I think that WW comes from a part of nerd culture that enjoys markers of group identity, cons, trekkies, etc. And because they're organized it means they have a disproportionate impact on nerd culture.

I think there's a lot of geeks who love genre stuff and love talking about it, but really rebel against group identification or any attempt to stereotype. I think I come from this latter grou^H^Hpersuation, I enjoy some decent SF but I'm not going to go to a con or lose myself over a celebrity. There's nothing wrong with those who do, whatever brings you meaning is worthwhile, but it's just not how I'm wired.

I'll be curious what the new show is actually like, despite not really connecting with WW I do enjoy a lot of his work.

I'm a huge opponent of the Iraq war but I consider Russia's actions in Ukraine quite a bit more objectionable than the US's actions in Iraq.

I think there's two parts to NASA, there's the straight science part and the space exploration part. The science part should mostly ignore the politics and ideally not be affected by the crisis. But the space exploration aspect doesn't have a lot of practical impact at this point and is more symbolic and aspiration, I'm still not sure if I agree with it, but a given the primary product of the space program is prestige it does make sense to use it to punish Russia for political reasons.

They sell drugs because the money is easiest and they have a competitive advantage with a large organization (manufacturing, retails, supply chains, etc). If you take the drugs away the replacement rackets are lower revenue and require smaller orgs. Both factors that reduce the size of the operations.

You'll still have organized crime but not the kind that grows to the scale of a large retail chain.

The phone and tablet shown in the video aren't particularly identifiable on their own, but shown immediately after an Apple laptop a viewer would automatically assume them to be an iPhone and iPad.

The trial is about whether Samsung violated Apple's patents on phones and tablets. The video leaves the impression that not only are Apple's patents valid, but they're such amazing examples of patents that the Federal Justice Center chose them out of countless possible inventions as examples.

I'm not sure you can get much more prejudicial than "you need to decide whether Apple's iPhone and iPad patents are valid, to understand the issue here's a video made by the courts that gives examples of good patents... like Apple's iPhone and iPad patents".

There was an earlier version of the video that Samsung wanted them to use. I honestly don't understand the decision.

First they had fascists in the government and now they'll have Sith. At the very least they should get Magneto as defence minister and fill the army up with Cylons.

It sounds like you mostly want to take a shot at the ADA but looking at the link I don't see any mention of software except for the two instances where courts have ruled that websites aren't covered. Is there any precedent for a software project being sued on the basis of the ADA?

It's unfortunately the worst kind of bug in a sense. A feature that affects only a small minority of users but affects them severely.

If some developer or company doesn't have a specific interest in that set of users it's really easy for the bug to get overlooked.

I wonder if this would be a good cause for a disabled rights group. Hire a dev or two to go around fixing/nagging open source projects in an effort to improve accessibility.

It just occurred to me that this is actually kind of how vaccines work. Of course a homeopath would likely just give you a shot of diluted live virulent Ebola (lots of fun if you get some active ingredient!)

The 2nd option said to stay in Ukraine under the 1992 constitution, that actually created a lot more autonomy and even allowed the Crimean parliament choose with which country it wished to be associated with. The Crimean parliament could even vote to join Russia anyways.

I think it's not a total exaggeration. Even a small royalty will be enough of a burden to knock out a lot of smaller podcasts who don't want to go through the hassle of paying someone to do their hobby, and larger podcasts may be driven towards more commercial content to generate enough revenue to make up the royalty. And how is the royalty calculated anyway? Flat rate? That kills the small podcasts. Per user? Where do the big ones get the money?

I think a ruling that resulted in podcasts having to may would legitimately devastate the podcasting landscape, even if the current big pods remain mostly unchanged it will adversely affect the number of new podcasts that enter the market.

I suspect the original herbalists did what you describe, but they were handicapped by the tools at their disposal. You can pick out a few very reliable correlations but you're going to screw up when it comes to ones that are rare or harder to detect. This is particularly an issue with side effects, as a rule if the substance interacts with the body it's probably going to have more than one effect and a lot of these natural cures can cause things like kidney damage since the herbalists simply had no way to detect that.

ps. I wonder who figured out that peeing on a wound was a good way to prevent infection. I can't help but think there's an interesting story behind that one.

But I'm not sure we can make even that determination.

1) There was no option that would have kept Crimea in Ukraine

2) Only 58% of the population was ethnic Russian, the Tartar's largely said they would boycott and many Ukrainians likely followed.

3) The pictures I saw the ballot boxes were transparent and the voting cards unfolded, that's a good way to influence the vote.

4) In early February only 40% of Crimeans wanted Ukraine to join Russia. Toss in a new government and a slightly difference question and you improve the numbers a bit, but not to 96%.

5) Pro-Russia mobs assaulted and intimidated anyone who was pro-Ukraine with the protection of the military, that helps keep people in line.

6) There wasn't evidence of fraud because there wasn't any international observers (or anyone else in a position to monitor the vote), for all we know they could have tossed the ballots in a shredder and made up the number.

7) Russia did a good PR job in making up stuff about Kiev

8) The pro-Russia President of Crimea (installed by Russia) came from a party with only 4% of the vote in Crimea

I have no doubt that a lot of Crimeans wanted to join Russia, and probably more than 50% at that time wanted to.

But consider another scenario. The Russians left then the pro-Russia Crimean government announced a referendum in 3 months. The Ukrainian government and Crimean government could both campaign freely and a vote was held similarly to the Quebec referendums in Canada.

It's probably close, maybe they still vote to join Russia, but I'd be shocked to see a result over 60%.

In the comment sections of news articles I noticed a lot of support for Russia, mostly talking about the "fascists" in Kiev (yes there's a few shady characters but that had been hugely overblown) and even endorsing the "referendum". It's not entirely unsurprising since Russia is a big country with a lot of ex-pats and people with Russian ancestry who might be sympathetic.

However, I noticed two curious things, first there was very little support for Russia on /. which has a more cumbersome account creation process (it's obvious if you're new). And secondly, unlike most people who have a strong opinion these commenters, when someone replied to them, very rarely replied back.

My gut tells me that Russia has engaged in a very widespread online astroturf campaign, targeting major news sites. I'm wondering if that has affected the degree to which news sites have been reluctant to directly criticize the 96% result in the referendum.

Wow! This changes everything, you should tell someone about your amazing discovery!

Send it into Nature

Abstract:
I don't think global warming will happen because the plants will eat all the CO2 out of the air

Introduction:
Because plants use C02, so if we make more CO2 we'll get more plants and we'll have less CO2!

Conclusion:
No CO2 means no global warming!

Future Work:
We've got lots of CO2 so figure out why still there's more CO2 instead of more plants.

Well I have two responses to that.

1) My criticism had nothing to do with his credentials, I actually treated him as a scientific equal to the climatologists and until I read his wikipedia entry while making my previous reply I actually thought he was a climatologist.

2) I re-read the criticism, and they never talked about his credentials either. They accused him of an overly simplistic analysis and misrepresenting climate research on extreme weather.

No one is guilty of your central beef.