He represents the minorities. You know, the same minorities that get offered scholarships based on their race or gender; the minorities that get hired in order to fill a quota, with no regard for their actual qualifications; the minorities that can say whatever they want and play the discrimination card when someone calls them out, while the rest of us are told to shut up and be tolerant; the minorities that never seem to be at fault for anything, always shifting the blame to the persecution of the majority.

The affirmative action policies I've encountered only state that minorities should be preferred only when two or more job candidates are equally qualified. How badly this is abused is, of course, open to debate (and liberal use of anecdote).

Credit scores are actually a pretty good example. Information that the credit companies collect about you, which can affect you greatly. In the US, they are considered important enough that laws have been written to require the credit reporting agencies to provide you with your score on a periodic basis (if you ask) at NO charge.

I don't think that's true. The agencies are required by law to provide you with your credit REPORT yearly at no charge. The credit SCORE -- that single number presumably distilled from the report by whatever arcane algorithms they use -- is still privileged information that you have to pay for.

I thought the point of printing them out was to allow for effective redacting of sensitive information? I read recently that the Alaskan officials didn't think they could properly redact in the original electronic documents.

Of course, they could print out, redact with Sharpie, then rescan the page image to PDF (making it much larger than it should be, of course), but that last step is time-consuming.

(No, I haven't yet RTFA)

I think you're ignoring part of the parent's point (which may not have been explicit). It's not just that the Supreme Court's decisions can be predicted beforehand, it's that the specific Justices' -votes- can be predicted beforehand.

If the law were really like a computer code, and the Supreme Court Justices were all rational, knowledgeable and honest, we would them to render identical opinions on every question; in fact, there would only have to be -one- judge. Since we may not trust one judge to be sufficiently knowledgeable, we have nine instead, and take a majority opinion.

But if you know that certain issues are going to split 5:4 or 6:3, with the -same- justices on the majority side each time, then there's a real problem. At least one of the sides is pushing a bias that has nothing to do with the law. At least one of the sides is failing in rationality, knowledge, or honesty; I suspect both are.

Not true.

If a tabloid decides to write about the affair they think he's having, then Mr Giggs has a problem. It doesn't actually matter whether he had an affair or not.

The real problem is certain journalists (professional or otherwise) intruding on the private lives of celebrities. To my knowledge, Mr Giggs has no official business in promoting public morality. Ergo, the public has no reasonable right to know about his morals.

There was a wonderful send-up of this in an episode of Red Dwarf. Search for "csi zoom red dwarf" on YouTube ...

"50-year anniversary" is as redundant as ATM machine, PIN number, etc.

And while I'm off-topic, they're not celebrating 50 years (or "50 year-years", if you're the headline writer) of Feynman; they're celebrating 50 years of his Lectures.

[Off to mow the lawn with my lawn-lawnmower.]

IMO, Lazenby was a joke. He smirked his way through most of OHMSS just as badly as Moore did later on. He took it about as seriously as Karen Allen took the last Indiana Jones film (which as we know WAS NEVER MADE).

It wasn't all Lazenby's fault, of course. The producers made half of the film (OHMSS) a tongue-in-cheek reference to the fact that Bond wasn't Connery any more (e.g. "this kind of thing never happened to the other fella"), when they weren't hammering home that YES THIS IS JAMES BOND, REALLY WE MEAN IT (long nostalgic montage of previous missions' mementoes in his desk).

Once they'd gotten over that, and the interminable Louis-Armstrong-soundtracked love story, it was a decent film that was pretty close to Fleming's book.

But I think Craig is much closer to the Fleming character. As close as you can get without making him unbearably sexist and pretty boring as well.

Yep -- thanks. I should read past the abstract, I suppose.

... so far, at least. My profile is just the same as yesterday. Only when I clicked on a friend's profile did I see the change.

There was a button I could click to follow suit, but I ignored it.

Let's also not forget that there's no way to "return" an app or even to politely ask for your money back. If the app doesn't work, you're screwed.

According to Androd Market, you can return the app for a refund within 24 hours:

http://market.android.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=134336

Does this not work for you?

(I'm just parroting the link given a few posts above -- I haven't tried this myself)

All the physics articles I've been asked to referee so far have appeared on the arXiv (http://arxiv.org/) already. They tend to be submitted to arXiv and the target journal at the same time. There's a good chance I'd be familiar with the paper by the time the journal came knocking with a referee request.

Makes me think we should eliminate names and parties from ballots altogether and simply have a 100 question questionnaire that you simply select 1 to 5 for or against, and weight how important that issue is to you and then the system matches your answer to the candidate who most closely matches your choices, and counts your vote for them. Never happen of course since it'd gut the power of the current parties and we might actually get people in there who represent what the people truly want, but hey, I can dream...

That only works if the candidates actually really -believe- in their own stated policies, and moreover, actually -act- on them when in power. There's not much point in matching voters' preferences to lies.

Yes, it's still wrong.

"Recoup" is a transitive verb, "recuperate" is intransitive. You can't "recuperate" losses or an investment or anything.

Your link is to a subscription service. More accessible (though not as impressive) is the dictionary.com definition:

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/cretin