I don't know how folks like you can live in the real world and parrot these lines over and over again with nothing to show for it. When the left "borrows and spends", the "spending" side all goes to rich business partners. Every single time.

Why do you think that the "recovery" in the US has gone mostly to the top 10%? What do you think about Solyndra? Geeze. Get out of the partisan gutter and join us here in the real world.

It's a toy helicopter. We don't need the FAA to do anything about this - but nannies never let a good "crisis" go to waste...

Okay. How does the fact that water boils at 100C help you when you cook? Let me state this another way. Imagine that the inventor of the Celsius scale arbitrarily decided that the boiling point of water would be 1000C. What would you do differently when cooking?

In case you're scratching your head trying to figure out my awesome brain-bender the answer is "nothing".

Okay. So? All arbitrary numbers. Like 32 and 212.

Great. How does the fact that water boils at 100C help you when you cook?

Sigh. Please read my post repeatedly until you get it. I never said that "0" and "100" celsius aren't "useful", just that it's entirely arbitrary. Also note that it won't work in "most places" - it only works at sea level at normal atmospheric pressure for pure water. Anything other than that is slightly off.

Which again supports my point. For real world use there's little difference between Celsius and Fahrenheit for people who use them. That celsius is based on properties of one chemical compound (out of millions of compounds) really doesn't make it more useful for anything. I mean, if you're at sea level with normal atmospheric pressure and you're boiling a pot of distilled water then you can safely say that it's 100 degrees Celsius. What, exactly, does that gain the normal person? Nothing more than saying it's 212F. Yes, 100 is a pretty and round number but in the real world it is, again, not relevant.

LOL. Let me help you:

1. the freezing point (arbitrary but easily observable state)
2. of pure water with no dissolved substances (arbitrary but common chemical compound)
3. at sea level (arbitrary but easily located place)
4. at normal atmospheric pressure
5. on earth (arbitrary but very convenient location)
6. is 0 degrees (arbitrary value which kind of makes sense until you realize that you can still get colder)
7. and the boiling point of water at sea level on earth at normal atmospheric pressure (previous comments still apply)
8. is 100 degrees (arbitrary number chosen for convenience of the units - "10" would be too course grained and "1000" would be too fine grained)

So, yes, the celsius scale is arbitrary, the Fahrenheit only slightly more so. At least the celsius scale can be kind of reproduced in a pinch if you're at sea level and normal pressure and you have water and the ability to freeze and heat it. But, then, if you have all that you can reproduce the Fahrenheit scale, too.

For an idea of a less arbitrary scale look at the Kelvin scale. On it, "0" is the absolute lowest temperature where matter has absolutely no heat content. Of course the scale is the same as celsius so it still ends up being arbitrary in scale, which *any* temperature scale will be. But "0" being "absolute 0" is what sets it apart.

"Boiling an egg" really means "heating it in hot water to cause the yolk and albumen to solidify". That can be done at a temperature far below the boiling point of water. This is good because in the summer local news stations can show how hot it is outside because you can "fry an egg on the sidewalk!" complete with a demonstration.

If I remember correctly 120F is the temperature needed. I used to make a custard ice cream which included a dozen uncooked egg yolks that couldn't be congealed. In order to accomplish this safely they had to be heated in a double boiler setup to around 105F and held there for 10 minutes which was supposed to be enough to kill the nasty bacteria that might be in there. It was a bit of a trick because if it got much hotter the yolks would congeal and become unusable.

This is exactly what I came here to say, too. It's easy for someone to sit in their office in DC or wherever and eavesdrop on the entire internet if traffic is unencrypted, so there's an incentive to simply be lazy and collect as much as possible. When they have to physically visit a person's home, office, whatever in order to eavesdrop - this is GOOD. Now there's an incentive to actually *think* and make sure you're doing the right thing before investing the resources needed to eavesdrop.

That's part of the problem: "a story". I watched 4, 5, 6, and 1. 1 was bad enough that I haven't bothered to seek out 2 and 3.

I would note that in 4, 6, and 1 the entire plot was "attack the single point of failure on the enemy ship/base for the win".

Uh, yeah. If he had been a Republican I would still see some a picture of him with some awful sneer or whatever (captured from a video) along with a hateful caption every single day on my facebook wall. But he was a Democrat so it's all good.

No. People use C to gain a speed advantage, not because python is incapable of doing something. This statement alone betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of computer languages that makes me wonder if he's qualified to choose what language his students use. The other issue here is that schools should use only freely available languages.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...

I knew the comments on this article would deliver the laugh lines. I can't mod you up so I just came to say "thank you".

The looney left thinks that planning ahead is racism. People who plan ahead typically do better in life, but the idea is to claim that anybody who "does better" is in that position due to societal structures that benefit them.

The Seattle Public Schools issued a statement that talked about racism and one of the elements was "future time orientation", another way of saying "planning ahead".

http://www.seattlepi.com/local...

The school district took the site down a few days later after widespread criticism, but you can see it here:

https://www.fourmilab.ch/fourm...

Ironically the anybody who would come up with this stuff, particularly planning ahead and individualism, is acting in a racist manner. It's pathetic.

Except that if drugs were legal the poor fellow wouldn't get gunned down. It's kind of fascinating to blame drugs for the problems that are actually caused by criminalization.

Exactly! People don't seem to realize that jailing someone hurts the country twice - first in the direct costs to jail them ($20K/year and up) and second in the lost productivity since they can't contribute to the GDP. We have a GDP of $17T with 350M people. Or, a GDP of $17,000,000M with 350M people which works out to $48,500 per person. If jail costs the low end of $20K per year we're paying 2.5 times that much in lost productivity. The costs are staggering. Of course not everybody in jail would contribute to the GDP but there's no reason to believe that pot smokers wouldn't.

We need to seriously take that into consideration when looking at the best options to punish people for crimes, and when looking at what activities need to be punished in the first place.