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You think U.S. fans would know what to expect from a title like Bakemonogatari is without having seen a fansub first?

Turns out that the aforementioned title is a popular romantic fantasy story about a young ex-vampire and the various supernatural girls he meets. Its title is probably best translated as 'Ghost Story'.

Despite the relative obscurity of both the story and the source material, It has a fairly strong U.S. fanbase that will likely make publishing a run of Region 1 DVDs profitable for both the Japanese and North American companies involved.

Without fansubs, that market simply wouldn't exist and everyone would miss out.

You're doing it a disservice if you don't mention the comedy. I would describe its genre as supernatural - there's not that much romance in it (just a few episodes). The comedy is interwoven throughout, and thrives mostly due to the dialogue (which can still be appreciated even when translated). That said, the article specifically considered sales within Japan.

You think U.S. fans would know what to expect from a title like Bakemonogatari is without having seen a fansub first

Yes they could get an idea by going to the link you pr

You think U.S. fans would know what to expect from a title like Bakemonogatari is without having seen a fansub first?

Turns out that the aforementioned title is a popular romantic fantasy story about a young ex-vampire and the various supernatural girls he meets. Its title is probably best translated as 'Ghost Story'.

Despite the relative obscurity of both the story and the source material, It has a fairly strong U.S. fanbase that will likely make publishing a run of Region 1 DVDs profitable for both the Japanese and North American companies involved.

Without fansubs, that market simply wouldn't exist and everyone would miss out.

This is your style of imagination (if you are really capable of asking "so?" when faced with how your pet fantasy would require EVERYTHING, but with much tighter tolerances for error, than what it's meant to "replace" ... plus a megastructure of doubtful practicality even in easiest of conditions), airplanes from "our" times (and we CAN even build them! Take a Harrier, remove wings and canopy ... doesn't mean it's anywhere near a good idea) - vs. boring reality

Yeah, you've descended into abuse now. Here's what's really happened: you've come across a concept, which I supported with technical discussions, real world examples, and a variety of articles, which is far outside your comfort zone, as in that area where you feel the real world exists and can be controlled, a conservative place where nobody steps too far out of line.

You responded to this intrusion by raising nonsensical objections (the space shuttle? really?) and ignoring the facts presented to you, dancing around your intuition that this all must be somehow against the laws of physics or something, which puts you right in the same ballpark as creationists and flat earthers.

With the best of intentions I say it is this kind of knee jerk counter-rational dogmatism, inspired by a misunderstanding of what science actually does to advance, that is strangling innovation and creativity, and it would appear Mr. Stephenson agrees with me.

But please, do link to this discussion, it might help some other seekers of philosopher's stone.

Indeed I will.

This is your style of imagination (if you are really capable of asking "so?" when faced with how your pet fantasy would require EVERYTHING, but with much tighter tolerances for error, than what it's meant to "replace" ... plus a megastructure of doubtful practicality even in easiest of conditions), airplanes from "our" times (and we CAN even build them! Take a Harrier, remove wings and canopy ... doesn't mean it's anywhere near a good idea) - vs. boring reality

But please, do link to this discussion, it might help some other seekers of philosopher's stone.

After a few years, maybe you could get underwear with this printed on the front:

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images

The search is the users, but if the response were not based on Google's Algorithm you wouldn't be bothering with the search; Microsoft is demonstrably copying their results and using them without doing the work themselves.

As for MS's response - sorry, but screaming that Google cheated by using a trap - well, if they hadn't been in the cookie jar, they wouldn't have been caught with the cookies.

Pug

That doesn't, by itself, automatically mean there must be higher hills to climb. We may have purposefully or accidentally climbed the highest hill we are currently capable of climbing. Perhaps we would have been further along with some other technology if we hadn't climbed this hill, but it might not have been better overall.

It might be actually slightly the other way around - did we already forget the absolute dominance of "spaceplanes" in scifi of 30s, 40s or 50s?! (even design attempts - Silbervogel, or early winged visions of von Braun) Flying saucers even, at some point...

No doubt fueled by rapid advances in aircraft technology at the time. What almost everybody wished for. And we still do, it's easy to remember and relate common experiences of air travel, while forgetting how it's "supposed to" look like (airplanes from "our" times as envisioned ~130 years ago, no doubt influenced by rapid advanced in marine technology), when approached in the same style as "spaceplanes" (actually, I wonder how much the Shuttle was influenced by designers and decision-makers growing on spaceplane scifi ... and we know how that ended, it didn't deliver on any of its main points as advertised; not a lot of flying boats around, too)

We are, among few things he does is basically hoping for "proper" airplanes from our times (we CAN build them! Take a Harrier, remove wings and canopy ... doesn't make it a good idea) vs. boring reality

Starting as an ICBM (the first operational ICBM, R-7 Semyorka) doesn't prevent getting "the most reliable ... most frequently used launch vehicle in the world". One of the more inexpensive ones, too... (if anything, efforts at departure away from what physics & rocket equation tells us tended to end ... inefficiently)

I've never, ever, received a link to a video on wikipedia (or any other wikimedia project). Ever.

First off, I'm glad I could help.

Second, what your friends send you a link to is kind of irrelevant. The Wikimedia family of sites exist to preserve knowledge and to provide a place for communities of contributors to build repositories of useful information from books to news to dictionaries to special-interest Wikis. Their scope and relevance is substantial, and because they're also extremely heavily trafficked, they are an important benchmark for any browser that wants to claim to support the Web.

H.264 is also a part of the Web, and Google is choosing not to support it. That's no different from a lack of support for ogg. What is different is that Google isn't supporting H.264 because it's a patent nightmare for which a consortium of rights holders had to be formed, just to make the collection of licensing fees practical. Not supporting that is actually doing the Web a favor.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Teledildonics

Windows NT 3.1 came out in 1993, it even had an explicit Advanced Server edition. Care to explain that less than a decade comment.

The mormons are only slightly crazier than the average religion. I imagine these guys would be spinning this news like crazy.

Shouldn't Wikimedia accept WebM as well then?

According to the Commons:Video page, "WebM support will likely be added in the future. See this bug report for its current status."

The bug report described is #23888, and was last updated on 2010-08-24 -- over 5 months ago. It appears that there needs to just be some hacking done on MediaWiki to support it.

I think that this bug report is a perfect example of what needs to be done to give WebM the traction to take the upper hand in web video. Do you want support for WebM video in Gallery2 or Gallery3? Do you want support for WebM video in MediaWiki? How about Drupal, Plone, or Joomla? Or how about just plain-old mime-type support for WebM in Ubuntu?

Yes, there are projects underway to support WebM in these FOSS projects, but nearly all of them aren't ready for daily use yet. If we want to see WebM deployed as the video format of choice for the web, we really need to step up and make sure that WebM is as supported as a video format as PNG and JPEG are supported as image formats.

Shouldn't Wikimedia accept WebM as well then?

According to the Commons:Video page, "WebM support will likely be added in the future. See this bug report for its current status."

The bug report described is #23888, and was last updated on 2010-08-24 -- over 5 months ago. It appears that there needs to just be some hacking done on MediaWiki to support it.

I think that this bug report is a perfect example of what needs to be done to give WebM the traction to take the upper hand in web video. Do you want support for WebM video in Gallery2 or Gallery3? Do you want support for WebM video in MediaWiki? How about Drupal, Plone, or Joomla? Or how about just plain-old mime-type support for WebM in Ubuntu?

Yes, there are projects underway to support WebM in these FOSS projects, but nearly all of them aren't ready for daily use yet. If we want to see WebM deployed as the video format of choice for the web, we really need to step up and make sure that WebM is as supported as a video format as PNG and JPEG are supported as image formats.

"God only knows how you'd classify the Tea Party supporters; "hard right" somehow doesn't seem enough."

They'd be the NeoNazis,

"Neo-Nazis are known to attack and harass Jews, African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, Arab Americans, Native Americans, homosexuals, Catholics, and people with different political or religious opinions."
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Neo-Nazism#United_States

On the failed GLONASS launch it was typical problem on the "Breeze M" accelerator module of the "Proton M" commercial rocket, and because of this rocket didn't push satellite to the required attitute. This rocket is known for one of the most successful rockets and even on the background of my Russia-hating psycho, it's developers and maintainers deserve highest honor in technology, but our Mr. genius president of Soviet Russia told us that there was a mistake made by math scientists. Come ooon!!! Do they use paper to count the orbit and load of it? It's bullshit. Even in case of incorrect trajectory, this rocket has enough power and acceleration to put all the satellites to the GEO orbit and higher. If they will continue this way - soon they will lose all their engineering power.

btw, GLONASS has great mini device, you can use it as hammer for nailing your lovely wall, so there is at least one plus in it, and it doesn't need any satellite, works without it!
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/11/Glonass-reciever.jpg

What you have said is true. On the other hand, this latest nomination brings the award renewed credibility.

They gave it to the head of a terrorist organization: Yassir Arafat...... they have no credibility, and will never gain any until they revoke his.

Feh, Arafat was a dilettante, Henry Kissinger bombed an entire country illegally and they still gave him a Nobel Prize.

Well EU has laws that require, for private corporations also, That disclosure, and consent is needed before sharing identifying data.
US has a similar organization that requires the same treatment of data, but it is currently voluntary (depends on the individual state laws, CA for one does require much of it)
So yeah, the Australian government could certainly help by adding punishments, and enforcements in situations like this, to protect their citizens from being forced into giving up information (since pubs,etc are likely state regulated, competition is limited, and thus the free market is not exerting the needed forces to maintain on it's own.)

You have either missed or sidestepped my point. I do not dispute that non-transitivities exist; I discussed them myself. My point was that in the majority of cases, a non-transitive result is not "ambiguous" at all.

I thought you were disputing the non-transitivities themselves, saying they were simply a consequence of how Condorcet methods processed the data; but you were saying they exist but are not ambiguous. However, when faced with a non-transitivity, a method has to make a choice since its output is transitive - either a winner, or a ranking of the candidates. Thus it has to project the space that includes non-transitivity onto one that doesn't. My point was that IRV projects in one way and Condorcet methods in another. Since each single-method system (Condorcet or otherwise) acts according to a consistent logic that is defined for the whole space, there's no reason to say, out of hand, that Condorcet systems are questionable but IRV is not -- unless the question is whether Condorcet itself is desirable.

And in THAT context -- ambiguities caused by removal of candidates in the middle of the process -- it might be justified to call them "ambiguities". But that is only a small subset of the non-transitivities that can occur in voting systems.

The results do not involve elimination. What Tideman is saying is that if you run 1000 3-candidate elections, you'd see cycles in about 10 of them, and if you run 1000 15-candidate elections, you'd see cycles in about 91 of them.

I will concede that in certain ways Shulze beats out IRV. But I will also say that Shulze is likely to be a much harder sell to the voting public. It allows freer choice but many people may not understand the implications of their choices, or how the votes are actually tallied.

True, I grant that Schulze's complexity is a problem. It might be better to rely on its precedence (in that it has been used in many organizations without much trouble), or phrase it in terms of repeatedly finding the group of candidates that are not beaten by any outside the group, and eliminating the candidate that has the least victory margin. The latter approach was used in the planning stage of an attempt to introduce Schulze to Washington elections in 2006 (see the discussion group, although it's dead now). Unfortunately, the state representative didn't get re-elected and so he couldn't propose it.
One might also use Ranked Pairs, which consists of sorting the pairwise victories by strength and going down the list, adding one-on-one preferences except when they contradict earlier ones. Ranked pairs has simplicity, Schulze has precedence, which is more important, I don't know.
Even Approval would avoid the oddities of IRV. If you're going for incrementalism, it's probably the easiest change to make: just count overvotes.

Without going into a lot of detail, IRV minimizes the larger concerns regarding Arrow. Whether it does so in ways that are "better" than Shulze, I cannot say at this time. I have not seen an actual comparison of the two in that context.

There are two ways to do such a comparison in a neutral manner.

The first is by criteria. A method passes a criterion if it always elects consistent with that criterion. For instance, a method passes the Condorcet criterion if it always elects the Condorcet winner when he exists. The Wikipedia page says that IRV "eliminates vote splitting, reducing concerns about tactical voting and strategic nomination". The criterion that mirrors this is called clone independence. A method passes clone independence if making duplicate candidates (that voters rank next to each other, but not necessarily in the same order) doesn't alter the outcome. Methods that split votes wou

First observation... Thorium reactor... No such animal... Thorium isn't a neutron source and doesn't fission.

One needs a large amount(1000's of kg) of Pu and/or 2x that amount in U-235, after 6 or 7 years you might produced enough U-233 from Th-232 to sustain the reaction.

What people are talking about is the Thorium fuel cycle, which has been researched since we started with nuclear power. The reason why we haven't used it is it's lack of relevance to nuclear weapons.

While you're technically correct in that natural Thorium doesn't fission (the abundance of fissile Th-231 is really really low), in the Thorium fuel cycle natural Thorium-232 absorbs neutrons to become Uranium-233 which is fissile. You are *way* off on those numbers. The US have apparently run a Thorium reactor back in the '60s at Oak Ridge.

If the matter within the universe is expanding, it has to be expanding into something. What is that something?

Here's my take on it.

"Outside" the universe is undefined in the same way as division by zero and Not A Number are undefined "values".

One could say it "expands" into the nothingness of non-existence however the whole idea of "expansion" and the resulting question of "into what?" is only an attribute of one particular way of describing a reference frame (a particular reference frame that comes naturally to us because we're inside looking outwards).

Let's change the reference frame:
freeze the "border" of the universe all the way from the big bang until today and towards whatever future and treat this "border" as a constant.

What does the changes within this fixed "border" look like?

A "singularity" (bending the word, hope you understand) which internally increases (so far at least) in differentiation and separation of non-nothingness and nothingness, internally.

Somewhat like a fractal like for example a Mandelbrot set, however a fractal which only moves "inwards" and which along the dimension of time changes from a point of even distribution into a point of infinite internal complexity in all dimensions as if it increased in existing complexity at the very same time as you zoom in on it.

Another description would be us looking out at things moving away and instead of thinking of those things as if they were expanding away we instead think of us as falling away from them into increased complexity. Those things are also falling into increased complexity however we're falling faster than those things closer to the "border" of the "singularity" and those things closer to the "center" of the "singularity" are falling faster than us thus giving us the illusion that we're falling faster than both (the distance to both groups increases at an accelerating pace as everything continues to fall faster).

Back to the "universal fractal". Just what would such a fractal look like?

I don't know but I know of a description that seems to catch the gist of it: it's turtles all the way down ^_^

P.S. turtles as opposed to seahorses.

If the matter within the universe is expanding, it has to be expanding into something. What is that something?

Here's my take on it.

"Outside" the universe is undefined in the same way as division by zero and Not A Number are undefined "values".

One could say it "expands" into the nothingness of non-existence however the whole idea of "expansion" and the resulting question of "into what?" is only an attribute of one particular way of describing a reference frame (a particular reference frame that comes naturally to us because we're inside looking outwards).

Let's change the reference frame:
freeze the "border" of the universe all the way from the big bang until today and towards whatever future and treat this "border" as a constant.

What does the changes within this fixed "border" look like?

A "singularity" (bending the word, hope you understand) which internally increases (so far at least) in differentiation and separation of non-nothingness and nothingness, internally.

Somewhat like a fractal like for example a Mandelbrot set, however a fractal which only moves "inwards" and which along the dimension of time changes from a point of even distribution into a point of infinite internal complexity in all dimensions as if it increased in existing complexity at the very same time as you zoom in on it.

Another description would be us looking out at things moving away and instead of thinking of those things as if they were expanding away we instead think of us as falling away from them into increased complexity. Those things are also falling into increased complexity however we're falling faster than those things closer to the "border" of the "singularity" and those things closer to the "center" of the "singularity" are falling faster than us thus giving us the illusion that we're falling faster than both (the distance to both groups increases at an accelerating pace as everything continues to fall faster).

Back to the "universal fractal". Just what would such a fractal look like?

I don't know but I know of a description that seems to catch the gist of it: it's turtles all the way down ^_^

P.S. turtles as opposed to seahorses.

... it by definition is part of this universe and not some alternate universe

Well, probably part of multiple entities?

CC.

Oh, a fractal viewer. Or more specifically, a Julia set viewer.

Would have been nice to know what sort of a viewer this was by the summary. After all, it's not like there are other things named Julia or that fractals have been used for other types of viewers.

There are relatively subtle signs that our science is incomplete. For what you wish for, it would have to be very, very wrong. A Universe with FTL (=time travel) would be most likely very different from the one we observe (and which agrees remarkably well with our understanding of it)

It seems to be a very fundamental limit; I wouldn't be too surprised if even more integral to our reality than we suspect now. Inertia appears to act like a gravitational influence from the rest of the Universe. Of course you'll say "so what?" ... well, that brings with it few headaches, like requirement for instantaneousness or requiring the "interaction" to go backwards in time! Couple it with how the Universe doesn't appear to have signs of expansive intelligence which developed (that's almost exactly equivalent to "will ever develop"!) FTL / time travel. Trying to work around it might not matter - the relative values, properties and characters of interactions remaining similarly limited for all sensible Universes.

Don't treat works of fiction like an oracle (airplanes from "our" time, as envisioned ~130 years ago, probably a mix of rapid advances in marine tech + a large doze of wishful thinking ... I don't see much in common with the boring reality ... but, the best part in this case - we even can build them! Basically: take a Harrier, remove wings and canopy. Nobody in their right mind would).

Can't you at least see that wishful thinking must have limits? Don't extrapolate progress (hm, I've seen a nice movie recently ... one happening in 2010); if anything, relative technological stability with shorts spurts of progress is a normal state for our species.
(but you might start by building a ship with a hull not constrained by Archimedes' principle ... its over 2 thousand years old, surely should be easier to ignore!)

How many times...

Don't work in the realm of works of fiction (airplanes from our times, as envisioned ~130 years ago .... I seem to notice few differences). But while you insist (hey, where we would be without trying, right? Right?) - maybe start with building a hull for ships which isn't constrained by Archimedes' principle? (it's quite old, at over 2 thousand years, should be much easier to ignore...)

I think he is making a valid - if not brave - point. And probably hoping for some support from his readership.
Multiverse Theory opens the possibility of "happy endings" in the style of Sliding Doors or the afterlife: although this existence is not perfect there is another world where it is/will be. We can't do much about this one, sorry for the inconvenience.

I think he is making a valid - if not brave - point. And probably hoping for some support from his readership.
Multiverse Theory opens the possibility of "happy endings" in the style of Sliding Doors or the afterlife: although this existence is not perfect there is another world where it is/will be. We can't do much about this one, sorry for the inconvenience.

Why all the negative spin in the summary?

those who hold to the Copenhagen understanding are willing to say that a wave function involves the various probabilities that a given event will proceed to certain different outcomes. But when one or another of those more- or less-likely outcomes becomes manifest the other probabilities cease to have any function in the real world. So if an electron passes through a double slit apparatus there are various probabilities for where on the detection screen that individual electron will hit. But once it has hit, there is no longer any probability whatsoever that it will hit somewhere else. Many-worlds interpretations say that an electron hits wherever there is a possibility that it might hit, and that each of these hits occurs in a separate universe.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Copenhagen_interpretation

The manyworlds thing is a boon for sci-fi, but it would be nice to hear about less fantastic interpretations. For a change.

Why doesn't shit like this get moderated +5 Interesting? Any time a complicated topic comes up, everyone goes for the obvious jokes and gets moderated +5 Funny. This is genuinely enlightening. I've been studying this stuff as an undergrad and it's difficult to see the bigger picture when you're stuck in the trenches grinding through the equations. What do they mean? So, when someone like Scrameustache posts something like this, it should be granted moderator points. Not stupid memes. Not obvious jokes. Not redundant-lifted-from-the-article-and-pasted-onto-slashdot-as-your-own shit.

Why all the negative spin in the summary?

those who hold to the Copenhagen understanding are willing to say that a wave function involves the various probabilities that a given event will proceed to certain different outcomes. But when one or another of those more- or less-likely outcomes becomes manifest the other probabilities cease to have any function in the real world. So if an electron passes through a double slit apparatus there are various probabilities for where on the detection screen that individual electron will hit. But once it has hit, there is no longer any probability whatsoever that it will hit somewhere else. Many-worlds interpretations say that an electron hits wherever there is a possibility that it might hit, and that each of these hits occurs in a separate universe.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Copenhagen_interpretation

The manyworlds thing is a boon for sci-fi, but it would be nice to hear about less fantastic interpretations. For a change.

Possibly no warp drive, too

(but you might start by building a ship with a hull not constrained by Archimedes' principle ... its over 2 thousand years old, surely should be easier to ignore; those airplanes from "our" times, depicted in works of fiction from mere ~130 years ago, shouldn't be too far away now, too - because reality is just too boring)

Railways can manage only very gentle gradients,

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Rack_railway

Indeed, and also funicular railways, which are hauled uphill and lowered downhill by cables, making them sort of halfway between a ropeway and a railway.

However even these need a lot of groundwork, to provide an even track -- whereas a few pylons will let you string a cable across extremely uneven terrain.

Railways can manage only very gentle gradients,

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Rack_railway

We already have that, it's called the Intermodal Container. A tram way could haul carriages that would just clip onto the top of the containers like those cranes that unload them from ships. You could design a station where trucks line up and drive under the cables, the carriage lowers and plucks the container off the truck, all with out stopping.

Your are referring to only one form of runoff voting, where the person with the least votes for an office is eliminated in each round. There are other forms, not all of which eliminate in such a manner.

To my knowledge, the term "instant runoff voting" is only used for what's also called Hare's method or the Alternative Vote. Quoting Wikipedia: In the initial count, the first preference of each voter is counted and used to order the candidates. Each first preference counts as one vote for the appropriate candidate. Once all the first preferences are counted, if one candidate holds a majority, that candidate wins. Otherwise the candidate who holds the fewest first preferences is eliminated..

If you would eliminate the candidate that gets the most last-place votes, it would no longer be IRV, it would be Coomb's method. That method, too, exhibits the oddness that moving your candidate higher can make him lose; every method that eliminates one candidate at a time according to a weighted positional method (first place n points, second place k points..., last place p points) can do so.

As for "satisfy", I meant just that: studies of instant runoff versus other "simple" voting methods has shown that in practice, it results in choices that reflect the actual preferences of the most people.

Could you give me links? Without knowing what they mean by simple or by instant runoff, it's hard to say anything here. For instance, I would imagine Approval to satisfy more than IRV, or Minmax, where you pick the candidate whose worst one-on-one loss has the smallest margin of defeat, to do better as well, but perhaps the latter is no longer considered simple.

Systems that conform to the Condorcet criteria tend to have the problem that they do not account for non-transitivity of inequalities (which Wikipedia calls "circular ambiguities").

The Condorcet rule can be ambiguous, that much is correct. Yet all that means is that there's no "the" Condorcet method, you have to pick a method that conforms to the criterion and does whatever when there is no such winner. That can be as simple as adding a rule that you eliminate, among the bottom two in IRV, the one who loses one-on-one to the other; or it can be an entirely new rule, like Schulze or Ranked Pairs.
To argue against Condorcet because it's ambiguous would be like saying that any method that satisfies majority rule is suspect because majority rule doesn't tell you what to do if nobody got a majority.

Various forms of Instant Runoff minimize problems with non-transitivity and also Arrow's theorem, while retaining the strengths of systems like Condorcet. Therefore it is superior.

Instant Runoff Voting (at least the AV method, I don't know which others you mean) hides the non-transitivity. So do the Condorcet methods above - the methods don't act differently depending on whether or not there is ambiguity. Approval itself sidesteps the issue completely because it's not a ranked method.

the unit of force is the newton, which is kg * m / s^2. you can't define mass in terms of force because force has a mass component.

Well, according to Wikipedia, pure molybdenum was going for $30,000 a tonne in August 2009 and before that had shot up to $100,000 a tonne for several years. (That works out to $30 / kilo and $100 / kilo respectively.) I based my cost statement on the higher number on the basis that MoS2 semiconductors would increase the demand.

I guess that cost puts it on a par with silicon for bulk material cost. More expensive potentially, but not orders of magnitude more like I was thinking. The rest comes, as you say, from the processing required to turn it into a working processor. Since they're putting it into etched features on a SiO2 substrate, what sort of process are they using to get it there? I guess that's where the money maker is for this process.

According to Wikipedia, Molybdenite is the mineral form of molybdenum disulphide.

Not dependent on pressure, temperature perhaps?

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Properties_of_water#Compressibility

Regardless, the temp and pressure could be standardized...

What we have now is stale legacy code. It's time to refactor.

the genetic components that predispose a person toward religion

*facepalms so hard that my head starts to bleed*...

JSYK, here's the Common misunderstandings of genetics page on Wikipedia.

This is absolute madness. Nobody knows what genes do anymore! They've all became tools for misleading people into believing the stupidest things, including, but not limited to:

• 
  That you can be "born" gay (or with ANY other sexual attraction, for the matter)
  That, as the article suggests, you can be born leaning towards religion in general, which is the most illogical thing I've heard this week
  That it's useless to try and change who you are because you were "born that way"

Etc. etc. etc.... There is NO SUCH THING as a gene that dictates your behavior, preferences, or predisposition! When will people actually care about this? All of those things are either semi-random or are determined by the person's general intelligence/experiences (IIRC).

Not to forget that this article also assumes that there is absolutely nothing positive to be gained from religion and that it "makes people stupid", therefore it's a "bad thing". I, as a Catholic, beg to differ. Roman Catholicism is one of the most well-thought-out, reasonable, logical, and historically accurate religions in the world (if not THE most, for all of them). Yes, there are stupid Catholics (including ones that abuse children) but that doesn't disprove the religion, unless it contradicts something (which it doesn't).

tl;dr, don't listen to this guy who obviously doesn't know his facts.

Lots of users suffer from NPD, they need to be befriended by the people who had their locker near them 20 years ago, because they don't have any friends in real life. Being unfriended makes them go off their meds.

Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) is a personality disorder.

The narcissist is described as being excessively preoccupied with issues of personal adequacy, power, prestige and vanity. Narcissistic personality disorder is closely linked to self-centeredness.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disorder

In the days of Kenneth Starr and the Monika Lewinski "The Skank Kept The Nasty Dress" Investigation, people were livid and up-in-arms when Lewinsky's book-purchasing records were sought.

Now all you need to do is give Amazon a few pennies and call yourself an "advertiser".

How times have changed.

In the days of Kenneth Starr and the Monika Lewinski "The Skank Kept The Nasty Dress" Investigation, people were livid and up-in-arms when Lewinsky's book-purchasing records were sought.

Now all you need to do is give Amazon a few pennies and call yourself an "advertiser".

How times have changed.

Thanks also to the crews of Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11.

A reminder courtesy of the Bad Astronomer.

Thanks also to the crews of Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11.

A reminder courtesy of the Bad Astronomer.

Sonymusic.com displays the labels Sony uses:

Arista
BNA Records
Columbia Nashville
Columbia Records
Epic Records
Jive Records
jRecords
Legacy Recordings
Masterworks
Provident Label Group
RCA Records
RCA Records Nashville
Roc Nation
Sony Music Latin
Verity Records

Sony online games:
Everquest / Everquest II
Free Realms
PlanetSide
Star Wars Galaxies
Vanguard: Saga of Heroes

Consoles:
PlayStation (all varieties)

Movies:
Sony Pictures Entertainment
Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group

The sony wikipedia page gives you links to many of them. The Other Subsidiaries page lists subsidiaries and shareholders. If you're complaining about Sony's behavior, complain to the shareholders too.

Having said all that...

If your complaint is about the RIAA, boycotting SOE isn't going to affect the issue. If your complaint is about the playstation crack (IE Sony Computer Entertainment/America) then boycotting Columbia Records isn't on point either. Feel free to boycott both, if you want, but do so for the valid reasons given earlier.

If you want to boycott *at all*, you need a force multiplier: one person not buying Sony products won't show up even in the statistical noise. One person writing a prominent blog post, however, might get noticed. One person starting a class action lawsuit is likely to spend a lot of money. ... and get real notice.

Sonymusic.com displays the labels Sony uses:

Arista
BNA Records
Columbia Nashville
Columbia Records
Epic Records
Jive Records
jRecords
Legacy Recordings
Masterworks
Provident Label Group
RCA Records
RCA Records Nashville
Roc Nation
Sony Music Latin
Verity Records

Sony online games:
Everquest / Everquest II
Free Realms
PlanetSide
Star Wars Galaxies
Vanguard: Saga of Heroes

Consoles:
PlayStation (all varieties)

Movies:
Sony Pictures Entertainment
Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group

The sony wikipedia page gives you links to many of them. The Other Subsidiaries page lists subsidiaries and shareholders. If you're complaining about Sony's behavior, complain to the shareholders too.

Having said all that...

If your complaint is about the RIAA, boycotting SOE isn't going to affect the issue. If your complaint is about the playstation crack (IE Sony Computer Entertainment/America) then boycotting Columbia Records isn't on point either. Feel free to boycott both, if you want, but do so for the valid reasons given earlier.

If you want to boycott *at all*, you need a force multiplier: one person not buying Sony products won't show up even in the statistical noise. One person writing a prominent blog post, however, might get noticed. One person starting a class action lawsuit is likely to spend a lot of money. ... and get real notice.