Idling, Inc

1dollarscan

2011-09-27T11:39:00.003-04:00

If you have a lot of books lying around, 1dollarscan.com converts them to searchable pdf. I find their prices reasonable, $1 for 100 pages (for books). Do note that your book will not be returned back.

Barclays Credit Card

2011-09-05T19:46:00.001-04:00

Don't ever apply for Barclay's credit card (or cards managed by Barclays - such as US Airways). They need proof of citizenship or permanent residency.

The Expendables

2011-09-02T22:45:00.000-04:00

Yin Yang: It's difficult.

Barney Ross: What?

Yin: My life is difficult. I need more money.

Barney: Why that?

Yin: I work harder than the rest.

Barney: No, you don't.

Yin: Yes, I do! Everything is harder for me. When I'm hurt, wound is bigger, 'cause I'm smaller. When I travel I need to go farther.

Barney: I know, because you're smaller, right?

Yin: Yes.

[awkward silence]

Yin: I need more money.

Barney: I know, you told me.

Depo-Provera

2011-07-03T13:37:00.004-04:00

... counteracts the biological tendencies. By lowering testosterone, Depo-Provera reduces sex drive. Males can have sexual intercourse but do not want to. Depo-Provera also decreases aggressive tendencies by reducing testosterone. "[T]he castrated criminal would be more docile and have a better opportunity to be rehabilitated, educated, and to become a worthwhile citizen"

Obihai Obi100

2011-05-22T18:37:00.001-04:00

Get OBi100.
Get a Google Voice number. Place a call via Gmail.
Login to Google Voice, Phones, check ONLY Google Chat. OBi uses Google Chat/XMPP.
Find OBi100 IP address from your router. Login to the IP, default password admin, admin.

Change Auto Provisioning - disable Firmware Update and Auto Provisioning
Change Network Settings - Static IP, Subnet Mask, Default Gateway, DNS.

Register at obitalk.com. This is simple, just register online and call the number from your phone, your device serial number and MAC address will be registered with obitalk.com
~~On obitalk.com, configure Service Providers, select Google Voice and enter Gmail credentials. This should automatically setup your device for GV incoming and outgoing.~~
Update: Login to obitalk.com. You will see 2 entries under My OBi Endpoints. Select OBi 100 (or 110 if you have that). Under "Configure Voice Services", you will find Google Voice setup. This will automatically configure the "Service Provider 1".

Some folks may have a problem with incoming calls. A possible solution is to use SIPGATE. See Amazon reviews for setup details.

The Michigan Telephone blog

Other ways of using OBi.

5BX program

2011-05-22T10:29:00.000-04:00

From Discussion

No kidding! I used to have frequent back pain, with aches that wouldn't go away even after an age of stretching.

Six years ago I started on the RCAF's old 5BX program (a quick Google search will lead you to the booklet that describes it -- dead simple) and, in exchange for 11 minutes of exercise a day on an open floor, had the body I've always wanted within a year.

I've since moved on to weights and other gym-like stuff and have not had back pain in years.

It's so stupidly obvious I'm kicking myself for it now: If you have decent muscle to support all those bones and tendons up your back, they won't be straining themselves to the point of pain while supporting your body.

Yeah, yeah, 5BX is great! While a certain rare exercise machine gives the most relief, one simple 5BX back exercise (chart 1, exercise 3) is as effective, provided I do it regularly.

The only thing that has helped is exercise. Strengthening your back (especially lower) is probably going to help more than anything else. Squats and deadlifts in particular.

Pull ups will do wonders as well.

I agree, but I wish I could caution my younger self about the risk of low back injuries from certain weightlifting activities

1) You can develop very strong lower back muscles (primarily the extensors), but don't challenge those muscles when they're nearing their endurance limit.

2) If your femurs are long relative to your tibia, don't try to force yourself to perform as heavy or with the same form and depth on squats, deadlifts, or cleans, as more normal folks. At low depth, your back will consistently be more parallel to the floor than upright, dramatically increasing shear across your spine.

Of course, it goes without saying that you shouldn't round your back excessively while bearing significant load, especially if it's far (horizontally) from your hips. It's not necessarily that a rounded back is automatically dangerous, but in general, if you're bracing your abdominal/back muscles (which will prevent rounding), you're less at risk of injury.

Outside of seeing a doctor to see if there's something seriously screwed up with your back, I'd offer these 3 pieces of advice I had to learn about the hard way.

1.) Massage.

You may not think it's the manliest thing ever, but if you can afford it you should find a good local masseuse and get yourself an hour session. Even if you go once and never go again, you'll get an education in just how kinked up your back and shoulders probably are.

I tweaked my back lifting a lawn mower out of my car a few years ago and didn't think much of it at the time. Over the next few weeks I started to have all kinds of shoulder problems and other various pain to the point where my arms were getting tingly and I couldn't sit and code for more than 30 minutes at a time.

Long story short, I went through a few doctors before I finally just decided to see a masseuse and see if it helped. I was lucky to find someone that knew what they were doing and helped get me straightened out. It took about 5 sessions over 5 weeks, but I've never had problems since.

2.) Trigger points.

Learn what they are and how you can fix them. This was my problem that the masseuse turned me on to. Trigger points are essentially little micro-knots in your muscle fibers that can add up to cause big problems for you. For me, lifting that mower was really just the straw that broke the camel's back. It just exacerbated all the trigger point problems I'd been creating over years of coding and not stretching out my back and shoulders properly.

If you know where the common trigger points creep up and how to get rid of them you can save yourself a lot of pain and downtime (not to mention massage bills).

Buy these two things: The Trigger Point Therapy Workbook (http://www.amazon.com/Trigger-Point-Therapy-Workbook-Self-Tr...) and a TheraCane (http://www.amazon.com/Thera-Cane-Theracane-TheraCane/dp/B000...)

The book will show you how to identify and treat the trigger points all over your body, and the TheraCane will help you reach the places on your back that you can't reach yourself.

3.) Yoga.

Once you get all your issues straightened out, yoga and/or a good daily stretching regimen can help keep you kink free.

Hopefully some of this advice is helpful. I was really messed up for a while until I figured all this out.

exercises for back problems

2011-05-22T10:26:00.002-04:00

I have 3 squashed discs in my lower back from a skateboarding injury. I've tried everything for back pain. Before I share what works for me, I'll say that if you don't have a structural injury you probably just have very weak "core" muscles and the best thing you can do is get into a general state of good fitness and then add in some core strengthening exercises.

After doing tons of PT, and trying everything from yoga to pilates to accupuncture to cyclobenzeprine, I figured out three main exercises that strengthen the muscles in the lower back:

- "superman": lay on your stomach on the floor. raise your left arm and right leg up at the same time. hold for a count of five. repeat on other side. do this 10 times for each side.

- "planks": this is like a pushup but you're on your elbows and instead of doing a pushup, you just hold in that position. It sounds easy but is very hard if you don't have strong abs. try to work up to 3-5 sets of 60 seconds at a time.

- "bird dog": like the superman but you're on your knees and hands, doggy style. raise left leg and right arm at the same time, hold for count of 5. alternate. do 10.

Those three things, and being generally in shape have helped my back more than anything else I've tried. You can find videos of them on youtube if you google those exercise names with "core fitness" or similar search strings added in.

Other lifestyle changes are good, too. Don't sit down in a pile for 8 hours at a time. Get up and move around, even if you're just getting out of your chair at least once an hour. Change your position. Sit on an exercise ball for a while, lie down on a couch with a laptop for a while, work standing up for a while. Go for a walk at least an hour a day.

I've found that pilates is much better for back care than yoga. many of the yoga moves are not good for your back if you have slipped discs. in particular, "downward dog" which is the staple move of most yogas is not good if you actually have a back injury like mine. Pilates arose out of rehab so most of the moves are safer for your back. I mention these activities because one of the side effects of back problems (or sometimes the cause of back problems) is very tight hamstrings. You'll need to do some sort of stretching to get the hamstrings back in order and I've found this easier to do in a structured, class context.

I'll be semi controversial and say that you want to have strong abs, but you DON'T want to do situps. do planks instead. Situps strengthen your abs while pulling your back into the same position that makes it hurt. planks strengthen your abs but you're also extended and working all your stabilization muscles at the same time.

Maybe Americans just aren’t dumb enough to keep buying houses?

2011-05-22T10:19:00.000-04:00

Psychologically, a person who just lost enough money to have paid for 5-10 years of rent is not a very likely candidate to go back into the market where he was just burned.
Thus the more houses are sold, the worse the buyer-seller ratio will get. Every sale has a roughly 37% chance of removing a person from the real estate ownership market. More and more Americans will be conditioned to the idea that home ownership is a waste of time and money, not to mention the inflexibility that it imposes on a person who might otherwise have been able to get a better job by moving.
Summary: Why would house prices continue to fall then? The longer that house prices fall, the more people will critically assess whether it makes any financial sense to own and conclude “it does not”. They withdraw themselves from the market of potential buyers, at least for 10 years or so until they forget what wounds they suffered and how boring they were when they owned.

Vivint - Home Automation

2011-05-10T23:25:00.000-04:00

When you’re looking for a comprehensive way to connect the technologies that run your home, the Vivint Home package is the answer. It features all the products in our Security and Energy packages, but also gives you a lot more. It includes automatic door locks, video surveillance, and non-emergency alerts. With only a $199 activation fee* plus the monthly monitoring charge, this package provides simple, affordable home automation.

From premier security, to heating and cooling, to access control and video surveillance, our Home package meet your needs today while helping you prepare for a smarter future. Its additional products include automatic door locks, video surveillance, and non-emergency alerts. And you can manage them all through your computer or smart phone, so you always know exactly what’s happening at your home—even when you’re not there.

The final humbling of America

2011-05-01T21:31:00.001-04:00

This had happened very briefly once before in 1979/80 when America was inflating the dollar faster than usual and investors started to rein back on buying US Treasury bonds. The gold price spiked up to $2,300/ounce. Volcker (then Chairman of the US Fed bank) raised interest rates to 20% and investors immediately sold their gold and bought dollar bonds instead. The gold price immediately collapsed. This time, however, gold has taken 11 years to rise and has done so steadily from about $300 to $1560/ounce. This time, Bernanke (the present Chairman of the US Fed bank), dare not raise the interest rate even by 0.25% for fear of plunging America into economic depression. Nor can the Bank of England do so. The European Central Bank has raised its low rate only very slightly in an effort to reduce inflation. It cannot raise it to normal levels because, like America and the UK the Eurozone stands on the edge of depression.

But it’s America—hitherto the central financial pivot of the world—that’s crucial. Its national debt, which was only 20% more than its annual GDP at the time of Bretton Woods is now almost four times higher. As both Europe’s and Japan’s debts, it is already higher than its taxpayers can possibly repay. Sooner or later it is going to have to pay some or all of its immense debts with gold—when the price of gold reaches high enough.

There are those commentators who still say that the present rise in gold price is a spike. But scores of central banks in the world, including China and Russia and the vastly prosperous Middle East oil and gas countries, don’t think so. Gold speculators have almost been driven out now, such is the heavyweight demand for the metal. Gold is now making its way back to its traditional role as the background currency which doesn’t inflate. You can be certain that although Bernanke of the US Fed and Geithner of the US Treasury are saying all sorts of brave things to the world, they are even now thinking seriously of how to bring about a gold standard world trading currency. This is what China and Russia have been asking for for years. This is what Zoellick, of the World Bank suggested last November.

Commuter Tax Benefits

2011-04-26T07:07:00.001-04:00

Up to $230/month* for transit expenses
Up to $230/month* for vanpool expenses
Up to $230/month** for parking at or near an employer’s worksite, or at a facility from which employee commutes via transit, vanpool, or carpool

National Center for Transit Research

BusinessPass Frequently Asked Questions

How Sports May Focus the Brain

2011-04-26T06:55:00.000-04:00

The student athletes completed more successful crossings than the nonathletes, by a significant margin, a result that might be expected of those in peak physical condition. But what was surprising — and thought-provoking — was that their success was not a result of their being quicker or more athletic. They walked no faster than the other students. They didn’t dash or weave gracefully between cars. What they did do was glance along the street a few more times than the nonathletes, each time gathering slightly more data and processing it more speedily and accurately than the other students.

“They didn’t move faster,” said Art Kramer, the director of the Beckman Institute and a leader in the study of exercise and cognition, who oversaw the research. “But it looks like they thought faster.”

... the finding did have a certain intuitive logic. “To the extent that athletes, in their sport, must routinely make split-second decisions in often very complex environments (e.g., whether to pass or kick the incoming soccer ball), it would make sense to me that they would have superior skill sets in processing the fast-paced information to successfully cross the street.”

Most folks ..

2011-04-24T20:22:00.003-04:00

are about as happy as they make up their minds to me. -- found on the interwebs.

Concept2 Model D Indoor Rowing Machine

2011-04-24T19:46:00.000-04:00

Found this rowing machine while searching for ergometer (see High-Intensity Interval training). Has the highest-rating I've ever seen on Amazon. 94 rated 5 out of a total of 100.

http://www.amazon.com/Concept2-Model-Indoor-Rowing-Machine/dp/B001A0ZT2I/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1303189308&sr=8-1

What’s the Single Best Exercise?

2011-04-24T19:38:00.001-04:00

From: What’s the Single Best Exercise?

the burpee, in which you drop to the ground, kick your feet out behind you, pull your feet back in and leap up as high as you can. “It builds muscles. It builds endurance.” He paused. “But it’s hard to imagine most people enjoying” an all-burpees program, “or sticking with it for long.”

And sticking with an exercise is key, even if you don’t spend a lot of time working out. The health benefits of activity follow a breathtakingly steep curve. “The majority of the mortality-related benefits” from exercising are due to the first 30 minutes of exercise, said Timothy Church, M.D., who holds the John S. McIlhenny endowed chair in health wisdom at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La. A recent meta-analysis of studies about exercise and mortality showed that, in general, a sedentary person’s risk of dying prematurely from any cause plummeted by nearly 20 percent if he or she began brisk walking (or the equivalent) for 30 minutes five times a week.

“I personally think that brisk walking is far and away the single best exercise,” said Michael Joyner, M.D., a professor of anesthesiology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and a leading researcher in the field of endurance exercise.

interval-style walking (three minutes of fast walking, followed by three minutes of slower walking, repeated 10 times). The results have been striking. “Physical fitness — maximal aerobic power and thigh muscle strength — increased by about 20 percent,” Dr. Nose wrote in an e-mail, “which is sure to make you feel about 10 years younger than before training.” The walkers’ “symptoms of lifestyle-related diseases (hypertension, hyperglycemia and obesity) decreased by about 20 percent,” he added, while their depression scores dropped by half.

“I nominate the squat,” said Stuart Phillips, Ph.D., a professor of kinesiology at McMaster University and an expert on the effects of resistance training on the human body. The squat “activates the body’s biggest muscles, those in the buttocks, back and legs.” It’s simple. “Just fold your arms across your chest,” he said, “bend your knees and lower your trunk until your thighs are about parallel with the floor. Do that 25 times. It’s a very potent exercise.” Use a barbell once the body-weight squats grow easy.

The squat, and weight training in general, are particularly good at combating sarcopenia, he said, or the inevitable and debilitating loss of muscle mass that accompanies advancing age. “Each of us is experiencing sarcopenia right this minute,” he said. “We just don’t realize it.” Endurance exercise, he added, unlike resistance training, does little to slow the condition.

High-intensity interval training, or H.I.T. as it’s familiarly known among physiologists, is essentially all-interval exercise. As studied in Gibala’s lab, it involves grunting through a series of short, strenuous intervals on specialized stationary bicycles, known as Wingate ergometers. In his first experiments, riders completed 30 seconds of cycling at the highest intensity the riders could stand. After resting for four minutes, the volunteers repeated the interval several times, for a total of two to three minutes of extremely intense exercise. After two weeks, the H.I.T. riders, with less than 20 minutes of hard effort behind them, had increased their aerobic capacity as much as riders who had pedaled leisurely for more than 10 hours.

The only glaring inadequacy of H.I.T. is that it builds muscular strength less effectively than, say, the squat. But even that can be partially remedied, Gibala said: “Sprinting up stairs is a power workout and interval session simultaneously.”Meaning that running up steps just might be the single best exercise of all. Great news for those of us who could never master the butterfly.

forests, immunity, depression, stress

2011-04-24T18:08:00.001-04:00

Research in Japan has demonstrated that being in green spaces improves a person’s immune system.

The test subjects were divided into two groups: those who stayed in an urban environment and those sent to a forested area. Both groups engaged in the same activities and ate the same diet. It is thought that the chemical phytoncides, an oil that defends trees from insects and decomposition, somehow affect the chemicals in the human brain.

In other studies, it was demonstrated that there was an increase in natural killer cells that fight cancer, an increase in white blood cells, and a reduction of glucose levels in diabetics.

In the U.K. and in Europe, depression is being treated with farm work and gardening. Whether it is tending plants or animals, the act of caring for something alive in the fresh air has had a positive effect on patients with clinical depression.

Walking in the Woods

2011-04-24T18:05:00.000-04:00

Trees are good for you. Walking in the woods can reduce stress and depression, ease muscle tension, counter attention deficit disorder, and even calm an erratic heart.

You knew that anyway, but fortunately intrepid Finnish researchers have come up with interesting proof. Published in Environmental Health Magazine, the Finns have collated evidence that forests promote Human Health. Forests reduce physical and mental stress. The researchers say, " Forests represent rich natural pharmacies by virtue of being enormous sources of plant and microbial material with known or potential medicinal or nutritional value. Forest food offers a safety net for the most vulnerable population groups in developing countries, and healthy forest ecosystems may also help in regulation of infectious diseases." Despite the large amount of work on biodiversity and forests, the psychological and medicinal aspects have not been studied greatly. Perhaps their very familiarity made them elusive as a subject of study - we all know from childhood on that it is good to have a romp in the woods.

Forests may even have an anti-cancer factor, "Forest visits may strengthen the human immune system. Spending time in forest increases natural killer (NK) activity in humans. The increase was observed as long as 30 days later. Since NK cells can kill tumor cells by releasing anticancer proteins, forest visits may have a preventive effect on cancer generation and development," according to Japanese researchers.

found on fb

2011-04-23T20:49:00.002-04:00

outofafricapark.com - Arizona

2011-04-23T20:44:00.002-04:00

Cat Talking, Translation

2011-04-23T15:25:00.002-04:00

You don't listen!

Someone's coming! Act like a cat!

How to install app on tablet

2011-04-12T15:51:00.001-04:00

From RK.

Originally Posted by cbmoore9
Downloaded it. Thanks! Seems too simple. Just hit the recalibration button,wait 5 seconds and you're done?

1.Download app
2.Find a live chicken
3.Buy some super glue
4.Buy a coat for the chicken
5.Pluck the chicken
6.Put new coat on chicken and turn it loose
7.Locate the box your GTab came in
8.Super glue chicken feathers to GTab box (may void your warranty)
9.Install app on your GTab
10.Fill GTab box with ketchup
11.Find a butter knife
12.Set Gtab on floor
13.Place Gtab chicken feather box on floor (place drop cloth under box)
14.Gtab box must be 6.66 ft from Gtab
15.Open app on Gtab
16.Hit Calibrate button
17.Without touching GTab quickly run over to GTab box and stab it with the butter knife 5 times
18.Spin in circle 3 times to the left and then 4 times to the right
19.Walk calmly to your Gtab
20.Observe it....DON'T TOUCH IT YET
21.Clean up the Gtab box mess and wash your hands
22.You may now retrieve your GTab and enjoy its new vodoo calibration fix

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=11002151&postcount=5

The Adventures of Polly Nomial

2011-03-27T22:35:00.000-04:00

Once upon a time (1/t), pretty little Polly Nomial was strolling across a field of vectors when she came to the edge of a singularly large matrix.

Now Polly was convergent and her mother had made it an absolute condition that she must never enter such an array without her brackets on. Polly, however, who had changed her variables that morning and was feeling particularly badly behaved, ignored this condition on the grounds that it was insufficient and made her way in amongst the complex elements.

Rows and columns enveloped her on all sides. Tangents approached her surface. She became tensor and tensor. Quite suddenly, three branches of a hyperbola touched her at a single point. She oscillated violently, lost all sense of directrix and went completely divergent. As she reached a turning point she tripped over a square root which was protruding from the erf and plunged headlong down a steep gradient. When she was differentiated once more she found herself, apparently alone, in a non-euclidean space.

She was being watched, however. That smooth operator, Curly Pi, was lurking inner product. As his eyes devoured her curvilinear coordinates, a singular expression crossed his face. Was she still convergent, he wondered. He decided to integrate improperly at once.

Hearing a vulgar function behind her, Polly turned round and saw Curly Pi approaching with his power series extrapolated. She could see at once, by his degenerate conic and his dissipative terms, that he was bent on no good.

"Eureka" she gasped.

"Ho, ho," he said. "What a symmetric little Polynomial you are. I can see you're bubbling over with secs".

"O Sir," she protested, "keep away from me. I haven't got my brackets on."

"Calm yourself, my dear," said our suave operator, "your fears are purely imaginary "

"i, i," she thought, "perhaps he's homogenous then?".

"What order are you," the brute demanded.

"Seventeen," replied Polly.

Curly leered. "I suppose you've never been operated on yet?" he asked.

"Of course not", Polly cried indignantly. "I'm absolutely convergent."

"Come, come," said Curly. "Let's off to a decimal place I know and I'll take you to the limit."

"Never," gasped Polly.

"Exchlf," he swore, using the vilest oath he knew. His patience was gone. Coshing her over the coefficient with a log until she was powerless, Curly removed her discontinuities. He stared at her significant places and began to smooth her points of inflexion. Poor Polly. All was up. She felt his hand tending to her asymptotic limit. Her convergence would soon be gone forever.

There was no mercy, for Curly was a heavyside operator. He integrated by parts. He integrated by partial fractions. The complex beast even went all the way around and did a contour integration. What an indignity. To be multiply connected on her first integration. Curly went on operating until he was absolutely and completely orthogonal.

When Polly got home that evening, her mother noticed that she had been truncated in several places. But it was too late to differentiate now. As the months went by, Polly increased monotonically. Finally she generated a small but pathological function which left surds all over the place until she was driven to distraction.

The moral of this sad story is this: If you want to keep your expressions convergent, never allow them a single degree of freedom.

Snacks In the dog wagon

2011-03-23T19:43:00.001-04:00

Windows is like that

2011-03-22T10:14:00.000-04:00

The Japanese are replacing error messages [eg "This program has performed an illegal function and will now shut down."] with Haiku poems.

The web site you seek
Cannot be located,
but Countless more exist

Chaos reigns within
Reflect, repent and reboot
Order shall return

Program aborting:
Close all that you have worked on.
You ask far too much.

Windows NT crashed.
I am the Blue Screen of Death.
No one hears your screams.

Yesterday it worked.
Today it is not working.
Windows is like that.

Your file was so big.
It might be very useful.
But now it is gone.

Stay the patient course.
Of little worth is your ire.
The network is down.

A crash reduces
Your expensive computer
To a simple stone.

Three things are certain:
Death, Taxes and Lost Data.
Guess which has occurred.

You step in the stream,
But the water has moved on.
This page is not here.

Out of memory.
We wish to hold the whole sky,
But we never will.

Having been erased,
The document you're seeking
Must now be retyped.

Serious error.
All shortcuts have disappeared.
Screen. Mind. Both are blank.

Where is the printer?
The printer can not be found
Though it is next to me

Inflation Adjusted Gasoline Prices

2011-03-20T22:10:00.002-04:00

$5000 gold

2011-03-20T21:57:00.000-04:00

Global pension assets are estimated to be – drum roll, please – $31.1 trillion. No, that is not a misprint. It is more than twice the size of last year’s GDP in the U.S. ($14.7 trillion).

.. the typical pension fund holds about 0.15% of its assets in gold. He estimates another 0.15% is devoted to gold mining stocks, giving us a total of 0.30% – that is, less than one third of one percent of assets committed to the gold sector.

Let’s say fund managers as a group realize that bonds, equities, and real estate have become poor or risky investments and so decide to increase their allocation to the gold market. If they doubled their exposure to gold and gold stocks – which would still represent only 0.6% of their total assets – it would amount to $93.3 billion in new purchases.

How much is that? The assets of GLD total $55.2 billion, so this amount of money is 1.7 times bigger than the largest gold ETF. SLV, the largest silver ETF, has net assets of $9.3 billion, a mere one-tenth of that extra allocation.

Insurance companies have about $18.7 trillion in assets. Hedge funds manage approximately $1.7 trillion. Sovereign wealth funds control $3.8 trillion. Then there are mutual funds, ETFs, private equity funds, and private wealth funds. Throw in millions of retail investors like you and me and Joe Sixpack and Jiao Sixpack, and we’re looking in the rear view mirror at $100 trillion.

Cat boarding

2011-03-10T21:22:00.002-05:00

Why leave your cat in a small cage when you can have a Cat Chalet condo? All of our accommodations are condos that have enough room for one person to go in, close the full-size door, and sit down. Each condo has a clean litter box, food and water, and 2 shelves with curtains to protect their privacy.

$18/day.

Simplified Employee Pension (SEP) Plan

2011-03-07T07:56:00.001-05:00

Advantages of a SEP plan
Easy to set up. A SEP plan is like a “corporate IRA” established by an employer for the benefit of each employee. There are no requirements for a separate employer trust account, because each employee establishes his or her own SEP IRA.
Tax advantages. SEP contributions are tax deductible to the employer, and all earnings are tax-deferred for the employee.
Minimal administrative costs. Employers sponsoring SEP plans are not required to file annual plan returns like those sponsoring qualified pension or profit sharing plans.
Contribution flexibility. An employer can make a discretionary contribution each year of up to 25% of each eligible employee’s compensation.
Tax planning flexibility. The employer can establish a SEP plan up until the tax filing deadline (including extensions), unlike qualified pension or profit sharing plans which must be in place no later than the last day of the plan year.
Investment flexibility. Since the employees can choose where the accounts are established, they may have a wide range of investments from which to choose.
Limited liability. The employer’s fiduciary duty is reduced because participants in a SEP choose their own investments after establishing their SEP IRA accounts.

Motorcycle Seat Cushions

2011-03-06T13:17:00.001-05:00

for a longer, more comfortable ride. Memory foam can’t do it. Gel seats can’t do it. Only genuine AIRHAWK can do it.

BMW R1200 RT

2011-03-06T13:15:00.000-05:00

It’s cold outside. On the Vespa I would have several layers under my cold weather riding jacket, electric gloves, and overpants. At 70mph on a 40 degree morning a person would get pretty cold without protection from the wind. But here I am with a sweater and t-shirt under my mesh summer riding jacket, summer gloves, jeans and boots. The power windshield and cowling keeps me out of the windblast. The heated grips keep my hands toasty and the heated seat, well, let’s just say it’s nice. By the time the thermometer reaches 55 I have shed the sweater. I could see riding this motorcycle until the snow flies.

Did I mention the R1200 RT has cruise control?

The BMW does a bit of deception when it comes to speed. The wind protection, power, and smooth ride give the impression that you aren’t traveling as fast as your actually are. On a stretch of US 15 I glanced at the speedometer and saw 80mph. I would have sworn to the State Police that I was going 60. No wonder I was passing everyone.

With the bike sitting in the driveway I imagined the kinds of rides I could make. Long day rides, weekend rides, or extended tours. The BMW R1200 RT would be ready for any of them.

Brammo Enertia

2011-03-06T13:09:00.001-05:00

4 hours recharge time, 42 miles range, 60 mph top speed, 324 lbs, 40 cents/charge, 1 cent/mile.

California

All Brammo Electric Motorcycles are eligible for a 10 percent Federal tax credit on electric motorcycles. On a $9995 purchase, that's a saving of almost $1,000.

In California the final cost for an Enertia is $5994 after state and federal incentives.

Stuff White People Like - The Ted Conference

2011-03-06T12:09:00.001-05:00

The TED Conference is an invite-only affair that brings together the smartest minds from around the world to share their knowledge and wisdom with the attendees. Additionally all of the talks are made available online and as podcasts so that white people are able to watch or listen to them at work or during their commute.

These talks are like college lectures, except that they are free to listen, shorter, and white people aren’t hung over and pretending to listen.

Due to the broad audience watching the talks, TED speakers generally take very complex ideas and boil them down into a simple engaging presentation. So when a white person finds out that you have a PhD and visits and attempts to engage you in a conversation about String Theory, you should know that all of their understanding comes from a twenty-minute talk they listened to while running on a treadmill. You should also be aware that the average white person considers their knowledge on the subject to be on par or superior to yours.Sadly, TED Talks are not all roses and NPR approved comedians. For many white people, TED Conferences are actually a source of sadness and depression. This comes from their dreams to attend a future TED Conference in person. But with a price tag of $6000 and an invite-only policy, many white people are simply unable to attend. This is a new concept for white people as they have successfully been creating and joining expensive exclusive clubs for over one thousand years. Popular examples include: private schools, politics, and ice hockey.

Note: It is not advised to try to use sarcasm when trying to console a white person about their lack of an invitation to the TED conference.

“It must hard for you not being able to get into an expensive, invitation only club. As a non-white person, lets just say I have some experience in that field.”

“You didn’t get into MENSA either huh?”

I'M COMIC SANS, ASSHOLE

2011-01-25T22:08:00.000-05:00

Listen up. I know the shit you've been saying behind my back. You think I'm stupid. You think I'm immature. You think I'm a malformed, pathetic excuse for a font. Well think again, nerdhole, because I'm Comic Sans, and I'm the best thing to happen to typography since Johannes fucking Gutenberg.

It doesn't even matter what you think. You know why, jagoff? Cause I'm famous. I am on every major operating system since Microsoft fucking Bob. I'm in your signs. I'm in your browsers. I'm in your instant messengers. I'm not just a font. I am a force of motherfucking nature and I will not rest until every uptight armchair typographer cock-hat like you is surrounded by my lovable, comic-book inspired, sans-serif badassery.

Designing Your Life

2011-01-14T22:36:00.003-05:00

This course provides an exciting, eye-opening, and thoroughly useful inquiry into what it takes to live an extraordinary life, on your own terms. The instructors address what it takes to succeed, to be proud of your life, and to be happy in it. Participants tackle career satisfaction, money, body, vices, and relationship to themselves. They learn how to confront issues in their lives, how to live life, and how to learn from it.

Is It Better To Buy Or Generate Bitcoins?

2010-12-18T13:55:00.001-05:00

Total Cost of building PC: $1995.94

How many bitcoins can I buy with $2000? As of this writing it is about $0.066 per bitcoin. So I could buy 30,303 bitcoins if I had $2000 laying around.

Now, how long would it take for my newly designed 25,000 hashes-per-second machine to generate 30,303 bitcoins? Using the bitcoin generation calculator available athttp://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator.php, on average it will take 1 day, 19 hours, and 44 minutes to generate 50 bitcoins. After doing a little arithmetic that means it will take a little over two years to generate 30,303 bitcoins!!! Let's not forget to mention that the difficulty levels seems to be rising over time so it could take much longer than that. In addition, the electricity costs to run a server could add up.

That was in August. Now?

For $2000, at current rate, you will get 8000 bitcoins.

To generate 8000 bitcoins, at current rate (50 coins/24 days) it will take 3840 days! Almost 11 years. However, current rate will change, resulting in significantly more time.

Gold taxes

2010-10-10T11:26:00.001-04:00

something else to consider: the US Government considers the sale of gold as a "collectible," and the profit realized aka capital gain is levied at 28% instead of current long term cap gains for stock at 15%! Also realize this same higher rate applies to the GLD ETF! so don't think you can circumvent the high tax the government takes via the ETF, instead of selling gold coins. I don't know if the collectibles cap gains tax goes up next year with reversing the Bush tax cuts. However, if buying gold coins, there is sales tax collected from a dealer within your own state, on top of their margin over spot price. There is a lot of headwinds to the liquidity of gold, I think this has lead to greater popularity of the gold ETF, however most people don't realize their realized cap gains are taxed at the higher rate of 28% even for an ETF.

Are you going to go crazy now?

2010-10-10T11:23:00.002-04:00

Finally, are you one of those Nobel prizewinners who is going to go crazy now that you've won?

As I've said before, some people stop doing science and just do crazy and awkward things; other people try to prove that they were worth it, and overload with research so much that they go crazy in a different manner; and of course, some Nobel prizewinners are actually senile by the time they get the prize. I'll try to keep my sanity as long as possible.

child abuse

2010-09-21T07:04:00.002-04:00

During the 1980s and 1990s, tens of thousands of Americans -- most of them middle-class, 30-something women in big cities, like me -- became convinced that they'd repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse, and then, decades later, recovered those memories in therapy.

In the years leading up to that mass panic, I was working as a feminist journalist, writing exposés of child sexual abuse, trying to convince the world that incest was more than a one-in-a-million occurrence. In the process, I convinced myself that my father had molested me. After five years of incest nightmares and incest workshops and incest therapy, I accused my father, estranging myself and my sons from him for the next eight years.

In the early 1990s the culture flipped, and so did I. Across the country, falsely accused fathers were suing their daughters' incest therapists. Falsely accused molesters were being freed from jail -- and I realized that my accusation was false. I was one of the lucky ones. My father was still alive, and he forgave me.

It's a little embarrassing for a person who's always been thought of as a critical thinker. There's a lot about writing this book and putting it out there that's embarrassing. It's not exactly the most flattering portrait. I think if it were a novel my editor would have rejected it, because the protagonist wasn't sympathetic enough. It really shocked me, I must say, to see how much influence the external had on the internal. That the most intimate emotions and relationships can be so affected by the dominant paradigm.

Can you make a male babysitter pay child support?

2010-09-20T15:43:00.002-04:00

On reddit.

internet privacy

2010-09-15T18:20:00.001-04:00

I can't follow you outside slashdot unless YOU make that possible. I don't know who you are. I can search your posts by your username because YOU choose to create an account and post under that account. I can't see what posts you made as an AC. Or what moderations you have done.
All your actions outside posts made under your account are unknown to me, unless YOU somehow share them AND link them to this account. You could be Obama for all I know, or be Lady Gaga. Now, I could google your nickname, but that only works if you used the same nick somewhere else.
It is possible to analyse all your posts and from them deduce a profile based on your style of writing. To be fair for the average slashdot poster that would put their location as "nearest kindergarden" but it might be possible to trace you to a specific location.
BUT that is because YOU choose to link all your posts together.
On the other hand, in the real world, I can't go invisible when I leave my house. So my neighbours know when I come and when I go. The supermarket can tell what I am doing by what I am buying. The bookshop knows my reading habbits (you sicko, is their personalized greeting) etc etc.
So, why do people worry about their online visibitlity where you can be a million different people, when everyone and their dog knows your offline person and what it is doing?
If you ever lived in a small community, you are used to it and you know, if the community is good, then it is a benefit. Neighbours actually stopped an attempted burglary because they knew I was away and saw movement so knew it couldn't be okay when I was younger and lived in a "village" that was about a dozen houses. In Amsterdam I had a neighbour discovered after the smell from the rotting corpse finally drifted into the hallway. All I knew was that the previous resident had moved and nobody ever noticed the new person moving in.
Don't complain about invasion of privacy is you broadcast every fart you make to the entire world. It is like saying "how dare people look at me when I streak down the high street".

Tim's watch is broken

2010-09-11T13:27:00.000-04:00

What steps will reproduce the problem? 1. Find Tim (he's usually in the Seattle office) 2. Engage him in conversation 3. Surreptitiously try to check the time on his watch  What is the expected output? What do you see instead?  Expected watch to tell correct time.  It tells the wrong time.  Please use labels and text to provide additional information.

Can you please provide us with some more details:  Has anybody else observed the same issue? Is the watch still broken, if somebody else wears it? Does the watch show the correct time in another time-zone? How about in a different country? Does the watch show the wrong time for all supported language markets? Have you ruled out the possibility of it being a simple rendering issue? Does the issue repro with other watches Tim wears? Is there any other equipment that might be interfering with the proper functioning of the watch? Have you ran recently virus scan? Can you please paste the output of 'uname -r' for both the watch and Tim? When was the last time the watch was synced?

Stay away from the border ..

2010-08-30T13:49:00.003-04:00

Even if you are legally in the US: While planning travel, avoid border towns and the routes close to the border. Stay away from Arizona, upstate NY, areas of Texas ..

The Lake Shore Limited runs between Chicago and New York City without crossing the Canadian border. But when it stops at Amtrak stations in western New York State, armed Border Patrol agents routinely board the train, question passengers about their citizenship and take away noncitizens who cannot produce satisfactory immigration papers.

Altenate link: Immigrants on Trains Near Northern Border Detained - NYTimes.com

How to draw a growling wolf

2010-08-29T17:42:00.003-04:00

http://nataliedecorsair.deviantart.com/art/Growling-wolf-tutorial-177244976?q=boost:popular+meta:all+max_age:8h&qo=10

domestic routes

2010-08-26T18:19:00.001-04:00

You Paid What for That Flight?

Great Divides

2010-08-22T12:34:00.001-04:00

When troops must be motivated to fight, “go team” speeches often invoke an ancient conflict, along a great divide:
Our fight, of [A] against [B] over [C], is but one battle in the ancient war over [F], along the great divide between [D] and [E]. Many do not realize how many of our apparently mundane conflicts are, in reality, battles in this ancient war. Today is a crucial day in this war, so we must not give up, and we must not lose hope, or someday [D] may lose [F] forever. Fight, fight!
Some classic great divides: tyrants vs. freedom-lovers, rich vs. poor, faithful vs. heathen, urban vs. rural folk, men vs. women, intellectuals vs. ignoramuses, artists vs. undiscerning, greens vs. greedy, civilized vs. uncivilized, east vs. west, farmers vs. herders, hill vs. valley folk, Aristotle vs. Plato followers, jocks vs. nerds, extroverts vs. introverts, neats vs. scruffies, makers vs. takers, communitarians vs. individualists, young vs. old, [can add more here].
Some questions, which I rarely see adequately answered:
How is this division a key division, underlying many others?
How do people acquire their sides in this conflict?
How has this conflict lasted so long, without one side winning?
How could one side finally win such an old conflict?
Why is one side better than the other in an absolute sense?
Why can’t those folks be persuaded that their side is bad?
Why can’t peaceful compromise replace conflict?

make new wheel with rocks?

2010-08-14T15:47:00.000-04:00

"So, what kind of rock should I get? Granite? Sandstone? And which quarry should I get it from? I was thinking that granite would last longer but sandstone would ride nicer and would be easier to lob at a dinosaur in case of attack."
Wheels made from rocks are quite a demanding application. Most rocks are very strong under compression (e.g., in a building or wall), but many are relatively weak under tension [wikipedia.org] with low elastic [wikipedia.org] strength, and therefore they will break relatively easily when a wheel is sheared laterally, such as when rounding a turn (due to forces acting perpendicular to the direction of travel). A way to mitigate this is to make the wheel rather thick, but the disadvantages (weight) are obvious.
Granite [wikipedia.org] is probably a better choice than sandstone [wikipedia.org] because most sandstones have individual grains that are in contact only over a small part of their area, with the spaces in between cemented together by other minerals that are often quite soft (e.g., calcite). Worse, many sandstones don't have those spaces fully infilled (i.e. the sandstones are porous [wikipedia.org]), which does increase their elastic modulus [wikipedia.org], but makes the material more prone to surface wear (it's easier to rub the mineral grains off the surface -- and it's even worse if water freezes in your neighborhood). Cracks tend to propagate [wikipedia.org]easily in sandstones. By contrast granite and other intrusive igneous rocks [wikipedia.org] are comprised of mineral grains that grew together as the molten rock crystallized and therefore the grains interlock quite tightly with virtually no open spaces between them (i.e. they are holocrystalline [wikipedia.org] and often equigranular [about.com]). A downside, however, is that some of the more common minerals in many granites (e.g., feldspars [wikipedia.org] and micas [wikipedia.org]) have good mineral cleavage[wikipedia.org] (it's not what you think, it's planes of weakness in the crystal structure), and the more coarse-grained granites therefore tend to break more easily (because the cracks propagate along the relatively large, weaker cleavage planes in the large grains). One way around this is to look for a granite with less of the minerals that have cleavage (i.e. less feldspar and mica) and more of the minerals that don't (e.g., quartz [wikipedia.org]), and to choose a granite that is as fine-grained as possible (then the random orientation of the cleavage planes from grain to grain will mean the cracks can't propagate as far along them before bumping into a grain boundary). As a bonus, quartz has a greater hardness [wikipedia.org] than feldspar or mica, so frictional wear will be reduced too. Therefore, a nice, fine-grained quartz-rich granite (ideally a quartzolite, but they are quite rare) is probably your best granite option. A fine-grained, non-vesicular [wikipedia.org] mafic [wikipedia.org] igneous rock, such as a basalt [wikipedia.org] or diabase/dolerite [wikipedia.org], might work well too, although they have higher density and don't have significant quartz (but the very small grainsize partly offsets this).
But why limit yourself to granite or sandstone? You can get all the benefits of a quartz-rich rock by going for a lithology [wiktionary.org] that is even more quartz-rich than granites. For example, a metamorphosed [wikipedia.org] quartz-rich sandstone will have the sand grains much more tightly cemented together than a typical sedimentary rock. These rocks are known as quartzites [wikipedia.org] and are much, much stronger. So strong, in fact, that your biggest challenge will become carving the rock into a wheel shape with the tools you've got (even bronze tools would be a struggle). You might be best off doing it the old fashioned way, and using quartzite tools to carve your quartzite wheel.
To find a nice deposit of quartzite your best bet is probably to find a location where quartz-rich sandstones have been heated up adjacent to a major igneous intrusion, thus producing contact aureole [wikipedia.org] in the sandstones where the rocks are metamorphosed into hornfels [wikipedia.org]. Basically, if you already know what granite looks like and already know what sandstone looks like (and it sounds like you do), then look in the area near the contact between the two. That will probably be the best stuff for the application you have in mind.
You've suggested using rock for your wheel, but in the end, you're almost certainly better off making your wheel out of a modern, light, composite material such as wood. A lighter wheel such as this would also allow you to flee faster should your attempts to throw rocks at the attacking dinosaurs fail.
I hope that helps. Good luck with your project.

http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1753934&cid=33247982

iPhone keyboard

2010-06-18T11:42:00.000-04:00

Recently I bought something called an iPhone. It drops calls so often that I no longer use it for audio conversations. It's too frustrating. And unlike my old BlackBerry days, I don't send e-mail on the iPhone because the on-screen keyboard is, as far as I can tell, an elaborate practical joke. I am, however, willing to respond to incoming text messages a long as they are in the form of yes-no questions and my answer are in the affirmative. In those cases I can simply type "k," the shorthand for OK, and I have trained my friends and family to accept L, J, O, or comma as meaning the same thing.

iPad vs Pebble

2010-06-04T23:59:00.001-04:00

To judge the usefulness of the iPad you can't compare to Android tablets, but to things that are already available now. This is a comprehensive list of the features between the Apple iPad and your typical Pebble.

Pebble (40,000 BC) features:
Multitasking - no
Camera - no
Flash - no
Windows Apps - no
Removable Battery - no
Optical Drive - no
Ugly bezel - NO
Color selection - VERITY OF DIFFERENT COLORS
Battery life - INFINITY HOURS
Weight - 0.01 LBS
Cost - $0

iPad (2010) Features:
Multitasking - no
Camera - no
Flash - no
Windows Apps - no
Removable Battery - no
Optical Drive - no
Ugly bezel - YES
Color selection - NONE
Battery life - 9-10 Hours
Weight - 1.6 LBS
Cost - $499.00 to $829.00

Note I'm only comparing features, for example I do not include things like touch screens as its not a feature, but a way to make available features more accessible. The pebble actually has a very intuitive and simple design interface. Much more user friendly.

In summary if your choosing between the Pebble and the iPad, they both are similar in feature sets, but the Pebble beats the iPad in Weight, Battery-life, portability, and variety. However the iPad has an ugly bezel around the screen, but than again the iPad is $499.98 to $829.98 more expensive.

In Praise of Idleness

2010-06-02T11:00:00.002-04:00

One of the commonest things to do with savings is to lend them to some Government. In view of the fact that the bulk of the public expenditure of most civilized Governments consists in payment for past wars or preparation for future wars, the man who lends his money to a Government is in the same position as the bad men in Shakespeare who hire murderers. The net result of the man's economical habits is to increase the armed forces of the State to which he lends his savings. Obviously it would be better if he spent the money, even if he spent it in drink or gambling.

The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich. In England, in the early nineteenth century, fifteen hours was the ordinary day's work for a man; children sometimes did as much, and very commonly did twelve hours a day. When meddlesome busybodies suggested that perhaps these hours were rather long, they were told that work kept adults from drink and children from mischief. When I was a child, shortly after urban working men had acquired the vote, certain public holidays were established by law, to the great indignation of the upper classes. I remember hearing an old Duchess say: 'What do the poor want with holidays? They ought to work.' People nowadays are less frank, but the sentiment persists, and is the source of much of our economic confusion.

the real trick is ..

2010-05-28T10:24:00.001-04:00

“Below 60,000 dollars a year, people are unhappy, and they get progressively unhappier the poorer they get. Above that, we get an absolutely flat line. I mean I’ve rarely seen lines so flat.”

“Clearly… money does not buy you experiential happiness, but lack of money certainly buys you misery,” he said. But the real trick, Kahneman said, is to spend time with people you like.

Daniel Kahneman: The riddle of experience vs. memory

Douglas Adams: Parrots the Universe and Everything

2010-03-23T04:49:00.002-04:00

... just a few days before his death.

Trayless Hot Swap Mobile Rack Backplane

2010-03-22T04:44:00.001-04:00

SNT SNT-SATA2221B Dual 2.5" SATA SSD / HDD to 3.5" Bay Trayless Hot Swap Mobile Rack Backplane

The Tyranny Of Compulsory Schooling

2010-03-20T23:57:00.001-04:00

Let me speak to you about dumbness because that is what schools teach best. Old-fashioned dumbness used to be simple ignorance: you didn't know something, but there were ways to find out if you wanted to. Government-controlled schooling didn't eliminate dumbness - in fact, we now know that people read more fluently before we had forced schooling - but dumbness was transformed.

Now dumb people aren't just ignorant; they're the victims of the non-thought of secondhand ideas. Dumb people are now well-informed about the opinions of Time magazine and CBS, The New York Times and the President; their job is to choose which pre-thought thoughts, which received opinions, they like best. The élite in this new empire of ignorance are those who know the most pre-thought thoughts.

Mass dumbness is vital to modern society. The dumb person is wonderfully flexible clay for psychological shaping by market research, government policymakers; public-opinion leaders, and any other interest group. The more pre-thought thoughts a person has memorized, the easier it is to predict what choices he or she will make. What dumb people cannot do is think for themselves or ever be alone for very long without feeling crazy. That is the whole point of national forced schooling; we aren't supposed to be able to think for ourselves because independent thinking gets in the way of "professional" think-ing, which is believed to follow rules of scientific precision.

Modern scientific stupidity masquerades as intellectual knowledge - which it is not. Real knowledge has to be earned by hard and painful thinking; it can't be generated in group discussions or group therapies but only in lonely sessions with yourself. Real knowledge is earned only by ceaseless questioning of yourself and others, and by the labor of independent verification; you can't buy it from a government agent, a social worker, a psychologist, a licensed specialist, or a schoolteacher. There isn't a public school in this country set up to allow the discovery of real knowledge - not even the best ones - although here and there individual teachers, like guerrilla fighters, sabotage the system and work toward this ideal. But since schools are set up to classify people rather than to see them as unique, even the best schoolteachers are strictly limited in the amount of questioning they can tolerate.

The new dumbness - the non thought of received ideas - is much more dangerous than simple ignorance, because it's really about thought control. In school, a washing away of the innate power of individual mind takes place, a "cleansing" so comprehensive that original thinking becomes difficult.

bailouts work!

2010-03-10T19:26:00.002-05:00

The past year saw an increase in the number of billionaires, from 793 to 1,011, Forbes said. The number is still lower than the record 1,125 billionaires recorded in 2008.

Not only are there more billionaires than last year, but the ones at the top are even richer than last year. The top 10 billionaires have a combined net worth of $342 billion, up from $254 billion in 2009, Forbes said.

There are more billionaires with a lot more money. Bailouts work! What more proof do you need?

chase credit line transfer

2010-03-05T04:13:00.002-05:00

Chase does not transfer credit line from one account to another anymore.

NASA Scientists plan for 2018

2010-03-04T04:22:00.001-05:00

Note: The Onion may not be safe for work.

NASA Scientists Plan To Approach Girl By 2018

punishment for being raped

2010-03-04T03:49:00.001-05:00

A Filipino woman in Saudi Arabia is scheduled to be lashed 100 times by the government as punishment for being raped. To add to the tragedy, the Filipino has been held in prison since September 2009. In December 2009, the woman — known only as “Camille” — miscarried. Now, she is facing a medieval crime — all because she was raped.

Gmail compose

2010-03-04T03:45:00.001-05:00

Shift C, R, F - to open in new window.

altruism

2010-03-01T02:40:00.001-05:00

Of all the nonsense that twists the world, the concept of 'altruism' is the worst. People do what they want to, every time. If it pains them to make a choice - if the 'choice' looks like a 'sacrifice' - you can be sure that it is no nobler than the discomfort caused by greediness... the necessity of having to decide between two things you want when you can't have both. The ordinary bloke suffers every time he chooses between spending a buck on beer or tucking it away for his kids, between getting up to go to work and losing his job. But he always chooses that which hurts least or pleasures most. The scoundrel and the saint make the same choices on a larger scale. - Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein

Federal poisoning program

2010-02-21T01:04:00.000-05:00

Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.

tax on profit or gross income?

2010-02-16T05:11:00.002-05:00

You obviously know nothing about business. Taxing revenue instead of profit is idiotic; this means that a company that has a very high profit margin because their operating expenses are low has a big advantage over a company that has high operating expenses.
For instance, look at Boeing, a big WA state employer. They build big, expensive planes. These planes aren't expensive just because Boeing decides to set the price on them at $250 million. They're expensive because it costs a lot to build a big plane: parts, materials, labor, safety testing, etc. That plane might cost a quarter-billion dollars, but only a small portion of that is profit, the rest is money they have to pay out for labor expenses, for raw materials costs, for parts from their suppliers, etc. Why should they pay taxes on all of that? You get to deduct your student loan and home loan interest from your taxes, as well as other things like medical expenses, and other unavoidable things.

Um, the parent was asking why its okay to tax people on gross income, but not companies? Either I should be taxed on Profit too, Or a company should be taxed on Gross income. Cause its just as easy to invent all sorts of crap to never have a profit. Go Google Hollywood accounting.
I mean with my income, I have to purchase a ton of expenses that eat at the total too. I have rent, food, medical care, etc. Just like Boeing has to pay for expenses to assemble their big shiny planes! And you can't get away with the "Well, they hire people and then they pay taxes" argument, cause I give income to the Landlord. I give income to Blue Cross, I provide income to farmers, sales clerks, hell, even the lady that cuts my hair. The economy is a network of economic networks..

Google Docs Additional Storage

2010-02-07T21:29:00.004-05:00

You can now upload any kind of file to Google Docs.

.. and buy additional storage at 25 cents per GB.

What better than a 80 GB backup drive for $20/year? And share it with others (shared folders!), to boot!

Climategate

2010-02-05T10:44:00.002-05:00

... why is it that environmentalists and the Pentagon both agree on one thing..which is that everyday people are the problem..why do both of them not mention missile testing, and weapons testing, and war and military exercises when talking about this stuff?

And the conclusion I came to is that both the Pentagon and some environmentalists (I am not talking about the average guy..I am talking about large groups with an impact on policy)…must be reading the same script.

Gates Foundation Plans To Invest $10B Into Vaccines

2010-01-31T01:36:00.002-05:00

Microsoft didn't put the patent laws into place, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation did. What, you thought those medicines were free? No, they came with the requirement that your country signs a trade treaty with the USA, bringing your patent system into line with theirs. You get the vaccines now, but you've just made it much harder to develop a native information economy, and you've probably just bought another decade or two of poverty for the majority of the population. Yay for altruism.

Big Pharma will love it. Bill buys $10bn of vaccines from them. They get the money. Then, he gives the vaccines to people in other countries on the condition that their government signs a treaty with the USA to enforce patents, like the ones on the vaccines. When the vaccines run out, the people in these countries start demanding that their government keeps supplying them. Unfortunately, they've just signed a treaty that prevents them from producing them locally, so now they have to go to Big Pharma and buy them. What's not to like?

Why did you bring up Microsoft? The comment that you are replying to has nothing to do with Microsoft. It has to do with the B&MGF's policy of requiring countries that benefit from their 'altruism' to sign IP treaties with the USA that prevent local production of the vaccines in question. Over the course of a decade, their 'donations' reduce the total amount of vaccines that will reach the people in the countries in question. Free vaccine now, but only if you make sure that the local company that could produce it for $1 never starts so when the donated vaccines run out you have to buy it for $200 from a US company. Sounds altruistic...

Democracy in Action!

2010-01-28T08:04:00.000-05:00

The dogs have voted!

.. and they form a majority.

Wives of Rockstar San Diego employees

2010-01-24T21:36:00.001-05:00

To whomever it may concern,

In response to the unfortunate circumstances, some wives of Rockstar San Diego employees have collected themselves to assert their concerns and announce a necessary rejoinder, in the form of an immediate action to ameliorate conditions of employees.

The turning for the worse came approximately in the month of March of 2009. Till present, the working conditions persists to deteriorate as employees are manipulated by certain hands that wield the reigns of power in Rockstar San Diego. Furthermore, the extent of degradation employees have suffered extends to their quality of life and their family members. Though it is presumed, this unfortunate circumstance is due largely to ignorance and unawareness of most, with enlightened knowledge, action must be taken to protect the rights of employees and those who depend on them. Realizing that such broad claims could hardly spark any interest to take a stand, a better illustration of the wrongs made unto Rockstar San Diego workers is necessary. Futhermore, the detailed descriptions about to be given can serve as a starting point as it will provide a clearer direction for change.

As a R* employee for a certain amount of years, let me first say that I feel like a proud citizen of my clan, but I like many of my peers seek a reprieve from the issues that the wives have boldly brought to the media's attention. I suppose I've been one to personally let things slide a lot over the last few months as I work many long hours, many of which I feel have been somewhat forced upon me, because I love my job so much, and every second I spend in my chair in front of my screen is only a second that comes completely natural to me. I like to make games, and I like to solve game problems. That being said, I also have a very supportive significant other half, and we have no children to feed and spend time with. Also because I'm in fairly good health, I don't find myself complaining about quality of life so much as I may complain of other issues at the studio that directly affect me. But I also do have close friends at the studio who have had their health and lives deteriorated in some way, and whether or not the long hours have directly contributed to these ailments, it certainly hasn't helped. And just because I may feel just fine today doesn't mean I'll still feel fine tomorrow or months down the road when it all catches up to me. And I acknowledge the day we have a child of our own may be a day of reckoning.

The blaming finger can be pointed in various directions here, but here's my take on the situation: We're producing a fantastic game right now, but in times past, it seemed to have little in the way of direction or conception. If it did indeed have these attributes, they were largely lost upon the majority of the development team, and many of us had little knowledge of what kind of product we were actually trying to put out there. I think we all do now, but it's in no thanks at all to any concerted effort whatsoever to actively motivate the team and evangelize the product to the developers themselves. I do believe that many of us didn't see how what we were doing could be important when we didn't really know what kind of game we're supposed to be making. Ultimately, I think we've all sort of "figured it out" and things started falling into place, but at the same time, I think this collective realization has put the pressure on all of us, management included, that we really need to nail this thing and get it out on shelves on time. There were extended core hours, frustrations rising, and then a false promise of the dropping of mandatory Saturdays, which seemed to last for about three such Saturdays.

But, perhaps an unsung root of the problems we face is a technical one, where many hours of productivity are wasted by everyone just waiting to get a build of the game that actually runs every time we need to update anything. Without getting too technical, lets just say that most of us are not happy with our build pipeline, and there are hundreds of errors and showstoppers that slow the game iteration down very significantly, in addition to many thousands of warnings that developers have littered about in both the build pipeline and the actual game itself for what we would assume are valid reasons, that pop up and nag, but there seems to be little effort on the part of the technical leads to enforce that these warnings be addressed. This I believe has brought us to where we are today. If these problems were minimized from the start, the game would have progressed much more quickly, and there would not be this frantic realization of being behind schedule and over-budget in the last year of development.

What Bitter PartyOfMany says about the "boys in New York" is also spot-on. For years there seemed to be indifference on the part of the big wigs everybody knows are really in charge, and the product never seemed to have true leaders. Directives come from people local to San Diego, when months later they are overridden arbitrarily by New York folks and work gets re-done, until they lose interest again or change their minds. Then of course we suffer their sustained scrutiny and sudden interest in what we're doing only in the last few months of development, and the weight and power they command often intimidates many of the leads at R* SD to the point where they may unnecessarily impose unreasonable expectations on the development team for the completion of a particular feature or bug fix, which may often not be universally agreed upon as particularly important.

When it's all said and done, I love my studio, I love my game, and I love my team, and I wouldn't give this up for the world. I just would like to see things improve for all of us, including our management.

FCC Brain Drain

2010-01-21T00:53:00.001-05:00

This all goes back to the days of Bill Clinton. The truth of the matter is, he didn't have sexual relations with any woman. There are even rumours that he is still a virgin. Chelsea is actually the result of Hillary reproducing asexually, under the reason that no one would want to regularily. This genetic mutation is considered an evolutionary advantage to some, so valuable that they want to keep it secret. This is why there was so much news surrounding Jenna Bush and none around Chelsea.
They ran some tests on CC. She has shown not only the ability to reproduce look alikes (see Hilary Duff), but also other another mutant power; laser eyes. Cyclops is actually an inspired character based on Chelsea. She currently works at Cern, powering the LHC with her amazing gifts. But as we all know, not everything is as it seems. We've all heard the stories about how the LHC is going to create black holes and destroy the Earth. It IS going to happen, in 2012, its a proven fact. It's all part of the Democrats plan. Why you ask? Despite beating the Republicans in the elections its never enough. They held a secret meeting in a hotel board room where they discussed ways to get rid of the Republicans for good. The vote was unanimous: Destroy the Earth.
So we were completely safe for 8 years while George was in power. He of course staged 9-11 to start the War on Terror so that he could reduce the amount of liquids allowed on airplanes, thus keeping the American population from over-hydration. A disguised way to protect us all from the looming threat of too much water. Water, angry in a fit of rage, retaliated with Hurricane Katrina.
And now we've got Obama back in power. How can you be certain he is in on the plan to black-hole the Earth? CHANGE. You know what another word for Change is? MUTATE. Remember Chelsea? Bingo! And look at those ears! They can't be natural! I know what you are thinking: What does all of this have to do with the FCC - the one loose knot left to tie. All the Engineers are leaving: Why? Joining CERN at the LHC. All the Economists are leaving: Why? They are needed to keep up the ruse that the economy is getting better, just long enough to keep order until the LHC can create a black hole. Of course the FCC's Administration is failing. It is under direct attack by the worlds most organized, powerful, and underhanded groups. A group which is hellbent on making sure the entire world is destroyed. And nothing, no silly Commission started a long time ago, is going to stand in their way.
Ladies and Gentlemen, its already too late.

Being White - Louis CK

2010-01-17T17:23:00.005-05:00

Adam’s Family Jewels

2010-01-17T02:29:00.001-05:00

“And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and He took the bone of Adam’s penis and made him a woman.”

Er, wait, wasn’t it from one of Adam’s ribs that Eve was created?

Not according to Ziony Zevit. A professor of Semitic languages at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles Zevit posits that the Hebrew word tsela (literally “side,” but traditionally translated as “rib”) employed in Genesis refers in fact to Adam’s member.

In court we swear to tell the truth with a hand placed on the Bible. But in the book itself, Jacob, nearing death in Egypt, asks Joseph to swear an oath not to bury him there by “put[ting] your hand under my thigh” (Gen. 47:29). Earlier in Genesis, Jacob wrestles with God, who touches “the hollow of his [Jacob’s] thigh” (32:25). “Thigh” happens to be a biblical euphemism for male genitalia; it’s from Jacob’s “thigh” or “loins” that his numerous offspring sprang. The practice of swearing an oath while touching one’s or someone else’s testicles was common in the ancient Near East (Abraham also orders a servant to do just that in Genesis 24:2). Its linguistic memory survives in our word “testify”—testis being the Latin both for “witness” and the male generative gland.

The People vs Larry Flynt (NSFW)

2010-01-08T12:27:00.003-05:00

Not Safe for Work!

Minute 42 to 45:40 - What is more obscene? (Can't find the clip on youtube, so text below)

Murder is illegal. But, you take a picture of somebody committing the act of murder and they'll put you on the cover of Newsweek. You might even win a Pulitzer Prize. And yet . . . sex is legal. Everybody's doing it, or everybody wants to be doing it. Yet, you take a picture of two people in the act of sex of just take a picture of a woman's naked body and they'll put you in jail. Now, I have a message for all you good, moral, Christian people who are complaining that breasts and vaginas are obscene. Hey, don't complain to me, complain to the manufacturer. Okay and although Jesus told us not to judge, I know you're going to judge anyway so judge sanely--judge with your eyes open.

I think the real obscenity comes from raising out youth to believe that sex is bad and ugly and dirty. And yet, it is heroic to go spill guts and blood in the most ghastly manner in the name of humanity. With all the taboos attached to sex, it's no wonder we have the problems we have. It's no wonder were angry and violent and genocidal. But, ask yourself the question, what is more obscene: sex or war?

Larry Flynt on Reverend Gerry Falwell: "I always appreciated his sincerity even though I knew what he was selling and he knew what I was selling."

Indecent Comment on an Indecent Subject

2010-01-08T06:34:00.002-05:00

Steve Russell, retired after 16 years as a trial judge in Texas, is Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

In cyberspace, there is no place. The "community standards" are those of the whole world. An upload from Amsterdam can become a download in Idaho. By trying to regulate obscenity and indecency on the Internet, you have reduced the level of expression allowed consenting adults to that of the most anal retentive blueballed fuckhead U.S. attorney in the country. The Internet is everywhere you can plug in a modem. Call Senator Exon an "ignorant motherfucker" in Lincoln, Nebraska and find yourself prosecuted in Bibleburg, Mississippi.

This is bullshit -- unconstitutional bullshit and also bad policy bullshit. To violate your ban on indecency, I have been forced to use and overuse so-called indecent language. But if I called you a bunch of goddam motherfucking cocksucking cunt-eating blue-balled bastards with the morals of muggers and the intelligence of pond scum, that would be nothing compared to this indictment, to wit: you have sold the First Amendment, your birthright and that of your children. The Founders turn in their graves. You have spit on the grave of every warrior who fought under the Stars and Stripes.
And what mess of pottage have you acquired in exchange for the rights of a free people? Have you cleansed the Internet of even the rawest pornography? No, because it is a worldwide system. You have, however, handed the government a powerful new tool to harass its critics: a prosecution for indecent commentary in any district in the country.

inappropriate and unacceptable

2010-01-08T06:30:00.001-05:00

No words are more typical of our moral culture than “inappropriate” and “unacceptable.” They seem bland, gentle even, yet they carry the full force of official power. When you hear them, you feel that you are being tied up with little pieces of soft string.

But this new, neutralised language does not spell any increase in freedom. When I call your action indecent, I state a fact that can be controverted. When I call it inappropriate, I invoke an institutional context—one which, by implication, I know better than you. Who can gainsay the Lord Chamberlain when he pronounces it “inappropriate” to wear jeans to the Queen’s garden party? This is what makes the new idiom so sinister. Calling your action indecent appeals to you as a human being; calling it inappropriate asserts official power.
The point can be generalised. As a society, we strive to eradicate moral language, hoping to eliminate the intolerance that often accompanies it. But intolerance has not been eliminated, merely thrust underground. “Inappropriate” and “unacceptable” are the catchwords of a moralism that dare not speak its name. They hide all measure of righteous fury behind the mask of bureaucratic neutrality. For the sake of our own humanity, we should strike them from our vocabulary.

How China Won and Russia Lost

2010-01-07T19:03:00.001-05:00

On a dark November night in 1978, 18 Chinese peasants from Xiaogang village in Anhui province secretly divided communal land to be farmed by individual families, who would keep what was left over after meeting state quotas. Such a division was illegal and highly dangerous, but the peasants felt the risks were worth it. The timing is significant for our story. The peasants took action one month before the “reform” congress of the party was announced. Thus, without fanfare, began economic reform, as spontaneous land division spread to other villages. One farmer said, “When one family’s chicken catches the pest, the whole village catches it. When one village has it, the whole county will be infected.”
Ten years later, in August of 1988, Mikhail Gorbachev lifted his nation’s 50-year-old prohibition against private farming, offering 50-year leases to farm families who would subsequently work off of contracts with the state. Few accepted the offer; Russian farmers were too accustomed to the dreary but steady life on the state or collective farm. Thus began reform of agriculture in Soviet Russia.
The results in each country could not have been more different. Chronically depressed Chinese agriculture began to blossom, not only for grain but for all crops. As farmers brought their crops to the city by bicycle or bus, long food lines began to dwindle and then disappear. The state grocery monopoly ended in less than one year. Soviet Russian agriculture continued to stagnate despite massive state subsidies. Citizens of a superpower again had to bear the indignity of sugar rations.

Throughout the reform process, the Chinese Communist Party simply reacted to (and wisely did not oppose) bottom-up reform initiatives that emanated largely from the rural population. Deng Xiaoping’s famous description of Chinese reform as “fording the river by feeling for the stones” is not incorrect, but it was the Chinese people who placed the stones under his feet.
Mikhail Gorbachev became general secretary of his party in March of 1985. By that time, he knew that the Chinese reforms were successful. His reforms, contrary to the popular narrative, closely mimicked China’s. He proposed to lease land to peasants, establish free trade zones, promote small cooperative businesses, and set up joint ventures. The difference was that Gorbachev imposed these changes from above, on an urban economy in which virtually all citizens worked for the state. Gorbachev’s reforms either were ignored or they were enacted with perverse consequences. Bottom-up reforms worked in China; top-down reforms failed in Russia.

Winston on Market Failure and Government Failure

2010-01-05T05:23:00.000-05:00

Clifford Winston of the Brookings Institution talks about the ideas in his book, Market Failure vs. Government Failure, with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Winston summarizes a large literature on antitrust, safety regulation and environmental regulation. He finds that government regulation often fails to meet its objectives. While markets are imperfect, so is government. Winston argues that idealized theories of government intervention based on textbook theories of market failure are not the way regulation turns out in practice. He argues that special interest politics explains much of the disappointing outcomes of government regulation.

Selling China Long-Term Innovation Assets

2010-01-04T01:25:00.001-05:00

On my way back from Beijing in December, I sat in front of a corporate guy who was returning to the US after pitching a deal to sell tens of thousands of electric car charging stations in China. He was talking to a California software guy, also returning after pitching after pitching a deal. Their exchange was all about the polite fiction that US companies are selling products to China when they are really selling their best technologies—for the lower price and profits of products. It’s short-term real gains over long-term potential profits.

Here is the essence of what I heard:

1-China is demanding technology transfer for the deal for electric car charging stations pretty much for the price of entry and for the price of the product alone. US, European, Korean and Japanese companies have known this and done this for the past 20 years. Most countries pay extra for the technology and most companies refuse to sell their best. China is getting cutting edge technology at almost no cost.

2- China can do this not only because of its enormous market but because it is the ONLY market for many products and services. China is building large numbers of high speed trains. The US is not. China is building hundreds of thousands of urban electric car charging stations. The US is not. China is spending $800 billion to make its electric transmission lines “smart.” The US is spending $8 billion. Corporations go to expanding markets. They have no choice today.

3- China is running a national, mercantilist economy policy that both state-owned and privately owned companies follow. Technology transfer is focussed on building Chinese global companies that can compete with US, Japanese and European corporations. Investment and trade are not just about raising living standards (if they were, then Beijing would let the yuan rise, increase the buying power of China’s consumers, and boost their living standards). They are about building national and global economic and political strength.

4—US companies know they are building their own competitors in China but feel they have no choice. They need that choice or the future long-term growth prospects for the US will grow dimmer and dimmer. China is playing a serious national innovation game. Good for China. The US is not. Bad for America.

emotional issue?

2010-01-02T09:19:00.007-05:00

Secret History of Credit Card

2010-01-02T04:46:00.001-05:00

NARRATOR: But what really attracted Citibank to South Dakota was an obscure Supreme Court decision that said a bank could now export its interest rate to other states. It was called the Marquette decision.

BILL JANKLOW: The Marquette Bank decision was a U.S. Supreme Court decision that said, forget where the bank is chartered. Wherever the credit decision is made, in whatever state, that's the place where you can apply interest, wherever you make the loan. In other words, if South Dakota had a 25 percent ceiling, then you could charge 25 percent, even to a loan in Florida.

BEN STEIN: The credit card companies hate people like me, who pay off our bills every month. And I know that because I ran into a fellow I went to high school with on the street, and he told me he worked for a credit card company. And I told him about how much I use credit cards and how I pay them off every month, and he said, "Oh, we hate you. We hate you guys. We call you deadbeats."

NARRATOR: "Deadbeats," in the upside-down world of the credit card business, are the people like Ben Stein, who pay off their bills on time. The industry's best customers are the 90 million Americans who don't pay off their credit card debt. They're called the "revolvers."

PAT WALLACE: Providian, for example, was accepting payments from consumers on their accounts, depositing the checks but not crediting the account for sometimes up to several weeks. What was the net result of that? Invariably, the consumer got a late charge.

LOWELL BERGMAN: They were holding payments so that they could charge late fees and they could charge overdraft fees and—

Deschooling Society

2009-12-29T22:20:00.002-05:00

If a team wants a good field goal kicker it will indeed seek a kicker who demonstrates to them he can kick. That someone comes to the team with a certificate that he went to kicking school and got all good grades in kicking would be laughed out of court. The issue would be: can the person kick field goals with accuracy and distance under pressure of game situations.

Similarly, with much in entertainment worlds. Webster University has a highly regarded theater department. Students work hard here and hopefully learn a great deal. But when they go out looking for an acting job, that they have a degree from Webster University with a major in theater is of extremely little interest. The issue is performance and demonstrated ability, not a credential.

China High-Speed Rail project

2009-12-29T05:46:00.001-05:00

Someone in my family works for Siemens as a senior member of the China High-Speed Rail project (not to be confused with the China Maglev project, for which Siemens is also a partner). We've talked about it quite often - and fairly extensively yesterday. Here are a few details:
The technologies of all four major high-speed rail system in the world - Germany's ICE, Japan's Sinkansen, France's TGV and Canada's Bombardier (in order of overall technological advancement) - have come together in China, though rather reluctantly. When the Chinese started the project years ago, they did something very clever: Instead of picking one of the four systems (which is what people normally do), they gave all four a pilot contract each. The one showing the best result in its pilot would then be chosen as the main partner, they said, making all four competing like crazy - routinely investing more resources than they've originally planed. The Chinese are not concerned about significant waste due to incompatibility between the pilot products, since all four are building to the specs written by the Chinese.
Now, years later, the Canadians and the French are practically washed out, even though some of their technologies have contributed to the new Chinese system. The Germans and the Japanese remain - as initially expected - the main competitors - or, reluctant partners for the Chinese. The vast majority of heavy lifting on the technological front is done by the Germans (which was also expected, since even the Japanese system was originally based on German designs), but the Japanese have the advantage that their pilot has started earlier (the Chinese intentionally delayed the German pilot in order to ransom a below-value price).
The record speed, for example, was achieved using two joined trains - of four sections each - built by Siemens in Germany and put together in China. Those are the only two German trains current available for this route. All the other trains are Japanese, and they're what people see on most new footages. But the top speed the Japanese trains (on the same route) can reach are significantly lower - about 350 km/h, or >10% less than the German record. Plus, while the German rains got to 395 km/h in standard configuration - with two tracking (active) and two tracked (passive) sections in each train - the Japanese had to cheat - using three tracking and only one tracked section in each train - in order to reach their 350 km/h.
As someone has mentioned above, there exist a TGV speed record that's much higher still, but that's a record nobody in the industry takes seriously, because it was achieved with a totally crazy, not nearly practical configuration of train sections. It's a fake number, period.
The bottom line is, for the original cost of one project, China has managed to get more than twice the amount worth of know-how (all legally via proper technology transfer contracts), and is now itself among the leading players of the industry. For the upcoming US high-speed rail system, the Chinese has offered a bid with a price tag 1/3 lower than anybody else...

Sumerians Look On In Confusion As Christian God Creates World

2009-12-16T03:22:00.001-05:00

According to recently excavated clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform script, thousands of Sumerians—the first humans to establish systems of writing, agriculture, and government—were working on their sophisticated irrigation systems when the Father of All Creation reached down from the ether and blew the divine spirit of life into their thriving civilization.

"I do not understand," reads an ancient line of pictographs depicting the sun, the moon, water, and a Sumerian who appears to be scratching his head. "A booming voice is saying, 'Let there be light,' but there is already light. It is saying, 'Let the earth bring forth grass,' but I am already standing on grass."

...

Moreover, the Sumerians were taken aback by the creation of the same animals and herb-yielding seeds that they had been domesticating and cultivating for hundreds of generations.

"The Sumerian people must have found God's making of heaven and earth in the middle of their well-established society to be more of an annoyance than anything else," said Paul Helund, ancient history professor at Cornell University. "If what the pictographs indicate are true, His loud voice interrupted their ancient prayer rituals for an entire week."

According to the cuneiform tablets, Sumerians found God's most puzzling act to be the creation from dust of the first two human beings.

"These two people made in his image do not know how to communicate, lack skills in both mathematics and farming, and have the intellectual capacity of an infant," one Sumerian philosopher wrote. "They must be the creation of a complete idiot."

Why girls dress up?

2009-12-15T03:10:00.002-05:00

scientific proof

2009-12-15T03:09:00.000-05:00

Perhaps it's time to once again point out that "scientific proof" is a red herring. As any number of science's theoreticians have carefully explained over the years, scientific methods rarely if ever actually "prove" anything. Rather, science works mostly with a double-negative approach: An accepted theory is one that we have failed to disprove. Scientific testing and data collection is mostly aimed at showing that a hypothesis is wrong. Results that agree with a hypothesis are generally called "support", not "proof", because usually the tests can't provide proof. But a single (correctly done;-) test or observation is often sufficient to disprove a theory.
This is why scientific theories are often called "tentative". Scientists are always trying to think of new ways to test a theory, and sometimes they succeed in finding situations where a theory fails. The poster child for this was the failure of Newton's mechanics to explain a number of anomalous observations about a century ago, which led to Einstein's theories explaining how the universe actually works. Of course, his theories have never been "proved", either. They have merely withstood hundreds of new experimental tests. Tomorrow some physicist (or high-school student) may produce a new test that demos an exception to Einstein's equations. But until then, they are accepted not because we've proved them, but rather because we have repeatedly failed to disprove them.
Of course, fundamental physics is "easier" that climate in an obvious way. Weather is much more complex than things like particle physics or orbital mechanics, which can be reduced to some fairly simple equations (though not quite as simple as we thought back in Newton's day). Anything dealing with weather has to be treated statistically, since the complexity is far beyond the capacity of our most powerful super-computers. (Our computers can't even model a butterfly's wings in detail, much less the effect the butterfly has on weather halfway around the world.;-) Since the public is generally totally ignorant of statistics, it's not surprising that people would fail to understand what the AGW theorists are telling us. It's fairly obvious that even most of the posters here in this "nerd" community don't understand the difference between weather and climate. You don't have much of a chance of understanding the issue without a good grounding in statistical methods, in addition to all the kinds of chemistry that you have to understand.
But the constant use of forms of the words "prove" and "proof" in regard to scientific theories should be treated with humor, since such words are an open statement that the author doesn't know much at all about scientific methods. Those are media and propaganda terms; they have very little use in scientific discussions. Proofs are what mathematicians do. Scientists do disproofs. (And it is interesting how well the radically different approaches of math and science complement each other. So far I haven't read much enlightening from either camp on this topic, just the observation that they play well together. But we all know that.)

Telangana - why so much opposition

2009-12-13T04:05:00.000-05:00

... Telangana lost out because it had to carry the burden of keeping the marriage working and pretending everything was alright while suffering and enduring discrimination all the while. Telangana lost out because the Indira Gandhi’s Congress was not ready to create more states. Telangana lost out because they had to unnecessarily live with the tag of united Telugu when they were only concerned with their self-rule, self-expression and self-development.

We don’t want continue with charade any longer. We don’t want to be cowed down by the majority of Andhra-Rayalaseema. We just want to be on our own so that our politicians, however vile they are, are at least accountable to us. So that they spend the money they get in our region, even if they eat half of it, at least we get the other half. Self-rule, self-development and self-expression are more important to us than the unity under a tag called Telugu. This tag does not even make sense when many Telangana people actually feel that their language is treated inferiorly by their Andhra brothers.

Harrison Bergeron - social equality

2009-11-06T12:35:00.000-05:00

.... social equality has been achieved by handicapping the more intelligent, athletic or beautiful members of society. For example, strength is handicapped by the requirement to carry weight, beauty by the requirement to wear a mask, etc. This is due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th amendments to the United States Constitution. This process is central to the society, designed so that no one will feel inferior to anyone else. Handicapping is overseen by the United States Handicapper General, Diana Moon-Glampers.

Harrison Bergeron, the protagonist of the story, has exceptional intelligence, strength, and beauty, and thus has to bear enormous handicaps. These include headphones that play distracting noises, three hundred pounds of weight strapped to his body, forty pounds of birdshot around his neck, eyeglasses designed to give him headaches, a rubber ball on his nose, black caps on his teeth, and shaven eyebrows. Despite these societal handicaps, he is able to invade a TV station, declare himself Emperor, strip himself of his handicaps, then dance with a ballerina whose handicaps he has also discarded. Both are shot dead by the brutal and relentless Handicapper General. The story is framed by an additional perspective from Bergeron's parents, who are watching the incident on TV, but because of his father's handicapping due to his superior intelligence, and his mother's less than average intelligence, they cannot concentrate enough to appreciate what occurs nor remember it.

A similar (though less developed) version of this idea appeared in Vonnegut's earlier novel, The Sirens of Titan.

A Library to Last Forever

2009-10-22T18:11:00.001-04:00

.. the vast majority of books ever written are not accessible to anyone except the most tenacious researchers at premier academic libraries. Books written after 1923 quickly disappear into a literary black hole. With rare exceptions, one can buy them only for the small number of years they are in print. After that, they are found only in a vanishing number of libraries and used book stores. As the years pass, contracts get lost and forgotten, authors and publishers disappear, the rights holders become impossible to track down.

Inevitably, the few remaining copies of the books are left to deteriorate slowly or are lost to fires, floods and other disasters. While I was at Stanford in 1998, floods damaged or destroyed tens of thousands of books. Unfortunately, such events are not uncommon — a similar flood happened at Stanford just 20 years prior. You could read about it in The Stanford-Lockheed Meyer Library Flood Report, published in 1980, but this book itself is no longer available.

Op-Ed Contributor - A Library to Last Forever - NYTimes.com

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The Uber Nutrient Worth “Hundreds of Billions”

2009-10-22T18:04:00.001-04:00

D is not just another nutrient. Putting it simplistically, it is the über-nutrient that affects the way all other nutrients, not just calcium, are utilized. Virtually every cell in the body has a D receptor, even those in the brain. Until recently, however, few asked why. This is a particularly interesting question because there is very little vitamin D actually available in food. Most of our nutritional D, in fact, is added. Historically, the primary source of D, not only for humans, but for many other animals, has been sunshine. We convert the energy found in ultraviolet B in our skin to vitamin D. Obviously, there is something critically important about D if our prehistoric ancestors could manufacture it even during times of famine.

Now we see a compendium of solid peer-reviewed research indicating that many of our most troublesome and expensive diseases are symptoms of vitamin D deficiency. Rickets, apparently, was only the tip of the iceberg. Other diseases on the list of conditions caused or exacerbated by D deficiency include cancers, diabetes, susceptibility to bacterial and viral infections, autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis, psoriasis, heart disease, stroke, osteomalacia or age-related bone mass thinning, osteoporosis, depression and even food allergies. Obesity, in fact, is highly correlated with vitamin D deficiency. In many of these conditions, risk factors drop within months, and by as much as 80%.

The Uber Nutrient Worth “Hundreds of Billions”

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The Improbable Rise and Fall of E-Gold

2009-10-13T22:09:00.001-04:00

So in early 1996, Jackson began programming a back-end system for a new electronic currency, practicing medicine by day, and coding by night.
He hired a software engineer to create the user interface, and four months later launched E-Gold.
As Jackson envisioned it, E-Gold was a private, international currency that would circulate independent of government controls, and stand impervious to the market’s highs and lows. Brimming with evangelical enthusiasm, Jackson proclaimed it a cure for the modern monetary system’s ills and described it at one point as “an epochal change in human destiny” and “probably the greatest benefit to humanity that’s ever been thought of.”

Timberlake, the economics professor, is convinced that Jackson’s radical dream, his goal of upsetting the economic status quo and overturning the government’s monopoly on money, is what really got E-Gold targeted.

Should Yale support biotech lobbyists? yalepatents.org

2009-10-08T19:09:00.001-04:00

I understand the hopes, shared alike by local universities and municipalities, that biotech will reenergize Connecticut’s sagging industry and employment landscape. The actual realization of a wealthy, well-educated workforce and lucrative industry may someday redeem the subsidies and other favors made to incentivize the growth of local biotech shops and drug manufacturers in CT.

Reasonable people disagree about the benefits society will reap from lengthy monopolies on biological drugs–for periods of a decade or more. For instance, is it true that a certain, dozen-year period of drug exclusivity is required for firms to recoup their research? After all, manufacturers of generic biological drugs will, in all likelihood, confront the same bevy of expensive safety and efficacy testing as the original producer. In some cases, the sheer cost of reproducing the process for making a biologic treatment may make these inventions immune to the kind of generic versions that can be made of simpler, small-molecule based drugs (mainstream antibiotics and antidepressants, for instance).

In addition, the monopoly provided by government-guaranteed data exclusivity has nothing to do with the already decades-long patent protections that cover the inventions packaged into drugs.

Considering the enormous price that our society will likely pay for high-tech drugs in the coming decades, we should at least understand what kind of deal we’re getting with drug manufacturers as we negotiate the monopolies they’ll receive on the next generation of life-saving treatments. It is in the interest of the university community, not to mention the Connecticut taxpayer, to keep industry lobbyists like CURE at arms length, at the very least, so that meaningful, two-sided debate can occur on the enormous issues of drug cost and healthcare reform.

Should Yale support biotech lobbyists? | yalepatents.org

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SAT and GRE testing

2009-10-08T19:00:00.001-04:00

The workaround for this problem is to tailor the test to the examinee, real-time, with computer-adaptive testing. So let's say you get an item with a difficulty estimate of 1 correct; now the computer will hit you with one at 1.2, for example, and keep ramping up until you kind of level off at getting 50/50 right, which is where it decides you belong. Once it has you figured out, it either just throws easy ones at you so you feel good about yourself, or starts serving up items still undergoing pilot testing. Either way, what you do after that point will not affect your score.
This sounds great, and it would be great, if it worked reliably. The problem is that the thing has to kick in somewhere at the beginning of the test, and define a broad range that you belong in, and then a narrower range, and then a narrower range, etc. What this basically does is unfairly "weight" the first few items of the test, because they are the ones that will determine what large band of scores you will be eligible for. Once the machine has pegged you at the lower half, say, there is no way for you to break out of that, because it's never going to give you those harder questions. If that's not where you belong, you won't be able to demonstrate that, and you'll just get the top score of that band. So if you start the thing out and you're nervous and you just make a dumb mistake, that mistake can really cost you--much more than it would later in the test. All these models are probabilistic, so guessing and just making dumb mistakes are accounted for. But the moment you go adaptive, the beauty of the model is trashed at the beginning and doesn't come into effect until later.
Many of the tests which moved to computer-adaptive methods have gone back to just serving a range of items, but one, the GRE, is still adaptive, even though ETS (the company that makes it and the SAT and the TOEFL) knows it doesn't work reliably (people taking the test over and over can get very different scores). Evidently there are financial/political reasons they can't get rid of it (rumor).

Slashdot Comments | MIT Axes the 500-Word Application Essay

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I can pay you back with penny stamps

2009-10-06T21:40:00.002-04:00

Dear Daddy

This is just a very secret letter between you and I. I really do not like asking you, but do you think you could afford to send me some money, what ever you can afford. I want to buy Mummy something for Xmas, but as we only get (?) a week pocket money I'm afraid I spend mine. I try hard to keep some, but somehow it goes. If you can Daddy, I will keep sending you penny stamps to pay you back young man, then you can use them can't you. We are very disappointing you will not be home for Xmas but we will still hang a stockingup for you. Father Xmas might leave you something if you are good.

Please do not tell Mummie I have written, else she will be annoyed at me asking you for money, she is in town at this moment.So I will post this straight away. If you can't send it don't worry.

Lots of Love + Kisses old-pop xxxxYour Ann.

Letters of Note: I can pay you back with penny stamps

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Where Did All Those Gorgeous Russians Come From?

2009-09-27T00:37:00.000-04:00

Where were they all before?

Though this is a fairly frivolous question (OK, extremely frivolous), I am convinced it has an interesting answer. To put it bluntly, in the Soviet Union there was no market for female beauty. No fashion magazines featured beautiful women, since there weren't any fashion magazines. No TV series depended upon beautiful women for high ratings, since there weren't any ratings. There weren't many men rich enough to seek out beautiful women and marry them, and foreign men couldn't get the right sort of visa. There were a few film stars, of course, but some of the most famous—I'm thinking of Lyubov Orlova, alleged to be Stalin's favorite actress—were wholesome and cheerful rather than sultry and stunning. Unusual beauty, like unusual genius, was considered highly suspicious in the Soviet Union and its satellite people's republics.

Ultimately, what goes for the fashion world goes for other spheres of human activity. In the past, you had to play chess or be a champion gymnast to come to international attention if you were born in the Eastern bloc—chess and competitive sports figuring among the few party-approved export industries. Nowadays, stars in fields previously unsanctioned by the party—crime novelists, conceptual artists, computer whizzes—from Russia, Hungary, or Uzbekistan have a shot at fame and fortune, too. As for talented entrepreneurs, the sky's the limit.

Beauty is a matter of luck, but the same could be said of many other talents. And what open markets do for beautiful women they also do for other sorts of genius. So, cheer up next time you see a Siberian blonde dominating male attention at the far end of the table: The same mechanisms that brought her to your dinner party might one day bring you the Ukrainian doctor who cures your cancer or the Polish stockbroker who makes your fortune.

How Do You Create Config Files Automatically?

2009-09-26T09:04:00.001-04:00

"When deploying new server/servergroup/cluster to your IT infrastructure, deployment (simplified) consist of following steps: OS installation: to do it over network, boot server must be configured for this new server/servergroup/cluster; configuration/package management: configuration server has to be aware of the newcomer(s); monitoring and alerting: monitoring software must be reconfigured; and performance metrics: a tool for collecting data must be reconfigured. There are many excellent software solutions for those particular jobs, say configuration management (Puppet, Chef, cfengine, bcfg2), monitoring hosts and services (Nagios, Zabbix, OpenNMS, Zenoss, etc) and performance metrics (Ganglia, etc.). But each of these tools has to be configured independently or at least configuration has to be generated. What tools do you use to achieve this? For example, when you have to deploy a new server, how do you create configs for, let's say, PXE boot server, Puppet, Nagios and Ganglia, at once?"

Actually this is one of the goals VMWare is proposing to meet with their vSphere. vCenter, ad nauseum initiatives. [full disclosure I've beta'ed VMWare software since v1]. This also presupposes full P2V, V2P cross machine conversions if required. The goal here is be anywhere, and run anywhere.

Now if I had the money, I'd toss full de-dup into the storage array mix as well, so much of the image file size essentially disappears unless there is simply no duplication anywhere. And if you are in that situation, take my advice. Quit, or just shoot yourself and get it over with.

It's been a long time since I played at that level (six mainframes, eighteen mini's, 575 desktops, and I never got an accurate count of the 100+ laptops) but at some point you have to ask yourself, when does the customization end? Standardization was the only thing that kept myself and my team of four !relatively! sane.

If you seriously need customization of that level, then you aren't doing things right. Reduce each VM to a single app (Apache, MySQL, IIS, network appliance, whatever) and use virtual switches to create a topology as required. Think of each VM as a particular Lego block, or IC: Systems Componentization as it were. And this is where de-dupe will also shine.

What Have VCs Really Done for Innovation?

2009-09-25T22:03:00.000-04:00

.... So I’m miffed by the National Venture Capital Association’s (NVCA) claim that companies like Microsoft and Google “…would not exist today without the funding and guidance provided during their early stages by venture capitalists.” And I’m amused that the NVCA claims credit for creating 12 million jobs and generating $3 trillion in revenue (that’s only 21 percent of U.S. GDP). In the software industry (which includes Internet/Web 2.0), they stake claim to 81% of the all jobs created. Yes, 81%. Can they please give the entrepreneurs who risk their life savings, max out their credit cards and put their families in the back seat a little more credit? We’re not talking about divvying up the company’s stock here, just a pat on the back.

How’d they come up with these numbers? They added up all the revenue generated in 2008 by any company a venture capitalist ever invested a dime in. So if John Doerr bought Bill a lunch in 1985, they’d count Microsoft as part of their empire. Maybe I’m exaggerating a bit. But seriously, the NVCA numbers aren’t even remotely credible. How can VCs claim credit for the revenue of a company which they cashed out of twenty or thirty years ago? And even then, claiming credit for 81% of tech jobs and 21% of GDP? More to the point, would those jobs never have been created if the VCs had never appeared on the scene? How can the NVCA prove causality?

The answer is, the NVCA can prove nothing and a growing pool of data suggests that VCs at best have little to no impact on these companies and at worst have a negative impact. I just completed a research project in which we interviewed the founders of 549 successful companies in several high-growth industries – the ones VC’s are most likely to fund. We selected companies that had made it out of the garage and were generating real revenue. Guess what? Hardly ten percent of the serial entrepreneurs took venture money in their first startups. In their subsequent launches, the proportion who took venture money went up to a quarter. In other words, three-quarters of even the most experienced entrepreneurs didn’t rely on venture capital (new report to be released in October).

Kids Who Get Spanked

2009-09-25T21:54:00.001-04:00

The IQs of the younger children who were spanked were 5 points lower on average four years later than those of children of the same age who were not spanked. Scores among the older children were an average of 2.8 points lower among spanked children than children who were not spanked.

"Parents spank to decrease bad behavior in the short and long term and to promote positive behavior," she tells WebMD. "What the research tells us is that spanking doesn't seem to be doing either of these things."

Nouveau Poor Facing Discrimination From Old Poor

2009-09-22T21:04:00.001-04:00

Report: Growing Ranks Of Nouveau Poor Facing Discrimination From Old Poor

RAID vs SSD

2009-09-18T16:18:00.000-04:00

The fundamental problem here isn't the RAID concept, is that the throughput and access times of spinning rust haven't changed much in 30 years. Fundamentally, today's hard drive is no more than 100 times as fast (both in throughput and latency) than a 1980s one, while it holds well over 1 million times more.
ZFS (and other advanced filesystems) will now do partial reconstruction of a failed drive (that is, they don't have to bit copy the entire drive, only the parts which are used), which helps. But there are still problems. ZFS's pathological case results in rebuild times of 2-3 WEEKS for a 1TB drive in a RAID-Z (similar to RAID-5). It's all due to the horribly small throughput, maximum IOPs, and latency of the hard drive.
SSDs, on the other hand, are no where near the problem. They've got considerably more throughput than a hard drive, and, more importantly, THOUSANDS of times better IOPS. Frankly, more than any other reason, I expect the significant IOPS of the SSD to signal the death knell of HDs in the next decade. By 2020, expect HDs to be gone from everything, even in places where HDs still have better GB/$. The rebuild rates and maintenance of HDs simply can't compete with flash.
Note: IOPS = I/O Per Second, or the number of read/write operations (irregardless of size) which a disk can service. HDs top out around 350, consumer SSDs do under 10,000, and high-end SSDs can do up to 100,000.

Stock Market Manipulation By Millisecond Trading

2009-09-17T18:29:00.001-04:00

A firm I worked with recently tore down an arbitrage network (they were getting out of the business as it was not core) which comprised of a great deal of Layer 2 dark fiber between sites in NYC and an external data center in NJ, Force 10 fabric switches with multiple paths to server clusters, and a great many Sun X-series servers running Linux. This arbitrage network bypassed the standard corporate (i.e. Cisco-based) network as they wanted exclusivity, higher bandwidth and as much speed as possible. Still, there were issues and the whole environment was scrapped since the actual returns did not match the expectations or cover the costs.
When I looked over the shoulders of the designers (they didn't want too much support from the regular network engineering team) they were concerned with raw performance and not as much with security or other daily operational issues. I would characterize it as the difference between, say, a NASCAR Sprint Cup car and your regular transportation. The former is purpose-built solely for performance while the other has to contend with safety requirements, daily functionality, and a lower common denominator for use.

The location of their server no longer matters as GS was allowed to put a peeker in line between everyone else (on the planet) and the publicly traded ETNS. They get an opportunity to front run every transaction. Every single one. Zerohedge is a financial blog that has been keeping up with this story. Their coverage is good if a little breathless.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is seeking to curb a practice criticized for giving an unfair advantage to some market participants who have lightning-fast computer trading software.

I’m Better Than You Are

2009-09-11T10:15:00.000-04:00

... she thanked me profusely for the rescue and also for not saying “That’s almost as bad as…” When I asked her what she meant, she asked me had I never noticed how people always say they’ve had worse things happen to them than you have? This was the first time I’d met someone else who was bothered by this.
I have occasionally noticed this pattern in speech before and while it’s sometimes humorous, more often than not it's annoying. Only after she reminded me, though, did I stop to analyze why we do it.

I can understand when you are telling a person you had an unexpected expense that was tough to deal with and they reply that they can relate, then go on to tell you of their most recent unexpected outlay. That, I think, is their way of saying they have been through what you’re going through. Another phrase is, of course, “Been there!”

But what I’m really talking about is the one-upmanship or ‘I’m better than you are’ meaning behind that phrase "almost as bad."

"Oh yeah, that’s almost as bad as…”

Now, there may be times when indeed, my experience might not have been as bad as one they’ve been through, but even in that case, isn’t it still wrong to begin dialog with someone in that way?

One-upmanship

2009-09-11T10:10:00.001-04:00

.. the systematic and conscious practice of "creative intimidation", making one's associates feel inferior and thereby gaining the status of being "one-up" on them.

What the DHS Knows About You

2009-09-08T12:23:00.000-04:00

"Here's a real copy of an American citizen's DHS Travel Record, retrieved from the US Customs and Border Patrol's Automated Targeting System and obtained through a FOIA/Privacy Act request. The document reveals that the DHS is storing: the traveler's credit card number and expiration; IP addresses used to make Web travel reservations; hotel information and itinerary; full airline itinerary including flight numbers and seat numbers; phone numbers including business, home, and cell; and every frequent flyer and hotel number associated with the traveler, even ones not used for the specific reservation."

I've actually heard people respond to revelations like this by saying, "If you're not doing anything wrong, why are you worried about the government having this information?" I then ask "Really? Well, tell me all about your sex life..no?..are you engaging in some perversion?" or "How much money have you got in the bank?...Why won't you tell me? Are you laundering money for drug dealers?" I don't know which is worse, these clowns prying into our lives or our wonderful Congress sitting there and letting them do it. Big Brother is taking over faster than you doublethink.