2010-1997 = 13

Surprisingly, some people didn't buy it the minute it came out ;)

I can haz slashdot.

-when to hit the buzzer: Jeopardy doesn't allow the buzzer to be pressed until Alex has finished reading the question. Anyone pressing the buzzer before that will be delayed 1/4 second in pressing the buzzer once they're allowed to. Lights surrounding the question wall turn on to tell the contestants when they can hit the buzzer. As such, assuming Watson has a camera to watch Alex and the board like the rest of the contestants, it will be a test of reaction time. Who can hit the buzzer the soonest after the lights turn on. I'll put a computer's reaction time up against a human's any day of the week. I'd guess the humans will never manage to even buzz in because of that.

-Following Alex's directions. They aren't all that hard: "Ignore everything except when he asks a question. Insert Eliza emulator for the Q&A session" (That would be hilarious, actually)

-Betting strategy: Because the computer is likely to beat the humans at buzzing in every time, and because it's pretty likely to be able to seek and find relevant records quickly enough to answer correctly (it gets 5 seconds after the buzzer press, and can start working on finding the answer as soon as its OCR interprets the question on the screen, and can narrow its database search to the category in question, so for instance it doesn't need to search 17th century English history if the category is about fish), it's betting strategy is pretty simple. Bet half every time. Keeps it in the game if it loses, and if it wins it just increases the computer's lead on the poor humans.

-paying attention to opponent's skill level: Irrelevant to the computer. It will either know the answers or it won't. If it knows them, it will beat the humans no matter what their strength due to reaction time.

-Speed of answers and question - Also fairly irrelevant, since due to my first point, the computer is likely to be miles ahead of the other guys at any given time in the game, and therefore doesn't need to employ delay or speed-up strategies.

That's about what he'd earn from the lawsuit, isn't it? ;)

Yeah, but the cops'll take all his cash that he just earned from the lawsuit.

Yeah, that's true, but there's all sorts of products that are legally sold that can hurt you if you eat them. Bleach, ammonia, CLR, antifreeze, rat poison, etc. Really, if someone is dumb enough to eat uranium, they're going to find a way to hurt themselves even if you keep it away form them.

If by your post you mean "what if they flush it down the toilet," again, you'd need a lot more than what's in that canister to reach toxicity levels in the water/food supply.

It's OK to buy and own non-depleted uranium too, actually. Very small quantities are bought all the time for wide-ranging projects like Geiger counter calibration, and school science labs.

The amount in the canister on Amazon (which I do not actually believe is fake) is not enough to do anything dangerous with, even if you bought a whole bunch of canisters. You'd have to pretty much spend a sizable fortune to get enough to make even a very small nuclear reactor, and if you were trying to make a nuclear bomb you'd have to buy even more, and that's assuming you had the equipment and knowhow to make weapons-grade fissile material out of it.

It always amazes me how many people have such "OMG! NUKYEWLUR!" reactions to things like this. They must not know that glow-in-the-dark watches and gun sights are radioactive (tritium, which is also used to make weapons and yet civilians can get hold of it by buying a Luminox watch). Hell, pacemakers used to be powered by plutonium until Li-Ion batteries came along.

Nuclear is no big deal in the amounts sold to the general public.
 

Exactly what I was thinking. If SA is based on his life then he's just admitted to enough crimes to put him in jail for about. . oh. . 6 thousand years. Is that what he's going for?

Well, I understand your underlying point, but I don't know that I can agree with your post. In the first place, the founding fathers never said anything about Judeo-Christian values being necessary for the Republic to survive. Many of them weren't Christian (Jefferson was a Deist), and a few specifically said in letters that the US was not and should not be a Christian nation.

As to the law being complex, yes, I suppose it would be nice if we could have 1 law that says "be nice to people," but unfortunately people have different interpretations over what is and is not nice.

So we have to get more specific. "Don't kill people."

And then I kill someone who's trying to kill me, and that shouldn't be illegal, so we have to say "Don't kill people unless they're trying to kill you."

And that's just a very simple and easy to understand concept. Get into something more intricate, like probate law or promissory estoppel, and by definition you have to have a complex law, because a simple one would be too vague to understand the meaning.

The law grows more complex because modern society is complex. People longing for simplistic laws will get their wish only when civilization breaks down and we revert to living in small tribes again. Dunno about you, but I neither want that nor do I think it's going to happen any time soon.

It's very common for people to sit back and criticize the law for being intricate and complicated, but the end result is a functional society. An example would be a stop sign. If I wrote the word "halt" in yellow crayon on a piece of brown cardboard and stuck it an an intersection on the ground under a bush, and then sent the town cop after anyone who failed to stop at the intersection, people would get pretty pissed off. They'd be even angrier if all the law said was "stop at a stop sign," without defining it, therefore making my stop sign legitimate under the law.

But the complex law says that I have to have a white-bordered red octagonal sign with the word STOP on it, in white, and it has to be a certain height off the ground, and it has to be clearly visible from a set distance away, and it has to be reflective so you can see it at night, and it can't be obstructed by anything. And because of that law we all know what to do when we see the standardized, familiar stop sign, and we know that the same stop sign will mean the same thing in cities all across the country.

Now, all that said, I'm not sure what this tangent has to do with sick time. The point regarding that is that when vacation and sick time are separated out, you're not losing vacation time when you're sick, and your boss doesn't view it as a normal day off when you call at the last minute to tell him you won't be there.

"As far as I know there is no "blue balls" clause letting you finish even if she says no halfway through."

You're right, but unless there are witnesses, it's her word against his, and considering she already recanted her testimony once, and threw a party for him the next day, I'd say this wasn't exactly a case of traumatic rape. If he's found guilty on this, it's going to get to the point where you record all your sexual escapades not for sexual thrills, but for liability protection. Otherwise, any time you have sex, you face a rape charge if the girl later decides she wants revenge for something and accuses you of not stopping when she claims she told you to.

Hence my mention of Forrest Gump. ILM digitally altered Kennedy's lips to make it look like he was saying something he never actually said ("I believe this man has to go pee.") And they digitally altered his arm and hand to make it look like he was shaking hands with Tom Hanks.

While it wasn't on the same scale as what Lucas is proposing now, that's just the progression of technology.

Who the hell is writing the live launch blog?

"One day I will go back to space. Like, without using pills."

This isn't really a new idea. They did it with Paula Abdul and Fred Astaire in a Pepsi commercial, and of course there's Forrest Gump.

So that won't change over there either. What's your point? Mandatory 30 days off per year for *everyone* means that the mandatory 30 days off per year won't be a factor in hiring *anyone.*

It's a good plan, but it still doesn't solve the asshole manager problem, where your boss won't let you take time off unless you're either sick or it's scheduled a month or more in advance. There's no "Crap, something's come up that I've got to take care of, I need to take one of my days off" with those people.