The aspect ratio of 4:3 is quite close to A-type paper sizes, so it's nice for PDFs.

Yes, and it's closer to US letter-sized paper than 16:10 is. I've also long thought that a 4:3 screen is better for using the tablet as a laptop replacement with a bluetooth keyboard. At 16:10 the screen is too wide in landscape and too narrow in portrait. 4:3 is much better for this (though of course generally worse for watching video).

So I really want a 4:3 tablet, but I don't want to buy an iPad. The list of 4:3 Android tablets is short and undistinguished, owing (I presume) to Android being aimed at the 16:10 form factor. I don't especially want to buy a Windows 8 tablet, but a Windows tablet is likely to be more flexible than an iPad, and eventually there will be one with a better build quality and a better screen than most or all of the Android tablets in the link above.

So good for Microsoft and whatever hardware vendors winkled this out of them. I'd rather have a really nice 4:3 Android tablet, but that doesn't exist right now. "OK" might not be as good as "good", but it's better than "meh".

Actually, in it's earlier forms (especially in Rome) slavery could in fact be voluntary. People actually were able to sell themselves into slavery, usually to pay a debt. Of course, back then slaves weren't really as exploited as they were in more modern times and one could even buy themselves out of slavery if the made enough money. A lot of slaves weren't just free/cheap labor, they became skilled craftsmen and could make a decent amount of money on the side. Or there was always the gladiatorial games if you were really desperate, since those rarely ended in death.

You're talking about the debt bondage called nexum , which was outlawed in 326 BC, pretty early in Roman history. It had no real role in the bulk of Roman history.

The condition of slaves in ancient Rome varied considerably. Some were essentially professional workers, who had jobs and could expect to earn their freedom while they were still young enough to start a family and have a free life. At the high end, several future Emperors were educated by Greek slaves. At the other end, some slaves were miners who could expect to live only a few years. Some were agricultural workers who had a rough life with little chance of advancement, but who could hope to at least survive. Rome was a slave society, with a huge percentage of the population either current or former slaves. They did almost every job available, and their condition was just as varied.

As for gladiators, the best guess is that you had a 1 in 9 chance of dying in any bout. This means that the mean survival would be 6 bouts. Wikipedia suggests that 20-25% of losers died. These numbers are all educated guesses, but the general point stands. A slave who was a gladiator would probably have to survive something like 10 fights to gain his freedom, and his odds of surviving that were very, very poor.

I was wondering about that because the 500MB is labelled high speed. So is it unlimited 3G and 500MB of 4G? Or what?

The base plan is 500 MB of LTE/HSPA+/3G (whatever you can get where you are), then it's throttled to 2G/EDGE once you go past that. I like that in this situation. T-Mobile is advertising the amount of high speed data in big letters, rather than in the small text under the words "unlimited data". They're also making overage costs disappear. And you can pay for unlimited high speed data, and for unlimited high speed data with tethering, and less exorbitant than usual rates.

It's really good that one of the big carriers are doing something different. I hope it works out for them.

Interesting to see the average usage at 24Gb to 28Gb. When our local cable company was trying to bring in a 30Gb monthly cap, their argument was that 95% of their users went through 2Gb a month or less, effectively subsidizing heavier users. Total bollocks argument of course, but that's another story.

The summary is a little misleading. The 24-28 gb is the average use, but the mean is a lot lower. Here's the full quote:

"While average [U.S. home broadband usage] is 24-28 gigs per month, the average is skewed heavily by the whales. The median is actually 5.8 gigs, which is basically your non-streaming user," Stokols said.

So half of all users are using 5.8 gb or less. Still makes the 2 gb limit ridiculously low, but the 24-28 gb average is skewed by some heavy users.

Public libraries were one of the great achievements of Western civilization. However, it seems to me their time has passed. Classic books are available freely anything, and for books still in copyright, a variety of online "for profit" lending options make more sense than somehow tying reading to a physical building.

I think that the physical building is maybe the most important part of the modern public library. In many cities there is nowhere that you can go and sit down and do some work or read or whatever without having to buy something. If it's nice out then you can sit in a park or something, but here in Chicago it is nice out a vanishingly small amount of the time. In my 20s had roommates, no space to myself, and no cash to waste on lattes. The local library not only gave me an education through the books on the shelves, but also gave me a chance to sit down and get some working and thinking done in a space in which I wasn't going to be bothered by anyone. Without the library I wouldn't have been able to do that. Even now that I'm 41 and have more space to myself I still spend a fair amount of time working at the library. It's a place to sit and focus and be serious.

And yes, some public libraries end up functioning as de facto homeless shelters. But very few are only this.

I agree with you on a certain level, that we will someday soon move past the point at which tying book lending to a physical building is no longer necessary. But we need some sort of place in meatspace for people to go and do work. Right now that space is the public library. In the current climate or privatizing everything I can't imagine an open and free public space growing up to replace it. So we need to hold on to the libraries we have for as long as possible.

A couple of years ago I installed Damn Small Linux on a Gateway 2000 I pulled out of a dumpster. It was a 486 machine, and DSL worked reasonably well. DSL came with vim and I installed elinks from a .deb and compiled Pine and pretty soon had the same setup I did in the computer lab back in 1992. In September 2012 DSL put out their first release in 4 years, with very minimal changes from their 2008 release. I assume that it will still work on a 486. I don't know if a distro with a 2.4.31 kernel can be called "modern", but at least it's "recent".

As a baseball fan, I have read literally dozens of articles and hundreds of message boards rants on this subject. If you're interested, a little wading through Baseball Think Factory will allow you to relive the endless re-hashings at your leisure. More generally, this sort of statistical talk is very common among a certain segment of baseball fandom, and is (as has been mentioned before) the milieu from which Nate Silver emerged.

What's interesting about this specific issue is that Cabrera vs. Trout has been painted as a traditionalists vs. stat-heads vote, but an argument for Trout can be made with no reference to advance statistics. It goes like this:

Trout's traditional "slash line" (batting average, on-base percentage, and slugging percentage) is very similar to Cabrera's. Cabrera hit for more power, but otherwise they are nearly equal. Trout's home ballpark is harder to hit in than Cabrera's. Trout led the league in stolen bases with 49, Cabrera had 4. Cabrera grounded into 28 double plays, most in the league. Trout grounded into 7. Cabrera is a poor defensive player, Trout is an outstanding defensive player. Trout's team even had a better record than Cabrera's, even though Cabrera's Tigers made the playoffs and Trout's Angels didn't.

Nothing in that argument requires anything more complicated than the division required to work out batting average and the like. The fact that Trout's candidacy has been painted as just the result of statistical mumbo jumbo is ridiculous.

(It should be pointed out that there is a lot of mumbo jumbo in baseball's defensive statistics. They are not at all mature yet, and are heavily influenced by very subjective inputs. This is part of why I prefer the non-statistical argument for Trout. When someone says that Trout's glove was worth 2.1 wins above a replacement player (the number given at Baseball Reference he is speaking with a false precision. Silver, it should be noted, doesn't fall into this trap, and I should say that Sean Foreman at Baseball Reference doesn't believe that his 2.1 win number is anything more than an educated guess.)

Apple are totally going to sue Fu Xi for starting the iChing in 2850 BC. All I can say is that it's a good thing for Fu that he's dead. And fictional.

It's been available for years in other places; my partner wrote her dissertation on 17th century science, and used scans of Hooke from a couple of online sources. The National Library of Medicine has a beautiful flash version of it. There is a decent version at the University of Wisconsin. It's at archive.org in a nice scan. The PG edition is very good, an original spelling transcription with scans of the original plates. IIRC there's also a scanned edition in the (pay access) database Early English Books Online. So this is not news at all.

But it's always a good time to look at Hooke. His illustrations really are astonishingly beautiful, and weren't bested for a century or more, and the text conveys something of the wonder to be the first person to *ever* see these things. It's pretty astonishing to imagine what that might have felt like. Hooke not only first saw cells, he coined the word in its biological sense, because he thought the cells in cork bark looked like the cells that monks live in. Hooke was a polymath, a successful mathematician, an architect and inventor, and by all accounts a very good musician. He was also apparently a bit unpleasant and a little crazed, but genius is allowed these things (at least when it's no longer around to annoy you)

Regardless of your findings...which if done soundly with regard to the science of numbers...you'd get roasted over a public open fire and branded a racist.

Uh, if I did your study in the US and released my numbers, the newspaper headline would be "Study Finds Blacks Poorer than Whites". I don't think I'd get raked over any coals for that.

You start getting into hot water when you talk about causes. Your study would just demonstrate an easily visible fact, and doesn't prove or really even suggest anything about anything relating to causation. If you want to say that the cause of this is somehow genetic, you're going to have to do a hell of a lot of work to convince people, and yes, you're probably going to be branded a racist. Part of this is political correctness, sure, but a lot more of it is the fact that most previous efforts towards establishing an evolutionary explanation for poverty were little more than pseudo-scientific hackwork. The history of the field is very, very unpleasant, and that naturally makes most of us think unpleasant thoughts about current practitioners.

The other major issue is that you want me to look at the "genetic profiles" of people in various government programs and also "adjust for % of each race in the the nation". But the problem is that a race isn't a genetic profile. To use the obvious US example, we call African-Americans a "race", while studies have shown that Africa has more genetic diversity than any other continent. So you'd expect that the genetic makeup of a group of people descended from Africans would be more heterogeneous than that of a group of people without any (or many) African ancestors. (This of course ignores that most Africans dragged to the Americas came from a relatively small section of the continent, but it also ignores the fact that most African-Americans have a little bit of everything in their ancestry. It should roughly even it out.) The point is that it'd be really hard to explain the socioeconomic fate of an extremely genetically diverse "race" on the base of genetics, unless you could find a few very specific sets of genes causing economic backwardness or something. I mean, maybe they exist, maybe they're out there. Good luck. But it's really, really doubtful.

I have relatives in the Midwest of the US that apparently don't pay per litre, but in every other country I've ever been, water usage is metered just like electricity or any other utility.

Yea, we call that "having a well."

FYI, having a well is far from free.

The largest city in the Midwest only has metered water for a small percentage of houses. For everyone else you are charged a flat fee. Chicago is trying to convince people to install meters, saying that metered water can result in lower bills if you use less than what you'd be billed for. So what's happening is that people who use very little water are installing meters and people who use a lot don't. This shouldn't be a big deal because we have a truly massive lake right beside the city, but the water level is a problem because they reversed the Chicago River to flow out of Lake Michigan rather than into it. Anyway, as of late September, only 41% of Chicago water accounts were metered.

So, what you're saying is that we return to the era prior to copyright (say, before the 1700's just to have a nice, rounded number), all of the authors will no longer have any motivation to publish just like before that time? No one will bother publishing works like Romeo & Juliet (or any of Shakespeare's books, for that matter), Beowolf (before copy right as a concept even existed) or any other works because of lack of copyright protection?

Well, there was great literature before copyright protection, but there was vastly more after it. Some of this is due to technology, demographics, economics, and so forth. But some of it isn't. The first copyright provision passed in 1710. The explosion of the novel, which is entirely a printed form, came after that date. Daniel Defoe published Robinson Crusoe in 1719, and Defoe was not only a crusader for copyright protections but also possibly the first person in England to be able to make a living by writing prose. Copyright made the professional writer possible.

Romeo & Juliet is a good example, actually. 16th and 17th century plays were written for the stage and printed as an afterthought, often in pirated (if we can use that term) editions. As a result we've lost a pretty large percentage of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, because why print them if someone can pirate them and kill your profits? Or, even worse, what if the rival theater company across the street puts on your play without having to pay you a shilling for it? We know of at least two Shakespearean plays (Cardenio and Love's Labour's Won) that are lost because they were never printed. If Shakespeare had had copyright protection, would it have been worth his time to publish them?

I think that the way copyright protection has been so abused by US corporate interests can sometimes blind us to the value of it. Our current system of unending copyright is very clearly bad, but a reasonable form of copyright is very clearly good. It frees writers from the requirements of patronage, it increases cultural output, and it provides a monetary incentive for making that production public.

The microSD card is a huge plus to me. Assuming the build quality is similar to the previous generation of Nooks, the big Nook will be the first 9"+ tablet with a microSD card, bluetooth, a solid build quality, an a debut price under $300. You can get an Asus EEE Pad Slider for $299, but it sold at ~$400 before this, and the build of the Archos and Le Pan devices didn't impress me when I played with them at my local MicroCenter.

I think that this is a really big deal -- bluetooth, the expansion slot, and a solid build quality will finally mean that there's a proper netbook replacement in the budget range. The Nook Color sort of worked like this, but the bluetooth required Cyanogenmod and is pretty wonky even then, and it's only a 7" device. The Nexus is nice, but you're stuck with the 7" model and there's no microSD slot. Samsung has a $250 device with most of what I want, but it's only a 7" device and there you're effectively paying a $50 premium over the Nexus just for the microSD. So the large Nook really does feel like a big deal to me. If it takes after the Nook Color more than the Nook Tablet in terms of being easy to root and to mod then I'll buy one the day it gets released. Even if it isn't I might buy one anyway.

If it doesn't freeze in the corn belt again this year, like it didn't last year, it would be a good crop to attempt, as it could easily offset feed costs, and avoid "graining" their cattle on refuse gummybears.

Just for the record, last winter was among the warmest ever, but it definitely did freeze here in the corn belt. Davenport, Iowa (for example) had subfreezing temperatures 4 times in October 2011, its first low in the teens on November 17th, and its first day with a subfreezing high on December 5. Buckwheat is a good cool-weather crop, but it isn't very frost-tolerant. It's too in the year late for it.

This is just a mild corrective to the parent. Buckwheat is an excellent alternative to corn, but for earlier in the season.

A quick search of eBay shows that potions are still for sale. For example, here is a love potion (the listing includes some vaguely NSFW images). They say, "I am happy to bring to you a special cast potion that me and the covens that joined us brought forth on Samhain/ Halloween night! [...] This is a guaranteed powerful mix to get you the results you need." That's pretty clearly a magical potion. With a guarantee!

Browsing the metaphysical section also brings up vast quantities of magic items -- 41,706 items under "Crystal Healing", for example. There's also orgone protection for your cell phone and a dust that attracts money. I'm curious -- has eBay banned the sale of magical services -- curses, etc. -- but not magical items? Or are these listings just slipping through the cracks? If it's just services that have been banned, then the complaint in TFA about holy water being sold is completely specious. And even if some physical items have been banned, the continued presence of lots of orgone accumulators and healing crystals suggests that eBay isn't working from purely pro-Christian motives. (Yes, I know about the category of natural magic that can in theory be squared with Christian belief. I don't think eBay is capable of being that subtle.)

And take heart, magic users -- a search for the word "grimoire" turns up 24 pages of items. Even if they've banned the sale of curses, no reason you can't still roll your own!