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"When you think of it, with things like the Boston tea party and other disruption, I'm sure all the founding father's would be branded terrorists today."

Or as has been attributed to Benjamin Franklin at the signing of the Declaration of Independence: "We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."

So, if they had lost, they would have been hanged back then, which is essentially the same thing as being branded a terrorist at the time. So, history is written (or rewritten) by the victors:
http://www.weeklyramble.com/culture/history-is-written-by-the-victors
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_hole

Still, the fact is, Canada never revolted against the crown, and they still got independence eventually, and it seems like a great country in a lot of ways. It has universal health care, for example.

British also were willing to free North American slaves during the Revolutionary war:
http://www.history.org/foundation/journal/autumn07/slaves.cfm

By the way, being able to print local currencies is one motivation for the US American Revolution that is rarely talked about:
http://21stcenturycicero.wordpress.com/fraud/how-benjamin-franklin-made-new-england-prosperous/
"Franklin, who was one of the chief architects of the American independence, wrote it clearly: "The Colonies would gladly have borne the little tax on tea and other matters had it not been the poverty caused by the bad influence of the English bankers on the Parliament, which has caused in the Colonies hatred of England and the Revolutionary War.""

Those taxes were to pay for the French-and-Indian war, whose costs ultimately proved ruinous to both the British and the French governments.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_and_Indian_War#Consequences

By revolting, the American colonists overall managed to shuck off that war-related tax burden (related to public debt incurred in the UK for empire and conquest) while still gaining the land benefits won in that war by the British from the French and Natives Americans.

Of course, some Native Americans might suggest that they have been fighting terrorism since 1492...
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncol1.html
"But too many of the slaves died in captivity. And so Columbus, desperate to pay back dividends to those who had invested, had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death.
The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed.
Trying to put together an army of resistance, the Arawaks faced Spaniards who had armor, muskets, swords, horses. When the Spaniards took prisoners they hanged them or burned them to death. Among the Arawaks, mass suicides began, with cassava poison. Infants were killed to save them from the Spaniards. In two years, through murder, mutilation, or suicide, half of the 250,000 Indians on Haiti were dead.
When it became clear that there was no gold left, the Indians were taken as slave labor on huge estates, known later as encomiendas. They were worked at a ferocious pace, and died by the thousands. By

"However, just having the source code and standards for the technology won’t get you too far. The real work (and the real money) is in the process of making sure the system can connect to all the state’s various data sources, and is customized to meet the particular requirements of each state, a process known as integration. This part will not be done for free. On top of that, the deployment of the SLC system will generate consulting fees, training, ongoing customization, add-on features, and other needs known as professional services. Wireless Generation’s $8 million data-coaching contract with Delaware is just a small example."

Wouldn't a guy with a net worth of 66 Billion dollars offer more than $150,000 to help this effort if he was serious about philanthropy? Wouldn't he also guarantee that the cost of deployment of the system would be covered, rather than picked up by the taxpayers.

This is all standard Gates tactics, as old as the hills. The reason why he has 66 billion is because he has made a history of drug dealer tactics involving tricking people into thinking they are getting something great for free and then keeping them hooked on his garbage. And make no mistake about it, what was produced under his watch was quite intentionally, garbage.

So perhaps do a bit of research on your own? You clearly also don't understand the concept, but you sure are quick to take offense.

The entropy of a system is simply the number of options for that scheme, expressed in bits. Sure, there are assumptions in the comic but they are applied equally to both sides. The password uses only one particular pattern (and offers a few more bits to account for picking other patterns), while the phrase is restricted to using exactly four words. While the phrase is restricted to a 2000-word (11 bit) dictionary, the password has a 16-bit dictionary to choose from (covering a vocabulary of 65,000 words).

The comic isn't meant to be an academic paper, but rather to make accessible the results of decades of study into information theory.

A couple of notes concerning Mate, Cinnamon, Xfce, and KDE 4. Note that I'm writing this from a "Debian point of view" rather than it being Ubuntu-specific, simply because I don't run Ubuntu (for a bunch of reasons).

We might migrate to Mate or Cinnamon or similar after they settle down a little. I'll also reassess Gnome 3 after another couple of minor versions, in case it actually improves enough to be tolerable. Otherwise, we'll either stay with xfce or move to KDE.

I've recently tried Mate and Cinnamon, and they have a common problem: they don't seem to respect the "Debian menu". i.e. there are normal menu items that don't show up and instead you get the menu that Mate or Cinnamon wants to show you. My experience (in testing Ubuntu-based distros in VMs) is that Mate works in 2D, but Cinnamon is 3D-only, so it sucks to run Cinnamon in a VM. Mate hasn't been accepted into Debian, so it's not even an option for me to run right now. There are DDs that don't want it to be included, partly because it (supposedly) depends on old Gnome 2 libs, and partly because they'd rather see more effort put into Gnome 3 (which I cannot stand using). Cinnamon isn't in Debian either, probably for similar reasons. I've looked at both the Mate and Cinnamon packages available in the upstream repositories and both seemed to need work and didn't appear to be stable yet, and installing them via the external repositories looked troublesome.

Xfce is great, and what I generally recommend today, especially on low-end systems. Users I've given it to seem to like it too. The only thing I don't like (which is not really a problem with Xfce itself) is that Debian has changed the default network manager used for the Xfce task from wicd to network-manager, but this is is fixable because the package is a Recommends rather than Depends, so this is a minor complaint. I think the reason for the default change is that network-manager is IPv6 enabled where wicd is not. I've had several problems with network-manager that I don't have with wicd though, which is why I stick with wicd.

KDE 4 is good, but only if you turn off Nepomuk and Strigi file indexing, otherwise it runs terribly. [I'm primarily a KDE 4 user and love it otherwise.] These settings are in K->Settings->System Settings within Workspace Appearance and Behavior -> Destkop Search. It isn't easy to figure out what you'll be giving up by turning these features off, but thankfully someone has come up with a web page and document that explains these features. https://kdenepomukmanual.wordpress.com/2012/02/06/detailed-kde-nepomuk-manual/ One additional interesting thing to note about KDE 4 is that it can do compositing (or not, your choice, easily switchable via Alt+Shift+F12) without using compiz -- instead it's built-in. KDE 4 also has several rendering engines for both raster and OpenGL, so it works on both 2D-only and 3D enabled systems.

As for Unity -- no. 3D only so it sucks to run in a VM, and it interferes too much with how I work. Also I'm told that Unity is an add-on to compiz, and that systems that run for days get slower over time and eventually compiz crashes requiring a restart of X.

Where I vote, you get a ballot stub when you vote. Later, you can go down to the place of records (county seat, etc.) and then use the stub to make sure your vote was recorded. They can do this because there's a number on the stub that matches the one on the ballot. The number isn't recorded or anything when you vote, but the ballots are stored by number (and district) so they can be retrieved and verified later.

It turns out Humboldt, California scans and posts all their ballots online, again, you can match them up by the number.

http://humboldtherald.wordpress.com/2009/06/14/get-out-your-ballot-stub/

(linked to blogspam because the sit that has the ballots is surely easily brought down by traffic)

Understood.
It seems to be a matter of semantics and very specific to jurisdiction. I think most people regard terror in terms of the law to be the threat or use of violence to affect political and/or religious change.

There's an interesting little tidbit on it here which seems to state that in Cali the term 'making terrorist threats' is the equivalent of 'making criminal threats':

“Despite its name, the crime of terrorist threats does not necessarily implicate al Qaeda or other terrorist organizations for their inflammatory speech or their attempts at political blackmail. Instead, the offense has more to do with situations involving domestic violence, hate crimes, bomb threats, and school violence. The question presented as to when is a threat actually a violation of the criminal law presents a tension between an individuals free-speech rights and the government’s duty to protect its citizens.”

The change in the carbon 12/carbon 13 ratio in the atmosphere is a direct fingerprint of human derived CO2 from burning fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are depleted in C13 because the plants that they came from preferred the lighter C12 isotope. The increase in the C12/C13 ratio is direct evidence that the source is fossil fuels.

This sparked my interest, as it is the first time I've ever heard anyone on either side of the argument mention the carbon 12/carbon 13 ratio (which, in and of itself, is pretty shocking considering how often GW debates go down on Slashdot). Doing my natural due diligence to research the ratio, there's surprisingly little dialogue of it out there in the Googlesphere either. I did, however, find one blog that brings up a few counterpoints: https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/02/25/the-trouble-with-c12-c13-ratios/

In particular, one that has me boggled is: how do climate scientists account for the Great Depression anomaly? (the fact the manmade CO2 emissions dropped by some 30% for 4 years, yet there was no matching ripple in the C12-C13 ratio trend or the CO2 trending)? Quoted below:

"I should acknowledge one imprecision in my description of Dr. Martin Hertzbergâ(TM)s graph in my first columnâ"âthe smoothly rising curve of CO2ââ"which prompted several intemperate responses, charging that I couldnâ(TM)t possibly expect CO2 or carbon levels to drop just because of a one-third cut in manmade CO2. Indeed, I should have written, âoeOne could not even see a 1 part per million bump in the smoothly rising curve.â Even though such transitory influences as day and night or seasonal variations in photosynthesis cause clearly visible swings in the curve, the 30 percent drop between 1929 and 1932 caused not a ripple: empirical scientific evidence that the human contribution is in fact less than a fart in a hurricane, as Dr. Hertzberg says. "

Everytime I see this brought up anywhere on the internet, it gets glossed over -- there's no counter argument. Could someone address this discrepancy?

It's sad, but we have limited amounts of fields and only so many resources(in dollar equivalents).

We have plenty of fields. The U.S. produces an oversupply of food each year, and has to figure out ways to get rid of the excess (foreign aid, high fructose corn syrup, cattle feed, corn ethanol). The reason is because we implemented policies to ensure overproduction, to avoid a repeat of the food shortages which followed the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. And population growth in Canada and the U.S. is less than one percent a year, trending towards zero growth. There is no need to maximize yield per acre here, just a profit incentive to do so.

The vast majority of the world's population growth is in third world countries. Developed nations all have population growth rates near zero or even negative. There's something about living in a modern post-industrialized economy which makes people want to have fewer kids. So the solution to feeding the burgeoning world population isn't to maximize yield per acre. It's to assist those third world countries in developing their economies so they too can become post-industrialized nations. If you instead concentrate on making more food, that population growth will just continue a vicious cycle of poverty and high population growth, until starvation and fighting over food finally caps it.

How about giving away a free voltmeter to any student from a 3rd world nation who passes the edX course "Circuits and Electronics"?

6002x "Circuits and Electronics", an online version of the MIT introductory electronics course. This was an exact copy of the MIT course, taught by an MIT professor, and was just as hard as the original course. Same material, same difficulty, online format.

Some of the 7,000 graduates were from 3rd world nations. For example, this article talks about a class of high-school students in Mongolia:

I'm reminded of William Kamkwamba, who built a wind-powered generator and was able to bring electricity to his village. His Ted talk is pretty interesting.

Mr. Kamkwamba had nothing. He built his windmill from scratch after learning the principles of electricity from books in the local library. He built his own circuit breaker by winding wire onto nails driven into wood.

His task would have been so much easier if he could have measured continuity, or the output voltage of his generator.

Most of the modern world is based on electronics - measurements, actions, communications, and so on. Having the tools and understanding would allow people to repair broken equipment and machinery, to take pieces from ewaste and hook them together in new ways, and generally have better life opportunities.

Supplying 5,000 students (a generous estimate) would cost only $10,000.

Here is the contact page for edX.

If you definitely want a computer solution, Android is the way to go for price and fuctionality. Pick a device that can be rooted (many no-name brands have same hardware - slatedroid.com might help you). Resistive is fine if you have a keyboard plugged in.

You can even put bangli on it - see http://androidbangladesh.wordpress.com/2012/05/15/bangla-on-android/ also the comments mention some tablets, and the guys at the link might know what is cheap and works if you talk to them.

If you know some programming or know someone that can help, you can use a USB hub and have two or three keyboards per device... but i wouldn't suggest you start with that idea.

There are very cheap USB to PS/2 converters, which might help if you get second hand PS/2 keyboards donated.

relevant:
http://allaboutjeff.wordpress.com/2009/05/03/the-distance-of-the-moon-by-italo-calvino/

This is absolute shit that this was moderated so highly. Slashdot--give me a fucking break. Anecdotal evidence from a propogranda film made by Wall Street investors backing charter schools is the source given in this comment. (Here is just one source if you haven't bothered to google how bad "Waiting for Superman" is: http://theradishpress.wordpress.com/2011/05/01/waiting-for-superman-part-ii) This should be modded into oblivion for sheer stupidity and lack of thought.

> I don't know a great deal about the other significent religions, but I'm sure a little research would reveal even Buddhism - usually regarded as one of the most non-violent religions around - must have a few skeletons in the closet.

Yup, despite this picture making rounds on the internet for a while, second suggestion from google on "why are buddhists" right now is "why are buddhists killing muslims in burma"

Even a blind person could see the difference between a Star Trek datapad prop and an iPad. http://edwardcheever.wordpress.com/tag/data-pad/

The premise of the article is that content owners want to stop piracy. This, I would argue, is not always correct, as US copyright law allows some copyright holders to collect more money from content infringers than they would ever make from legitimately selling their product without any copyright infringement. Take a look at the RIAA and the porn industry. The porn industry alone has sued over 300,000 individuals for downloading porn over bittorrent, and has sued each for $150,000. They settle about 30%-50% of the cases for an average of $3,400. That's $300 - $500 million from suing infringers. How much do you think they make selling copies of their films at $30 a pop, or a subscription to a website for $15 a month? The RIAA just got a judgement for $200,000 reaffirmed, and you can bet they're going to hold that over the head of anyone they send a settlement offer to. Don't want to pay $200,000 like this lady? Settle now for the low low price of $5000, more than you'll spend in you're entire life on legitimately purchased CDs.

Seriously, this is just the beginning. The music industry is stepping back in the game after years of dormancy, following the road the porn industry has paved with their nation-wide network of copyright litigation.

Oh, and I forgot the best part: by their own estimate, at least 30% of the people they sue are not actual infringers. But they'll be glad to take your ass to court for $150,000 per infringement and potentially ruin your life based on shoddy, untested, unverified, unregulated, unlicensed "forensic" IP evidence.

So no, this is not about "The industry winning and stopping copyright infringement." This is about their ability to monetize infringement through the judicial system.

You obviously never worked inside an academic research department. Just read RetractionWatch to have a daily account of how peer review completely fails to detect fraud and bullshitting most of the time. Plagiarism, image manipulations, data manipulation. Even creation of whole data sets, like in the case of Fujii, a Japanese anesthesiologist who faked data in some 172 papers . Universities indeed recruit scientists that publish lots of research. Such incentives push researchers to fake data in order to get a job - and latter on, to get grants. The whole system is rotten by this idea - more papers means more papers to peer-review, means less time to dedicate to each peer reviewing, means overall decreasing quality.

You obviously never worked inside an academic research department. Just read RetractionWatch to have a daily account of how peer review completely fails to detect fraud and bullshitting most of the time. Plagiarism, image manipulations, data manipulation. Even creation of whole data sets, like in the case of Fujii, a Japanese anesthesiologist who faked data in some 172 papers . Universities indeed recruit scientists that publish lots of research. Such incentives push researchers to fake data in order to get a job - and latter on, to get grants. The whole system is rotten by this idea - more papers means more papers to peer-review, means less time to dedicate to each peer reviewing, means overall decreasing quality.

I remember writing a post about this phenomena about a year ago. The short version of the story is that over the last 30-40 years, universities and research institutes have increasingly recruited "scientist" with strong tendencies towards showmanship, fraud, lying and bullshitting. This change is largely due to changing nature of incentives as well as methods of evaluation and promotion in these institutions. Peer reviewed research and grants are probably the biggest culprit. Here is the link: http://dissention.wordpress.com/2011/02/06/why-all-publicised-breakthroughs-are-lies/

Motivation is not as simple as you think, it's not "pleasure" or "pain".

There are at least 3 levels of motivation by "doing", and 3 levels of motivation by "being".

The 3 levels of motivation by "doing" are, in increasing order:
1) enjoying the job/the tasks. There are 3 steps in this one: autonomy, mastery, purpose (check Dan Pink's video)
2) looking for an evolution in your career. There are 5 steps in this one, check Maslow's pyramid
3) meaning in life. Check Viktor Frankl's approach: "Man's search for meaning".

Life is meaningless, it's just you who add meaning in your life. Its meaning could change in a very short amount of time, but it's sometimes difficult to accept this change.
For example, your first meaning would be to have children, but if one of your children dies, you'll need to find another meaning to continue.

In my opinion, you should always try to see if the new job could provide you some interesting lessons.
What is important to learn in your life is lessons, not status nor money nor fun.
Becoming a director will force to develop human skills and corporate strategy.

I'll soon explain what is motivation by "being" on my french blog:
https://psychologieagile.wordpress.com/category/motivation/
(sorry, no english version)

Thomas Edison Was A Douche (The Oatmeal!)

http://historylist.wordpress.com/2008/05/29/human-deaths-in-the-us-caused-by-animals/

I was looking for the Statistic for number of deaths caused by Deer per year as I remember hearing that it was the most dangerous animal in North America...

They don't count it in that list, but still a healthy (or not) 130/year.

Apparently alergic reactions to bees/wasps are also pretty high at 51/year.

Lassie weighs in at 31.

Closest to 2.3? Bull at 3/year. So you are slightly more likely to get killed by a Bull than by a terrorist.

and here is my take on the proposed 2013 mars mission. I believe that it can be done, based on what others have done in the past. http://dissention.wordpress.com/2012/08/22/educated-speculation-on-indias-2013-mars-mission/

Seriously? You can do considerably better than that.

Words are defined by use not by logic.

That's a very short-sighted statement. In a communication medium where only popular opinion decided the meaning of words, constructive communication and formation of new ideas would be incredibly difficult. I would prefer the opposite extreme, like an evolved dialect of Lojban, where definitions are perpetually scrutinized by a system of logical analysis. In the meantime, we can have a mixture of both, with proper clarification to avoid ambiguity. Context is crucial to communication.

So when a pro-capitalist calls Obama or Clinton a "socialist", your reasoning skills should deduct that it's not the Marxist self-serving definition of socialism that is intended. (And other socialists, including dozens of varieties of self-proclaimed big-S Socialists, would have their own contradictory definitions.) In calling him a socialist, I primarily mean the relative rankings his economic policies would have on economic freedom.

Hitler was not a socialist, he was far right wing.

Here you're wrong by every standard I can imagine, including Hitler's own nomenclature (example). The name of his party was the National Socialist German Workers' Party.

He was a "far right wing" (i.e. very nationalist) socialist. Socialism without nationalism has a rather unimpressive history, with socialism in the USSR, China, North Korea, etc becoming quite nationalist ("right-wing") as well. The Nazis' greatest enemies were the socialists outside of their national mythos, including "Soviet Bolshevism", just as history is filled with examples of king fighting against king and religion fighting against religion. (Economically free countries, however, have never yet had a war among themselves.)

You are essentially using the word socialism as a stand in for authoritarian market systems. Using clearer wording would convey what you are trying to say. Your ideas might be interesting, but your redefining of words makes communication more difficult than needed.

"Authoritarian market systems"? I am using the word "socialism" for political and economic systems where relatively more decisions are made on the scale of the "society" (a vague and easily subvertable collectivist abstraction) rather than the individual. It is the proponents of the various self-serving Utopian definitions of "socialism" that are using subjective and dishonest language that causes much confusion...

Anyway, the main point of this "Socialists love to build pyramids..." thread isn't whether you agree with my use of the word "socialist" where someone else might have used the word "liberal" (a stolen, ideologically redefined, topsy-turvy term that causes much confusion). The point is that Starship Willie (LOL!) is a minor propaganda distraction, and that much of government-redistributed space R&D spending follows the same impractical sensationalist pattern.

You don't mention this but DNS Crypt is only, officially, supported on Windows and Mac but it can be made to work on GNU/Linux and BSD with a little work. The following site gives the details you would need to do this https://johnfail.wordpress.com/2012/07/24/dnscrypt-for-linux/

Since PopeRatzo seems like such an informed guy, I guess using that word was intentional. Clever too, since others get to throw the hand grenades of truth.

Why should there be "breaks/deductions/credits"?

For the same reason the incentives are there in the first place, to encourage the behavior. If you want to encourage people to go to school and get an education, why not give everyone the same deductions on school loans? I'm not at all surprised it's hard to find doctors these days. They come out of the school with an average of around 140k+ in debt (http://www.usnews.com/education/best-graduate-schools/the-short-list-grad-school/articles/2012/05/22/10-med-schools-that-lead-to-the-most-debt). Then they get 150k salaries and are treated by the Obama administration as rockefellers when the truth is far different: https://benbrownmd.wordpress.com/

If saying an increase in taxes for income over $250,000 is a "tax on millionaires" is disingenuous, then how much more false is it that the Republicans claim that they're worried about people who are making $255,000/yr and say they're "concerned about the middle class"?

I'd say it probably is as disingenuous. However, it's fair to call the 255k the "working class" -- as I've said, those people do have far more in common with the middle class than they do with CEOs and oil tycoons. Heck, what do you even call that kind of salary in New York, or in San Franciso where the median house price is 700k? Hell, someone making 100k in Arkansas is worth a hell of alot more than someone making 200k+ in New York (http://www.bestplaces.net/col/?salary=100000&city1=50501990&city2=53651000), but according to the government, the former deserves all sorts of handouts while the latter deserves to get his/her taxes hiked.

Unfortunately, they were not asked to work for Foxconn. They were forced to work at Foxconn.

So it would have been okay if they had been forced to work elsewhere? Like HEG, the Samsung supplier http://chinalaborwatch.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/samsung8-271.pdf

Not at all!

There is a word for forced labor, it's called SLAVERY

This. It's not just the being more powerful than processing text streams (which it is). It's the ability to touch so many pieces of the environment. SQL, Active Directory, Exchange, IIS, VMware, Sharepoint, the list goes on. All seamless, all using the same language rules. If Linux had Powershell, I could pitch running more Linux in our environment (I'm in an all Windows shop). I have a ton of stuff I'd like to stand up, but the learning curve is so high with all the new languages you need to know it's just not worth it. Jeffrey Snover talked about this at the last conference I went to. Here let me find a recording: http://powerscripting.wordpress.com/2012/05/14/episode-185-steven-murawski-on-v3-and-jeffrey-snovers-keynote-from-the-2012-powershell-deep-dive/

Assuming you're not harming anyone else, live as you see fit. I believe that if by living and learning you happen to ignore religious "law" god will understand it's all a part of growing up. If god does will not understand then he is not god, so why worry about it?

If god was so offended that creationism is not taught, why didn't god write/inspire his holy book/s correctly the first time?

Don't get me wrong, I completely agree creationism must be taught alongside of science, my problem is which version of creationism to teach.
Once we can decide which religion is true and which is false we can finally begin the holy work of teaching the right version of creationism and all that good stuff.

Of course I'd not want to put many different people of different religions in a room to debate this, god might be offended by their consequent behavior.

Come to think about it, if god is so bothered about people believing in him and their eternal souls and all that, why doesn't he just say so? heck Amazon will give him an exclusive on the Kindle Fire HD. I can see it now "Kindle Sin Hellfire - GOD EDITION!"

Unfortunately, they were not asked to work for Foxconn. They were forced to work at Foxconn.

So it would have been okay if they had been forced to work elsewhere? Like HEG, the Samsung supplier http://chinalaborwatch.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/samsung8-271.pdf

I just had a thought; what would the Google National Anthem be?

Japanese companies often have anthems which the employees have to sing.

For example: Mitsubishi Anthem

(Ed. note: I've been trying to post comments like this one since 2012-09-01, but they never appeared on my article at the San Gabriel Valley Tribune. So I finally posted this reply at my website, Slashdot, and Mike Haseler's website Scottish Skeptic.)

Let's get the facts straight. Even doubling CO2, means its greenhouse effect would only rise global temperatures by 1C. That is half the threshold for action set by the IPCC.

But, this scam has nothing to do with their real science. These charlatans would be predicting the same nonsense if CO2's effect were twice as high or half as much, because the real contribution of CO2 is much smaller than the natural variation.

And let's not forget:

1. This scam is based on a rise in temperature from 1970 to 2000 which happens to be coincident with rising CO2. The overwhelming bulk of this rise has nothing to do with CO2 greenhouse effect.

2. Largely the same academics who cry wolf over this short term trend were crying wolf over the short term cooling before the 1970s.

3. It all stopped in 2000 (1998 to be precise). That's 14 years without warming, compared to the 30 year trend they say proves warming will continue till the earth fries (much like we were heading for an iceage)

4. And just to cap it all, it warmed the same amount, for the same period, before CO2 was measured rising between 1910 and 1940 and guess what ... we didn't end up global warming doomsday then either. [Mike Haseler, 2012-09-01]

0. Many diverse lines of evidence (paleoclimate, modern observations, fundamental physics) show that doubling CO2 warms the planet by roughly 3C.

1. Human CO2 forcing has increased dramatically since 1970, while solar irradiance, volcanic activity, cosmic rays, solar flares, etc. have remained about the same.

2. Even during the 1970s, most scientific papers were predicting warming.

3. Skeptical Science's "going down the up escalator" shows at a glance that this often-repeated myth about global warming ending in 1998 is wrong.

4. The rate of warming from 1910 to 1940 was about 0.13C/decade compared to about 0.18C/decade from 1975 to 2005. But scientists don't simply compare the rates; they examine natural and human radiative forcings which change the global climate's total energy, which is indeed an average over at least several decades. In the early 20th century there was a lull in volcanic eruptions which usually cool the climate by blocking out the sun over a few years. Early human CO2 emissions and a slight increase in the Sun's brightness also played small roles. Internal variability modes, which shift energy from one part of the globe to another (i.e. climate cycles) are also important. Temperatures measured in the 1940s were warmer than the models; this discrepency is thought to be due in part to Ar

Damn that chat bar was a waste of space:
http://afaikblog.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/message-tray2.png?w=640&h=400

Especially on a wide screen.

Not really a fan of notifications either. In KDE the device information just goes away and I have no idea where to and how to access it again =P, and if they stayed on the screen and wanted me to click them it would suck if say someone pasted something in an IM client.

What about scrolling a message somewhere and light up an icon to inform me something has happened. Then say left click to show notifications, middle click to clear the icon/message queue and right click to pick what applications I got notifications from with simple list of applications + check marks in front of them for instance.

This is a good article on the problems with fishing expeditions like this. Basically, the farther you cast the net, the greater the chance of false positives. What's worse, if there's just one false positive, it becomes next to impossible to argue your innocence because people look at the improbability of a single person being a false positive instead of the probability that there are false positives.

See http://professionalparanoid.wordpress.com/the-fastest-man-made-object-ever-a-nuclear-powered-manhole-cover-true/ for more about the manhole cover and the circumstances of its launch.

Great link, I've never even heard of this story. What I don't understand is how the velocity could be accurately calculated with the manhole cover in only a single frame. If the first frame has the manhole cover sitting, the second has it airborne, and the third shows it out of the field of view, you could calculate a minimum velocity, but there's not way of knowing specifically when the manhole cover launched or when it left the field of view of the camera. You would need two airborne frames. Or am I missing something?

The manhole in question went 45 miles a second. That's around 70 kilometers a second whereas the speed of light is around 3*10^5 km/s. So it was going around .002 the speed of light, which is still very damn impressive but is a lot less than .1c. See http://professionalparanoid.wordpress.com/the-fastest-man-made-object-ever-a-nuclear-powered-manhole-cover-true/ for more about the manhole cover and the circumstances of its launch.

So... much... awesome.

The manhole in question went 45 miles a second. That's around 70 kilometers a second whereas the speed of light is around 3*10^5 km/s. So it was going around .002 the speed of light, which is still very damn impressive but is a lot less than .1c. See http://professionalparanoid.wordpress.com/the-fastest-man-made-object-ever-a-nuclear-powered-manhole-cover-true/ for more about the manhole cover and the circumstances of its launch.

I'll swap you for 11 months of freezing temps, increasingly worse rain and wind, occasional snow (anytime between September and July :P) and 1 month where any day that promises > 30 minutes of sun also brings semi-naked obese people out of every nook and cranny.

You also get the joy of having a national leader with an uncanny resemblance to Shrek

It is possible in some cases to run a VM in a VM. It's been done for decades on mainframes. It just happens that this particular VM won't run in a VM, but it's not an unreasonable thing to try.

It's not safe for the simple reason that the automatic cars will drive the speed limit, and cause accidents because everybody else is going 20 over.

That already happens,example here !!

They seek nothing less than a complete monopoly on the smart phone market.

"Good artists copy, great artists steal" - Steve Jobs, 1994

Yawn. He quoted Picasso, who "stole" from T.S.Eliot: http://nancyprager.wordpress.com/2007/05/08/good-poets-borrow-great-poets-steal/

One of the surest tests [of the superiority or inferiority of a poet] is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest.

Thanks for the detailed analysis.

However, I'm a facilitator, so I'm well aware of group performances.
I still maintain that Ringelmann & Köhler effects are the same effect.
I wrote an article (in french) on my blog:
https://psychologieagile.wordpress.com/2012/06/24/les-effets-ringelmann-et-kohler/

I believe that if you are in a group that you think (even unconsciously) that it performs excellently, then you'll over-perform.
If you think that you are in an average group, you'll perform averagely.
And if you think that you are in a weak group, you'll sub-perform.
Of course, there are some exceptions, when some people have some neurosis issues.

And basically, this is what Ringelmann & Köhler verified in their experiences.

About the group's performance, I don't think that a group can perform better than the sum of the individuals, except for tasks requiring some sharing between the members (sharing knowledge or ideas for example).
When the tasks don't need sharing, group performance will degrade, unless you are able to create some sharing between members (and most of the managers don't want to create sharing, because they believe that they maintain their power by dividing people). In fact, collaboration is always superior to competition.

Also, I worked on myself these last 15 years, so I'm well aware of my cognitive processes, I don't believe in conspiracy, and I'm also working on finding who I really am without rationalization.

I think that you rely too much on external proofs, instead of checking how you perform yourself.
Most psychologists are full of theories, but their theories don't match with practice, because they are not practicing.
For example, there are a lot of psychological effects when pair-programming, but they can only be described by someone who pair-programs, not by an external viewer.

Oh, and I think that the most abused word is not "innovation", it's "we are a company focused on the human", which is always false when the company announces it.

The moral of the story is this: dissidents should airgap any system they use for sensitive/secret material.

What about the Free journalists in countries like the USA where they should not be considered "dissidents"? Perhaps this was just an oversight on your part. In the USA, many Journalists are called dissidents by US Government Agencies (CIA/DHS/TSA) but that is not correct constitutionally.

I genuinely do not understand how people don't get this. You want to push against the big boys? Assume they have tools you've never even imagined. It's just like sterilization in medicine. You don't know what the patient has, so you treat everything they touch like it's covered in plague. Diligence, children, diligence is the key to anonymity.

Is it wrong that this exists? Probably. Are you naive for believing that these types of tools aren't used every day? Absolutely.

As with my comment above, there is a danger in suggesting that _all_ journalists are dissidents, and that _any_ or _all_ Governments should be actively fighting against free journalism. In the last 50 years in the US, we have lost the wisdom of JFK. The full text can be found here in both edited and unedited form. Before you claim "but but conspiracy blah blah" go read the full fucking speech you lazy pricks! (not to be interpreted as the poster I'm responding to)

This deadly challenge imposes upon our society two requirements of direct concern both to the press and to the President–two requirements that may seem almost contradictory in tone, but which must be reconciled and fulfilled if we are to meet this national peril.I refer, first, to the need for a far greater public information; and, second, to the need for far greater official secrecy.

The very word “secrecy” is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it. Even today, there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary restrictions. Even today, there is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment. That I do not intend to permit to the extent that it is in my control. And no official of my Administration, whether his rank is high or low, civilian or military, should interpret my words here tonight as an excuse to censor the news, to stifle dissent, to cover up our mistakes or to withhold from the press and the public the facts they deserve to know.

But I do ask every publisher, every editor, and every newsman in the nation to reexamine his own standards, and to recognize the nature of our country’s peril. In time of war, the government and the press have customarily joined in an effort based largely on self-discipline, to prevent unauthorized disclosures to the enemy. In time of “clear and present danger,” the courts have held that even the privileged rights of the First Amendment must yield to the public’s need for national security.

I have added some emphasis on key items for consideration. We are beyond simply censoring news, we now have the NY Post sending stories pre-editor to CIA for preview. We now have media claiming racism on any criticism of Politics (hell, even Rush Limbaugh went off on that one today).

I implore you to read the full speech and keep things in context. Evaluate where we have gone in the last 50 years, inductive reason should tell you that it has not been forward. To claim "no sense in fighting technology" is an ignorant stance suggesting we should all just say fuckit and stop being free.

Cyborg baby.

As an American who's coming up on his tenth anniversary of being overseas full-time, I can say only this: respect your heritage. Say center and truck and elevator and for fuck's sake don't say 'cheers mate'. Be who you are, without apology. Only the douchiest Americans abroad have a hard-on for British English. Don't Britishize yourself - the first people to ridicule you will be the Brits themselves. And as for Americans who are still in America desperately trying to prove how internationally aware they are by self-consciously pointing out how they're using British spellings...well there's a chart out there somewhere similar to this with this sort of American ranked as one of the furries.

My first thoughts were of the robot 'Clamps', from 'Futurama':
http://ochemonline.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/clamps.jpg

you'd probably leave very very quickly.
Depends, if your an 80 year old guy or Steve Stiffler your probably embrace the situation...

evaluate potential partners for being
decent-looking, reasonably healthy and not crazy before jumping into bed.

Amen to that!

Some real reasons women might be happier
Disagree, a better list:
+ shopping
+ shopping for shoes
+ no pmt
+ shopping
+ self induced orgasm
+ shopping
+ chocolate
+ shopping
+ chocolate
+ shopping for shoes

That's the whole point. The "obvious" rectangle with rounded corners only became obvious after Apple came up with it.

I think you're mixing up two words there; "obvious" and "popular".

You remember the 1994 device by Fidler, right?
http://gigaom2.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/screen-shot-2012-06-05-at-11-03-06-am.png%3Fw%3D604

To him, a rectangle with rounded corners must simply have been an option. To others, sharper corners were an option. yet others had maybe pondered square devices, or round, or triangular.
Point is - none of them are "obvious" per se - they're simply one of many choices out there that, if you were to ask a person, would come up with.
There's certainly advantages to a rectangle - we're used to rectangles. Be it horizontally when dealing with TVs, computer screens, etc. or vertically when dealing with newspapers, magazines, books, etc.
There's also advantages to making the corners round. Making them razor sharp simply makes them uncomfortable to hold.
In that way you could say it's certainly a more obvious choice than a triangular, sharp-cornered, screen.

The thing Apple did do - through its marketing prowess, among other - is make it popular. But its popularity is not what makes it obvious.

Similarly slide-to-unlock. No, 'slide' mechanisms weren't very popular until the Apple's use of it. That in itself isn't what makes it obvious, though. The average lock on a public restroom stall may be what makes it obvious - because if you ask 100 people to come up with ways to perform an action (not necessarily unlock) given a 2D surface on which a continuous/non-continuous position may be tracked, 'slide' is more than likely to come up as one of the first suggestions.
So why didn't others use it before? Because there weren't 100 'others'. There was Palm, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, essentially. Most everything else were what you would now call 'feature phones' and unlocking those is pretty universal.. '*, OK' or '#, OK'. Maybe that was patented, too, and everybody licensed that from whoever held that patent. I should hope not, though. They copied that model - Windows Mobile required pushing an on-screen 'unlock' button or *, followed by an on-screen button or the 'enter' key, for example. If Microsoft were told by, say, Ericsson that they patented 'a two-tap method for unlocking' and to quit using it and also get all devices banned from sale (instead of just licensing it out for something a little less ridiculous than e.g. $10/device), odds are that Microsoft would have implemented a slide action - and thought of 50 more ways, patented them all, etc.

There is a difference between these two, though.
The former is form following function. Nobody wants to be jabbed in the hands by the throwing star tablet and look at the accompanying screen because it's just impractical - so the rectangle with more or less rounded corners is something that you eventually tend to evolve toward. Granting a patent on that, or even its use as a component in a patent (design or otherwise) is shenanigans.

The latter, however, is completely arbitrary. To use the bathroom stall analogy - there's knobs you have to turn, buttons you have to push, bars that you have to flip over. If the cleaning crew wants to access the maintenance room, they may have to enter a pin, or hold up a card (NFC), etc.
There's so many ways in which to implement a device lock/unlock method that at least when faced with patent litigation, it's not worth the bother to fight over keeping a 'slide' mechanism on your device unless you're fighting it out of principle (i.e. believe the patent should not have been granted OR that it should be FRAND).
That's not to say that the horizontal slide is innovative, ground-breaking, etc. Just a lot more 'meh'.