So how should a web site provide a good reading experience the majority, who apparently are "so fucking retarded as to maximize [their] browser window" even on a 1920px-wide screen?

Gee, if only there were a way to suggest (but not mandate) that the browser render a piece of text in a certain manner. A "style", if you will. The specification of such a "style" might include a maximum width. Well, I guess no such thing could ever exist, so in order to format that text the server will need to send a whole pile of executable code.

Unregulated last mile wiring looks like this [ggpht.com]. It's a "natural monopoly" because the alternative is a dangerous, unmaintainable eyesore.

Except of course, as best as I can tell, your image appears to be from India, where the companies responsible for those poles are chosen as regional monopolies heavily regulated by the government. That short of undercuts your argument....

I agree that a co-op is a decent middle ground, especially in rural areas where the residents may be more interested in the services than might be otherwise profitable for companies to create the infrastructure. The key for me to that is that the co-op actually be voluntary, not a co-op in name only, but really just another required-by-the-government organization that they decided to name a co-op.

Imagine a beowulf cluster of those.

I am willing to bet that there is some non-free-market shenanigan going on here.

If the price of cocoa was exploding, then people would plant them...When reality does not follow the course your ideology says it should, sometimes it's not the result of fraud. Sometimes it means your ideology is bunk.

Otherwise as cocoa goes missing the producer would get better price, and more people would plant them..

Saith TFA, "The problem is, for one, a supply issue. Dry weather in West Africa (specifically in the Ivory Coast and Ghana, where more than 70 percent of the world's cocoa is produced) has greatly decreased production in the region. A nasty fungal disease known as frosty pod hasn't helped either. The International Cocoa Organization estimates it has wiped out between 30 percent and 40 percent of global coca production. Because of all this, cocoa farming has proven a particularly tough business, and many farmers have shifted to more profitable crops, like corn, as a result....For these reasons, cocoa prices have climbed by more than 60 percent since 2012, when people started eating more chocolate than the world could produce."

This [Trader Joe's The Dark Chocolate Lover's Chocolate Bar] is the one to avoid.

Yes, please avoid that dark chocolate. More for those of us with refined taste buds who like the taste of chocolate above the taste of sugar.

One, it's amazing the things some people would rather have than money.

Money is pretty useless. You can't eat it or shelter yourself from rain with it. I'd rather have almost anything than money. The relevant question is, between two things (including potential future things) I can have rather than money, which do I prefer?

What stops you from competing with an ISP in the last mile? You could do it right now..open your own competing cable internet/copper wire internet/fiber internet provider to the premises.... except of course that's currently illegal in most parts of the U.S.

Last mile is not a natural monopoly... if it was, the government wouldn't have to make it illegal to try, people just wouldn't be willing to waste their money trying without any possibility of success.

Are there first mover advantages in many of the last mile connectivity markets? Sure there are, but If your city only allows one cable company to lay any cable, it isn't the market nor private enterprise preventing competition. There's only so much crap customers will put up with from the first mover before they're willing to look elsewhere, but when they're not legally allowed to....

I'm guessing that the problem here is that there can either be executive salaries for chocolate (and coffee) companies in the US, or there can be adequate revenue for sustainable chocolate (and coffee) agriculture outside the US.

Of course we know which is more important.

Sure you can. "Officer, those aren't my drugs". Ever heard of someone being prosecuted for saying this?

Saith the wik, "Making false statements (18 U.S.C. Â 1001) is the common name for the United States federal crime laid out in Section 1001 of Title 18 of the United States Code, which generally prohibits knowingly and willfully making false or fraudulent statements, or concealing information, in "any matter within the jurisdiction" of the federal government of the United States, even by mere denial.[1] A number of notable people have been convicted under the section, including Martha Stewart,[2] Rod Blagojevich,[3] Scooter Libby,[4] Bernard Madoff,[5] and Jeffrey Skilling.[6]"

I've got one or two of those TutorText books tucked away from my dad's collection when he was studying programming ("data processing", as they called it back then) in the late 60s.

Like others I found the headline confusing. I read it as "Researchers are predicting the use of Wikipedia as a vector for the spread of disease". This may mean that:

• Disinformation and ignorance are diseases.
• Memes and computer viruses are diseases.
• Wilipedia contains information that leads to depression.
• Instructions on Wikipedia lead to substance abuse.
• This is getting entertaining, fill in your own reason here.

He meant about this matter. He is also wrong.

He is wrong because he makes the mistake that a finding of no statistically significant result means the result doesn't provide evidence.

To see this is wrong imagine you initially thought people were probably (but not certainly) likely to react to these pictures in a racist way. Scientists perform larger and larger surveys never surveying every person but failing to find any statistically significant difference with arbitrarily large populations (assume for simplicity there is an arbitrarily large number of humans). No matter how likely you found the question initially at some point you will find the result so improbable if the claim is true that it provides enough evidence to reject the claim.

Statistical significance is a trick for giving a gauge of how persuasive you should find the result given your priors. Since different people have different priors it's not usually useful to assume a certain prior probability distribution of results, e.g., the probability that people are at least X% more likely to judge a black woman negatively when breastfeeding. So we tell people the significance of a study and if they want to know how it affects their beliefs they figure out just how surprising a result of that kind with that level of statistical significance is on their model if the claim is true and if it is false. Theoretically they could apply bayes theorem to that...in practice we use a more heuristic approach. To see this has to be true note that no study will shift your belief if you think it is already true with probability 1 or 0.

Then again this is almost impossible to teach in a full year stat course so few people who don't already know this are likely to understand.

It doesn't contradict it.

However, it does provide EVIDENCE against the hypothesis.

Given some prior probability A that you have for believing that people do in fact respond in a racist way to the picture as long as his result is less probable if not A is true than if A is true Bayes theorem requires that your probability for A conditioned on his result be lower than your prior probability.

In other words he ruled out something that you would have been more likely to predict if A were true that if ~A were so that fact must, at least a little, decrease your belief that A is true.

Except cows udders aren't larger than you would expect given evolutionary pressures ignoring mate selection. Breasts and the depth of male voice and 1,000 other things are no different than a peacock's tail. The result of selective pressure purely on the basis of their ability to attract sexual mates despite the inherent uselessness or even harm to survival and physical reproduction they provide.

I mean evolution selects for those who get the best mates. What the hell *wouldn't* be sexual? I bet even bad teenage poetry has a biological basis in sex selection for mates with greater intelligence/wordplay. It's useless but a good signal of a desirable trait.

Umm, so why would an otherwise disadvantageous feature like enlarged breasts (bad for balance, backs etc..) be selected for to such a degree that it was universal among human females. Other than sexual display you got nothing.

Any display that functions as a valid signal of sexual fitness that can be picked up by evolution will picked up by evolution and used in mate selection. Why would breasts be so different? Do you doubt that women are attracted to deep male voices or larger shoulders and men have evolved to overemphasize these traits as a result?

You might say, "showing breasts isn't biologically determined to convey a sexual invitation." This is no doubt true. Then again so little of human behavior isn't so modulated by culture that anything short of penetration isn't determined by biology to be a sexual invitation with high probability. In our culture It's not at all absurd to think a girl might merely be a friend despite the fact that she bent down, spread her legs and rubbed her ass up against your cock if she was dancing with you at a club. Even more can be done in special contexts like movies or film without conveying an actual sexual invitation. On the other hand showing an uncovered face, in other cultures, can convey sexual invitation.

Sorry, but there just isn't a nice line to be drawn. Nearly everything humans do is partly sexual, even the most innocent play in childhood mimes and explores behavior that will later be used to attract mates and nothing short of sex is necessarily conveys sexual intent.

Ignore the idiots obsessed with the connection to reproduction. It doesn't even make sense to connect what biologically follows from child birth to sexual behavior. Screaming in pain is biologically caused by child birth yet is the farthest thing possible from openly sexual.