Slashdot Mirror

So slashdot was sold to Andover.net on n June 29, 1999 for $1.5 million in cash and $7 million in Andover stock at the IPO price (see ultra depressing GeekNet stock chart)

Winamp was sold to AOL on June 1999, for $80m.

With CmdrTaco's bitterness, I can't help but see this quote apply from Justin Frankel (founder of Winamp and later gnutella):

"For me, coding is a form of self-expression. The company controls the most effective means of self-expression I have. This is unacceptable to me as an individual, therefore I must leave." - from a blog posting announcing his resignation from AOL

Cmdr, you should sit down with Justin and compare notes...

Single page instead of page 2 only

Here's the link to page 1 for the extremely laz—editors: [Filter error: That's an awful long string of letters there.].

TFA does a pretty good job of explaining why. Here's something I'd like to add: no, correlation does not imply causation, in the strict mathematical meaning of "imply"; in mathematical parlance, "A implies B" means that if A is true, B will always be true as well, and of course "X is positively correlated with Y" does not mean "an increase in X causes an increase in Y." But there's another meaning of "imply," and, like the common confusion about the meaning of the word "theory" in creationist arguments, it causes a lot of problems.

In common usage, "imply" carries a lot of ambiguity with it. In fact, it's almost never used to connote mathematical certainty. If you ask me, "Did John say he stole my money?" and I reply, "He implied that he did," that is a very different response from "Yes, that's what he said." In this usage, "A implies B" means that A is something which increases our estimate of the probability of B; if A is true, we're more likely to believe that B is true as well than if we had no information about A at all.

And in this sense, yes indeed, correlation does imply causation, and if you don't understand this then you should probably stop pretending that you understand the English language. Furthermore, it makes perfect mathematical sense. If you have data on both A and B, then if you can show a positive correlation, the hypothesis of a causal relationship will be much, much stronger than if you can't. And if you show a negative correlation, then forget about it. In other words, while "correlation implies causastion" isn't true in mathematical terms, the converse statement, "causation implies correlation," is true. Correlation is necessary though not sufficient for establishing causation.

Perhaps most importantly, every author of every peer-reviewed paper published in a respectable journal knows this. Next time you read some pop-sci reporting on any study in any field, and are tempted on that basis to dismiss it with "Correlation isn't causation, don't those dumb scientists know that?" ... stop. Think. Read the abstract. And if you want to discuss the results in any detail, read the paper, and understand the methodology. If it's paywalled, find a way to get access (I guarantee you that you can). And if you're unwilling to do this, then you should probably just keep quiet, because you do not know what you need to know to form an informed opinion.

BTW, the link in the summary goes to the second page of a two-page article. Here is a link to the single-page version.

1) you are forced to accept dollars at face value for services and trades.

A small nit to pick: this is not technically true. You have to accept currency in settlement of any debts that are owed to you, but you are under no obligation to accept currency in any other situation.

Source: Slate.

The US has already made the most significant contribution to lowering CO2 emissions (which of course could mean totally nothing, since the CO2 hypotheses is fragile to say the least), Thanks to fracking US carbon emissions are at the lowest levels in 20 years. It's not a little drop, it's huge!

So the best course of action could just be to make sure fracking companies are held accountable to the law, like the rest of the people. Don't exempt them from the clean water act and many other laws. Fix the sleeve leaks, take them to court for hiding the evidence with NDA's where leaks have occurred and in general ensure they clean up their act. At least then the global warming alarmists will be happier with the lowered CO2 output (plants in general will be worse off I suppose) and we'll have a cleaner world.

They're already working on it.
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/small_business/2012/07/amazon_same_day_delivery_how_the_e_commerce_giant_will_destroy_local_retail_.html

It's also worse for the environment because it takes a /lot/ more land for the same yield.

Organic yields are substantially lower than conventional yields and the only way to obtain additional farmland it to take wildlands. According to Dr. Steve Savage who did the first comprehensive study of organic farming for the USDA in 2008 simply converting the United States alone to organic standards would require substantial additional cropland.

        a switch to organic agriculture would require a 43 percent increase over current U.S. cropland, according to Savage. As he puts it, "On a land-area basis, this additional area would be 97% the physical size of Spain or 71% the size of Texas

Taking additional farmland (not necessarily explicitly for organic but the principal applies) is the leading cause of the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. I don't think I need to cite the significant loss in biodiversity and carbon offsets from the loss of wildlands for conversion to croplands. The trade off in pesticide use is more than offset by other ecological costs.

The first comprehensive studies of organic farming came back saying that the health benefits are anecdotal and the loss of yield substantial. I'm inclined to say organic farming should be help in contempt and exposed as simple green washing. I think in years to come it will be looked at no differently than ethanol from corn.

Yes and no. In NYC to operate a taxi legally you need a medallion on the cab. The current prices for the medallions run about $1 million and as such the industry is heavily concentrated among just a few operators who then lease the medallion to the driver (at a price of roughly $130 per 12 hour shift). Getting rid of the call center would not change the dynamics of the industry at all since the medallion regulation defines the industry more than the call center.

At least in NYC. Cities without medallions like DC it would definately effect them, but the cities without medallions already have large numbers of owner operates (and have a completely different set of problems).

I'm a atheist liberal utahn, some would even say socialist, and I'm here to tell you that John Huntsman does NOT belong with that group of whackos. I even think he'd make a really good president.

He'd have gotten my vote solely by virtue of the fact that he's an avowed Captain Beefheart fan..

Yet, with very few exceptions, they have been fairly accurate. But you are right, they ARE "marred by a persistent, consistent" something... usually articles claiming they are crazy wrong and then need to backtrack after they are proven accurate...

I think somewhere around $60M per piece, maybe even more given very limited availablity of plutonium-238. USA already ceased production of it::
http://www.spacepolitics.com/2011/09/11/senate-energy-bill-includes-no-pu-238-funding/
PU-238 can only be bought from Russians (as it was done in case of Curiosity power source):
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2012/08/mars_rover_curiosity_its_plutonium_power_comes_courtesy_of_soviet_nukes_.single.html
Hovewer RTG will be producing heat and 100-200 W of electricity for 100 years.

I would say something like this is needed:
http://pesn.com/2012/08/22/9602166_Existence_of_1200_C_E-Cat_Test_Report_Confirmed/

Your kidding right? You don't know who Alex Zülle, Jan Ullric (2ns place to Lance THREE times), Joseba Beloki , Andreas Klöden and Ivan Basso are?

Cycling fans do, that is for sure.

I had to look up the spellings, but I know all those guys and would kill to meet any of them.

Oh, and all of them were busted at one point or other for doping, in the Festina Raid, Operación Puerto, or other tests.

You cheat, you test positive or get caught in a raid with your name on a bag of blood for doping.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2012/08/24/lance_armstrong_doping_scandal_everyone_was_chating_from_1999_to_2005_.html

Everyone that the USADA says will testify against him has a charge against them that the will get mitigation for, or has written a book they made money on.

If they had some hard evidence, and the testimony, fine. Otherwise, it is just a case of rolling lieutenants to get the Capo by making them immune to criminal prosecution.

Note my exact comment
"Do you know the name of the guys who would have won those tours if Armstrong and those other guys didn't cheat? The guys who were incredibly talented and hard working, but were too ethical to cheat? No? Well neither do I. We'll probably never know who those guys were and even with this action by the USADA Armstrong will still be rich and famous, while these other guys who probably deserved it more, will remain unknown, probably not even knowing that they should have been the real winner."

The idea is that we don't know, and probably never will know, who the best clean rider was, how far down the rankings they finished, and whether they would have won if everyone else competed fair. That's the legacy of Armstrong and those others, we can't trust the exceptional athletes, and the clean ones, who puts in the extra work to succeed fairly, end up just as tainted as the cheaters. Moreso, even if they definitely prove that Armstrong cheated, from his perspective it was still worth it! He still has his (tainted) fame and riches.

Right now Armstrong shows the young cyclists that even the big hero cheats, and if they want to win they have to cheat too, this culture of doping destroys sport and turns otherwise good people into cheaters. I don't mind handing out some deals to take that hero down a few notches and give people a reason to stay clean.

Your kidding right? You don't know who Alex Zülle, Jan Ullric (2ns place to Lance THREE times), Joseba Beloki , Andreas Klöden and Ivan Basso are?

Cycling fans do, that is for sure.

I had to look up the spellings, but I know all those guys and would kill to meet any of them.

Oh, and all of them were busted at one point or other for doping, in the Festina Raid, Operación Puerto, or other tests.

You cheat, you test positive or get caught in a raid with your name on a bag of blood for doping.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2012/08/24/lance_armstrong_doping_scandal_everyone_was_chating_from_1999_to_2005_.html

Everyone that the USADA says will testify against him has a charge against them that the will get mitigation for, or has written a book they made money on.

If they had some hard evidence, and the testimony, fine. Otherwise, it is just a case of rolling lieutenants to get the Capo by making them immune to criminal prosecution.
 

3 Years ago...

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2009/08/is_it_time_to_burn_this_book.html

Excerpt 2nd paragraph: "Think back to the original novel. Comic books are the only books shallow enough to go unburned, the only ones people are still allowed to read. "

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2010/04/fuera_de_aqu.html

Perhaps Dishevel meant illegal immigrants when he mentioned "they".

In only the last 7 years the percent of Americans identifying as atheist increased from 1% to 5%.

And that is all it'll ever be as it's a logically untenable (and angry) position. Agnostic maybe, atheist no.

In only the last 7 years the percent of Americans identifying as atheist increased from 1% to 5%. OK, so we've only finally reached parity with Saudi Arabia - but we were talking about trends.

This is not news. This is Wikileaks publishing uncorroborated "evidence" that matches their expectations about "Big Brother".

Some things to remember:

• 1. The system is in no way secret and there are numerous publicly available sources of information about municipal uptake: public hearings, contracts, etc.
• 2. Most (if not all) of these emails were marketing materials or communiques regarding trial runs.
• 3. There is no evidence that TrapWire is currently in use as described in the Wikileaks release. See the NYTimes, Slate articles (among many others) that investigate the system's actual purpose and use.

Wikileaks has been more or less forgotten by the general public, so it's not surprising that they would take every opportunity to spout sensationalized conspiracy theories to regain the spotlight. After all, what would they be today without Mr. Manning's foolish self-sacrifice? A wanna be World News Daily.

Perhaps it is not feasible (or even desirable) for the /. editorial staff to vet everything that gets posted, but I for one am not interested in hearing every conspiracy theory floating on the web - regardless of the sympathy some may have for the source.

A female teacher received No JAIL TIME/ for Molesting a 13year old male student. So no jail time looks like the answer.

Remember SOPA ?

And how the Obama administration OPPOSED SOPA?

http://www.dailytech.com/Obama+Admin+Declares+War+on+SOPA+SOPA+Author+Caught+Stealing+Work/article23783.htm

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/01/14/obama_administration_comes_out_against_sopa_and_protect_ip.html

But please, don't let things like facts get in the way of your mindless bashing. Nevermind the fact that there are plenty of legitimate reasons to be displeased with Obama, let's make something up.

Unfortunately, things are going the other way. NASA's unmanned space budget is being cut.

The Obama administration plans to massively cut funding for NASA’s planetary exploration program. Zubrin writes that Obama’s 2013 budget would permit the continuation of a couple of projects—the MAVEN orbiter and the Mars Science Curiosity Lab—but would otherwise leave planetary exploration without much of a budget. The space astronomy program, too, faces deep cuts.

The overall NASA budget is similar, but unmanned probes and robotic science budgets have been savaged :-(.

See: this article from slate.com.

. . .I hope it isn't Bobby Jindal.

After the disappointing, and frankly insulting performance put on by Matt Lauer and Meredith Viera (who I watched while growing up as local TV personalities) and the execrable Ryan Seacrest interviewing Michael Phelps instead of showing the 7/7 memorial, and the NOT EVEN 5 MINUTES BETWEEN COMMERCIALS, I'm done with the Olympics for this go-round.

So much this: http://www.slate.com/blogs/five_ring_circus/2012/07/28/nbc_olympics_coverage_meredith_vieira_think_it_s_cool_to_be_ignorant_.html

FUCK NBC. Fuck all of this crap.

Yes, the Mars Landing is much more relevant. I would rather watch grass grow and paint dry than turn on NBC coverage of the Olympics.

--
BMO

The Forbes bankster types are just sore because they got played. Worse, they got played by a geek – someone they underestimated because he wasn't wearing a $5,000 business suit, but who proved by his handling of the IPO that he was smarter than all of them put together.

Zuckerberg already cashed out to the tune of a billion dollars. Why should he care that a bunch of arrogant bankers lost money on the stock? Not his problem. He still has a controlling interest in the company thanks to the Class B shares he retained, so the other shareholders can't even force him out.

Zuckerberg beat Wall Street at their own game, and they can't stand it.

When Google had it's IPO it used an auction system that made the pricing more fair, but did not make the underwriters as much money.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/1999/05/what_is_a_dutch_auction_ipo.html

If you are too lazy to RTFA:
"If the first guy bid $100 per share for the eight shares, and the second guy bid $75 per share for the 12 shares, they only pay what the last guy bid--say, $50 per share."
"Naturally, there is great competition to be one of the lucky few buying shares at the low price. In an ordinary IPO, the investment bank decides who gets to buy these discounted shares, funneling them to its best clients, usually rich individuals or large institutions (pension funds, endowments, etc...). This is a good deal for the prized clients, who make easy money, and for the investment bank, which gets to impress clients. But it's a bad deal for the firm holding the IPO because they could have reaped that capital."

The theory is that investors will be more willing to invest in a company trying to find such a diagnosis if there is a better chance of the company finding it making a profit. That would lead to more resources being spent finding diagnosis mechanisms, which would lead to more being invented/discovered. If you have a better idea of how ensure investments in medicine, feel free to share. I like this idea, even though it builds heavily on the existing patent system, to the degree where it doesn't eliminate all monopoly protection.

They're trying to protect themselves from Michael Moore style lies.

They're "The Worldwide Leader in ~News"

Interesting fact: the age of consent in the U.S. was originally 10 years old, following English common law. Many Americans alive today have great-grandmothers who were married at 12 years of age.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2011/02/16_going_on_17.html

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_nature/2007/09/the_mindbooty_problem.html

Interesting fact: the age of consent in the U.S. was originally 10 years old, following English common law. Many Americans alive today have great-grandmothers who were married at 12 years of age.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2011/02/16_going_on_17.html

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_nature/2007/09/the_mindbooty_problem.html

"I’ve been told things like ‘I hope you have an accident, die and go to hell.’ So that’s what I’ve been up against."

Friends have rejected him. “I used to be a good running friend with somebody who doesn’t live far from here. I mentioned on one occasion that I was an atheist and I’ve never seen him again I came here knowing this was the Bible Belt, but I didn’t realise it was a more like a totalitarian Christian society: you’re either one of them or you’re not and there’s no in between. So I’ve learnt this lesson, to keep it to myself as much as possible.”

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/ft/2012/02/atheism_in_america_why_won_t_the_u_s_accept_its_atheists_.single.html

When the ultra-religious right despise atheists more than gays and lesbians, I'd consider that "hate" even if they won't admit it.

I'm glad your local jail is well-staffed, although I don't know where it is. If it's a good program, it's unusual.

According to the Journal of the American Medical association, prison health care is bad around the country. One of the problems is that services are contracted out to a few big corporations, like Correctional Medical Services, which according to JAMA was providing incompetent care which led to many deaths. Another problem is sheer budget-cutting.

http://www.aaskolnick.com/jama/28oct98a.htm
http://www.aaskolnick.com/jama/28oct98b.htm
http://www.aaskolnick.com/jama/28oct98c.htm
http://www.aaskolnick.com/baddoc1.htm
http://www.aaskolnick.com/baddoc2.htm
http://www.aaskolnick.com/baddoc3.htm

That was the most comprehensive series. Here are some more recent stories:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2009/03/jailhouse_doc.html
http://www.democracynow.org/2005/3/4/harsh_medicine_new_york_times_exposes
http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2010/11/care-prison-healthcare.html

Parent said, "Prisoners receive better medical care than most Americans, and it's illegal to let them go untreated."

It's not true that prisoners receive better care than most Americans. If it is, I'd like to see the supporting data.

It may be illegal to let them go untreated. So it's illegal. Prisons do it all the time. Many organizations are suing prisons over health care, and often getting court orders. Sometimes the prisons respond to the court orders, and sometimes they don't.

If they get arbitrary 10% budget cuts, as they did in Texas, they couldn't improve their health care even if they wanted to.

Check this shit out: a bunch of trans-humanists who think artificial intelligence is the biggest threat ever, so they want to slow it down by working out plans in detail to sabotage Intel. You gotta keep in mind that nerds are nuts, and engineers are terrorists alot more than other people.

83% of doctors have considered quitting over obamacare.

That story about 83% of doctors threatening to quit under Obamacare is bullshit.

Slate had a nice story about it. http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2012/07/09/about_that_83_percent_of_doctors_hate_obamacare_so_much_they_might_quit_poll.html

About That "83 Percent of Doctors Hate Obamacare So Much, They Might Quit" Poll
By David Weigel
Posted Monday, July 9, 2012, at 5:12 PM ET

"Eighty-three percent of American physicians have considered leaving their practices over President Barack Obama’s health care reform law, according to a survey released by the Doctor Patient Medical Association."

What is the "Doctor Patient Medical Association"? Short answer: A bunch of right-wing Republican wackos, like Kathryn Serkes and Mark Schiller, who previously claimed Obamacare would kill off elderly sick people.

"The survey was conducted by fax and online from April 18 to May 22, 2012. DPMAF obtained the office fax numbers of 36,000 doctors in active clinical practice, and 16, 227 faxes were successfully delivered... The response rate was 4.3% for a total of 699 completed surveys."

Translation: 83% of 4.3% said they considered leaving under Obamacare. That's 3.6% of those polled.

But most people who have taken a college statistics course would throw a survey with a 4.3% response rate in the shredder.

They "considered" leaving medicine. What were they leaving medicine for? Real estate sales? Financial planning? Opening a restaurant? There aren't too many other occupations that can bring in a doctor's salary in the US. Doctors are always threatening to leave, but few do.

As I understand it, the controversy really heated up when this researcher started shouting 'SEXISM!' at the first sign of peer criticism. As Sagan said (paraphrased) "If you're gonna make an extraordinary claim, be prepared to back it up with extraordinary proof!" Not assertions that those mean old boys are picking on you because you're a girl.

Is this really true? What is your source for that?
I believe that one of the biggest critics of the original research was Rosie Redfield (who is female).
Redfield is also a co-author of on the Science papers.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=study-fails-to-confirm-existence
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2010/12/this_paper_should_not_have_been_published.html

Except for the guy currently running for president, Massachusetts politicians would not be a bad bet (since it's Democrats that run the state, you wouldn't want to pay too much attention to our Republicans anyway). Details here, but in general we score well on most metrics -- low divorce rate, lots of education, healthy population (especially children). Economically, high income, low unemployment, high productivity. What's not clear is whether the high incomes cause the other good stuff, or if the other good stuff attracts/causes the high incomes.

Interesting thing about Texas (and I did live there for about eight years) is whether they have forgotten the lessons that they learned back in the 80s. Back then, I believe it went: "Please God, Just Give Me One More Oil Boom. I Promise Not to Blow It Next Time."

Here, there's an AP story on Chavez recalling a governor for speaking against his policies.

Reporters Without Borders, also considered a liberal organization, reports several instances of censorship, including blocking entire topics from discussion. It lists Venezuela as 117 out of 179 in overall press freedom.

For me, Chavez is one of the less harmful dictators, but a populist dictator remains a dictator, and anybody who blocks freedom of speech and requires media to carry his opinions is a dictator.

Two cellphone manufacturers enter!

RIM takes one on the chin, and is down for the count!

Google, Samsung, and Android just took a bunch of horrible hits.

The import and sale of the Google flag ship Nexus released Monday has just been banned in the USA by court order obtained by Apple a few hours ago.
http://gigaom.com/apple/apple-gets-another-injunction-this-time-on-samsungs-galaxy-nexus/

Google's strategy of buying Motorola to protect Android using FRAND has been hit hard after six key congressmen visited the FTC Thursday and warned them FRAND ABUSE will not be tolerated in the USA either. Don't you just love an election year?

http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/7/3071117/ftc-standards-related-patents-can-cause-substantial-harm-when-used-to

Then Google has been hit hard by Apple dropping Google maps from Apple mobile this fall. Google looses map revenue and market share while Google is forced to dump large sums into new map display technology to try to convince mobile users Google maps are better.

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2012/06/google_maps_can_apple_dominate_mapping_by_kicking_google_off_the_iphone_.html

Is it really true you can loose your voice if you excessively scream in anger and pain?

There may be a point in the middle of all those scare quotes ... I think you're claiming that the US income gap isn't really growing. That's BS, of course.

Try this report, the first one I came across:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_great_divergence/features/2010/the_united_states_of_inequality/introducing_the_great_divergence.html

The stat used there: a greater percentage of total income is going to the top 1%. It's significant.

"At some point in recent American history, we started assuming that if people are rich enough, they must be experts in all things. That's why we trust Mark Zuckerberg to save Newark schools and Bill Gates to rid the world of malaria. Expertise is so 20th century". link

'Bill Gates has certainly proven that he can make a pile of money, but does founding Microsoft make him an expert or even an authority on education?', bowl_haircut
--

The Halo Effect

He did something that wealthy people are more able to do than poor people: He had himself listed in two states. It's entirely legal to do this, but it requires a great deal more financial resources since you have to travel to the other state(s) frequently for medical exams and you have to prove that you can pay for the transplant out of pocket. There are no legal limits on where you can be put on the transplant list.

You don't have a single counter-example to the fact that exposure leads to better immunity. That's how vaccines work, and its how your body naturally fights off most infections. Protecting yourself from them doesn't help you at all in the long run unless you can prevent your body from ever being exposed to any pathogen. In the long run, you're better off having eaten dirt as a child than being in a bubble.

Here's an article if you want to do some reading though: http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex_health/2010/03/which_dirt_should_your_baby_eat.html

By sending some guns to Mexico, causing violence there, maybe having them come back into the US, and getting people shot? What? He wants to get rid of guns and gun violence, so he's intentionally distributing the guns and causing causing gun violence?

Whether or not that was the intention this time, it's a time-honored tradition, and a successful one at that.

The government did the same thing, effectively, with alcohol during prohibition (TL;DR: randomly poisoning bootlegged alcohol with methanol so that people would be afraid to drink it).

Whenever you want to force policies on people that they naturally don't want, you have to do some scare-mongering first.

So, the premise isn't invalid, though the conclusion might be.

1. A few perfectly innocent people get targeted and all hell breaks loose

Well, it seems that close to thousand innocent people already got killed, including 175 children, and that's the official count: (statistics)

This is not due to the list, but due to "collateral damage" when attacking the target. What I meant is that the wrong targets entirely would be selected.

3. It remains officially in existence, but nobody actually uses it. They rely upon a separate list which may or may not be a subset of the polluted list.

President Obama already takes care of selecting the "sub-list" of people to be targeted from the official list: link

It's just the next step in the US governements Rule by Fear policy...and if this doesn't provoke an uprising by the american people, fascism has definitely won in the states...

Most people don't KNOW, because the media is complicit in this. Whether "liberal" or "conservative", both sides are avoiding shaking the two-party apple cart. If people don't KNOW, how can you expect them to be UPSET?

This is the problem we have in society where instead of advancing thought and morals, we advance an atheist agenda lacking in morals.

Atheists lack a defining text. And people think managing programmers is like herding cats. Unification of agenda under a grand banner is mostly a theist creation.

More simply put, without any moral guide lines we only have survival of the fittest to guide us.

Apparently, we hadn't properly solved the equations for Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma after three decades of study and you suspect on gut instinct that the grand mechanism of fitness is tapped out? Let me guess, you're soon about to argue that lack of a moral code correlates with lack of fitness?

Guess what happens to people with no moral guide lines? Well, you simply need to look at the declining mental and moral health of the USA to see how this turns out.

Bee Eye Enn Gee Oh.

Shortly after the 1983 Korean Air Lines Flight 007 incident I attended some Sunday services at a televised evangelical church in Toronto out of courtesy to the family I was boarding with. One of the speakers they invited was Hal Lindsey. I don't recall the other guests by name. In one service it was preached that America engage in eye-for-eye tactics and shoot down an equivalent aircraft from the Soviet sphere. Nice. Well, America evened the score on quick trigger fingers not long after with the Iran Air Flight 655 incident in 1988. If we had deliberately boarded the eye-for-an-eye bus, we'd now be asking the Irish for advice on how to cool the exchange.

The other sermon I recall rather vividly was the claim that the rapidly rising disease in western society was a sign of God's wrath. He was referring in particular to the number of distinct diagnostic categories, completely oblivious to the fact that refinements in diagnostic category are the hallmark of science making progress. Where we used to have one lump for infectious disease, we now distinguish thousands of pathogens, all the way down to minor strains.

FOX News excluded, mental health in America has probably never been better. I watched the extremely difficult movie Breaking the Waves over the weekend. There wasn't a shred of mental health in evidence in that nasty Calvinist congregation. Every one of them would rather crush pint glasses with their bare hands than seek help for depression. Hitchens was exceedingly vocal about how Mother Teresa defined misery as next to godliness. She did almost nothing to alleviate suffering.

MT was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God.

As society less frequently accepts that suffering is next to godliness, more people seek treatment for minor mental health conditions. The same data you cite reads to me as major progress.

1. A few perfectly innocent people get targeted and all hell breaks loose

Well, it seems that close to thousand innocent people already got killed, including 175 children, and that's the official count: (statistics)

3. It remains officially in existence, but nobody actually uses it. They rely upon a separate list which may or may not be a subset of the polluted list.

President Obama already takes care of selecting the "sub-list" of people to be targeted from the official list: link

It's just the next step in the US governements Rule by Fear policy...and if this doesn't provoke an uprising by the american people, fascism has definitely won in the states...

Well..if the US government (stuxnet for example) can do it (with no declaration of war), then it mustn't be illegal right? /ironyoff

If Iran can do it without a declaration of war, then it mustn't be illegal, right? (After all, what is a string of assassinations and a little planning for genocide among friends? No doubt the Iranians are envious because they didn't think of it first.)

At least they have a clear vision for the future, one that seems remarkably free of Jews in the Middle East.

No. did you actually read the link you provided? That is a cease-fire. It is not a peace treaty. It does not end the war. (It is true that South Korea never signed the cease fire.)

here's a longer explanation.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2009/05/are_we_at_war_with_north_korea.html