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That line seems to resonate with the Slashdot crowd, but I can't recall any case of it actually happening. Columbine was misconstrued as a case of fighting back against bullies around here (including comments below), but that wasn't the motive behind Columbine at all.

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

Can you point out any specific incidents where a bullied kid turned into a mass murderer?

Castro is as irrelevant as ever. Seriously. If you're dusting off the boogeyman of our grandparents, you are irrelevant as well. Oh! Have we all forgotten the gulags that Social Security and Amtrak ushered in?

So what if some third world hasbeen has praised us? So has everyone else in the entire rest of the world, lest we forget.

Now, all we need is a good CEO outsourcing firm and the transition will be complete.

Not necessary. They're outsourcing themselves already.

Or have you forgotten the new Prescription Medicine Reform where people can get "free" medicine?

You mean the one that will cost about a trillion dollars that isn't paid for:

Simply stated, the bill cost a fortune, wasn't paid for, is complicated as hell, and doesn't do all that much--though it does include coverage for end-of life-counseling, or what Grassley now calls "pulling the plug on grandma." In their 2009 report to Congress, the Medicare trustees estimate the 10-year cost of [the republican medicare bill[ as high as $1.2 trillion. That figure--just for prescription-drug coverage that people over 65 still have to pay a lot of money for--dwarfs the $848 billion cost of the Senate bill.

This is typical of Republican governance, they bitch and moan all the time about fiscal responsibility, but they acted in the most inconceivably fiscally irresponsible way again and again during the decade or so they were in power. Now we the taxpayer and the democrats are at least attempting to clean up after the unmitigated spending spree that was the Bush Administration and Republican Congress (Iraq war, tax cuts for the wealthy, "free" prescriptions drugs) and are getting dinged for not being fiscally responsible? If this is a joke, it's not funny.

You're correct, during Dubya Bush's presidential term he ran up a whopping 1.7trillion dollar deficit. That's a huge amount of money.

So far in the Obama presidency he has managed to acquire a 3 trillion dollar deficit, in the first year. I shudder to think what it'll look like in the end.

Or have you forgotten the new Prescription Medicine Reform where people can get "free" medicine?

You mean the one that will cost about a trillion dollars that isn't paid for:

Simply stated, the bill cost a fortune, wasn't paid for, is complicated as hell, and doesn't do all that much--though it does include coverage for end-of life-counseling, or what Grassley now calls "pulling the plug on grandma." In their 2009 report to Congress, the Medicare trustees estimate the 10-year cost of [the republican medicare bill[ as high as $1.2 trillion. That figure--just for prescription-drug coverage that people over 65 still have to pay a lot of money for--dwarfs the $848 billion cost of the Senate bill.

This is typical of Republican governance, they bitch and moan all the time about fiscal responsibility, but they acted in the most inconceivably fiscally irresponsible way again and again during the decade or so they were in power. Now we the taxpayer and the democrats are at least attempting to clean up after the unmitigated spending spree that was the Bush Administration and Republican Congress (Iraq war, tax cuts for the wealthy, "free" prescriptions drugs) and are getting dinged for not being fiscally responsible? If this is a joke, it's not funny.

For those seeking more background on the general insanity of this story and "sexting" in general, see Slate.com's Textual Misconduct and the Economist on America's unjust sex laws: An ever harsher approach is doing more harm than good, but it is being copied around the world. The latter is tangentially related to the main issue but nonetheless useful.

Only girls can be vaccinated; there is not yet any vaccine for boys.

That's because the vaccine was designed and tested for girls only. Girls were targeted because of the greater risk to them.

"Why vaccinate girls but not boys? The authors cite several factors. First, HPV is more likely to harm girls. Second, the vaccine is more effective in girls. Third, the rate of viral transmission depends on the virus's prevalence "in the opposite sex at any given time." If girls are routinely vaccinated, there's nothing for boys to catch or transmit."
-Why vaccinate girls but not boys?

Bush's decision on stem cells might have been a good compromise at the time, but it was one that ignored further science. Read this analysis from slate.com. There were supposed to be 78 stem cell lines available after Bush's decision, but by 2005 there were only 22 that were available, and some of those had degraded to the point they weren't viable. The science was clear that the existing cell lines weren't enough, and even Bush's own NIH Director disagreed with the policy by 2007.

How many "school shootings" in the past 10 or 20 years? Go back to your 50 years and replace "knife" with "gun", and check again. I bet you'll find that in lower-income schools especially, school violence has remained relatively constant. Or else the difference may be that they simply waited until after school?

How many turned out to be related to violent gangs?

How many were actually "videogame related"? And no, Columbine doesn't count, despite the propaganda and misinformation you've been hearing.

The bigger question is why denialists cluster around Slashdot in the first place.

Oh, wait. I know the answer:

ENGINEERS ARE BATSHIT INSANE

(Yes, computer science proper is pure mathematics, and most people employ a bit of both in their jobs. But it's well-known that the only people crazier than engineers are mathematicians.)

Computer scientists [more like programmers self-taught mainly around here] aren't Engineers.

The bigger question is why denialists cluster around Slashdot in the first place.

Oh, wait. I know the answer:

ENGINEERS ARE BATSHIT INSANE

(Yes, computer science proper is pure mathematics, and most people employ a bit of both in their jobs. But it's well-known that the only people crazier than engineers are mathematicians.)

I agree that we should look at this man's thoughts and actions with an open mind. I read his website and his manifesto the day this happened. I came away with the sense of a guy who felt special, entitled and an out-sized sense of his own importance to the world.

I pretty much concur with Dave Cullen's analysis at Slate. He was a guy who chafed at having to pay taxes, though he was God's gift to programming, and blew himself up, thinking society's loss of Him would start a revolution, when he began to see that neither of his grandiose fantasies of self-worth were true.

He burned his wife and kids out of a home. How does that action help anybody or make the world fairer?

• Narcissism/egocentricity
• Grandiosity
• Martyr/injustice collector
• Superiority masking self-loathing (projection)
• Isolationist thinking
• Construing selfishness as selflessness
• Helplessness/hopelessness:

A very insightful and prescient piece.

I caught the satire, I just wish the Supreme court did also in Citizens United vs. FEC. http://www.slate.com/id/2242209/

I think they mean "record" as in "silly, pompous, official organ of the establishment's conventional wisdom and the status quo". And: Did you get a whiff of the latest stink of scandal from the "All the news that's fit to print" outfit today? Yet another NYT plagiarism scandal.

See also: http://www.slate.com/id/2152487/ Excerpt:"What happens when a particularly violent movie is released? Answer: Violent crime rates fall. Instantly. Here again, we have a lot of natural experiments: The number of violent movie releases changes a lot from week to week. One weekend, 12 million people watch Hannibal, and another weekend, 12 million watch Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.
University of California professors Gordon Dahl and Stefano DellaVigna compared what happens on those weekends. The bottom line: More violence on the screen means less violence in the streets. Probably that's because violent criminals prefer violent movies, and as long as they're at the movies, they're not out causing mischief. They'd rather see Hannibal than rob you, but they'd rather rob you than sit through Wallace & Gromit."

You are right of course.

In the below article about Tehran's former police chief, they say that prostitutes wear veils or even chadors so, also, the ones wearing veils might not be the ones one would expect ;-)))

http://www.slate.com/id/2189816/

They still sell the Enquirer? I haven't actually SEEN a copy in ages.

They still exist, including online. Which wouldn't be so bad, except that the reason tabloids are still around is that people BUY them. That's the real tragedy. Remember that cultural crap doesn't exist in a vacuum - people create a market for it. (This is ss even true in politics.)

Wait - I get it. Man evolves slowly, because he retarded. Or, at least experiencing retarded evolution.

Shhhhhhh! You'll anger Sarah Palin. Better call it mentally challenged evolution.

suck it, Jenny McCarthy & Oprah!

"Since then, four perfectly good studies comparing large populations of kids have showed that thimerosal did not cause the increased reporting of autism. The best evidence comes from Denmark, which stopped putting thimerosal in vaccines in 1992; the rate of autism in kids born afterward continued to increase. "

...suffice to say, by the end of that article, I'd lost interest in the subject. About the only question of interest here, is "what took the Lancet so long?" Physician and SF writer F.Paul Wilson runs a blog at TrueSlant.com: http://trueslant.com/fpaulwilson/ ...where his most recent post riffs off the BBC story about the Lancet article author actually being cited for "acting unethically". Wilson puts it:

The MMR is the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine. The UK's General Medical Council also ruled that Dr. Andrew Wakefield ...acted "dishonestly and irresponsibly" in doing his research... Get this: the guy is a gastroenterologist and he was doing spinal taps on kids. He paid kids and his son's birthday party £5 each for blood. His so-called research was published in 1998 in the respected journal The Lancet, but he neglected to mention that he was being paid to advise the lawyers for parents who believed their children had been harmed by the MMR. The board said he had acted with "callous disregard for the distress and pain the children might suffer".

Click on Dr. Wilson's link to see his copy of a graph showing the slight drop in MMR vaccinations resulting in a sharp increase in measles cases. Fortunately, a mere thousand or so more per year will only mean a couple of deaths, blindings, sterilizations, and so forth. Words fail me.

As a rancher (and a geek) I've done some research into this, including raising and feeding different breeds of cattle different feeds. The result? All marbling does is add extra fat. If you overcook your meat, the fat keeps it from drying out, and makes it more tender. If you don't overcook your meat, even the leanest cut can be tender and juicy.

As for flavor, yes the flavor is in the fat, but more fat doesn't mean more flavor. What the cow is fed determines the flavor MUCH more than how much intramuscular fat is present. When growing grapes to make wine, grapes often have the best flavor in poor soil. In the same way, grass-fed beef has the best flavor. I've had the best of prime beefs, and it often has all the flavor of tofu, because they feed-lot their carefully raise high-intramuscular-fat breeds on corn. Zero flavor. But a grass fed steer, even with a lot less fat, has much better flavor.

Get grass fed beef, cook it correctly so you don't make it tough, and you'll save money and eat better steak than the richest of Japanese.

Don't just take my word for it. http://www.slate.com/id/2152674/

the cost of malpractice insurance at every level of healthcare is a major driver of the enormous cost

  Take a read Tom Baker's The Medical Malpractice Myth.

Ezra Klein also has a highlight/review of the book.

Doesn't the onus to follow the law fall on the person providing the information? If a person were to say break into Apple and snap pictures and then provide the pictures to Gawker, wouldn't they be the party to prosecuted, not Gawker? From reading the Slate article it appears that Gawker might be protected if they are not actively soliciting people to break the law and reveal trade secrets. If an individual shows up at their office with the product and assures the editors that they have the right to share this, anything published is fair game. If, on the other hand it can be shown that Gawker knows that the product was obtained illegally or that the person sharing the product is breaking the law, they probably don't have a leg to stand on.

It is pretty obvious that Apple has something brewing by their instantaneous lawyering up though. I am getting a little sick of the play by play speculation however. I'm interested in new gadgets, but I'll read about 'em a few months after they're released so I can get the good, bad and ugly of it all rather than the Jobsesque hype.

And this is devastating for the Chinese government. After keeping their populace docile and stupid,

Clearly, you've never met an actual Chinese person. Do you honestly think they don't know what's going on? No, they know. They just don't care. They're lives have been massively transformed for the better. Especially for those on the coast. (The western interior is another story.) They don't want to rock the boat. Everything is going swimingly for them. Why change?

what they want more than anything else is to be taken seriously as an economic player, sit at the big boy's table and rake in some of that fat global trade cash.

As the world's largest exporter, and fastest growing economy, aren't they already?

So, when one of the biggest companies around says China's market is more hassle than it's worth, it shows them up for the bumpkins that they still are.

Yeah, but Google isn't the biggest in China. It's Baidu. Blogging? That's MSN Spaces. I've yet to meet a Chinese student that does not have an MSN Spaces account. Twitter? I'm sorry. Did you mean Plurk?

Seriously, it's a whole other world outside the US, and you don't seem to know its players.

But we knew this was coming (and hopefully Nixon did too). Can't have all the benefits of capitalism without losing some of the "benefits" of totalitarianism. You can have some of one and lots of the other (like most Western democracies), but not lots of both.

Well that's the line Wall Street sold us back in 1989 while the Tianamen Square was still damp wasn't it? It's been 20 years. While some may argue the jury may still be out on that one (I wouldn't.); it's been long enough to get some indication of how its leaning, Let's examine the facts shall we?

China's GDP growth was at 11% last quarter, for year-over-year growth of about 8%, and just now replaced Germany as the world's leading exporter. (Funny, how does a "Socialist" European Free Market(tm) democracy be former world's largest exporter, but the US can't be? The mind reels. Oh wait. No it doesn't.) Now China is luring back it's top talent, by offering them better opportunities. Allow me to quote from that article:

These scientists were not uniformly won over by the virtues of democracy, either. While Dr. Rao said he hoped and believed that China would become a multiparty democracy in his lifetime, Dr. Shi said he doubted that that political system “will ever be appropriate for China.”

As a Tsinghua student, Dr. Shi joined the 1989 pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square. As a registered Democrat in the United States, he participated eagerly in elections. “Multiparty democracy is perfect for the United States,” he said. “But believing that multiparty democracy is right for the United States does not mean it is right for China.”

Such is the sweet taste of liberty, eh?

No, I believe that China has found it's third way. Not only "To be rich is glorious", but "Sometimes when we [Chinese] have the faith we have to take different approaches to realize our beliefs. The ultimate goal is the common prosperity, but we have to let a group of people to get rich first." Or as Slate put it, "How do you say 'trickle down' in Mandarin?"

And this is devastating for the Chinese government. After keeping their populace docile and stupid,

Clearly, you've never met an actual Chinese person. Do you honestly think they don't know what's going on? No, they know. They just don't care. They're lives have been massively transformed for the better. Especially for those on the coast. (The western interior is another story.) They don't want to rock the boat. Everything is going swimingly for them. Why change?

what they want more than anything else is to be taken seriously as an economic player, sit at the big boy's table and rake in some of that fat global trade cash.

As the world's largest exporter, and fastest growing economy, aren't they already?

So, when one of the biggest companies around says China's market is more hassle than it's worth, it shows them up for the bumpkins that they still are.

Yeah, but Google isn't the biggest in China. It's Baidu. Blogging? That's MSN Spaces. I've yet to meet a Chinese student that does not have an MSN Spaces account. Twitter? I'm sorry. Did you mean Plurk?

Seriously, it's a whole other world outside the US, and you don't seem to know its players.

But we knew this was coming (and hopefully Nixon did too). Can't have all the benefits of capitalism without losing some of the "benefits" of totalitarianism. You can have some of one and lots of the other (like most Western democracies), but not lots of both.

Well that's the line Wall Street sold us back in 1989 while the Tianamen Square was still damp wasn't it? It's been 20 years. While some may argue the jury may still be out on that one (I wouldn't.); it's been long enough to get some indication of how its leaning, Let's examine the facts shall we?

China's GDP growth was at 11% last quarter, for year-over-year growth of about 8%, and just now replaced Germany as the world's leading exporter. (Funny, how does a "Socialist" European Free Market(tm) democracy be former world's largest exporter, but the US can't be? The mind reels. Oh wait. No it doesn't.) Now China is luring back it's top talent, by offering them better opportunities. Allow me to quote from that article:

These scientists were not uniformly won over by the virtues of democracy, either. While Dr. Rao said he hoped and believed that China would become a multiparty democracy in his lifetime, Dr. Shi said he doubted that that political system “will ever be appropriate for China.”

As a Tsinghua student, Dr. Shi joined the 1989 pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square. As a registered Democrat in the United States, he participated eagerly in elections. “Multiparty democracy is perfect for the United States,” he said. “But believing that multiparty democracy is right for the United States does not mean it is right for China.”

Such is the sweet taste of liberty, eh?

No, I believe that China has found it's third way. Not only "To be rich is glorious", but "Sometimes when we [Chinese] have the faith we have to take different approaches to realize our beliefs. The ultimate goal is the common prosperity, but we have to let a group of people to get rich first." Or as Slate put it, "How do you say 'trickle down' in Mandarin?"

"Over the years, Lanier has become a skeptic of that amorphous thing called Web 2.0. He directs most of his ire toward the "anonymous blog comments, vapid video pranks, and lightweight mashups" that flit through our browsers and Twitter feeds. But he's also critical of bigger Internet landmarks, such as Wikipedia, the open-source software Linux, and the "hive mind" in general. It would be fitting to rue Lanier's fate as mere sausage for search algorithms if he had organized his opinions into a coherent thesis. The reality is that Lanier's stimulating, half-cocked ideas are precisely the kind of thinking that gets refined and enlarged on vibrant Web places like Marginal Revolution, Boing Boing, and MetaFilter." article link

Just another cranky failed ex-hip guy who flamed out cuz he couldn't keep up.

Or Atlas Shrugged. Why anyone would believe anything a woman that for all her self-professed love of the free market, showed such a dismal misunderstanding of it in that book is beyond me.

No. No one will fill the void that oligarchs left by going on strike, because they're horrible horrible people, nay not "people," but "imitations of living beings." Oh yes, and unions and strikes are horrible and ineffective because someone (i.e. "scabs") will always fill the void in labor. Brilliant. Truly Brilliant. No wonder, addicted to amphetamines, she died of the "communist lie" of cigarette caused lung cancer, alone except for her one daily companion, the nurse that she paid to be there.

Truly, a life worth imitating.

Well that, or L. Ron Hubbard.

Follow the linked article and you get to the Atta article on his ideas on urban development in Aleppo. What's interesting is that he saw Islamic and Christian culture in fundamental and irreconciliable conflict...and he may have been right. We live in a largely secular society and it's hard for us to fathom its religious underpinning but the basis for much of our Western culture and society are rooted in the simple Christian gospel messages of Jesus which recognize that all people should be loved, regardless of their race, sex, money, age, vulnerability, or power. So ...if Jesus was truly the divine Son of God, then the inevitable result of the conflict is failure for the ideology of terror as a means to perpetuate values which are counter to the Gospels of Jesus. Much of our technology was developed to accomplish Christian-based objectives (labor-saving, health, nutrition, transportation, communication) and that would become especially obvious to a student of that technology (such as an engineer.)

Ummm, the techdirt article is based on an unsourced report - and if you look at the article that techdirt links to, it's a totally unsubstantiated piece of garbage, Are you really going to believe Amazon is losing money on every e-book transaction because of this nonsense article? No "facts" are provided, just unfounded conjecture.

This NY Times article says the same thing: "American publishers chafe over Amazon's pricing policy for the Kindle, under which it generally sells digital versions of best sellers at $9.99 - less than the wholesale price that Amazon pays for many of these books."

So does this article on Slate: "For a typical hardback that retails for $26--say, E.L. Doctorow's Homer & Langley--Amazon pays $13 and then sells it for $9.99 on the Kindle, taking a $3 loss on each sale." The same article also ran in Newsweek.

Here is an article at Publisher's Weekly: "That Amazon is currently treating the bulk of Kindle editions as loss leaders--items it either breaks even on or loses on to build market share in e-book sales and to fuel the growth of the Kindle--is one of the worrisome aspects of the current system."

Seems like a remarkable journalistic conspiracy by The New York Times, Slate, Newsweek, and Publisher's Weekly to cover up the truth. Or do you imagine that all these publications ran stories by all these reporters without making sure that the statements in them had sources?

When someone has pointed out that you've made a factual error, usually the best response isn't to get angry.

Sorry, what? No I don't.

What, exactly, has Apple done to help that situation?

Nothing. The iphone is a closed, tightly managed platform which dramatically restricts what cell phone customers can do with it. Which is exactly the same as most other cell phones from US carriers.

More detailed explanation here: http://www.slate.com/id/2169352/

If the government insurance is as good as the private insurance but cheaper, what's the problem?

Your point is valid, and applies to everything and anything — not just health insurance: "If the government X is as good as the private X but cheaper, what's the problem?"

The obvious problem is, it can not. It can only be "cheaper" if the taxpayer subsidizes it — our Medicare and Medicade spending (which only covers the old and the poor), for example, exceed the entire Department of Defense expenditures already.

Indeed! Dizzy with success of our:

• government schools — where we pay at the top of the world per pupil, but produce highschoolers unabled to compete with those of the Third World;
• government highways, which cost a fortune, but still cause an American — average, including those who don't drive at all — to spend 38 hours per year waiting in traffic (double that in busy places like LA)
• government postal service — which needs billions of bailouts every few years — despite having a monopoly on First Class Mail service

who wouldn't be anxious to switch to government-provided health insurance? What could possibly go wrong? Next up — government provided food (can't be healthy without good nutrition, can you?), shelter (same), clothes — you name it... I grew up in a country, where the government claimed to provide everything — and it sucked. I move to the US, and what do I find? A bunch of idiots wishing to make the mistake, someone has already made for them!

And it is not like you haven't been warned by your own:

I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them. Thomas Jefferson

Additionally, the insurance industry itself published a study (pretty much shooting itself in the foot in the process) showing that the opportunity costs of not passing healthcare reform would greatly exceed that $1.2T figure.

They don't know how. (from http://www.slate.com/id/2234600/) BEIJING—The first time Hu Jing tried to have sex with her college boyfriend, there was a technical difficulty. "We knew we had to use a condom," she said. "But we didn't know how." Faced with this conundrum, Hu and her boyfriend went looking for answers—he from his more experienced friends, she from the university library, where she combed through Dream of the Red Chamber, a literary classic from the Qing Dynasty. The following week, they reconvened for a second try. This time, they managed to roll on the condom but then well, where was the penis supposed to go? It took another week of research before they succeeded in doing the deed. [/i]

"How is it that, with such easy access to information, people still think the crash had anything to do with business? "

More right wing lies.

As the economy worsens and Election Day approaches, a conservative campaign that blames the global financial crisis on a government push to make housing more affordable to lower-class Americans has taken off on talk radio and e-mail.

Commentators say that's what triggered the stock market meltdown and the freeze on credit. They've specifically targeted the mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which the federal government seized on Sept. 6, contending that lending to poor and minority Americans caused Fannie's and Freddie's financial problems.

Federal housing data reveal that the charges aren't true, and that the private sector, not the government or government-backed companies, was behind the soaring subprime lending at the core of the crisis.

Subprime lending offered high-cost loans to the weakest borrowers during the housing boom that lasted from 2001 to 2007. Subprime lending was at its height vrom 2004 to 2006.

Federal Reserve Board data show that:

_ More than 84 percent of the subprime mortgages in 2006 were issued by private lending institutions.

_ Private firms made nearly 83 percent of the subprime loans to low- and moderate-income borrowers that year.

_ Only one of the top 25 subprime lenders in 2006 was directly subject to the housing law that's being lambasted by conservative critics.

In Slate, Daniel Gross, senior editor of Newsweek, lays out the right wing mantra on the financial crisis:

http://www.slate.com/id/2201641

On the Republican side of Congress, in the right-wing financial media (which is to say the financial media), and in certain parts of the op-ed-o-sphere, there's a consensus emerging that the whole mess should be laid at the feet of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the failed mortgage giants, and the Community Reinvestment Act, a law passed during the Carter administration. The CRA, which was amended in the 1990s and this decade, requires banks—which had a long, distinguished history of not making loans to minorities—to make more efforts to do so.

The thesis is laid out almost daily on the Wall Street Journal editorial page, in the National Review, and on the campaign trail. John McCain said yesterday, "Bad mortgages were being backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and it was only a matter of time before a contagion of unsustainable debt began to spread." Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer provides an excellent example, writing that "much of this crisis was brought upon us by the good intentions of good people." He continues: "For decades, starting with Jimmy Carter's Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, there has been bipartisan agreement to use government power to expand homeownership to people who had been shut out for economic reasons or, sometimes, because of racial and ethnic discrimination. What could be a more worthy cause? But it led to tremendous pressure on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—which in turn pressured banks and other lenders—to extend mortgages to people who were borrowing over their heads. That's called subprime lending. It lies at the root of our current calamity." The subtext: If only Congress didn't force banks to lend money to poor minorities, the Dow would be well on its way to 36,000. Or, as Fox Business Channel's Neil Cavuto put it, "I don't remember a clarion call that said: Fannie and Freddie are a disaster. Loaning to minorities and risky folks is a disaster."

* * * * * * * *

The Community Reinvestment Act applies to depository banks. But many of the institutions that spurred the massive growth of the subprime market weren't regulated banks. They were outfits such as Argent and American Home Mortgage, which were generally not regulated by the Federal Reserve or other entities that monitored compliance with CRA. These institutions worked hand in glo

Except those prosecutors were fired for refusing to do their job prosecuting voter fraud cases.

That article is from 2007, and seems to lack many details surrounding this case. I googled up this timeline ( http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Bush_administration_U.S._attorney_firings_controversy ) that seems largely comprised of dates, direct quotes and similar facts. I see a very different story here. For example:

On March 26, 2007, Monica Goodling, the senior counselor to Gonzales and Department of Justice liaison to the White House who was on an "indefinite leave of absence," refused to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Goodling threatened to invoke her Fifth Amendment rights to not incriminate herself

Your quote implies the fired attorneys were dismissed for wrongdoing, but the facts do not appear to support that supposition.

Except those prosecutors were fired for refusing to do their job prosecuting voter fraud cases.

"We've always been at war with Eastasia"

Here's a slate article from 2006:

http://www.slate.com/id/2140850/

"To take a strong example, would it be a problem if AT&T makes it slower and harder to reach Gmail and quicker and easier to reach Yahoo! mail?"

This is what net neutrality used to mean. There is not a single mention of traffic shaping in the article.

I don't disagree that it's come to mean something else. And my point is that it looks like it's still on the move...

Pleo was a toy dinosaur robot.

What made it interesting is that it not only pulled off being a toy dinosaur robot, but it did it without being creepy.

The toy originally promised an SDK, but even without it you could get some limited access to it via USB, basically it had a scripting language which was easy enough to at least play around with it. The company also provided some free downloads to override the normal behaviors which you could load via SD card (like pretend to destroy a city, play hide and seek and such). Those were fun for about 10 minutes.

With a camera, infrared, multiple sensors, something like 26 servos (I forget how many exactly) and a couple of 32 bit processors, it looked to be a lot of fun to the geek crew.

Unfortunately, there were battery problems (mine has never charged fully without overheating and shutting down multiple times), and the SDK never appeared (but some nice folks did implement a scripting tool and there was an OS SDK developed), and then the company went belly up.

Still a neat toy though.

Sparkfun from the good old days.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/68/Old_Sparky.jpg
http://www.slate.com/id/32298/

"Literally" has been used as an intensifier since the 17th Century...

...by illiterate ignoramuses.

You're literally full of it. "Literally" has been used as an intensifier since the 17th Century. Get over it. And before you go off on the author of the article I just linked... He's a dictionary editor. I think he spends more time with a dictionary than any of us.

I came across a proposed way of doing just that some years ago: http://www.slate.com/id/68674/
Basically, every time a patent is granted, an auction is performed over the patent*. Now, 9 times out of ten, the government pays the one who applied for the patent the winning bid*, and the patent is released into public domain. 1 time out of ten, the highest bidder pays, and gets the monopoly. So, the one who applied to the patent gets what the market thinks it is worth. He can bid in the auction himself, and have a chance of getting the monopoly. Plus, capital investment is not necessary to get paid for having a good idea.

* To make sure the one who applied for the patent doesn't bid the auction up, it is made as a third-bid-auction, i.e. the one who bid the highest wins, but pays the third-highest bid. That way, you need 3 entities in cahoot to throw the auction (but the details is in the article I linked to). Oh, and the third bid is of course lower then the first, but that lower price is offset by the bidders bidding a bit higher than they would have in a first-bid or second-bid auction.

Hmm OK. My BS meter is kind of tingling... its possible, but for 25 million TX citizens, plus or minus some illegals, that's like 1500 watts average on a cool weekday midday... Ya'll have a lot of aluminum refineries down there on the ranch?

Why Texas Has Its Own Power Grid: "The state uses more electricity than any other, 44 percent more than runner-up California. Much of this is used by industrial customers such as petrochemical plants and oil refineries."

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You should pay more attention ;-) Here's a couple I've unearthed with very little digging : "Is the iPhone a Failure? Maybe!", "The iPhone is a Beta Product", "iPhony - Why Apple's new cell phone isn't really revolutionary", "Why the iPhone is a ripoff", "THE LONG VIEW: Why the iPhone will fail", "iPhone Fever: Not Everyone Buys the Hype", "Apple should pull the plug on the iPhone" and "Apple iPhone Doomed To Failure -- Windows Mobile 7 Plans For 2009 Leaked"

It's easy to point and laugh now, except that all those people are still making predictions as analysts.

Augmentation and the Olympics have already collided. A man with carbon fiber legs attempted to compete in the olympics. http://www.slate.com/id/2191801/

Slate recently had an article partially along similar lines (palmer vs italic cursive styles). It's also worth a read: http://www.slate.com/id/2227680/

I wonder how it came to be that one would be permitted to check web-based email in the hospital's pediatric cardiac surgery department?

And exactly why wouldn't be allowed? It's not like the computer is sitting in the surgery theater. Especially given that arbitrary restrictions of computer usage negatively impact productivity.

This incident could very well be the least of their problems for all they know.

I fail to see what you're implying. Elaborate.

Why the Mafia Loves Garbage.

Here's an article that gives another possible reason. It's hard to recruit volunteers for a study that really have a condition like clinical depression. If you actually recruit a bunch of people who are just temporarily feeling down instead of having true clinical depression, then of course they tend to get better whether they were given a sugar pill or a real anti-depressant. And they would have gotten better if they had taken nothing.

Hey damburger, you've been quoted on Slate: http://www.slate.com/id/2227002/