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In addition to the Google Talk client, there are many other clients out there that provide a great communications experience. We believe users should have choice in which clients they use to connect to the Google Talk service and we want to encourage the developer community to create new and innovative applications that leverage our service. To enable this, Google Talk uses the standard XMPP protocol for authentication, presence, and messaging.

What does this mean for those who care about security? For one, you can choose software that includes Off-the-Record end-to-end encryption (OTR) such as Pidgin with the OTR plugin on GNU+Linux or Windows, or Adium (which has OTR built-in and enabled by default) on Mac OS X. On Android you can use Beem or Gibberbot, although I personally recommend Beem (and if you are using iOS you obviously don't give a shit about security anyway). By using OTR, Google has no idea what you are typing, even as you use their servers to send & receive XMPP data. As a bonus, you can proxy any of these applications over Tor, so Google has no idea where you are even connecting from, anonymising your IP address.

Because of the benefits of an open protocol, the fact that Google is in the US is far less of a problem than Microsoft being in the US because Skype by design restricts your ability to know how it communicates with Microsoft's supernodes and other Skype clients. This is the very nature of proprietary software: to subjugate you, keep you ignorant, and wield power over you. Google may not be perfect, but at least they are committed to using open standards as the base level of their communication networks, and explicitely encourage people to use what software they want, allow proxied and/or Torified connections to their services, & allow you to use end-to-end encryption with crypto keys that YOU control.

TL,DR:

I am very happy to find out a friend has a Google account, so that as soon as they use it with OTR encryption, I can communicate with them safely & securely from my own XMPP server with end-to-end encryption using an standard, open protocol. Incomparably better than Skype.

Not sure if you're trying to be funny, sarcastic, or if you genuinely think that.

The reason we got stuck with 32 bits is because when that was decided upon, nobody ever expected that the internet protocol was going to become ubiquitous. That shortsighted view does not exist today.

Yes, we will run out of ipv6 space eventually... it's a given. But it's not going to happen before we go to the stars.

This is what will they grow into

The Koran is more internally consistent, having a single author and single editor, and is read in its original language

Ignorant Bullshit. The Qur'an was not created until 150 years after Mohammed's death (assuming he existed, there is little evidence). There were many competing versions of the Qur'an and a single version was taken as canonical and alternatives were burnt. The discovery (and subsequent suppression by uncomfortable Mulims) of the Saa'na Qur'an in 1972 in Yemen shows how inconsistent the Qur'an is. Then the Qur'an has 'satanic versus', then the hadiths have 'weak' hadiths that may or may not be accurate. Your position is ignorant of the facts and therefore bullshit. Do your homework:
http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/quran/index.htm [shows how incredibly *inconsistent* the Qur'an is]
http://kafirgirl.wordpress.com/archive/ [this one rips the Qur'an apart and is funny]

Get a clue. Stop repeating the falsehoods made up by the evil Islamist supremacist. Your ignorance has led you to be an unpaid shill for evil.

You would think that Facebook would use something more arcane. Can't they afford dragon blood or something? :D http://alphawordomegapress.wordpress.com/2013/01/22/the-dragon-the-george-and-market-forces/

Here is a graph of global temperatures using skeptic Roy Spencer's satellite reconstruction: http://woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/plot/uah-land/trend Temperatures have gone from -0.25 to 0.25 since 1980. That is 0.5C in 30 years or 0.16C/decade. [Layzej]

Here is a classic case of cherry-picking your data in order to try to prove your point. You are comparing the low temperature from one year to the high temperature of another. [Jane Q. Public]

That's nonsense, Jane. Click on "raw data" then scroll down:

#Time series (uah-land) from 1978.92 to 2013

#Least squares trend line; slope = 0.0175687 per year

1978.92 -0.295807

2013 0.302992

So Layzej actually understated the warming trend, which his link calculates (not cherry-picks!) based on all the UAH satellite data to be 0.175C/decade.

Note that the supposed average starts at that low point on the left. In a curve that accounted for prior data, the line would start somewhat further up. [Jane Q. Public]

The supposed average? Do you mean the trend line fit to the UAH data with ordinary least squares? Also: what prior data? Again, there is no prior UAH data.

Also, look at the years chosen: if you choose instead 1998 to present, you end up with (roughly) 0.4 to 0.3, or a change of -0.4. [Jane Q. Public]

Again, this is nonsense. Layzej didn't choose any years, as anyone who glances at the URL can tell. He loaded the entire UAH dataset.

Ironically, right after baselessly accusing Layzej of cherry-picking data to show that the Earth is warming, you once again endorse cherry-picking a shorter timespan, despite the fact that shorter timespans have larger error bars.

These error bars can be shrunk by accounting for natural variability. I've recently discussed warming trends and uncertainties over the last 16 years. This graph removes natural variations like solar activity, ENSO, volcanos, etc. Notice that the warming trends since 1998 for all 5 adjusted datasets are statistically significant at the 95% confidence level, and they're all statistically indistinguishable from the IPCC's projection.

I'm not arguing with you about AGW. I'm just saying that the evidence you have used to support your point is almost laughably weak. [Jane Q. Public]

No, you're not arguing about anthropogenic global warming; you're baselessly (and ironically) accusing Layzej of cherry-picking data to "try" to prove the obvious point that the world is warming as scientists predicted.

Jane, please stop spamming humanity with all this misinformation. It's staining your legacy and threatening the future of our civilization.

There are your products:
http://deepresource.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/german-pv-price1.

Many incremental technology advances like the one in this article make these dramatic price reductions possible.

Eh? streamline.js doesn't use promises. It rewrites code to use callbacks. Or am I missing something?

Good points, and with regard to the laws and legaly system in America, a few years back a lawsuit brought against one of the two major legal databases owners/purveyors in the USA (alleging the fabrication and rewording of legal-setting case precedents to alter court law) was widely covered in the European press, yet received absolutely no publicity in Amerika. A most important and crucial factual point from the blog site:

http://dissentingdemocrat.wordpress.com/2013/01/16/aaron-swartz-r-i-p/

“Reed Elsevier” is one of two companies which collectively own the Law in the United States. The other company, Thompson-Reuters (formerly Thompson-West) along with Reed Elsevier collect statutes, regulations and case law from the various States input the compilations into computers, collate it and add notes and then turn around and sell the Law to lawyers and the very governments that produce it. So if you, or the lawyer you pay, want to know what the law is on any topic, you will have to pay one or the other, and sometimes both, of these companies for the privilege.

And interesting to note the Thompson-Reuters is now owner of the text analytics software firm, ClearForest (also used at NASDAQ, FBI, NSA, Credit Suisse, and financed by the same private equity firm which gave us Narus -- now a Boeing subsidiary, but still active in helping to arrest, torture and murder pro-democracy activists in China, Egypt, Syria, etc.).

Compiz is dead

It's all about Wayland now...

Gnome 3.12 = Gnome 4.0 = Gnome-OS. Coming to us in March 2014.
They don't care about the Distro community, they want to go up against Android.

http://www.slideshare.net/juanjosanchezpenas/brightfuture-gnome/
Slide 18 up .

They have been deliberately breaking Community themes and extensions, because of their "brand" image.
Blog with links for those who are interested.

https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotting-in-threes//
Anon.

At least now there is a happy face on the bluescreen...
http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/image23.png?w=640

I did not know that. Wow, Microsoft finally catches up to January 1984.

At least now there is a happy face on the bluescreen...
http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/image23.png?w=640

Featuring Aaron Swartz: http://zekeblog.wordpress.com/2013/01/14/homophobia-in-the-hacker-ranks-2/#UPDATE

Surounding the large rock in the upper left of the picture looks like mud to me. Specifically just to the right of the shadow.

Take a look at the high resolution image. Kind of looks like this to me:
http://godschildrenblog.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/img_2063.jpg

Just drawing vertical lines to indicate indent levels makes it much, much easier to see the blocks (which is probably why most Python IDEs do it by default).

But, yes, it's better with color. And such things already exist.

So it's not at all nonsense to think that groups in favor of "gun control" are aiming to completely disarm Americans.

It's exactly the same sort of nonsense. Banning clip sizes and certain gun types isn't on the same planet as total Prohibition, and only a troll or a moron who attended the Pete Hoekstra school of analogies would claim otherwise. Regulating guns no more involves 'removing guns from society' than bank regulation involves 'removing banks from the economy'.

One is significant to me:

http://doctorbulldog.wordpress.com/2010/07/17/tulsa-woman-shoots-two-would-be-rapists-in-their-heads/

and it's a two-fer.

Certainly this woman's testimony should carry some weight:

http://www.nevadanewsbureau.com/2011/03/17/rape-victim-to-testify-on-campus-carry-law/

The debt problem cannot be addressed without increasing taxes.

This turns out not to be the case. Read and learn.

-jcr

You mean like the Bernhard Goetz shooting, that only made it to the front page of Time magazine?

Bernhard Goetz

Yes, the horror – just imagine a dark superman played by Nicolas Cage:

http://thepopcultist.wordpress.com/2013/01/12/how-producer-jon-peters-and-a-giant-spider-nearly-ruined-superman/

Now – on a more serious note – I like seeing big budget movies based on comics, which only makes economic sense if they can sell the “official” trademarked merchandise.

On the other hand I don’t like our culture perpetually controlled by large corporations. Honestly, I am a bit more offended that Marvel / DC has a joint trademark on “super heroes”. Still trying to pick my way though this.

https://brontebaxter.wordpress.com/2008/06/24/is-george-carlin-dead-because-he-spoke-of-the-new-world-order/

I donâ(TM)t know about you, but I find it very curious that comedian George Carlin died of chest pains a few months after his new, scathing routine on the powers-that-be got excerpted in a you-tube video, and five days after it was announced to the press that âoeCarlin was being awarded the 11th annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, which will be presented Nov. 10 in Washington and broadcast on PBS.â (quote from AP article appearing on yahoo! this morning)

Were the bad boys afraid of what would happen if honor-laden Carlin spoke his mind about the global conspiracy on national public television to millions of intelligent viewers? Stranger things have happened. I attended a lecture 12 years years ago by Bill Cooper, a retired naval intelligence officer who had written a book, âoeBehold a Pale Horse,â that spilled many secrets he had been privy to during his service.

Cooper said he had taken an oath, as a military officer, to defend the constitution of the United States against all enemies, domestic and foreign. He believed it was his duty to that oath to expose the truth that was being kept from the American public, threatening American freedom. He had received warnings on his life and said if he wound up dead, it would prove everything he had been saying was true. Three years later I read that he had been shot to death on the front yard of his home.

Bill Cooper was not the first âoetrutherâ to be assassinated, but itâ(TM)s a name that sometimes gets forgotten on the list, which is reason enough to mention it. Was George Carlin a victim of something similar? Hard to say. But when an outspoken, fearless man with a growing public image steps forward claiming the people who âoeownâ the country have swallowed our freedoms and intend to swallow those few remaining, that tends to get noticed by the âoeownersâ he is talking about. How could they let Carlin stay on the loose?

Assassinations show us that aware people must collectively shoulder the burden of speaking about the whatâ(TM)s really happening in the world, quietly and in our personal circles. We must also, when we feel our numbers are great enough, act en masse, in huge nonviolent demonstrations and broad, collective acts of civil disobedience, against rules that infringe on basic human rights.

The few who become public targets by revealing information that points to the guilty (heroes like David Kelly, the Kennedys, David Icke) find themselves murdered or their reputations murdered. We can prevent that happening when we are everywhere, acting in a grassroots, âoethought-guerrillaâ fashion. The little mice, in the fable, freed the lion. The big beasts couldnâ(TM)t do it.

I discovered this you-tube announcement for a âoeRally Against the New World Orderâ scheduled to take place in London and in Washington, D.C. on July 4. We can support our heroes by standing with them on this day. Donâ(TM)t let David Icke, Alex Jones and other brave individuals try to stop the emerging fascist state alone. The time comes when each of us must do something.

Those who want to microchip humanity and establish a global government can sniper-shot our leaders. They canâ(TM)t kill millions of people who choose to oppose their strategies.

Itâ(TM)s time for us to speak out together. I believe the time has come to demonstrate, to make our message and presence widely known to the world.

The press canâ(TM)t ignore demonstrations that take place in massive proportions. Will these rallies be massive? Are we ready yet? Where will you be on July 4?

Bronte Baxter

© Bronte Baxter 2008

Anyone may republish this article on another website as long as they include the copyright and a back link to this site.

They have.

You can already get into serious trouble in many or most areas carrying an obviously toy gun in school, and there have even been cases of persecuting children for making a sign of a gun with their hand, or drawing a PICTURE of a gun. Coming next: outlawing THOUGHTS of violence.

It is only the logical final step that we end up in the Firefly universe through extending social engineering to actual physical or chemical monkeying with human brains. Oh wait, we are already there, with psychotropic drugs being handed out like candy to children.

This would all have been universally considered crazy by any previous generation. It still is considered crazy by rational people.

Nice trick those graphs.

Symbian was already tanking in Q2 2010, nearly a full year before the famous memo and Android had already passed Symbian in market share by the time of the memo. They were screwed no matter what.
http://dominiescommunicate.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/android_bypasses_symbian.png

I saw a graph recently (I think it was in Sciam), which showed that in a hospital setting the nurses were the central contact point between everyone. That is, nurses had more contacts per day with other staff and patients than anyone else in the hospital.

I think that should effectively label nurses as "super-spreaders" in that environment. http://contagions.wordpress.com/2012/03/14/what-is-a-super-spreader/
Anything that reduces the risk of hospital infections should be mandatory, and that includes washing hands between every patient.

No, he just needed to make it clear that this was a reference to the non-gay one.

The non-gay football? You mean the one with less contact than the other one?

https://vernonryoung.wordpress.com/2010/01/11/banning-assholes/

My current team is very good about providing positive criticism and admitting when our code sucks. We are all in it for the same reason, to produce a great product and make money, but last year was a different story. We had a guy who would never, ever take responsibility for bugs in his code and would openly criticize others because it wasn't done the way he would do it. No matter what your reasoning was, you were wrong, he was right. Period. He could have been a good developer had he actually taken input from the team.

These guys HAVE to go! They will bring down the morale and productivity of the entire team.

Knowing that your work will be negatively criticized obstructs the creative flow needed to produce quality code efficiently. I've personally lost hours either being upset or second-guessing my work because of unfair criticisms. Just replacing that one guy has made a world of difference. We are now very direct with each other, accept that we make mistakes, and can even jokingly say "What the fuck were you thinking on FooBar.java:152!" and no one will take offense.

Explain to him why his behavior is unacceptable, and if it doesn't change, let him go.

All your credibility went out the window when you posted AC, Are you debating the facts in the article?
Because where you get the facts from is so much more important than the actual facts...Riiiightt

Are these more "politically correct? :
http://foodmatters.tv/articles-1/anti-depressants-linked-to-suicide-and-violence
http://uniteforlife.wordpress.com/2009/03/13/antidepressants-probable-cause-in-german-school-massacre/
http://healthimpactnews.com/2012/colorado-mass-murder-linked-to-prescription-drug-use/

This needs an update to include the town sheriff's amazing press conference ("Anonymous, I am coming after you!") and Anonymous's response.

Not to mention I think this is relevant. A lot of people today have completely disassociated the slabs of meat found vacuum packed in the store from actual livestock. I don't mean that they don't actually know, they just don't like to think about it. I don't particularly like reminding myself that a rump steak is an animal's butt myself, but it tastes good. Same with sausages, try reminding people the skin is made of intestines and see how many friends you make. I don't think lab made meat would be a hard sell at all, once you got over any concerns that the meat might not be healthy for you..

This blog by a seven year TSA worker describes first hand what it's like to work an airport checkpoint.

Taking Sense Away

Hint: if you year a TSA employee saying "Yellow Alert" or "Code Red", look around for a hottie passenger wearing that color.

Could boys perhaps be more susceptible to vitamin D deficiency and mitochondrial dysfunction? http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health-conditions/neurological-conditions/autism/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-mark-hyman/autism-research-discovery_b_794967.html

One of the reasons we homeschool/unschool is that school especially these days push intense academics on all kids way too early, and boys especially suffer for that. Echoing your point, at least one study I've heard of shows that the focus on early academics is depriving children of the early experiences they need in nature and with water and sandboxes that kids need to later have an intuition about scientific and engineering things (so that they know what the symbols for mass, force, volume, rates of change, and so on actually physically represent).
http://www.ci.pleasanton.ca.us/services/recreation/gb/gb-playessentials.html
http://www.chrismercogliano.com/childhood.htm
http://richardlouv.com/books/last-child/
http://susanlemons.wordpress.com/category/early-academics/

And then the schools push parents to drug the non-compliant children...
http://www.thewaronkids.com/

Almost any school is filled with large numbers of well-meaning good-hearted hard-working adults who really care about children. The problem is they and the children are trapped in "an abstraction that has escaped its handlers":
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
http://www.the-open-boat.com/Gatto.html

Here is a psychologist saying the only reason affluent kids do better on math is that their parents teach it to them since most schools are terrible at teaching it:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201003/when-less-is-more-the-case-teaching-less-math-in-schools

The iPad has a lot of math-learning games for it that your son might like. We just got several for our kid. Here is one:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/motion-math-wings/id508228412?mt=8

See also:
http://www.autismspeaks.org/autism-apps
http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/14/tech/gaming-gadgets/ipad-autism/index.html
http://www.squidoo.com/ipad-for-autism

The directness of the interface is probably a big win for that situation.

There are lots of interactive online resources for learning math of course, and PC simulation environments like "Scratch", and lots of other such tools you can use together with your kid (like geometry related ones).

Just watch out from becoming even more vitamin D deficient by being even more inside using fascinating computing gadgets. A focus on early academics instead of outdoor play also harms kids in that sense. My speculation about that:
http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-October/005083.html

See also the writings of John Holt and Seymour Papert on math education, including Papert's idea that to learn any foreign language, whether French or Math, it is best to be im

Also on this theme: "The World Was Probably Already Destroyed"
http://www.digitalcosmology.com/Blog/2012/12/06/t/
"Some people wonder if our planet will be destroyed on December 21, 2012. I have friends asking me every day whether I think the world will end in a few weeks. But it is possible that our planet was already destroyed and before that occured its scientists managed to send a capsule in space with a supercomputer running its simulation. ... Will the destruction happen again in the simulation? Probably not since the conditions that caused it were of stochastic nature. However, even if the destruction takes place in the simulation, the computer will restart it and the world will be created again in an endless fashion. ..."

I have for a time made a little niche creating a little ripple with my sig on the irory of technologies of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity, as well as related writings. That is a little ripple that may only be meaningful as a "trimtab" when surveillance AIs newly emerging into sentience decades from now process it from all the other stuff being archived these days. :-) Perhaps even after the human race is physically long gone from our follies as above? :-( Recent example:
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/12/06/0055206/army-tests-autonomous-black-hawk-helicopter

Would I like to do more such as with various other projects I've tried that have not gone very far in reality (educational simulations, self-replicating space habitats, design libraries, social-semantic desktops, etc.). Sure, but at least I can do something even if it is small. Our path out of any technological singularity may have a lot to do with our path going into one. Every little effort may make a difference. So, as I see it, with every email I send and slashdot post I make, I'm potentially programming the values of computers that won't exist for decades. :-) Well, or statistically as above, I guess I'm most likely perhaps programming an infinite chain of future simulated versions of the same computers that are already simulating me? What an admittedly odd way to spend so much time... :-)

Although, that is not that different from the plant growth algorithm my wife and I developed in our PlantStudio software, which grows structures through successive iterations on a numerical seed. And it is in keeping with someone else's point on the interrelation between the universe coming into being and our own personal growth. And of course everyone is doing that kind of programming too with every Slashdot post or twitter or text message; I'm just more aware of the possibility perhaps. See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trim_tab#Trim_tab_as_a_metaphor

So, in that sense, are we creating our own future "God" at some moral and physical temperature? Which is a different argument from saying we are "God" or that we see "God" in our own image. And even different from this ultra-short sci-fi story (only as big as the previous paragraph):
""Is there a God?" sci-fi short story âoeAnswerâ by Fredric Brown"
http://obront.wordpress.com/2011/03/06/is-there-a-god-sci-fi-short-story/

I wish I could remember the author or title of a journal article my (sadly late, just found out recently) advisor at Princeton, George A. Miller, had laying around about 1984, which talked about mind as an infinite tower of effectively simulations. I'm sure that theme may also pop up in some religions, especially Eastern ones. Perhaps it indeed is simulated turtles all the way down? :-)

Anyway, at least we can try to see an upsid

It's not exactly about enlightenment, it is about the ideologies themselves. Every ideology needs a mechanism to stay coherent - if there is a group of people sharing thoughts without enforcing certain ideas and suppressing doubt, they simply won't have anything resembling what we call an ideology - because they all have different ideas and what we call an ideology is a group of people shareing the same kinds of ideas ...

I've tried to put together my thoughts on this elsewhere.

http://christopherfountain.wordpress.com/2012/12/26/keep-up-the-heat-and-look-whos-got-the-home-address-of-cyndee-royle-editor-of-the-journal-news/

What's good for the goose is good for the gander.

It would have been nice if Samantha Grossman's "cum laude degree" taught her something about chronological order. Because her resume certainly doesn't display that. Add in the fact that she's advertising that she's a member of a social sorority and has a "fun fact" of "having the most social media profiles", and her resume would go straight into my circular file,. . .

Just got the demo CD. Hopeless Masquerade is going to be the best 2D fighter this year.
BTW if anyone is interested in future PC games I highly recommend this blog. May not be perfect but it is light years ahead the (mostly)disgusting list in the summary.

Why should the US convert? Here's why: graph.

Another problem is that SD cards are an external, possibly horribly broken component, that the manufacturer has no control over. Stick a class 2 SD card into your android phone and try it out, you'll see what I mean. The device becomes so slow that it seems broken.

And this is assuming you don't have a faked SD card.

Crappy USB sticks and any mass storage device suffers from the same problem. You can bet this will be blamed on the device manufacturer though. Why doesn't my (extremely cheap) SD card run on this phone ?

Where the heck are you? Home Depot stocks the Phillips LEDs, and all the parts I use are available mail order from an outfit in Vermont. There are others, these are just the guys I stumbled across when I first set out to build bike lights.

This stuff is not-not-not prototype -- I built my first set of lights in 2008 or earlier: http://dr2chase.wordpress.com/2008/10/19/more-undercabinet-lights/

The biggest problem is that the design point for incandescent bulbs is all different from LEDs, and trying to put LEDs into a compatible package in a compatible fixture is a PITA. When you can avoid that (under cabinets, for example) results are far better.

Power cycling does NOT kill LEDs dead. Where do you get this information? LEDs are installed on bicycles running on one phase from a bicycle hub generator; at low speeds, it is flicker-flicker-flicker. Chopping LEDs at a kHz is a recommended way of modulating their power. LEDs are used for brake lights (and now, headlights) in modern cars; those are cycled frequently.

The Phillips bulbs are notably NOT harsh; they're a low-color temperature light. I personally like a hotter (bluer) light, but that's not available yet in a good screw-in bulb (Home Depot has some other high-powered brand X that does a nice impersonation of a welding arc; THAT is harsh. Don't buy that one.)

The neighbor post is an idiot. Modern high power white LEDs deliver a much more even spectrum than your standard fluorescent bulb. It's not black-body, but the LED I can buy at Home Depot is far better than any CFL or fluorescent tube I have ever bought anywhere (someone elsewhere asserts that very good fluorescents can be had, and I'm willing to believe it). If it's my own work -- mixed color temperature mounted under cabinets over a counter, I beat that handily. For example: http://dr2chase.wordpress.com/2011/02/20/undercabinet-lights-basement-kitchen/ Yes, there is a bit of a dropout at 480nm -- I know that was immediately obvious to you -- but if I cared, I would fill in with blue+cyan.

I think you're being misled by the height of the spike at the blue end, versus the (lack of) width. And if you had a powerful need to fill that gap around 480nm, they make LEDs around that color, called "blue" (470nm center) and "cyan" (505nm), so you could mix 5 (cool, neutral, warm, blue, cyan) and get pretty good coverage. In particular, Luxeon Rebel, Blue, bin codes 4 and 5 -- 475-480 and 480-485. This is really, truly, not an insurmountable problem, if you really want quality.

Fluorescent bulbs, even high-quality ones (see below) have the problem that their basic light is not just "around" particular frequencies, it *IS* a small set of particular frequencies. You can see this with a diffraction grating: http://dr2chase.wordpress.com/2008/05/08/spectrum-led-vs-fluorescent/ Interestingly, you can see the 480nm dropout in the LED spectrum (narrower part of the smear) and you can get a feel for what color that is -- truly, blue-cyan.

I am a little curious whether it would be possible to make a two-part "white" LED for diffuse light; have a separate glass with phosphors on it, and illuminate that with royal blue.

In reply to a previous Slashdot article on LEDs, this minor effort: http://dr2chase.wordpress.com/2011/02/26/led-color-rendering/
The summary is, if you take decent LEDs (CREE or Luxeon) and mix the color temperatures (warm/neutral/cool) it's not bad. Your eyes adapt; the camera is much less forgiving.

And decent LED kicks the crap out of fluorescent.

Nonsense

Your nonsense. All of your examples are from before the end of WWII, before the fourth Geneva conventions, and some territory disputes from long gone empires (Prussia and Ottomans). Not one apples-to-apples modern comparison of Israel's 1967 land grab, following a war it started with a sneak attack on Egypt.

The USA would have to give back a large chunk of territory to Mexico.

And if this were the year 1912 (64 years past the concession), you'd have a great point. But we're a hundred years past that point, so you don't. Whereas there are still Palestinians who have keys to the houses they were forced out of in 1948 (64 years ago), much less 1967 (45 years).

Acquisition of territory by force has happened all through history, is continuing to happen, and will continue to happen for the forseeable future. The supposed illegitimacy of this practice is used as a tool to demonize Israel, but it's completely ignored when anyone else does it.

Demonize Israel? Bitch please. Everyone knows that America was built on apartheid and land theft of the native population. Some of us even know that this happened over a hundred years ago - as opposed to Israel's apartheid and land theft, which is happening right now.

What's the alternative? If Israel evacuated the West Bank today, it would have rockets landing in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem tomorrow.

Drivel. The two recent rocket barrages - first in 2008 and the second in 2012 - followed a cease fire violated by Israel and the Israeli assassination of the Hamas official who was....busy trying to negotiate a cease fire.

The best Israel can do is keep a lid on the violence and make sure it only proceeds at a low-level.

Snort. You say that like you're from some alternate universe where Israel isn't and always has been the primary, secondary, and tertiary aggressor:

For example, in 2011, the projectiles fired by the Israeli military into Gaza have been responsible for the death of 108 Palestinians, of which 15 where women or children, and the injury of 468 Palestinians, of which 143 where women or children. The methods by which these causalities were inflicted by Israeli projectiles breaks down as follows: 57 percent, or 310, were caused by Israeli aircraft missile fire; 28 percent, or 150, where from Israeli live ammunition; 11 percent, or 59, were from Israeli tank shells; while another 3 percent, or 18, were from Israeli mortar fire.

Through September 2012, Israeli weaponry caused 55 Palestinian deaths and 257 injuries. Among these 312 casualties, 61, or roughly 20 percent, were children and 28 were female. 209 of these casualties came as a result of Israeli Air Force missiles, 69 from live ammunition fire, and 18 from tank shells. It is important to note that these figures do not represent a totality of Israeli projectiles fired into Gaza but rather only Israeli projectiles fired into Gaza which cause casualties. The total number of Israeli projectiles fired into Gaza is bound to be significantly larger.

Meanwhile,, you have a greater chance of being killed by a bus in Israel than by a qassam rocket. No, not just car accidents, but car accidents involving buses. Even the IDF admits that "Qassams are more a psychological than physical threat".

Eventually, it may find a real peace partner in the Palestinians.

Israel has no interest in peace, it has an interest in solidifying it's control over it's acquired territory and waiting out the clock. If they delay and deny p

Most temperature data collected over the years should be disqualified for those and other various reasons including the data fabrication that is done by GISS, NOAA and others.

For a number of articles on the topic that show the data fabrication see: http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/data-tampering-at-ushcngiss.

Showing graphs without the data to support them, and claim operations have been applied without specifying the operations is quite frankly horse shit. Back up your assertions or go away.

http://jennre.wordpress.com/2012/07/20/the-public-hating-steve-allen-1955/ is worth a look.

Look at this graph, move the time scale forward and change 'hole left by Christian dark ages' to 'hole left by fear of patent infringement'.

http://mycourselinks.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/ellis-bret-easton-american-psycho.pdf

Thursday night I run into Harold Carnes at a party for a new club called World's End that opens in a space where Petty's used to be on the Upper East Side. I'm with Nina Goodrich and Jean in a booth and Harold's standing at the bar drinking champagne. I'm drunk enough to finally confront him about the message I left on his machine. Excused from the booth, I make my way to the other side of the bar, realizing that I need a martini to fortify myself before discussing this with Cannes (it has been a very unstable week for me - I found myself sobbing during an episode of Alf on Monday). Nervously, I approach. Harold is wearing a wool suit by Gieves & Hawkes, a silk twill tie, cotton shirt, shoes by Paul Stuart; he looks heavier than I remember. "Face it," he's telling Truman Drake, "the Japanese will own most of this country by the end of the '90s."

      Relieved that Harold is, as usual, still dispensing valuable and new information, with the addition of a faint but unmistakable trace of, god forbid, an English accent, I find myself brazen enough to blurt out, "Shut up, Carnes, they will not." I down the martini, Stoli, while Cannes, looking quite taken aback, stricken almost, turns around to face me, and his bloated head breaks out into an uncertain smile. Someone behind us is saying, "But look what happened to Gekko..."

What happened to Japan? Property bubble burst and they had twenty years of poor growth.

China has a property bubble too, and unlike Japan is likely to go through a lot of political pain if the economy ever stumbles. Aka a bloody revolution against the swine that run the place. The LDP spent a couple of periods in opposition but bounced back quickly - the CCP will likely go down to bloody defeat Tiananmen style and then explode into factions. Actually there's a fair chance of a Yugoslavia style transition to an authoritarian nationalist regime in an attempt to keep Tibet and Xinjiang from seceding.

The CCP's legitimacy is solely due to the fact it has presided over economic growth, and if that stops I think things will get very bad, very fast.

This blogger has dug up and posted the home address, email, phone number, personal interests, family demographics, satellite imagery,and even Zillow interior photos of the publisher's home. http://christopherfountain.wordpress.com/2012/12/24/sauce-for-the-goose/