Teresa, my problem wasn't that it takes too long to scroll down comments. It's that "antisocial actors, 'drive-by trolls,' people for whom dialogue isn't the point" are all too successful in stealing my attention. As much as I wish I could just shrug off such trolls, some of them get so under my skin that they derail my whole day. This way I can enjoy the many thoughtful people in the comment threads without the psychic assault of one or two puerile individuals. I thought others might enjoy that ability as well. Freedom of speech should also come with freedom of listen.

I know there is a potential for abuse, with this as there is with BitTorrent and many other fine technologies, and I tried to allude to it in a wry way. I also didn't publicize it at all other than by submitting it to the editors, thinking that you guys would be better able to decide whether this should "go wide" or not.

If you like, I will take the script down if you so request. I will also stop posting if you ask me to -- you were ambiguous with what I was "closer to the mark" on.

Oh, I forgot my individual responses!

First, thank you to everyone who likes this little tool, or felt strongly enough about it to talk about it.

Whiterwitch (#63), I'm not that vindictive. #31 was closer to the truth of it.

Monkeyboy, that is a very good idea. It sounds like you know Javascript much better than I do. Would you like to post your own version of the script? Or, if you send me your improvements, I will gladly update the original.

Teresa, if my comments so irritate you that you wish I would never come here and post them again, please, please tell me so directly and of course I will respect your wishes. I like you. I respect you. My goal here is not to aggravate you.

My line about "differing points of view" is tongue-in-cheek, as A New Challenger (#31) articulates so much better than I could myself. I come to BoingBoing in order to hear differing points of view; my primary reason for reading here is to see insightful and thoughtful exploration of points that I may oppose very substantively. I disagree with Cory on a lot of things, but he is a talented writer and makes his points very well which makes him even more worth reading than people I agree with.

When I wrote the script I only had trolls in mind, people -- one person, really -- who comment very profusely only to provoke and annoy and obviously without any consistent point of view beyond that. That's not discussion, it's just noise. I'm a big fan of the "MUTE" button on XBox Live too: my life is just easier if people aren't yelling abuse in my ear trying to get a rise out of me, and I don't want to have to quit reading BB altogether to avoid it.

But, I have no illusions about how others may choose to use this tool, so I put in what I thought was a humorous reminder to its user (and to myself) to ask herself whether she was muting someone because they were truly spamming the threads, or simply because she disagreed with him. I hoped that this crowd would pick up on the irony, and for the most part it seems to have!

Look, this is just an automatic way of scrolling past names you think never say anything of interest. It isn't blocking the editors, which I always thought was a little mean-spirited. If someone muted says something that really draws discussion, you'll notice the responses to that person and the noncontinuous comment numbers, and you'll turn the script off and reload the page and see what they had to say. If it was something interesting, I hope you'll take them out of your filter list.

Incongruously, after I wrote this script, I ended up not using it myself. Just writing and posting the thing made me feel like I'd taken back some degree of control over my blood pressure, and that was therapy enough.

Teresa, you've made me realize something. I had always assumed that what people would want, as they grew older and less mobile, is robots to do things for them -- tend the garden, clean the house, haul in the groceries. Just now I have flashed on to how awful that would really be, and how much more we need mechanicals that help us do things for ourselves, even if they would superficially seem menial and tedious.

Takuan: http://www.politicalbase.com/ has a fairly extensive database of who has contributed to whose political campaign. I was slightly amused to learn that my favorite television actor and I both supported the same lost cause.

For me the most interesting thing about this is totally tangential to the evolutionary question: the Venter team is essentially trying to build the "Hello World" of microbial life, determining the very simplest possible group of chemical mechanisms that can be said to be alive. That will have powerful implications for our understanding of more complex biology all the way up to our own cells.

Cory, thank you for your reply.

If you're under the impression that I'm talking about a new start-up business, I'm afraid I've misled you; we've been around for quite a few years and the revenue model I mentioned has paid our bills so far.

You mention the enforcement of copyright as an impediment to the existence of free speech, but I'm afraid I don't see the conflict there. It reminds me of an argument I often receive from free software advocates, who somehow feel that my legal ability to sell proprietary software impedes their ability to give away theirs for free. I have no objection to their right to give away their own work, yet they object to my right to charge for mine.

In the same vein I'm afraid I don't understand how my having the rights to my work makes it impossible for YouTube to exist: the only use I, the copyright holder, object to is the one where they take someone else's work, repost it in its entirety without permission, sell adspace all over it, and pocket the cash for themselves.

The existence of copyright in the original Constitution didn't inhibit anyone's ability to take their own work down to the local printer's and self-publish, no more than my desire to control my own words at all impedes what you do with yours. The converse is not true: if I lose control of the right to sell my work, I will be unable to make it at all.

I've been in the entertainment business for a while now, and I know a great many commercial artists who earn a living by working for hire on larger projects. I like those projects, and to be honest I personally derive much more joy from seeing a new Pixar film or Battlestar Galactica than I do from watching amateur jugglers show their moves on YouTube. I would never, ever want to make a law preventing those jugglers from showing their own work, but I would be very sad if we could not preserve a business model that supported my industry's contribution to culture even as we do theirs.

Cory, I have followed your arguments regarding individual artists such as musicians and graphic novelists, and I can see where you come from regarding the consolation of at least having art read, even if one isn't paid to make it.

But, where I am sitting right now are about eighty full-time artists engaged in the production of a large-scale creative product. The sort of thing we make takes the concerted full-time effort of all these people for months or years on end, and our revenue comes almost wholly from the sale of individual copies directly to the consumer. Without that revenue, we cannot make payroll, and none of these people will work on our project. If we cannot sell our units, the kind of thing we produce will simply not be made at all.

So, my question to you is: is there a new revenue model that we can use to recoup our payroll costs? Or in the future will we simply no longer have the business of many people working on major entertainment projects, and working on them full-time for years because they can pay the bills?

There are surprisingly many magicians who, off the stage, are strong advocates for rational, empirical thinking -- Harry Houdini, James Randi, Penn Jillette all come to mind. I find that to be an interesting correlation. What is it about the work of an illusionist that makes them want to dispel illusions outside the theatre?

Sensoz: so download them all and post a multi-file torrent to a public tracker. Nothing's stopping you!

It's too bad they didn't get a shot of the Naughty Dog creative director's office -- gigantic, teetering stacks of pulp adventure novels and Indiana Jones movies and Far East travelogues, really almost a fortress of research material built like a curtain wall around the actual tiny workspace.

Cowicide, I can't seem to find a publication of the changed rules of approach but I'm willing to take your word for it as what you're describing does make sense. Thank you for correcting me.

Well, okay, I'll rephrase my original point: I wonder how I would respond if a group of small outboard boats sped directly towards my ship over a period of time from a long distance away, refusing to reply to instructions to keep their distance, when all of a sudden a voice came on the radio saying "YOU WILL EXPLODE."

I still don't think I would have handled it as well as the deck officer here (Cdr. Jefferey James of the the USS Hopper, maybe?). I am impressed by his professionalism and nerve in the face of something very much resembling someone trying to kill him.

Xeni, what should we do about Kenya?

On the contrary, Cowicide, current Navy rules of engagement explicitly prohibit them from shooting at such boats, unless they shoot first. That is how a small dinghy managed to bomb the USS Cole.

MK Ultra, obviously I agree with you that the Cole was on every sailor's mind through that whole little exchange, but on reading the Navy Times' article it doesn't seem totally farfetched that the "you will explode!" radio message came from someone other than the Iranian commander. There's a lot of shipping out there and someone might have found it funny to see if he could bait the Americans into doing something foolish.

I wonder how I would handle it if I were on the deck of a US cruiser in hostile water, and suddenly a small watercraft came out of nowhere, beelining for the side of my ship, a saying "you will explode!" Probably not as well as the guys on these ships did.

Theophrastus, I've lived in Los Angeles, and I've lived in Seattle, and I have to say that I found getting around LA every day much more painful than commuting across the floating bridges. The 520 clears up pretty well by 10am. Getting from Wilshire to Burbank remains a nightmare til midnight.

That said, I'm as peeved as you are that a majority of regional voters chose against building mass transit -- that light rail line would have gone directly from my home to my office. I view its cancellation as a personal attack by the 698,635 people who voted against Prop 1.

They must have had to drag Andy Lack out of the boardroom kicking and screaming for that one.

It seems like the only source for this story is Lord Alton mentioning it as part of a speech to the House of Peers. Has anyone corroborated it?

#26 (Adam Backstrom): The most common case is if there is a key episode of some major sporting event to be broadcast, and you wish to enjoy it in the company of other afficionadoes of the same sport.

#12: The problem is coming up with a pitch persuasive enough to get a roomful of executives to risk ten million dollars of their money. In order to do that you need to demonstrate why the show will bring in twenty million dollars of revenue.

As the article says, this news was raised by the House Oversight Committee. The TSA more generally falls under the purview of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee's Subcommittee on Aviation.

To learn more about the addictive properties of caffeine, see "Caffeine Withdrawal: A Parametric Analysis of Caffeine Dosing Conditions" by Suzette M. Evans and Roland R. Griffiths. There's other research too.

Buried in the hysteria is this interesting tidbit about how France means to deal with the problem of compensating artists in a filesharing economy:

France, like other countries around the world, is struggling to find ways to keep cultural industries, like video and music, afloat at a time when their traditional audiences are waning.

Sarkozy ... said: "I want us to profoundly review the requirements of public television and to consider a complete elimination of advertising on public channels."

Instead, he said, those channels "could be financed by a tax on advertising revenues of private broadcasters and an infinitesimal tax on the revenues of new means of communication like Internet access or mobile telephony." ...

Some people in France have also lobbied for a "global license" that would essentially levy a fee on Internet users that would pay musicians and others in the music industry for revenue lost because of digital music piracy.

I also wonder what sort of penalty Mr. Sarkozy has in mind for rogue underground econometrists who secretly compile GDP statistics in defiance of his policy.

You can learn a lot more about the Briggs-Rauscher reaction at Wikipedia and elsewhere. It doesn't run endlessly nor pick up energy from the mixer, but slowly peters out after about a dozen oscillations as its reagents are consumed.

You can try it at home if laboratory glass is legal in your state. It requires household peroxide, distilled (not filtered) water, potassium iodate, sulfuric acid, malonic acid, MnSO4, and starch.

Given the general Art Deco style of Rapture, It's quite likely that Bioshock art director Scott Sinclair spent a lot of time researching 30's architecture and visions of the future.

Schneier's reasoning for the risks of keeping an open home wi-fi are "farfetched" sounds similar to Jeremy Clarkson's reasoning for why fears of identify theft are "hysterical".

My biggest worry with open WiFi is that it would encourage strangers to loiter near my home.

I'm sure a lot of the problem, unspoken, is that filesharing users eat a lot of upstream network bandwidth, enough so that the monthly pricing model starts to break down. What would happen if ISPs started to charge metered bandwidth, made users pay by the megabyte the same way the ISPs themselves do upstream?

No offense, Takuan, but if I owned a business, and one of my employees took a two month vacation, I would tell him not to bother coming back. If many of them all took a two month vacation at once, there would not be a business for them to come back to.

They've been airing an amusing series of television commercials for this thing, such as this one featuring a very manly pinata party.

Steven: perhaps http://www.identifont.com can help you.

How does the Data Protection Act prevent the bank from finding the thief?

Although now that I think more about this particular item I come to question the wisdom of storing sensitive solid-state electronics right next to a device meant to emit tens of thousands of volts.

I keep my iPod in my holster sometimes.

Why is that, Takuan?

#32 (Silva): It should be! =)

Regarding the home inspector, the original news story explains that they did hire a home inspector, but that the inspector didn't find mold because airborne mold tests are not a customary part of home inspections in that area. I know they aren't done as a matter of course in Washington. (You need to explicitly hire a specialist for that.)

Like most homebuyers, Jason and Kerri Brown got a home inspection before they bought the house. But the Browns acknowledge that the inspection did not include a mold test. Most home inspections do not. "That is true. I signed it. I initialed it," Kerri Brown said.

Also, like #28 I don't understand why BoingBoing insists on linking to opinion blogs talking thirdhand about these news stories instead of linking to the original news stories themselves, which have all the context and undistorted facts.

To be fair, Peterus, land wasn't property either until we passed laws making it so. Before then, land was simply part of the earth, and how could someone be said to own it for themselves? I can't "take away" land from someone by standing on it any more than I can take away the air or light that falls on it. Yet at some point a code of laws defined land as an individual's property and so it was.

What I'm getting at is that what is or is not property is more of a legal distinction than an intrinsic one. (I am not suggesting that real estate should not exist, I'm just using it as a clear analogy.)

Svein: I'm afraid some commenters have confused their wishes with facts. Under US law, duplicating a CD for someone else, whether one friend or a hundred, is still duplicating it illegally, much like duplicating a movie or software disc and giving away the copy. Of course I can't imagine that anyone has ever actually bothered to prosecute piracy on such a tiny scale, or would.

The legal fair use is when you make a backup of media you own already for your own personal use. (Or when you transformatively quote some small fraction of the work into your own larger work for any of the many reasons Mr. Doctorow has explicated at length.)

Takuan: it is one tenth the true cost of ten lives lost due to a blackout, or one hundredth the cost of the hundred lives lost in warming driven-storms.

#22: I think I heard that two or three years ago.

Saintcynr: Thank you for those details; they are very illuminating and do a lot to humanize the faceless homeless. We all see panhandlers, but hardly ever know or ask how they got there. We probably should.

If I may ask you one more question -- when you wrote earlier you mentioned that much of the strain on the destitute comes from "everyone simply trying to do as well for themselves as possible; someone else has to pay to make that a reality." Did you mean that in relation to your own story? Are you talking about the absence of meaningful social support for basic living after you ran out of cash, your difficulty in finding a job, your fair-weather friends? Or are you talking about something else entirely, such as the more chronically impoverished?

#10 (SaintCynr): How did you come to be homeless? And how did you end it?

Methane is pretty useful. It's the primary component of the "natural gas" the utility company sells you to heat your home and run your oven. So like #7, maybe we would be better off trying to find some way to bottle and sell cow farts.

#19: And many more were evicted from homeless shelters for their behavior (often due to mental illness).

Oh, I should add the above describes RSA encryption, which is only one form of public-key cryptography. Other popular algorithms include Diffie-Hellman, its child ElGamal, and the Digital Signature Standard.

Certron: I guess the easiest pop-sci metaphor for the math would be to think of a clock. A clock is circular and has twelve numbers, so 10+3 = 1 on a clock, right? You and I agree in secret on some imaginary clock that has n numbers on it. Now if you send me a message like "the secret number plus 13 is 9 on our clock," it's pretty hard for a spy to figure out what the secret number is without knowing how big the clock is, but I can get it just by subtracting, so long as your message is a number less than n. The math of public-key encryption gives us a way to agree on the size of the clock without ever actually having to meet or send anything in secret.

There is a somewhat lucid explanation of the math at Wikipedia, though it is easier to follow if you have worked with modular arithemetic before.

The summary is that if you have two prime numbers p and q, then you can multiply them to get p*q = n, and do some other jiggery-pokery to get related numbers e and d. e and d have the special relationship that if you take another number m, the remainder of (m^e) / n = c, and the remainder of (c^d) / n = m. If you can break up your message into a long string of numbers m, you can see how the first operation encrypts them into a string of c's, and then the second gets them back again. Conveniently, computers are very good at turning things into numbers.

The use of this for cryptography relies on the fact that it's very difficult to figure out p and q if you only have n, e, and d. So you throw away p and q after making them. e is the public key. d is the private key.

Before the law was changed in 2000, this explanation would have technically made Boing Boing considered munitions legally unexportable from the US. At one time it was fashionable to flout this law by putting the equations on t-shirts.

Will these problems become more frequent as Adobe and other developers move towards online software-as-a-service with client-server models?

I really don't see the Mary here. This is so much more obviously St. Winifrede.

#24 (Cory), I'm with you on this one. As a fellow matzoh-muncher, I gotta say that the Running Of The Jews and bed&breakfast sequences were the only parts of Borat that I found truly funny.

#16 (Abelard): Could that qualify as an example of a nonprofit news source?

#2 (Adventure/Seattle): It sounds like you had a bad experience in Tel Aviv. Would you like to provide more details? I found flying out of Ben Gurion to be a less painful and generally Kafkaesque experience than flying through LAX, though admittedly more annoying than SEATAC (where though the lines are long, at least they're friendly).

It's worth remembering that Boing Boing itself is a for-profit media site that makes revenue from advertisements.

The founders of our country wrote patents and copyrights into Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution.

#54 (Svein): In a sense what you are describing is analogous to the historical displacement of hand craftsmanship by mass production in the Industrial Revolution. A lot of artisans were thrown out of work, but consumer goods became cheaper for everyone else, ending in a net benefit for society.

TA Adjuster: A novelist works for a year on his book and then it is done. Because he does not have an industrial printing press in his basement, a publisher prints and sells copies of it on his behalf for many years, giving him a share of the revenue. That is royalty, which is how he makes his income and is compensated for the work. If he cannot make an income from selling copies of the book (because any publisher in the world may print them without paying the author), how is he to make an income? Working every day with his hands to sign paper copies and sell them by mail? Or should he accept that in the legal system of the future he cannot make money off his writing, that writing novels is no longer a way to earn a living, and do something else entirely with his time?

Though this is an obvious hoax, there are people who will happily custom-paint such lenses for you if you're willing to pay enough.

#12, #31, et al: Maybe it's time for us to reconsider what it means to make a living in music. If there's something one can do that will pay better money than can be made performing live, then one should do that instead of being a musician.

I bet there's a brilliant paper on experimental combinatorics waiting somewhere in this.

#18 (CptTim): I think it's more that in San Francisco, expecting the government to actually fix something is tantamount to an act of faith.

#15 (Hypertime): So true, and moreso because homebrew developers really don't want to be developing for the console itself anyway. Console development is a huge pain in the butt, for really not much benefit unless you're planning on printing off 100,000 of your game and selling them at Wal-Mart: it's just hard to program for. If you want to play around with programming the Wiimote, you can hook it up to your PC and work with it there, in a more familiar environment where there are lots of free development tools and much easier ways to distribute your game for free to all the world.

When he says "you voted," he really could mean any member of Congress. I found a record of the Senate's vote on the DMCA: it passed unanimously. I can't even find the voting record for the House because so far as I can tell it passed by a unanimous voice vote; they didn't even bother with a roll call.

#5: Far from being a red herring, the issue of piracy is one of the major drivers for this kind of security in gaming consoles. To my knowledge there is not yet a means of duping retail 360 discs that runs on store-bought consoles.

There are a number of reasons why Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo want to restrict what runs on their embedded platforms, of which the problems detailed in #7 are among the most important. Related to this is quality control: the manufacturer -- let's say Microsoft -- wants customers to be assured of a certain level of quality in everything that runs on their 360, and there is an extensive manufacturer-driven QA process that every product has to go through. In addition to making sure that there is never any such thing as malware for the 360, it also means that all games meet a minimum standard of UI, integration with Live features, stability, usability. If you can't pass Microsoft QA you don't get to run on their 360, period. That's how the non-techy consumer knows that if he buys something for the 360, it'll run well and not trash his system. (If you as a third party dev manage to get a bluescreen crash or data-corrupting error past Microsoft QA, there is some unholy legal hell waiting for you behind the scenes.) As a customer I have no such assurance with open-source software, which makes me not want to pay for it.

Another big reason is cheating. A lot of games have some kind of multiplayer, and that's only fun so long as every one is playing fair. If people can run any arbitrary code on their consoles, that means they can hack up their retail client to cheat in all kinds of ways, go online, and grief the heck out of everyone who legitimately paid for their copy. That's fun for the griefers I'm sure, but it makes me not want to buy the next multiplayer Splinter Cell.

And piracy is still a major reason for hardware security -- any argument otherwise is frankly Kool-Aid. Less than one third of games sold these days are multiplayer; hardly any are multiplayer-exclusive. If developers cannot sell copies of their single player games at a profit, they're out of business. Retail sales of PC games have been on a precipitous decline for years now, and it's only partly because of consoles cannibalizing their sales.

Now, for reasons that Mr. Doctorow has so astutely explained many times, it's impossible to completely stamp out piracy when there are so many people around the world with their time entirely devoted to circumventing it, but by moving the security into the hardware you can at least make it difficult, costly, and dangerous to pirate. By forcing the would-be pirate consumer to crack open that white case and delicately sauter a chip onto the board (risking bricking the entire system), you create a barrier to entry that the majority of average customers would rather not hurdle. My car alarm may not be able to stop organized criminals with lots of tools from stealing my ride, but it sure as hell keeps your average garden-variety methhead from just jimmying the door and driving off.

#41 (Jenniferfolly): I do not mean to deride the laudable morality of pacifism, but the Torah is hardly unequivocal in its attitude towards violence. Notwithstanding the injunction given Moses against killing, His people are given explicit instructions to massacre entire populations many times (Deuteronomy 7, 20; Joshua 6, 8, 10; etc.) and punished for leaving some of the conquered alive (Judges 2). The Bible is not a wholly pacifistic law, and presenting it as such makes it the victim of cherrypicking.

#5 (Jawells): That's an interesting point; I wonder if JWZ will hold a wake at the DNA on that day.

Lasers and sniper rifles indeed do not coexist, both because they give away the shooter and also because they're not really useful at those ranges (for reasons having to do with bullet drop and windage and the effectiveness of scopes etc.)

You do see a lot of laser sights on handguns and carbines, though. Not that anyone would shoot at a plane with them.

A laser can easily dazzle a pilot, however. Think about it: if the pilot of the helicopter could not only see the laser, but see it clearly enough to trace it back to the source on the ground, then obviously it must have been visible at that range.

Still I say that with lasers as with sniper rifles, it ain't the gadget that's at fault, but the irresponsible goon holding it.

Sometimes I wonder if half the commentators on BB are in fact an enormously diverse piece of work by an very industrious performance artist.

I have taken many pictures in airports, indeed of policemen in airports, without any trouble.

According to an 80's CineFx, a similar technique was used to create the glowing lines on characters in Tron. The actors were filmed in black and white, with black tape on the costumes where the glows were supposed to go. This was developed to a super-high-contrast negative on 8x10 acrylic transparency cels, such that the black lines in the original would become transparent in the cel, and everything else opaquely black. The cel was placed over a lightbox of the appropriate color -- blue for good guys, red for bad guys, etc -- so that the color glowed through the transparent lines. Then special effects were airbrushed or diffraction-grated in, and a picture was taken of the cel, just as for hand done animation, and the background composited over with a travelling matte.

Here is a picture of the technique, and a more detailed description.

Jphilby, I assure you that it is as easy to injure a police officer with an axe as it is with an assault weapon. Check your statistics. Hardly any murders are committed with legally purchased assault weapons.

#23: Bear in mind that the 50 year limit is set by law. The Egyptian parliament, by definition, writes the law.

"Road scholar?"

Who wouldn't want Gandalf as a godparent?

Phlavor, what town was that?

At first glance I misread that as "...and want you to buy some carp!" And really I think they'd have more luck if they did, because carp is delicious. There's a man who sells carp down the street from me and he does great. He's not even homeless, because he sells so much carp.

If the royalties are being paid to the government, this is really more of a tax.

5¢ in 1920 is about 50¢ in 2006, or maybe 12 minutes' work for an unskilled laborer (working from the CPI).

Indeed, even in 1920, Einstein himself still contemplated the possibility of an interstellar aether. It would take many successive experiments of increasing accuracy such as this one to finally and collectively displace aether with an elaborated general relativity. (That's science, after all, you come up with a theory and then use gazillions of measurements to prove it's right.)

In 1932, the same time Dr. Joos built the gadget depicted, other experiments to measure "aether drift" were conducted as well, such as the Kennedy-Thorndike experiment, meant to prove special relativity by measuring length contraction.

As the launch of Gravity Probe B reminds us, we're still conducting experiments to empirically test relativity to this day.

Jack, I think Mannakiosk is pulling your leg.

Itomato: Of course it is fantasy, fashion, an aesthetic! Like any fashion it's about creating uniqueness and visual appeal and maybe even a personal statement through form rather than function, for things where function is already well solved and commoditized -- the same impulse as aftermarket auto flash, or elaborate dinner service, or even t-shirt decals. That's the "punk" part, a reminder that really it's a fashion statement and not a technological trend.

Now I bet someone is going to dig up a bit of some kind of steampunky gadget that actually uses boiled water instead of electricity for some common task, to which I say: though awesome, that's still clearly a deliberately retro-functional statement.

#34, Mullingitover: I agree that the ban on liquids thing is annoying and pointless (boy am I sick of having to perpetually re-buy contact lens solution), but it's worth remembering that the Israelis have certain expedients in dealing with air terrorism not available to the US, such as shooting hijackers on the spot. El Al employs a variety of security techniques that might be uncomfortable for a US airline, such as armed ticket counters and passenger profiling.

I hope this means that US media-makers can sue Germany for its unfair trade practices -- forcing us to censor explicit violence and Nazi references out of our products to the detriment of consumers -- so I can start my bootleg Run Lola Run store like I've always wanted.

This one needs a review from Xeni.

Gosh, anonymous harassment for pay truly is hilarious.

#14: I'm already looking to mixed drinks that self-illuminate with Cherenkov radaiation.

Guernican: can you think of any places in the world today where a population of local insurgents equipped with small arms and improvised explosives are able to resist occupation by the United States Army?

Awesome. I look forward to not having to pay for their subsidies any more.

It's funny how I've never seen a gun owner actually shoot at a photo target, only gun renters. I wonder if that means anything (or if it's just a sampling glitch).

For far too long now we've taken our ice cubes for granite.

Apparently developing this sort of application for the iPod is untrammeled agony, which makes the high quality of this port all the more impressive.

#21, Kinetiq: Sounds like a pretty good insight to me -- context-free footage is like flypaper for preconceptions.

Father Brown: in the United Kingdom, they have banned not only guns, but also swords and are working on knives as well. Perhaps you will feel safe if you move there.

There's a long and somewhat strange tradition of photo silhouettes for firing ranges. I've seen photos of cowboys, 70s thugs with mullets and denim, cartoon thugs, variations on the theme of "mustachoied guy using woman as human shield", a cartoon floozy pulling a Saturday Night Special out of her handbag, turkeys, prairie dogs, and obviously the Osama Bin Laden photo (almost none of it to be found on the web I'm afraid). Strangely, no Klansmen or hippies.

These photo targets are all very cute novelties but no serious shooter ever practices with them; there's just too much visual noise and you have no good means of measuring how close your groups are and which way they're drifting. The real pros are the ones shooting at the unassuming pages of five 4" circles. I hate shooting at human-photo targets, because it makes me feel like just the kind of trigger-happy jackass that Father Brown portrays.

There is a certain training necessity in shooting human-form silhouettes: studies have shown that your reaction time in a real emergency will be worse if you don't; so occasionally when exercising my defensive sidearm I'll use one of the plain black head-and-shoulders silhouettes, but for my target guns -- never. They're just not good for practice, they're more expensive, and they make the 70-year-old guy teaching his grandkid how to work her .22 in the next lane over look at you like you're some kind of psycho.

Still, I'm glad that Cory took the time to enjoy this pastime on his visit to Vegas. If Americans can go to Holland to smoke up, then Europeans ought to have the chance to squeeze off a few.

Zak: most indoor ranges will have some old-fashioned revolvers to shoot, but for the real Old West experience you ought to find some place that's doing classes in muzzle-loading pistols -- caploaders, like they had in the Civil War. Surprisingly, they're still made and used for hunting and competition.

#56: Yes, for DWI at the least, and rightfully so. Don't drive stoned.

Where and when is this happening? Who is the old man? When was this reported? How do they know it's over the missing eyeglasses? Why does Neatorama mention a police report when the YouTube original doesn't?

Joel, you seem to have a good eye for interesting novelties. Why not start your own import business?

I look forward to seeing what sort of open-source projects might be undertaken with the human genome.

#20 (Mark Gordon): Acetylaldehyde is indeed the major cause of hepatotoxicity over time, but the usual cause of death from acute alcohol overdose is cardiorespiratory depression from the unprocessed ethanol (there's only so much NADH to go 'round, natch, so the rest of the drug gets backed up into the bloodstream waiting its turn).

In additional fake Chinese statue news, the Chinese authorities are threatening to sue a German museum for staging an exhibition of the Terracotta Army -- with replicas.

#1, Simplehuman: I'd like to heartily second, third, fourth, and n that. I've been to many Gaiman book signings and am always impressed by how genuinely sweet he is at them, even when totally jet-lagged and exhausted after reading the entirety of Coraline. This is only one incident in many that demonstrate what a sincere force for good he is in the SFF community.

I'm still peeved at the Sierra Club for their opposition to light rail in the Seattle area (because the political compromise required to get it involved also expanding roads to areas outside the rail's service).

That video is rather gay. I might also describe it as merry or frolicsome.

#9: I wish my discipline for checking that readout before getting huffed was as good as yours. Generally I use the much simpler heuristic of screening based on grammar and punctuation, which works only almost as well.

This article would be alarming, but fortunately we live in a world where one may protect oneself with robot insurance... for when the metal ones decide to come for you.

#3: You are suggesting that blister packs should be banned because they actually are effective at preventing theft?

Even in a drought, wouldn't it be more cost effective to take the $1000 that everybody would be willing to pay for this over a $500 water fountain, pool it all together into a big pile, use it to build a big desalination plant on the coast, and then just pipe that extra water into people's houses?

It is also nice to remember the days when most video games had subject matter suitable for Mr. Rogers' show.

I wonder if they will sell these things on the civilian market. It would be nice to have a nonlethal means of dealing with an intruder with better range than pepper spray.

That's about $67 today (using the CPI).

Thank you Micah! Now I know to go to Schedule 14A when trying to corroborate Yahoo's claims of ownership (which are evidently gleaned through some unreliable mechanism from Sched 3 and 4).

Zikzak -- I don't mean to be a contrarian, but isn't that really more a problem of poor controls against misuse of force? The argument otherwise seems to be, "well, if this less-lethal gadget exists, then people might use it," but if we focus on that, we'll feel a sense of accomplishment when Tasers are withdrawn when we've done nothing to keep abusive police from just bludgeoning people the old-fashioned way.

Do banks actually still use vaults to store cash?

There's a weapon just like this in Bioshock.

This charmingly reminds me of the dinosaurs segment of the ride -- sort of a "Back To A Bygone Era When Nerds Had Yet To Rule The Earth!"

I wonder how it is known that Mr. Jobs is Disney's largest shareholder. I believe Cory when he says it, and I do find a BusinessWeek news story reporting such, but SEC filings say that Bob Iger, Thomas Staggs, and Alan Braverman are the largest direct shareholders, while the biggest institutional holders are all I-banks like Fidelity and Barclays.

But everybody knows, and knew then, that the Federalist Papers were written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay. It was an open secret to start with, and the 1792 edition had their names on the front page. They weren't subversive pieces of sedition being written against a standing government, they were a work of advocacy in an open political arena.

Publius was just a pen-name in the spirit of "Nicolas Bourbaki", to convey an impression of unity to the papers, and to diffuse criticism of the individual authors that would have distracted from debate of the subject matter.

Daniel: Those food illustrations are great. Thank you for posting them.

This is really interesting, as much so for the surroundings of the ads as the ads themselves. Retailers in the US struggle so hard to make their storefronts look their absolute best, but in these photos, there are simple hand-lettered signs propped up in dilapidated windows, meagre displays of a dozen identical fish cans variously tipped up in an attempt at tasteful arrangement, empty cornucopias.

This dichotomy reminds me of that great "Soviet Fashion Show" ad that Wendy's ran in the 1985 Super Bowl -- at the same time Mr. Hlynksky began to shoot these photos.

#26, Mike Lotus: Generally a "rake" is the percentage of each pot taken by the house -- ie, every time someone wins $100, $5 of it goes into the house's pockets. This is the most common way by which both Internet and brick-and-mortar casinos make money from their poker tables.

The question of whether it's legal to have people pay up front to get in the door while the tables themselves are free is one of those legal gray areas that varies from state to state and judge to judge. The NYTimes article talks a little more about the law in that state, but generally speaking if you're making people pay for the privilege of gambling in your building, a prosecutor can make a pretty good case that you're running a casino.

#23, Fnord: The article suggests that "three or four men in ski masks and dark clothes [who] entered the room after 11 p.m. to rob the players." Are you suggesting they were agents of the New York state government?

Also, in New York as in Texas, playing poker for money is not illegal. It is only taking a rake for the house that is illegal, because that constitutes an unlicensed casino.

It took some searching, but I found additional coverage on this issue from The Dallas Morning News.

In Texas, private poker gambling is legal, so long as the place running the game doesn't profit from it, such as by taking a door charge or a cut of the profits. The law specifically does not not apply to gambling "in a private place, where no person received any economic benefit other than personal winnings."

So, the raid implies that the veteran's hall was charging a vig on the poker game, which made it an illegal casino operation under Texas law. If not, then this was an illegal raid and the veterans have grounds for suit.

An upside of this is that apparently, washing your clothes in plain hot water is more effective than I had realized.

Besides, marketing these soap nuts as an "organic" alternative to soap strikes me a little like those shops that sell yerba mate as a "natural" alternative to coffee -- as if coffee were somehow unnatural, or mate a more natural plant.

Our cat was greatly alarmed when she heard us play this. Could there be a subversive purring code hidden inside?

Happy Birthday, Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom!

Cory, I appreciate your argument regarding the doctrine of first sale here, but as an alternative to your interpretation, it's also possible that some junior lawyer's assistant just put in the word "redistribute" when translating from BMG's instructions in German, meaning "duplicate and give away" without fully thinking through the ramifications.

It raises an interesting question to me, though: if you were to purchase a track from this store, then decided you wanted to give it to a friend, would you delete it from your own drive afterwards?

#14: I'm still laughing.

Or perhaps an action photo of some hypothetical journalist in a lighter-than-air craft, the solar power affixed to the balloon envelope and drawing power as he squints through his aviator goggles at the tiny screen, pointing the satellite antenna at the sky in one hand and heroically blogging with the other.

So this is how the feds found out about the Iranian nuke program.

He needs to visit the patent office with this, immediately followed by the Brookstone marketing HQ.

In further news, there were mass public protests today by "thousands" of Sudanese citizens demanding the teacher's execution: Times, Guardian, USA Today.

The colors and curves here are really wild. I'm trying to decide, looking at it, whether it's meant to be a sea anemone or a Flying Polyp.

The sinuous translucency of balloon rubber seems to evoke the effect of glass sculpture very well, only obviously much cheaper and easier to install. Looking at his other photos it seems that the technique really needs good lighting to look its best, Hackenwerth's work in particular, because it looks like he makes great use of some colored parts of the structure to filter the light shining through the rest.

I wonder why he chose a sea-monster theme for so much of his work; maybe the medium is just well suited to making tubey, tendrilly things that look like they're floating.

#3, Lauralee: Perhaps you are thinking of Todd Moeller and Adam Vitale.

Mr. Moeller and Mr. Vitale are presently guests of the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, NY. I wonder if they would appreciate some mail.

This alone is reason enough to resurrect a defunct PDA.

The most astonishing thing about spam to me is that the success of pump-and-dump scams means that there are actually people in the world willing to buy thousands of dollars of stock on the advice of an unsolicited email saying "th1ss s+0 ck is ready to EXPLODE!!!!"

It's too bad that Colbert is on strike; this would have merited an entire segment from him.

It seems like the Question Authority proposal is congruent with the ACLU's platform. But perhaps Sirius believes that a less formalized, monolithic organization will draw more people to the cause who prefer focusing their efforts on education over litigation, or might otherwise be reluctant to commit to something card-carrying.

(Usually RU Sirius himself is near the top of the list of authorities I question, but if he actually helps restore civil liberties, state transparency, and checks and balances, then more power to him.)

I wonder if this will be legal in Texas.

#38 Robert, in fact they're even selling the farts. (Well, their carbon anyway.)

#15: High stress and pepperspray were reported to sometimes cause asphyxiation and cardiac arrest by newspapers of ten years ago. The recorded cause of death was, for pepper spray as for tasers, "excited delirium". The controversy over studies on its safety also resembles the recent one over tasers.

#5: It's the latter: there's a fad for reportage about tasers right now because they are relatively new. The same thing happened when pepper spray was first introduced.

In fact, there are lots more pepper sprayings and clubbings than taserings under circumstances similar to here, but they don't get reported because there's no novelty in them.

Perhaps the cat is depressed.

This is so true of not just Universal, but most of the big music labels in the business. During my time at Sony I occasionally visited the Sony Music offices and was surprised by their really luddite attitude towards technology, and their incomprehension of the work being done by the rest of the corporation. They didn't know what we were up to with those computers, they didn't want to know, they didn't want to hear about how that rootkit idea of theirs was crazy, and frankly they didn't even want to talk to me in line at the cafeteria.

The are probably lots of reasons for this, including the ones suggested in #25 (MaximusNYC) and #15 (Clif Marsiglio), but one day it occurred to me that this may have far more basic personal roots than I had realized: the fashionable, popular kids in high school grew up to work in marketing and management at music labels, and the nerds became the engineers, and they still listen to us exactly as much they did back then. It sounds so trite that I would never believe it if I hadn't seen it for myself.

Regarding #21 (Ms. Hayden): Regrettably, in corporate boardrooms, Mr. Morris is probably right. As a CEO it is his job to keep everyone else honest. (Of course if he is himself dishonest he can't do that so effectively, but that's a different topic.)

#10, Cory: That was kind of my point. Every economic activity in our lives has some kind of carbon cost, and compared to most of those, the power spent on an iPod, or on operating the truck that transports the cow that makes the leather bag, is tiny.

I prefer therefore to judge a solar-powered satchel on its true merits, such as how many times it saves me from kicking myself for leaving a charger at home, or how effectively it communicates whatever it is that one wants a satchel to communicate about oneself.

If we really wanted to worry about the carbon footprint of a few feet of leather, it would be easier to look at the source of the problem -- electricity generation, mostly -- which can be addressed much more scaleable technologies for clean power. But I am not worried about the carbon footprint of my bag! I am just worried about how well it works as a bag.

With due deference to Mr. Doctorow, I'd like to suggest that the main point of putting a solar panel on a shoulder bag really isn't green-ness at all -- if you really wanted to reduce your carbon footprint you would just desist using portable electronics altogether -- but convenience and fashion.

I mean convenience in that the bag lets you charge your phone while you're walking around, so that you don't need to remember to plug it in when you get home or keep track of whether you left it at the office today. And fashion in that it's mostly a novelty but one that suggests a story behind it, which is exactly what makes a saleable fashion statement.

The leatherwork here is really nice, but I wonder how durable it is -- all those straps and stitching on the front, and how well armored is that panel on the back? Will the leather stand up to being left in a sunny window every day?

Well, I for one hope that if cattle husbandry comes to an end, then the resulting massive slaughter of cows necessary to bring their population down to feral-sustainable levels will result in many quality leather accessories such as this one.

Just for clarification, this car runs not on biodiesel (which is what came to my mind when I heard "biofuel"), but E85 fuel: 85% ethanol, 15% gasoline.

#2, Dave X: If they're free, they'd hardly be gifts, now would they.

Of course the bigger problem with trading oil for lithium is that the energy density of gasoline is approximately 46.9 megajoules per kilogram, while the energy density of a rechargable lithium ion battery tops out around 0.72 MJ/kg. With a specific gravity of 732.2 kg/cu.m, a 20-gallon automobile gas tank works out to around 55.8kg, so to store that much energy you would need a lithium battery weighing 3,635 kilograms, or four tons!

Even though electric motors are about four times as efficient as gas engines (95% thermal efficiency vs 25%), that's still a one-ton power source, about half the weight of the average passenger car by itself.

(I don't mean to make it sound like the electric car is a bad idea, because it isn't; just that lithium batteries were never a realistic means of storing the power for them.)

In the same vein is the remarkable case of the Abraham Crijnssen, a WWII minesweeper that manged to escape from the Japanese Navy by disguising itself... as a tropical island.

One wonders what setting on the screws constitutes "island speed ahead".

#6 (Aaron2): Shh! If people don't believe that hustlers are gone, the con won't work!

I hope they glaze the windows such that the office lights inside show through clearly, like a giant pixelated surface undulating across the facade. That will be very cyberpunk.

If only they had free-run up a nearby railing, leapt through a merchant kiosk, sped round an alley corner and triangle-jumped into a conveniently placed bale of hay, the cops would have run right past them.

"Fight cynicism about government. It encourages you to give away an institution that belongs to you." That is indeed a superb way of putting it.

One of the interesting things about diet and exercise research is that different people can have radically different effects from exercise depending on their personal genetics.

For example, the large HERITAGE study headed up by Claude Bouchard tried putting six hundred people through the same exercise program and measured the physiological results. There were huge differences in how much benefit different people got from the exact same program: some people lost a lot of weight and got a lot fitter, others didn't lose "so much as a gram" of fat or get even the tiniest bit of extra endurance. If you were to look at the results in average, you might conclude that exercise is a little bit effective for everyone. But that's a statistical illusion: in fact, it's super effective for some individuals and completely ineffective for others (and in between for the rest).

So, the same principle quite likely applies to the rest of human nutrition. There may not be a specific one-size-fits-all diet; instead it might be the case that individuals with a genetic allele A gain more weight from carbs, while genetic allele B ditches carbs but stores fat.

#46 (Kyle): I followed your reasoning up to the point where you say that you "just walk out after paying" after bad service in a non-tip society and the problem is gone. I'm not sure what you mean. Do you mean that you just don't go back to that restaurant again? That doesn't seem to solve the situation where the food is good and you want to go back but one time the service was bad. Or, if you go back anyway, isn't that just like tipping 20% regardless of the quality of service?

I'm asking this question honestly, because I think you have an answer that I just haven't understood clearly: in a non-tip system, how do I the consumer create an incentive for better service or penalize poor service without making it unsafe for me to eat there again (as it would be if I complained to management)?

Clay, while I agree that Tasers aren't the gentle sleep-ray that the police sometimes wish they were, I think there is indeed a genuine difference between a firearm, which is designed to be deadly and if targeted correctly usually will be, and an electric stunner, which in 0.3% of cases [Bozeman, Winslow, et. al] can cause a sequence of events that eventually lead to serious injury. It's not totally nonlethal, but even half-nelsons can and do cause disablement or death.

The question here is really not whether a Taser needed to be used, but whether any force was necessary at all. Would the police have been justified in pepper-spraying or manually pummeling Mr. Gaubert? From the story, it sounds not, but the case as described is so bizarre that I have a hard time understanding why the police would do what they did.

Efnord, are you suggesting we should encourage waiters to commit income tax fraud?

This seems very strange. Why would a police officer feel the need to Taser someone for not moving? The point of a Taser, from a cop's point of view, is that it is a more convenient means of subduing a combative arrestee than repeatedly clubbing him over the head. If a person is just sitting quietly and not repsonding, it seems like it would be easier still to simply walk over and put handcuffs on him. I feel like there must be some key details missing from this story.

I have high hopes for this anthology. Mirrorshades was a great zeitgest collection in its day; I even got a couple of nice papers out of it in those days when I still wrote papers. I hope some clever academic will find fodder in this book to draw the spline from Futurism to inverted millenarianism to whatever's now.

It's interesting that Gibson and Sterling are included here as well: is the evolution to post-cyberpunk reflected in their own personal development as writers?

James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel are editors of very sound taste. I look forward to obtaining my copy.

Skulking around someone's land without his permission in Oregon seems hazardous.

Ah, you've noticed they're working for the Daleks.

#11: Indeed we do not use any GPL software for that reason. I am only contesting the untrue assertion that no one in IT earns or should earn their living by selling software.

#7, #8: Mike is not alone in needing to be able to sell his software in order to make a living. There is such a thing as consumer software, for example, video games, where the entirety of the product revenue comes from the sale of the non-customized software itself. Sure, there are subscription-model online games where you pay for continuing access to a proprietary server, but they are only a small fraction of the entire market.

The majority of games sold today are single-player, non-networked experiences, which simply would not be developed professionally if they could not be sold for profit. Ancillary sales due to merchandising (t-shirts and toys and lunchboxes) could not make up for the cost of development alone.

IT is not entirely a service industry. Some of us make mass produced consumer end products.

Or, you could use a bioreactor to turn the vinegar into fuel hydrogen.

Incandescent seems pretty red hot to me. =)

Mr. Wizard used acid and sugar, but this reaction seems a lot safer. Of course, if procure pure ammonium nitrate to play with, you may be getting a call from some nice people in unimaginitive suits.

@Jay Levitt, #19: It is my understanding that parking enforcement in the municipality of Washington, DC is under the purview of the mayor and city council, for whom the citizens do vote. The DC Department of Motor Vehicles is not a Congressional bureau.

Furthermore, Santa's Knee says that "they invalidated his vote", implying there was a relevant ballot he voted upon but for some reason was disenfranchised.

Sulfuric acid and sugar.

This product would sell like gangbusters in New York (which is possibly also the only city with boutiques specialized enough to sell it).

#9: I think he is advocating political activism, rallies, or perhaps even a run for public office if you think enough others share your views. Also, registering to vote far enough ahead of time to make sure your registration is valid; you can't simply accept disenfranchisement with a shrug and use that as a reason to disregard the rule of law.

Er, that is "refusal to answer can't be construed as admission of guilt."

(Has anyone else noticed that you can't post a comment after previewing it? It's making proofreading a little difficult.)

#5: The law is actually the same in New Jersey (at least, it was when I got my license there eleven years ago). So it's not really clear why they felt they needed a blood test in the first place. It may have changed due to some court challenge on the Constitutional grounds that refusal answer can't be construed as admission of, but I remember no such case.

You may learn more about the NJ court decision by reading it here: http://www.thenewspaper.com/rlc/docs/2007/nj-johnston.pdf

In summary, what happened is that a drunk driver got hauled into the area hospital for a blood draw, and was flailing his arms around so the tech couldn't jab him. A cop had to physically restrain him, which is when the putative injury occured. Because police officers have qualified immunity, you can only sue them *personally* for actions that violate clearly established law (457US800). This appellate decision upholds an earlier summary judgement that Ofc. Boccanfuso did no such thing.

The ruling has no bearing on the constitutionality of the search itself; that decision would come during the criminal trial, as a question of whether to suppress the blood draw evidence.

Personally I am a little disturbed by this ruling, because of the immunity it seems to confer to cops who injure me in a search for a crime that I may not have committed. The judge in this ruling hints that the facts are different here because the plaintiff really was DWI, but all the same, as much as I believe that drunk drivers are scum and ought to go to jail, I'm concerned about injuries to people who cops think might be drunk drivers and get jabbed on their say-so.

Oh, if only you knew how many fact-finding missions the Sims team undertook to IKEA.

#9, Elevenwatt: That story is awesome. We should totally legalize that stuff.

It's a prototype helmet so I expect the cartoon eyes are there for the camera's benefit.

Spanish and, depending on the region, often also Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc.

An ATM like this is an impressive display, but I imagine it must be quite costly to do all those localizations for every software update.

People high on meth and PCP have a well-publicized tendency to absorb large amounts of damage before stopping, making pepper spray and similar chemicals less effective against them as well.

That picture of a Taser doesn't make it look like it has a very useful form factor, either. Imagine carrying that in your pants.

The police presumably pulled them over on an equipment and moving violation for the mudflaps and DVD player, then realized the car was stolen when they ran the plates, which made them bother with searching the vehicle (which they could have legally done anyway as a Terry stop but probably weren't suspicious enough to mess with otherwise), and that's probably when the cop looked at the label on the disc.

Also, having a DVD video player in a location where it's visible to the driver while driving is illegal in California.

Blackbird, #37: If you're concerned for the security of your checked electronics, maybe you should consider flying with a gun for extra baggage safety: http://www.boingboing.net/2006/09/24/secure-your-checked-.html

This is the perfect opportunity for an enterprising falafel stand owner to drum up sales by presenting falafel consumption as a fashionable act of civil disobedience.

Steven (#16): I suppose there's a humorous lesson in the way that the "landlord game" did less to show the dangers of unbridled captilism than it did to make everyone realize they just wanted to be the landlord themselves.

Anyway this analysis relies on the application of Markov probability theory to the game. I remember once Scientific American had a Mathematical Recreations article on it, which is reproduced here: http://www.math.yorku.ca/Who/Faculty/Steprans/Courses/2042/Monopoly/Stewart4.html

There's more discussion of it here: http://www.tkcs-collins.com/truman/monopoly/monopoly.shtml , and elsewhere if you Google on "markov Monopoly".

Mr. Karney, as you have experience from within the army, maybe you can answer something that I've never understood: if the military is aware that torture doesn't work, then why does it continue to use it?

Let's all give a hand to Mrs. Hayden, Mr. Weisberger, Mr. Schreiber, Mr. Kanevski, Mr. Snider, Mr. Stankaitis, and everyone else who no doubt works tirelessly behind the scenes to provide us this forum.

Can someone explain this recent trend of omitting standard capitalization from art essays?

I don't mean this as a detraction from Mr. Brandou's work, which is clearly attractive, technically strong, and iconographically allegorical. I'm just wondering why I've seen many artist's statements recently, such as this one, apparently written in the style of Archy and Mehitabel.

There are all these steampunk objects, but so few steampunk costumes, nor indeed a steampunk style of dress. We all know what punks dress like and the Wachowskis have given us a vision of how cyberpunks dress, but what does a Steam-Punk look like?

Sketch (21): That's about right -- a health trust is basically "compulsory savings", essentially a bank account that your money goes into before you get a chance to spend it. It's a patriarchal approach, but a lot of people have trouble saving money (eg the kind of people with lots of consumer debt), so the alternative would be to leave a lot of spendthrifts unable to pay for medical treatment at all, or force their more prudent neighbors to pay for them.

I am not convinced that Kos would have been much better off had it been a government health service that maltreated him so, rather than an insurance company. His only recourse might have been to sue, whereas now he still has has the resources of the state insurance commission and attorney general to tap before resorting to that expensive proposition.

Also, I know it's dangerous to mention the subject of capricious disemvowelment, but I have to echo Moonbat's concern that the "pre-existing agenda" comment was squelched, while the profanity-laced "F- you, Blue Stick Blue Stone, and all of your cronies in Washington and elsewhere. Your days are numbered," stood. It seems quite reasonable to me to mention that Kos' clear agenda does color the credibility of his claims, whereas the latter post, though containing an excellent point about moral hazard, seems deliberately inflammatory.

It's bizarre that Obama is promising this bill upon his election to president, which is the moment that his present ability to introduce bills to Congress ends.

According to prior news coverage, the "government shutdown" was also forced by citizen protests. Per BBC News on Oct 17: "Protesters armed with sticks and stones smashed windows and set furniture ablaze in at least 20 bars in El Alto, on the edge of the capital, La Paz. They want local government to pass laws banning pubs and brothels near schools."

Or, Time has the more inflammatory, "The rampage began after citizens demanded that brothels and bars be located at least 3,200 feet away from schools. Within 48 hours, angry mobs had taken matters into their own hands, burning more than 30 establishments. Hundreds of women and transvestites were forced to strip while their belongings were torched; dozens were beaten and mutilated as the police stood by and watched. 'It was something we needed to do,' says El Alto resident Roberta Quispe Mayta. 'Now our husbands will behave better and the prostitutes will leave.' The municipal government responded by closing all brothels within 1,600 feet of schools, but took no action against those who had attacked the prostitutes."

So there are citizen protests on both sides. The prostitutes are really protesting the restrictions their neighbors have demanded.

Is it truly so impossible that someone might learn from his mistakes?