Slashdot Mirror

Apparently, it's sexist when hired female sales staff ("booth babes") wear T-shirts, makeup, and big hair. But apparently it is OK to use your feminine wiles if you declare yourself a feminist and a female technologist (and apparently, you don't actually need to know much about technology to do so). Can someone who is well versed in the intricacies of sexism and political correctness please explain who is allowed to wear revealing clothes under what circumstances, and who is not?

Anyone is allowed to if they want to. It's a problem when your boss tells you to and makes it a job requirement.

Apparently, it's sexist when hired female sales staff ("booth babes") wear T-shirts, makeup, and big hair. But apparently it is OK to use your feminine wiles if you declare yourself a feminist and a female technologist (and apparently, you don't actually need to know much about technology to do so). Can someone who is well versed in the intricacies of sexism and political correctness please explain who is allowed to wear revealing clothes under what circumstances, and who is not?

I mean, look auto convention :

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/driveon/post/2010/01/sexism-fashion-models-start-returning-to-us-auto-shows/1

Sexism at comic book convention :

http://everythingstheworst.wordpress.com/tag/sexism-at-comic-book-conventions/

And tehre are similar stuff for gun convention (one of the weapomn show had sexy fashion model on their tank), I even saw it at downright other normal book convention.

I am not saying it is good, It annoy me too, but game convention are not the only one it happens. but domain which are seen by publisher as populated by men, they misuse sex appeal as advertising. And before you says me "but but there is 50% women in gaming!", check it up : triple AAA is still sadly the province of the young man/male teenager where they dwell in majority.

Hopefully you smiled at the various cameras in-store

Or wear a baseball cap and hoodie. Preferably with a full beard. And an a heavy foreign accent.

Wearing a balaclava couldn't hurt, either. I get a kick out of wearing mine when I go to my local credit union in the winter — the tellers always seem a little startled until they realize it's just me, then they're all "oh, you're so bad!" and "such a prankster!" and so forth...

When I decided to switch from the bank I was using (or rather, was being (ab)used by) to a local credit union, I obviously wanted to make a complete withdrawal, so I passed the teller a note that said "GIVE ME ALL MY MONEY," but she didn't seem to think it was funny at all, and I wasn't even wearing my balaclava!

My point is this: Balaclavas are great for maintaining your facial privacy, just so long as you're not someplace where everyone already knows who you are — unless it's a bank, where they don't seem to know (or care — I don't know which) who anyone is, unless perhaps you're a "high-roller" or whatever is the equivalent in banker jargon.

And then there's this to consider: http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2013/06/10/grid-parity-new-mexico-style/

That's awesome if true, but I have to ask, why only 50MW if it's so price competitive? Why not scale it out to 5000MW?

Certificate-based encryption (like HTTPS) is only as secure as the certificates that sign sub-certs. If you accept certificates signed by a trusted CA, and that CA is compromised (i.e. controlled or accessible by the NSA, which all of them are), then you have no privacy, and all of your communications can be monitored without your knowledge or consent.

Here's a good writeup on how it works:

http://theorylunch.wordpress.com/2013/01/24/ca-mitm/

Have you ever actually listened to George Carlin?

Yes. Did you know that he has a long history of releasing recorded comedy routines on various media? They are available on Amazon.

Have you seen his "Al Sleet the "Hippy Dippy Weatherman" routine?

He was still doing it years later: George Carlin 'The Hippy Dippy Weatherman'

That is how he made his living. Could he be insightful? At times, sure. A philosopher? To the extent that anybody can be, in an informal sense, sure. But he was certainly no Buddha or Jesus.

And he got some things very wrong that should have been obvious. After Saddam's Iraq invaded and annexed Kuwait in 1990, the UN took action against him. The US led a military coalition of 34 nations, including the armed forces of multiple Arab nations fighting as part of the coalition, to remove Saddam's army from Kuwait and restore Kuwait's sovereignty. There is no question about who was the aggressor, or why Saddam's occupying army in Kuwait was being attacked, and UN approval was explicit and strong. And how did Carlin respond?

Carlin: Most overrated comic ever?

Carlin had a coherent analysis once, but by the mid 80s if he was still the boldest standup guy out there, never missing a chance to attack U.S. racist-imperialism abroad (his 1991 HBO special made a lot of his audience nervous and/or confused when he dismissed the Gulf War as one more case of us bombing brown people because they’re brown — which he distinguished from WWII, the last time we bombed white people, which because they were muscling in on our game) , it was in the context of an increasingly cranky and humorless misanthropy. When you spend a fair chunk of your time complaining about the annoying habits of the people around you in various settings, no matter how reasonable your arguments, it makes your more overt politics seem too damn abstract, i.e. why exactly does what the U.S. or organized religion does bother you if you don’t like people to begin with? (Bill Maher also suffers from this contradiction, never mind Lewis Black.)

He reduces the US action to racism, overlooking the fact that the US had many allied nations of the same group, Arabs, and was acting to restore the rightful government of an Arab nation after an attack by a "brother Arab." Wrong. Misleading. Dishonest.

That doesn't mean that he didn't go after other groups and ideas as well.

CARLIN: Let me tell you about endangered species, all right? Saving endangered species is just one more arrogant attempt by humans to control nature. It's arrogant meddling. It's what got us in trouble in the first place. Doesn't anybody understand that? Interfering with nature. Over 90%, way over 90% of all the species that have ever lived on this planet, ever lived, are gone. They're extinct. We didn't kill them all. They just disappeared. That's what nature does. We're so self-important, so self-important. Everybody is going to save something now. Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails. And the greatest arrogance of all, save the planet. What?

CARLIN: I'm tired of these self-righteous environmentalists, these white bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is there aren't enough bicycle paths, people trying to make the world safe for their Volvos. There is nothing wrong with the planet. Nothing wrong with the planet. The plane

You would still have to go through the cellular network, and the phone would have to trust the carrier's CA, so really there is no such thing as security on a mobile phone. The carrier can still monitor all of your encrypted traffic. Here's a site that explains it pretty well. Employers do this all the time:

http://theorylunch.wordpress.com/2013/01/24/ca-mitm/

Sipping a nice $2.50 vintage from Grocery Outlet. Excellent!

Which one? I've had good luck with a lot of stuff in the sub-$10 range there, and once or twice a year, you can get something incredible for sub-$20.

On 2008/10/31:

Speaking tonight at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri, Senator Obama said, near the beginning of his speech: "We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America."

He is doing what he said he will do. Excuse me for trying to steer around Godwin here, but a certain other politician, almost a century ago, also told everyone, in writing, what he will do if he is elected - and then he did just that.

http://sgallagh.wordpress.com/category/fedora/

That will give you all the posts for the week, not just the first one.

No the problem can at times be the TSA. Let me illustrate...

Look at the jolt cola can referenced by this link: http://bevwire.wordpress.com/2009/10/01/jolt-cola-soon-to-be-discontinued/

I was at SD West (last one btw), and they were giving out the jolt cola awards, and cans. I managed to get a can, put it into my backpack with my notebook. The next morning, too early (as I was flying to Europe) I forgot the can was in there. So off I go into the search, and they asked "what's this?" I said its cola, and they asked if I wanted to drink it. I said, "na, just throw it away, its too big for me to drink right now".

Well, apparently that was the wrong answer. One agent said "we have never seen this type of can!" I was like, really? Never, apparaently it was a new can design. So off they go and search my entire body and took my entire backpack apart. I was there 45 minutes! It was not funny and of course they found nothing. This was a stupid search and because the TSA had never seen one of their products from their own country I was dodgy! Come on people!

http://xsisupport.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/softimage2013cer.png

I'd suggest that Autodesk and its ilk crashes far more often than NASA software.

You're mixing the 4th and 5th amendment rights here. The police without a warrant can assert in some cases that you allowed them into your home or to search your car. You have to be explicit and deny them access. They of course can force access into a home if there's a fear of evidence destruction or lives are threatened, the courts have ruled on that many times but stopping you on the street, say in the NYCPD pat downs is a 4th amendment problem because they are seizing you (temporary detainment) and searching you without reasonable suspicion.

your last statement I think is a bit off though.

And it's the same with an encrypted hard drive. You can't be forced to admit that you can decrypt the hard drive, if that knowledge, the knowledge that you _can_ decrypt, was incriminating. But once it is known that the hard drive is yours, then decrypting the hard drive is not self incriminating.

Judges have this neat power of holding you in contempt of their orders. If you encrypted something on a device then it's reasonable for a judge to assume that you can decrypt it as well. The point of compelling you to provide the information, the key, is what goes against self incrimination and in this case, the feds, initially, couldn't decrypt the hard drives so they filed a petition to get the judge to compel the individual to help them by giving them the keys. That's information that's not in the open, it's in one's head usually (or if he was an idiot, written down in his desk drawer somewhere). This case, I believe, opens up not only the self incrimination aspect because the feds, initially only had a suspicion of breaking the law, he wasn't charged with anything and they just wanted to search through his data for evidence of crimes. If a judge under those conditions can compel you to give up your decryption keys, when you're not charged with a crime is unjust and a violation of our rights. Now if the Feds had other Child Porn people give depositions or testimony that said "I got the stuff from him" and they have a trail, Internet logs, e-mails etc. then I can see where the judge could compel and individual to give up the info. In that case if he still refuses to do so there's a nice jail cell available where he can sit until he does what the judge orders.

There was a case back in the 80s called the Wonderland Murders in LA. Part of that case involved a porn actor named John Holmes who was accused to be one of the murderers in that case. He was held in contempt for 110 days for refusing to cooperate with authorities or testifying. The guy was nuts, like keeping pet bugs while in jail but he never broke and even though there was other evidence that he was involved, he never was convicted nor did he ever give testimony. The police if they'd had his blood stained clothes or other evidence probably would have been able to get a conviction but in this case, without his cooperation they had no way of putting him away.

How is this similar? He had knowledge of what probably went on in these murders and did tell the authorities what he knew he would have probably been convicted of the actual crimes or conspiracy. The same thing IMO applies here with compelling you to give away your encryption keys to your digital information. You may have something incriminating there not related to what the authorities are investigating, but once you give away that information, i.e., decryption keys then whatever they find can be used as possible evidence against you. In this case, a judge has ruled again in favor of the now accused and his lawyer is going to push to suppress what was found. It's been done before when police obtain evidence illegally, without probable cause. Locking the door to your house, encrypting your data to me are the same thing, it's just that the cops don't have great locksmiths or door busters when it comes to the latter.

This dude's building a Mold-a-rama clone. cool!

trying to do a sequel/derivative of an awesome film like "Blade Runner" seems like a sure letdown.

On the other hand the game, a derivative work, rocked:
http://incomedisposed.wordpress.com/2009/05/17/retro-blade-runner/

However I really don't want a sequel, unless it absolutely retains the moral ambiguity, grittiness and atmosphere of the original.

This should be on slashdot because ...

If you were smart, you'd just get any one of the VESA mount Raspberry Pi cases and mount the pie on the monitor

Oh, and in a 10 second Google search, here are a few that do the same thing but you know, a long time ago.

http://blog.parts-people.com/2012/12/20/mobile-raspberry-pi-computer-build-your-own-portable-rpi-to-go/
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1952418207/all-in-one-raspberry-pi-case
http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2013/05/17/raspberry-pi-in-oak-case-with-monitor-piday-raspberrypi-raspberry_pi/

You can find all the required parts by visiting pretty much any website of a large Raspberry Pi dealer (Adafruit, Element14) that has a dedicated RaspPi section and you'll find a list of all the parts, ready made, to be shipped to you to do just this.

Its not like this guy had to even 'find parts'.

And these are cooler (alas, the don't really qualify since they don't have monitors attached):

http://supernintendopi.wordpress.com/
http://raspi64.blogspot.com/2013/03/all-buttoned-up.html

If this kind of crap post belongs on slashdot, so does everytime I take a shit, as its equally as impressive and as rare of an accomplishment.

Not so much: Picture showing last 50 years of tornado tracks

Sorry, but the ability to save my life by accelerating from a dangerous situation trumps your eco-turtle.
The average local freeway is 75 mph. Many places have open ended speed limits based on safety of the road and ability of the vehicle. Montana comes to mind.
If you think you don't drive well, don't drive fast, stick to the streets and fasten a fluorescent orange warning triangle to your bumper so people can safely avoid you like an Amish carriage. Better yet, take the bus so you don't create a situation in public traffic.

          Small fuel efficient cars have a huge problematic bug , that has never been worked out. They're dangerous, hard to spot, slow to get out of the way and driven by people convinced that they will be around to enjoy a cleaner environment. http://ferrellgummit.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/wrecked-smartcar.jpg
          I'm surprised the foil hat crowd hasn't fingered them as a population control conspiracy.

At least two: Sickle cell anemia provides resistance against malaria. Hemochromatosis can be beneficial for people at risk of anemia from insufficient iron in their diet (and might provide some resistance against tuberculosis).

The little orange posts on the side of motorways are not mile markers, but rather kilometer markers - they're placed 1/10th of a km apart. Every size of a new roadway is metric, even the road signs, just that they've got imperial markings on.

Citation: http://daveatherton.wordpress.com/2012/03/17/the-true-costs-of-treating-smokers-the-obese-and-the-healthy/

It is just a summary but they link to their more official sources. The core values, as quoted from the blog:
The lifetime costs were in Euros:
Healthy: 281,000
Obese: 250,000
Smokers: 220,000

So, obesity saves more than 10% of lifetime healthcare cost.

Thank you! I knew that was true of smokers, but wasn't sure about obesity. Despite silly things like objective data (which Slashdotters otherwise rightly insist on) people will still use "fat people raise my healthcare costs" as an excuse for their sanctimony.

People will use whatever excuse they can find as a reason to say that they are better than somebody else. Weight is just an obvious one as is skin color or ethnic background.

Citation: http://daveatherton.wordpress.com/2012/03/17/the-true-costs-of-treating-smokers-the-obese-and-the-healthy/

It is just a summary but they link to their more official sources. The core values, as quoted from the blog:
The lifetime costs were in Euros:
Healthy: 281,000
Obese: 250,000
Smokers: 220,000

So, obesity saves more than 10% of lifetime healthcare cost.

You are confusing correlation with causation. While obese people tend to have a shorter life span, it is not directly from the obesity but some other related condition. For instance many diabetics are also obese. The obesity. Diabetics have a shorter life span than non-diabetics, so if an obese diabetic dies before a non-obese non-diabetic, what was the cause of the early death?

In addition, while there is no definition of healthy. Healthy what? BMI? Weight? How about a healthy BMI but stage 3 lymphoma? Then there is overweight versus underweight and one fares better medically if one is somewhat overweight than if they are underweight.

So, unless you are actually comparing similar health conditions along with their weight, the statistics are worthless. Of course, maybe you already knew that and it is why you posted as an AC.

Citation: http://daveatherton.wordpress.com/2012/03/17/the-true-costs-of-treating-smokers-the-obese-and-the-healthy/

It is just a summary but they link to their more official sources. The core values, as quoted from the blog: The lifetime costs were in Euros: Healthy: 281,000 Obese: 250,000 Smokers: 220,000

So, obesity saves more than 10% of lifetime healthcare cost.

Thank you! I knew that was true of smokers, but wasn't sure about obesity. Despite silly things like objective data (which Slashdotters otherwise rightly insist on) people will still use "fat people raise my healthcare costs" as an excuse for their sanctimony.

Easy solution. Warn them with a cartoon.

How do you think we tell people that something is poison?

http://tabzified.files.wordpress.com/2010/10/poison_sign.gif?w=520&h=539

Just throw a cartoon at them. If you make the list of whitelisted applications expansive enough then its unlikely that people will see it very often.

We could even crowdsource the white lists. Work out something so if enough people with the right level of trust click YES to something it gets added to the global lists.

There's a big difference between detecting the rough direction of magnetic North and being able to discern the source of radio waves, and an even bigger difference from being able to pick out specific frequencies against a noisy background. There are also some very good reasons from physics and chemistry why a "biological radio" would be impossible to evolve naturally. In short, radio is too low energy to be biologically useful.

Oh and there's an exception about my wheel analogy. Bacteria really did evolve a freely rotating axis used for propulsion. However the physics of the microscopic world is different from what we experience at our scale that our intuitions of what is possible and how matter behaves aren't applicable. The analogy holds as long as we restrict ourselves to larger organisms. No freely rotating axis has ever evolved in a macroscopic animal--the intermediary forms wouldn't work.

And the hits keep on coming:

http://sunshinehours.wordpress.com/2012/10/10/agw-experts-are-idiots/

tl;dr - less antarctic ice is global warming. more antarctic ice is global warming.

there's another corporate scam: sending fake compliance notices that look like they are from the state w/ an official looking seal, citing some state law, and demanding $X for compliance. I've received 3 of them over the past few years.

If I'm willing to risk tossing a state notice in the trash, then the trolls letter has no chance.

This guy posted an image of one on his blog:
http://parasec.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/screen-shot-2013-04-05-at-9-23-41-am.png

Another example: http://futiledemocracy.wordpress.com/2011/03/28/the-curse-of-mother-theresa/

Of all the things you say you can cite about this, you choose something with the words "futile democracy" and "the curse" in it? Do I even need to look at it to know it's biased?

But in many less secular societies,

Where, exactly, are you going with this? So what if some people think that; It doesn't make it right. You even say so. So at best this is a populist argument.

Also, we do actually need the occasional contrarian. Our democracy is weak enough without further deference to the strong, wealthy and powerful! Also, to be a "troll", it's usually implicit that the argument itself is weak. I've not yet seen Hitchens lose a debate.

He lost to Death. I have yet to see anyone win that argument. And I get that you're some kind of Hitchens fan, but maybe he won every last debate he had... but he lost in the court of public opinion. Miserably. This woman won dozens of awards and was loved by millions. Hitchens was a social malcontent whose only claim to fame was being an irritating thorn in famous people's asses... and at that, only a mediocre fame.

And democracy will survive just fine on the facts; We don't need to carve out special groups to hold above criticism -- strong, weak, rich, poor, powerful, weak... what matters in a democracy is the truth, and having discourse. If you think it's gotten "weak", then you either need to re-examine what you consider democracy, consider that maybe democracy itself is fundamentally flawed, or that there is insufficient participation.

There seem to be quite a lot of references, usually well researched and with eyewitness testimony about poor care. Cases where her victims suffered and died because they went to her care centers, rather than to the existing hospitals. Not to mention the awful waste of giving money to support missionaries rather than medical care. Another example: http://futiledemocracy.wordpress.com/2011/03/28/the-curse-of-mother-theresa/

As for defending the right to oppose contraception... yes, I agree with you in a Western context, where it's just a debate, and people can rationally choose. But in many less secular societies, this is the equivalent of "fire in a crowded theatre" - her advocacy actually denied people access to birth control, keeping the uneducated poor poor - at this point, it goes from an issue of free speech to one of moral culpability (in the same way that the previous South African president has the blood of millions on his hands for his continued assertions that AIDS was caused by poverty, not by HIV).

Also, we do actually need the occasional contrarian. Our democracy is weak enough without further deference to the strong, wealthy and powerful! Also, to be a "troll", it's usually implicit that the argument itself is weak. I've not yet seen Hitchens lose a debate.

http://electricalnotes.wordpress.com/2012/02/17/effects-of-high-voltage-transmission-lines-on-humans-and-plants/

Ignore the poor English and hit up the study sources listed near the bottom - those aren't bottom-rate scientists, pal.

Well, guns are pretty much banned in Chicago, New York City, etc. And yet, dozens of shootings every day....

This image has a nice take on it... apparently cold weather causes violence.

http://danieljmitchell.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/houston-chicago-guns-weather.jpg?w=500&h=500

Interesting thing is that all the * exact* same arguments and dismissals was used before the Australian gun ban. After the gun ban actually lead to undeniable positive results did even the opponents admit that it was a good thing, and have now become supporters.

Well, guns are pretty much banned in Chicago, New York City, etc. And yet, dozens of shootings every day....

This image has a nice take on it... apparently cold weather causes violence.

http://danieljmitchell.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/houston-chicago-guns-weather.jpg?w=500&h=500

As a Vermonter, sounds totally legit to me.

USA, murder rates are many times higher among blacks and hispanics than among whites

And yet Houston has MORE blacks and hispanics than Chicago, yet lower murder rate. Here's the source.

among poor people of all races

Income levels are the same. source.
Looking at the chart before stomping it into the ground helps.

USA, murder rates are many times higher among blacks and hispanics than among whites

And yet Houston has MORE blacks and hispanics than Chicago, yet lower murder rate. Here's the source.

among poor people of all races

Income levels are the same. source.
Looking at the chart before stomping it into the ground helps.

Wait a bit. See: http://olimex.wordpress.com/tag/a20/ - when these become available, they'll be about 4x the speed of a pi for about twice the money. Plus the olimex boards have a lot more GPIOs and useful stuff like that. :)

Well, guns are pretty much banned in Chicago, New York City, etc. And yet, dozens of shootings every day....

This image has a nice take on it... apparently cold weather causes violence.

http://danieljmitchell.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/houston-chicago-guns-weather.jpg?w=500&h=500

And barriers to importation of guns into Chicago are nonexistent. It's a majority-minority city, which means you would expect its murder rate to be high for American cities because in the USA, murder rates are many times higher among blacks and hispanics than among whites and many times higher among poor people of all races than among middle-income and up people of all races. If you don't figure that in when thinking about violence, you will come to all kinds of conclusions that won't withstand the light of day.

Well, guns are pretty much banned in Chicago, New York City, etc. And yet, dozens of shootings every day....

This image has a nice take on it... apparently cold weather causes violence.

http://danieljmitchell.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/houston-chicago-guns-weather.jpg?w=500&h=500

As requested: http://completeoutrageredux.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/bugs.gif

Oh yes. We MUST worry about looking "dated".

http://www.dangermouse.net/blog/images/trek/TheWayToEden.jpg

Can't have that!

And fight scenes! In an "intellectual" Trek flick!

http://m0vie.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/tos-courtmartial15.jpg

"The Gateway Pundit" the name pretty much makes clear this is NOT objective news

What was that intellectual coward? Afraid of looking at a website that doesn't fit your view point? That's okay. The story itself was in the daily mail, and it was reported to parliament, by in an independent body, as to the massive failings of the NHS in the UK. Oh and there were protests, they simply weren't covered in the media in either Canada, the US, or most of Europe. Not forgetting that this has been the subject policy of the NHS since the 70's.

Well would you look at that? Just one of hundreds of others.
Or here, or here, and so on, and so on, and so on.

Where the D-Wave CTO and founder Geordie Rose reflects on how his company got to this point.

The educated reader would realize that productivity increases aren't distributed equally across the workforce.

Once upon a time, they were
http://exopermaculture.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/526916_10150870575016275_36774245_n.jpg

Then things changed (the bottom half of this graphic)
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2013/01/13/opinion/13greenhousech/13greenhousech-popup-v4.png

"likely able to" is just conjecture. Try again with facts.
The numbers are out there, see if they support your hypothesis.

... that's Digital Equipment Corporation m'boy, the mommy of the VAX (and other stuff.) There was an extensive network (the dearly departed DECNET) wide repository of "knowledge" called "Notes". If I were to squint and stress my gray matter, I might be able to recall that Xerox/PARC had a similar unstructured knowledge base. Now you got me imagining tons of organizations that had these hordes of "useful information." No, that can't be. Sorry. Forget all this stuff.

OMFG, I've seen it all now.

space programs are great, but not at the expense of burying future generations in debt

Do you ever read newspapers? Or do you get all your news from Limbaugh and FOX? The deficit is shrinking far faster than thought. And the space program is one half of one percent of the budget. Eighteen billion compared to the 711 billion military budget, as big as the five next largest armies in the world combined.

Stupid brainwashed fool! There seems to be a lot like you here lately, where did the idiots all come from in the last few years? You, sir, are a fucking moron. What the hell is an antiscience, anti-nerd, ignorant refneck doing at slashdot? Go away and stop trolling us, idiot.

The D-Wave 1 was approximately $10 million:

https://dwave.wordpress.com/2011/11/01/siri/

From a recent Financial Post article profiling D-Wave:

        If computers could learn, grow and evolve the same way humans can, the world would be a much better place, Dr. Geordie Rose argues. The co-founder and chief technology officer of Burnaby, B.C.-based quantum computing firm D-Wave Systems Inc. contends that humanity would gain unprecedented access to education, health care and information if only his company’s technology were more widely adopted. Having sold its first quantum computing system to Lockheed Martin Corp. for approximately $10-million, the doctor of theoretical physics spoke to Financial Post technology reporter Jameson Berkow about his plan to change the world. The following is an edited transcription of their conversation.

And second, home ownership has been dropping precipitously. My landlords own multiple properties but almost all of them are mortgaged

I'm happy to confess that I am an exception from that rule, in every part of it.

You do realize that Cubans have similar outcomes to Americans in spite of being theoretically vulnerable to all the stuff you're talking about, right?

I have never been to Cuba. Going there from USSR was impossible, and going there from the USA is illegal. Funny that.

Hugo Chavez perhaps has a different opinion about quality of Cuban healthcare. Not easy to ask him now, though.

I understand that his particular case is not a sure indicator of anything. People die in the USA all the time - and wealthy people too, like Steve Jobs. To compare Cuban healthcare with the US one you need to go there and see it for yourself. But it is against the law. Does anyone even remember why the law is in place? Aren't those Fidel's men freedom fighters, or whatever we call "our" SOBs? Do you know what was the final straw that broke the back of USSR? It was the free flow of information. Fidel probably has a secret shrine to US Congress that protected him for all these years. Socialism works best in isolation, just like in North Korea - and the border fence is against crossers from either side.

I personally think that the law must be cancelled, and everyone should be free to go to Cuba and see for themselves how bad (or how good!) the situation is over there. Truth is always the best strategy.

But with regard to "outcomes," did you ever know why 100% of immigrants from USSR have bad teeth? That's the outcome of the socialized healthcare. USSR had no such job even as a dental hygienist; no ultrasound machines; no Plax even, and no electric toothbrushes (until the end of 1980's when import started showing up.) If you must go to a dentist, you will not get an anesthetic in most cases. The drill is not a modern high-RPM one, but the old one from 1930's. There was no UV-cured filling material, no composite crowns... steel and ceramic is all that is available; and gold, if you are rich. As I said, the treatment is *minimal* - just to keep the worker ant alive, if practical. Read this and weep. If that's not enough, read this too. Google is full of those horror tales because *everyone* in USSR had to go through these "procedures."

No, "saccharine rainbow powers solve everything!" Isn't "deep". Not even for a show intended for children.

Want a show that really is?

watership down

Its intended age range is 8 and up. (Hint, that's most of the same age range for MLP, which is 6 to 12 (and bronies).)

I saw it when I was 7. My parents had already explained death to me, and the cold war was still going on. It did not leave me with emotional baggage, and I liked it, much like this reviewer liked it. It depicts "serious shit happens! Only hard work and bravery really fixes it."

It prepares older kids for the not so nice things in the world around them as adults, and helps them be more than 2 dimensional emotional fountains when the saccharine landscapes they were sheltered in are violently ripped away.

I wouldn't show it to 6 year olds, but 8 year olds should be able to handle it, if their parents haven't tried to unnaturally extend their childhoods with a diet of saccharine to stunt their mental and emotional growth. Thankfully, my parents fed me a more healthy diet of media that featured consequences and resolutions that had real meat in them.

MLP:FIM is not "deep". No, Not even for a kids show. HR Puffinstuff had deeper meanings hidden in it, and it was made for 3 year olds.

Children need to learn that "saying sorry" and "let's be friends" doesn't absolve dickery, and it doesn't fix a wounded heart, or a scarred mind. It helps, and is the first step, but that road is a long and hard one. Friendship isn't really magic.

It isn't about being noir, or gloomy, or broody about things. That's equally unhealthy. It's about accepting consequences, and learning that often times the best ways to avoid those consequences, BECAUSE they are hard to resolve, is to just not do those things to begin with. (And when you have to, accept those consequences gracefully and with maturity.)

If the people hooked on the saccharine in MLP were absorbing THOSE lessons instead of cancer causing sugar substitutes, they wouldn't be as callous about their candor with other people and other people's interests, and react so violently and negatively when people demand they stop. (No, putting pinkiepie in places she does not belong is NOT 'cute', and IS an offensive gesture. People getting mad about it and telling you to stop is the consequence, acting like a petulant child and throwing a fit and resorting to creating lynch mobs and retaliatory strikes on communities outside the fandom is aggression, and people hating you and your lynching pals for it is the consequence. Saying "I'm sorry!" In a saccharine sweet voice, then going off and doing it right away again like nothing happened is NOT resolution.

Again, you would have learned this, if you watched things with *real* substance.

MLP is not such a food item.

Oh yeah -- I forgot that I blogged about this iTunes annoyance. Luckily I found a way to delete orphaned references to moved or deleted music files, but it really shouldn't have been necessary. Here's the post: http://randomascii.wordpress.com/2012/03/30/itunes-itunes-why-hast-thou-forsaken-me/

Dude, that's a joke at your expense. You keep trying to argue around the fact that your "statement of fact" is obviously wrong.

I've provided you a simple and effective demonstration that your belief is not coherent with reality. Even your counter proof says "Trend: 0.14". You do realise that a positive trend indicates warming, right?

Here's a quote from the Met Office:

The linear trend from August 1997 (in the middle of an exceptionally strong El Nino) to August 2012 (coming at the tail end of a double-dip La Nina) is about 0.03C/decade, amounting to a temperature increase of 0.05C over that period, but equally we could calculate the linear trend from 1999, during the subsequent La Nina, and show a more substantial warming.

As we’ve stressed before, choosing a starting or end point on short-term scales can be very misleading. Climate change can only be detected from multi-decadal timescales due to the inherent variability in the climate system. (emphasis added) If you use a longer period from HadCRUT4 the trend looks very different. For example, 1979 to 2011 shows 0.16C/decade (or 0.15C/decade in the NCDC dataset, 0.16C/decade in GISS). Looking at successive decades over this period, each decade was warmer than the previous – so the 1990s were warmer than the 1980s, and the 2000s were warmer than both. Eight of the top ten warmest years have occurred in the last decade.

Over the last 140 years global surface temperatures have risen by about 0.8C. However, within this record there have been several periods lasting a decade or more during which temperatures have risen very slowly or cooled. The current period of reduced warming is not unprecedented and 15 year long periods are not unusual.

The atmospheric warming trend has slowed a little, however, the ocean (which absorbs about 90% of the extra incoming heat from the green house effect) continues to warm, Decades of slower warming are expected. Especially, see Figure 2 in the last link. Natural variability laid on top of a trend can always lead to an endless series of plateaus, if you try hard enough.