codex

Mormons typically fast one day a week, no? What other concrete examples of culture do Mormons manifest?

CORRECTION: It's actually one day a month.

How so you test for national inflation on a small or even medium scale?

Most of the poor are renters. If you gave everyone $12k more a year, why wouldn't everyone's rent (and other expenses) simply rise by $12K?

This is the wrong approach. BMW has the right idea here: define an interface that lets a user's smartphone paint a car's built in LCD(s) and receive input from its joysticks. Then the car becomes agnostic to ever changing network, app, and graphics technology.

The real question is: has an human looked at Congressional metadata, or are they likely to do so? This question was not asked because, given the data protections in place, the answer is likely no.

Free post-secondary education is a reasonable idea for the advanced economies of today. However, if the public pays for post-secondary education, then the allocation of majors should be in the public interest. Graduating a surplus of English majors does nobody any good.

According to the coroner's report [1], both his girlfriend and his friend told the police he had a history if opiate and cocaine use.

[1] http://cdn2.sbnation.com/assets/3803095/barnaby_jack_autopsy...

It's my impression that kids don't really start to pay off until you're in your fifties and sixties.

What a nasty piece of trash. It doesn't do young techies any favors.

It bears mentioning that the sugar content of modern fruit is much higher than that of Paleolithic fruit. It's been bred to be sweeter and larger.

If Emacs moves to git, can we call it by its proper name: git/Emacs?

The entire GNU project is like a house that looked so mod in 1971, but now has peeling paint, stained concrete, shag carpeting that smells pretty funky, and a crazy old relative that haunts the place. "Renovation" is changing the light bulbs and occasionally washing the stucco.

As far as I know, none of the NSA's practices have been ruled unconstitutional. At best, the courts have sent mixed signals, and the collection of metadata was explicitly decreed constitutional by a precious Supreme Court ruling.

In other words, you're underemployed and don't have small children--prime circumstances to foster Internet anxiety addiction.

Startups are all about risking failure to push the envelope. The military, on the other hand, is apparently not allowed.

I'm considering it only from a currency regulation standpoint, as per the article. But it's easy enough to make sure that you may deposit or withdraw money only from a local bank account, in the local currency, which you must have opened using valid non-anonymous credentials. Existing banks are highly regulated, as you point out.

BTW, EverBank offers foreign currency denominated money market accounts in the US.

I don't see Bitcoin as an alternative currency. I see it more as a bank account held in a foreign currency. These exist today.

Without Linux, Android would have used something else; likely BSD. iOS is a variant of BSD as well, albeit with a different kernel core.

In most locations you can get 4-hour support by buying AppleCare Premium.

Surprise feature: 512GB of DRAM associated with the SSD. Is this a write cache? If so, is it battery backed?

The potential of Bitcoin is that volume can grow to be so high that the spreads are negligible. Meanwhile, bank interchange fees remain stubbornly high.

San Francisco is over-hyped, possibly because of the high concentration of bloggers who live in and around the city. I prefer New York, Chicago, Boston, and Seattle.

I think there are two variables here:

A: the number of people radicalized into anti-American terrorists

B: the opportunity that As have to cause damage

I suspect A went up in the late nineties and continues to be high-ish today. B went up with OBL and the Saudis funding the game, but has gone down post-9/11 for a variety of reasons, including decreased Saudi bankrolls, increased airport and aircraft security, tighter restrictions on student visas, and a weakened Al Qaeda.

I believe it's a lot easier to down a plane than to kill 180 people in a shopping mall. The latter would require much more explosive given the wide open spaces. You can bring down a plane much more easily.

Mainly, though, people feel more vulnerable in a plane, so an aircraft bombing is higher impact.

It depends, I think. Human willpower and resources are a finite resource.

If a terrorist could bring down a plane by clicking a button on a website, we would see hundreds of planes downed every day.

If it takes a day of preparation, we'd see perhaps a dozen per day.

If it takes a week, we would see another order of magnitude fewer.

If it takes a year of training and preparation by one or more high IQ individuals with several hundred thousand dollars, we'd see almost none. This is why we haven't seen any more 9/11 style attacks even though they were so amazingly effective as a terrorist tool: it's become sufficiently difficult to pull them off after counterterrorism efforts were amped up.

In other words: criminals can still break into my car if they really tried, but I still lock my car doors.

That's the idea. There were more people waiting for trains inside the station than waiting in line at the metal detector. Russian officials claim that the barricades reduced casualties.

I think it's pretty weak, both to politicians and to common sense, to use the fact that these bombers failed as an argument to reduce security. They were able to bring bombs on planes. Given enough opportunity, eventually an attempt would have succeeded.

Since 9/11 there have been no highjacking attempts, true, but there have been multiple bombing attempts on aircraft by would be suicide bombers, and these bombers were able to evade the limited screening employed at the time. As bomb technology grows more sophisticated and easy to hide, screening has become more rigorous. That's what the TSA is focused on these days.

Russian train stations employ metal detectors and barricades. Just as the TSA has been ridiculed in the United States, these were similarly derided in Russia.

And yet this combination was effective in limiting the number of casualties in the recent Volgograd train station bombing. I suspect the amount of Russian editorializing over these security procedures will soon decrease.

Fortunately, while civilian memory is short, government institutional memory is long.

In a far off land, bounceyball was the national sport. A funny cross between basketball and volleyball, it was hugely popular, and to be a professional player was considered the most prestigious occupation.

A minor scandal erupted when was noted that there were few women in the co-ed national league, and a huge about of effort was made to recruit female players. Every family wanted the prestige, fame, and fortune that came with having a daughter in the league. Male players wanted more females playing so it didn't feel like a damn sausagefest all the time, and to help with dating (for some odd reason, most male bounceyball players were surprisingly unattractive).

Eventually it was suggested that the problem lay upstream, so major efforts were made to recruit teenage girls for the middle and high school leagues, which were also coed.

However, for some reason this attempt also failed. Finally, an anonymous poster on the Internet noted that, as a broad generalization, taller bounceyball players were more suited to the game, scoring more points. Perhaps a gender difference in height was to blame, discouraging female players and hurting them in the draft. The poster tracked down these differences in height to a disparity in average male and female birth weights, and suggested that perhaps a cocktail of experimental prenatal hormones (primarily testosterone), continued until age 15, would do the trick.

The anonymous poster was promptly downvoted and the discussion turned to topics of sexism, discrimination, and cultural bias in the bounceyball leagues. Various horror stories were recounted by female bounceyball players and a new round of self-flagellation began among those in the industry.