Even you netbook users have 600 pixels. The New Yorker's website only use like 400 pixels, and leaves the rest to white space.

It's HTML, who cares how wide the screen is? Why anyone is still using fixed pixel widths is beyond me in this day and age. Just say <div width="80%"> and let the browser figure out the rest...

Repeat after me, children, "HTML is supposed to describe the content, not the layout."

-JS

And eating too much kills. Drinking too much alcohol kills. Products tainted with poisonous substances kill.

You've never had someone you know become a crack addict, have you? It's so out of proportion to just saying well, "eating too much kills," its unbelievable. The scale of damage even some of the so-called recreational drugs can cause (eg LSD) is way beyond mere over-indulgence.

We [society] allows the sale of these prescription drugs because they cause less harm than the psychological conditions they're meant to treat, not because they're harmless or "significantly safer" than alcohol. Deal with the aftermath sometime and you'll understand better what I mean.

-JS

No. His "system" is indeed based on the assumption that such events are unpredictable.

His system is basically arbitrage. We have an algorithm for pricing options (Black-Scholes) that makes an invalid assumption (it uses Gaussian statistics where it shouldn't). This fault was recognized almost as soon as it was published, but people continue to use it anyway, which means they're mis-pricing their options. Black Swan makes money in the long haul because they know big price swings occur more often than the options are priced for, and they buy based on this knowledge. Exploiting market mis-pricings like this one is the essence of arbitrage.

Like classic arbitrage, this only works because a) there is a mismatch between price and real cost [risk] and b) there aren't a lot of players making the same purchase. Change either A or B and Black Swan's strategy will become a money-loser, or at least a break-even.

-JS

Using quantum entanglement, that may not be so far off. If it turns out information can be transmitted near-instantaneously, telepresence could become a reality.

Unfortunately, this won't work because communications [and encryption, for that matter] using quantum entanglements requires a classical channel and thus information transfer is still light-speed limited.

-JS

... insults female co-workers and ...

I don't care if he's brilliant, this guy's a legal liability and he needs an ultimatum: if you ever single out your female co-workers again, you're fired.

He may be good, but he's not worth a sexual-harassment lawsuit.

-JS

You're comparing apples and oranges. Each new release of OS X might, at best, be compared to a service pack.

No, the OSX equivalent to service packs are noted by changes to the minor version number (10.5.5 to 10.5.6 was the latest one — in Microsoft language, that would be 10.5SP6). Major releases (10.4 [Tiger] to 10.5 [Leopard]) involve significant changes to the API and introduce new features to the OS, as you can plainly see from Apple's web OSX page (Apple claims 300 new features added with the upgrade to Leopard; I can't verify the count, but I've found many of them to be very useful additions).

So yes, the shift from Vista to Windows.7 is comparable to one of Apple's major releases. That Windows upgrades leave a trail of wreckage has more to do with the general level of quality control [third-party's as well as Microsoft's] than the scale of the changes.

-JS

I do not believe that there is a god. This is quite different than believing in a different god or believing there is no god.

1. "I do not believe that there is not a god."
2. I believe that there is not a god.

These are the same thing as far as I can see. Atheism is not a lack of belief, it's just a belief in a lack.

-JS

"His science has become his religion, ..."
That makes no damn sense.

It makes perfect sense. Science has become Dawkins' "Higher Power," and he has become a religious fundamentalist in the worship of his own deity. Just because it's not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob doesn't make it any less a religion.

-JS

And if you do pay the big bucks to a publisher for access to a scientific paper, there's no assurance that you'll be able to read it, unless you've spent your life learning to decipher them.

I know that this is a real shock to you humanities majors, but science is hard. And yes, for the record, I do have degrees in both [physics and philosophy, or will as of this May — and the physics was by far the harder of the two].

Here's another shocker. If you think the papers are hard to read, you should see the amount of work that went into processing the data until it's ready to be written up in an academic journal. Ol' Tom Edison wasn't joking when he said its "1% inspiration and 99% perspiration." If you think seeing the raw data is going to magically make everything clear, well, I'm sorry, the real world just doesn't work that way. Finally, if you think professional scientists are going to trust random data they downloaded off the web of unknown provenance, well, I'm sorry but that isn't going to happen either. I spend enough time fixing my own problems; I certainly don't have time to waste fixing other peoples' data for them.

-JS

(4) pre-emptive removal of dead satalites (no, not shooting them down from earth - attaching small moters to send them into the atmosphere) - maybe steering them into a declining orbit as the last thing they do before swithing them off

The term you're looking for is "controlled re-entry," and this is already done on a regular basis, when possible. The problem is, as we saw with the Russian satellite, you can't have a controlled re-entry once you've lost ground control (e.g., because of electrical or mechanical failures). For an out-of-control satellite, there is no simple solution.

-JS

I always assumed that when nations put stuff in space, they always included a way to make it de-orbit and burn up in the atmosphere.

Unfortunately, that would be a faulty assumption, especially when there's a technical failure and a satellite never makes it into a proper orbit. If ground control can't talk to the satellite, it doesn't matter how much fuel you have on board; the only way to de-orbit then is to wait for atmospheric drag to pull down the satellite for you.

-JS

Now, it seems that "laying someone off" is exactly the same thing as "firing that lazy bastard." If we remove the political incorrectness of the latter, then, can ANYONE bloody tell me the difference between how these less-useful people were oh-so-gently laid off, and just fucking firing them?

Individuals get fired, entire divisions of companies get layoffs.

This was more true back in the Regan era (which I was also around for). Now, as you point out, it has displaced "fired" and the distinction between the corporate neutron bomb (your division is losing money because the VP is a moron, but that doesn't matter, we're shutting it down and letting go of all 200 of you) and the individual screw-up (you were sleeping with the boss's wife) has been lost.

-JS

In religion, truth is established by authority: the preacher or the bible or (fill in the blank) says it's true, therefor it's true.

In religion, truth also has a communal and experiential component - what has been the community's experience of the divine (this is true of non-Christian religions as well as Christianity).

This explains why some people are so enthusiastic about finding errors in religion. Logically, once the flaw is found, the authority is dethroned, and the whole religion should collapse.

And that's the flaw in your argument. It doesn't collapse first, because religion isn't based only on authority, and second, because logical arguments don't contradict people's personal experiences. It might force a re-interpretation of specific points (eg the age of the earth), but the age of the earth is religiously irrelevant and a 4.6 Gyr earth is not a threat to religion as a whole.

-JS

PS Ethics is not objectively possible without God. Just go to any university philosophy department and you'll see what I mean.

Actually, IIRC, the Pope made a declaration a while back that there's nothing biblical that bars the existence of extraterrestrial life.

It wasn't the pope, it was the director of the Vatican Observatory (although some newspapers mis-attributed it to the Pope). The Catholic Church does not have an official position on extraterrestrial life.

-JS

One study simply said: "there is no risk of any significance whatsoever from such black holes". The danger is that this thinking could be entirely flawed, but what are the chances of this?

The earth is bombarded daily with cosmic rays literally billions of times more energetic than anything LHC will produce. There is nothing going on at LHC that hasn't been happening continuously in our upper atmosphere since the very formation of the earth.

In my book, that qualifies as "there is no risk of any significance whatsoever from such black holes"!

-JS