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"Oh stop it. 90% of food at the grocery store does not have high-fructose corn syrup in it."

Assuming a grocery store is a supermarket and not a greegrocer's, then you are wrong.

I apologise for the payment gate, but there's an hour long lecture on corn in the US food system available here:
http://www.alternativeradio.org/programs/POLM001.shtml

Amongst other things, the speaker details the scientific testing done trying to find processed food with no corn in it. USians should listen to this talk.

If you're referring to a real greengrocer, then you need to check the availability and price of these stores and goods compared with processed foods. I don't think most people can afford a fresh fruit-and-veg diet in the US, or so I've been told.

As for the liver, apparently every cell in the body can metabolize glucose. However, all fructose must be metabolized in the liver. The livers of rats on high fructose diet look like the livers of alcoholics, plugged with fat and cirrhotic. (from http://www.westonaprice.org/motherlinda/cornsyrup.html)

This is probably what the previous poster was referring to.

A tarrif is not the same as a subsidy. However, they have roughly the same effect. Ignoring tarrifs, it remains true that the corn industry, and the oil industry upon which it depends so heavily, are both subsidised by the US taxpayer.

Between 1995 and 2003, federal corn subsidies totaled $37.3 billion. Ethanol makes this even worse.

http://www.slate.com/id/2122961/

There are very big problems with corn in the USA and you should do your own homework; it took me 5 mins to glue some links together.

Oh, and read "fast food nation".

http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/humannature/default.aspx

Inflation was essential for swimming when I was 3.

After I read this article yesterday (single page), that's what I thought: given all the spammers that are Russian, there's a chance there might be a slowdown in spam as patriotic Russians "pitch in" by helping DDOS Georgian resources.

It's pretty amazing if you read that article how easy it was for just an average person to find out how to "volunteer" for the Russian army: independent helpers have made it so you can find out which Georgian sites you should ping in order to maximize your effectiveness, and have programs that you can download that do most of the work with minimal hassle.

However:

a) According to most posters, spam hasn't actually abated.
b) Spammers wouldn't do something as selfless as pitching in for their country.

After I read this article yesterday (single page), that's what I thought: given all the spammers that are Russian, there's a chance there might be a slowdown in spam as patriotic Russians "pitch in" by helping DDOS Georgian resources.

It's pretty amazing if you read that article how easy it was for just an average person to find out how to "volunteer" for the Russian army: independent helpers have made it so you can find out which Georgian sites you should ping in order to maximize your effectiveness, and have programs that you can download that do most of the work with minimal hassle.

However:

a) According to most posters, spam hasn't actually abated.
b) Spammers wouldn't do something as selfless as pitching in for their country.

Doesn't really matter... since a third party won't win this election.

A third party candidate won't win because people are always saying they won't so they won't vote for them. If everyone who says that did in fact vote for a third party then one could win.

Things aren't bad enough yet, and the people still believe the lies from R & D candidates.

This is all too true.

Voting for the lesser of two evils is still better at this point in time. Maybe that will change someday, but not yet.

Yea, I wasted my vote in the 2000 election. Instead of voting for who I wanted to vote for, because the polls were so close I specifically voted against Bush by selecting Gore. I didn't want a President Gross, er Gore, but a President Bush was, and is, worse. So I vowed to never vote for the least bad and just vote for the candidate who came the closest in their stands on the issues that matter to me to my position. I don't know why I didn't in 2000 because I did every election both before and after 2000. I've voted for Democrat, independent and Independent Party (both as there are candidates that run independent of any party and there's an Independent Party), Libertarian, Reform Party, and Republican candidates. Some lost and some won.

I think what would help, which neither Democrat nor the Republican Party would agree to because it's take their power away, would be to repeal Amendment 12. Originally all candidates ran for President. Each tyme the Electors, elected by the voters, in the Electoral College voted for President the candidate with the least votes was dropped from the ballot. Then they'd vote again until there were only 2 candidates left. The final vote who determine the President with the loser becoming the Vice President. However in 1804 an amendment was ratified which changed that, candidates instead ran as a team. The political parties didn't want to risk the president and vp being from different parties.

In my amendment I'd also add the election follow one of the Condorcet methods of voting. Voters rank candidates by preference with the voter's first pick getting the most points and second choice get less points. Third choice if one gets even less, and no points at all for candidates that are not voted for. All of the voter points are then added up and the one with the most points becomes President while the runner up becomes Vice President. And instead of paper ballots or most e-voting machines I'd use machines like those used in India which is fool proof and tamper resistant.

Falcon

most new cars only have a 2-3% AC penalty (4-5% on max AC setting). With the adoption of variable nozzle compressor technology (called variable displacement), the AC system in most cars only make air as cold as you're requesting it to, and the unit automatically disconnects during acceleration, allowing a smaller engine to feel like it has more power.

In fact, most cars, actually get better fuel economy with the AC than with windows open, when driving over 50 MPH. In stark contract, SUVs actually get less of a benefit than do small cars... 1st, there's already so much drag, opening your windows does not add much more. Also, large engines have ample torque, and have no trouble running larger (and thus more efficient) compressors. http://www.slate.com/id/2194536/.

Older cars, yes 8-10% was normal for AC efficiency loss, but not really anymore.

In other interesting news, they have actually shown that comfortable drivers actually get better fuel economy than uncomfortable drivers. On hot days, drivers tend to be more impatient, and accelerate harder and driver differently than on comfortable days. ventilated seats actually help this further since not only is your front cool, but your back as well is not self insulating and sweating into the seat behind you, and in most cars with ventilated seats, AC use will be decreased slightly (drivers are more comfortable at slightly warmer temps).

Rule of thumb: it varies from driver to driver, ,ambient temp, and with humidity, but if it's over 85, keep the windows up regardless of driving speed. If you're going over 55MPH, keep em up regardless of outdoor temp. It's not only more efficient, but has safety implications as well.

If your car has variable temperature controls separate from the fan speed and vent position controls, generally, use the COLDEST setting, regardless of the temp you want to achieve. (most cars mix warm air with cold to make varying temps, so setting to a warmer temp does not reduce energy use). Use recycled air settings always with the AC. Use the fan speed to control your comfort level. The most efficient system will have automatic temp control (with digital temp readouts) but unfortunately there are typically only available in high end cars. Also note, in most cars, the defrost setting will use the AC unless you are blowing heat, even when the AC is off, so if you've got foggy windows in the summer, you might as well roll the windows up cuz the AC is going to be running one way or the other...

Literacy is a tool used to accomplish things, and like any other tool (car, gun, intelligence) they are power multipliers. Most societies grow at a slow enough rate that allows them to learn how to cope and deal with the negative side of the tools they use (like computers unintentionally give us cybercrimes, which we respond to with cybercrime fighters and cybercrime fighting tools).

I can think of nothing more cruel than a group that would enjoy playing Superman or God, and prematurely introduce tools that will severely imbalance developing cultures. We all know what financing the Janjaweed has accomplished. (money + horse + gun = destabilized power grab) Literacy is NOT good, anymore than a gun is good, both can be 'used' to do good or bad. Developing cultures don't NEED a $5 iPod, they need to develop at their own pace without those with good-intentions paving the way.

iphones and all apple products are for arrogant, self important douchebags

Haha. Everyone knows that blackberry users are #1 when it comes to douchebaggery.

and who the hell knows why all the major news networks feel the need to report on it.

Because it's a slow news day, journalists are very lazy and like when a prepackaged story drops into their lap, and journalists also get free iphones from uncle Steve.

But seriously, blackberries are better by far.

They were getting their information from the place that was in charge of investigating the anthrax.

Fort Derrick.

It's an old variant on 'it takes a thief to catch a thief'. Namely, 'it takes a terrorist to catch himself'.

What i want to know is who warned Richard Cohen:

The attacks were not entirely unexpected. I had been told soon after Sept. 11 to secure Cipro, the antidote to anthrax. The tip had come in a roundabout way from a high government official, and I immediately acted on it. I was carrying Cipro way before most people had ever heard of it.

If you buy Greenwald's premise -- that there was more to the whole anthrax episode than met the eye, more than just a Unibomber-type loner responsible for it -- then it doesn't take too many layers of foil on your hat to make that leap.

And if you don't buy Greenwald's premise, you probably shouldn't be given the right to vote.

This story, this criminal case, makes no sense.

I quote Richard Cohen, a small comment he made that he doesn't seem to realize the significance of:

The attacks were not entirely unexpected. I had been told soon after Sept. 11 to secure Cipro, the antidote to anthrax. The tip had come in a roundabout way from a high government official, and I immediately acted on it. I was carrying Cipro way before most people had ever heard of it.

...so, the attack came from a US government lab (1), the same lab that apparently lied about bentonite in said attack (2), implicating Iraq, and the US government told journalists in advance to get anthrax antidote? (3)

Well, nothing to see here, move along.

You don't even have to postulate any sort of conspiracy, you don't have to jump to any conclusion. You just have to add one and one and one together and realize it is not, in fact, seventeen.

Someone in the US government getting a 'tip' about an anthrax attack by a terrorist and passing it outside channels is a security breach, but explicable. Someone in the US government getting a tip about a crazy person at a US lab stealing anthrax and going to mail it out is just inane. There's no possible way for the original source in the government to know that in advance without either being involved or trying to stop it.

1) According to the US government
2) According to ABC news, although they have, until recently, refused to admit it was a lie or even that it was wrong.
3) According to a writer for the Washington post.

Actually, I would say it's less acceptable to portray a torture scene in a TV show like 24. People get it into their heads that it's ok for government agents to do such things to people. Particularly politicians - see http://www.slate.com/id/2195864/

Check the federal funds report

That report covers (according to page 7):

• Retirement and disability ($739 billion)
• Other direct payments ($569 billion)
• Grants ($494 billion)
• Procurement contracts ($409 billion)
• Salaries and wages ($243 billion)
• Direct loans ($24 billion)
• Guaranteed or insured loans ($160 billion)
• Insurance ($1.1 trillion)

Only the "grants" section (%13 of the total) can be considered "welfare". See page 13 for explanation of what "grants" means in the context, and table 4 (on page 30) for the grants-distribution. And now come the surprises. For example, one of the most Illiberal state of the Union — Vermont — received $2.19 per person, New York — $2.34. Although Alaska got twice as much at $4.59, another "red" state such as Missouri — only $1.47 per person.

What was that about lies, damn lies, and then statistics?..

Sounds like he followed the usual guidelines (well explained here). The slime-ball didn't actually divulge the fine details, just summarized that it was not cancer.

How, exactly ? There doesn't appear to be anything germane in that article.

Simon

Sounds like he followed the usual guidelines (well explained here). The slime-ball didn't actually divulge the fine details, just summarized that it was not cancer.

"Believes he is appointed by God - check"
Cite this ... you know, just give me a Bush quote that supports this in any way ...

http://www.slate.com/id/2106590/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/nov/02/usa.religion

"Believes he is absolute ruler - check"
See above. Also, just what has he ever got done without congress.

http://www.fff.org/comment/com0604b.asp

http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2006/04/30/bush_challenges_hundreds_of_laws/

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/07/02/bush-commutes-libbys-sentence/

So. How would have Kerry ( or Obama ) handled Iraq...

Really quite irrelevant to the question of Bush, but... Iraq was nothing to do with 9/11, and invading the country has solved nothing and given the US a whole raft of problems in the mideast which are now just going to get worse. It is an attempt to dominate the mideast by force, which the US has neither the patience, the budget, nor the military might to do.

I've usually found ./ to be populated with people who are a step above the median in intellegence. Why don't we see many people taking the long term view,

I don't believe political disagreements have anything to do with intelligence. Osama Bin Laden is intelligent, that doesn't mean you have to agree with him.

Perhaps the world you want to live in is dominated by Christian Fundamentalists, whom Christ would have disowned - I'd rather not live in that world.

The US has helped, and continues to help, to prop up the festering cesspool of little dictators in the mideast - they backed Saddam in the 80s, backed the Iranian coup before that, and currently back Pakistan, Saudi, Israel, and many others with military and monetary assistance. If you want to address those issues, I suggest you look to your own countries current actions in backing undesirable regimes worldwide.

Slate's review touches upon this a bit, as well as pointing out some other parallel's to the state of the US.

Yes, I'm sure you are kidding but those charges are related:

• List of controversies
• That showed a huge crack of light a year ago.
• And people are connecting the dots between election fraud and manipulation of justice.

The real question is will courts extend the logic set forth in cases like Amalgamated Foods to the modern day equivalent "virtual" properties, perhaps controlled by the type of activity (allowing passively posting otherwise innocuous content vs activism vs hosting vs commercial) or the site (destination sites like Yahoo or Facebook being more likely to be considered public forums than a storefront like bestbuy.com). In any event, should Amalgamated Foods be extended, private web sites that operate forums could very well be considered limited public forums with some First Amendment protection, despite being private property.

PS. Before you start believing statements like this which imply Amalgamated Foods is no longer good law, read the cases referred to (Hudgens v. NLRB was looking at the applicability of the NLRA, while Pruneyard was applying California's more liberal freedom-of-speech rights).

PPS. None of this should be considered legal advice, nor have I shepardized anything.

There's a lot more, ironically. Accodring to this Slate article, 64,000 tons of yellowcake is produced worldwide annually: http://www.slate.com/id/2085848/ Puts things into perspective, at least.

Maybe you can explain this Slate article (Slate:

Here, then, is the bitter joke of the new legislation: From 2001 to 2007, the NSA engaged in a secret program that was a straightforward violation of America's wiretapping laws. Since the program was revealed, the administration has succeeded in preventing the judiciary from making a definitive declaration that the wiretapping was a crime. Suits against the government get dismissed on state-secrets grounds, because while the program may have been illegal, it was also so highly classified that its legality can never be litigated in open court. And now suits against the telecoms will by dismissed en masse as well. Meanwhile, the new law moves the goal posts, taking illegal things the administration was doing and making them legal. Whatever Hoyer and Pelosiâ"and even Obamaâ"say, this amounts to a retroactive blessing of the illegal program, and historically it means that the country will probably be deprived of any rigorous assessment of what precisely the administration did between 2001 and 2007. No judge will have an opportunity to call the president's willful violation of a federal statute a crime, and no landmark ruling by the courts can serve as a warning for future generations about government excesses in dangerous times. What's more, because the proposal so completely plays into the Bush conception of executive power, it renders meaningless any of its own provisions. After all, if the main lesson of the wiretapping scandal is that we need more surveillance power for the government, what is to stop President Bushâ"or President Obama or President McCainâ"from one day choosing to set this new law aside, too? "How will we be judged?" Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., asked in a stirring speech deploring the legislation yesterday. "The technical argument obscures the defining question: the rule of law, or the rule of men?"

By Timothy Noah

Posted Thursday, June 26, 2008, at 12:49 PM ET

The Supreme Court has discovered a constitutional right to convenience. In District of Columbia v. Heller, which strikes down D.C.'s handgun ban, Justice Anthony Scalia writes,

It is no answer to say, as petitioners do, that it is permissible to ban the possession of handguns so long as the possession of other firearms (i.e., long guns) is allowed. It is enough to note, as we have observed, that the American people have considered the handgun to be the quintessential self-defense weapon. There are many reasons that a citizen may prefer a handgun for home defense: It is easier to store in a location that is readily accessible in an emergency; it cannot easily be redirected or wrestled away by an attacker; it is easier to use for those without the upper-body strength to lift and aim a long gun; it can be pointed at a burglar with one hand while the other hand dials the police; it can be twirled around the index finger like Lee Marvin did inSeven Men From Now. Whatever the reason, handguns are the most popular weapon chosen by Americans for self-defense in the home, and a complete prohibition of their use is invalid.

OK, I added the clause about twirling it on your finger (and anyway, John Wayne had no difficulty twirling an 18.5-inch Winchester rifle in Stagecoach). My point is that a handgun's convenience when put to good uses is heavily outweighed by its convenience when put to bad ones. A handgun can be concealed easily, and it can be tossed down a sewer drain without attracting much notice. The barrel can be used to break a snitch's jaw. (There's no such thing as "rifle whipping.") If it's easier for a woman to handle (I presume that's the meaning of Scalia's gallant reference to upper-body strength), imagine how much easier it is for a 4-year-old child. It can be twirled on a table when you want to play Russian roulette. It can be used to caress a woman, as various witnesses attested in Phil Spector'smurder trial (which, despite this testimony, ended in a hung jury; a retrial commences Sept. 29). Because of its light weight, it can be accessed immediately after your wife tells you she's been sleeping with your best friend, but well before she heads out the door with a suitcase. Because of its small size, it can be used to shoot a cop dead before the chump even realizes you've got it in your hand.

It's this second set of conveniences that led the District of Columbia to ban handguns. Granted, in jurisdictions where gun ownership is permitted, criminals seldom obtain their guns legally. But illegal guns begin life as legal ones. Glock, Beretta, and other handgun manufacturers are not illegal enterprises; rather, they manufacture a legal product that is subsequentlystolen and fenced by criminals. More legal guns therefore mean more illegal guns. More illegal guns mean more people get killed. The inconvenience this poses to the dead and their families, and to society at large, does not concern Scalia.

Check it out:

http://www.slate.com/id/2191412/

Smokers behavior indicates that many of them don't mind the taxes, or at least indirectly benefit from the taxes.

I'll leave out really common feeds and a few that won't interest many people, but here are the top 25% or so of my feeds:

A Gentleman's C http://gentlemansc.blogspot.com/rss.xml
An Angry Professor gripes about stuff

Armchair Generalist http://armchairgeneralist.typepad.com/my_weblog/index.rdf
Blog by a moderate-left military analyst

Arts & Letters Daily http://aldaily.com/rss/rss.xml
Three interesting links every day (actually usually one or two INTERESTING ones)

Breaking News (History News Network) http://hnn.us/roundup/rss_full/41.xml
Stories about History with a slight conservative bias

Consumerist http://consumerist.com/excerpts.xml
Shoppers bite back.

indexed http://indexed.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss
Note card humor, usually featuring Venn diagrams

Inside Higher Ed http://feeds.feedburner.com/insidehighered/OxmP
Stories from academe, with fairly grumpy comments

Junk Charts http://junkcharts.typepad.com/junk_charts/rss.xml
Redraws charts to make data analysis easier

Obscure Store and Reading Room http://obscurestore.typepad.com/obscure_store_and_reading/index.rdf
Well-known wierd news site with comments

PostSecret http://postsecret.blogspot.com/rss.xml
Secrets on postcards, every Sunday. Fascinating.

ReelViews New Reviews http://feeds.feedburner.com/ReelviewsNewReviews
My favorite currently-active film reviewer

SCOTUSblog http://www.scotusblog.com/movabletype/index.xml
Get the skinny on the latest Supreme Court actions

Slashfood http://www.slashfood.com/rss.xml
Because I love food

Slate Magazine http://www.slate.com/rss/
The best of the online political mags; lefty bias

Spluch http://spluch.blogspot.com/rss.xml
Always something interesting. Similar material to the extremely popular Boing Boing, but with fewer posts per day.

The Monkey Cage http://www.themonkeycage.org/atom.xml
Analysis from political scientists. Much better than the usual partisan approach.

The Onion http://feeds.theonion.com/theonion/daily
Most of the humor is usually contained in the headlines, so I seldom read more

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Is_Bill_Gates_Jewish Good G-d! Don't you people know this yet? You goyim are so stupid. http://www.slate.com/id/2177228/ Debate. If you dare...

For those that can't be bothered to cut-and-paste, here are some handy links: Slate article and Pimp My Ride.

I also write grants for nonprofit and public agencies, and the third item in this blog post involves some of the research into computers as educational devices. It isn't positive. That doesn't mean someone won't find a way to make computers useful in a statistically significant way, or that the next great hacker with a world changing idea won't get their first computing experience via OLPC or Intel's version or whatever, but it's harder to justify computers en masse without more solid evidence behind it.

If Intel is guilty of keeping other processors out of machines by being anti competitive, they are going to see some sanctions and fines.

"...Microsoft has never warned anyone to start using Firefox when a remote execution exploit in IE was discovered!"

I wouldn't be so sure about that if I was you. Think back about four years ago, right here on /. it was covered:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/07/05/1440228

http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/07/09/28enterwin_1.html "The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, otherwise known as Dancing with Big Brother, tells the world to stop using the Web browser you fought long and hard to tie into your operating system. That's what happened to beleaguered Microsoft when the department's Computer Emergency Readiness Team (CERT) recently recommended users switch to alternate browser platforms to avoid the security holes in IE caused largely by ActiveX.

And Microsoft isn't objecting. Microsoft's own Slate even posted an article advocating Firefox, a Mozilla offshoot, in favor of IE until Microsoft gets its security act together. "

http://www.slate.com/id/2103152/

Those three (all related to the same incident to be fair-not three separate ones) are just off the top of my head, and the results of about 45 seconds on Google.

Indeed. An interesting mention is international mail, because you put US stamps on letters going to Paris, so how do the French get paid for their part of the route? slate did a good writeup on this last year.

I think the people interested in Net Neutrality need to use international mail as an example.

Actually it turns out you do.

Economists have found some evidence to support these ideas: Pamela Mobilia finds that betting at racetracks falls in anticipation of increases in bookies' takings; Nilss Olekalns and Peter Bardsley find that coffee addicts show similar foresight; Philip Cook and George Tauchen found that when some U.S. counties raised taxes on alcohol, liver cirrhosis fell more sharply than overall consumption, suggesting that it was the alcoholics who cut back most.

It seems to me that it would be impossible to extrapolate this VR study to real life.

I have to wonder how they accounted for the Uncanny Valley.

People are having kids late for lots of reasons, but dishwashers are at least as good an explanation as financial security:

http://www.slate.com/id/2182089/

The gist of it is that the benefits of a couple splitting breadwinning and domestic roles decrease when the domestic role gets easier, so some people tend to put off entering into a relationship that they are not certain of.

I'm 10 years out of high school, and dozens of the people I graduated with have children, out of several hundred, so not everybody is waiting.

Sofge is a contrarian jerk whose only goal is to stir up messes so that he can gain from the attention. This is the "super geek" who blasted the Wii and, as a way of demonstrating a complete inability to connect the dots, he bashed Gary Gygax after Gygax's death. His bashing of Gygax was monumentally stupid because his argument was essentially this: There are much better RPGs than Dungeons and Dragons today, therefore, we ought to remember Gygax as the guy who invented the shitty RPG. He seems to completely miss the fact that none of the games which he talks about as being better than D&D, would likely exist had it not been for Gygax, who pretty much invented the genre. That's like arguing we should remember Thomas Edison as the guy who invented shitty lightbulbs or Henry Ford as the guy who made shitty cars just because there are better versions of those products available today.

As far as I'm concerned, Sofge is no geek. He just likes to stir things up for attention. I'm not going to follow links to his stories anymore and whenever his name is mentioned, I'm going to raise these issues. Not because I have any specific place in my heart for Gygax or the Wii, but because I'm not going to support someone whose writings are largely there just to be controversial and to get the writer attention.

Sofge is a contrarian jerk whose only goal is to stir up messes so that he can gain from the attention. This is the "super geek" who blasted the Wii and, as a way of demonstrating a complete inability to connect the dots, he bashed Gary Gygax after Gygax's death. His bashing of Gygax was monumentally stupid because his argument was essentially this: There are much better RPGs than Dungeons and Dragons today, therefore, we ought to remember Gygax as the guy who invented the shitty RPG. He seems to completely miss the fact that none of the games which he talks about as being better than D&D, would likely exist had it not been for Gygax, who pretty much invented the genre. That's like arguing we should remember Thomas Edison as the guy who invented shitty lightbulbs or Henry Ford as the guy who made shitty cars just because there are better versions of those products available today.

As far as I'm concerned, Sofge is no geek. He just likes to stir things up for attention. I'm not going to follow links to his stories anymore and whenever his name is mentioned, I'm going to raise these issues. Not because I have any specific place in my heart for Gygax or the Wii, but because I'm not going to support someone whose writings are largely there just to be controversial and to get the writer attention.

> Thanks for taking the time to write this.

You're very welcome. It's something I needed to do, a sort of
professional-piety response, perhaps, giving credit where due.

> I enjoyed it very much. I never stop to think about how my affinity
> for Perl might be related to imagination then related to AD&D.

Adam Rogers of Wired Magazine wrote convincingly in the NY Times that:

        GARY GYGAX died last week and the universe did not collapse.
        This surprises me a little bit, because he built it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/opinion/09rogers.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

I strongly encourage you and all programmers and gamers alike to check out
what Adam has to say there about our world being one that Gary built.

Adam also has a 17-minute segment on NPR:
      http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=88062853

D&D promotes open, imaginate thinking and problem-solving ability.
Consumerist alpha-state zombies entranced by the bube tomb do not
develop these skills. From the moment I took up D&D in 1975, lo these
33 years ago, I never again watched TV with any regularity, racking up
fewer hours per year than the average American does in a single week. I
later became convinced by Postman's position, and his take on Huxley's
_Brave_New_Word_, and so came to see television as modern-day soma.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World#Comparisons_with_George_Orwell.27s_1984

The crossover between gamers and programmers, especially but apparently
not uniquely those of us of a certain age, is remarkably high. For it's
still going on as young players, often social outcasts looking for a safe-
space for nerds or geeks or whatever outsider term you care to apply to
them and us, are always coming into the gaming world.

The imaginative, creative, problem-solving ability essential in any good
admin or programmer is not nurtured by couch potatoes in trance state
worshiping their false idols of TV and spectator sports, wasting away
"Amusing Themselves to Death" per Postman. That ability is stifled, quelled,
stanched, nipped in the bud before it can even develop. Instead, these
abilities are much better fed by interactive challenges, and this is why
good gamers make good sysadmins, and good programmers sometimes, too.

Gary also helped plant the seed in me of being a word-guy, something of
a vocabulary antiquarian. He would plumb older sources for words in
English that in modern times were either unused entirely, or used
quite differently. A brief list of these might include:

        adamantite, aegis, cantrip, cuirass, curate, drow, durance vile,
        dweomer, electrum, glaive, habergeon, lich, morningstar, myrmidon,
        panoply, rune, sigaldry, sigil, thaumaturge, theurgist, and wight.

I should really write these all down some time. I'll bet even such words
as apothecary and dwarves owe much to Gary for their modern currency.

For a while, Slate had the best Gary Gygax article at:
        http://www.slate.com/id/2185914/pagenum/all/#page_start

But I think now that the Wired treatment is most impressive:
        http://www.wired.com/gaming/virtualworlds/news/2008/03/ff_gygax

--tom

I've posted about this topic before. The Wall Street Journal had an article a while back on the topic. It's under the blog section, so I think non-subscribers can read it. It basically says that adjusted for inflation Gone With the Wind is the highest grossing film of all time, and ticket sales have in fact remained flat. Slate also has several articles.

I've posted about this topic before. The Wall Street Journal had an article a while back on the topic. It's under the blog section, so I think non-subscribers can read it. It basically says that adjusted for inflation Gone With the Wind is the highest grossing film of all time, and ticket sales have in fact remained flat. Slate also has several articles.

I've posted about this topic before. The Wall Street Journal had an article a while back on the topic. It's under the blog section, so I think non-subscribers can read it. It basically says that adjusted for inflation Gone With the Wind is the highest grossing film of all time, and ticket sales have in fact remained flat. Slate also has several articles.

Wikipedia entry on disparities between way infant mortality is measured.
US News & World Report article on same (doesn't cite sources, though news magazines almost never do).
Slate article on impact of premature births on infant mortality rate.
Boston Globe article on rate of premature births in U.S.

It would appear there is something to the claim that better medical care can skew infant mortality rate upwards.

It seems like there will be a lot of people wanting to opt out, considering that Australia's per-capital porn revenue is twice that of the US. Or, if the option to opt out is difficult, it will be interesting (and disappointing) to see if the reduction in rape caused by Internet porn is reversed.

You see, I think that the only real purpose the government serves- to protect us from deranged people by keeping a police force/armed forces- effectively means that they need to hold a monopoly on power in the country.

This reminds me of an Onion headline I saw once: "Libertarian breaks down, calls fire department." Fire department, roads/bridges, etc. aside, I think a big difference between Libertarian-types like you (no offense--I hope that's a fair characterization) and former Libertarian-types like me is that you are not thinking globally. Universal health care is not just to restrict your freedoms or protect you from yourself, but to ensure the economic future of our nation (assuming you're from the US too), as well a to INCREASE the freedom and happiness of the 2/3 of the people last year who declared bankruptcy because of unforeseen medical illness. Government investment science/technology research is the same thing, and no, we can't simply turn that over to industry--not because they're "greedy," but because industry lacks the flexibility to invest in high-risk technologies that might not pay off.

Look, I agree with you about the abuse of power by police and so forth, but I don't think it's fair to link that to everything "the government" does as though it's a monolithic entity. Police brutality is terrible--down with mandatory public education for children! Sometimes that logic just doesn't make sense. I think the correct answer is more transparency and so forth, not simply reducing the powers of government as a whole. Here's a short essay on the role of government in protecting liberty, which I think explains this point better than I ever could.

This reminds me of the aye aye (http://www.slate.com/id/2160742/), my favorite pro-simian. They got us going with their little hands. Poor little guys are endangered.

The papers of any branch of government, Judicial, Executive or Legislative are considered protected if it is the sole responsiblity of that branch. That is implied by "Separation of Powers"

The first test case was Washington:

"In 1796, President George Washington refused to comply with a request by the House of Representatives for documents which were relating to the negotiation of the then-recently adopted Jay Treaty with Great Britain. The Senate alone plays a role in the ratification of treaties, Washington reasoned, and therefore the House had no legitimate claim to the material. Therefore, Washington provided the documents to the Senate but not the House."[2]

Also, here is the meat of the problem:

But as telecommunications--and especially the Internet--evolved, a communication between, say, Paris and Karachi, might actually be routed through the United States and thus become off-limits to government agents without a warrant.

http://www.slate.com/id/2171747

Neither end of the conversation is privileged as they are not US citizens on US soil, but because it routed through here it is covered by FISA. (you do realize any mail you send or receive across the border can be read, don't you? Your rights end at the border)

Quite frankly, I am all for it if it expires every few years. It is a power granted in extraordinary times and it should not be perminate.

So let me get this straight. You were once near a research program, but not actually a part of it, and the head of a department, but apparently not the head of the department doing the research, dismissed it out of hand, before the research was published, implying to you the data was noisy? Your ass just fell off. Let me hand it to you, so you can re-attach it.

Perhaps it didn't occur to you that in some cases you can pull signal out of noisy data by looking for regular repeating patterns? Or with maybe some other techniques you hadn't thought of? Maybe some technique described in the research paper, or its references?

Here's the thing. Getting signal from noise is hard, but often possible. As a species, we get better at it as time goes on. If signal could never be pulled from noise, radio, television, cell phones, and the internet wouldn't work. Heck, even without any fancy schmancy scientific instruments, we're pretty darn good at it. A big chuck of most brains (including yours) is devoted to the task. In fact, you couldn't use spoken words to communicate with somebody else in a bar where everybody else was talking, too. Seismographs couldn't detect earthquakes from the other side of the planet, because there are too many people having raucaus sex and too much truck traffic at any given time.

Take this signal, for examle, the pattern of posts dismissing something with a wave of the interjection "meh" when they clearly have no concept, amidst the general noise of Slashdot posts. If I see it once, I think it's just a random person, spouting off, maybe pre-caffeinated, maybe late at night, maybe not thinking it through, whatever it is. When I see "meh" many times, and every time it's from somebody who is seriously and totally lacking clue, then I wonder. Is this "meh" some sort of signal for someone who doesn't realize the limits of their own knowledge? Is there something about the "meh" meme which causes it to preferentially survive in a cesspool of incompletely formed thought, and die out amidst the frenzy of competition in a curious mind? Is "meh" a signal which indicates intellectual laziness? Perhaps it's related to the phenomenon of the unskilled being unable to correctly assess their skill? (This applies to all of us, in domains of our in-expertise. I'm not insulting you, merely pointing out that we all need to become more aware of the areas of our in-expertise, in order to avoid looking like idiots.)

Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments
(Also available in this HTML version if you prefer.)
Overconfidence


Your geek card is hereby suspended for the weekend, which you should devote to reading about signal processing and astronomy. You are also prohibited from using "meh" for one year.

The Fundamentals of Signal Analysis
Extrasolar Planets

A caveat: there is no external confirmation that Amazon did what is claimed here.

External confirmation? I don't even see any internal confirmation. The one link in the submission goes to the item on Amazon.com's site, at which there is one glowing five-star rated customer review. As far as I can tell, this submitter simply wrote up something that may or may not be a complete fabrication with absolutely zero backing evidence, without even so much as a "here's my blog article about the experience," and somehow it make the front page.

Where's the screenshot of the item being offered for $31? Where's the printout of the placed order? Who were those customers that Amazon strung along for over a month, and where are they complaining? Was there even more than one? Was there even one? What "highly publicized price guarantee policy?" Are you talking about? This one, which Slate describes as "not something Amazon publicizes?" You are aware that companies don't have to honor prices that are obvious misprints, right? (And that a 75-CD limited edition import CD set being sold for $31 is an obivous misprint, right?)

Man, next time I have a beef with some company, remind me to completely make some shit up about them and post it as an article here on Slashdot. I'm usually not one to gripe about the job the editorial staff does here, but you guys really drop the ball in a major way on this one. Whether you like Amazon.com or not, with nothing to back it up, this borders on outright libel.