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Good video over the net is 2 Mbps for Netflix.

MAYBE that's true for netflix. It isn't true for other services.

I'm looking at season 1 of "Parks and Recreation" from Itunes at 720p.
The bitrate of these episodes is roughly 4.5Mbps and it is just at the bare minimum of what I consider acceptable. They are going to need to more than double that for good quality 1080p, say at least 13Mbps for broadcast-quality (not blu-ray) 1080p. For example, NBC's nationwide 1080i backhaul is 15Mbps h264 and they are the lowest bitrate of all the major networks, ABC is roughly 35Mbps h264 for their 720p backhaul.

So, 13Mbps for decent 1080p material - that works out to:
~4.0GB at good 1080p
~1.5GB at itunes quality 720p
for typical 42 minute show with no commercials.

That puts comcast's cap at about 2 hours a day for good 1080p or 5.5 hours at itunes quality.
For an entire family, with no commercials.

The average television is on for more than 8 hours a day in the US.

That puts comcast's 250GB cap at about half of the necessary level for itunes quality television, and a quarter for good quality 1080p. For the AVERAGE family. It doesn't account for the bell-curve at all. The cap needs to be more like 2TB to cover the average household video consumption out to the 1st standard deviation.

No cat in the world can be kept on a leash. You don't keep them, they keep you.

Are you nuts? I've done it. So have plenty of other people. It's not that hard with cats that are kept indoors, provided they're already used to wearing a collar.

Or are you going to claim that you can't control an animal that's a small fraction of your weight and strength, and that you can't outsmart an animal that's got a small fraction of your brains? Look at how much bigger than us a horse is ... and we still do it ... and you can't even control a cat? Oh, right, you're from the "you don't keep them, they keep you" school of thought. I've heard of being pussy-whipped, but by a real pussy-cat? That's just sad.

USA Today: http://www.usatoday.com/life/columnist/pettalk/2009-02-24-cats-leash_N.htm " Cat on a leash: We'll walk you through it

Back in the late 1950s when I was a wee one in small-town Maine, we all -- kids and grown-ups alike -- snickered relentlessly at the lady who lived across Benton Avenue from my grandparents. Every afternoon she'd carry her massive tiger cat outside and connect a long cable to its harness, and the cat would spend the next several hours sunning herself, scratching at the maple tree and stalking birds.

This was at a time when people had mostly indoor-outdoor cats that roamed at will. Most of those cats had short lives, the result of unfortunate run-ins with cars, foxes, dogs and other cats. The neighbor lady's cat, on the other hand, lived nearly 20 active, sociable years. So much for our derision.

I thought about that old cat recently when on two separate occasions I saw women walking their cats through the park. Yup. Cats in harnesses on leashes strolling about the boulders and pine trees. Acting like it was the most normal thing in the world.

Turns out that in these times when most cat breeders, trainers and shelter personnel implore people to protect their cats by making them indoor-only pets, a few are recommending leash walks for felines as a way to stimulate them, keep them fit and allow them to connect with nature.

There's even a new self-published book, Walk Your Cat, The Complete Guide (Spiraka, $12.99), written by Steven Jacobson and Jean Miller, a married couple who have trained a handful of cats to prowl about confidently at the end of a leash.

"After a tough day," says Miller, a Virginia Tech philosophy instructor, "it's a nice, relaxing thing to come home, get the leash and take the cat out for a long walk."

Right.

Even she acknowledges that those words have an odd ring to them.

She hopes that in five or 10 years, though, cat owners the world over will be seen every evening de-stressing with cat walks. For the moment, however, as perhaps the nation's most vocal cat-walk advocate, she's "spending a lot of time trying to overcome the stigma."

The reasons leash walking for cats isn't already part of the American routine, she says, are twofold. First, most people think you can't train cats. More important, anyone who has ever tried to venture into kitty-stroll territory has probably been wildly unsuccessful. And that, Miller says, is "because they've used a dog model of leash training. That's certain to fail."

Miller and Jacobson have developed a step-by-step method that they say ensures success as long as the owner abides by the ever-so-important, can't-be-breached, No. 1 rule: You can't rush the process. It could take months to get a cat accustomed to the harness, confident with the process, no longer struggling against the leash, responsive to such words as "wait" and "no," and willing to return home when it's time.

The authors say that the command-and-control approach often used with dogs never works with cats (and

I personally run/have run many huge enterprise apps on .NET. It's actually a pretty good platform if you know what you're doing.

Don't take my word for it, though.

When I googled for what you asked to google, I found this list of sites running ASP.NET.

Costco - http://www.costco.com/
Crate & Barrel - http://www.crateandbarrel.com/
Home Shopping Network - http://www.hsn.com/
Buy.com - http://www.buy.com/
Dell - http://www.dell.com/
Nasdaq - http://www.nasdaq.com/
Virgin - http://www.virgin.com/
7-Eleven - http://www.7-eleven.com/
Carnival Cruise Lines - http://www.carnival.com/
L'Oreal - http://www.loreal.com/
The White House - http://www.whitehouse.gov/
Remax - http://www.remax.com/
Monster Jobs - http://www.monster.com/
USA Today - http://www.usatoday.com/
ComputerJobs.com - http://computerjobs.com/
Match.com - http://www.match.com/
National Health Services (UK) - http://www.nhs.uk/
CarrerBuilder.com - http://www.careerbuilder.com/
Newegg http://newegg.com/
Geico http://geico.com/
Capital One http://capitalone.com/
Zecco http://zecco.com/

Maybe you should tell those sites that .NET is a unproven technology? Or will you try to argue that these are not huge enterprise apps? Just because you want something to be true(or maybe you were just karma whoring) doesn't make it true. C# is a better language than Java, though each one has it's strengths. And even conceding your point(I don't) that Java is faster, speed is not everything. Or we would all be coding in assembly or machine code.

Graduates of the college Class of 2009 may not be as lucky as previous grads when it comes to finding jobs after graduation. Due to the current economic recession, stock prices are plummeting and the unemployment rate has soared to a high of 7.2 percent. Consumers have curbed their spending habits, resulting in a reduction in demand for goods and services.

Earlier this academic year, employers ... reported that hiring for new graduates will remain flat compared to last year. This ... suggests that average starting salary offers will be flat as well. Last year at this time, the average starting salary to all bachelor's degree graduates was $49,300, representing a 4 percent increase from the previous year.

And there's this:

Two-thirds of bachelor's degree recipients last year graduated with an average debt of about $23,000, according to Finaid.org, a financial aid website.

Total debt for borrowers with graduate or professional degrees ranges from $30,000 to $120,000, Finaid.org says. New graduates face an even more unforgiving job market. Employers expect to hire 22% fewer graduates from the class of 2009 than they hired from the class of 2008, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers.

You sure about that? http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2009-06-29-amish-economy_N.htm

Bullshit.

The lighter ban was instituted because Washington geniuses who decided that IF AND ONLY IF the shoe bomber had tried to light the fuse with a lighter, he MIGHT have had slightly more success.

The lighter ban was nothing more than a knee-jerk, crack pipe smoking, hypothetical scenario dreamed up by our elected officials - the TSA even opposed it.

citation and citation

I have lived overseas for 17 years, smoke, and fly internationally regularly. Lighters have no problem with flying, pressure differentials, or any other such shit. Morons make stuff like this up to make issues where there are none.
           

Sorry, I'm an old fart. This was a big scandal in the 80s.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-11-16-pentagon-travel_x.htm

http://armedservices.house.gov/list/speech/armedsvc_dem/AndrewsOS092409.shtml

http://www.cdi.org/adm/725/
(excerpt :
Senator GRASSLEY [R Iowa]: The Defense Department wants you to believe that they are making dramatic changes in the way things are purchased, particularly spare parts. I think the most out-standing example is the $600 toilet seat of 1983. And we thought that we had that problem taken care of and, 16 years later, the $600 toilet seat was costing $1800. )

yes, that's the same reason MS has never had anti-trust brought against them~

Idiot.

Actually, there's a lot of merit to that statement. After all, MS didn't start pouring sacks of money into both parties until after they got sued, and neither did the tech industry as a whole. Compare the numbers before 1998 to after. They learned their lesson well, and now the IT sector is a huge contributor to BOTH parties, unlike the fools in the oil, tobacco, and housing industries which used to be far more partisan and who got nailed when their parties weren't in power.

Though they've been pretty even-handed across parties, they've certainly had clear favorites in races. Look at how much they gave Bush v. Gore in 2000. They also hired Ralph Reed to lobby Bush during the 2000 election, and Bush was a strong opponent of breaking up the company. And it paid off well.

(I only remember this so well because Bush's position on the MS antitrust case was what fired up my interest in politics for the first time during the 2000 race. I might not be a Democrat today if it wasn't for that public stance angering me so much. I was pretty conservative on social issues, though I probably would've ended up here anyway over science policy and the environment.)

These guys flew for 78 minutes without speaking to ground controllers. The lives of the pilots themselves could have been in jeopardy as well as the lives of the passengers. I giggled when the thought first crossed my mind, but considering the pilots' shifting explanations, it is the reasoning to beat. What kind of passion would have caused that level of incompetence at your job? Detailing the aspects of how scheduling software works? I doubt it. Having sex? Absolutely.

Just so you know kids and dogs have lived in close quarters for the last 10,000 years or so and incidental exposure to dog poop may even cause more benfits than harm.

When there are still regions of the country without affordable broadband, games as digital downloads are a long way off. I don't think any of the console companies are ready to ignore significant chunks of the country because their residents can't afford to pay for expensive broadband plans solely to justify their shiny new console.

You are making the wholly unfounded assumption that half of the dead kids were obese. Where is your justification for that?

Over half the US population is obese.

It sounds like you have a personal issue with obese people. That's well and good, but that doesn't translate into "data"

Ya, but i'm not putting together the data, I'm just telling you about it. Really, is google now beyond the means of the average /.er?

http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2009-07-10-swine-flu_N.htm
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/19/AR2009051902609.html
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601202&sid=aM.7Dg3Z_msI

http://www.naturalnews.com/006781.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2007/dec/11/medicalresearch.health
http://health.families.com/blog/a-link-between-obesity-and-your-immune-system

This is an influenza virus we're talking about. There are plenty of studies showing that getting vaccinated for influenza is completely pointless.

Please read this story in The Atlantic.

From page 2:

The history of flu vaccination suggests other reasons to doubt claims that it dramatically reduces mortality. In 2004, for example, vaccine production fell behind, causing a 40 percent drop in immunization rates. Yet mortality did not rise. In addition, vaccine “mismatches” occurred in 1968 and 1997: in both years, the vaccine that had been produced in the summer protected against one set of viruses, but come winter, a different set was circulating. In effect, nobody was vaccinated. Yet death rates from all causes, including flu and the various illnesses it can exacerbate, did not budge.

That magical polio vaccine, which is now being given in Nigeria in the form of a nasal spray (just like the current influenza vaccine being given out now) has mutated and been responsible for causing the current outbreak there.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2009-08-14-nigeria-polio_N.htm

Everyone who got the polio vaccine in the US has been exposed to SV 40, one of many viruses in vaccines that have been found to cause cancer.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvsXrVkjyz4

When you get a vaccine you are getting many unknown viruses, proteins and random DNA fragments that are grown with the vaccine in whatever substance is used. There has never been a study of long term effects on what these can do to you.

Doctors in Germany have been warning about this.

The nutrient solution for the vaccine consists of cancerous cells from animals and "we do not know if there could be an allergic reaction".

But more importantly, some people fear that the risk of cancer could be increased by injecting the cells.

The vaccine - as Johannes Löwer, president of the Paul Ehrlich Institute, has pointed out - can also cause worse side effects than the actual swine flu virus.

Wodrag also described people’s fear of the pandemic as an "orchestration": “It is great business for the pharmaceutical industry,” he told the ‘Neuen Presse’.

Swine flu is not very different from normal flu. “On the contrary if you look at the number of cases it is nothing compared to a normal flu outbreak,” he added.

But please fearmonger about the plague and polio without looking at any associated risks with getting vaccinated for everything that may make most people sick for a few days.

And since the dawn of time, marriage was considered to be for a lifetime, yet anti-gay conservative after anti-gay conservative cheats on his wife and/or gets a divorce. If you were railing against divorce and philandering in defense of the sanctity of marriage, I would have a much easier time listening to your anti-gay rhetoric, but since the only time the "sanctity" of marriage comes up is with regards to homosexuality, I have a hard time respecting that argument. (Here's looking at you, Rush, the three time divorcee, for single handedly making this argument for me.)

Also, as to your procreation argument, many gay couples often want to adopt children but are forbidden from doing so because of state laws that use bogus logic in order to discriminate. There have been plenty of children who have grown up with gay parents, yet there is still no evidence that this harms the children, whereas there is plenty of evidence that these children are better off than kids in single-parent families and foster homes. Yet people feel that these children should be put in less advantageous positions in foster homes rather than be raised by loving same sex parents.

Finally, marriage IS a right. If a white man and a white woman were denied their right to marry, there would be holy hell to pay. There’s even a considerable backlash (as there should be), when an interracial couple is prevented from marrying, as was recently the case in Louisiana. Yet when two men decide to marry, many people feel the law should be used to prevent this from happening. This even happens even though there are progressive churches that bless same sex unions.

Personally, because of all this mess, I think the government should just back off. Marriage should be a religious choice rather than a legal one. Allow anyone to get a civil union and the legal protections afforded by it, and get out of the way when it comes to marriage.

Nice, make shit up, hope it sticks.

At the beginning of presidential terms, prosecutors traditionally hand in their resignations. Every president.

And the fired prosecutors were the ones investigating public corruption.

And this one was fired to give the job to a buddy.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2007-02-06-prosecutor-rove-aide_x.htm

You're relying on people's ignorance to slide these by, to slam the Clintons, to praise Bush.

I am not ignorant, so it doesn't work on me.

Instead, I point out your lies.

when you can just pay for everything with a million dollar bill?

And what happens if it happens to kill a couple orders of magnitude more than 250,000 to 500,000? Mass immunization is partial insurance against a dangerous mutation in this strain. As I see it, this strain is more likely than usual human-borne flu strains to become something more dangerous.

That would be a GOOD THING (tm). If it happened, we would be a much healthier population, because this flu is pretty mild - it's taking out mostly the morbidly obese (who, as one doctor pointed out wrt the ones who died, were sick enough that they were probably going to die anyway within 6 months) and those with severe underlying diseases (almost all the infant deaths had neurological problems). Interestingly enough, this variant is showing a preference wrt death rates, not must for the morbidly obese, but the "ordinary obese" as well. Now if we could just engineer it so that it kills off smokers in 7 days, rather than tobacco killing them in 20 years, everyone would stop smoking within a week (one way or another). Can I get my research grant now?

There's ALWAYS a silver lining, Skippy.

Also, mass immunization isn't insurance against a mutation. Look at what's happening in Nigeria, where the polio vaccine mutated last year and is now the cause of the majority of polio cases.

Polio surge in Nigeria after vaccine virus mutates
LONDON (AP) -- Polio, a dreaded paralyzing disease stamped out in the industrialized world, is spreading in Nigeria despite efforts to stamp it out. And health officials say in some cases, it's caused by the vaccine used to fight it.
In July, the World Health Organization issued a warning that this vaccine-spread virus might extend beyond Africa. So far, 124 Nigerian children have been paralyzed this year -- about twice those afflicted in 2008.
Experts have long believed epidemics unleashed by a vaccine's mutated virus wouldn't last since the vaccine only contains a weakened virus strain -- but that assumption is coming under pressure. Some experts now say that once viruses from vaccines start circulating they can become just as dangerous as wild viruses.
"The only difference is that this virus was originally in a vaccine vial," said Olen Kew, a virologist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Kew said genetic analysis proves mutated viruses from the vaccine have caused at least seven separate outbreaks in Nigeria.

It's not speculation - it's happening right now. Makes me wonder about the wisdom uf rushing out deployment of the "live virus" nasal vaccine. Gives a nice pool of infected people with the real McCoy. If you're looking for a mutation to happen, that's where it'll come from.

Also, on the topic of vaccinations, the WHO admits that vaccines HAVE mutated and caused diseases . Tthe latest polio outbreak in Africa was CAUSED by the polio vaccine:

Polio surge in Nigeria after vaccine virus mutates

LONDON (AP) -- Polio, a dreaded paralyzing disease stamped out in the industrialized world, is spreading in Nigeria despite efforts to stamp it out. And health officials say in some cases, it's caused by the vaccine used to fight it.

In July, the World Health Organization issued a warning that this vaccine-spread virus might extend beyond Africa. So far, 124 Nigerian children have been paralyzed this year -- about twice those afflicted in 2008.

Experts have long believed epidemics unleashed by a vaccine's mutated virus wouldn't last since the vaccine only contains a weakened virus strain -- but that assumption is coming under pressure. Some experts now say that once viruses from vaccines start circulating they can become just as dangerous as wild viruses.

"The only difference is that this virus was originally in a vaccine vial," said Olen Kew, a virologist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Kew said genetic analysis proves mutated viruses from the vaccine have caused at least seven separate outbreaks in Nigeria.

So, I won't be bothering to infect myself with the flu.

A 70% chance of preventing influenza is worse than my current odds - which are well above 98% historically (only had the flu once on over half a century, and never had a flu shot in my life).

I'll stick with what works. as apposed to an almost 1 in 3 chance of getting it if I *do* get a flu shot.

But speaking of vaccines - the latest polio outbreak in Africa was CAUSED by the polio vaccine:

Polio surge in Nigeria after vaccine virus mutates

LONDON (AP) -- Polio, a dreaded paralyzing disease stamped out in the industrialized world, is spreading in Nigeria despite efforts to stamp it out. And health officials say in some cases, it's caused by the vaccine used to fight it.

In July, the World Health Organization issued a warning that this vaccine-spread virus might extend beyond Africa. So far, 124 Nigerian children have been paralyzed this year -- about twice those afflicted in 2008.

Experts have long believed epidemics unleashed by a vaccine's mutated virus wouldn't last since the vaccine only contains a weakened virus strain -- but that assumption is coming under pressure. Some experts now say that once viruses from vaccines start circulating they can become just as dangerous as wild viruses.

"The only difference is that this virus was originally in a vaccine vial," said Olen Kew, a virologist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Kew said genetic analysis proves mutated viruses from the vaccine have caused at least seven separate outbreaks in Nigeria.

So, I won't be bothering to infect myself with the flu.

No, his refusal to click on it shows that he knows about the claim that Seigenthaler killed Kennedy, which stood for months; the guy named Essjay who was put into powerful positions on Wikipedia after claiming he was a religious scholar even though he was a kid who was frankly a waste of carbon, and who was defended by Wiki-overlord Jimbo Wales even after it was clear what had happened; the man who was detained at Canadian customs because of false information in his Wikipedia entry; or any of the other billions of things that show that Wikipedia is a complete disaster and that human knowledge is made less, not more, by its existence.

Wikipedia has actual negative impacts on real people and is run by people like Essjay who really aren't fit to be sweeping streets, and attempting to defend it makes you look like a fool.

I would expect the presence of books in the home to be correlated with parent intelligence, not necessarily parental involvement. Parent intelligene is strongly correlated with child intelligence. I suspect that student intelligence is actually the biggest factor, but this factor is either not studied or not published in the results, because it goes against widely held politically correct ideals.

Actually it has been well researched. If I remember correctly, Freakonomics spends two whole chapters on a readable summary of the research into child test scores. And if I remember correctly, parenting itself has no observable effect on test scores, which is surprising for most people to hear.

Here's an extract:

The most interesting conclusion here is one that many modern parents may find disturbing: Parenting technique is highly overrated. When it comes to early test scores, it's not so much what you do as a parent, it's who you are.

It is obvious that children of successful, well-educated parents have a built-in advantage over the children of struggling, poorly educated parents. Call it a privilege gap. The child of a young, single mother with limited education and income will typically test about 25 percentile points lower than the child of two married, high-earning parents.

So it isn't that parents don't matter. Clearly, they matter an awful lot. It's just that by the time most parents pick up a book on parenting technique, it's too late. Many of the things that matter most were decided long ago - what kind of education a parent got, how hard he worked to build a career, what kind of spouse he wound up with and how long they waited to have children.

The privilege gap is far more real than the fear that haunts so many modern parents - that their children will fail miserably without regular helpings of culture cramming and competitive parenting. So, yes, parents are entitled to congratulate themselves this month over their children's acceptance letters. But they should also stop kidding themselves: The Mozart tapes had nothing to do with it.

The linked to article is just an overview, there's a lot more content in the actual book.

Along the same lines... there was recently a case about fantasy sports stats that concluded it was public info and therefore MLB had no right to restricts someones use of those stats. It seems that "any reproduction, account or description of this game..." stuff is BS and I am glad someone finally called them on it.

Rural phone companies are allowed to charge about 2 cents to 8 cents a minute to connect long-distance and wireless calls to their networks. The fees, up to 100 times higher than rates charged by large local phone companies, offset the rural companies' high costs and low call volumes.

Sorry, but if your business's cost structure is 100x that of similar businesses (i.e., more urban phone companies), you don't deserve to have a business. The article makes clear that a bunch of scumbags got into the scam^Wbusiness to make a quick buck, then got shut down, and now the CLECs are getting in on the act. Google's in the right on this one - screw the CLECs. If the CLECs customers don't like it, find another phone company (the first C in CLEC stands for competitive, after all).

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=976446 for the legal-speak of why they allow it.

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/2002/04/04/sinrod.htm for a non-legal discussion of a 2002 case where the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld validity of service of legal process by email.

So, yes, there is a legal obligation to check your inbox on a regular basis which is just one more reason why the remedy granted by Judge Ware was seriously out-of-bounds.

Order Google to provide the bank's lawyers with contact information of the account holder -- sure; order Google to terminate the third party's ability to conduct business affairs as well as his/her ability to receive bills, service of process or other legal notifications which require time-constrained response (e.g. terms of service changes, etc) -- "reversable error".

We know why most audio CDs cost $17.99. Illegal price fixing.

We know why video games cost $60. Illegal price fixing.

The FTC and the Justice Department's antitrust unit were out to lunch during the Bush administration, but that seems to be changing. Stay tuned for enforcement.

1) Are they really more efficient?

They're certainly better than helicopters for hovering and slow patrolling, but for transporting lots of people or stuff to a definite destination I doubt it. Given the typical shapes used, I can imagine them spending lots of fuel just fighting the wind or air resistance. Not going to be easy to beat ships or trains, or even normal planes.

Airships are fuel efficient if you don't mind going wherever the wind blows you.

2) What gas to use though?

I don't think there will be enough helium to go around:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.08/helium.html
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-12-02-Helium_N.htm

So the options are hot air (which doesn't produce as much lift) or hydrogen (which has significant PR problems for airship usage).

I suppose this would be a smaller problem. Could use hydrogen both for fuel and for lifting.

Report: Obama to use NSA to monitor Net (USA Today)

NSA Must Examine All Internet Traffic to Prevent Cyber Nine-Eleven, Top Spy Says (Wired)

In short, the NSA has been reading everything sent in plaintext since Bush II, and yet the EFF spends untold millions on lawsuits to make sure that my friends on Facebook don't know what kind of pizza I order from Domino's. What a great allocation of scarce pro-privacy resources.

I know exactly why this is: if you sue Facebook or Twitter or whatever, you get your name in the papers. If you go after the NSA you get called "soft on terror" and your campaign bid for governor of East Nowhere is sunk.

I checked the schools. The groups of kids smoking. The larger groups of kids smoking on college campus. Way down, yes, but with adult smokers. "The results come from a survey of 54,301 regular smokers, part of the 2004 and 2006 National Youth Tobacco Survey of nearly 5 million 12- to 17-year-olds." (emphasis mine). Pulled from http://www.usatoday.com/money/advertising/2009-02-12-marlboro-kids-smokers_N.htm. I'll see if I can find some evidence of kid smokers also decreasing, but...I don't think kid smokers have decreased.

I think former California assemblyman Mike Duvall would nominate his lobbyist friend. Apparently she's got quite a body and wears panties the size of an eye patch!

You mean when they weren't killing people for disagreeing with "approved" science ?

The USSR did a lot of nasty shit, but I don't see a subcategory at your link for "people who disagreed with `approved' science" who were executed. Please give details.

Here you can find one of many Soviet repressive science disasters.

Yep, pretty nasty. Of course, for a little context, let's consider the American projects in eugenics and other misapplications of Darwinism to social and political issues.

Communists kill scientists, and science.

Stalinists, maybe; I can't imagine Kropotkinists killing scientists. "Communists" are not a homogenous group.

Anyway, it's sure interesting that those science-killing Soviets somehow beat us into space. Maybe the truth is just a little more complicated that simplistic slogans like "Communists kill scientists"?

or... Alligators

I got a FULL SCHOOLERSHIP into ANY state school (ASU, UofA or NAU) because my SAT scores were nearly perfect. Get that GP. I. Didn't. Pay. Anything. Because. I. Was. Homeschooled.

No. You didn't pay anything because you were smart.

The very real possibility of some of those stats is that homeschooled kids would be smart in regular school as well. Parent involvement is critical in any education, and the commitment of homeschooling parents is very high. Maybe parents with that commitment level are smarter or work harder and pass those traits on to their kids.

Just like the study reported in Freakonomics that kids parents with at least 50 books in their house score 5% better than a child with no books, and a child with 100 books scores 5% better than the child with 50 books. But there was no correlation at all with test scores and how often parents read to kids. Because educated and motivated people will buy more books, and they pass those traits on to their kids. The books are not the cause of intelligence, but an indicator of intelligence.

It may be the same for homeschooling.

...

However, I think that the real trouble in the US is that they don't have a consistent electoral system. They have 51 individual systems for each state (or is it more based upon county?).

The other issue is that they seem to vote for everything from the street cleaner to judges.....

Usually, it is by state, but it can vary by county, as it did in Ohio in 2008. The real complexity is that each voting precinct (typically 1000-ish people) can potentially have a unique ballot. In 2008, Cuyahoga County had 4,317 different versions of the ballot for different precincts Cuyohoga is the largest of 88 counties in Ohio.

Even the hardest sciences are subject to healthy dispute that can be unhealthily portrayed as though there are two equal and opposite positions.

Ah, the wedge issue ID supporters try to have included in education as regards evolution.

Oh, let me get this too:

The argument global warming deniers

Scientifically it's not Global Warming that a concern, it's Climate Change. While record highs are being recorded in the Pacific Northwest, such as in Seattle, this seems like the coolest summer I can recall in the Minneapolis, St Paul, twin cities area in the 10 years I've been here.

Falcon

According to this article from two weeks ago, Google has a 65% share of the U.S. search market. That's hardly a monopoly.

That was the fault of command sending that F-117 on the same flight path over and over. Eventually the plane was shot down when the enemy simply guessed where it would be at that time and started shooting into the air. They were rather surprised themselves when the plane came crashing down.

I'm not sure what the source for your "rather surprised" claim is, because the guy who shot it down actually says that they tweaked the radar of their SAM in order to detect it. This was indirectly confirmed by NATO command when they claimed that this involved using unusually long wavelengths (which in itself was partly an artifact of design of Soviet SAM in question, which was vastly outdated by that time - and hence more accidental than anything else).

It is true that F-117 flying along the same path all the time definitely contributed to Serbs being able to set up and calibrate the SAM properly to shoot it down in the end, but nonetheless it did not involve a "blind shot".

I think close to every large museum or gallery has been the victim of forgery (or "fakes").

The National Gallery of Victoria, the largest public gallery in Australia, has misattributed a painting to Van Gogh for the last 70 years. Meanwhile, it was discovered that the Art Institute of Chicago had purchased a fake Gauguin. The Wallraf-Richartz Museum has discovered that a "Monet" purchased five-and-a-half decades ago was a fake as well. Even the Getty and the Smithsonian have fallen victim to countless fakes.

The Dutch National Museum can at least be forgiven for not suspecting that a U.S. ambassador would present a fake artifact as a gift.

This story appeared in USA Today yesterday. From the article:

Astronomers have found what appears to be a gigantic suicidal planet.

The odd, fiery planet is so close to its star and so large that it is triggering tremendous plasma tides on the star. Those powerful tides are in turn warping the planet's zippy less-than-a-day orbit around its star.

The result: an ever-closer tango of death, with the planet eventually spiraling into the star.

It is a slow death. The planet WASP-18b has maybe a million years to live, said planet discoverer Coel Hellier, a professor of astrophysics at Keele University in England. Hellier's report on the suicidal planet is in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.

"It's causing its own destruction by creating these tides," Hellier said.

Putting aside the sensationalist journalism (calling it a "suicidal planet"), it appears that its proximity to its star is causing plasma tides on the star (similar to the tides we have here on Earth due to the Moon), and those tides are warping the planets orbit.

I think that it would be a waste NOT to use these organs.

Yeah, there's all those people just walking around, what they hell are they using their organs for?

The simple truth is that you don't need death vans if your society is healthy. Instead of making their country a better place, they are simply making a profit on the creation of criminals, and their eventual murder. ALL EXECUTIONS ARE MURDER, the premeditated taking of a life. You might think that's okay (hypocrite) but another simple truth is that governments take actions which affect the people. The government helps create conditions that lead to crime, then profits from murdering the "criminal". Just like here, except here there's probably less organ harvesting. One percent of our population is in prison, and three times that is in the corrections system. How is that a win?

Exactly... which is apparently one argument people have made about why China stopped using the firing squad quite so much in favour of lethal injection - this was reported as long ago as 2006, e.g. here.

One thing I don't quite get though - doesn't lethal injection leave the poison/drugs (whatever you want to call it) in the organs so they'd be pretty dangerous to use for a transplant?

Regardless of comparative levels of restraint -- I mean, that's a bit like saying one lunatic's genocidal campaign was a little less bloody than another's, but I did get your meaning -- there have been a couple of reports recently that seem to indicate that the Chinese government intends to tighten up (read, make a tad more fair) the criminal court system and severely reduce the number of crimes that could earn you a bullet in the head.

Here's a 2006 USA Today article reported that the Supreme People's Court would have something like final say and/or oversight on capital sentences. FTA:

Chinese legal scholars and lawyers welcomed this week's announcement by the government that the country's Supreme People's Court will review all capital punishment cases.

The change is "an important procedural step to prevent wrongful convictions," said China's top judge, Xiao Yang, according to the state-run Xinhua news service.

China was responsible for 81% of the world's known executions â" 1,770 out of 2,184 â" last year, according to Amnesty International. Amnesty said the actual number of executions in China could be several times higher. In the USA, 60 people were executed in 2005.

A month ago, it was widely reported that they would also limit the crimes incurring death to "a small number of serious crimes, particularly those that threaten social stability", which would be a huge improvement since, FTA:

More than 60 crimes can draw the death penalty in China, including tax evasion, embezzlement and drug trafficking

Now, I'm against capital punishment on principle, but if a country is going to have it, then big time drug trafficking should probably be on that list. But tax evasion or small-time embezzlement? Geez!

On the upside, they do take that tough stance towards corruption in politicians (even if only of those who've made their actions *too* public) that we in the west so often deam of.. ;)

Funny, I thought that was proper politics. Oh right, under "evil Republican administrations" debate and criticism were met with cries of being "unpatriotic", "anti-american", and protests were corraled into "free speech zones" and impromptu prisons.

Yeah, sure am glad that Democrats wouldn't do the same thing.

Poland has an unfortunate history both during and directly after the war, extending into the 60s. The embarassing reaction to the relatively recent release of Jan T Gross's book (hereby incorporated by reference) in which the former Kaczynski, the former Primitive Polish Prime minister even tried to prosecute the author.

It's important to remember that during the war the Poles had much harder situations for rescuing Jews than in most other countries (you risked your entire family going to a concentration camp; elsewhere you risk only yourself and only prison) and many still did. It's also worth remembering that the reason Jews were in Poland was because they were historically treated better there than elsewhere. Poland is much further along coming to terms with and apologizing (though with reservations) for it's former anti-semitism (even Kaczynski has made efforts to return passports to the victims of the 60s) than a number of surrounding countries.

Essentially anyone who tells you that Poles are all good is a Holocaust revisionist. As is anyone who tells you that they are all bad.

In all cases where I referenced Wikipedia, all references in the page references are incorporated by reference as material to read. There; is that enough citations for you?

Trolls are a problem on Wikipedia, as they are with any site that lets anybody contribute content. But it's actually a smaller problem on Wikipedia than you'd expect. Wikpedia has a fair amount of crap, but the really obvious crap seems to get discovered and expunged pretty quickly. Thousands of eyeballs can be helpful.

Unfortunately, a lot of those eyeballs belong to people who mean well, but just don't understand their chosen subject matter as well as they think they do. Like the guy who "corrected" the article on Pluto because he didn't know that Pluto is sometimes closer to the Sun than Neptune!

That's pretty lame under any circumstances, but when a WP "editor" addss fourth-hand information about living people, it can cause a lot of grief. Which is why they're locking down this content first. It's not a sudden love of accuracy, it's fear of getting sued.

My favorite story in this context is from Brooke Gladstone, who's a big fan of the whole crowdsourcing concept in general and Wikipedia in particular. However, she was less enthusiastic about this edit, which she found intrusive, and was apparently made by a friend of her children.

In digging up this edit, I found an earlier version of her page that includes the name of a canary her husband used to own! That's my other big issue with Wikipedia: too much useless trivia.

"Linux is for real work and Windows is for gaming"

NO, Linux is for real work, Games Consoles are for gaming and Windows is for swearing at !

--

Citibank Hack Blamed for Alleged ATM Crime Spree"

Hackers breach Heartland Payment credit card system

Jaws

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Citibank Hack Blamed for Alleged ATM Crime Spree"

Hackers breach Heartland Payment credit card system

Obviously the blogger wasn't very anonymous if the abusee could so easily find out her real identity. And if you are going to abuse someone else online than at least have the gumption of using someone elses account, preferably on their home computer - that way they'll get the blame ...
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Citibank Hack Blamed for Alleged ATM Crime Spree"

Hackers breach Heartland Payment credit card system

"It looks almost as if they publicized the whole PB deal just to inflate the shares of the company, and then one by one leave the company (with the proceeds in their pockets maybe?)... Classical case of Enron-itis"

Pure speculation on your half and Enron was never about falsely inflating the stock but outright fraud as in they cooked up fake trades that were actually between subsidiaries of Enron, a classic shell game.
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Citibank Hack Blamed for Alleged ATM Crime Spree">

Hackers breach Heartland Payment credit card system

This article IS about Arizona, and DOES mention restaurants (well, a "business that serves alcohol":
http://www.gazette.com/articles/bill-57730-gun-alcohol.html
"carry a gun into a business that serves alcohol"
"The measure would ban drinking while packing and allow restaurants to deny entry to gun-toting citizens by posting a sign next to their liquor license."

As does this one:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2009-07-13-arizona-guns_N.htm
"into bars and restaurants that serve alcohol "
"Drinking while carrying a weapon would be illegal."

and this one:
http://azccw.net/2009/06/09/senate-considers-allowing-guns-near-alcohol/
"concealed weapons in restaurants that sell alcohol. "
"People carrying a weapon would not be allowed to drink."

Sheesh. You really need to know the facts better.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2006-09-11-map-8Americas_x.htm