18 billion dollars would buy a a lot of lesbians. Can it be so?

Wikipedia:

From 2002 through 2006, Wal-Mart received steadily increasing scores on the Human Rights Campaign's Corporate Equality Index, a measure of how companies treat LGBT employees and customers. The company's rating increased from 14% in 2002 to 43% in 2004, due to an expanded antidiscrimination policy to protect gay and lesbian employees.[97] The score increased to 57% in 2005, because of the company's new definition of family that included same-sex partners,[98] and increased again in 2006 to a high of 65%.[99] However, the rating for the 2008 edition dropped back to 40%, attributable to losses in two key areas: not renewing its membership in the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce (which it joined in 2006), and a discrepancy from last year's study that was discovered in this year's answers and resulted in another 10-point loss (by comparison, Target scored 80% and Kmart 100%). As a result of the 40% rating, HRC encouraged consumers to "strongly consider other [shopping] options."

As for the smiley face, everyone knows or visage souriant is the house arms of Ogrek the Undisciplined. Wal-Mart never stood a chance.

"Mad Cow will show the Singularity I have good taste!" Ha ha ha.

Couple more things.

First, many of the posters here would do well to read the article, and also to read the sister article in the same issue Never Mind the Singularity, Here's the Science. Especially:

But it turns out that each neuron is supported by a supercomputer's worth of additional circuitry. MIT bioengineer Andreas Mershin and UCLA psychologist Nancy Woolf have independently confirmed the importance of microtubules, the scaffolding that undergirds each neuron, in animal memory and learning. At the University of Alberta, physicist Jack Tuszynski has developed computational models suggesting that these supposedly dumb structures could be smarter than previously recognized. Stuart Hameroff at the University of Arizona argues that trillions of computations per second take place in the microtubules of each neuron. If he's right, the brain's speed is 10^28 operations per second — a trillion times faster than is generally thought — which pushes the vaunted singularity back by decades.

and

Oxford physicist Roger Penrose proposed that the classical physics ruling neurobiology can't explain consciousness. The mind, he declared, relies on the baffling mechanics of quantum physics. Although his point remains controversial, evidence in its favor is accumulating.

So, y'know.

Secondly, I added Ray to Wikipedia's article Immortality the other week. At the end of the day, I'm afraid that that will have to satisfy him.

Ha-ha-ha. Ray is taking gelcaps. Banned in Japan years back, because they had the highest chance of BSE contamination.

I am literally pointing at the screen and laughing.

Ah-ha-hahahaha.

You'd think some people would have a problem downloading a file marked "infected". Even "infected_novel".

I was on a panel with him once. He always looks like he doesn't want to be around people.

He's wrong about time travel, too, btw. Niven's Law is simple misanthropy, it has nothing to do with physics.

Apparently Cory doesn't read Xeni's posts...

Seriously, though. The animation is a bit manipulated. Here's a pic of the original 5-frame image on the pottery. While debatable as "animation" it does plainly depict small actions in time sequentially, which is significant in itself.

And if Buckley gets so much as within spitting distance of the lights of Heaven, down from the Upper Planes shall descend our champion, Gary Gygax, vorpal sword in hand, to snicker Bill's snarky little head from its undead purchase upon his ill-defined neck.

Good game, man. Good game.

-Barbara Manui & Chris Adams
yamara.com

I see they're just "the Kremlin" again. Oh well.

I just got finished watching Idaho Transfer, so doing disturbing things with your car trunk in Oregon isn't really sitting well with me right now.

That being said, the ads are pretty awesome.

Motion equaling invisibility was an early issue with photography, due to long exposure times. This photo taken by Louis Daguerre in Paris in 1838 or 1839 is the first image of human being permanently captured. He's in the lower left, with his leg raised. The photo should show a busy street, but the motion of the people and carriages have made them vanish into time. The image of the one man survives only because he is standing still, probably having his boots blacked by a phantom street urchin.

Well, if it's that phallic, it certainly belongs on Wikipedia.

Done.

Oh, hey. 1970s copyleft in Issue 1:

"To encourage dissemination of the information in Radical Software we have created our own symbol of an x within a circle (x). This is a Xerox mark, the antithesis of copyright, which means DO copy. (The only copyrighted contents in this issue are excerpted from published or soon-to-be published books and articles which are already copyrighted.)"

http://www.radicalsoftware.org/volume1nr1/pdf/VOLUME1NR1_0002.pdf

I leave the discussion open as to how Xerox and the MPAA would feel about the symbol itself.

Blue food bestows immortality...?

Maybe colloidal silver is what bodhisattvas eat for breakfast.

Do they have a lot of casino money? They might hire an army with that.

Legislation really shouldn't be passed in a way that resembles trolling on Wikipedia.

Like a kindergarten, democracy requires constant vigilance, but it only works if you put adults in charge.

It's vertical, so only toons can dance on it.

Why should machines produces literature?

Because theys always wins Novel Writing Month.

Seriously, though, neither the Foucault canard nor "efficiency" answer the question. I'll listen to the presentation once I can get ahold of it, but tha6 Powerpoint slide does not fill me with confidence that an insight has been had.

Short of AI expressing a viewpoint, machines aren't participants of a sentient conversation. Text is a tool. Authors and readers are users.

The Tenth was always one of my favorites.

Anyone notice the whole "Fahrenheit 451" quality of the brand name, there?

Jeez, what dickheads.

I call time travel.

Lynch should consider himself vinced.

If they really loved the Disney legacy, these fans would have their heads cryogenically frozen and then have their survivors hide them somewhere in the park.

Show some respect!

I really don't know which is more troubling.

1) The attitude that nuclear annihilation is a thing of the past.

2) Pyros making a rousing gendercidal manifesto... while in her/his weblink trying to sell me insurance.

I will say that making the experiment to kill off all male humans would be safer and more recoverable than an old-fashioned WWIII.

Either would break the insurance industry, though. You've been warned.

Is Blinn on Anderson's blacklist now?

Good point Talia. Newton has gone unopposed for too damn long.

I think we have a winner of the "Ugly Mickey" contest.

I call time travel!

"Suck all the fun out of the game"?

Any boardgame with no built-in time limit is automatically not very fun.

I'm glad the capitalist mystique of the game is now blown open. Monopoly needed its rules broken eons ago-- now maybe people can discover some truly well-designed games, like Puerto Rico.

RStevens @39:

Prophecy is all about being first, my good man.

Gilbert @46:

Don't forget what the title of that story was.

Nonsense. The process may be beginning, but other technologies will intervene.

In the end humanity will consist entirely of supergenius goddess-like women and the servorobots that cater to them.

Let R. Stevens be your prophet in this matter.

So… the big story at FEMA is that they’re screwing around in the office, pretending to be something they’re not.

It is a crucially important issue, of course. The government posing as the press is a terrible manifestation of tyranny and irresponsibility. An abrogation of the defense of our liberties that they swore an… um… that they…

…

…Does anyone smell smoke?

Kids need to eat more.

But I'm a halfling. We throw a party for a kid's first cirrhosis diagnosis.

All the popular girls need a forklift to leave their homes.

Wow. You think our times are the most creative wild and decadent, and that our supermedia can put our ancestors all to shame, even in their own centuries.

And then stuff like this surfaces.

Humans are cool.

Well, the researchers should stop using "Sarah Connor" as their damn password!

APE HAS KILLED APE
APE HAS KILLED APE
APE HAS KILLED APE
APE HAS KILLED APE
APE HAS KILLED APE
APE HAS KILLED APE

It's been pointed out elsewhere that many of those homes are owned by Glenn's fellow staunch conservatives who live in Orange County. Maybe he meant them.

Maybe he meant that Blackwater base that's planned in the area.

I don't think he really specified.

One example of this is that when we watch a scary movie, we get scared, and when we watch porn we get turned on. We cry when someone dies in a movie. Our brain cannot tell the difference between what’s simulated and what’s real, because this distinction didn’t exist in the Stone Age.

Clay@11:
The assertion that we cower/cry/are aroused by fictional situations due to a deep-seated inability to discern fantasy from reality seems to be a shallow plumbing of what the mind actually does when exposed to these media.

To which I must point out that media that genuinely simulates the sound and motion of real life has only existed for about 100 years. Not many movies were released into the Neolithic trade culture, but I think the human imagination was flourishing just fine with orally-copied stories, which allowed the hearers to hack the feelings of being scared or romantic without actually believing they were about to get eaten or laid that very second.

Perhaps the authors feel that evolution can only take place when everything stands still, because the only times they have observed reproductive stimuli is in cases where the desired female is a lifeless photograph. To which I and Mr. Darwin wish them many happy returns.

Way to go, Guitar Hero.

Is Led Zep running for governor of California?

'Cause I don't want to see the title references running amok in any other context ever again.

in a store that celebrates the shirtless male, shirtless men are not allowed to buy shirts

Ironically, that's not ironic, but merely self-defeating honesty in advertising.

AT&T had thousands of phone sanitizer employees they had to let go...

Until one day...

Oh, every edition has its haters. This kind of central control has been tried since Mr. Gygax's time, and people always just wind up playing whatever and however they want.

And all the dungeons should have been emptied of monsters by now anyway. They got character rights back in 3rd edition, remember?

Seriously, that shambling mound you fought back in 1996? He wears a suit now and has a higher paying job than you.

Cute how there's no religion before Krishna. It's all blank and stuff. And large swaths of Africa are animist to this day, which I guess counts as Christian now.

This is like charting the rise and spread of the internet by following only five companies. Seriously, it's a lot of non-information.

Meh. Hyde Park has a real one an hour north. Requires a car, of course.

GYWO always rocks. Always a chore to link to properly, which is starting to have a kind of "old school" internet caché.

As for evil wizards and their mercenary armies, see the end of the Lord of the Rings, when Frodo comes home to the Shire.

What, nothing happened in the movie?

READ A BOOK!

"Jaywalking" as "raping traffic" deserves to become a net meme, perhaps applied to Wikipedia spawn sites.

As for murder not being theft, it is a figure of speech that murder is "taking a man's life"-- I imagine the phrase is of considerable antiquity, but it is only a metaphor, not a legal construct.

Compare the phrase "music piracy" which is a much more recent conflation, actually designed to confuse contemporary customers. True piracy was murder and theft on the high seas. It's in the Constitution as something Congress has authority over.

Pirates of the Spanish Main were not known for quietly pulling up alongside galleons, copying the gold and jewels therein, and then sailing off without murdering, raping, or stealing anything from anyone.

The economy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries would be very different if the pirates had been able to do that. Spain might have had to rethink it's business model. Which was destroying their own economy while murdering and raping Aztecs and Incans.

But, y'know, it's just a metaphor.

"Do writers make more money or less money from a world that has Google in it?"

Um, this isn't phrased as a yes or no question.

So the "yes" (presumably to the "more" money) is kinda equivocal.

Which leads me to ask, do editors make more or less money in a world that has Wikipedia in it?

That's terrible. Yet, she did more to further kids cherishing their independence and liberty of thought than many other authors.

Who can forget the terrible tyranny of IT in A Wrinkle in Time? The image of a street of identical children bouncing the same exact ball in the same exact way—except for one, who kept at it after the allotted play period, and whose mother rushed out and dragged the poor thing inside, terrified of the consequences.

Our class in school read Wrinkle, and we all wrote—handwrote, mind you, ye webkinder—to Ms. L'Engle, who had a policy of returning every letter written her with a letter of her own.

She wrote back only one for our class, to me personally (possibly by alphabetical order of my last name? I don't recall what I wrote her) and she asked that I thank the rest of my class for her, and apologized for not having time to write one to each of us. But her letter arrived after summer vacation began, and next year's classes of course had different students.

So if there are any classmates of the Central Dauphin School District Class of 1980 I didn't mention this to before, Madeleine L'Engle sends her kindest thanks.

Sweet journeys, ma'am.

Yes, he was 1975. He was known to compare the nascent Goth scene unfavorably to the Visigoths and even the Ostragoths, whom he knew personally back in the day.

Vick's in trouble, sure.

But it ain't illegal in Flatland.