Rob: It's 2008.

"... business of taking people's money online remains in 2007."

Joel:

Agreed: Until someone pwns the box.

Step 1: Wake Up
Step 2: HELL-LO
Step 3: ????
Step 4: SCARRED FOR LIFE.

Mouse like there's no-one watching.

As a college kid, I did support for HP.

I watched the last of the /real/ customer service be run off by metrics.

It's not cost-effective* to hire anyone other than American high-school drop-outs and people who do not share the same language as the customer.

*cost-effective to someone's 6-month vacation replete with first-class accommodations.

That was neat. I need to remember that should I ever need to demonstrate harmonic frequencies, latch-up and capacitance bleed in a silicon circuit. That makes a tremendous practical demonstration of those concepts.

I was all "lalalala - Thanks BB, yet another wonderful book I will never find time for and never get on the half-priced bookshelf" - until one of the comments said "FREE". Obviously I need to get this book - I need to RTFA or at least skim it better!

*yoink*

A little red at the bottom, a cricket bat, and bob's your uncle!

What's the hex-dec for transparency?

Like dark matter, but mediated by the speed of light.

Doctors aren't allowed to fail to treat people because they're idiots.

Now, if Ben Stein had the courage of his convictions, he would voluntarily forgo modern medical treatment.

Instead, he is a hypocrite.

Ben Stein's words are an outright lie.

Hatred and mistrust of Jews was rampant throughout European Protestant / Lutheran / Russian Orthodox / Catholic / Orthodox Christendom for hundreds of years before the 20th century. Accusations ranging from well poisoning to host desecration to deicide were levelled against Jews as a whole. Luther hated Jews, and wove his anti-Semitic views into Lutheran culture.

Twentieth Century: Along came The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Along came Hitler, and Mein Kampf - which made its' argument not on science, but on divine right of the German people to hold historically German lands. Hitler hooked into religious sentiment. He got blessings from the Lutheran and Roman Catholic churches.

Did Nazi Germany employ scientists? Yes. Did they force some scientists to work? Yes. Did some leave before the forced detainments began? Yes. Did some people who weren't scientists get to claim to be scientists because they were Nazi ideologists? Yes.

The incredible irony is that Mein Kampf - and Hitler's ideology and propaganda - draws very heavily on the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion - which explicitly call out "Darwinism" as being a lie and a supposed tool of "Zionists"!

Ben Stein is depending on his audience to not know the history he's talking about. And he's laughing all the way to the bank.

There is no pejorative fit to print for Stein's hypocrisy and utter cynical craven pursuit of money.

K386: The problem is, we don't know precisely - and the answer is therefore "Probably, Yes."

Woot!

My $.02:
Kenny and Dolly, "Islands in the Stream"
MC Hammer, "Addams Groove"
Vitamin C, "Smile"
LEN, "Steal my Sunshine".

Necessary: A script that changes all instances of the string "eBGIQ7ZuuiU" to some random other RickRoll.

It's bad when I can recognise the RickRoll from having memorised the URL ID.

No one could have foreseen this.

No ONE.

This will only work if one is wearing goggles and a mouth filter as well; Allergens have a tendency to glom onto the wet surfaces of one's eyes, and drain through the tear ducts into the sinuses.

I love the robot generator. That's terribly nifty.

The only cool Apple genius I've ever known never worked for Apple, as a genius or otherwise. He worked for an outsourced tech support company handling an Apple contract in the early nineties, and it was his insistence that I try a Mac that got me hooked - and I've never looked back.
This man may or may not have been able to fix the problem over the phone (most often he was); He still received - unsolicited - more customer appreciation letters than any other phone tech Apple had, in-house or out, in the ten+ years they'd existed.

He eventually became a free-lance Mac repair tech; Many of his clients considered him the "go-to" guy, and would pay ridiculous amounts of money for his services. Sadly for the Mac world, he has a regular gig now.

I hope Apple can find the chutzpah to get guys like him into stores as Geniuses.

So what we have is in fact two groups, the NYPD and the Critical Mass bicyclist group, who are both cheating / breaking the law, and both are justifying their cheating / breaking the law because the other is cheating / breaking the law.

So who will be first to stop breaking the law?

For the few albums I own where the album actually makes sense as a work in its' own right, I make a playlist - not just to drop onto the Shuffle, but also for the Roku in my living room.

I recently picked up an iPod Touch, and find myself wishing for an Album shuffle, or even Album - to - Album progressive play. If that existed, I would probably never use a playlist again.

MichaelWDean:

"Are some of these corporations any different from ... crotch grabbin' gangatas who "gots to git paid"?"

*cough* google O'reilly Falafel *cough* NSFW*COUGHCOUGHCOUGH*

Evidence's postings follow a kind of script that I've seen many, many other anti-evolutionist propagandists follow:

1: Make a lot of posts containing a lot of strawmen of Evolution / Biology;
2: Only respond to certain people who don't completely shut down his blather on Evolution or who try and engage him on religious topics;
3: Talk up his deity, ask for people to read the Bible;
4: Make some statements that are designed to get people to read the Bible / reference the Bible to refute them (example, The Bible saying the earth is round - it actually says it is flat and has four corners and sits on columns (Genesis!))
5: Claim to have to go, offer to pray for all the people in the room / forum / post.

I've seen this over, and over, and over again that I've often wondered: Is there a script? Is there someplace training people to do this? Or is it the same troll over and over and over again?

Andygates: Yeahp. I bet those lizards hurt like the dickens when they bite yer fingertip.

Takuan - Touche'. Perhaps you are.

Mechphisto:

In fact, Stein was not the one doing the interviewing. Have you seen the movie - ? Did they dub in Stein's voice asking questions over the actual interviewers?

If that is the case, I'd like to know if Mr. Stein ... "editorialised" the questions. /Smoooothed/ them, y'know. Fudged. Mislead. Little white lies. Invalidated his journalistic credibility (as if he ever had any).

Takuan:

Nnno.

First: We aren't inhumane fascists. We don't censor because we let idiots demonstrate their idiocy in public and then we turn to our children and say "And that's why we aren't X". Everyone needs examples of what not to do, and people have - hard as it may be to believe - engaged their brains and realised they were caught in a cult / scam / bullshit and have walked away from it.

Second: Even if we /were/ inhumane fascists, this "problem" has been bred in to the European population and European society for 1500 years at least - since the Roman and thus Catholic conquest of Europe - if not longer. Who knows how long it will take to breed out gullibility and pigheaded willingness to Lie For Jesus™?

"Evidence" - the poster - is using what is known as a "strawman" of evolution - a strawman built by Ken Ham, propagated through his organisations: ICR, and Answers in Genesis.

His statements demonstrate that he does not know what he is talking about. Nothing he has said about evolution up to this point has been true or accurate.

Post #44 demonstrates that he is intentionally lying to further his religion.

This is known as Lying for Jesus ™.

To those of you in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere:

This is what we, in America, have to put up with. It is what our politicians believe and practice. It is what blocks our funding for actual science. It is what cripples children's education.

And it is spreading, to Turkey, to Europe, to Australia, and beyond.

And #44 lies once again, and demonstrates that he is in fact Lying for Jesus™.

A:
Yes, it's evolution.
B:
Yes, the slam on Ben Stein was entirely necessary. People learn to censure themselves through shame or guilt. Ben Stein's sense of guilt was replaced before he entered the service of Nixon. he also has no shame. The final function is to warn others - which BoingBoing is very good at doing.
C:
There is no difference between macro-evolution, micro-evolution, and just plain old evolution. Anyone who makes noise about "no new information", "no new traits", "there has to be a transition to a new species - cat to dog" "evolution is a religion", are lying, outright.
D:
#27! Yes, Darwin did say that a lack of transitional fossils would disprove his theory! Right after that he says, in essence: "So thank goodness we have this mountain of transitional fossils in the record!"
Either you're a liar, intentionally trying to mislead readers as to what evolution is and the evidence for it - or you are completely ignorant of the subject and lack qualification to discuss it.

#11 JackCastile:

So, so very sorry to inform you that you are wrong. Police have to follow the law like everyone else. That's so important that I'm going to repeat it:

Police have to follow the law like everyone else.

They have special dispensations when in active pursuit of their duties - not at any other time.

They have to obey the speed limits unless the lights are flashing, they have to refrain from littering unless it's part of an actual operation, and parking in front of a fire hydrant while not actively answering a call is clearly illegal.

Frink was breathless: "It happened while I was testing a batch of the new Giant MagnetoResistive tech; I'd initialised the platter with zeroes and then read it back to verify. The qual script flagged it as a write failure, but with an incredibly high failure perce-"

Johnson interrupted: "Cut to the chase, man - you're saying the run was contaminated."

"No - no sir, it's not that at all. I dug through the log fil-"

"So if it's not contamination then it's the test equipmen-"

Frink spoke uncharacteristically louder: "NO, sir, let me finish: I checked the log files. It's reading back the same values every. single. time. No matter /what/ we write to the platters."

"... So?"

"At first, we thought it was random noise - but it turns out to be twenty-two digits from the deeply insignificant depths of Pi, sir, followed by seven others."

The room went really quiet.

Terwilliger drew breath and said "Followed by one through ten, right?"

"A thousand, sir. Binary counting."
--
Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution - ShareAlike license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/

I live in Dallas.

I gave up driving in Dallas years ago. The stress was terrible.

Drivers pack intersections during congestion, causing gridlock.

I have noticed (I take public transit) that the red light cameras in Dallas and suburbs have been put up in intersections where gridlock often occurs during congestion.

Whether it is failing to yield right of way, failing to allow a lane change for a properly signalling vehicle, or failure to even notice other vehicles - Dallas has a very high percentage of aggressive, selfish drivers.

Our city council is also staffed by a band of merry criminals - our Mayor named his campaign finance treasurer to chair the public transit board - who promptly forged legal documents to avoid repaying debts, arranged mafia-style secret deals with supporters of the campaign for access to public contracts with the public transit board, and when these facts came to light, was first charged with a mere misdemeanor and then later apparently committed a murder-suicide pact with her husband. And that's merely the most recent scandal! Most of the city council have been investigated by the FBI for making or knowing about secret sweetheart real estate development deals, one former councilman has been indicted (and I seem to recall convicted or plead out) for collusion to fix taxi fares and rig taxi licensing, and the bond money we have collected over the past decade and a half to build a park in South Dallas has been hijacked to create developments "more in the public interest": Translation, more taxable things such as a toll road. The city CFO "discovered" millions of dollars misplaced in several accounts and the city jail has lost people long enough for them to need hospitalisation and was closed by the Feds for being incredibly filthy. And that's just the past few years.

Dallas - without a doubt - illegally shortened the duration of the yellow lights to bilk citizens out of money; Nothing could move our bureaucracy to do something for the sake of the citizenry without lining some politician's pockets.

Followup: Ah-ha!

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/11/21/land-grab-case-in-bo.html

#1: Depending on where the property is, the laws differ. You'd want to ask a lawyer. I do know that (thanks to a BoingBoing story about it) there are some places in the US that have laws that state "If you use X real estate for Y time and Z owner fails to object, it becomes yours." - the cost of fighting in court might be more than the house is worth, however.

I'd love to see a lawyer provide an opinion on this kind of thing. Speculative squatting of abandoned sub-prime properties!

Anangbhai (#6):

I think I will be forced by the brilliance of your lyrical illustration to regurgitate it elseplace.

Just off the top of my head:

An attempt to comply with treaties/laws that prevent certain types of technology (i.e. encryption engines or encryption IP, or items that could plausibly be re-used for encryption purposes) from being exported to 'terrorist states'.

Probably the only way we'd ever know exactly why is if the lawyer who decided this was necessary comes forward.

When is Bush ordering the National guard to start wearing red coats?

The difference between what the GOP have done and what the Nazis did seems to be:

A: The Nazis suppressed free speech first;

B: The Nazis militarised their domestic police first;

C: The Nazis only wished to dominate much of Western Europe.

#31:

Again, you will probably wish to contact or retain an attorney, and seek that attorney's advice.

I'm not an attorney.

My understanding is that under the freedoms that the Press enjoys in the United States of America, what Xeni and BoingBoing have done - publish a fair use excerpt of a publicly available web site - falls under the protections of free speech.

While there are laws in various localities that to one extent or another restrict the media from publishing photos of children without the verified permission of their parents, those laws extend solely to children inside the United States.

Neither Xeni nor BoingBoing have any indication that this photo was taken inside the United States, and would therefore fall under United States copyright / child-identification-in-the-press laws; nor that you are the author of that photo under United States copyright law, nor that you are the parent of the child in the photograph, nor that the child is verifiably a United States citizen at this time

UNLESS

You provide to them documentation /proving/ that you are the parent, and that the child is yours.

The very best way to do so is to use the services of an attorney, as a trustable and secure channel, to communicate to Happy Mutants LLC your identity and the identity of your child.

Until you do so, the editors have no way to distinguish you from someone who wishes to make vague legal threats on an online forum in an attempt to hamper their free speech rights.

Even after you do contact them through an attorney, there are still - in my opinion - many questions of fact and law that are best left to professionals who deal with the law, as to whether the editors and Happy Mutants LLC have a legal obligation to censor or blur that particular photograph when /they/ use it, when it is freely available from other sources.

I cannot speak for anyone employed by BoingBoing or Happy Mutants, LLC and I'm certainly not a lawyer. If I were acting in the place of Xeni, I, personally, would consider the wishes of a bona-fide parent to not have their child's photo published. I have a step-son, and have all the parental concerns regarding my son's image being misused on the Internet.

The burden of proof to establish that you are the bona-fide parent, however, is on you.

#97: Simplicity and elegance? In 24 hour this entry /will/ be buried somewhere on the site.

Even the "how to submit stories" link goes to an entry.

#21:

I am not a lawyer. I suggest, however, that

IF that is actually your child pictured on the CQ website,

THEN you should contact an attorney and have them contact Happy Mutants LLC's retained attorney with documented proof that you are the parent, and cite relevant and jurisdictional child safety / protection laws and precedents that demonstrate that your interest in preventing your child's picture from being re-published as part of news reporting, over-rides Xeni's fair use rights to re-publish it as part of topical news coverage of an organisation that is using the image themselves, without Xeni having included any personally identifying information herself regarding the child.

In short: While I cannot say with any authority that the comments are not the correct venue for your concern, I will suggest that your satisfaction will be best served in another manner.

For anyone who wonders what the minimal standard among the community for "acceptable swearing and personal abuse" happens to be, please refer to the timeless canonical classic on the subject,'Insult Scene from "Roxanne" by Martin and Hannah'.

If you cannot meet the minimum level of self-deprecation and originality - as well as wit - set by that milestone, please consider not engaging in either personal abuse or swearing.

Thank You.

(paraphrased from my policy statement on my WWIV-BBS, circa 1991).

Xeni:

I presume that the story leaves out the name of the evangelical mega-church, and its' offshoot, to protect the identity of the child and/or your sources. If there is ever a way to publish the name of that evangelical mega-church, then there are /numerous/ watchdog organisations who would very much like to know that info.

I'm a member of the dark_christian community on LiveJournal, and I'm posting a story referring to this article, asking the community members for their best informed guesses - reverse engineering the identity of the organisation, as it were.

stupendous.

It's like Ikea porn for percussionists.

Never. Had. So. Much. Technolust ...

I have to wonder about the motivation of whomsoever placed the ads.

I can only come to two conclusions:

A: Someone was playing a juvenile prank;

B: Someone was righteously pissed off at that fellow and put some thought into their revenge.

I can't blame the people who responded to the advertisement. Many years of such adverts being placed in local papers - and dutifully checked for authenticity by the editorial staff - has primed a large swath of the older population to take such advertisements at face value.

I also cannot blame them for blowing off the owner. For all they knew, he was just another person responding to the advertisement, and trying to swindle them out of what was 'rightfully theirs'.

I have to wonder about the motivation of whomsoever placed the ads.

I can only come to two conclusions:

A: Someone was playing a juvenile prank;

B: Someone was righteously pissed off at that fellow and put some thought into their revenge.

I can't blame the people who responded to the advertisement. Many years of such adverts being placed in local papers - and dutifully checked for authenticity by the editorial staff - has primed a large swath of the older population to take such advertisements at face value.

I also cannot blame them for blowing off the owner. For all they knew, he was just another person responding to the advertisement, and trying to swindle them out of what was 'rightfully theirs'.

I'm liking the notion of an index that tracks the Cost of Evil. We could have it in three different flavours:

Absolute Cost of Evil, expressed in monetary valuation;
Relative Cost of Evil, expressed in percentage of corporation's market capitalisation;
Tendency to Valuate Evil, expressed as the product of Absolute to Relative costs.

I caught Michael Shermer on CSPAN last night giving a talk at (urgh) the CATO Institute about his latest publication, The Mind of The Market. (MythBusters was not yet on.)

He noted that humans have a tendency to be susceptible to being suckered, by the way a fact or question is framed.

Ask someone whether they'd be willing to walk four blocks to save fifty bucks on a $100 purchase, and they're all for it!

Ask someone whether they'd be willing to walk four blocks to save fifty bucks on a $1200 purchase, and they routinely respond "Nah! It's just fifty bucks!"

I'm sure the same thing happens to the capitalists who profited from the mortgage bubble. "It's just $500 extra on a $120,000 house!" "It's just $1100 extra! Less than 1%!"

At the very least, I think they're aware of that and used it.

Beeeecause no-one has yet figured out how to remotely tap into and access the contents of someone's cellphone, via the cellular network or via the ubiquitous and of-course-highly-secure Bluetooth protocol, right?

When they ask if anyone else has had access to your baggage, they need not worry whether anyone else has had access to your mobile device / cell phone.

It is with only a tinge of irony that I ask: "Papers, please".

He should name her: Every man in London needs to know who this woman is. $12,000 seems expensive, but I'm sure there's at least 20 men over the course of her lifetime who would have been nominally willing to invest fifty quid to learn of this personal quality of hers.
There's an opportunity to ensure someone faces the consequences of their choices.

#76:

Uhm, have you not been paying attention?

The Federal Government is funded by us, down here, in the lower-to-middle-class. George Bush's administration gave the ultra-wealthy many, many tax breaks.

The rich are rich because they figured out ways to not have to give up money that came into their hands.

Having the federal government 'bail out' this problem is like bailing from one boat into another.

P.S.: Encouraging people to not pay the debts that they are /legally required/ to pay is Incitement - in and of itself a crime. I'm not a lawyer, so don't take my word for it, ask your own lawyer.

Every time someone questions my opposition to voting machines, I refer them to what it takes to license and operate a video poker machine in the State of Nevada.

Entire casinos can be shut down for audit if an inspector suspects that there's more than one machine malfunctioning, and the inspector can have access to the machine and everything to do with it at any time. Machines that are capable of being influenced or exhibit statistical deviations from random get yanked.

But VOTING MACHINES ARE CLOSED TO INSPECTION?

My wife asks me why we don't have a car, when other people who make "less than we do" have cars; I shall have her read this article - and the comment, especially about kids in Cali driving BMWs - and the record profits of ExxonMobil and the lavish lifestyles of the oil-owning people of Brunei, Saudi Arabia, the Sudan, the UAE ...

My co-workers wondered why I have never and never intend to invest in the IRA we have; I am forbidden by law and like my job too much to explain it to them.

My parents wanted to know why I didn't buy a house, when the rates were so low.

Only in modern America can living the lifestyle of an ascetic be rebellion.

They neglected to include "tiny magnet to place on needle" as well as "needle and 00 silk".

I'd bet the Reflective Signal Surface is the back of the sardine lid.

Anyone who thinks Sardine Tins are un-crushable has never, ever worked stocking in a supermarket.

#24, #23:

Archimedes' technique finds volume.

THEN YOU WEIGH IT ON A SCALE.

And /then/ you do some simple math and get density.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes#Discoveries_and_inventions

Don't Hold Strong Opinions About Things You Don't Understand.

So, for a bar that's 1 inch by 1 inch by 2 inches, gold weighs 632.54 grams and tungsten weighs 630.90 grams - a difference of 1.5 grams.

For someone who is "fencing their looted Nazi Gold" on the black market to a mid-level idiot thug who has never heard of Archimedes and who is guesstimating volume, 1.5 grams is too small to distinguish. Hell, even if the thug /does/ drop the bar in to a tank to check volume and then calculates weight, that tells him the gold is %99.94 pure.

The standard for 24-karat is %99.90 pure.

Idiot thug is going to knife-nick the gold, bite the gold, weigh the gold and never notice the tungsten until he melts it down.

#10: You'd need a heck of a lot of current to reach gold's current-carrying capability to force some electricity through the tungsten; Losses at /that/ level of current could be ascribed to impurities or within the error bar of the equipment, unless your equipment was really good and you had a really well-characterised connection to the gold bar.

Which can also be read as "Verizon is teaming up with Yale to design P2P technology that stays inside their network, dramatically reducing the amount of money they have to pay to other networks for traffic across those networks, and building towards yet another walled garden scenario where they are the gatekeepers and can suppress P2P traffic that doesn't play ball."

On the one hand: I'd partcipate in a heartbeat, just because I'm an extremophile. Endure SERE-level endurance testing and get paid? sign me /up/. (yes, I would get paid. I have slept through tornados and been awake for five days straight, ridden in a Yugo with four other 250-300 pound men and hiked Philmont, and can engage myself in tasks many others find screamingly boring - the secret of my employment.)

On the other hand: This really does de-sensitise people to torture.

Dichotomy! One electric monk, stat!

For once, I agree with Takuan: Continue to speak out against them. Give them nothing. Never stop raising your hand against them. Boycott them whenever possible.

The line must be drawn /HEYAH/. /This/ Far! No Farther!

As someone who has lived in both Arlington and in Dallas, and who has drunk the tap water in both cities, and has sat on city board meetings in both locales, I have a small amount of insight here.

Arlington will not divulge what pharmaceutical showed up in their drinking water because

A: The details of Arlington's water treatment are actually considered a matter of national security; Their system is not custom made but off-the-shelf and is shared by several other mid-sized cities in the United States and the details of that are a matter of public record (they had to bid it out); Revealing a particular chemical that they aren't screening for would reveal the same for many other cities. Publicizing this exploit - in a system that can't easily nor quickly be patched in all instances - would be ethically irresponsible. Parts of Arlington's water supply comes, also, from the Ft. Worth municipal water supply, as Arlington grew, it incorporated previously un-incorporated parts of Tarrant county.

B: The pharmaceutical was detected at a few parts per billion or per trillion - trace amounts - far less than what you would pick up if you were, say, involved in kissing or having unprotected sex with someone being treated with the pharmaceuticals in question. You might pick up a comparable dose, or more if that person /sneezed/ on you, or you shook their hand and then wiped your eye.

C: Dallas and Fort Worth both have state-of-the-art water treatment and testing facilities. The water supply in North Texas comes, pretty exclusively, from publicly-accessible man-made reservoir lakes and for decades, someone poisoning those reservoirs has been a nightmare security scenario. We are in a drought condition and have been for many years, thanks to global warming patterns.

Our wastewater treatment plants put the treated sewage right back into those reservoirs. The same can be said of So. California.

Ozarka bottles their water - the water they deliver in five, three, and one gallon bottles as well as the 20-ozers - out of the Ft. Worth municipal water supply and filter and test it fairly thoroughly before they ship it out.

What's the answer? Well, probably the answer is to start catching more rain and filtering and treating it for use as drinking water. There's upgrading wastewater treatment - which is expensive. And, of course, there's giving people fewer drugs in the first place.

Bad for your lungs, perhaps.

DEFINITELY bad for your electronics.

Don't look for a warranty with this product - it's essentially a lemon.

#4: Contempt of crooks while in defense of actual standards is no vice.

I can think of rational trade restrictions that prevent all of these except for /sewing machines/.

That one sounds to me like a holdover from communist "our products are the best, we protect the livelihoods of workers" mandates.

I am tired of lawyers who ignore the spirit of the law in favour of the letter-that-keeps-their-workload-down-yet-violates-the-rights-of-others.

There can be no religious test for governmental office. All verbally-administered oaths are now available in a manner that accommodates and preserves the religious values of the person taking the oath.

That university's lawyer made a decision based on what should be a question of law, which to my understanding is the exclusive purview of the judiciary - and violated a Constitutional law in the process.

That university's lawyer - undoubtedly having signed said oath themselves - has violated it, as well as their professional ethics and duty to the public good. /That lawyer/ should be fired, disbarred, and fined 120% of their yearly salary. For incompetence.

The sound you are hearing is My Head Exploding In Frustration.

Moonbat:

It's hardly a point of view. Theft is theft, whether it is done by someone trying to stave off hunger or it is done by a government employee mindlessly following poorly-conceived policies and making up a non-existent policy ("has to be signed by Other Doctors", indeed).

Cory's readers - myself included - read him because he is willing to call a spade a spade.

The quality of discourse in these comments is generally fairly high - I speak as someone who spent a great deal of free time over the course of years 'debating' Creationists, and that is a cess-pool I never wish to revisit.

Holy Bleeping Bleepedy.

The judgment of history will not be kind.

#13:
"There is no medical reason to carry that much food ..."

And you, being a medical doctor, are qualified to make this determination - right?

You are in full possession of the facts?

You - as a licensed and educated doctor - don't mind that an uneducated, unlicensed government employee is making a medical decision, over-riding the medical decision of two fully-qualified and licensed doctors?

Pardon, please, the fact that I do not lend credence to your opinion, whether you really are a medical doctor or not.

Michael: I remember it from my high-school German classes, with my former-East-German immigrant German teacher. He intimated that the term was uncomplimentary and was a euphemism during the Cold War ala "Big Brother". His use may have been entirely regional.

For those who don't speak German, "Ueberwachenden" is literally "hyper-attentive", the German idiom for a smothering micro-managing personality.

#44:
"Christians such as the Falwells, Dobsons and Huckabees never claim to speak for others ... "

Really? Wow. That's why one of them isn't running for PotUSA, one of them didn't run for PotUSA, and two of them aren't ministers who've abused or broken electioneering laws - right?

#9: But does it make popcorn?

Yes, officer: My computer is that ten-year-old Compaq Deskpro with Ubuntu installed. Not the MacMini in the cubbyhole of my desk.

Wild-assed guess out of second field:

The changes he made increase the speed of the rotor while reducing the torque output. I'll bet it's a three-phase (or polyphase) induction motor and that whatever changes he made set up a harmonic of the original three-phase (or polyphase) wave. Twice (or three, or four, or five) times the number of magnetic repulsion/attraction impulses but for shorter periods of time.

Takuan:

What part of "No, you don't get to take away my right to bear arms and no, you don't get to vote on it." do you not understand?

By your logic, no-one "needs" recordable audio cassettes, recordable VHS cassettes, or freely copyable digital media.

Thankfully, we have rights inherently, not given to us by the state; We surrender some rights conditionally as a bargain for living in a society. And we do not outlaw tools that have legitimate purposes - we outlaw using them for illegitimate purposes.

I hate guns.

I love America more than I hate guns.

NOEN:

Or - hey, here's a revolutionary idea: An encyclopedia, with up-to-date entries! There's a killer application. Damn. Hope someone hops on that.

I could make the argument that semi-automatic firearms / automatic firearms in the hands of citizens are not now tools that - nor could they now potentially be - used to establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, nor promote the general welfare. They don't suppress crime, we don't shoot people in the streets after trials, widespread gun ownership doesn't stop riots.

It's the fact that firearms secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity - that clinches them, forevermore, in the realm of "No, you don't get to take away my right to bear arms and you don't get to vote on it either." If the US Government collapses or is hijacked by a fascist military coup or just abandons us (Katrina Aftermath, anyone?) we will need them.

Arms are the first tool for securing one's self, property, family, health and life. Allowing a government to take them away without specifically, in each and every single case, showing due and reasonable cause to do so - is unConstitutional.

Airspeed. You either have it or you don't.

If you don't, you stall.

Is the prop/engine power/volume able to pull a large volume of _air_over_the_wings_? If so, takeoff occurs.

Questions about whether the treadmill is ideal or practical, whether it accelerates infinitely or can keep up with the wheels, whether the wheels catch fire or not - beside the point.

In short: The entire formulation misses the real point.

If every third firing of the taser carried a %30 chance of tasing the person holding the device instead, fatalities from police tasings would drop markedly.

Every police officer should be videotaped while on duty, and the video and audio should be encrypted, with separately-encrypted checksums, and the video and audio should be available to anyone connected to a case /immediately/ upon subpoena - no delay, no exceptions. Any police officer found to not be recording their on-duty time or any time when they are carrying their gun and/or badge - immediate dismissal.

I'm a natural-born, law-abiding and peaceful conscientious dissenter American. Any police officer that points a taser or gun at me and pulls the trigger had better be ready to pay for my child's and grandchildrens' college tuition, and any administrations that kidnaps me or declares me an enemy combatant had better have arranged to be paying for my great-great-grandchildren's tuition. Personally.

This bullshit has to stop.

Ever ask a Scientologist /why/ they're trying to "crush" psychiatry?

Some representative answers I've gotten:

"They have no ethics." (note: To a scientologist, "ethics" has a specific meaning different from what the rest of us use)
"They are enemies of mankind."
"They've created drugged victims of millions."
"They're part of a conspiracy to keep humans subjugated."

- mixed in with a variety of lies and evasions.

-- Psychiatrists, who are not just medical doctors and are subject to all the ethical and professional codes that other medical doctors are, but also their own supplementary ethical codes.

I could just go on and on /however/ others have done so at length and everyone can use Google.

Long live fair use and news reporting!

This is bad. Why?

Lack of proper, scientific study and wide public appeal for more research. Lack of peer review.

The same straight-to-the-public approach was used for:

1: A recent "free energy" machine;
2: "Irreducible Complexity"
3: cold fusion
4: left as an exercise to the reader to fill in.

Bad, M'Kay? Perform more studies, with controls, and with followup.

Encrypt your traffic, folks. Encrypt, Encrypt, Encrypt.

I bragged to my wife two nights ago about the JREF Million Dollar challenge while she was watching NBC's "Medium" - she said "That woman really exists!".

The Million Dollar Challenge is a great rhetorical tool. It is a shame to see it go. I do understand that given the state of Randi's health, the overwhelming paperwork involved in the application process, and the fact that it's not performing in the way he originally imagined (visibly and powerfully prying scammers free from their prey), it has become difficult to continue it. Apparently even raising the bar on the application process hasn't helped.

RIP, JREF $1,000,000.00 challenge. Here's hoping that whatever Randi comes up with next works as well or better.

Where's the "IAMLEGEND" tag when one needs it?

The true answer, of course, is obvious: Eat 'Roo.

Rugerredhawk: ... "Sunbathing topless is equally anti-social in a family park like this." - Because the human body is anti-social? You may as well be saying "Sunbathing is equally anti-social in a family park like this." or "I shall use my authority and funding as Attorney General of the US to promptly cover this classical nude of Lady Liberty."

Sunbathing topless isn't anti-social - imposing Puritanical and Victorian views of women on a free people is anti-American. The only crime here is the government's officials over-stepping their Constitutional authority and restraining the liberty of consenting adults - not to mention the chilling effects it will have on women who - LEGALLY - would consider sunbathing topless in that jurisdiction!

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

@29:

When was the last time you had Circuit City over for a dinner party? When was the last time you sent Circuit City holiday snaps?

It's NOT working perfectly: It's allowing greedy executives to hide behind a (throw-away) corporate reputation. Each of those executives is profiting, immensely, at the expense of shareholders, workers, store management, and customers. Not content to skip a trip to Vail this year, they destroy the livings of hundreds.

"Circuit City" does not care about the reputation of "Circuit City". The executives only care about looting it and letting the corporate brand take the hits to 'reputation'.

IANAL, but all the published stop-and-search documents from the EFF and ACLU that I've read seemed to me to delineate just how illegal this procedure is.

#'s 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, & 11: RIGHT ON.

JS7A: I wish that everyone who intended to vote for Ron Paul were as well informed as you seem to be. Thanks.

Phasor3000:

They can't incite people to go out and start 'the apocalypse' - their prophecies revolve specifically around the Second Coming. They /do/ witness, proselytise, convert, steeplejack, lobby, and advocate the overthrow of the U.S. Government - it's Dominionism. They also go on mission to Asian Muslim states and South America.

You asked for one. I gave you three. Phelps has a tiny following, but the other two have widespread following and influence.

I said, and the research backs the fact, that violence is tied to economic poverty, frustrated post-adolescent males, and lack of education - all three together. You have made a strawman by eisegesising what I've written. What the US lacked in that equation during the Great Depression was a lot of frustrated post-adolescent males and a lack of education. Work could be had, families could be started, men could train in trades, children got educations - all because of the New Deal. We had also a sense of collective nationality due to the Great War before - leading into WWII ahead of it. World War Two, brought to you by the post-Weimar Germans: Economically frustrated by the Treaty of Versailles and the effects of the Great Depression, with a surfeit of nationalistic frustrated post-adolescent males who were poorly educated and actively miseducated through propaganda.

PHASOR3000:

Tim LaHaye, author of the "Left Behind" novels.
Fred Phelps, the domestic terror(ist) of Topeka, Kansas.
Pat Robertson.
Anyone preaching Rapture theology, or literal Second-Coming-of-Jesus theology; They support the state of Israel specifically because it is part of prophecy - a prophecy that includes the death and torture of any and all Jews who do not convert to Christianity.

Christians are less violent in America because violence is not tied to the peacefulness preached by a religion; Violence is tied to economic poverty, frustrated post-adolescent men and lack of education. Even Buddhists in Japan committed suicide bombings when they were denied economic freedom, prosperity, family life and relative autonomy (or so they believed) - in WWII.

If they forbid me to view their HTML code, how do they expect my computer to render their web page? Perhaps they should pull all the HTML and merely post password-protected PDF files.

And then they can have all their briefs engraved upon boxwood slabs, for reproduction purposes.

If I were to hire a law firm, (certainly not these jokers!) I would be free to state that I had retained their services, whether they like it or not - it's the First Amendment.

No education is complete until it includes them. Very true - also, no education is complete until it includes frauds, scams, hucksters, shysters, criminal behaviour and fascistic tendencies and why those things are bad.

Is there a correlation? Or is it mere coincidence? You decide!

The article is misleading, stating that the supposed battery doesn't use fission but then later states the energy source is when a neutron decays to a proton - which is beta decay.

It states that tritium is generated in the process.

This battery, even if it could be put into production, seems to use either tritium as the power source (half-life ~12 years) or lithium-6 or lithium-7 (which produce tritium when bombarded by energetic neutrons, which begs the question /where are the energetic neutrons coming from/ ); All three are considered to be precursor materials for nuclear weapons, with import/export highly controlled in the US, and all three are dangerous to human health when consumed/ingested/inhaled.

Occam's Razor would explain away any one of the parts, but not the totality of them.

When we have discovered that the White House issued an entire manual on how to suppress dissidents - Google "white house protester manual" -
When observers are denied entry to public proceedings because they wear lapel buttons that state, in fourteen-point type, "I love the people of Iraq" -
When the people who are key in the White House for the past six years were key in the Nixon administration, or grew up admiring the Nixon administration -
Occam's razor demands a view of the totality, not the isolated parts.

#6: Penn and Teller describe readily available and commonly known stunts and party games.

They do so in order to both prime the pump - to hook people into being interested in magic - and to give people who want nothing more than cheap thrills plenty of opportunity to do nothing more than that.

If a talented magician comes up with a great new trick, tells no-one how it is done, and takes that knowledge to the grave - is humanity in general really at a loss?
Are we counting the number of young innovative magicians the old master inspired?
Are we counting the number of people who avoided being hustled by charlatans because the old master's performance helped them realise that such feats are within the capabilities of humans and aren't supernatural / spiritual - ?