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Opera Mini is the only way to go for mobile devices. [...] Opera mini is a much more pleasant experience. Try it!

Ugh, I've had a terrible experience with this browser on my Treo 680 (and before that on my Treo 650). I've tried various versions of Opera Mini starting with version 3, then 4, now 4.1, and each time it's been a pain to try to figure out how to keep it from crashing. I was able to get 4.1 working a little better using these instructions, but even then Opera Mini 4.1 still frequently locks up the device, forcing me to have to remove the battery. With earlier versions of Opera Mini 4 I've even reset my Treo to factory defaults and reinstalled everything, and that didn't fix the problem.

Your mileage may vary, but Opera Mini has been extremely crash-prone and disappointing for me.

Fact is, Facebook was late in opening up to the German market, and an abbreviation like StudiVZ is an excellent name to target abbreviation-loving German students. It reeks to me like the barbie-vs-bratz issue, where Mattel tries to sue only after it noticed that the success of the other was immense.

The previous VIP container, called "Silver Bullet", actually was an Airstream trailer, minus the wheels and with an aircraft pallet base added. The new "Steel Eagle" thing was designed based on an aircraft-qualified shelter module, which is basically an empty metal box on a pallet base. Then the USAF had to engineer an aircraft interior into the box, with lighting, HVAC, comms, and furnishings. It was a tight fit (the Airstream was bigger) and much custom engineering was required to cram everything in.

Looking at the pictures, one can see how the project got out of hand. They're doing the engineering required for an aircraft interior, but only building two or three units. There are companies that do luxury private aircraft interiors, and they would have had this done years ago at a lower cost, but the USAF apparently did this in-house, which ran up the costs.

So, having stated that you haven't seen any data, and having implied that you discount the opinions of so-called "Leftists" (i.e. the only people in America who actually care about the unfairly incarcerated, or, lately, about human rights in general), and are therefore motivated to expose the problem), you then proceed to float an unsupported opinion. Now that's some mighty funny stuff right there.

That being said, if you are open-minded enough to read studies containing *actual data* from so-called "thinktanks" that support the notion that racial and other demographic disparities exist in criminal justice, here are a couple:

The Sentencing Project: Geography: The War on Drugs in America's Cities
Human Rights Watch: Targeting Blacks Drug Law Enforcement and Race in the United States

I found these on Prof. Douglas A. Berman's interesting Sentencing Law and Policy blog, which links to many other sources of the facts you seek.

The claim that blacks are being unfairly punished is a totally bogus one.

No, it isn't. See http://archives.cnn.com/2000/LAW/05/04/civil.rights/index.html and http://sentencing.typepad.com/sentencing_law_and_policy/2006/01/should_criminal.html for starters.

It's quite simple. The amount of growth and increases are already estimated going into the fiscal year based of previous years performance and so on. Whenever there is a meaningful tax cut, that increase is increased resulting in the gains.

Let's see the data. The fact that revenues come in more or less than estimated is more of a reflection on the CBO's ability to estimate GDP growth accurately.

No one is saying that lowering taxes by itself causes revenue to increase, they are saying that is causes movement in the economy that results in more growth then without. This has been pretty consistant with the data.

Again, let's see the data. Specifically, what are the time horizons, and how are you separating out potentially confounding variables?

What clean room assumptions do you need to make? I mean human behavior, while somewhat erratic is also predictable. This is especially true with people who have made their own money out of personal sweat and decisions they have made instead of inheriting it.

The theory behind the "lower taxes increases growth" idea is quite sound. The question of by how much, and whether that amount offsets the lower tax rate is a different one. I'm simply saying that there's absolutely no reason to believe that the Laffer curve isn't riddled with local maxima and minima or that it's even a smooth and continuous function. The idea that we should use an idealized parabolic function to approximate a function whose nature we don't (and likely can't) know is crazy, and making policy based on it is even crazier.

Aslo, the voodoo economists we deplore are the ones who seem to think that if you tell 1/3 of the graduating seniors to become scientists or hair stylist or whatever industry is having a shortage where the employees are making killer case, that flooding the industry with workers is somehow good for you and me working there.

I've never seen a serious economist suggesting something like that.

It is the same voodoo economist who seem to think that the government manipulating a market area (not necessarily markets) can have any advantage other then to the participants in that market area.

These discussions never end up landing on any concrete claims--only vague truisms about abstract bad people wanting to micro-manage things. I don't really have much to say there.

I'm sorry that you don't seem to see the differences there.

Perhaps my point wasn't clear. I see an almost universal disdain for economics as a "soft" discipline with no real truths in these sorts of armchair policy debates, usually from the same people who suddenly think that it's a 100% certainty that our economy is described perfectly by a neat, parabolic Laffer curve and that we're on the downward sloping side of it. The reality is that there's no justification for that claim to be found in the data. It's that sort of reasoning that leads to abominations like this one.

Is the Laffer curve "inherently idiotic"? As a theoretical construction, no; in reality, in the current tax regime, yes. Do you really think people are likely to put down their keyboards and stop working if the tax rate increases from 30 to 35%? Preposterous.

Of course, data trumps theory. If there's any data suggesting that we're to the right of the Laffer peak, I have not seen it. And when even right-wingers' data show that raising taxes raises revenue, you really have to wonder whether there is any scrap of data anywhere in the world to support their position.

True these are snake oil too I guess ?

Valcent Vertigro Algae Oil:

http://thefraserdomain.typepad.com/energy/2006/10/vertigro_algae_.html

Coskata $1/gal Ethanol partners with General Motors:
(non-crop oriented ethanol)

http://www.autobloggreen.com/2008/01/13/gm-and-coskata-announce-worldwide-cellulosic-ethanol-partnership/

Bacteria the eats waste and releases petroleum:

http://thegoodcity.wordpress.com/2008/06/19/bacteria-that-eat-waste-and-poop-petroleum/

Read it here

Of course. Earthberming a building could cause the end of all life on earth and requires at least six years of specialized training. Yeah, right.

I wrote as long a list as I did precisely because people's skills and resources vary. Are you telling me that "most people" have neither the skills not the money to buy a solar powered battery charger? I mean, hey, twenty-five bucks is serious money and it's hard work getting those little suction cups to stick to the window. Converting a car to biodiesel? If something that low on risk wasn't viable, half the projects posted on this site would be even less so.

solar panels . . .burn buildings down and electrocute people to death.
Unlike, say, using a backyard barbeque grill? C'mon, how frequently do homes get burnt down by solar panels? Especially since most put out 24 volts of power or even less. You're seriously pushing it here. I gave a bit of thought to the things that I suggested before I posted and not a one is limited to people with any more money or skill than is required to build a nice gaming-optimized PC. In fact, you could start with a little unit from thinkgeek, about as /.-friendly a site as there could possibly be.
I'm not claiming that the average American should put up a dozen terawatts of photovoltaics on their garage. I'm saying that most people, certainly most /.ers, are capable of taking at least small steps to reduce the need for megaprojects in the first place.
Looking again, I should have put more emphasis on small starts, on things like battery chargers. As it happens, I just finished writing a blog post in which I did just that. But as for your concern about "the masses" not being able to handle something as simple as a wind turbine, dude, you're on the wrong site. What do you think "free as in speech" is all about? I posted on a site that's all about taking control of the technology around us, about not just curling up and waiting for some huge corporation, whether Microsoft or General Motors or General Electric, to tell us how they are going to run our lives.
We stop paying attention, stop keeping involved in "the means of production", and we're all screwed.

America has been DESIGNED for the automobile...
Um, actually, not always. A lot of our older suburbs and cities (Pasadena comes to mind) were designed for streetcars. America is filled with moderately intact streetcar suburbs. They were designed for mass-transit and would work even better now that fifty years of technology could make streetcars that would be cheaper, lighter, and easier to maintain.
What is keeping cheap, small, streetcars like this from being brought back? Well, among other things, there are now thousands of expensive regulations about how a mass-transit rail vehicle can be made. The doors alone cost thousands of dollars because, for example, they need to be able to be opened manually if the power goes out while simultaneously not being easy to open while the vehicle is in transit while ALSO needing to be controllable electrically from at least two points, and on and on and on.

I've been looking into this for a few years now and the tech is ludicrously easy. I did a little thought experiment and I would say that it should cost about thirty thousand bucks for a bunch of techies to build a light-duty streetcar these days. But making it legal for use? Good luck with that.

No, the truth is, America, other than the winding suburban streets of the sort that are being phased out anyway, could actually implement mass transit and related technologies pretty fast and cheaper than you would think. IF, that is, the people in the various legislatures get off their asses and make it possible.

Actually, as Edison & The Electric Chair documents quite nicely, Edison originally intended to run all of his utilities through purpose-built subsurface channels. It actually made economic sense with late eighteen-hundreds technology. Almost. Unfortunately, waterproofing technology wasn't ready yet, so he eventually gave in and used raised power lines. Why we *still* do this over a hundred years later isn't so easy to justify. And the fraud that this kind of approach makes very easy helps protect the telecoms at times like this. I suspect that one of the many reasons that they fear the prospect of municipal service-providers is that once a few have been built, it will start becoming obvious how much the telcos lie about their costs and procedures.

As many of you have seen me say before, I think that we should build more public service tunnels along our rights of way of the sorts that private business have used for generations. You may know them better as the "steam tunnels" so key to many cheesy seventies slasher flicks.

My wife is in the same boat as you - she had lots of slides (~3000) from her parents, lots of 35mm negatives (too many to count), and a bunch of photos (again thousands) from all different formats.

I ended up buying her a Nikon Coolscan V ED for her to scan in the 35mm negatives she has and her parent's slides. She has been very happy with it. I already had an Epson 2450 flatbed scanner...

She scans the slides, photos, and negatives while working on other projects in her office. The easiest tool I found for the photos is Adobe Photoshop CS (a bit expensive, but worth every penny - you could download a trial version from Adobe.) You put as many photos as can fit on your flatbed scanner (no need to straighten them perfectly), scan the photos, and then click on File --> Automate --> Crop and Straighten Photos - this will break up all the scanned photos into individual files, arrange them so they are straight, after which you can then edit and save each one.

Someone else wrote some instructions at http://photoshop911.typepad.com/help/2006/01/automating_crop.html/

There are probably some scanners where you can feed photos in - but some of the photos we have are irreplaceable (no negatives or copies.) We would not want to see them lost due to a scanner feed malfunction.

Also, do yourself a favor, and make backups of the work that you do. You would hate to lose all that effort due to a hard drive failure.

Best of luck!

"they are going to cripple their countries economically" yeah, cause that part of the world currently has strong economies with high employment. "As it stands there hasn't been any meaningful scientific research from a middle east nation for decades." i thought they cured aids... http://righttruth.typepad.com/right_truth/2007/02/iran_cures_aids.html ...come on man!

And before they made it into a movie it was an interesting short story. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sentinel_(short_story)
If you'd like to read it, seems it is this PDF, http://econtent.typepad.com/TheSentinel.pdf

As people keep having to point out, nobody is presenting one form of sustainable power generation as some sort of panacea. Where it's windy, use wind; where currents and tides are strong, use hydro; where it's sunny, use PV, where there's trash land, grow switchgrass; and so on. And even beyond this, per capita demand is a result of many behaviors that people like me are working to change. It's not just about power generation. It's about all kinds of changes from better insulated houses to more mass transit, to eating more food that's grown locally. (Food is actually the biggest energy cost for many Americans.) This doesn't require moving into a teepee and living on uncooked twigs. It's possible to live very elegantly and very comfortably indeed in a sustainable way. We just need to make the changes that make that possible.

In short, the fire and moving back west and getting my product line built has kept me from those two but they're both, as it happens, back on my tasklist for the next few weeks.

I can tell you this much: Walmart, of all places, now sells a little set of LED room lights, all connected to one little power block, and designed to plug into a solar panel. And more and more solar panels, not just ones for cars, are designed with little suction cups to attach to the inside of a window. When Walmart does it, you *know* that it's going mainstream.

Oh, and fwiw, here in Portland where we get 37 inches of rain a year, I've met several people who are working on tiny little hydroturbines on downspouts and other water lines, both within and outside of a building.

whatever happened to that lump of shit? did he finally get flushed?

He's busy shilling for Barry-O.

Finally got the paper to download. It's interesting, and was obviously a very serious study that required a lot of work. Good on them for that.

But the mean interrater correlation is 0.41, meaning that it only explains about 17% of the shared variance. This looks to me like another psych study that mistakes statistical significance for practical significance.

To put it another way, there was really only an average of 17% agreement between rater and writer in their assessments. What this study finds is that judging people based on their profile, while not completely useless, isn't very useful.

To put it another way... It's basically just as you would assume: You can get an idea of what someone is like based on what they present about themselves, but the picture is going to be far from complete.

So, let's rename this Slashdot article correctly: "Your Online Profile Actually Tells a Little About You!"

True that the interrater correlation was .41. True that the r-squared is 17%. But interpreting this...turns out that peers who have known each other for a long time and even married couples only correlate around .50 or 25%. So although your online profile doesn't tell everything about you, it tells more than what a stranger in a grocery store would see, and nearly as much as your friends see.

Check out the table down on the page here to see how online profiles compare to other sources of info in conveying your personality.

You of course already know how a monopoly is broken because it happens so frequently. Y'know, cuz like... it's always in the news that our government breaks monothic companies like Microsoft or Halliburton into pieces to foster competition, create free markets, and promote options for the consumer.

Regardless, here is a handy chart to illustrate how Ma Bell was broken up in '84 and what has happened since. Stephen Colbert broke it down nicely here, although that link has been removed do to copyright claims by Viacom, one of our six global media conglomerates.

Thank goodness you can still watch it in Canada.

Of all the AT&T derivatives... we know Qwest didn't spy on us. So that's one.

W

The taxes should be equitable. If you earn more, you should proportionately pay more. I agree with Buffet, he should be paying proportionately as his employees pay. See http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2007/06/warren-buffet-p.html The problem is, businesses and business lobbies have secured so many short cuts for saving taxes for big businesses the middle class is obviously jealous. I won't be surprised when someone comes up with the numbers for % of taxes paid by top 1% money earners - its a fact.

That is one of the things I love in Kurt Vonnegut's The Big Space Fuck:

...so even the President was saying shit and fuck and so on, without anybody's feeling threatened or taking offense. It was perfectly OK. He called the Space Fuck a Space Fuck and so did everybody else...

On the other hand Bush has been making inroads in that direction...

Whoops, I should have made that link go here. Good list of starter posts.

Well, I'm not sure how important outside help is to the equation. For example, the French didn't assist the American revolutionaries until it was clear that they had a decent shot of winning already. Outside powers don't tend to take altruistic risks, after all.

You might be interested in John Robb's "Global Guerrillas" blog. Robb theorizes that with the Iraq war and other conflicts, we're seeing a new generation of warfare, in which small, loosely networked groups are increasingly able to fight effectively against traditional state forces.

When I was in the Navy we were using this term well before the Internet. Over bad communication lines, it was used as Whiskey, Tango Foxtrot, over.
BOHICA and FUBAR has been around forever to.
Here's some more good military acronyms:
http://timesonline.typepad.com/inside_iraq_weblog/2008/06/whiskey-tango-f.html

I like POO from that list...well not literally. Point Of Origin.

Your point is still valid though, because you certainly aren't making any less than your father did.

A.) We need to start building service tunnels, even if only one street per city at first.

B.) We need to start building a mesh network of wireless nodes that are then owned by nobody at all. (Make a node out of a cantenna, an old PDA, and a solar panel, duct tape it to the side of building, walk away. Maybe even make tiny nodes and stick them under the seats of city buses.)

C.) Eventually we need to look at the technologies made better by the N Prize and start bloody well launching our own damn satellite network.

I, for one, do NOT welcome our new familiar overlords and am working on a regular basis to route around them. How about you?

Try the Whatever blog then:

http://scalzi.com/whatever

It's by science fiction author whatever and covers a large range of topics from science fiction (obviously) to politics, and also bears the honour of being on of the first ever blogs.

It's also quite prolific most of the time.

On the subject of authors, there is also:

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/
Charles Stross, science fiction author

http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/blog.asp
William Gibson - surely you know who this is.

http://blog.laurellkhamilton.org/
Laurell K Hamilton, most well known of the Paranormal Romance emerging genre

http://wilwheaton.typepad.com/wwdnbackup/
Wil Wheaton, author and famous as "Wesley" from Star Trek: TNG years ago.

There are a lot of other feeds on my list, many of which have already been mentioned. One that hasn't however is The Register.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/

A british news site with a tech slant

and Worse than Failure (The Daily WTF)

http://thedailywtf.com/

A site that highlights the worst of the worst in programming and IT stories. Highly entertaining.

On the PM note, our CIO likes to think of himself as a PM, what with his MBA and all, but I wouldn't put him in charge of taking care of my cat for two days let alone any project. Disorganization and incompetence are two words which describe his skills. Not to mention no people skills whatsoever.

On the other hand, there are people out there who have the natural ability to organize tasks, communicate goals and have the phrase, "Plays well with others" stamped repeatedly in their personnel files but who will never be given the chance to manage projects because they don't have that little piece of paper.

Here's an idea which I'm sure will drive people nuts who have been in the business for a while: how about taking people under your wing and mentoring them on how project management works, what skills are involved and the other basics.

Better yet, for someone who shows an aptitude for organizing processes, put them in an entry-level job doing minor projects and let them grow. You'd be surprised at how well people who want to do PM perform under such conditions.

Ask not, and please tell not.

we can do it better, but overall it's still the best bang for the buck (calculating the waste output, and handling of said waste output, into the buck) that we have.

How is nuclear power the best choice? We don't even have a way to deal with the waste.

I'm hopeful that when we do get around to building new reactors, they'll be of a more modern and efficient design than the ones running currently.

Where are these designs? And not just general hand waving but actual designs. And doing more research into new designs don't count, the same energy and money put into alternative resources may come out with better things.

Sorry, Falcon, but solar, wind, wave, hydro and all the other renewables won't cut it at our current consumption levels (see the link at the end).

So your news link beats my science links?

A nearly-as-bad downside is the fact that the footprint for enough of a solar or wind farm to replace a coal plant means you're eating up many times more real estate with concrete and metal than the coal plant did, and I've no desire to pave the planet.

Did you even read the Sciam article? Or the Wind Atlas?

So the big objection to coal power (which also pertains to combustion engines; cars) is that we're running out of the power source and there's not more we can get or make.

My biggest issue with coal, and nuclear power, is that it is dirty. If you're going to bring up carbon capture and storage, show one such plant in operation that actually works.

and then there's the limited-fuel-resources-from-few-suppliers drawback as well

Now I'll admit here the US doesn't need to worry about running out of coal, there's hundreds of years of coal in the US alone. As stated above though it's dirty. And not just the burning of coal but the mining as well. Mountain Top removal is probably the dirtiest mining there is, though uranium mining comes close. And underground mining isn't any better, healthier, or safer. It causes Black Lung as well as other health problems. There are a number of underground fires in coal mines, the Centralia mine fire in Columbia County, Pennsylvania has been burning since 1962.

However, with only a few thousand nuclear plants, eventually, powering the US

We don't need more centralized power, we need more distributed power. Nor do we need to devote land for just one purpose, which nuclear power requires. With wind gennies, generators, farmers can lease small plots, or use as their own, to erect a genny. This would create a second source of income for farmers. One of the biggest problems with wind farms are all the NIMBYs, such as the ones fighting siting wind farms off the coast of Cape Hatteras. The Mid-Atlantic Coast Could Supply 330 gigawatts of Electricity, from Cape Cod to Cape Hatteras, alone according to researchers at University of Delaware. Meanwhile 4 Nuclear Power Plants in California had a capacity of 4 gigawatts in 2005. That comes to 1 gigawatt per power plant, whereas the wind potential off the Mid Atlantic comes to 330 nuclear power plants.

Second Life Blogs - Blogs about the Second Life virtual world. Usually I list these by avatar name.

• The Lexx's Second Life - Alexzandria Aeon ("Lexx") is my "SL daughter" and a businesswoman.
• Jacek Antonelli - An artist and commentator on various aspects of the world.
• Hamlet Au - New World Notes - The "big dog" in Second Life blogging. Hamlet Au used to work for Linden Lab, and wrote a book, The Making of Second Life.
• life|cubed - One of my friends, "Padre" Triste Bertrand, who is also a minister in RL.
• Cala - Transgender in Second Life - She writes about some interesting topics.
• Evans Avenue Exit - I write this one. :-) I post about current events, scripting, and whatever else suits my fancy.
• Vint Falken - One of the premier European SL bloggers (she's from Belgium).
• Grand Unified Linden Blog - Official news and information from Linden Lab.
• Torley Lives - Everybody in Second Life should know Torley Linden. Torley is unique, helpful, and watermelon-flavored.
• An Engine Fit For My Proceeding - Ordinal Malaprop is SL's own version of Ada Lovelace...a fine Victorian lady and a top-flight scripter.
• Massively (Second Life) - The latest news and information about Second Life. (Massively.com also covers other virtual worlds and MMOs.)
• Second Thoughts - Prokofy Neva is perhaps the most-hated person in SL, and is sort of the "official gadfly." He's well worth reading for an alternate perspective, though.
• Dwell On It - Tateru Nino is one of the smartest people I know. Her writing is part of what got me into SL in the first place.
• MeraTalk - Mera Pixel is insightful, witty, and very purple.
• Second Life Grid Status Reports - When there are problems with SL--an all-too-often occurrence these days, alas--Linden Lab posts here.

Political Blogs - This is stuff with a right-wing bent, and is the section that will probably be most responsible for this post being modded down. :-/

• The Smallest Minority - Kevin Baker is partly a gunblogger, partly an excellent commentator. He's had good posts recently about education.
• La Shawn Barber's Corner - A Christian blogger who only dabbles in politics these days, spending more time writing about music and digital technology.
• Leslie Carbone - A Virginia political blogger who I found via Twitter.
• Personal Effects - Connie du Toit is one of the clearest-minded writers you'll find on many subjects.
• Geopoliticus - Kim du Toit (yes, he and Connie are married) is the L33t Master of Firearms, and an insightfu

This is a huge topic, since so many different strategies are being brought to bear. For data center operators, energy efficiency is a business imperative since the power bills are soaring. Here are some sources offering ongoing reading about Green Data Centers:

The Green Data Center Blog
Data Center Knowledge
Groves Green IT
The Big List of Green Technology Blogs

Slashdot
http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot

WWdN: In Exile
http://wilwheaton.typepad.com/wwdnbackup/rss.xml

Penny Arcade
http://www.penny-arcade.com/rss.xml

The Merry Corsetier
http://community.livejournal.com/corsetmakers/data/rss

T-Shirt Surgery
http://community.livejournal.com/t_shirt_surgery/data/rss

Winnipeg Bargain Barn Swap Meet and Flea Market
http://community.livejournal.com/winnipeg/data/rss

Post Secret
http://postsecret.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

XKCD
http://xkcd.com/rss.xml

National Post
http://feeds.feedburner.com/NP_Top_Stories.rss

Astronomy Picture of the Day RSS Feed
http://www.acme.com/jef/apod/rss.xml

Dilbert Daily Strip
http://feeds.feedburner.com/DilbertDailyStrip

We The Robots
http://www.wetherobots.com/feed/

Disclaimer: I have removed all of my friend's blog's feeds.

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

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

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

Here's one idea:

http://michaelfeathers.typepad.com/michael_feathers_blog/2008/06/the-flawed-theo.html

Personally I think good software is a result of re-using what works in the form of libraries or design patterns, keeping things as simple as possible, and utilizing developer experience and judgement.

Know any women who are developing Social Media, (Web 2.0) or Web 3.0, (The Semantic Web), applications? Please comment to this blog post to add them to a list being compiled by nFold: http://martalyall.typepad.com/nfold/2008/06/yes-women-are-geeks-and-do-develop-social-media.html

That's funny, because a buddy of mine lives in Argentina and tells me that armed carjackings and home invasions are a regular occurrence.

http://deconsumption.typepad.com/deconsumption/2006/04/stories_from_po.html

Space suit of the past more like!

Seriously, come back when we have sexy space suits!

What should NASA do? Damned if I know. Or care all that much for now. AFAIC the real concern is for a private group to choose some location well away from the various government-run bases and just bloody well start shooting itty bitty robots up there ASAP. As I've said about Mars, the rational thing to do is to start processing minerals, digging tunnels that are deep enough to be radiation resistant, establishing power generation capacity, and maybe even starting a few teeny separate greenhouse enclosures in which the beginnings of working ecosystems can get going. In the next few years. Not to mention building the kinds of expertise one only gets through real world implementation.

To wait to do this with human-optimized vehicles or even simply to wait to do this until the billions of dollars in funding needed for a full mission can be rounded up and the milions of man-hours in research and development needed to make a moonbase human-capable is as boneheaded as, say, using only Microsoft products "because that's the established approach".

We already know that dust is going to make every job bloody difficult. We already know that our attempts at equipment that reliably works in vacuum and under those temperature changes haven't gone all that well. We have a lot of learning to do. And it will all go a lot better if the first humans get there to find as much mass and equipment already waiting and running as possible. So let's start with the least demanding tasks and get more ambitious as we go.

So I say:
A.) Put a couple of relays in Moon orbit. This massively cuts power and complexity demands down for the devices we later send moonside. If they can take pictures of the moon as they orbit, that's jim dandy too.
B.) Have at least two teams launch at least two different approaches to digger robots. These robots will, hopefully, if nothing else, build the first enclosures in which other robots can do things like wait out the worst radiation storms.
C.) Send more robots to survey the local area for mineral resources. Each package also includes some amount of additional power generation capacity. Ideally some mix is used of solar, temperature differential-based systems, and other approaches.
D.) And only then send robots to start doing things like making rocket fuel from moon mass.

Maybe I'm wrong about the ideal order. But I'm pretty damn sure that I'm right about my basic point. We should be launching payloads as soon as we possibly can. Barring some other group stealing what we send, we lose far more than we gain by waiting.
Oh, and if we do it right, the group that does so may even get to have that /. classic become true.
E.) PROFIT!!!!

http://arizona.typepad.com/blog/files/Stonewall_handout.pdf

This was written for the Stonewall Democrats. It includes boilerplate public records text at the end, some examples of dirty stuff seen in public records, examples of screwed-up facilities (with pictures) and more.

This is an example of an after-action report written along these principles:

http://www.bbvdocs.org/sequoia/Maricopa-County-Elections-Report.pdf

I'm doing another right now for Monterey County California for the election of June 3rd '08. Found all sorts of crazy stuff. That should be posted at http://blackboxvoting.org/ in a day or two.

Jim March
Member of the board of directors
Blackboxvoting.org

That's actually a blog post by Wil Wheaton.

Oh, you sooooo need to see Cats (and other animals) and Racks!

Which reminds me: hack XP's start button. I think "stop" is appropriate here.

The American Medical Association restricts the supply of MDs, and by law you can't get most medical care from anyone who isn't an MD.

AC is correct: you cannot be a "realtor." You can be a "REALTOR" (Registered trademark) if the National Association of Realtors permits it.

Both restrict capacity of the labor in their industries. This is known to create at best Cournot competition. Meanwhile, a market that is not capacity constrained has Betrand competition - where the mere threat of entry can keep prices near their minimum. Cournot competition reduces economic efficiency (id est, screws you out of money).

I'd estimate the average working American is getting "screwed" (how much he pays less what a competitive market would cost) by about $6,000 per year (of the approximately $16,000/yr of medical expense he and his company pay). Your paycheck is probably light by $500 per month due to the AMA tax.

It is also worth noting that a supply shortage of saved lives is equivalent to preventable deaths. This artificial shortage raises prices of having your life saved while simultaneously reducing your odds of having your life saved.

The AMA and NAR are de facto monopsonists, restricting the ease of health care and real estate purchase respectively, and using your medical bills and need for housing to make their members artificially richer.

Don't believe that doctors are getting paid "too much"? See if you can find the trend in the Forbes best paying jobs in America:
1. Anesthesiologist
2. Surgeon
3. Obstetrician
4. Orthodontist
5. Oral Surgeon
6. Internist
7. Prosthodontist
8. Psychiatrist
9. General Practitioner
10. Chief Executive Officer
11. Physician and Surgeon, Other
12. Pediatrician
13. Dentist
14. Airline Pilot
15. Podiatrist
16. Lawyer

Productivity in the US has been going up steadily over the last decade, but real median income has gone down. Where does all that extra money go that you're not getting paid? Your company spends it on health insurance, most of which ends up in the hands of MDs.

OPEC dominates the trillion dollar global petroleum industry. The AMA dominates the two trillion dollar national medical industry. Politicians blame OPEC for our economy because doctors write big checks.

Wow, this was news in like... April? It's almost June. Get with it Slashdot. All I see are stupid Digg stories and "featured" Yahoo stories here, and a day late to boot. Oh well, I suppose it's better than the global warming drivel... Anyway, according to that link:

government employees could be fined, suspended, or even fired for blogging at home

Scott Adams said everything I wanted to say.