Overall, an average of five times as many students in 2007 surpassed thresholds in one or more mental health categories, compared with those who did so in 1938.
It only takes two words to frame the result with intelligence, yet so few reporters surpass this easy threshold. A gem of a sentence. I'm rendered completely unable to snark.
This is one of those issues where the instinct of any good capitalist is to privatize benefit and socialize risk. When you screw up in the auto industry, the company faces the massive expense of a product recall. That helps to keep you honest with your engineering quality.
I personally think 30 days is a reasonable notification period. Not pleasant for the vendor to have to respond that briskly, but this isn't about being pleasant. If the vendor wants pleasant, they should invest more competence in the original product. This isn't easy, and might move a few pointy-haired managers out of the executive suite.
Probably a more viable compromise is eight weeks. This adds a thin margin for the possibility that key zero-day SWAT staff are booked off, that multiple issues are raised concurrently, or that a product has a stupendously long build cycle.
I would be thrilled to see an industry standard put in place where everyone knows the ethical notice period is eight weeks, period, perhaps with the odd extension on a track record of good behaviour.
I would also like to see proprietary TCO calculations updated with a term to account for the customer disruption of having to rapidly deploy a not-tested-for-months-at-a-time critical vulnerability patch.
Speaking of which, that whole TCO thing really bends my biscuits. It's just loaded with sly neglect of not entirely apparent costs, of which the year-long critical vulnerability update is one of the more egregious.
During that time, your pants are down if anyone less ethical discovers the same flaw. It never happens that two scientists make the same discovery in the same year and end up in priority dispute, according to the industry of socialized risk.
Any statistic significantly skewed by adding or subtracting 1 to either your numerator or denominator is a statistic too fragile to support a conclusion.
The "we are here" argument is a functional celebration of innumeracy, which reminds me of Operation HUMBUG when Canada first introduced Metric: inference by nostalgia.
What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
— Oscar Wilde.
Once you sober up, there's something to be said for putting your best foot forward.
I'm not quick to judge over superficial indicators, but there's no question aol.com raises my vigilance level.
It's not just tech either. It won't get you hired for an environmental job any quicker after AOL's five year run as the world's most industrious landfill factory.
Bias is a term used to describe a tendency or preference towards a particular perspective, ideology or result, when the tendency interferes with the ability to be impartial, unprejudiced, or objective.
I would hardly call dislike of a convicted monopolist with a Machiavellian business creed a bias (embrace and extend, choke off the air supply, etc.) Apple is a bit more puzzling. Underneath that lickable exterior is a major hard-on for DRM.
I don't regard my dislike for DRM to be a bias, either. I believe in generative abundance, exactly as Jonathan Zittrain outlines it in "The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It". The right balance for society does not lie in secretive international treaties ratified with no democratic involvement, leading to DMCA-style legislation few citizens want. I guess I'm biased against non-democratic power grabs.
Over the years I've observed a fairly strong relationship between dislike of Microsoft and detailed knowledge of their past corporate behaviour, both among the open source crowd, as well as the many venturists they crushed.
OTOH, I concede that the junk DNA here on slashdot spells out "Microsoft sucks" and "BSD is dying" more often than expected by chance. Yeah, we really hate BSD around here.
If you lived in the seventies, you wouldn't take his accomplishments for granted. Back then inhaling a transistor could puncture a lung. He accomplished three times as much over a short period of time as most technologists accomplish in a lifetime. Then he went insane by any linear metric, but definitely not senile.
His own business maxim is that most technologies succeed, but are brought to market under the wrong conditions. Sometimes staying out of the market is the right thing to do. "Buffett says perhaps his best decisions over the past 18 months were the deals he decided not to do." [examiner.com]
In poker, after you amass a decent pile of chips, sometimes the right thing to do is sit out until you spot your main chance. Unfortunately, Kurzweil seems to be going head to head against the man with the sickle, on the vain hope that antioxidants will cover the blinds.
Even if Kurzweil is wrong, he'll still have been more right than most people. What irritates me with Kurzweil is how blithe he is about his extrapolations. Technology always goes up, because, uh, housing always goes up. He could use a refresher course in black swans. The singularity is a black hole orbited by black swans, but he doesn't see it.
I usually enjoy his lectures, but always feel at the end like I've just spent half an hour on a monorail with all the side windows painted black, as if the singularity is some Matrix-like demarcation at the far end of Potemkin Valley.
At the end of the day, what does Singularianism boil down to? Either he's right, or we'll wish he had been, when one of those meddling black swans body-checks us back to the stone age. What's the middle ground here? Our machines become smarter than we are, and nothing happens? Now that I would regard as a bold prediction.
Isn't this mutually exclusive? I've never met a woman who had a prefrontal cortex and a G-spot at the same time. Anyone else noticed how women often don't remember much about sexual activity the morning after? If you ask, "anything you particularly liked?" often the woman looks back at you like Hal with half his memory cubes removed, like there's too many circuits blown to connect the dots backward in time. That's the good answer, if you can make do without specifics.
Reminds me of Vonnegut's comment about his typist Carol who "lived out in Woodstock, New York, which you know is where the famous sex and drugs event in the '60s got its name from (it actually took place in the nearby town of Bethel and anyone who says they remember being there wasn't there.)"
I was thinking about cloaking devices earlier today. For some reason, there's a lot of hard-vacuum back-scatter from phaser beams. A cloaking device would have to be pretty impressive to have a finger phaser fired through it, without creating a visible artifact associated with beamus interruptus.
I think that's how you have to conduct this study with women: is there any part of your anatomy that you're sure some man has stimulated, but you can't remember anything at all about what happened next, until the middle of next morning?
Next they'll be telling us the chloroblast doesn't exist either and that Greenies are just like the rest of us.
He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I ever met.
— Abraham Lincoln (about a lawyer colleague)
About the book's title:
This was one of those points where the Trousers of Time bifurcated themselves, and if you weren't careful, you'd go down the wrong leg—
—Terry Pratchett in Guards! Guards!
We need to take censorship seriously. This begins by refusing to position fraud masquerading as parody as a freedom of speech issue, which is terribly disrespectful of real censorship. Freedom of speech was never meant to be used as a day pass to Dorkville.
I can well imagine the childhood of someone who signs up the domain ec-gc.ca to engage in serious debate. I was played against his likeness in an online poker room yesterday, a fellow playing under the identity "Custard Pump" with a unkempt mop of hair over a naked upper torso icon posed with a conspicuous, demure, downward gaze.
Cluster Hump goes all-in on the first hand, and miraculously doubles up. Mustard Sump goes nearly all-in again on the second hand, and this time gets busted down to 100 chips. The next hand Cluetard Rump craftily bids himself down to 1 chip, whereupon he does nothing but sit there on every bid opportunity running down his bid clock (15s per bid plus his one-time 60s extra time clock), to express the emotional futility of his existence to everyone else at the table. Took half a dozen deals for the blinds to come around and knock him out.
Climate change is an important debate. If you've got something serious to say, show up and play, and stop hiding behind a daffy-ass parody pretence.
I'm waiting for the first published life reflection on the topic of wife-beater interruptus by a man whose blood-honey got wise to syntheholic Narcan. I'd dearly love to read an explanation by a man who experiences a sudden return to clarity mid swing.
The mind reels at the possibilities. If synaloxone is designed to be easily absorbed through eye membranes (there's another criteria for the designer checklist), it will soon become the feature ingredient in Pepperpoison H. This could lead to the baning of real alcohol. If real alcohol is banned, then only the alcoholics will have it.
Speaking of roids, how many drunks are going to drive home under the influence to maintain the party atmosphere, and quickly jab themselves at the first sign of traffic surveillance or air bag deployment? How is that going to be regulated?
Should this comes to pass, the law of unintended consequence is going to be working double shifts for several decade.
they have gone almost 100% there why they stop at 95% i dont know.
In your case, the other 5% would be adding an apostrophe, a comma, and a well timed tap on the shift key, and would have cost you another 300ms (apologies for that remark if you lost both pinkies in a wheat-field bailer accident).
In their case, as we all know, "the first ninety percent of the task takes ninety percent of the time, and the last ten percent takes the other ninety percent", so they're well into exponential innings already.
And finally, a tip of the hat to Corinna Vinschen, who answered my emails about problems with services under Cygwin as far back 2000. That's a long run shepherding the near-sighted stepchild into some semblance of functional adulthood.
I know many younger Linux people whose devotion to a software download rarely exceeds ten minutes if the first spin doesn't immediately express preconceived gratification mojo.
The problem as I see it is that you can't do science concerning near term climate change on the climate data as it presently exists until *after* it's far too late for proactive change. I figure that's a done deal. Crisis: noun, the point in a debate when action becomes possible. See also: New New Orleans.
A few hundreds years of global satellite climate data would be a good starting point for establishing some baselines solid enough to predict short term climate change in the decade time frame.
Science isn't a magic hat. It's a convergence process. Not always guaranteed to converge in the short duration that everyone is hot and bothered about the magic answer. Science, in the lofty view, does not cater to funding cycles.
I think the trap that climate scientists have fallen into is the belief that (probable) urgency supplants honesty. The honest message is that by the standards of hard science, a firm predictive baseline takes centuries to collect and synthesize.
The reasoning becomes "if we tell an honest story, no one will do anything, so let's tell a story more conducive to what needs to be done". Taking paternal responsibility for the inaction of crowds is far, far away from science as hard boiled authority, even if the crowd seems to favour paleolithic regression, and elects a speech impaired albino chimp as president.
Science: people are pretty stupid when preoccupied with their narrow self interests and will sit around doing nothing until it's too late, or almost too late.
In the poorly studied naked hive primate, there is newly discovered taunt syntax pertaining to social dominance. The call "super" refers to illicit advantage in the race to kick the crap out of the nearest naked hive primate one rung below your own, and the call "loser" means "the simpering dupe didn't even call my testosterone fueled check raise".
In other news, the former mode of mock combat know as an "arm wrestle" now typically ends in shoulder dislocations, or worse. Status hierarchy persists unchanged, but taunting escalates as 200 pound weaklings hiding behind their mother's skirts look more pathetic than ever.
Microsoft's fiscal year starts in July, which is only eight months away.
They just keep coming, faster and faster. Next next year is a mere twenty months away and we haven't even *started* next year.
Dripping with weedy urgency, like a guy six weeks into his first relationship, waking up his girlfriend at four in the morning to have sex for the againth time because "there's only another two weeks before your placebos". If she's still too love-addled not to permanently dismember the weedy bastard right then and there, she'll be going "yeah, like I know already, been there before".
Actually, it's more like a guy doing this ten years into his third marriage, who won't get snipped because he still thinks he's a stud.
Fermat's theorem was that, given a tantalizing-enough hint, mathematicians will spend centuries trying to discover a proof that does not exist. I'd say he was right.
That always strikes me as projection. I mean, if you haven't got slashdot to post the most dumb-ass thing you can think of, what *would* a man do to keep his sanity? Invent riddles for future civilizations, with a model of the future based on your historical knowledge of Rome?
It some ways it would have been more intriguing if Fermat had written this in the margin beside the four colour theorem, having realized it could be decomposed into several thousand cases and only a large amount of scribbling stood in his path, with some heavy irony on "elegant", since he could not have justified purchasing enough paper to finish the project.
Perhaps it was a flash of insight that what a man can prove in mathematics is partially dictated by the market rate for ink and paper, a realization which can come as a bit of a blow to an objectivist psyche.
Instead of a sketch artist listening to a description and modifying based on feedback, the system will be "prompting" the witness.
Many years ago, in a part of town I don't normally visit (touristy) in pursuit of a mother's day present, I ended up instead in pursuit of a man who assaulted a woman in an ocean-front parking lot.
I was standing there with my credit card about to purchase some crafty pottery thing, and then we heard a woman scream from across the road. The clerk, an attractive blond with big hair, spots this man emerging from a downward sloped parking lot, churning his short little legs toward the warehouse and trendy restaurant district like he's feeling guilty about something.
She screams at me, "stop him!" I guess I'm suggestible. Some almond shaped brain nugget takes control: "breasty blond, at your command". Off I go, pottery transaction dangling.
Now it happens I have Dustin Penner's body dimensions, as well as his (former) work ethic (not so good), and (former) fondness for wheat-based beverages. So I'm built like this Manitoba Mennonite, minus the muscles and masculinity. Intimidating--if you're afraid of hulking shadows. This was back in my unabomber, motorcycle makeover phase, with hockey hair and a bad shave. Hey, I'll be like Ted, that will get me the girls. Really, I'm still nerd to the core.
Anyway I must have learned something playing so much Quake: if you're in relentless, aggressive pursuit, the other player doesn't have a lot of time to figure out you've got no skills (or, in real life, no manhood). Usually when I played Quake II, I had the highest death total, but if the invincible monkey no one else could hit had only died once, I was guy who did it. Pistols at dawn was my primary style. I rarely got off the first shot, but if your first shot missed me, you were in trouble. Not that I was slow, far from it, but I could never bring myself to lay off on "damn the torpedoes". And since I died so much, I was often pursuing with knives or hand blasters. With any self-control, I might have been good, but that's not why I played.
So I'm off in pursuit of this low-life, armed mostly with the other fellow's ignorance about my wimpitude, and a motorcycle helmet swinging madly in my free hand, tight inside grip on the mouth guard with my dominant hand.
Unfortunately, the laws of physics dictate that this is a foot race I'm not going to lose. Big guys with giant loping strides often look slow, "as if the wind is blowing you in the right direction" (as Lowetide once wrote about Penner). This is an illusion. Giant loping strides quickly overtake furious chop. It's mid afternoon in a downtown tourist district. There's no one around. The guy turns up a deserted street, that two hours later would be restaurant central, ten witnesses to every parked car.
Perp has by now also figured out the law of invisible breezes, so he wheels around to confront me. We both stop, about 8 feet apart. He steps toward me. I step back with my right leg, keeping the Marushin in my swinging arm, tucked behind my hip. Damn, I don't want to crack the dumb thing on some low-life's noggin. I'm now standing there like Dan Marino protecting the football, about to go yard with my skid lid, waiting to see what this bulldog with short little legs is going to do next. He stops again, decides he doesn't want to fight through the first blow. Yet.
The problem for me taking the guy down (which I'm not man enough to do, in any case) is that I haven't actually seen the guy do anything wrong. We're three blocks from where the chase started, it's a little late to invoke "heat of the moment" assaulting someone for beating a rapid retreat. Maybe he doesn't like the sound of a woman screaming. This is Canada. We don't do heat of the moment. You get busted for that.
He quickly figures out I'm not going to initiate, says something inane I don't recall, then buggers off. I let him go. I got a great look at him. Too bad I wasn
I think the Pax Romana and the Pax Britannia were nicer. They actually developed their colonial areas.
Paul Collier has a different opinion on this. He might be wrong, but he at least RTFA. In fact, I suspect he read the entire fine literature, which requires a time frame known by the ancient unit of "year".
America has arguably done as much to revitalize Western Europe and Japan in the aftermath of WWII as nation in history. Because they had to slow the Red Menace.
For the guy who thinks that the American empire is overextended like the Roman empire, one small difference is that ability to collect information about how the far flung empire is functioning.
Ancient Rome measured this in fortnights, modern America measures this in milliseconds. Roman conquerors had world maps skirted with sea monsters. American school children pan and zoom the world over at the resolution of habitable structures or backyard orchards. I don't see *any* grounds for useful comparison. America is a fickle beast of a strange new stripe. Historical antecedents merely confuse matters. I don't understand this thread at all.
Better than Collier is the Mesquita interview on EconTalk. He's a much darker pessimist, who doesn't think America does a lot in this world entirely out of the goodness of its heart.
He does concede that the American political system still runs on the production of public goods (aka policy), and not pure kleptocracy--yet--though IMO the system is increasingly straining in that direction.
I think I've posted this one before. The dark banking sector scares me, in combination with the technology and will.
But above all, what we have to do is we have to help the good guys, the people on the defensive side, have an advantage over the people who want to abuse things.
The problem is, he's probably right, and some of those "advantages" are going to look ugly by the standards of fraternal liberty.
I just spent several hours reviewing various axiomatic treatments of probability theory and then... this. Major train derailment. Stick accordion self-compacted for hundreds of yards. Tragic loss of brain function for all involved. Luria weeps at the carnage.
What people self-report on exit polls proves bupkus all. Most people suck at preference reporting (ask any economist). This nut case is thinking that if a person self-reports incorporating "is black" in their preference determination, that Michael Vick would have prevailed over Abraham Lincoln on every one of these ballots.
The sad fact of life in America is that a man who is regarded as a black man experiences life differently--and usually not better. Would it were not the case that Obama had a longer row to hoe to get where he is now. And I'm not even counting overcoming negative precedent: that no black had yet accomplished this feat. Could it be that most black people in America have a stronger sense of Obama rose above, having faced it themselves? Empathy considered harmful. What next?
Likely many of these people voted for Obama because he rose above his blackness, and made it a non-issue, which would be hard to accomplish (the rising above part) if he wasn't *black* in the first place. (Zeno's unknown paradox of non-issue making.)
I'm sure the average exit poll carefully distinguishes this sentiment from the depiction in the word salad above. And then this nameless worm goes on to complain that the major media didn't smoke his troll weed.
I'm never given a rat's ass about the Turing test, but I sure would like to code a reliable troll detector, one that isn't fooled by sarcasm or wit, because we sure need more of that and less of this.
Voting on the basis of skin color is quite acceptable by today's moral standard.
Concluding sentence: slime-factor bonus +5
"on the basis of skin color" => via mental processes too unseemly to state clearly; to the exclusion of all other factors
"quite acceptable" => passive-aggressive fang-baring under cover of triteness
"today's moral standard" => we're all going to hell in a hand-basket
Surely these are easily detected memes? The indirection isn't terribly clever.
83 legal experts vs. crude statistical algorithm tried to predict Supreme Court, yet the statistical algorithm did better than the legal experts at predicting the Supreme Court's decisions. Supreme Court hates the 9th Circuit, California, but legal experts can't bring themselves to take that history into account.
Russ Roberts made a rebuttal to this guy's claims in a following podcast, but I think statistics goes a long way, applied appropriately. What I would like to correlate are the predictable trappings of the sleaze module when forced to intertwine emotion and logic in certain styles of pathological prose.
We've spent too much time trying to understand the logic of language, when often there isn't any. Why aren't we studying instead the pragmatics of sleaze?
I would regard it as a credible difference if, when you asked Obama the reason, he gave an intelligible answer, regardless of whether the answer was one you liked or not.
What I'd like to see from Obama is saying to his insiders, "OK, I see why you want this and I'll back you on it, but you're going to have to explain yourself to the public a lot better than you used to".
That's what I hated most about Bush, how entitled he felt about operating in the shadows. From a leadership perspective, bad policy is often better than no policy. I accept mistakes. The problem was that the little cretin never stood up for his reasons. That old excuse "national security" sounds exactly the same whether you pronounce it in English, Chinese, or North Korean.
It's the surrounding discussion that makes the difference.
I agree with you that much of the math content on Wikipedia is unevenly developed and sometimes almost impenetrable.
Not sure I would get hot and bothered about presentation order. If I went to the page wondering "what the heck is a haversine?" I'd be happy to find it near the top. That's a common use case. I gave up on pedagogy long ago. How does one implement outcome-based-pedagogy on a site such as Wikipedia?
My personal Wikipedia survival guide: at the first sign of opposition, edit somewhere more obscure. These days I rarely edit anything except to trim the most egregious bloopers.
Wikipedia failed to deal with some serious issues during its adolescent phase, and now it's discovering the consequence.
One of these failures is the Wikipedia has no concept of a regression test. Instead, the strong nuclear force is implemented as an edit war, with a winner and loser. It almost works like one of those sleazy dollar auctions: eventually the better man steps aside.
Wikipedia also failed the deletion test: you don't solve the problem of someone contributing an article you don't want by returning the system to the state which elicited the unwanted contribution in the first place. That's just a good way to piss people off.
Wikipedia needed to come up with a quarantined content tier which is not included in normal use (does not appear on Google, is not linked from primary content), but which *does* appear in searches performed by people wishing to create a new article.
I thought Wikipedia was truest to its nature as a squatter city with a lot of ramshackle cruft. The whole process breaks down when it puts on the pretence of being encyclopedic.
I don't think Wales learned much from the failure of Nupedia. His brilliant accident was redefining the venture. The harder they pull toward the old concept of Nupedia, the more it resembles the old Nupedia: tedious, gridlocked, and uninviting.
Whatever happens, Wikipedia will remain a great resource for studies in the sociology of collaboration, automatic spam recognition, machine learning, and perhaps even machine translation.
I wish they had worked harder on being maximally inclusive, with a fairly narrow criteria for what Google indexes and presents to casual visitors, with the rest of the shantytown available to anyone who wants it.
Google is part of the problem here. You need to be able to mark shantytown content as indexed, but with demerits. If your google search hits some content in a Wikipedia article in a section titled "Bokononism in Popular Culture" it shouldn't come up until everything else of value is exhausted. But it should come up if you dig hard enough. If you're determined enough to go there, Red Light districts can be a useful resource.
For me, Wikipedia would work best with a safe well-scrubbed downtown core and a vibrant street culture for anyone who wishes to wander down a side alley. I've never entirely bought into its agenda to become a sober encyclopedia, all glass and steel, with no life. Radiant City Beautiful, as Jane Jacobs used to put it. And very sterile.
It will be interesting to see what happens as the human maintainers fall away. We could end up seeing a lot more maintenance bots. That would be interesting in its own right. We're about to enter the golden era of knowledge bots, within a decade or so. Some people call this the semantic web. I think it will crufty with many cockroach heuristics.
The funny thing is that the chip manufacturers commit this same fraud daily.
This is the strangest definition of fraud. Smacks of a mail order degree in popular economics with hand typed training materials.
What a company is selling is a chip that conforms to its spec. sheet. If the military version has a different spec. sheet, they can charge any price they like for putting into effect the QC process which allows them to stand behind those claims.
It's not even in the military's interest to squeeze these vendors on price. That would only result in niche products the military depends upon being discontinued faster than ever. There's real cost here. You've got to keep some old guy around who remembers details about products you rarely sell, in case the military comes calling. If a company fails to maintain this courtesy, it won't long find itself on the preferred vendor list for new designs.
The way out of this price trap is for the military to toss their aircraft carriers onto the landfill at the same rate consumers dispose of their cell phones. Then they can quote for volume on parts rated for a short rough-and-tumble service life and only pay twice as much as the common man.
According to the laws of science as we know them you'll need infinite energy to cross c from below.
I can't think of much I've read on the behaviour of particles already travelling in excess of c. Does the law state that a faster than light particle can't exist, or does it state "you can't get there from here"?
The laws of physics are already oppressive enough to the unborn Federation without being overstated by rote and reflex.
Who knows, maybe tachyons only exchange information among themselves; or maybe this new unlinked gravity is the only force which exchanges information between tachyons and tardyons (aka plain old matter). Gravity is so weak, we'd almost certainly fail to notice this in an experiment looking for anything else.
There are two levels to Michael Moore. On the surface, there is his populist appeal, which finances his movie production. On the deeper level, the message is this: if you're clever enough to figure out Moore's little games, surely you're clever enough to see through the games being played--far more earnestly--by the individuals, corporations, and institutions he's criticizing.
Michael Moore understands that great comedy results when a staunch supporter of a sly character like Newt getting all in a froth and bother over Moore's distortions and manipulations. I suspect Moore basks in starting a public mud fest over the deceptions of power: his own, or anyone else's. When the race to the bottom ends, he'll be the guy laughing the hardest.
Moore's adversaries keep hoping that the credibility card will someday stick, without the same card sticking to the politicians who wish to wield it. Difficult trick. I've read a number of strident blogs criticizing Moore and Moore's films. What none of these blogs seem to grasp is that many of us who appreciate Moore's rabble rousing had Moore pegged for what he is 15 minutes into Roger and Me. The difference between Moore's red cards and Bush's red cards is that Moore wasn't starting major wars with no plan for how to win the peace.
Moore has a knack for deception thinly veiled as entertainment. For all his false working class piety, he understands the people he skewers more than they wish to admit, which is why they mostly attack Moore through rabid lap dogs with personal blogs.
Of all the Moore movies I've seen, the only time he came across as completely stupid on all levels simultaneously was wandering around in Paris, depicted as a working class utopia of medical security, with that smarmy blissed-out expression. Maybe he's counting on Americans knowing amazingly little about the rest of the world. (Americans seem to think that international studies is a word association game. France? Freedom Fries! Good. Next country.) Up in Canada, where France is a little closer to home, that doesn't play.
The sad thing is that American politics has degenerated to the point where we need guys like Michael Moore to inject a little common sense. Ouch. If it were my government, I'd be wanting to fix that.
Slashdot Mirror
It only takes two words to frame the result with intelligence, yet so few reporters surpass this easy threshold. A gem of a sentence. I'm rendered completely unable to snark.
This is one of those issues where the instinct of any good capitalist is to privatize benefit and socialize risk. When you screw up in the auto industry, the company faces the massive expense of a product recall. That helps to keep you honest with your engineering quality.
I personally think 30 days is a reasonable notification period. Not pleasant for the vendor to have to respond that briskly, but this isn't about being pleasant. If the vendor wants pleasant, they should invest more competence in the original product. This isn't easy, and might move a few pointy-haired managers out of the executive suite.
Probably a more viable compromise is eight weeks. This adds a thin margin for the possibility that key zero-day SWAT staff are booked off, that multiple issues are raised concurrently, or that a product has a stupendously long build cycle.
I would be thrilled to see an industry standard put in place where everyone knows the ethical notice period is eight weeks, period, perhaps with the odd extension on a track record of good behaviour.
I would also like to see proprietary TCO calculations updated with a term to account for the customer disruption of having to rapidly deploy a not-tested-for-months-at-a-time critical vulnerability patch.
Speaking of which, that whole TCO thing really bends my biscuits. It's just loaded with sly neglect of not entirely apparent costs, of which the year-long critical vulnerability update is one of the more egregious.
During that time, your pants are down if anyone less ethical discovers the same flaw. It never happens that two scientists make the same discovery in the same year and end up in priority dispute, according to the industry of socialized risk.
Any statistic significantly skewed by adding or subtracting 1 to either your numerator or denominator is a statistic too fragile to support a conclusion.
The "we are here" argument is a functional celebration of innumeracy, which reminds me of Operation HUMBUG when Canada first introduced Metric: inference by nostalgia.
Spoken as a man who knows the price of Vodka.
What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
— Oscar Wilde.
Once you sober up, there's something to be said for putting your best foot forward.
I'm not quick to judge over superficial indicators, but there's no question aol.com raises my vigilance level.
It's not just tech either. It won't get you hired for an environmental job any quicker after AOL's five year run as the world's most industrious landfill factory.
From Wikipedia:
Bias is a term used to describe a tendency or preference towards a particular perspective, ideology or result, when the tendency interferes with the ability to be impartial, unprejudiced, or objective.
I would hardly call dislike of a convicted monopolist with a Machiavellian business creed a bias (embrace and extend, choke off the air supply, etc.) Apple is a bit more puzzling. Underneath that lickable exterior is a major hard-on for DRM.
I don't regard my dislike for DRM to be a bias, either. I believe in generative abundance, exactly as Jonathan Zittrain outlines it in "The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It". The right balance for society does not lie in secretive international treaties ratified with no democratic involvement, leading to DMCA-style legislation few citizens want. I guess I'm biased against non-democratic power grabs.
Over the years I've observed a fairly strong relationship between dislike of Microsoft and detailed knowledge of their past corporate behaviour, both among the open source crowd, as well as the many venturists they crushed.
OTOH, I concede that the junk DNA here on slashdot spells out "Microsoft sucks" and "BSD is dying" more often than expected by chance. Yeah, we really hate BSD around here.
If you lived in the seventies, you wouldn't take his accomplishments for granted. Back then inhaling a transistor could puncture a lung. He accomplished three times as much over a short period of time as most technologists accomplish in a lifetime. Then he went insane by any linear metric, but definitely not senile.
His own business maxim is that most technologies succeed, but are brought to market under the wrong conditions. Sometimes staying out of the market is the right thing to do. "Buffett says perhaps his best decisions over the past 18 months were the deals he decided not to do." [examiner.com]
In poker, after you amass a decent pile of chips, sometimes the right thing to do is sit out until you spot your main chance. Unfortunately, Kurzweil seems to be going head to head against the man with the sickle, on the vain hope that antioxidants will cover the blinds.
Even if Kurzweil is wrong, he'll still have been more right than most people. What irritates me with Kurzweil is how blithe he is about his extrapolations. Technology always goes up, because, uh, housing always goes up. He could use a refresher course in black swans. The singularity is a black hole orbited by black swans, but he doesn't see it.
I usually enjoy his lectures, but always feel at the end like I've just spent half an hour on a monorail with all the side windows painted black, as if the singularity is some Matrix-like demarcation at the far end of Potemkin Valley.
At the end of the day, what does Singularianism boil down to? Either he's right, or we'll wish he had been, when one of those meddling black swans body-checks us back to the stone age. What's the middle ground here? Our machines become smarter than we are, and nothing happens? Now that I would regard as a bold prediction.
This must be why I keep a small halogen lamp on my desk. When the lamp is turned on (even during the daylight hours) I rarely get eye strain.
My subconscious was hoarding the punchline until I opened the fridge: the mythical chloroblast, widely known at Starfleet Academy as the T-spot.
Isn't this mutually exclusive? I've never met a woman who had a prefrontal cortex and a G-spot at the same time. Anyone else noticed how women often don't remember much about sexual activity the morning after? If you ask, "anything you particularly liked?" often the woman looks back at you like Hal with half his memory cubes removed, like there's too many circuits blown to connect the dots backward in time. That's the good answer, if you can make do without specifics.
Reminds me of Vonnegut's comment about his typist Carol who "lived out in Woodstock, New York, which you know is where the famous sex and drugs event in the '60s got its name from (it actually took place in the nearby town of Bethel and anyone who says they remember being there wasn't there.)"
I was thinking about cloaking devices earlier today. For some reason, there's a lot of hard-vacuum back-scatter from phaser beams. A cloaking device would have to be pretty impressive to have a finger phaser fired through it, without creating a visible artifact associated with beamus interruptus.
I think that's how you have to conduct this study with women: is there any part of your anatomy that you're sure some man has stimulated, but you can't remember anything at all about what happened next, until the middle of next morning?
Next they'll be telling us the chloroblast doesn't exist either and that Greenies are just like the rest of us.
About the haystack I have yet to frisk:
He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I ever met.
— Abraham Lincoln (about a lawyer colleague)
About the book's title:
This was one of those points where the Trousers of Time bifurcated themselves, and if you weren't careful, you'd go down the wrong leg—
—Terry Pratchett in Guards! Guards!
We need to take censorship seriously. This begins by refusing to position fraud masquerading as parody as a freedom of speech issue, which is terribly disrespectful of real censorship. Freedom of speech was never meant to be used as a day pass to Dorkville.
I can well imagine the childhood of someone who signs up the domain ec-gc.ca to engage in serious debate. I was played against his likeness in an online poker room yesterday, a fellow playing under the identity "Custard Pump" with a unkempt mop of hair over a naked upper torso icon posed with a conspicuous, demure, downward gaze.
Cluster Hump goes all-in on the first hand, and miraculously doubles up. Mustard Sump goes nearly all-in again on the second hand, and this time gets busted down to 100 chips. The next hand Cluetard Rump craftily bids himself down to 1 chip, whereupon he does nothing but sit there on every bid opportunity running down his bid clock (15s per bid plus his one-time 60s extra time clock), to express the emotional futility of his existence to everyone else at the table. Took half a dozen deals for the blinds to come around and knock him out.
Climate change is an important debate. If you've got something serious to say, show up and play, and stop hiding behind a daffy-ass parody pretence.
I'm waiting for the first published life reflection on the topic of wife-beater interruptus by a man whose blood-honey got wise to syntheholic Narcan. I'd dearly love to read an explanation by a man who experiences a sudden return to clarity mid swing.
The mind reels at the possibilities. If synaloxone is designed to be easily absorbed through eye membranes (there's another criteria for the designer checklist), it will soon become the feature ingredient in Pepperpoison H. This could lead to the baning of real alcohol. If real alcohol is banned, then only the alcoholics will have it.
Speaking of roids, how many drunks are going to drive home under the influence to maintain the party atmosphere, and quickly jab themselves at the first sign of traffic surveillance or air bag deployment? How is that going to be regulated?
Should this comes to pass, the law of unintended consequence is going to be working double shifts for several decade.
In your case, the other 5% would be adding an apostrophe, a comma, and a well timed tap on the shift key, and would have cost you another 300ms (apologies for that remark if you lost both pinkies in a wheat-field bailer accident).
In their case, as we all know, "the first ninety percent of the task takes ninety percent of the time, and the last ten percent takes the other ninety percent", so they're well into exponential innings already.
And finally, a tip of the hat to Corinna Vinschen, who answered my emails about problems with services under Cygwin as far back 2000. That's a long run shepherding the near-sighted stepchild into some semblance of functional adulthood.
I know many younger Linux people whose devotion to a software download rarely exceeds ten minutes if the first spin doesn't immediately express preconceived gratification mojo.
The problem as I see it is that you can't do science concerning near term climate change on the climate data as it presently exists until *after* it's far too late for proactive change. I figure that's a done deal. Crisis: noun, the point in a debate when action becomes possible. See also: New New Orleans.
A few hundreds years of global satellite climate data would be a good starting point for establishing some baselines solid enough to predict short term climate change in the decade time frame.
Science isn't a magic hat. It's a convergence process. Not always guaranteed to converge in the short duration that everyone is hot and bothered about the magic answer. Science, in the lofty view, does not cater to funding cycles.
I think the trap that climate scientists have fallen into is the belief that (probable) urgency supplants honesty. The honest message is that by the standards of hard science, a firm predictive baseline takes centuries to collect and synthesize.
The reasoning becomes "if we tell an honest story, no one will do anything, so let's tell a story more conducive to what needs to be done". Taking paternal responsibility for the inaction of crowds is far, far away from science as hard boiled authority, even if the crowd seems to favour paleolithic regression, and elects a speech impaired albino chimp as president.
Science: people are pretty stupid when preoccupied with their narrow self interests and will sit around doing nothing until it's too late, or almost too late.
Not science: we should do something about it.
In the poorly studied naked hive primate, there is newly discovered taunt syntax pertaining to social dominance. The call "super" refers to illicit advantage in the race to kick the crap out of the nearest naked hive primate one rung below your own, and the call "loser" means "the simpering dupe didn't even call my testosterone fueled check raise".
In other news, the former mode of mock combat know as an "arm wrestle" now typically ends in shoulder dislocations, or worse. Status hierarchy persists unchanged, but taunting escalates as 200 pound weaklings hiding behind their mother's skirts look more pathetic than ever.
Microsoft's fiscal year starts in July, which is only eight months away.
They just keep coming, faster and faster. Next next year is a mere twenty months away and we haven't even *started* next year.
Dripping with weedy urgency, like a guy six weeks into his first relationship, waking up his girlfriend at four in the morning to have sex for the againth time because "there's only another two weeks before your placebos". If she's still too love-addled not to permanently dismember the weedy bastard right then and there, she'll be going "yeah, like I know already, been there before".
Actually, it's more like a guy doing this ten years into his third marriage, who won't get snipped because he still thinks he's a stud.
Fermat's theorem was that, given a tantalizing-enough hint, mathematicians will spend centuries trying to discover a proof that does not exist. I'd say he was right.
That always strikes me as projection. I mean, if you haven't got slashdot to post the most dumb-ass thing you can think of, what *would* a man do to keep his sanity? Invent riddles for future civilizations, with a model of the future based on your historical knowledge of Rome?
It some ways it would have been more intriguing if Fermat had written this in the margin beside the four colour theorem, having realized it could be decomposed into several thousand cases and only a large amount of scribbling stood in his path, with some heavy irony on "elegant", since he could not have justified purchasing enough paper to finish the project.
Perhaps it was a flash of insight that what a man can prove in mathematics is partially dictated by the market rate for ink and paper, a realization which can come as a bit of a blow to an objectivist psyche.
Non-standard analysis
On the other hand, much can be proven by an industrious person once you relax the requirement that proofs are finite in length.
Instead of a sketch artist listening to a description and modifying based on feedback, the system will be "prompting" the witness.
Many years ago, in a part of town I don't normally visit (touristy) in pursuit of a mother's day present, I ended up instead in pursuit of a man who assaulted a woman in an ocean-front parking lot.
I was standing there with my credit card about to purchase some crafty pottery thing, and then we heard a woman scream from across the road. The clerk, an attractive blond with big hair, spots this man emerging from a downward sloped parking lot, churning his short little legs toward the warehouse and trendy restaurant district like he's feeling guilty about something.
She screams at me, "stop him!" I guess I'm suggestible. Some almond shaped brain nugget takes control: "breasty blond, at your command". Off I go, pottery transaction dangling.
Now it happens I have Dustin Penner's body dimensions, as well as his (former) work ethic (not so good), and (former) fondness for wheat-based beverages. So I'm built like this Manitoba Mennonite, minus the muscles and masculinity. Intimidating--if you're afraid of hulking shadows. This was back in my unabomber, motorcycle makeover phase, with hockey hair and a bad shave. Hey, I'll be like Ted, that will get me the girls. Really, I'm still nerd to the core.
Anyway I must have learned something playing so much Quake: if you're in relentless, aggressive pursuit, the other player doesn't have a lot of time to figure out you've got no skills (or, in real life, no manhood). Usually when I played Quake II, I had the highest death total, but if the invincible monkey no one else could hit had only died once, I was guy who did it. Pistols at dawn was my primary style. I rarely got off the first shot, but if your first shot missed me, you were in trouble. Not that I was slow, far from it, but I could never bring myself to lay off on "damn the torpedoes". And since I died so much, I was often pursuing with knives or hand blasters. With any self-control, I might have been good, but that's not why I played.
So I'm off in pursuit of this low-life, armed mostly with the other fellow's ignorance about my wimpitude, and a motorcycle helmet swinging madly in my free hand, tight inside grip on the mouth guard with my dominant hand.
Unfortunately, the laws of physics dictate that this is a foot race I'm not going to lose. Big guys with giant loping strides often look slow, "as if the wind is blowing you in the right direction" (as Lowetide once wrote about Penner). This is an illusion. Giant loping strides quickly overtake furious chop. It's mid afternoon in a downtown tourist district. There's no one around. The guy turns up a deserted street, that two hours later would be restaurant central, ten witnesses to every parked car.
Perp has by now also figured out the law of invisible breezes, so he wheels around to confront me. We both stop, about 8 feet apart. He steps toward me. I step back with my right leg, keeping the Marushin in my swinging arm, tucked behind my hip. Damn, I don't want to crack the dumb thing on some low-life's noggin. I'm now standing there like Dan Marino protecting the football, about to go yard with my skid lid, waiting to see what this bulldog with short little legs is going to do next. He stops again, decides he doesn't want to fight through the first blow. Yet.
The problem for me taking the guy down (which I'm not man enough to do, in any case) is that I haven't actually seen the guy do anything wrong. We're three blocks from where the chase started, it's a little late to invoke "heat of the moment" assaulting someone for beating a rapid retreat. Maybe he doesn't like the sound of a woman screaming. This is Canada. We don't do heat of the moment. You get busted for that.
He quickly figures out I'm not going to initiate, says something inane I don't recall, then buggers off. I let him go. I got a great look at him. Too bad I wasn
I think the Pax Romana and the Pax Britannia were nicer. They actually developed their colonial areas.
Paul Collier has a different opinion on this. He might be wrong, but he at least RTFA. In fact, I suspect he read the entire fine literature, which requires a time frame known by the ancient unit of "year".
Paul Collier on the "bottom billion"
Collier on the Bottom Billion
Marshall Plan
America has arguably done as much to revitalize Western Europe and Japan in the aftermath of WWII as nation in history. Because they had to slow the Red Menace.
For the guy who thinks that the American empire is overextended like the Roman empire, one small difference is that ability to collect information about how the far flung empire is functioning.
Ancient Rome measured this in fortnights, modern America measures this in milliseconds. Roman conquerors had world maps skirted with sea monsters. American school children pan and zoom the world over at the resolution of habitable structures or backyard orchards. I don't see *any* grounds for useful comparison. America is a fickle beast of a strange new stripe. Historical antecedents merely confuse matters. I don't understand this thread at all.
Better than Collier is the Mesquita interview on EconTalk. He's a much darker pessimist, who doesn't think America does a lot in this world entirely out of the goodness of its heart.
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita on Democracies and Dictatorships
He does concede that the American political system still runs on the production of public goods (aka policy), and not pure kleptocracy--yet--though IMO the system is increasingly straining in that direction.
I think I've posted this one before. The dark banking sector scares me, in combination with the technology and will.
Misha Glenny investigates global crime networks
That's fairly grim. This next fellow is perhaps too dour to be much use to anyone.
Bill Joy: What I'm worried about, what I'm excited about
But above all, what we have to do is we have to help the good guys, the people on the defensive side, have an advantage over the people who want to abuse things.
The problem is, he's probably right, and some of those "advantages" are going to look ugly by the standards of fraternal liberty.
I just spent several hours reviewing various axiomatic treatments of probability theory and then ... this. Major train derailment. Stick accordion self-compacted for hundreds of yards. Tragic loss of brain function for all involved. Luria weeps at the carnage.
What people self-report on exit polls proves bupkus all. Most people suck at preference reporting (ask any economist). This nut case is thinking that if a person self-reports incorporating "is black" in their preference determination, that Michael Vick would have prevailed over Abraham Lincoln on every one of these ballots.
The sad fact of life in America is that a man who is regarded as a black man experiences life differently--and usually not better. Would it were not the case that Obama had a longer row to hoe to get where he is now. And I'm not even counting overcoming negative precedent: that no black had yet accomplished this feat. Could it be that most black people in America have a stronger sense of Obama rose above, having faced it themselves? Empathy considered harmful. What next?
Likely many of these people voted for Obama because he rose above his blackness, and made it a non-issue, which would be hard to accomplish (the rising above part) if he wasn't *black* in the first place. (Zeno's unknown paradox of non-issue making.)
I'm sure the average exit poll carefully distinguishes this sentiment from the depiction in the word salad above. And then this nameless worm goes on to complain that the major media didn't smoke his troll weed.
I'm never given a rat's ass about the Turing test, but I sure would like to code a reliable troll detector, one that isn't fooled by sarcasm or wit, because we sure need more of that and less of this.
Voting on the basis of skin color is quite acceptable by today's moral standard.
Concluding sentence: slime-factor bonus +5
"on the basis of skin color" => via mental processes too unseemly to state clearly; to the exclusion of all other factors
"quite acceptable" => passive-aggressive fang-baring under cover of triteness
"today's moral standard" => we're all going to hell in a hand-basket
Surely these are easily detected memes? The indirection isn't terribly clever.
From transcript gloss for Ayres on Super Crunchers and the Power of Data
Russ Roberts made a rebuttal to this guy's claims in a following podcast, but I think statistics goes a long way, applied appropriately. What I would like to correlate are the predictable trappings of the sleaze module when forced to intertwine emotion and logic in certain styles of pathological prose.
We've spent too much time trying to understand the logic of language, when often there isn't any. Why aren't we studying instead the pragmatics of sleaze?
I would regard it as a credible difference if, when you asked Obama the reason, he gave an intelligible answer, regardless of whether the answer was one you liked or not.
What I'd like to see from Obama is saying to his insiders, "OK, I see why you want this and I'll back you on it, but you're going to have to explain yourself to the public a lot better than you used to".
That's what I hated most about Bush, how entitled he felt about operating in the shadows. From a leadership perspective, bad policy is often better than no policy. I accept mistakes. The problem was that the little cretin never stood up for his reasons. That old excuse "national security" sounds exactly the same whether you pronounce it in English, Chinese, or North Korean.
It's the surrounding discussion that makes the difference.
I agree with you that much of the math content on Wikipedia is unevenly developed and sometimes almost impenetrable.
Not sure I would get hot and bothered about presentation order. If I went to the page wondering "what the heck is a haversine?" I'd be happy to find it near the top. That's a common use case. I gave up on pedagogy long ago. How does one implement outcome-based-pedagogy on a site such as Wikipedia?
My personal Wikipedia survival guide: at the first sign of opposition, edit somewhere more obscure. These days I rarely edit anything except to trim the most egregious bloopers.
Wikipedia failed to deal with some serious issues during its adolescent phase, and now it's discovering the consequence.
One of these failures is the Wikipedia has no concept of a regression test. Instead, the strong nuclear force is implemented as an edit war, with a winner and loser. It almost works like one of those sleazy dollar auctions: eventually the better man steps aside.
Wikipedia also failed the deletion test: you don't solve the problem of someone contributing an article you don't want by returning the system to the state which elicited the unwanted contribution in the first place. That's just a good way to piss people off.
Wikipedia needed to come up with a quarantined content tier which is not included in normal use (does not appear on Google, is not linked from primary content), but which *does* appear in searches performed by people wishing to create a new article.
I thought Wikipedia was truest to its nature as a squatter city with a lot of ramshackle cruft. The whole process breaks down when it puts on the pretence of being encyclopedic.
I don't think Wales learned much from the failure of Nupedia. His brilliant accident was redefining the venture. The harder they pull toward the old concept of Nupedia, the more it resembles the old Nupedia: tedious, gridlocked, and uninviting.
Whatever happens, Wikipedia will remain a great resource for studies in the sociology of collaboration, automatic spam recognition, machine learning, and perhaps even machine translation.
I wish they had worked harder on being maximally inclusive, with a fairly narrow criteria for what Google indexes and presents to casual visitors, with the rest of the shantytown available to anyone who wants it.
Google is part of the problem here. You need to be able to mark shantytown content as indexed, but with demerits. If your google search hits some content in a Wikipedia article in a section titled "Bokononism in Popular Culture" it shouldn't come up until everything else of value is exhausted. But it should come up if you dig hard enough. If you're determined enough to go there, Red Light districts can be a useful resource.
For me, Wikipedia would work best with a safe well-scrubbed downtown core and a vibrant street culture for anyone who wishes to wander down a side alley. I've never entirely bought into its agenda to become a sober encyclopedia, all glass and steel, with no life. Radiant City Beautiful, as Jane Jacobs used to put it. And very sterile.
It will be interesting to see what happens as the human maintainers fall away. We could end up seeing a lot more maintenance bots. That would be interesting in its own right. We're about to enter the golden era of knowledge bots, within a decade or so. Some people call this the semantic web. I think it will crufty with many cockroach heuristics.
This is the strangest definition of fraud. Smacks of a mail order degree in popular economics with hand typed training materials.
What a company is selling is a chip that conforms to its spec. sheet. If the military version has a different spec. sheet, they can charge any price they like for putting into effect the QC process which allows them to stand behind those claims.
It's not even in the military's interest to squeeze these vendors on price. That would only result in niche products the military depends upon being discontinued faster than ever. There's real cost here. You've got to keep some old guy around who remembers details about products you rarely sell, in case the military comes calling. If a company fails to maintain this courtesy, it won't long find itself on the preferred vendor list for new designs.
The way out of this price trap is for the military to toss their aircraft carriers onto the landfill at the same rate consumers dispose of their cell phones. Then they can quote for volume on parts rated for a short rough-and-tumble service life and only pay twice as much as the common man.
How about this version instead:
I can't think of much I've read on the behaviour of particles already travelling in excess of c. Does the law state that a faster than light particle can't exist, or does it state "you can't get there from here"?
The laws of physics are already oppressive enough to the unborn Federation without being overstated by rote and reflex.
Who knows, maybe tachyons only exchange information among themselves; or maybe this new unlinked gravity is the only force which exchanges information between tachyons and tardyons (aka plain old matter). Gravity is so weak, we'd almost certainly fail to notice this in an experiment looking for anything else.
There are two levels to Michael Moore. On the surface, there is his populist appeal, which finances his movie production. On the deeper level, the message is this: if you're clever enough to figure out Moore's little games, surely you're clever enough to see through the games being played--far more earnestly--by the individuals, corporations, and institutions he's criticizing.
Michael Moore understands that great comedy results when a staunch supporter of a sly character like Newt getting all in a froth and bother over Moore's distortions and manipulations. I suspect Moore basks in starting a public mud fest over the deceptions of power: his own, or anyone else's. When the race to the bottom ends, he'll be the guy laughing the hardest.
Moore's adversaries keep hoping that the credibility card will someday stick, without the same card sticking to the politicians who wish to wield it. Difficult trick. I've read a number of strident blogs criticizing Moore and Moore's films. What none of these blogs seem to grasp is that many of us who appreciate Moore's rabble rousing had Moore pegged for what he is 15 minutes into Roger and Me. The difference between Moore's red cards and Bush's red cards is that Moore wasn't starting major wars with no plan for how to win the peace.
Moore has a knack for deception thinly veiled as entertainment. For all his false working class piety, he understands the people he skewers more than they wish to admit, which is why they mostly attack Moore through rabid lap dogs with personal blogs.
Of all the Moore movies I've seen, the only time he came across as completely stupid on all levels simultaneously was wandering around in Paris, depicted as a working class utopia of medical security, with that smarmy blissed-out expression. Maybe he's counting on Americans knowing amazingly little about the rest of the world. (Americans seem to think that international studies is a word association game. France? Freedom Fries! Good. Next country.) Up in Canada, where France is a little closer to home, that doesn't play.
The sad thing is that American politics has degenerated to the point where we need guys like Michael Moore to inject a little common sense. Ouch. If it were my government, I'd be wanting to fix that.