Slashdot Mirror

Revolution Muslim is a false-flag organization. Both the leaders are "supposide" Jewish converts. Here's an image of one of the leaders carrying a sign that misspells "Jews" as "Juice" (a Jew that can't spell 'Jew' correctly?)

http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2008/12/death-to-the-ju.html [typepad.com]

The pair is often featured on CNN and Fox News. I don't even think they have any actual followers.

There is some information collected about the pair here:

http://catholicforum.fisheaters.com/index.php?topic=3427255.0 [fisheaters.com]

Revolution Muslim is a false-flag organization. Both the leaders are "supposide" Jewish converts that can't even spell 'Jews' properly.

http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2008/12/death-to-the-ju.html

The pair is often featured on CNN and Fox News. I don't even think they have any actual followers.

There is some information collected about the pair here:

http://catholicforum.fisheaters.com/index.php?topic=3427255.0

A) Currently, the FDA has the power to regulate cigarettes.

It doesn't matter if it is not a new drug. The FDA controls things like: how much nicotine are you getting? How quickly? Is the delivery mechanism safe? Is the mechanism for delivery safe, repeatable, and reliable? Can they be tampered with? How consistent is the manufacturing - Ex: does the dosage vary from lot to lot?

B) FYI: e-cigarettes are sold at mall kiosks.

1. Get a Bank or Credit Union that gives a damn. Investigate before you choose one. A good one will monitor your activity and shut it down and call you when something goes wonky (like charges from all over the place or charges from known fraudulent organizations). When it does go wrong a good one will either fix it quick or possibly give you provisional credit to get you buy until they do fix it.

Problem with this is, the ones that tend to give a damn are the smaller banks. And with those bank bailouts that the US Gov kept giving out only to the big banks has caused many small banks to go under. This leaves most of the power in the big banks, weakens to small banks and leaves most people with a lack of options and no longer looking for which bank gives a damn and more looking for a bank that won't completely screw you over.

So we should ban E-Cigs

No, but like other nicotine products, they should not be sold at mall kiosks.

Just google for "obgyn leaving state malpractice".

Here's some links from that search:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0CYD/is_19_36/ai_81006732/
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4189/is_20030328/ai_n10166472/
http://www.miwww.acog.org/acog_sections/pa/Pdf/ACOGPatientEdMedMalFinal.pdf
http://greatdivide.typepad.com/across_the_great_divide/2006/09/saving_the_obgy.html

you'll need to back up your claim about police treating aboriginal deaths the same as animal deaths. i've lived here my whole life and never heard such a claim.

I have read many times that, under Australian law, it was legal for white men to hunt Aborigines up until the 1950s. e.g. this:

"the classic "nigger hunting" license that station (ranch) owners obtained from the local police was to permit them to eliminate Aborigines by hunting the local fauna, Aborigines were fauna by constitutional definition, kill them and feel not the retribution of law for murder. I have interviewed men who say this genocide continued into the 1950s when they had to get more subtle about the disposal of the remains, so they'd slit open a steer and slide the corpse inside. Mutual decomposition took care of the rest."

and this:

"In fact, as recently as the 1950s, a white man could apply for a hunting permit to hunt and kill Aborigines! Can you imagine? They were hunted and killed as if they were a game animal."

These are not great references - I would welcome a better reference to settle this urban myth one way or the other.

I've not seen any ads that advertise unlimited gigabytes.

Verizon has/had a plan simply called "Unlimited Access" that they sold in New York State. They didn't specifically use any terms denoting quantity ("gigabytes") or any other usage restrictions in their plan name or advertising; they left it wide open to the customer's imagination, in their advertising/marketing (although not in the actual contract), as to what "Unlimited" implied. And, they got spanked for it by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo back in 2007 for "deceptive marketing." Verizon agreed to stop the "deceptive marketing" and reimburse Verizon customers in New York State $1 million.

http://riskman.typepad.com/peerflow/2007/10/cuomo-to-verizo.html

Cuomo's action was most likely brought on by vocal consumer backlash in various forums:

http://consumerist.com/2007/04/verizon-unlimited-access-plan-is-extremely-limited.html

Apparently, at least in New York State, the contract doesn't mean much if you are judged to have engaged in deceptive advertising while trying to sell that contract.

* * * * *

All my life, I always wanted to be somebody. Now I see that I should have been more specific.
—Jane Wagner

ok, you're clearly retarded, so continuing this debate seems pointless, but i'll make one last, half assed attempt.

http://classiclit.about.com/od/atreegrows/fr/aafpr_treegrows.htm

http://www.harpercollins.com/books/9780060736262/A_Tree_Grows_in_Brooklyn/index.aspx

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14891.A_Tree_Grows_in_Brooklyn

http://classicreads.wordpress.com/2010/03/28/a-tree-grows-in-brooklyn-schedule/

http://www.teachwithmovies.org/guides/tree-grows-in-brooklyn.html

http://www.powells.com/biblio?isbn=9780060736262

http://www.librarything.com/work/1475

http://kimbofo.typepad.com/readingmatters/2005/11/a_tree_grows_in.html

And again, Betty Smith is not a 'classic' author, but one of the few books she wrote is a classic book. Can you really not understand that very simple concept, or are you just grasping at straws in a desperate attempt to not have to admit you're wrong?

You want a healthy economy, you need jobs. Unpaid internships punish job creation. Why would company 'a' hire a person, give them a wage, when company 'b' can get a person to do the same work, for free?

Because in order to be a legally unpaid internship under US labor law there are six criteria that must be met, and the overall cant of the regulations is that legitimate internships actually constitute organizational deadweight.

Here, educate yourself: http://laborlaw.typepad.com/labor_and_employment_law_/2007/11/unpaid-internsh.html

Even ignoring global warming, most of the proposed solutions are still good policy. Energy efficiency, resource efficiency, distributed alternative energy sources, a high tech energy grid... none of these have to avert global warming to be a good idea.

Someone who agrees.

I'll let others debate the 'privacy' issues; (personally I think there's nothing wrong with scraping profile information that people have explicitly made 'public')
Anyways, just check what he did with it; very interesting: (FTA)
http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2010/02/how-to-split-up-the-us.html
There must be many, many legit uses this data could be put too...shame it's being killed by NIH syndrome

As the anonymous person points out... your link starts with a note that they are over 90% the same ethnic group. And most view themselves as the same race.

First, where does the wiki article say most Chinese view themselves as the same ethnic group? Next, as for the majority of Chinese being Han, that's true for all of modern day China, however in some regions ethnic minorities are the majority. To offset this the authorities encourage, and even force, Han Chinese to emigrate to these regions. As Niccolò Machiavelli wrote in "The Prince" an effective way to take over an invaded area, and China did invade independent areas, is by relocating native inhabitants to that area. So for instance the Chinese government encouraged Han Chinese to move to Tibet after the 1949-1950 Chinese invasion of Tibet and continues to do so. Heck the British did that in Ireland, encouraged Protestant British to move to Ireland. Unionism in Ireland. Even the US did that, encouraged settlers to "go west" giving them the land they homesteaded on. This of course didn't sit well with American Indians.

You run into it all over the place... one example being here:
http://cobb.typepad.com/cobb/2005/01/is_that_what_yo_1.html [typepad.com]
"When I pressed him on why he thought that way he finally revealed that because of the racial superiority of the Chinese people, there can never be true equality between a Chinese and non-Chinese and since any deep relationship would require that...there can be no true relationship."

Think about that, you just said the same as I did, it's found everywhere and not just by Chinese. Even the link you hints as much, "And I thought back to the 80s when everybody was sure that the Japanese were going to buy all the real estate in America up, including the Statue of Liberty. Yet somehow when it came to moving around the cities they were consuming, they would still somehow figure out not to go to the ghettoes or buy anything there, thereby leaving blackfolks just as poor in an overheated market." Today there are any number of groups in the US who if not have a superiority/inferiority complex. The "Southern Poverty Law Center counted 932 active hate groups in the United States in 2009." Like U2 sang, "you've got someone to blame?"

Oh, btw, some economists think it will turn out the same for the Chinese as it did for the Japanese. While many Americans and Europeans are afraid the Chinese will take over the world economically, like some did in the 1980s about the Japanese, there are economists who dispute this. Chinese was able to take over a lot of manufacturing because their wages were low however those wages are rising and as they do manufacturers will be looking for other places to go to. Free trade, er as there is no free trade freer trade, benefits a lot of people. Of course China needs to allow it's currency the yuan to float on exchanges. However the US needs to stop giving US agribusinesses billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies. Much like the nuclear industry the agriculture industry is hooked on subsidies. Archer Daniels Midland or ADM which is a $500 billion a year multinational corporation, and Cargill the largest privately owned company are examples of corporate welfare queens, receiving billions of taxpayer dollars a year.

Falcon

Here's another explaination: http://storagezilla.typepad.com/storagezilla/2009/02/unified-storage-file-system-deduplication.html

There's a table about half-way down showing the differences between file-level dedup (elimination of duplicate files), fixed block dedup (elimilation of duplicate blocks as stored on the disk, which is what Opendedup is doing), and variable block dedup (which handles non-block aligned data, such as when you insert or delete someting at the start of a large file). File level dedup is (almost) drop dead easy, you just take a checksum of every file and link those that match to a single copy. (Handling file updates can be problematic, though. You want your deduped files to be read-only.) Fixed block is almost as easy, since a file is just a list of blocks. You use FUSE to turn those blocks into fixed length files, which are then themselves deduped. This fixes the file-update problem, since each update creates a new block.

Variable block dedup looks for special groups of bytes to divided a file into chunks (like using newlines to divide a text file into lines). These chunks are then dedups as above. If you aren't careful, you can waste space (since the blocks aren't exactly multiples of the disk's block size). Random seeks can be harder, since you can't multiply the block number by the block size to find a location.

So why do you remove some legitimate negative reviews entirely?

Move them to the bottom of the list, if you must, but don't delete legitimate content, EVER.

The problem is that it is impossible to algorithmically to determine what is "legitimate" content, especially in the face of people paying others to write reviews. We have made the choice to be conservative about what is considered legitimate. I wasn't the one who made this decision, but it seems like the right one to me. Given the generally low signal to noise ratio of the internet it's probably best that automated filters to be as aggressive as possible.

We also have to be concerned about giving away too much about how the algorithm works. Clearly it would be ideal if the algorithm were bulletproof enough that even with complete knowledge of how it works one could not be defeat it. Unfortunately this is a very hard problem, and so we need to use some amount security through obscurity. If anyone thinks they can write a better algorithm, we are hiring.

Also, the content is not really deleted. It remains on the user's profile page, and it can be restored if it is deemed legitimate in the future.

As the anonymous person points out... your link starts with a note that they are over 90% the same ethnic group. And most view themselves as the same race.

You run into it all over the place... one example being here:
http://cobb.typepad.com/cobb/2005/01/is_that_what_yo_1.html
"When I pressed him on why he thought that way he finally revealed that because of the racial superiority of the Chinese people, there can never be true equality between a Chinese and non-Chinese and since any deep relationship would require that...there can be no true relationship."

The faster the rest of the world interbreeds with the chinese, the faster this redneck, asian klu klux klan attitude ends.

Re: your comment, GP's user ID *IS* a palindrome. It helps if you know what a word means before you correct someone else's use of it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palindrome
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/palindrome
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/palindrome
http://sarahpalin.typepad.com/

Oops, well 3 out of 4 anyway ;)

The weirdness of logic and maths certainly is a large part of Alice, though I doubt it's all of it. But it's fairly obvious to me, just as a geek with a bit of general knowledge, that the Alice books parody a number of things from late-Victorian era politics and education. It's also about puns, wordplay, and the strict application of logic beyond the domains where it applies; and just general nerdy amusement.

* The organising principle of 'Wonderland' is the card game
* The 'Caucus-race' obviously a satire on politics: the members run in a circle, accomplishing nothing except a lot of hot air. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/caucus_race

I couldn't speak for certain about whether the Mad Hatter's party and the stuckness of Time really is a reference to Hamilton's quaternions, but quaternions are fascinating and they did introduce the idea of a 4D space-time continuum (and therefore time travel) half a century before Einstein/Minkowski, and scandalised and baffled the maths world, so it wouldn't surprise me if that was in the background.

* The organising principle of 'Looking Glass' is the chess game
* Anglo-Saxon literature (possibly Beowulf?) appears in Looking Glass - 'Jabberwocky' is a parody of the Beowulfian sort of epic, with the hero slaying the monster and lots of untranslated words
* The March Hare and Mad Hatter reappear as 'Anglo-Saxons' Haigha and Hatta. Again, this is the sort of stuff that educated children would have been expected to know as a matter of course, along with Latin and Greek and art ('Laughing and Grief; reeling, writhing and fainting in coils')

* The White Knight's speech ('the name of the song is called...') parses out the fine but very important distinction between objects and names, which becomes a major issue in logic (and more so in computer programming):

The name of the song is called 'Haddocks' Eyes.'"

"Oh, that's the name of the song, is it?" Alice said, trying to feel interested.

"No, you don't understand," the Knight said, looking a little vexed. "That's what the name
is called. The name really is 'The Aged, Aged Man.'"

"Then I ought to have said 'That's what the song is called'?" Alice corrected herself.

"No you oughtn't: that's another thing. The song is called 'Ways and Means' but that's only
what it's called, you know!"

"Well, what is the song then?" said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered.

"I was coming to that," the Knight said. "The song really is 'A-sitting On a Gate': and the
tune's my own invention."

Like Terry Pratchett (and Bram Stoker - see Dracula Blogged), Alice really needs a decent annotated edition to explain the obvious cultural and scientific references, since it is densely packed with references which might now be misunderstood, and so many weird conspiracy theories have arisen around the books.

The classic example of Dodgson's geeky humour is from 'Four Riddles':

http://www.online-literature.com/carroll/2826/

Yet what are all such gaieties to me
Whose thoughts are full of indices and surds?

x*x + 7x + 53 = 11/3

It doesn't just rhyme and form part of an overall story - it's an equation to be solved, which gives you a word, from which you can take the first and last letters and which give you a crossword/acrostic clue. Beat THAT for geek cred.

It's fact, not flamebait. The rural, conservative states tend to be the ones that receive more money from the federal government than they pay in federal taxes. It's somewhat hilarious for people in those states to complain about taxes and government spending when that stuff is what's keeping their states afloat.

I agree. The first example does get pity from me, and I support every assistance to improve their circumstances. As for hunting, while I not keen on the concept, I have no problem with it. Most hunters would be distressed to see an animal suffer. The 2nd slashdot effect is to always clamor for grey areas. I thinks its black and white. The above examples you cite are different to the person who stood on a kitten till their stilleto heel pierced its head, then posted in online and thought it funny. Summary.

Locking a ticket to a person is nothing like DRM. A ticket is not a digital issue. A performance is rent, not purchase. You aren't buying the right to watch a show forever (thats called a dvd, or a download, and requires a server), just when its live. You are purchasing an experience, like food. You get it at a specific time and place. You show an ID to buy groceries (if you use a credit or debit card), so it shouldnt be a big deal to show that you are the person who purchase a ticket.

The DRM analogy was how DRM locks a digital asset to a single person or device in order to maintain control. By locking a ticket to someone they are doing the same thing. And no, I rarely show ID to buy food. I use cash 99% of the time.

Again, you are retarded, because I gave you no connection between small town shows which tend not to have scalpers and performances that have scalpers which cause sellouts with significant numbers of empty seats.

You're the one who brought up small cities in a previous post and mentioned they have no problems with scalpers. I'm not sure that in larger cities artist will ever quit showing up because of scalpers. There is just too much money to be had in larger cities.

I believe in a free market, in which performers can decide which venues in which to perform, part of which is determinate upon their personal gain and part of which is determined upon how the prospective audience will be treated in its ability to attend and enjoy such performance (there certainly will be other considerations, but that's the basis of a free market :) ).

I'm not sure how you can believe in the free market and then want to limit my (or anyone else's) ability to re-sell a ticket, perhaps even for a profit. Why can't I sell my steak to someone else? Did you ever sell lemonade as a kid? Those kids bought those lemons so they should eat them. How dare they sell the for a profit. That is about as anti-free market as it comes.

You seem to be so worked up about defending your position (the name calling is really unnecessary) that you quit thinking about what you were writing. I'll go ahead and link to some papers/sites about scalping and how they help clear the market (and that the main driver is prices set too low to begin with):

Ticket Scalping
Dynamic Ticket Pricing
Scalping

Locking a ticket to a person is nothing like DRM. A ticket is not a digital issue. A performance is rent, not purchase. You aren't buying the right to watch a show forever (thats called a dvd, or a download, and requires a server), just when its live. You are purchasing an experience, like food. You get it at a specific time and place. You show an ID to buy groceries (if you use a credit or debit card), so it shouldnt be a big deal to show that you are the person who purchase a ticket.

The DRM analogy was how DRM locks a digital asset to a single person or device in order to maintain control. By locking a ticket to someone they are doing the same thing. And no, I rarely show ID to buy food. I use cash 99% of the time.

Again, you are retarded, because I gave you no connection between small town shows which tend not to have scalpers and performances that have scalpers which cause sellouts with significant numbers of empty seats.

You're the one who brought up small cities in a previous post and mentioned they have no problems with scalpers. I'm not sure that in larger cities artist will ever quit showing up because of scalpers. There is just too much money to be had in larger cities.

I believe in a free market, in which performers can decide which venues in which to perform, part of which is determinate upon their personal gain and part of which is determined upon how the prospective audience will be treated in its ability to attend and enjoy such performance (there certainly will be other considerations, but that's the basis of a free market :) ).

I'm not sure how you can believe in the free market and then want to limit my (or anyone else's) ability to re-sell a ticket, perhaps even for a profit. Why can't I sell my steak to someone else? Did you ever sell lemonade as a kid? Those kids bought those lemons so they should eat them. How dare they sell the for a profit. That is about as anti-free market as it comes.

You seem to be so worked up about defending your position (the name calling is really unnecessary) that you quit thinking about what you were writing. I'll go ahead and link to some papers/sites about scalping and how they help clear the market (and that the main driver is prices set too low to begin with):

Ticket Scalping
Dynamic Ticket Pricing
Scalping

Very well said. Those that scream "conspiracy theorist" seem to miss the simple facts about how some (most?) human beings behave when they have a lot of power and get rewarded for a given behavior. Even more so in a large organization.

And some people ARE sociopaths! In fact, that may well be the case with high level executives, which set the tone for their companies and make key decisions:

http://willblogforfood.typepad.com/will_blog_for_food/2009/07/are-ceos-sociopaths.html

Pah, from this side of the Atlantic Ocean, it looked like Reagan/Bush 1 were big spenders, Clinton then fixed the budget, and then Bush 2 spent money in a way that paled even the Reagan years.
http://bethemedia.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/deficits.jpg

Clinton was admittedly a fiscal conservative, even if I didn't agree with his lifestyle nor his social policies. Also missing here is that unlike what happens in Britain, the "chief of government" often tends to have the opposition party in control of the purse strings. Reagan only had a Republican majority for two years, it never happened at all with Bush Senior, and W had some particularly nasty political fights with congress in the opposition party too. I could also point out the same thing with Clinton and that he had to work with a Republican controlled congress for most of his tenure.

Only Jimmy Carter and now Obama have had a congress that was of their same political viewpoint to pass legislation that reflected their governing style that made a difference with influencing spending.

BTW, if you used that graph, the current deficits by Obama simply fall off the chart completely.

Pah, from this side of the Atlantic Ocean, it looked like Reagan/Bush 1 were big spenders, Clinton then fixed the budget, and then Bush 2 spent money in a way that paled even the Reagan years.
http://bethemedia.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/deficits.jpg

Obviously, it would be impossible to communicate with these life forms since our learning paths would never match.

What? You need a serious history lesson. And by history, I mean in 80's sit-coms. These two communicated just fine. Well, often they didn't but the misunderstandings always made for quality (and high-brow, I might add) entertainment.

He talked about it early this morning.

I see this point, which is why I prefixed my post with "While I appreciate your point ... "

But when a new user asks for advice, I prefer to ask them a few questions and tell them about a single, specific distribution, even a specific version. When I don't know anything about the user except that he is a newbie, I advice to use the most popular. Telling them that use what YOU like, breeds confusion. And, perfect is the enemy of the good enough, paradox of choice:
http://www.getrichslowly.org/blog/2007/04/23/the-perfect-is-the-enemy-of-the-good/
http://tedblog.typepad.com/tedblog/2006/09/paradox_of_choi.html

However, in mine, nobody says you have to try Ubuntu or FlavorX

Then, the users do not switch at all. Because they are presented with so much choice, they take no action at all. Do read and watch the links I have posted above. This is not a joke.

I also debate your assumption that somebody who tries several distros is not a "new user."

If you read my post more carefully, I had mentioned that "trying" is quite an involved activity when you want to figure out a good linux distribution for yourself. I.e., you have to "spend a few release cycles with it". Trying, in that sense, a single distribution takes about a year or more of complete usage, upgradation/migration to new version when it comes out, reconfiguring the new version to suit your own needs, testing new features of this version and taking advantage of them if possible. If trying be defined thus, I maintain that the user is no more a "new user" by the time he has tried more than one distribution. You have introduced the phrase "seasoned veteran" here, which I didn't use and I see this as an attempt to beat a strawman.

you can determine if you like or do not like a distro. When you have "Why won't it do XYZ with my monitor?" or "How come I can't use my 7th mouse button?"

No linux distribution tests its releases on all possible hardware. So these observations will vary release-by-release. Would you suggest them to switch distros every release?

A distro is a dynamic thing. When you choose a distro, you don't just choose a few working features over a few non-working features and work-out a compromise between them. You choose a philosophy, a work ethic the distro maintainers will stick to etc. One release which does not work well with some particular hardware of yours is not a good reason to switch distros: you always have the choice to not upgrade and wait for another release. Long support cycles, live CD/USB come handy in doing this.

I've found that self-taught programmers can actually be quite productive. However I've noticed (in general) the following deficiencies which I think are both rooted in the fact that the need to memorize seemingly arbitrary facts about a system is inversely proportional to deepness of understanding of that system (see graph):

-Design Patterns (noted earlier by others): There is a tendency of self-taught programmers to follow a design pattern more doggedly than others. This can be tied back to the fact that for the self-taught a particular design pattern represents what programming is to them. They memorize a series of facts that support the design pattern they use rather than understand the nature of a design pattern itself. They tend to have steeper learning curves when presented with new structures and design patterns because using a new design pattern requires the abandonment of the facts they've memorized and starting anew with memorizing a new set of facts.

-Adaptability: Self-taught programmers tend to reach a certain level of comfortableness with technology (ie: languages/libraries/etc.) and attach themselves to it. The thought of using a different language, library, or system is daunting (or even aggressively resisted) since, again, changing requires a new memorization of facts around the technologies (see graph).

Much of what you should learn formally from a CS degree is WHAT a programming language is or WHAT a design pattern is, not merely HOW to program or HOW to use a particular design pattern.

That said, there's nothing stopping a self-taught individual from learning these things on their own. It's just that when you're teaching yourself a trade you, naturally, immediately (and sometimes exclusively) focus on things that allow you to compete on a particular level or with a particular technology. Learning design patterns or what programming is in the abstract doesn't seem to have an immediate payoff (clients aren't going to ask you about those things). But they are skills which allow you to be competitive across technologies or design patterns which is especially important in the rapidly changing world of computers.

Yes, please point out what is wrong with my implication.

Write a book, keep tight control, make profit on its sales = $X.
Write another book, put it online for free, make profit on its sales > $X.

Is that really what you're saying? I'm genuinely curious, not trying to be an idiot.

Say you are either an obscure or not a top-shelf author. The publisher isn't going to spend a bunch of money on promoting you, so you are left to get your name out there. The hardest part about being a writer is getting people to recognize your name and read your work.

Fans will buy what you write no matter what, but you have to get the fans before that can happen. Slashdot favorite Wil Wheaton is a great example of this. He makes the majority of his income from book and audio book sales...yet try to find his work on torrent sites. You will be suprised at how little of his work is pirated. This is because people love what he does and understand that their support enables him to care for his family. His books have gotten slightly more expensive over the years, because his fans are willing to pay for his work. He still gives away a TON of content at very little or no cost. His audio production diary from Criminal Minds is a good example of this. It was originally a free blog post, people enjoyed it, and now he can charge money for it.

In summary:

Write a book, sell it = sales
Write another book, put it online for free = exposure
Write another book after the increased exposure, sell it = more sales than your first book.

Making a portion of your work available for free increases the number of people that it will reach, since people don't have to spend money to see if they like what you do. Exposure is basically free advertising. Given what it costs to properly and professionally promote your work, giving some of it away for free is the cheapest and most effective form of advertising you could possibly engage in.

Privacy law often says (roughly) that personally identifiable information needs to be protected. But this research calls into question whether we can define personally identifiable information in a legally-meaningful way. All information related to a person can contribute to identifying the person.

> His defense that the images were just funny is a total lie -- and other people have pointed this out.

REALLY?! If you couldn't get 'real' porn or a woman (assuming that is your preference) you would fap to Marge Simpson having sex with Homer instead of Victoria's Secret commercials? Can you say (without feeling silly) that Marge blowing Homer is more exciting than these (assume NSFW, YMMV)
http://binside.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/02/07/victoria_secret_karolina.jpg
http://binside.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/02/07/victoria_secret_adriana.jpg
pictures? I for one know which of those I'd prefer...

I think it's safe to assume that the vast majority of pedophiles would find pictures of real children in swimsuits way more exiting than a cartoons of children having sex. A simple google for "children beach" would likely be more rewarding than those cartoons, and then there's the various 'child model' websites, which are supposedly legal.

> His defense that the images were just funny is a total lie -- and other people have pointed this out.

REALLY?! If you couldn't get 'real' porn or a woman (assuming that is your preference) you would fap to Marge Simpson having sex with Homer instead of Victoria's Secret commercials? Can you say (without feeling silly) that Marge blowing Homer is more exciting than these (assume NSFW, YMMV)
http://binside.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/02/07/victoria_secret_karolina.jpg
http://binside.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/02/07/victoria_secret_adriana.jpg
pictures? I for one know which of those I'd prefer...

I think it's safe to assume that the vast majority of pedophiles would find pictures of real children in swimsuits way more exiting than a cartoons of children having sex. A simple google for "children beach" would likely be more rewarding than those cartoons, and then there's the various 'child model' websites, which are supposedly legal.

The sentry gun control in Aliens was pretty good: picture. It looks like you'd control it like a BIOS setup. It's possible to convey relevant information to the viewer while keeping it plausible. I'd imagine most filmmakers just aren't concerned with that level of detail (maybe they should be; it seems to be working for James Cameron.)

Close. What you mean to say is, "That's because everyone is in marketing".

As usual, Kathy Sierra said it best:

If you're interested in creating passionate users, or keeping your job, or breathing life into a startup, or getting others to contribute to your open source project, or getting your significant other to agree to the vacation you want to go on... congratulations. You're in marketing.

I'm in marketing because I need to sell my consulting services to pay my bills. I'm also in marketing because I need to keep people interested in my cocktails blog in order to make the time I spend on it worthwhile. I'm in marketing because the conference I'm organizing needs people to actually show up.

That said, I don't own any marketing books, much less books on "social media marketing", but I do recognize that marketing is not just for a few execs or business school grads.

Regarding the risks to holders of a company-backed rather than a state-backed currency, I don't really see the big deal. I trust Blizzard much more than I would trust the national bank of Zimbabwe, and yet Zimbabwe dollars are traded in international markets and exchange rates are published. According to Oanda's currency converter, a million Zimbabwe Dollars will exchange for exactly US$2,702.70 today. Why are we treating WoW gold differently? It can't be because we trust Mugabe's financial wizards more than we trust Blizzard.

Yeah, it's just like that time when the Dollar tanked when Zimbabwe started printing those hundred million dollar bills? Oh wait, except that didn't happen at all. (Hint: nobody even suggested that there would be a fixed exchange rate between virtual currency and the Won.)

Oh noes!

You Sir are spot on: it is only fair that people should be compensated for their work. However I think you are presenting a false choice. The choice is not 1) the 'incredibly valuable service' of the NYT and 2) 'crappy blogers that can't spell.'

There are plenty of high quality sources of information that are still available for free online, including most major newspapers and media companies. Fortunately there are also quite a few blogs who are a good source of information, opinions, and independent research, and whose authors are quite well versed in their field, and include Nobel prize winners. For example, on economics and finance you have Calculated Risk, Greg Mankiw's blog, Becker and Posner, Zero Hedge. Really, when you think about it, NYT does not have an especially compelling offer.

There's an app for that called morse texter. It lets you enter morse code on your symbian phone for texting. You can get it here.. It's the only way to fly now.

Sorry, I just found an article from May 23, 2009 where Dr. Fukuda of the WHO discusses changing the definition of pandemic to one with criteria that would include "substantial risk of harm to people". http://crofsblogs.typepad.com/h5n1/2009/05/who-rewrites-the-definition-of-pandemic.html This was at a time when the last update to the way pandemic was defined had been made in 2005.
So, they did not change the definition of "pandemic" to make it apply to diseases that were less serious, they were actually disucssing changing the definition to only apply to diseases that were more serious than the definition that applied at the time.

Rocket J Squirrel would hole heatedly agree especially when flying over Gimli! Just hope they have learned how to do metric to British Standard unit calculations by now.

The wage differences in the developing world are far less significant that the union rules GM needs to deal with. In a highly automated factory the machines and materials become a far more important cost component relative to the workers. Honda has started several US factories and pays a decent wage without the overhead of a unionized workforce.

And the main benefit of not having a unionised workforce seems to be an ability to pay a lot less:

http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/laborprof_blog/2007/10/neal-boudette-w.html

+5 funny?

Have any of you ever been to one of the ORIGINAL McDonald's restaurants? You know, the ones that actually had big golden arches over the entire building?

The one I went to when I was a kid down in LA was a WALK-UP with precisely TWO tables, and both of those were outdoors on the patio. There was NO inside for customers.

What you describe is exactly what Kroc had in mind (and built), a hamburger STAND.

Read this article. It states that McDonald's is building NEW stores exactly the same way.

http://retrolife.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/02/mcdonalds_reviv.html

You're right, that was TIVO:

http://snarkiness.typepad.com/snarkattack/2002/11/my_tivo_thinks_.html

Yo Grark

...Al Qaeda is broke and mostly useless.

Don't understand guerilla warfare, terrorism or fourth generation warfare do you?

Al Quaeda is mostly a venture capital organization, roughly. They are also small and very decentralized. They only way they are broke and useless if they are all dead or maybe if they lose the support of "the people". That still wouldn't stop the other organizations they've sponsored or assisted from continuing their work.

Asking a conventional army to beat a band of guerillas is damn near impossible. Just ask King George III and the Hessians.

"Drop into the glacier"?????? Errr, no - you didn't read that anywhere, did you? You've presumed or assumed that he fell into a crevasse. From his wounds, he was hunted down by enemies. Nothing indicates that he fell - it seems that he died of an arrow wound, bleeding, and exposure. My reading suggests that he was encased by the glacier after death. If you care to look around the 'net, there are other instances of people being exposed after thousands of years, from other glaciers.

http://www.nytimes.com/1999/08/25/world/body-of-ancient-man-found-in-west-canada-glacier.html

http://frankwarner.typepad.com/free_frank_warner/2009/08/melting-glaciers-reveal-bodies-from-the-ice.html?cid=6a00d83451cd3769e20120a4d01ff2970b

This one begins to explain why a body falling into a crevasse is unlikely to remain intact for thousands of years.
http://www.mummytombs.com/mummylocator/featured/glacier.htm

http://archaeological-burial-practices.suite101.com/article.cfm/the_qilakitsoq_mummies

You can dig around more if you like. I'm not especially enamored with conspiracy theories, but things that might throw a monkey wrench into the works of climate change advocates don't tend to make it into the news.

Tthe efficiency and quality gains you make from being able to run a suite of unit tests that confirm that the code still works as intended,

This.

I would take it a step farther -- first, code like a girl. Then, use behavior-driven design. A comment explaining how the code works is well and good, but a human-readable spec which explains what it's supposed to do is, IMO, the best possible example you can provide.

Well-written specs don't really even need comments, if you provide descriptive names -- though that's not an excuse for leaving the original code uncommented.

I said "unqualified", and you jumped to the "executive experience" Republican talking point. I don't think Sarah Palin had particularly valuable executive experience (mayor of Wasilla doesn't count, and she was not governor for long),

She had more experience as Gov of AK than Obama did as Senator from IL. Also, let me add that being a governor, where you alone are seen as being responsible for a state is a whole hell of a lot different than being a senator, where you actions are blurred with those of 99 other senators. So I consider Palin's Gov experience much more highly than I consider Obama's legislative experience.

and I believe experience as a community organizer,

Really? Community Organizer? You consider handing out charity and tax payer money to more important than running and working for you own business? Seriously, has Obama ever held a blue collar job?

Here is your other post:

Here's some ideas. You might work on proving that they failed in some of the following ways and that those failures systematically favored Obama.

        * the facts they presented were incorrect
        * the facts they presented were irrelevant
        * they omitted significant facts
        * they masked editorial pieces as objective journalism
        * the values described in their editorials are not shared by the majority of Americans
        * the facts and values described in their editorials do not support their conclusions

Misrepresent facts? Don't know if I can point to any specific cases. However, there are plenty that were simply not reported/over reported. It's also important to as to HOW they present their stories. How many pictures of Obama have you seen with a aura around his head? How many sexist images have you seen of Palin?

Irrelevant facts? Sara Palin's reading list comes to mind. Did anyone ever ask Biden what he reads? How much coverage did Palin's wardrobe receive? How does that compare to Hillary's? For that matter, I heard more about how much money Palin's wardrobe cost than I heard about Obama's ties to .... well, ANYONE! (ACORN, Michelle's patient dumping scheme, Tony Rezko, Bill Ayers, Blaggo...except to try to debunk any connections, of course) Of course, the is AFTER Obama said to judge him by the company he keeps.

Omitted significant facts? Have you ever seen THIS video? That's Joe Biden. I saw the main stream media show fake pics of Palin in a bikini holding a rifle than I saw them show this video. I think this is by far the best example of bias! They'll report crap that makes one side look bad and completely ignore crap from the other side. How many times have you seen anyone other than FoxNews report on "Climate-Gate"? Hell, even /. thought it was important enough to cover! Are /. contributors better journalists than than NBC, CBS, MSNBC, ABC and CNN combined?

they masked editorial pieces as objective journalism... Remember when Chris Matthews got a tingle up his leg. He was covering the convention as a journalist, not an editor.

the values described in their editorials are shared by the majority of target audience (Fixed that for you). But the main question here should be, do they present a side that differs from the majority of their viewers/target audience? Fox is the only network that does this on a regular basis.

Has Google actually done something "Evil" that I missed?

http://www.adrants.com/images/evil_google.jpg
http://dinamehta.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/03-google-73802138_10.jpg
http://geekandpoke.typepad.com/geekandpoke/images/page_1_182.jpg
http://www.adrants.com/images/google-evil.jpg
http://www.ideachampions.com/weblogs/google-dr-evil.jpg
http://www.crackunit.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/01/Picture%203.jpg
http://www.cubanxgiants.com/berry/images/google_extremes.jpg
http://www.masternewmedia.org/images/Google-text-links-evil-460.gif
http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyimages/780.gif
http://www.softsailor.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/google-is-evil.jpg
http://culturalpolicyreform.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/evil-google-logo.jpg