subordinate in the CIA?

It wasn't. The affair was with his biographer, and it was uncovered by the FBI.

It does not matter who it was with. The security clearance is contingent on the person not ever being in a position where they can be blackmailed. He broke this rule. That is the reason.

and if the affair was with a subordinate in the CIA?

It wasn't. The affair was with his biographer, and it was uncovered by the FBI.

Petraeus' biographer Paula Broadwell under FBI investigation over access to his email, law enforcement officials say

Petraeus Resigns Over Affair With Biographer

He had an affair with his biographer, which apparently began while he was active duty military in Afghanistan. Extramarital affairs are illegal under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. He'll be lucky if the DoD doesn't bring him out of retirement just to take a star off his shoulder.

that is basically willing to blame anything and anyone for their failure to secure a presidential victory. it is to politics as a petulant spoiled child is to a classroom.

As an ex-Catholic, this is exactly correct.

There are, I think, a variety of things that go into it. You're very conscious of your religion not being as relevant to the rest of the world as it used to.

Abortion is a Protestant, almost a Fundamentalist issue. You could get worked up about it, but you could get worked up about the Protestants too, but you could actually do what that Yeshua bar Yehosef guy said and shut the hell up about it.

http://www.slate.com/articles/technol/technology/2012/11/microsoft_surface_why_is_the_new_tablet_so_much_worse_than_the_ipad.html

Indeed they have, the axis of evil is on the march. Pity it is the Italians, feared by none, their tech out of date before the first shot is fired.

I haven't used skype in ages, Xbox is the only gaming platform I don't own, W8 phones need to be insanely subsidized and when you google for "sales record W8 phone" you get pictures of thumble weeds.

Windows 8 is universally despised and it just a copy cat of Unity and Gnome in an attempt to alienate users.

Maps? MS has maps? Gosh... that should tell you something about it, honestly didn't know they had.

Office... they had that for over a decade, for matter they also have had phones etc etc for that long.

You are saying that MS has all the tools to lock people in. Yes. That is what everyone else thought... and then iOS and Android happened and showed that the lockin wasn't as tight as everyone thought. Rim got big because they locked you into exchange and surely that was essential. Where is Rim now? Where is the exchange lockin? GONE! Suddenly every boss has a macbook and insists the office systems work with it and screw MS attempts to create a windows only network.

I have no doubt that MS would love to see the parents posts brainfart happen for real but they had two decades to get it done, why should they succeed now when for the first time there is some serious competition and the computing landscape has changed forever?

No doubt oztiks grandparent was in that bunker, grasping his headless dead leader screaming "come on, we got the enemy right were we want them, we can win it!"

The battle has been lost, all MS can do right now is try to not loose the office desktop too.

[...]

That said, I just wholeheartedly believed Farhad Manjoo's highly opinionated review of the Surface, and I don't think[sic] ... here's the stuff that the guy said... namely that the Surface is a sluggish, buggy faux-pc that also isn't any better for "real work" than the iPad. In particular, MS Office on the Surface sux because apparently it's cool to both hate on MSFT and misspell things here. Pity.

FTFY

Yes, indeed. It is a pity.

That said, I just read Farhad Manjoo's review of the Surface, and I don't think the amount of memory matters for other reasons... namely that the Surface is a sluggish, buggy faux-pc that also isn't any better for "real work" than the iPad. In particular, MS Office on the Surface sux. Pity.

Ironically, there's an article in the Economist this week about how the Greeks gave up on income tax decades ago and tried to redress the shortfall via VAT.

It's true that there are lots of Commonwealth tax bolt holes. This is the main reason why income and corporation tax are ineffective, the revenue shortfall falls onto those that can't afford to avoid the tax but can afford to pay it (the middle classes end up subsidising the wealthy), and people start to look to other forms of taxation, like the OP. To my mind, the answer is to fix the loopholes, not try to fudge around them.

A graph I found earlier today, re: whether marginal tax rates correlates with GDP (which you would expect if "wealth creators" upped sticks to avoid tax, or returned in droves when rates were lowered - there was something in the news last week about a study on this, but I can't find it):

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_best_policy/2010/02/tax_fraud.html

As to the Netherlands vs Greece, well, there are plenty of examples either way. I've always found it relatively easy to see examples of centre-left societies working reasonably well (Austria, Denmark, Norway etc) than centre-right societies (are there any? Australia maybe?)

http://oregonstate.edu/ua/ncs/archives/2010/jan/effects-forest-fire-carbon-emissions-climate-impacts-often-overestimated-0
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_green_lantern/2007/10/dirty_burns.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/green-living-blog/2010/jun/24/carbon-footprint-bushfire
So no, it's not true. Forest and brush fires produce only a small fraction of the emissions that humans do. The _really_ large fires, which occur only rarely, can get up to hundreds of megatons of CO2, while we're releasing dozens of gigatons.

Its stupid to keep the lab animals in the basement obviously, if only from the perspective of setting research back years, let alone the needless killing of thousands of animals.

Manhattan real estate is expensive.

The hospital board can put income generating wards, clinics, operating rooms, cafeterias, restaurants, shops and other services on an upper floor or they can chose to house the animals there.

Research centers often stash their animal labs underground. That makes it easier to store heavy animal equipment like cage washers, autoclaves, and giant tanks of fish, and the lack of windows helps technicians control the light-dark cycle. Labs in California use basement cages to keep them safe from earthquakes, and other building managers like to have the excrement and waste sequestered down below.

Institutions like to keep their animals from public view. After all, even with the basements dry, these research centers are the site of massive rodent slaughter: The several thousand mice that drowned in Monday's flood represent just a tiny fractionâ"0.002 percent, perhapsâ"of all the mice and rats that die for research every year. It's ugly work, even when it's useful and important. Ken Kornberg, an architect who's worked on more than 400 biomedical research projects, points out that basements are more secure from activists and protesters.

Sandy's Toll on Medical Research

When Syria and Texas are batting the same game, they are in the same ballpark.

America signed the treaty, and the treaty supersedes your state laws.

The only treaty signed was the one in your mind.

The enemy is trying to blow up shopping malls and Christmas tree lightings, not prevent those actions. Very few people will shuffle off this mortal coil due to a pat-down for refusing the back-scatter sensor, or from having excess shampoo removed from their baggy of liquids before boarding a flight. Very few people will survive having a building collapse on top of them, their plane being flown into the ground, or standing too close to a truck bomb that goes off 50 feet away at the mall.

I would say that some people are immature, or badly confused, or mentally ill, if they think DHS are the enemy. One might reasonably argue about their necessity, but not their hostility.

This is genuine state terror: Stalin's Cannibals , Remember the Holodomor

.

It went something like:

Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you were publicly lashed tortured by the cultural police yawn don't tell me yet again, I know you aren't allowed to drink, and and live in a tragically patriarchal society, and many of your friends of alternative religions are either being killed or are trying to kill you, and you are likely to be beheaded for offenses which seem trivial in more civilized parts of the world. But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor First World skeptics have to put up with.

Only this week I heard of one, he calls himself Richard Dawkins, and do you know what happened to him? People in the same country as him invited children to stay after school to learn about religion. I am not exaggerating. They really did. They invited them to stay in their own school classrooms to learn about religion. Of course Mr. Dawkins said this will not stand, and of course the religious types didn't force his children to stay after school, but even so

And you, Muslimo, think you have social evil to complain about! For goodness sake grow up, or at least grow a thicker skin.

More here: article with more details (you have to read down the page a bit for Dawkins).

He's a douche about the whole thing. People think he's insulting because he's a total dick when he talks about religion. There are lots of folks who can critizise religion without being jerks about it. At least for me, it's not Dawkin's ideas that people are offended by, but how he expresses them. More proof Dawkins is a jerk:

http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/10/sexism_in_the_skeptic_community_i_spoke_out_then_came_the_rape_threats.single.html

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/files/2011/07/dawkins_watson1.gif

That's OK, it wasn't mentioned in the Foreign Policy Debate, even as Pakistan, so it clearly must be of no real significance.

Perhaps not bigotry, but he's certainly been labeled as sexist: http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/10/sexism_in_the_skeptic_community_i_spoke_out_then_came_the_rape_threats.html

teresa supposedly was extreme fundamentalist...
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2003/10/mommie_dearest.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Missionary_Position_(book)

and for more visual material, all 3 parts of this :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIED4kDWyk8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30ixu0q1oyY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haZliWIHBRI

Would putting up a bill board in South Central LA that says Drive By Shootings are a Felony, would that be racist?

No, and if South Central LA has a lot of drive-by shootings, I would say it's appropriate.

Are you trying to imply that there's a lot of voter fraud that goes on in poor, minority-populated neighborhoods?

Have you ever even looked up voting fraud statistics? You should - knowing what you're talking about is a great way to avoid saying stupid things.

Tell ya what, I'm a nice guy in a good mood, I'll make it easy on you: here's a map of all "known" voter fraud cases since 2000.

Have fun with that.

You people are just plain losing it.

Waddayamean, "you people??"

LOL

Slate did an excellent writeup a few years back on experimenting using non-prescription ADHD meds. One of the most interesting tidbits to come out of that article was that authors Jack Kerouac, James Agee, Graham Greene, and Philip K. Dick all apparently took ADHD drugs "recreationally" to help them write, as did Paul Erdos. Whether it really helped them create all that great work is up for debate, but most of those guys swore by the stuff and they all seemed to pump out some pretty good work....

"The 1980's are calling for their foreign policy back" -- Barack Obama :)

Have a look at Matthew Yglesias' map of the world for the policy debates.

could not agree with you more. as much as i respect their intelligence and creativity and all that ...

but they are still the worst monsters on the planet ... ok, well besides us.

and just because i can't find an article about dolphins raping humans does not mean that it doesn't happen. you have been warned

Taxi Commissions everywhere don't like Uber. In DC recently, Uber has had to defend its practices because the DC Taxi Commission who is out to get rid of them. Why? You have to get a license to operate in DC and that means revenue for them.

So that's just in DC, where most of the "regulated" cabs are broken down piles of crap that usually don't have A/C in the summer and have tons of other issues.

Now, New York? well New York allows a monopoly on hired car services whether it be hired cars (limos) or Taxis. New York says it's to "regulate" theses business so they don't overcharge and so that the streets are not overrun by cabs, of course that would mean competition and drive down prices. What the city really wants to do is keep getting all those fees and regulations to keep coming at you. Let's see you apply, have to take a test then 80 hours of training then a medical test, then pee in a cup. All of that generates jobs and it's considered necessary to be allowed to drive in a New York Taxi with a hack license. Now if you want to own your own cab, that's more fun. If you want a medallion be prepared to pony up big time and all it does is make cab fares higher and squeeze the guy who's trying to make a living. Try a million dollars for a medallion. What that does is create a monopoly on service and New York likes that...

Oh and you have to have a medallion if you want to be able to pick up passengers in response to a street hail. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicabs_of_New_York_City

So, Uber comes along and wants to shake things up and make it easier for suppliers and consumers to link up? Do you think New York is going to allow this when it's so lucrative and bureaucratic all at the same time? Not in this life pal.

Thank the government / crony capitalism duo . Taxi medallions are now worth 1 million $ in NYC these days. Slate had a good article on the situation. If taxi prices were set by the market, you would save a bunch, and they would be likely to support Uber as they might see a competitive advantage in doing so.