As many have pointed out - the only safe way to ride is to take a whole lane. If you're off on the side of the lane, drivers either don't notice you, or assume they can pass you without giving an inch, and make sharp right turns directly in front of you (or not even pas you first). If you take a lane, they acknowledge you and change lanes to pass.

I don't quite see how this should increase the chance of accidents. Giving everyone on the road enough room decreases the chance of accidents. If you can't even change lanes safely, then get the expletive deleted off the road and stop blaming me.

As for slowing traffic - I ride plenty fast, and almost invariably those who are most impatient to pass me, just end up just spending longer stuck at the next light. I don't pass them in the same lane as they sit there though - that's just the same stupidity, and invites them to pass me in the same lane as soon as the light goes green.

In my city, the cycling routes have these little dinky traffic signs, maybe 1/2 or 1/3 the size of a regular traffic sign. They are terrible.

I know what a stop sign looks like, I look out for them, and I stop at them, but these mini-signs do not look like the "real" thing; they are different enough from the pattern I'm looking for that I just don't see them. I'm not the only person who has noticed this occurence - other people have confirmed the same thing.

I recently noticed a mini-stop sign on a bike route I'd been taking to work for the past 6 months, and had not once noticed - I only noticed it because I was walking that day, so I WASN'T looking for traffic signs. I always slowed down, and often stopped, at that crossing because it's the sensible thing to do there, but I had no idea there was a stop sign.

Incidentally, this recalls what I was always taught as a safety rule:

As a pedestrian, assume drivers can't see you.
As a cyclist, assume drivers can't see.
As a motorcyclist, assume they see you just fine, and want you dead.

Joe @ 8

I can't believe that! I mean, I believe you to be telling the truth, it's just that my brain's unreal-o-meter is pegged at the injustice of it, and I will have to wait for it to settle down before I can accept what you described. I find this is a regular reaction to drug-war stories.

I can see one rogue nut-job of a judge doing that, and then the conviction immediately going to appeal, and the initial trial judge getting his naughty bits handed to him on a plate. But for that to happen repeatedly!

This is one of the reasons I just can't go to the States - it's a beautiful country, I even have family there, but I just can't bring myself to travel to a country with a justice system so severely demented.

Sunfell (#7)

Ritter Sport marzipan chocolates are merely good - Sarotti marzipan chocolates are excellent.

The fact that you only find Ritter Sport in stores in N. America is clearly part of a Bavarian dominated anti-Cologne mass-produced confectionary cabal.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Maximilian Cohen yet.

Indeed Arkizzle - I've set off my smoke detector by opening the door after a shower, and it's not even all that old-looking.

Also bacon, toast, a bit of coffee spilled on a burner coil, dry roasted mustard seeds...

Yep, he got off cheap. $12,000 is nothing to find out your girlfriend only loves you for your ability to provide $12,000 bling.

Hm, now I've gotten to thinking of all the things nicer than a ring that could be bought with $12,000. My wife has told me several times that she'd have been furious if I'd wasted our money on something so useless as an engagement ring. Just one small part of why I love her...

TOMT

The real question is why would anyone buy a product where the license agreement prevented them from testing or evaluating it?

It's a depressingly standard license provision. I'm pretty sure it's part of the standard Microsoft EULA.

Now, that doesn't answer your question. If anything it makes it all the more perplexing - not just, "why would anyone buy such a product", but "why do the biggest and theoretically best-run corporations and governments constantly buy such products?"

She pulled up the stairway, drove her husband's truck underneath it so he couldn't get the stairs down and left him stuck inside.

People don't want to spend exorbitant amounts of money on a house that would be a death-trap in a fire? How odd!

This made me so nostalgic! At one of the first birthday parties I can remember, my parents borrowed a Hardware Wars and a reel-to-reel projector from the library.

parts 1 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7p96aiE32k
and 2 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UVVBctvylU

Jardine - You should try the tires again - they're mostly organic compounds; even the steel-belted ones are still mostly organic.

Jardine - You should try the tires again - they're mostly organic compounds; even the steel-belted ones are still mostly organic.

There's more than just hipsterism that's relevant here. Too often big-corporate takeover is a harbinger of rising cost for declining quality.

Breyer's All Natural icecream, pre- and post- takeover by Unilever is a perfect example.

I never bothered making my own icecream before that - Breyers was just a good as the cheesy "status" brands, but still good. Now it's shot up in price, and it's full of the same goop as the crappiest brands.

Remember back in 1980 when the Olympics were boycotted. Wouldn't it be nice to imagine democratic countries would show some spine again?

Unfortunately this law is pointless - the danger of using a cellphone while driving has nothing to do with a shortage of hands, and everything to do with a shortage of brains.

We can concentrate on talking on the phone, or on driving, but not on both. Whether one hand is off the wheel to hold the phone up makes no difference to safety. If anything, this might make it worse - with a hands-free set, it becomes easier to have long conversations, and so to spend more time driving while impaired by someone nattering in your ear.

#80 I feel certain that if I declared myself a crusader against public intoxication, and stood outside this guy's bar spraying people who looked drunk, he wouldn't hesitate to call the police and complain.

That is a fantastic idea!

The main problem I see with this is that well-to-do drunks tend to stand up for themselves (even in the absence of provocation) much more, and more aggressively, than do homeless people. Homeless people have discovered that in any dispute, they are automatically in the wrong. Drunks consider themselves to be automatically in the right.

On another point - I have a suspicion the people talking about how awful it is to live near homeless people. My suspicion is that they're afraid that they can see themselves in that situation, and that's what scares them. They're not afraid of being robbed of whatever little bit of money they have, they're afraid of catching homelessness.

For the record - I have never been homeless myself, but I live in a city with a bad homelessness problem, in an area with more than its share of that problem. Street prostitutes work in our area, and I'm pretty sure someone was selling drugs on my street corner on Saturday night.

I'm holding out hope that my XO, when I finally get it, will be the promised ebook reader. That was pretty much the reason I ordered one.

They shipped later in Canada, and then the one I got was DoA. One day I should have a working one...

Shanealeslie's post gives me some hope that I was right about the XO.

100 grand is "a living for most folks"?! That's a laugh.

If I'm not mistaken, you could cut the top one into a stencil. It would take a very long time, but I think you could do it.

Takuan, just weigh the bundles of bills on an accurate scale. Come on, 1 bill = 1 gram, close enough.

Randomly open up 5 or so of the bundles to make sure they really are the same denomination all the way through.

Sure, you may be accepting a little shrinkage, but you are out of the building with the bricks of coke and the heat-scores who might have been followed that much sooner. It's worth it in the long run.

Indeed, please do not tag our glaciers, or any other thing that is already beautiful and would not be improved by graffiti.

Please, however, do tag the dead, grey, slablike cement factory on my bicycle route to work (actually the best graffiti is on a dead, grey, slablike warehouse across from the cement factory). Better yet, take your time and make a nice well-composed piece. Please piece the ugly green dumpsters in the alleys behind the highrises downtown. Please piece any of the oppressive monoliths of civic concrete with which city hall defaces the landscape (as if by coincidence) only in working class neighbourhoods.

Note, if you will, that a case of someone writing graffiti on something that's beautiful is rare enough to make news. Nobody remarks on it when someone writes graffiti on something ugly, and makes it beautiful, or at least less ugly.

RRSafety - I accused you of trolling because I thought surely nobody could be that obtuse. Perhaps I misjudged you, and you really are that obtuse.

So their goal is to have the technology used by people who need it, even if it means no global monopoly can make vast profits off a simple technology, simply because of a patent.

If a global monopoly really is the best way to get these devices, and the bricks and housing that it produces, within reach of the needy - fantastic, bring it on. They're releasing the designs precisely so that can happen.

If they were anti-free market, they would have put all sorts of silly riders on the license - no company with more than X employees, or more than Y offices, or with a market cap greater than Z, can use the design. But they didn't.

The only one anti-free market is, apparently, you - you seem to think that a truly free market, where anyone is free to compete with the big companies, is a dangerous and counterproductive thing.

OK - explicate.

#36

The difference is obvious - the geezers who disapproved of the 10,000 year old petroglyphs have been dead 9,993 years, and had no lasting medium in which to express themselves except other petroglyphs.

They don't tell you about the ancient dyspeptic rants in the cave down the valley from Lascaux.

#7

That's a pretty odd set of categories alright.

Other than the obvious fact that their "fact" category basically comes out to "things we want to believe in, and things that are demonstrably true as long as they don't contradict things we want to believe in", I find their choice of a "demonstrably true" fact to be odd.

I think I would be hard pressed to demonstrate to a sceptic that Washington DC is the capital of the USA. I could find other people and documents that agree with me. I could point out a rather fine white building and a sign claiming it's the capitol building. If I were somewhat influential, I might be able to arrange a meeting with a person claiming to be the president, in a room he claims is his office. But I don't see how I could possibly demonstrate that Washington is the capital (or even that a particular city is Washington, for that matter).

I'm not entirely convinced. There's too much 'cool factor'. This is a box for rotting organic matter - it just seems wrong for such a thing to be cool.

On the other hand, the pet waste thing is very cool. Yes I realize how inconsistent I am. Right now, cat litter and poop is probably 80 or 90% of what we throw out. We don't buy a lot of packaged stuff, we live in a city with a good recycling program, and we compost kitchen waste (in a compost bin that's the exact opposite of this one - it's made of a shipping pallet from an abandoned shop down the alley. It looks like the one your dad probably made). Getting cat litter out of that waste stream would probably get us down to a small bag of garbage a week, or less.

@ Rich Gibson

He's trolling because he's delibarately misunderstanding the entire purpose of the project, and it's worked - you fell for it. The third sentence in the quoted section, the introduction to the project, is:

The design process and final plans will be "Open Source"-- part of the public domain, with free access to anyone.

So how does this prevent commercialization? The very purpose of putting the plans in the public domain is to encourage businesses to form around making and selling the things, without having the additional overhead expense of licensing the plans, or accepting the risk that next year the licensing fees might go up and crush the business.

Also from the quoted extract above:

At the same time, we are developing an open source enterprise, according to the principles of neocommercialization.

The link didn't make it through the copy into the story here, but if you follow the link, you'll see that the word "neocommercialization" is also a link, to a wiki page on the term, which begins:

"Neo-commercialization means that we can both ‘commercialize’ a product - make it available for sale at competitive prices to others - and help others replicate the enterprise itself. We are interested not only in production, but also in business replication by others, because it’s good for the world. The replication goal is grounded firmly on the open source nature of the entire development program.

Pretty much the opposite of "anti-commercial" isn't it? But YHBT and you bit.

@ BACKLIKECLAP (#3)

No, RRSAFETY is not joking, but trolling.

I've heard lots of people slag the XO laptop, but none of them have ever used one. Everyone who's had a chance to use an XO for a week or so has nothing but good things to say about it.

I'm not sure if that's sour grapes, or just a misunderstanding of what the device is about...

Lately I have not actually seen much evidence that Fidel Castro is alive. I mean, he writes things, and I seem to recall he did a TV appearance that was generic enough it could have been pre-taped.

Am I missing something major that would offer proof the man really is still alive?

Kyle - It's generally considered good practice, when offering hospitality, to attempt to provide food and drink that will be to your guests' liking. If you don't want to prepare a meal a vegetarian would enjoy, fine, then don't invite any vegetarians to dinner - that's not being a rugged individualist, that's being an asshole.

Anyway, who's talking about cooking something you don't like? Provide vegetable dishes that you like, by all means. Or are you a meatarian, and refuse to eat or handle any plant products?

In case you hadn't noticed, vegetarians will occupy the same room as meat, just not eat it. So, you can have your meat, as long as you provide dishes that can add up to a pleasing meal for all your guests.

nevermind - downloaded a newer version of my browser, and it works...

Anyone know if there's another way to watch this? Only the first half of the video plays for me.

#7

What is it with people who get all outraged whenever someone mentions vegetarians? No one even brought up morality, made any suggestion that you're less worthy, marvelous, and fragrant because of eating meat, and you're attacking this phantom horde of self-righteous smug vegetarians.

Is there some crew of vegan thugs who follow you around and heckle you when you order at restaurants or something?

I've honestly never heard anyone behave anything like you describe. Of course they ask whether a dish has meat in it, when it's not obvious. If you get all shirty when someone dares to ask about the ingredients in a dish, it's no wonder you take a dim view of vegetarians - the hooligans, they keep taking an interest in what htey eat! They're as bad as those goons with celiac disease, all asking whether there's flour in the soup and bombing grain elevators!

#10

The reason the site wasn't ordered to remove the documents is that the entire design of the site is meant to be uncensorable - it's hosted in a number of countries, so that no court can have jurisdiction over all the servers.

What the court did find it had jurisdiction over was the domain registrar in California through which the name wikileaks.org was registered; the order to remove the name was directed at the registrar, not at wikileaks.

Incidentally

wikileaks.be (name under Belgian authority) -> 88.80.13.160 (IP address in Sweden)

wikileaks.de (name under German authority) -> 213.131.227.73 (IP address in Germany)

wikileaks.cx (name under Christmas Island authority) -> 88.80.13.160, the same IP as the .be site

and, until recently,
wikileaks.org (name under American authority) -> 88.80.13.160, the same IP again

At the risk of taking the discussion down a couple of notches, did anyone find Kiki hard to watch? Even at the framerate of the mp4 video, he was moving around so fast he got blurry. I mean, the puppeteer must have been flapping his mouth about 2-3 times per syllable.

Perhaps it shows my intellectual poverty, but I found that interfered with my paying attention to what they said...

#77

That's extremely interesting! Do you know of any more documentation of that? If it was coursework in am ethics class, I guess I'll probably be able to find some.

What confuses me is the fact that the officer is able to turn the camera on and off. Presumably the purpose of the cameras was largely to protect officers from complaints of one sort of misbehaviour or another. If that's the case, then letting the cop choose when to record and when not to would utterly destroy the cameras' value. Anyone could accuse an officer of just the behaviour this fellow was using.

#43 - Mikey, I think this must be the video you're referring to.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6791959446828923055

That is some kind of impressive. That's a cop who commands respect - someone I'd actually want to turn to if I was in trouble.

You kind of have to wonder if the driver in that episode was on drugs and/or having a psychotic breakdown. That's just not a normal reaction. Not violent at least, but wow...

That is really beautiful! I've sure got a lump in my throat.

Dumbasses with stomachs like you and me must die!

"having a bad day"? Come on people, that is not someone who's had a bad day, that's someone with a nose full of cocaine. The cop in that video is coked to the gills and should not be allowed within 100 feet of a loaded nerf gun for everyone's safety.

And anyway, what's wrong with calling a cop "dude"? He's not talking down to the man, he's addressing him like an equal, a fellow human from whom he expects reason. No Scott, he's not insulting the cop (who richly deserves is), he's jus not being a grovelling snivelling wretch.

Somehow, I expect that, if a cop went off on you like that over a trivial communication error, you'd be back to your "anti-cop stance" pretty quick. After the fact, that is, after you had grovelled and lick-spittled your way out of the immediate situation.

#3

See #1 - the goal of any interrogation is to put just enough stress on the suspect that they would confess if guilty, but not enough that they would confess if innocent. Interrogations seeking information rather than confession have analogous goals - to extract true information, but not to drive the person to make up information.

And that's the problem with torture - the innocent confess, the ignorant pick up on cues from their interrogators (conscious or unconscious) to make up a story that will fit the interrogator's theory of the case.

" We have ways to break anyone. Always have, always will. Because when someone has a secret you need, you'll get. Those are the rules of warfare."

And when someone doesn't have a secret you need, but you've convinced yourself that they do, you'll get false information out of them. Then you'll waste time, energy, money, and probably human lives on a wild goose chase.

That's one of the reasons we (are supposed to) have rules against torture - not that torture fails to extract truth, but that it increases the rate of extracting falsehood by so much more.

Of course there are other reasons, like the fact that humans don't perform torture - and if we order our own people to do so, we steal the humanity of both the torturers and the victims.

His record player spins backward - anyone else notice that? He must be a villain, he listens to the subliminal devil messages.

#21

"Guidette"? I've heard "Gina" for Guido's girlfriend...

Normally I cringe in horror when I see "Faire"s or "Shoppe"s. I suppose I can give on this one, as faire is "to make" in French.

Doesn't mean I have to like it though.

Apparently I'm out of touch. What does

22 No one has ever been able to sit down comfortably to a meal of “liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.”

even mean? Why ever can't you eat these things? Does the US not have butchers? Fava beans? Chianti?

Oooh, I'm offended because Paulballs' handle apparently refers to St. Paul's testes!

Also, I am offended by Cory's failure to post articles disparaging Zoroastrians.

I agree about the meathook aspect.

However, I am inspired to seek out the most overwrought ornament I can find for at least one of my bicycles...

As many commenters have echoed - we got the usual drug propaganda fed to us in elementary school. It was so alarmist, I concluded then and there we were being lied to, and began to do my own research, experimentation, and then a fair bit of assisted mental exploration, along with the typical highschool silly mild drug abuse.

I really don't know if I would have started without all that propaganda we were fed. I certainly would have started a somewhat later, and I probably wouldn't have done as much research and seeking after harder to find psychedelics.

10. Don't stare at yourself in a mirror. Unless you're really, really stable.

I did that on my first trip. I sat crosslegged, held a midsized mirror in front of me, and rolled around in slow circles, like one of those dolls you can't knock over (Daruma dolls?).

When the light fell on my face, the brightness made my reflection look cheerful, and I smiled, then laughed like crazy. When my face passed into shadow, the darkness made my reflection look sombre and sad. I quickly stopped laughing, frowned, felt deeply melancholy. I must have looked some kind of dumb.

A good thing I was (and am) fairly stable, I guess, as I had too much youthful cockiness to have arranged a sitter.

I think the business of waiters earning significantly less than minimum wage is the ticket - I normally tip somewhere around 15% on large orders, or 30-50% on small orders (who leaves a 25c tip for a coffee and danish?).

But tips are only for good service. I have no trouble leaving no tip at all, if the service was rude or incompetent. I expect that a restaurant will pay their staff enough to live on - a gratuity is supposed to be gratuitous, as I see it.

As a Canadian, I feel a perverse sort of honour at this.

Is that wrong?

I should have added to the above - only because the guy on the train had explained that this was common practice for Bavarian cops, did I not immediately assume we were being robbed.

I would have tried either to run away, or to fight back. Given that these were armed cops in a state that obviously lacks respect for civil rights against police interference, either of those courses of action probably would have been unfortunate...

It's an important distinction that this is the Bavarian state government, not the German federal government. Certain civil rights are considerably more limited / less respected in Bavaria than in the rest of Germany.

When I was there some years ago, I was exposed to the Bavarian police's powers of arbitrary search and seizure:

While I waited for a train, about three men approached the man waiting next to me on the platform, showed police IDs, and demanded to search his possessions. They went through his backpack, all his pockets, and his backpack. He didn't seem anything like as upset as I would have been at this.

On the train he explained to me that this was normal procedure - the police can stop and search anyone, without a warrant or any reasonable grounds to suspect him of anything. He didn't like it of course, but he felt there wasn't much he could do - it was allowed.

Not long after that, I walked from the campground I was staying at to the nearby gas station to get some snacks. On the way back, an unmarked car pulled up, and three guys in (frankly seedy-looking) street clothes got out and demanded to search our stuff (I was with two fellow campers). They didn't even show their police IDs until I asked to see them. They searched all our bags, our pockets, and went through our wallets. All the while it was "stand along the fence. Keep your hands in plain sight".

I asked these cops how it was legal for them to search us, and they again explained that they needed no more grounds than that we were young, were staying at a campground, and were coming back from a gas station, where we could potentially have met a drug dealer - in other words, they felt like stopping us, and there was no law to stop them. They also said that this would not be possible in any other German state.

#7 - this isn't about making things soundproof - it's about making them maximally sound-permeable.

#4

I think it's mostly about deliberately mangling banknotes, then spending them or taking them in to a bank, so the bank has to withdraw them from circulation and send them in to get new notes printed. This increases printing costs, so it's a nuisance crime, basically.

This book isn't doing that - there's clearly no intent to make a bank send these banknotes in as unfit to recirculate. But it's probably still technically against the law quoted in #2...

Right you are - when people say "Abu Ghraib", without specifically indicating what particular aspect of Abu Ghraib they mean, we should not assume they mean the one and only aspect of Abu Ghraib that got massive press coverage.

Sometimes, a place name implicitly means one particular incident for which that place is almost exclusively known. If you want to refer to something else, you have to spell it out. Abu Ghraib, Little Big Horn, Chernobyl - these are such places.

If I said "Pearl Harbour was a case of failed communication, not a deliberate abuse of military strength", would you assume that by "Pearl Harbour" I mean the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbour by the Japanese air force?

If you then went on to dispute the alleged intention of the Japanese to declare war in advance of the attack, and I tore into you for interpreting my statement as refering to the Japanese attack, would you not say I was being disingenous?

"You cannot have any idea what I'm referring to. Why ever would you assume I wasn't talking about the incident in 1826 when US Navy Lieutenant John Percival bullied the local government into repealing an alcohol prohibition so his sailors could have a drunken shore leave?"

Come on.

"...Abu Ghraib as an example of the U.S. failure to understand Middle Eastern culture."

That's a bit rich - Oops, it turns out Middle Eastern people prefer not to be tortured. Who knew?

That's not a cultureal misunderstanding.

Go the extra mile, I'd say - fuel it on barley malt an hops. Then you'll have an easy time disposing of the spent fuel.

#10

at least it was 1,000 and not a "life changing" amount. I'd hate to see them whammy the big bucks from the poor guy.

I don't know the cost of living in Ellsworth, but depending on where you live, $1000 could be enough for damage deposit, first month's rent, and a suit of clothes fit to wear to a job interview. For a homeless person who's always scrabbling to get money for one night at the Y, the next meal, or a laudromat, $1000 could well be life changing.

Granted, for a heroin addict who's having so much trouble quitting that he's selling off his methadone, it would probably be hard for him to discipline himself to actually spend it that way. But the potential is there.

# 13

Yeah, it's usually pointless to walk to the next stop, and the walk generally isn't very enjoyable because you spend the entire time looking over your shoulder to see if your bus has shown up and whether you should sprint back to the old stop, or try to sprint to the new stop.

But that's the fun part! Constantly analyzing the risk that any particular segment of the walk will leave you stranded between two bus stops at the precise time the bus shows up makes the walk so much more exciting. Bridges are especially good that way - they're riskiest, but they're also the most fun to walk across.

Also re #11 - I find that, unless it's very windy and the bus stop has good shelter, I'm much warmer walking than standing still. In summer, I'll more likely stay put or walk to a bus stop in the shade, but in winter I tend to walk between stops, just to stay warm.

This seems to leave out the fact that walking is more pleasant than standing still, particularly on the busy streets where buses tend to run.

From just reading the links, it looks like this optimizes only for speed, not for total expected utility of the journey.

I guess that would be tricky, as it would introduce all sorts of unpredictable constraints - negative utility from missing appointments, relative utility of time spent at the destination vs. time spent walking there, etc.

"This gets so tiresome - like the idiots who say that when oil is twice as expensive as it is now, a loaf of bread will also be twice as expensive. Know what the only thing is that will be twice as expensive? OIL."

Nevermind that the article never even suggests this - they're talking about a doubling in oil prices, as only one of four factors in increasing food price, all leading to a price increase of 50 percent or less.

Even so - food could get less than twice as expensive, or it could get more than twice as expensive.

As oil prices increase, that's not just an increased input cost - it's also a whole new source of demand. If ethanol or some other biofuel becomes a major source of fuel (a disastrously bad idea, but it's not like that ever stopped the energy companies), then we'll be trying to outbid Exxon for cropland at the grocery store. Do you care to take bets on what effect that will have?

#31

Living in Canada, I find the "eat local" thing terribly annoying. If I eat only local in this region, I will be spending my winter eating pretty much nothing but potatoes and partially rotten shrivelled up apples

That's only if you don't freeze, can, dry, pickle, salt, smoke, or candy anything, or keep a root cellar, or buy your food from anyone who does any of those things. Which, if you go to a farmer's market (and where else will you be buying locally?), would be pretty much impossible.

When everyone ate local, a great deal of effort went into preserving local food. Now much of that effort has shifted toward preserving food in Spain and California and the like, in order to sell it eight months later in Canada and Sweden. But the techniques haven't changed much, and the art of doing these things hasn't been forgotten by the locals either.

#30

I guess I wasn't clear - I'm not saying this case is like the example I put forward. I agree with you that this sounds, from the tiny blurb it gets in the BBC story, like a meritless suit. (Although, it may be that her claim was that the dealer got her into meth deliberately in order to hurt her was found to be credible in this case. The article isn't enough to judge by).

I was adding to your answer to the Sean's question at #5 - predicting that there would be both meritless suits, of which you gave an example, and suits with merit, of which I gave an example.

In other words, drugs would become like any other product now on the market - the courts would decide which suits have merit, and which lack it, and over time things would sort themselves out into something similar to our centuries-old, legal, alcohol market.

That is definitely the most beautiful looking sequencer I've ever seen.

@ Cpt. Tim, #15

Also, the kind of lawsuits that would arise if a winemaker put antifreeze in their wine, and drinkers of that wine ended up getting kidney damage, when they had a reasonable expectation to be dealing with ethanol, which they (should) know how to consume safely.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_fraud#Hazardous_materials)

i.e. legitimate suits that presently don't end up in court (because it would require the complainant to admit to acts that are presently illegal), but that should be possible in order to let the "free" market do its miraculous invisible-handed work.

Jetsetsc @8

Actually, the US incarcerates more of its own citizens than any country in the world, not than more than most. That includes places like N. Korea, Syria, Singapore...

@ #7 "a hooligan known to the police since 2003, an infamous menace in his neighbourhood"

He's 14 now, so he's been an infamous hooligan since he was 9? That's hardcore.

@ #15

look at GDP ratings, where the US leads, versus the UNDP's Human Development Index, where failings in American education, social services, income inequality and healthcare put its apparent wealth in perspective.

But Sen has been pretty clear that HDI is intended as a way of more validly comparing the progress of developing countries...that it is not intended as a way to evaluate developed nations.

So, what, failing at education, social services, socio-economic equality, racial integration, and healthcare is alright, as long as there are enough rich people in the country?

The self-signed cert makes me wince.

Everyone here knows, the issue there is not the self-signed cert, but the overall incompetence it reveals. Far too many people don't get that - they figure, alright, we'll get a commercial cert, now it's fixed.

Nobody would be that nonchalant if they took their car in to be fixed and came back to find the steering wheel on upside down - they would demand that the garage foreman not only remount the steering wheel properly, but fire the clown who worked on their car, have someone qualified go over it from top to bottom to see what else he might have screwed up, and fix all those things for free too.

So, what do you think it would take to make things like that - a self-signed SSL cert, or SQL injection by entering the username 'OR1=1;-- at the login page - popularly understood to be the equivalent of an upside-down steering wheel? Not something you fix and accept, but something you thank your lucky stars the site builder was incompetent enough to give himself away with something that obvious, and not just barely competent enough to get past your non-expert inspection, only to let you kill yourself when the brakes give out next week?

As others have said - adverse possession has its benefits. Principally this is needed when people are occupying land they believe to be rightfully theirs.

Official property lines often don't match the lines of fences that have been there time out of mind. Neighbour A finally finds this out, and wants to take his land back, which would mean forcing Neigbour B to tear down the house his family has lived in for generations.

And indeed - one of the main weaknesses of the laws as we have them now is that they favour exploitation over conservation. Goes back to the days of "breaking the land", dunnit.

What I want to know is, what kind of vegetable instrument does the fat bassline come from that comes in at about 4:24 and continues to the end of the piece?

If they made a Roland TB-303 out of veggies, I absolutely need to know how it's done.