Slashdot Mirror

Interesting. The religious killings you speak against are, of course, an expression of bigotry.

Really? Is it?

To follow the argument of Hitchens that it is only thanks to the taming of religion by modern society that we do not have crusades, witch burnings, inquisitions and other large-scale religious killings, not to mention all the variations of small-scale killings (death penalty for "crimes" against the faith).

In the west. Always remember that. For the majority of humanity today, religious killings are pretty much a perfectly normal thing still.

Welcome to the difference between the western world, and the Islamic world.

Western world: "I may disagree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
Islamic world: "Die for insulting our moon god!"

I suppose we should add "...unless some backwards 7th century scumwad threatens to carbomb us" to the Western side though.

Seriously though, this is getting ridiculous. As Christopher Hitchens pointed out a couple columns ago, " As Western Europe has already found to its cost, local Muslim leaders have a habit, once they feel strong enough, of making demands of the most intolerant kind. Sometimes it will be calls for censorship of anything "offensive" to Islam. Sometimes it will be demands for sexual segregation in schools and swimming pools. The script is becoming a very familiar one. And those who make such demands are of course usually quite careful to avoid any association with violence. They merely hint that, if their demands are not taken seriously, there just might be a teeny smidgeon of violence from some other unnamed quarter ..."

Feisal Rauf, Muslim Brotherhood member, Hamas stooge, etc... has just gone down the line of every other Imam before him in this regard. If you didn't think his whole big speech last night wasn't simply threatening violence if he doesn't get his way, then you're not thinking clearly.

I could also offer a nicely formatted treatise comparing Mohammed point-by-point to scum like Warren Jeffs and L. Ron Hubbard and David Koresh as well, but that'll keep for another day.

Same with China.
Rants on Fox over democracy and freedom, $ in reality.
http://www.slate.com/id/2184197/

I don't know how old you are, but I currently have less freedom of speech and other rights than I did 30 years ago. And that's mostly on account of people born to William Lashua's generation and their misuse of the US military.

Ah, but you also forget that most of these people who have misused the military either "had other priorities" than serving their country and used their connections to get repeated deferments, claimed they had a boil on their asses that prevented them from serving, or got a cushy air force position and then went AWOL when even that was too hard.

Mr. Lashua's a hero and deserving of respect. Save your (justified, right, correct, and intelligent) scorn for the clowns screaming "Support Our Troops" while running the military into the ground.

Dude, I just DID refute them. This amateur partisan hack used made up figures, and a simple sanity check shows us that for the higher figures to be true, the entire mall would have to be packed shoulder to shoulder, and you would not be able to see so much green grass. People at the Beck rally were laying out blankets to sit on. If there were as many people as Beck claims, there would have been no room for sitting.

Here is an explanation of how crowd size is estimated by professionals. Today, we use aerial photography and computers to make highly accurate crowd size estimates.

http://www.slate.com/id/2265622/

Gmails defaults to HTTPS and gmail is the most popular one.

Yes. And there are lots & lots of crooked certificate authorities out there that would happily issue a fake certificate for gmail. One of them is Eitisalat, the UAE cell phone carrier that sent spyware to all their blackberry users.

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/08/open-letter-verizon
http://www.slate.com/id/2265204/

Feel safer about your https now? Most people don't check the certificates...

If licensing the proprietary standard ends up costing more than the bandwidth/time it saves, I can't see it being a very popular choice.

Google paid $106 million for On2.

The enterprise cap on H.264 licensing is $5 million a year.

Bandwidth for YouTube costs $1 million a day. Do You Think Bandwidth Grows on Trees?

For the foreseeable future, user generated content will be H.264. The HD "Flip" camcorder at $150. Professional content as well - supported by Flash, Netflix, the iPhone, etc.

That implies a cost for storage and trans-coding.

I don't see any savings in WebM.

Any nurse who does something like this is purely incompetent.

You are barking up the wrong tree.

Here is a must read. Quote: 'You change the culture by giving people new tools that actually work. The old culture has tools, too, but they're foolish: "Be more careful," "Be more diligent," "Do a double-check," "Read all the medical literature." Those kinds of tools don't really work.'

The NYT is correct. I read the conservative attacks on Obama's health care plan in the WSJ, including Betsy McCaughey. I also read about the health plan in the New England Journal of Medicine.

For McCaughey, or anyone else, to claim that these were or would be anything like "death panels" to decide when to let someone die for cost-control purpose, is a lie. The conservatives lied. You can go to places like Factcheck.org to confirm that.

I guess when you close your eyes to everything that doesn't fit your own reality, your reality is only what you make it instead of anything real. I'm not going to go through the trouble of actually linking to these articles, but if you are interested in anything more then conformation bias, I suggest you copy and past these links out and read them. You should also note the dates of the articles and maybe send a copy to fact check dot org too. as you have already mentioned that you have read some of these, I have to ask why you are arguing that the death panels definition must be limited to a narrowly defined concept delivered by the democrats who are also in opposition to the republicans? I mean it's the conservatives making the charge, their attack, it's them who define what death panels are, not your biased opposition sites.

http://online.wsj.com/article/NA_WSJ_PUB:SB10001424052970203863204574344900152168372.html
http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=107403
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/7948878/US-breast-cancer-drug-decision-marks-start-of-death-panels.html
http://www.lifenews.com/bio3084.html
http://www.slate.com/id/2224790

and before you start clamoring those are biased sites, I suggest you stop looking only at sites that you agree with and pay attention to the links as the one is from another country altogether with absolutely no vested interest in the US health care system. A few others are what most would consider a left leaning site which admits that the death panels were more then end of life counseling stating that they would ration health care which Obama already has said it's done already, why not do it in the open.

You don't think Al Franken's libel lawyers would have let him print a book like "Lies: and the Lying Liars who Tell them" if he couldn't actually prove that Republicans lied, do you? Actually, all Franken did was assign a bunch of summer interns to fact-check statements by right-wing crackpots like Limbaugh.

This is hilarious. Are you actually arguing that Al Franken's lawyers are so smart that they wouldn't let him publish a book with falsehoods in it but so stupid that they can't go after the people he claims is spouting falsehoods? I mean seriously, do you think it's anything like that at all? Did you even think that out before making your statement or is that something you saw on one of your conformational bias sites and liked it enough to repost?

Here is a hint, Franken's lawyers said to him- if anything, it's political speech, the most protected speech by the first amendment. And no, the so called fact checkers didn't check the facts or he ignored them completely just as you are in order to impress your views right now.

All I asked for when I made that post was that there was some honesty in this discussion. You have proved to me that it is impossible to expect that from you or perhaps your side. The death panels charge was more then end of life counseling and you seem to know it. You can find more about it simply by searching for obamacare death panels. And of course, there is no shortage of people connected to Obama who reinforce this concept by public policy positions publicly held in the present or somewhat recent past.

And, for what it's worth, this is exactly the same excuse Cheney gave for the phenomenal power consumption of his DC residence, which had a monthly power bill of about $9,000, compared to the Gores' bill of about $2,500 (which includes both gas and electric).

"We collect and SELL over a THOUSAND tonnes of paper products every month. Things might be different in your area but here our multi-million company is quiet profitable from it."

If companies like yours just somehow gave customers just a FEW DOLLARS a month to recycle then I promise you recycling would increase 10x fold.

Instead the stupid environmental movement makes us pay to recycle. What? Yes, we have to pay to make you more money. What's next, do we have to pay to give blood so the Red Cross can sell the blood?

I will never recycle as long as I have to pay to recycle.

I think it is arrogant and counterproductive to Islamic/US relations for them to build this symbol near ground zero

Of course there is no Grand Central Islamic Authority to engage in "Islamic-US relations."

And oh yeah, THERE ALREADY A MOSQUE RIGHT THERE !

I wonder what the world's reaction would be were Jews to build a huge synagogue on the site of the first Iranian nuclear reactor they bomb into smithereens.

Or perhaps the Dome of the Rock?

Bush said that the muslims have the right to build next to Ground Zero.

We would have been dumbstruck that he would have said anything so shockingly obvious.

Call me crazy, but is Star Wars even culturally relevant anymore? It feels like Disco at this point.

Ask your average boy who is 4-8 years old how relevant Star Wars is. I teach pre-K Sunday School, and I can tell you that Star Wars is extremely popular, especially the prequel/Clone Wars stuff. It is weird to get kids whose favorite character is "Obi-Wan". For more details on the how relevant Star Wars is there is a great article by Emily Bazelon called Why does Star Wars still take over the minds of small boys? http://www.slate.com/id/2215160

Apple's multitouch patent is well documented.

There's plenty of examples, I'm not sure why you're so blind to them. I actually quoted Apple's press release which was also quoted in the article so if its misleading or sensationalistic then it is Apple behaving that way. Feel free to discount what you don't agree with even though you're arguing with recent history.

Industry experts from one company all notice that they have more problems in during summertime! Their ideas are corroborated by the idea that hot stuff breaks easier! Barry Collins (the author) should watch out, or his literary works will end up on this website: http://www.slate.com/id/2260970

Hmm maybe we should go back to phone banking. It's not like phones can be easily hacked to sniff passwords.

Oh wait, I forgot, we aren't in the 1980s any more. Nevermind.

I think I'll do my business in person now. I'll just have to make sure the Russian Mafia doesn't set up a look-alike storefront down the street that looks like my bank's latest branch office.

Sigh.

Well, at least I know my currency is real.

Seriously, though -- I once thought as you do, but it's been a long time since "literally" always literally meant "literally". http://www.slate.com/id/2129105

I'm kinda curious how this will work out long term, I'd think this wouldn't get very good designs since people wouldn't do that much work when they probably won't get paid.

On the other hand if you've worked X hours already, than it's worthwhile to work X+1 to make sure you're the best design so you do get paid.

It reminds me of an economist trick of auctioning off a $20 bill. Basically the idea is just that, auction off the $20 bill, except not only does the winner have to pay, but the second place bidder as well.

So if I bid $18, and another student bids $19 than I'm still paying $18 but I won't get the $20. So I now have to bid $20 just to get the $20 bill and break even, and the other student has to bid $21 so they're only losing $1 instead of $19 and so on until one of the participants smartens up and decides the bill isn't worth the cost.

Anyone know of any other industries where such a big proportion of the work is done in the bidding process?

BP is just the liberals' whipping boy right now. They are riding it as hard as they can to drive hits to their worthless whiny blogs.

Oh yes, THAT'S all this is about.

You're clearly not quite used to having a full brain to work with, but don't fret. You'll figure it out eventually, but until you do, try to slow down. Telling the difference between those M's and W's can be really tough on the newbies.

http://www.slate.com/id/2173965
http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v10/n10/abs/nn1979.html

-FL

I shall point out to you that you wrote your post in English. No need to thank my country or my ancestors for that, you're welcome! Or perhaps you are of the sort that would prefer the world to speak German?

Russia is probably owed as much for the defeat of the Nazis as the Americans.

I shall also point out that Islam seeks power and money, and that I am not sure one would find either in any of the "countries" you listed.

Islam seeks submission to God. That's what the word Islam means. People seek power and money. For instance, Saudi Arabia is a theocracy, but it's a US Ally, because it's leaders seek money and power. (Remember GW Bush holding hands with the Saudi Crown Prince?)

If you wanted to knock terrorism into last century, you'd have to do two things: leave Iraq and Afghanistan, and form a new Manhattan style project to harvest energy directly to the sun to end our oil addiction. Of course, those things are nearly impossible for the US to do, since it only seeks power and money.

Real-life cops love the way guns are held in movies because the ballistic accuracy is basically zero when you hold a gun sideways.

[citation needed]

Here's your citation.

http://www.slate.com/id/2238560

Although, accuracy isn't zero, but it is much lower.

"Should We Throw Hazardous Waste Into Volcanoes?". Heavy metals and nuclear waste would just get dispersed into the atmosphere.

Mr. KDawson,

To correctly link to a text only version, use the MySlate feature found here, select your story, press view story, and link the new link. That way thousands of users will not have to press "cancel print".

thanks,

-Everyone

Link without the print:

http://www.slate.com/Apps/MySlate/action/read.aspx?action=read&ids=2259350&sortmethod=false

Mr. KDawson,

To correctly link to a text only version, use the MySlate feature found here, select your story, press view story, and link the new link. That way thousands of users will not have to press "cancel print".

thanks,

-Everyone

Link without the print:

http://www.slate.com/Apps/MySlate/action/read.aspx?action=read&ids=2259350&sortmethod=false

You are on it exactly. Humans are optimized for endurance over strength. Chimps tend to have denser muscles with more long fibers and they also tend to have much denser bones. The 5-8X often quoted is an exaggeration, but in terms for short term force they are substantially stronger than us. There are some details for the laymen at: http://www.slate.com/id/2212232

You're sure there are abuses? well so am I. In fact I have no doubt personally that the abuses far outweigh any possible good that can come of the classification system. Time after time throughout history the US government has classified information for the sole reason that it's embarrassing to those currently in power. Until we require a judge to review every classification for legality (and I mean every one from presidential orgies to black ops) the abuses will continue. The government's record on this is absolutely unacceptable.

I've watched it. But if you think it's "fighting corruption" now, you should look into what the minority Republicans do to filibuster. They just notify Reid (the Senate Majority Leader) that they will filibuster, and Reid accepts that they will.

So, Democrats did the same when Republicans were in power. Why the filibuster is OK for Democrats but not for Republicans tries explain why filibusters are okay for Democrats but not Republicans. Do you say that Democrats can use them but not Republicans?

Falcon

I'm glad you feel that way.

But TV commentators have been fired in the not too distant past for saying similar statements.

I assume you mean the guy who got fired for saying black people have an extra muscle in their hamstring (which isn't true)? That is grounds for being fired, in my book.

Or maybe you mean the guy who said, "look at that little monkey run!"

Here's a fun source on the topic: http://www.slate.com/id/2154672

Here is another article with several links. Quoting: "We've derived stem cells by inserting human genomes in rabbit eggs. We've made mice with human prostate glands. We've made sheep with nearly half-human livers. This week, Britain's Academy of Medical Sciences reported (PDF) that scientists have created "thousands of examples of transgenic animals" carrying human DNA. According to the report, "the introduction of human gene sequences into mouse cells in vitro is a technique now practiced in virtually every biomedical research institution across the world."

http://www.slate.com/id/2254979/

Seems they were responsible for cementing the base of the well and their people were unfortunately part of the accident day.

The United States is not a dictatorship and one person cannot, by law, rule unilaterally. Obama tapped Julius Genachowski to head the FCC, and thus had done more than anyone reading this thread to promote network neutrality. When you consider the myriad issues facing the USA, and how intractable most of them are, it's remarkable a single person is expected to fix even a fraction of them.

Indeed, it's a miracle that politicians accomplish anything at all considering the electoral minefield they enter every time they attempt anything of consequence. Many of these people entered politics with dreams of saving the world, then learned that votes come not from sound policies but from hyperbolic promises and expensive ad campaigns. They learn that trying to do their jobs right garners nothing but controversy, disapproval, and well-funded enemies; play-acting for the cameras, pork-barrel projects, screwing the future for short-term gain, and funding their campaigns with corporate-sponsored bills are the secret to staying in office.

And for that, the blame can squarely be laid upon the people. It's called a representative democracy for a reason: The quality of the government reflects the quality of the voters. The voters by and large are ignorant masses that vote for whatever politician promises the world and asks for no sacrifices in return. Later, when the politician fails to deliver on the impossible promises—the ones he had to make to get elected in the first place—the voters toss him out in favor of the next guy with fancy TV commercials and exactly the same promises.

If you want to change the representatives, you need to change the voters. Start a campaign to educate your community about the truth behind important issues. Get them to ask tough questions and to expect real answers instead of sound bites. Get them to vote not for the candidate with the biggest promises but the one who offers detailed policies. Explain the federal budget and where tax monies really go, and how it might be fixed. Explain the issues that matter most to you. And if you can't find anyone to represent your views in congress, run for office yourself.

But if you can't be arsed to do anything but make hollow demands, expect your representatives to do nothing but make hollow promises.

http://www.slate.com/ is running the thing.
HP contracted the thing out to Slate?
Is there a lawsuit in the future?

Ironically, at the high end most of what prostitutes do a lot of chatting.

What high-end clients pay for may surprise you. For example, according to my ongoing interviews of several hundred sex workers, approximately 40 percent of trades in New York's sex economy fail to include a physical act beyond light petting or kissing. No intercourse, no oral stimulation, etc. That's one helluva conversation. But it's what many clients want. Flush with cash, these elite men routinely turn their prostitute into a second partner or spouse. Over the course of a year, they will sometimes persuade the woman to take on a new identity, replete with a fake name, a fake job, a fake life history, and so on. They may want to have sex or they may simply want to be treated like King for a Day.

Since 1999, U.S. military and intelligence agencies have demonstrated http://www.slate.com/id/2136480 that once data is "out there on the internet" it is still possible to put the genie back in the bottle.

When the volume of released data is large enough, at least some (decreasing over time) portion will remain unreplicated and able to be put "back in the bottle".

And if you think you're interested in keeping your private data off the net just imagine how interested the CIA was in keeping their official lies off the net.

By way of extra lesson value, this example dmeonstrates why it is dangerous to share private data with "Friends of Friends" or pseudo-friends.

It's the other way around, actually. 80 - 90% of a vehicle's lifetime energy use is in driving it around. You can google many versions of this calculation, but here's one from Slate.

You might be remembering the report from a few years ago that claimed a Hummer was more efficient than a Prius, but that's been pretty thoroughly debunked many times now.

Sorry, here's the link: Mother Teresa is a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud.

It's also worth noting that we're currently writing another arms-reduction treaty with Russia, and some Republicans are signaling that they may not vote to sign the treaty in part because they believe that it would limit our ability to develop a missile defense system. (There's a left-biased view on the matter here, I apologize for not having something more neutral immediately off-hand.)

Perhaps you should go donate blood to the red cross. It'll make you feel better.

The Red Cross is doing just fine..

Net Assets $2,559,637,123

We have determined that this charity has a privacy policy which requires you to tell the charity to remove your name and contact information from mailing lists it sells, trades or shares.

They sell my blood for $200 a pint and then sell my name and address as a blood donor.

I'm sorry, but your argument is 99.44% full of fail.

Let's build a toy economy, wherein there are two agents (you and me) and two jobs. You create 100 units of value for every day you spend making widgets, and 20 units of value for every day you spend writing. I create 20 units of value for every day spent making widgets, and 10 units of value for every day I spend writing. According to standard comparative advantage, we should both be making widgets. But you like writing, and do that instead of making widgets. So the economy hobbles along at 40 units/day.

Now let's open up a third job category: slaver. By forcing you to make widgets, I can pocket 100 units every day (minus care and feeding of you). The economy is more productive because now everyone is at maximum utility. It would be irresponsible for me not to enslave you, right?

Now replace "you" with African natives, "me" with American southerners, "writing" with tribal life in Africa, and "making widgets" with "harvesting cotton," and there you have it.

Arguments against slavery should be based entirely on the immorality of slavery. The only reason you're trying to argue any other grounds is to defend the ability of the free market to always deliver beneficial outcomes, regardless of the rhetorical contortions required. By doing so, you're arguing that most societies throughout history took part in a wildly suboptimal, self-immolating practice.

Any argument that slavery always takes the economy away from maximum utility rests on the assumption that there is only one possible maximizing function. But there are many to choose from. Maximum GDP. Maximum self-reported happiness. Minimum number of people below some absolute consumption threshold. A function that maximizes absolute GDP times some income inequality coefficient. A function that maximizes expected happiness over fifty years, or five thousand. Minimum environmental damage. Each one says something vastly different about how your economy should behave.

But unless you begin with the assumption that the happiness of participants matters (which economists generally don't do, because they wrongly assume that people know how to make themselves happy) then yes, you can "improve" the economy by forcing people into a life of slavery.

Expropriating the value of another person's work is generally always beneficial to the expropriator, regardless of whether or not the economy as a whole deviates from "maximal utility" as a result. So even if you could show that slavery is economically suboptimal (which I doubt you can), there is nothing in unfettered capitalism to prevent it from happening.

P.S.: Mises and Hayek were idiots. It's clear that the free market does a terrible job of valuing natural resources. Under the free market, oil, water, natural gas, etc., are valued not as assets but as revenue streams, with values proportional to the maximum rate of extraction. That's like treating a bank account as a revenue stream, with a value exactly proportional to the maximum daily withdrawal rate. Add some Herman Daly to your economics readings, expand your horizon beyond conspiracy theorist economics.

* Fast action on Oil Spill

Oops! You let a real one slip through. I suggest you break out of your epistemic closure.

Come back when the rich aren't dictating the government agenda and while getting huge for tax breaks both personally, and for their private interests.

You have no understanding of the causes of poverty. The single biggest predictor of whether you'll die in poverty is if you were born into poverty. That's just the sad truth. By your logic, the "bad choice" was being born.

The real world is far more complicated than your simple preconceptions. I suggest you break out of your epistemic closure.

But casting him as an intellectual and a history buff? Have they ever even watched his program?

He could very well be an intellectual and history buff, who happens to become an emotional demagogue once he's in front of the camera.

In that case, he's a pathological liar.

Show me a single instance of government regulation of the internet -ever- increasing freedom and having a truly positive end.

Since the government sort of took the initiative in creating the thing in the first place, I'm not sure how to comment to that. I can tell you an example where deregulation had the opposite effect, where telling carriers that they didn't have to lease their lines to competing companies set up local monopolies and discouraged further development beyond high-rent urban areas. It's also sort of funny that we're discussing giving the FTC power to restrict throttling on certain content, and you're trying to tell us that this is what leads to... the FTC censoring certain content. That's a bit like telling me I need to go South to get to Canada from Houston, because eventually I'll swing all the way around the globe.

Regulation breeds monopolies and big businesses that are 'too big to fail'.

It's just the opposite, unless you don't consider antitrust laws to be regulation. We have large investment banks in control of much of our trading sector because we stopped deciding at some point that too-big-to-fail entities were in violation of monopoly laws. You should see how we used to break up large companies, even if they didn't control 100% of the market. It's sort of amazing that after a heavy downturn in the market that came about largely because of commodities being traded unregulated in a sort of a shadow market that people somehow believe that government regulation NEVER improves the market.

Daniel Gross does a decent job of highlighting the Chicken Little effect of regulation on Wall Street here. But of course, this was a discussion about the internet, not Wall Street. In order to believe that further regulation will hurt the development of the internet, you sort of have to believe that there's already healthy competition in the American broadband market, that local monopolies don't exist, that customer service isn't getting worse as the ISPs get lazy on lack of competition, and that the rest of the world isn't slowly smoking us on improving network speeds. But obviously if we'd just get out of Comcast's way, then the internet will be just fine, right?

Some old school geeks have issues with a technologies that an average joe can use. Makes them feel inadequate.

"Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will want to use it." -- attributed to George Bernard Shaw.

The problem is not with "technologies that an average joe can use", it's with technologies that restrict above-average Joes and Janes.

There are in fact a lot of "average joes" using GNU/Linux and other Free Software systems out there. The beauty is that when people who are not average Joes gets their hands on one, they can do above average things with them. This is not an option with walled-garden, information appliances of the sort marketed by Apple.

Apple is the last of the true PC companies left.

No. Apple makes "information appliances", not PCs. The hallmark of a personal computer is that it was personal -- the owner, not the manufacturer, had control.

The iPad is all Jobs, no Woz; it's marketroid, not hacker.

However, I would feel happy if I had it, and people are willing to pay for happiness.

Of course Apple wants you to believe that you would feel happy if you had it. And perhaps you would feel a shallow sort of sham happiness (mostly a placebo marketing effect) for a few days, or even a few weeks, if you had one.

But no material thing -- not an iPad, not a brand new sports car, not an official Red Ryder, carbine action, two-hundred shot range model air rifle -- will make you truly happy. Nor will other people, who have this annoying tendency to change, to disappoint your expectations, to get old and sick and to die.

The good news is that, knowing this, you can stop wasting so much time and energy looking for the things and relationships that are finally going to make you happy. Nothing outside yourself will do it.

Meanwhile, while neither is going to bring me happiness, when looking for tools I prefer actual general-purpose computers to information appliances designed for passive consumers. Fsck the iPad and all the other gilded cages that come out of Apple.

Yeah, I read the book and I saw the commercial. Ironic.

This week, Slashdot featured a really good article form Slate that ended with this quote:

Steve Wozniak has said that he pre-ordered three iPads, two for himself and one for a friend. This is a testament to his incredible good nature and his loyalty both to the firm that marginalized him in the 1980s and to a friend, Jobs, who refused to write a foreword for his memoirs. Yet somewhere, deep inside, Wozniak must realize what the release of the iPad signifies: The company he once built now, officially, no longer exists.

That last sentence is really the core problem here. We were used to Steve Wozniak's Apple and we were in love with that Apple. Now the only Apple left is Steve Job's Apple. Times have changed but before we cast acerbic words at Jobs you must acknowledge he has led the company in a very profitable direction. Could he have done that while adhering to Wozniak's "open" idealism? That's the real debate here.

That is where your knowledge of history is askew. Steve Wozniak didn't build Apple. He built a computer which Steve Jobs leveraged to build a corporation. Steve Jobs and a group of talented venture capitalists, not to mention dozens of teams of engineers built Apple. Wozniak knows this as well.

Yeah, I read the book and I saw the commercial. Ironic.

This week, Slashdot featured a really good article form Slate that ended with this quote:

Steve Wozniak has said that he pre-ordered three iPads, two for himself and one for a friend. This is a testament to his incredible good nature and his loyalty both to the firm that marginalized him in the 1980s and to a friend, Jobs, who refused to write a foreword for his memoirs. Yet somewhere, deep inside, Wozniak must realize what the release of the iPad signifies: The company he once built now, officially, no longer exists.

That last sentence is really the core problem here. We were used to Steve Wozniak's Apple and we were in love with that Apple. Now the only Apple left is Steve Job's Apple. Times have changed but before we cast acerbic words at Jobs you must acknowledge he has led the company in a very profitable direction. Could he have done that while adhering to Wozniak's "open" idealism? That's the real debate here.

To not show how to have safe sex is pretty much to rely on either teaching the kids nothing and let them learn the hard way, or teach abstinence in the schools. Problem is, abstinence doesn't work. This has been shown many times.

And to not show any safe sex information is worse, as shown in in China where they don't teach much about safe sex and this leads to many unwanted pregnancies. Teens are bombarded with images and messages of sex every day, even in places like the supermarket where the latest issues of magazines like Cosmo, scream sex on their covers for all to see. Then you have ads from companies like American Apparel. These images just play on teenage hormones so teens need to learn this since it's thrown at them so much and so often. And we can already see what happens if we don't.

Columbine was NOT about being bullied. Harris was a psychopath, he was not bullied, and he was not part of the "trenchcoat mafia". That is all myth spread by the misinformation going around shortly after the incident.

http://www.slate.com/id/2099203/

Search for "columbine motives" and you'll find many more articles correcting that misinformation.