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Carefully read this blog. While his main point is to say that there isn't any evidence that cosmic radiation is causing global climate changes, it does discuss a possible mechanism.

What the paper is hinging on seems to be the statement that

the changing rates of supernova explosions relatively close to the Earth have strongly influenced the biodiversity of marine invertebrate animals, from trilobites of ancient times to lobsters of today.

With the assumption that other clades follow suite (the several mass extinctions have involved virtually all life forms, some more than others but a significant change in all genera).

Further, the hypothesized effect from supernovae is also coincident with changes in uptake of Carbon 13 (as a proxy for photosynthesis).

Fairly strong correlates if the underlying assumptions are true.

SoulSkill complete rewrote my submissions, which I admit I completely plagiarized from here, which is a good summary of the very technical paper.

The author does take pot shots at AGW at the end so perhaps SoulSkill was looking to avoid a flame war that would completely drown out the very interesting paper.

Of course, now that posted the link, it's probably Flame On for many.

The correct translation from this guy would be:
"I can't actually show that it's the cause of climate warming, so I'll put in a confusing sentence to make it seem that way."
He compares the climate change with we are currently experiencing to things that take a much longer time, and things that aren't happening at the rate he referrers to 500 million years ago.
If the Earth was currently being bombarded at the rate necessary for his claim, we would be seeing extinction events.

Classic denier.

Here is a break down of his points:
http://thingsbreak.wordpress.com/tag/cosmic-rays/

with links to data and sources.

--

I use FF on Mac OS X. It's been steadily becoming one of the worst browsers for the platform, performance-wise, but certain plugins still cause me to use it as my primary browser.

FF has always been shaky about remembering which monitor it should be on, but if I kept it there once I got it to open on the right monitor, it would at least always open where I left it. Well, in FF12, they have added this fantastic feature where all new windows open up on the primary monitor. Hooray! This should really increase my productivity. It might seem minor, but it's not minor to me.

Alright, that's annoying, but I decided to upgrade on day 0 of the release. My mistake assuming that they would stick with random interface changes, and not break lower-level functionality. I'll just roll back the browser. Fired up Time Machine, and I rolled back to the previous installation. Now, FF randomly hangs on various pages for up to a minute. Maybe the profile is hosed? Rolled that back, too. No, still hangs. Also tried starting in "safe" mode - it still hangs.

So, this isn't necessarily FF fault, maybe the rollback was corrupted. I'll just download FF11 and reinstall it. Except, since it's no longer the latest-and-greatest, it's not available. I couldn't find it without manually editing the FF12 link to point to 11.0.

Firefox, I don't know how much longer I can bother dragging your sorry carcass around with me. Your 3D transforms are so slow they are often unusable and the rapid update cycle is starting to cause real issues. Of course, I can't forget the random interface changes like removing favicons from the URL bar, because the interface is so terrible you can't tell the favicon from a security marker. I've now got almost as many interface hacks (via Stylish and plugins) as I do normal plugins.

I don't know what the solution is for FF, but I keep getting my hopes up, and keep getting more frustrated.

Note: I know that this might be only my computer. I don't have a lot of time or energy to set up another multi-monitor system, upgrade FF to FF12, and try it out. Since FF is one of the only applications I use that has multimon issues (besides a few random utilities), I have to assume it's something wrong with FF.

Please don't inure people to the idea of "security theater". It really is a great description for a lot of what is being done publicly to pretend to do something, often at great expense, and frequently to the financial benefit of well connected people.

She swore by affidavit not to cook, but returned to cooking. Under a different name. Her release as a carrier depended on her not cooking, which she didn't follow.

She was the first carrier identified (at least in New York), and the policies evolved as more information came along. The effective solution to the bigger problem was to restrict carriers' activities, and Mary was used as the example of what would happen if you didn't comply. The rest were considered not justified for quarantine, again as more information was discovered.

Making up policies as you go along, and having to fight an obstinate woman who refused to acknowledge her danger to others, is not even close to security theater. You may be able to call it "meting punishment based on public perception" since she became relatively famous, which is not a whole lot better.

http://cythereabast.wordpress.com/2007/02/20/the-board-of-healths-exile-of-mary-mallon-was-it-justifiable/

According the tradition, after the Meshica (aztec) leave Aztlan, they wandered for two hundred years, seeking a signal sent by their god Huitzilopochtli: An eagle on the top of a Cactus. And finally they found it..

In the middle of a lake, in a small Island.!!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CodexMendoza01.jpg

So, they built a great artificial Island around it.

http://abrahimappel.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/tenochtitlan.jpg

Now... the Texcoco lake is a system of Endorheic lakes.. which means, no only that the city suffered form periodic inundations, but that the water was a bit salty , so there was the problem of getting fresh water for the city. They built a system of dams to separate the water of the lake in salty and fresh water. and control the level of water.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Texcoco

charming isn't it?

After the conquest, the Spaniards dried the lake, son now... Mexico City suffers form lack of water

Many Mexican Urbanists have confessed they have dream the travel to the past, with some stones at hand.. to sent that damn eagle to a better place.!!

Last I checked, the department was rated 39th nationally, and it brought 17% of the money to the College of Engineering while only costing 10% of the budget. It's not that the department wasn't delivering, it's that there is some ugly internal politics going on:

http://saveufcise.wordpress.com/

If you're okay with the look/fit/not-always-dimmable-ness of CFLs, definitely use up the ones you've got. My wife has better color sense than I do, and some of them bug her (and there's reasons why this would be so, the light really is different). We also have a bunch of ceiling cans, and the ceiling gets plenty cold in the winter, and thus they are slow to come on bright then.

And hopefully, by the time you use up your CFLs, LEDs will be cheaper, and a hair more efficient. What I would do, if you do have some of those "pisses me off" CFL problems, is selectively replace those particular CFLs with LEDs, and then carry on. That's what I've done -- where the light matters to my wife, it tends to be LED bulbs.

One place where LEDs totally kick ass is underneath cabinets, to light counters.
http://dr2chase.wordpress.com/2008/10/19/more-undercabinet-lights/
http://dr2chase.wordpress.com/2011/02/20/undercabinet-lights-basement-kitchen/

If you're okay with the look/fit/not-always-dimmable-ness of CFLs, definitely use up the ones you've got. My wife has better color sense than I do, and some of them bug her (and there's reasons why this would be so, the light really is different). We also have a bunch of ceiling cans, and the ceiling gets plenty cold in the winter, and thus they are slow to come on bright then.

And hopefully, by the time you use up your CFLs, LEDs will be cheaper, and a hair more efficient. What I would do, if you do have some of those "pisses me off" CFL problems, is selectively replace those particular CFLs with LEDs, and then carry on. That's what I've done -- where the light matters to my wife, it tends to be LED bulbs.

One place where LEDs totally kick ass is underneath cabinets, to light counters.
http://dr2chase.wordpress.com/2008/10/19/more-undercabinet-lights/
http://dr2chase.wordpress.com/2011/02/20/undercabinet-lights-basement-kitchen/

If you use Anonpaste then the governments will claim you're a credit card thief, a child pornography, or a terrorist, because why else would you want to use something like Anonpaste?

Politicians are a lot less quick to use that, "Only criminals demand their right to privacy" routine after a few demands for public strip-searches.

Interestingly, the political corruption in the U.S. is getting resolved by, of all people, the military.

I really doubt that millions of people were more than slightly inconvenienced. Smart people didn't put their only copy of any data they thought was important there. A service like that is for backups and exchange with other users. Unless either you were stupid or list your original due to a crash, you can just re-upload to another service.

You are really silly.

I had my whole photo album there (12GB or so of photos), uploaded over a very long period of time. Of course, it was not the only copy, but it was the copy which family/friends could always see.

It did not require me to give any 'identifiable' details when creating an account, it doesn't really know who I am, I haven't been getting spam to email address which I've used for registration, it was extremely fast for everyone, it was much faster than other services I've tried, blah, blah, blah. I still have backups of my photos, but do you realize how long I'll have to upload them, on 512Kbit uplink, to another service? That won't happen.

Can't you just accept that they were providing a good service? I'd rather pay them for premium account, than have it for free and have my data being sold to everyone who asks for it.

There is not such thing as a free lunch.

If you still don't understand what I am talking about, maybe this will help:

http://verydemotivational.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/demotivational-posters-facebook-you.jpg

the economy is picking up

Only if you believe Obama's fudged unemployment numbers is the economy picking up. If you use the real unemployment number the economy is actually getting worse.

Here is the blog address as a link Gravity as a Pushing (not Pulling) Force for those of you who like to click :)

Google already has video recognition filters in place. Granted it's not nearly as develloped as their music recognition but it exists.

That is old news. Research in many areas of academic science has been mostly unreproducible for some time. http://dissention.wordpress.com/2011/02/06/why-all-publicised-breakthroughs-are-lies/

The 302 Views is caused by YouTube's "spam guard" explained here. It's a way for YouTube to censor some popular channels without really censoring them. They mark certain channels as spam magnets, freeze their view counts at 300, and therefore keep their videos out of the "most popular" lists. This allows videos from "proper" channels like Vevo, CNN, etc. take over the front pages.

In fairness, they only pay for themselves in Germany because of huge subsidies

Yup. Over here in the US, there are absolutely no subsidies on energy production.

I wonder if this new building really is a new building, or is it an "extension?"

Some snips from Wayne Hale, former Space Shuttle program manager
http://waynehale.wordpress.com/
Construction of Facilities, February 26, 2012

A long standing federal law states that any new buildings must be approved by the Congress; any new building must be its own separate line item in the Federal Budget. This is to make sure that the legislators know exactly what is being built on Federal property; to ensure that money is properly spent and not wasted. ...officers and enlisted, who served at Fort Laramie in the late 19th century.

Every year the post commander would propose building 4 or 5 new officer’s houses, and every year Congress would strike those line items from the Federal budget. No new houses. Until one year, he had a really ingenious idea. He proposed that since the army was often in the field pursuing the “hostiles” that the government should construct four “field kitchens” to feed the men. Then, the commandant used the maintenance budget and the free labor of the troops during the winter months to build “extensions” on those “field kitchens”.

True in the 1880’s, true in the 1990’s, and still true today; it is no so much following the rules as it is finding a way to get what needs to be done in spite of the rules.

In fact, in Federal installations all around the country, I have encountered “additions” that were bigger than the original building. Makes you wonder about the effectiveness of a rule that was probably written in the 18th century.

So my advice to anybody trying to get things done in the byzantine maze of Federal regulations is to get creative. There is almost always a way to accomplish the mission in spite of the obstacles. Sometimes it pays to study history because other clever people have gotten their mission accomplished by perfectly legal and legitimate ways to work through the regs.

for more see, http://waynehale.wordpress.com/ Construction of Facilities, February 26, 2012

I wonder if this new building really is a new building, or is it an "extension?"

Some snips from Wayne Hale, former Space Shuttle program manager
http://waynehale.wordpress.com/
Construction of Facilities, February 26, 2012

A long standing federal law states that any new buildings must be approved by the Congress; any new building must be its own separate line item in the Federal Budget. This is to make sure that the legislators know exactly what is being built on Federal property; to ensure that money is properly spent and not wasted. ...officers and enlisted, who served at Fort Laramie in the late 19th century.

Every year the post commander would propose building 4 or 5 new officer’s houses, and every year Congress would strike those line items from the Federal budget. No new houses. Until one year, he had a really ingenious idea. He proposed that since the army was often in the field pursuing the “hostiles” that the government should construct four “field kitchens” to feed the men. Then, the commandant used the maintenance budget and the free labor of the troops during the winter months to build “extensions” on those “field kitchens”.

True in the 1880’s, true in the 1990’s, and still true today; it is no so much following the rules as it is finding a way to get what needs to be done in spite of the rules.

In fact, in Federal installations all around the country, I have encountered “additions” that were bigger than the original building. Makes you wonder about the effectiveness of a rule that was probably written in the 18th century.

So my advice to anybody trying to get things done in the byzantine maze of Federal regulations is to get creative. There is almost always a way to accomplish the mission in spite of the obstacles. Sometimes it pays to study history because other clever people have gotten their mission accomplished by perfectly legal and legitimate ways to work through the regs.

for more see, http://waynehale.wordpress.com/ Construction of Facilities, February 26, 2012

Regarding "throw away your lightbulbs" -- I believe George Bush signed that bill.

In addition, the requirements (the current ones) can be met with halogen lightbulbs (they're sufficiently efficient) which are not very different from incandescent bulbs in light quality (they are somewhat bluer). And, given modest assumptions about the price of electricity or how many hours per day you run a light bulb, the new LED lights (the one I tried was about $30 at Home Depot) pay for themselves quickly, and work very well -- they are on instantly, have better light, are durable, contain no mercury. I am sure that the much more expensive new Philips light has even better light quality, though it will not pay for itself as quickly. I've also read a good review of CREE EcoSmart LED bulbs. CREE is a good name (I use CREE and Philips LEDs on bicycles that live outdoors in Massachusetts; summing over all the bikes and all the LEDs, over 20 LED-years of weather exposure, with no failures).

I know this is off-topic, but you were just completely wrong, and on the internet, too.

I already did this a long while back. Not only the color displayed on the screen matters for power, but even contrast and brightness settings also make difference. Higher brightness setting of the monitor result in more power consumption.

The results are posted here.

http://kedarsoman.wordpress.com/2006/11/21/saving-energy-one-monitor-at-a-time/

What has Banksy to say about it? http://thequotesproject.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/brandalism.jpg

People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disapear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on tv making your girlfriend feel inadequate.
They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it.
They are the advertisers and they are laughing at you.

You, however are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

Fuck that.

Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours.
It's yours yo take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rocj someone just threw at your head.

Your owe the companies nothing.
Less then nothing, you especially don't owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs. //Banksy

Here is an abstract at least.

Man, I remember when everything from Austrailia used to be cool .
Then that movie ruined everything. Forever.

White males have been, and continue to be, in a position of privilege.

Are we, now? I'm afraid someone didn't let me in on the secret handshake to get the privileges. Either that, or I'm just not white enough. Either way, I object to being attacked under the cover of "erosion of privilege".

Yes, we are. As a white US resident, I've never had to worry about selecting a wardrobe that carefully avoids any chance of being mistaken for a criminal (e.g. avoiding hoodies, no matter how convenient they are); and as a male, I've never had to make an on-the-spot calculation of whether or not the guy entering the elevator is going to use the confined space to sexually harass me or bully me into accepting a sexual proposition.

Only in rare cases does privilege come with a special handshake -- it's often the mere absence of bias. In the context of discrimination, "privilege" is a term of technical jargon; I strongly recommend you read Of Dogs and Lizards: A Parable of Privilege for a good explanation of what "privilege" means here.

True, but for the first two years of his presidency he had a super majority in congress meaning his party could pass any legislation they wanted no matter what the opposition wanted.

six months

What happened with that?

Basically, the Affordable Care Act, which the Right has tried to obstruct every step of the way. (Actually, they've tried to obstruct Obama himself and everything associated with him since inauguration, and haven't been shy about their intent to do that.)

The scientific quality of WG2 is unfortunately rather low

Thanks for your blithe dismissal of that, but I think the many climate experts and scientific bodies who contributed to and reviewed it have a more credible opinion.

it's easier to just quote some scientists who are typically described as skeptics [wsj.com]

Well, if that's your best source for your opinions, it's no wonder you're labouring under this misapprehension. Maybe you should be listening to actual climate scientists? Or if you just want to see a bunch of signatures, try this letter, signed by 255 scientists.

If you want us to believe that WG2's conclusions are inaccurate and can be safely ignored, you're going to need much more credible evidence than that.

Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. http://verydemotivational.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/demotivational-posters-history.jpg

http://greenewable.wordpress.com/2011/01/15/how-to-fire-a-teacher-in-new-york-city/

Reality is often more cruel than the (R) actually state. If it weren't for the fact that the Teacher's Unions are a Subsidiary of the (D) party you might have a point. The reality is there are enough bad teachers (yes, I've seen them) that you cannot dodge all the raindrops.

Obvious troll is obvious. The moment you used "patriarchy" I knew you weren't earnest (or at least not a modern feminist).

I suppose nobody on this blog is modern, then.

It is very revealing that so-called "skeptics" of global warming reject the results of studies carried out by multiple different laboratories, using a wide variety of different analytical methods and many different types of data collected from around the globe, but uncritically accept as fact conclusions based upon 3rd hand accounts of agricultural practices in one small region of Europe. Summary and citations of the actual science can be found here

It is by the way, absolutely false that there has been "NO" temperature increase in the past 10 years. In fact, analysis of the data shows a clear upward trend over the past 10 years. The question is whether the increase satisfies the technical criterion of "statistical significance" -- which means showing that there is less than a 5% probability that an apparent increase of that magnitude could occur by random statistical variations. This is a particularly stupid argument, because statistical analysis of climate models (as well as weather trends) indicates that 10 years is too short an interval to reliably detect the predicted global warming trend even if it is real. (Although if you correct for known natural sources of climate "noise," it turns out that it is significant after all. So while we cannot prove that global warming did not end 10 years -- or 10 seconds -- ago, this is not evidence that it has stopped.

http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/FrontPage

Maybe this?

Or this perhaps: http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/HardwareStatus

From what I've read 2D *is* faster for many of the cards but not all, and only notably so for the older ones that Nvidia has shuffled off to their "legacy" driver. 3D, from what I have heard, does not work at all on most cards, and is massively slower across the board on the few older cards for which there is some minimal support working thus far.

Maybe my information is out-dated now but I would say if you have archaic Nvidia hardware (AGP-era and earlier) then this driver may be a breath of fresh air for you as far as features (KMS support, woo-woo!) and 2D application performance. For all other purposes... eh, I'd say the future of this project shows promise but it could use some generosity from Nvidia of the same sort they provided for the forcedeth ethernet driver.

In short, everything I see seems to demand a creator.

I don't think this is an indefensible belief on your part, necessarily... although you should read some Dawkins, perhaps, to balance the Behe.

Collins is an interesting case, as a prominent scientist who doesn't feel compelled to hide his religion the way most of the rest of us non-scientists have to hide our atheism. He's told the story of his own epiphany... but what he's never explained is why it led him to the specific god of Abraham, rather than to simple Deism. He encountered a frozen tripartite waterfall, and he somehow instantly connected enough dots to draw the Holy Trinity. Is this the act of a rational human being, much less a scientist responsible for helping us understand the way life works? It seems that Francis Collins trusts his own perceptions far more than any scientist should.

Maybe I worship the God of truth through study of his work ( scientifically ) and they worship Him by throwing parties in his name at someone else's expense

It's one thing to carry a Deist's admiration for the architect of all creation, even if that architect can be described as a God of the Gaps. The Universe does not owe us an accounting of itself, and it's safe to say that there are weirder things out there than our observations will ever reveal to us. One could potentially consider the existence of the Universe to be the result of a conscious act of creation, and apply the term "god" to the creator. At no point will science ever be able to contradict such an outlook.

But buying into the specifics of the Judeo-Christian faith? Buying into hundreds of pages of demonstrable bullshit written by a Bronze Age tribe of nomadic goat-herders? Buying into the idea that the god of creation, omniscient and infinite, who dwells outside all space and time, was disappointed because somebody once rejected him in favor of a talking snake, and wants me to vote Republican?

I can't see that as anything other than wishful thinking at best, and psychosis at worst. Religion as we know it today is arguably a mental illness that threatens all of civilization. It seems clear that a lot of smart people are going to have to waste a lot of valuable time figuring out how to stop it. Ultimately, what side of the line do you want to stand on?

When will America finally have enough guns that she and all her citizens are safe? What a happy day that shall be.

There is no such thing as safety until there are no people with evil intent, which means there is no such thing as safety.

Any perception of safety, anywhere, is an illusion caused mostly by not paying attention. That doesn't mean danger is omnipresent, either, nor that the vast majority of people can't live out their whole lives without being threatened by death or maiming, but there's basically nowhere that it's impossible.

Guns are a great equalizer, which give a 90 year-old woman some hope of fending off violence from a 20 year-old martial artist, and allow a person to defend themselves at a distance, but they're only tools, they don't address the fundamental problem. However, neither are the tools the fundamental problem... if criminals cannot obtain firearms they will use knives, bats, fists, etc. See the example of Great Britain, which has had some success at making handguns hard to obtain, only to witness a wave of knife violence that causes people to talk semi-seriously about banning knives with points.

Violence is caused by people, not by the tools they use. In the presence of aggressive, unlawful violence, the only effective response is defensive, lawful violence and a handgun is the most effective defensive tool we've yet invented -- though a good pepper spray or taser is a close second in effectiveness. Perhaps someday we'll invent the Star Trek phaser with its stun setting. Of course, even with that Captain Kirk occasionally felt the need to set his to kill.

The linked article says "Java scripts" but the actual blog post http://msujaws.wordpress.com/2012/04/11/opting-in-to-plugins-in-firefox/ she was writing about just says plugins. I'm guessing they wouldn't require permission for javascript.

And his more famous 1988 prediction was much farther off. So what is the lesson here? That accuracy decreases with time? Or maybe he likes to guess a lot?

I like GOTOs... and so does this this guy, and this guy and the book on writing Linux devices drivers

Can you take your dogma out back and shoot it? 8-)

This site is very useful for your situation: http://python4kids.wordpress.com/getting-started/

It doesn't run Civilization 2

I'm not sure if this is intended as a joke or not but saying that backwards compatibility is massively broken because a game that was released 16 years ago won't run is pretty funny. Especially as apparently you can actually play Civ 2 on Windows 7 if you have the gold edition (released in 1997)

Are you sure?

Nope, they were PCs before IBM manufactured them.

Sorry, that's just wrong. It's an anachronism.
They were "personal computers" sometime, not PCs. Though the were more often called microcomputers and home computers.

e.g.
TRS-80 Microscomputer: http://techmisadventures.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/6213180-583-800.jpg
Commodore Pet Home Computer: http://i.techrepublic.com.com/gallery/6213166-568-800.jpg
Apple II Personal Computer: http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2011/09/10/article-2036072-0DD160A800000578-895_468x566.jpg

The rest of your post I agree with.

There was no significant number of free blacks fighting for the South for a simple reason: the South made it illegal for free blacks to fight. While a handful joined state militia units, they weren't allowed to fight for the national army, and the militia regulations the CSA Congress passed specifically banned them from state militia service. The most prominent exception (the confusingly named Louisiana Native Guard Regiment, whose "Natives" were all black) was put on display for the papers in grand parades three times, and then abolished when Louisiana adopted the national Miltia regulations.

The magazine "Civil War Gazette" did a good blog post on this. Their low estimate is 6 guys actually fired their weapons in Confederate service. The highest estimate is 300. The highest estimate raised in the comments is 3%, or 15k-60k. It's unsourced, with poorly done math (29 in a regiment would be less then 3% because most regiments had 1100-1200 guys). Many others quote Frederick Douglas, who had no access to military records North or (especially not) South, was probably extrapolating any numbers he got from the aforementioned Louisiana Native Guards, and was a fairly biased source anyway. He wanted to convince the North to use black troops, which was a lot more likely to happen if the South was doing it. He stopped when the alleged black troops never appeared in battle. The rest are all "My Great-Grandpa swore he had a buddy..."

I went looking on the 'Net for a link to my favorite paper airplane design, so that I could post it here. To my mild surprise, I couldn't find one. Since this is a rather unusual paper airplane that I learned to make at my local elementary school (about 20 years ago--does that make me old?), I decided that I should preserve it in a blog post for posterity.

Below is a link to the post, with pictures of the various steps, as well as the finished product. It should be noted that this planes is not good for distance, but rather for really neat flying patterns. I hope you enjoy it.

http://danemutters.wordpress.com/2012/04/11/cool-paper-airplane-design/

And some very nice shoes

The real problem is that in the real-world, the police didn't bother to do anything but to take the shooter at his word that it was self-defense. You can bet your sorry ass that if a black watch volunteer would have killed a white kid, he would have been in prison post-haste.

You might want to be a bit more careful with the sweeping generalizations, or you could end up losing your ass.

The white preachers wouldn't need to jump into the fray because the black volunteer would have been arrested.

Are you sure?

As long as we have a patent system that blindly issues a patent to damn near anything applied for, even though there's no real innovation involved ... e.g. stuff that the best engineers/programmers in their field could do without much effort if given a task that needs it, then we'll be having these wars. Patents need to be limited to the kinds of innovation that that we simply would not have if the applicant had not figured it out or spent the extensive effort and cost to come up with it.

Fundamentally, patents are themselves a government sanction theft of intellectual property from those that invent it, just because they didn't invent it first. Only because we can't know whether someone did invent it, or did steal it, do we justify a patent (which is really nothing more than government sanctioned exclusivity). But our patent office is not working to filter genuine innovation from trivia ideas. A few years ago I scanned over some random patents, selecting those in areas I happened to know, and found that the vast majority were easily doable, and not innovation. The ratio was around 500 (junk) to 1 (innovation). This was one sampling, so that can be off. I only used higher numbers spanning about the last 5 years at that time.

So it's not really the corporations doing this. They have to react this way under such a system, or end up being a loser. This is why we need an epic-major overhaul of the patent system itself, and not some minor tweaks that politicians have paid lip service to.

I have written more detail about this recently here.

I have a story to tell about Mr. Tramiel. He touched my life in such an obvious way, with such a hackable C64, and I got the chance to thank him in person for his vision.

I used to work in Silicon Valley. When I first went there, I had visions of rubbing elbows with personal computing luminaries like Jobs, Wozniak, Tramiel, and Bushnell. Let me tell you, working in a startup is not the way to make this happen. Of course, Nolan Bushnell doesn't live in Silicon Valley, and Steve Jobs was busy running Apple, so they got scratched off my list. I did get to meet Steve Wozniak, simply because I was in the right place at the right time. But Jack Tramiel was... well, someone I wanted to meet badly enough to track down myself.

I had heard he still lived near Silicon Valley, but it was only by sheer luck that I came across a way to contact him (which I won't share here). It was my last week to work before moving back east, and I worked up the courage to initiate contact with him. Immediately, I found out he was someone who valued what privacy he could get, so I had to explain why I wanted to meet him in person. He graciously agreed to meet me for Thursday lunch. That gave me two days to think about what I wanted to say to him, and to ask him.

Not that it mattered. I got there a little bit before he did, got shown to his customary booth, and started tripping over my own tongue as soon as he showed up. Any photos you've seen of him reflect exactly how he looked: somewhat rotund, mostly bald, clearly Jewish, and very contented with life. The ease with which he greeted me showed I wasn't the first 37-year-old Commodore fanboi he'd ever met.

We ordered our meals, and began to chat. I tried to present myself as respectfully as I could, but... really, this was Jack Tramiel, and I was having lunch with him! He explained right away that he had just come from the gym, he always ate there after his workout, and that's how the restaurant host knew where to seat me. He worked out three times a week, as a way to stay somewhat active, but he had a good life, he knew it, and it showed.

We talked about how he had learned what American business was about, and how he had learned about America. When I told him I was from Ohio, he piped up immediately with, "Ah, my favorite city is Toledo, Ohio. Even though I've never been there." I knew he was a Holocaust survivor, but I didn't know that an American from Toledo, Ohio was the first Allied soldier to greet him when the Ahlem labor camp was liberated. This soldier taught him to speak basic English, talking about Toledo, Ohio enough that it essentially became young Jacek's understanding of what city life in the USA was like.

We talked about Commodore Business Machines, and how the design evolved from the early PET, through the VIC-20, C-64, and C-128. He had wanted economical designs from the beginning of his involvement with computers, and his products reflected that. He bore no ill will towards IBM, Apple, or any of the other competitors. It was all business; life is too short for animosity on any level. As the fortunes of CBM varied through time, that philosophy made it easier for him to stand aside and let history take its course. (I've heard that from a few other Holocaust survivors as well.)

We also talked a little politics. I asked him what he thought about the conservative/liberal polemic, and his response was simple: The government governs a nation, but it's a nation of people. When a government prefers the nation over her citizens, they suffer as he suffered. He asserted that no form of government was completely immune to this hazard, but some are less suceptible to it.

I had a website that the time, and said something about what an incredible brag I would have for it. He demurred a little, and asked that I refrain from speaking publicly about having lunch with him, at least while he was alive. So I did.

The hour and a half I spent

And white men make up the vast, vast majority of serial killers and pedophiles. I guess we shouldn't let them be teachers, etc, right? It's just 'fact-based statistics', right?

Right about the serial killers but wrong about the paedophiles.