I believe someone from Sweden posted in a previous story that their jails were already full up, even without people turning themselves in. Apparently, there's a waiting line for when you do your time, with the exception that violent criminals skip to the front.

There's no need to give up on secret voting to get this. Thanks to advances in cryptography we can have secret *and* verifiable ballots. An example implementation can be found at Helios voting. Also, check out a description of a paper based system: Scratch and Vote [PDF]

Is Palladium still going strong? I recall a few years back that they were basically asking people for donations in order to remain solvent.

Since I played a lot of TMNT as a kid that was a sad day for me. It's good to see they're still around, and I hope that they are going strong, as you say.

It's nominally at the federal level, but the 14th amendment is generally construed to make the other amendments about rights and so forth applicable at the state level.

You may as well just say what you mean: without a soul to experience pain or change in temperature, it is unwarranted to assume a crab "feels" anything at all.

It's an extremely popular idea, but many people fill a little silly worrying so much about souls (especially those trying to distance themselves from christian philosophy). Which is why dualism so often runs around under the guise of "consciousness". But be honest with yourself: if it sounds silly when you talk about souls, it's no less silly when you replace "soul" by "consciousness".

This is a common belief, but it is utterly wrong. Consider flipping a fair coin. The probability of getting heads is 1/2 always. If I got heads the last 100 flips, what's the chances of getting heads again? 1/2.

On the other hand, the probability of getting heads 100 times in a row is 1/2^100. Confusing these two probabilities is the basis of the Gambler's Fallacy.

However, there are some natural processes that fall subject to this reasoning. Take the earthquake example. Let's say that the chances of an earthquake happening increase as subterranean pressure increases. Let's say that everyday the subterranean pressure increases by some (small) random amount. In this situation the chance of an earthquake does get bigger everyday, but that's because there is something actively increasing the probability.

Compare with the earth being struck by a cataclysmic asteroid. In this case, there's no analogous process building up over time so it is fallacious to conclude that the chances are getting bigger every day that we don't get struck.

Whether or not editors get paid varies based on the discipline as well as the journal. In my area (mathematics) a few journals may pay editors, but most do not. Editors, just like referees, work voluntarily; except that editors get the prestige of having their name associated with a well-known journal.

Also, I think you vastly overestimate the cost of running a journal. In math there have been a few cases of mass resignations of editorial boards (essentially killing the journal), and a brand-new journal springing up to take its place. Remarkably, these new journals that are basically equivalent to the old ones manage to charge 5 or 10 (!) times less to get the same job done.

Journal prices have been rising out of proportion with actual publishing costs for a long time now.

Gowers mentioned this in one of his early posts about the project. Publishing will probably be under some sort of pseudonym (think Bourbaki), with a link given to the blog entries. If you're curious about how much someone contributed, you can go check it out exactly.

The option to thread comments on Wordpress was only introduced after the project had begun. You can find a post by Gowers that talks about this very issue on his blog.

That's irrelevant. Based on the fact that you knew it was a Christmas card with a gift certificate in it the GP inferred that you opened the mail which was not addressed to you. Which is a no no (last paragraph).

Hardware encryption may be the easiest to use, but on more than one occasion a hard drive labeling itself as "secure", or even specifically saying that it uses AES, has been found to merely be XOR'ing with a fixed key.

It's better to leave real encryption to a source that can be trusted: one that lets you audit the code, which manufacturers are loath to do.

Because the Magnetic North Pole and the actual North Pole are quite a ways apart, and the conditions only get worse once you pass the latitude of the magnetic pole. The Top Gear folks had a fair bit of trouble getting as far as they did: basically scouting ahead on foot and clearing areas to drive. If you have to scout on foot, you might as well just keep walking.

That's not to say that there's no promise in there. I'm not really in favor of the idea of quantum consciousness, but it is interesting to think about.

Not that long ago John H. Conway and Simon Kochen proved a theorem they call the "Strong Free Will Theorem" (which improves on past results; hence the "strong") that shows that if the quantum world satisfies a few axioms then the measured response of a particle is not a function of the past state of the universe. I.e. if we have free will then so do elementary particles, in a certain technical sense.

Of course, with the right axioms you can prove anything. But these particular axioms are testable, and so far the evidence seems to support them; in addition to the fact that they are already commonly believed by quantum physicists.

Here's a link to one exposition.