Gesundheit!

Words like what?

Could it be that taking time out of their day, to see a "professional" and lie down for an hour or so, was the actual effector here, rather than any manipulation the healer or actor did ?

Hardly a conclusive sample, but I have this friend who is a major stress bucket, he is uptight about every littlest thing and I occasionally have to "disconnect" him for a month or so, to preserve my own sanity. He used to see a chiro every week or two for back pain, until one day Howard Stern endorsed a book about back pain that basically told him what I've been saying all along: "it's all in your dumb fat head". Since Stern is this guy's idol, he finally read the damn book, stopped seeing his chiro and his back pain is much less debilitating than it once was. Oh, and this guy is 30, not obese or anything, and is moderately active - more than the average /. reader and myself, at least.

His back pain was (and still is) directly related to his stress and anxiety levels, and while I am in no way a doctor or anything close, I would hazard a guess that many people's chronic pain is a direct result of stress. If you're high-strung all the time, your muscles tense up, blood pressure rises, and a whole bunch of other subconscious things happen as tied to the endocrine system. It is only logical to assume that these can lead to soreness and pain, especially if your stress management skills are poor (or nil). Anything that helps you relax is going to help with the pain. What the person does with their hands is irrelevant, it's the ritual, the psychosomatic effect that is at work here.

If they have the ability to detect these things, why in the world doesn't a little popup appear in the systray or security center saying "Your system appears to have a form of Malicious Software installed. Windows Updates are currently disabled. Please see your Network Administrator."

Seriously, the rogue spyware apps do this all the time, why can't Windows itself do it?

doublefacepalm.jpg
I don't know what the entertainment industry has been smoking, but it must be some powerful shit if they think crap like this is going to fly. Read my lips: Over my dead body.

No office pranks in that department, eh?

Lou to his cubicle-neighbor Jimmy, "I just ordered a strafing run on that sonovabitch who had me kicked from the TF2 server".
Jimmy: Uh. I'm gonna take off early today.

faulty equipment of that nature, faulty enough to cause the kind of damage alleged, would have tripped the circuit breakers for the building, if not the whole darn block long before anyone ever had the chance to scan some kid.

It hardly matters how much better it is if it's frustrating to use. Greatest app X doesn't matter unless it's easy to use, which is what apple has really done well (partly by restricting the things us nerds love- hardware specs and openness).

It's not a micromanaging style though. The project managers only get access to the team rollup, not to the individual stats, and recoding the time has actually made the team better at estimating and better at seeing date slippage earlier. The stats of 'on task time' are personal, not compared between employees, and only ever brought up if there's a problem. As an added bonus, it's gotten us more 'work at home' days and 'no meeting days', which has lead to happier developers and more productive use of my time. I'm not saying it can't be abused, butt if used properly, it can be good tool.

Let's see. You have a PHD and you don't have a chance of understanding that an ARM mortgage will bite you in the ass financially when interest rates rise, if you're left to your own devices.

We didn't get an ARM. We insisted on a flat-rate mortgage, to be held by the institution from which I received it for the length of the loan. We put down 20 percent. We have not missed a pyament; in fact, we are making overpayments (towards principal). Besides the house, we have no debts outstanding.

None of that means that I can personally parse the agreement I signed. We had to rely purely on the honesty of the credit union representative and our realtor throughout the whole process. They could, for all I know, show up tomorrow and tell us that our agreement says we have to move out and wander the streets, a pitiful subset of our belongings in a stolen shopping cart. Do I think that likely? No. But let us remember, the various native tribes also signed agreements, relying on the honesty of the other party. Look at their housing situation.

I'll bet you're a liberal or progressive and think debt can do our country no real economic harm, and that the government can spend us out of a depression too.

It was the last administration who had a vice president who said OUT LOUD "Deficits don't matter." That and the ability to compare the debt uptake between the administrations of the two parties in the modern era is indicative of why I, as a deficit hawk, vote the way I do.

And since you mention it, only the government can spend us out of a depression, because in a depression the commercial paper market has become completely dysfunctional. That speaks not at all to the issue of structural deficits.

Just because you don't see a useful or 'good use' of it, doesn't mean that others won't. If you're just randomly looking at tweets, you're going to have a hard time finding anything useful. But if you do a targeted search or data mine, then you can come up with useful stuff. Say for instance, all the tweets somebody has made since the time they went online. You can get a pretty good idea of that individual's development. Or the tweets on a day like 9/11. And like others have mentioned, it's not like resources are scarce to archive them. 140 characters could hold literally trillions upon trillions of tweets on a single hard disk.

It's not about breeding into uniformity. It's about not looking down upon someone who is different from you.

If I post that your mother intimately cosorts with farm animals and it isn't true then I am a TROLL.

That's not trolling, that's slander (libel if it's written) unless it's true, and if it is you better have some proof. If I say your mother is ugly and you're a moron and your dad is a loser, THAT'S trolling. One is actionable, the other is not.

Just dig up the privy.

Here's Ben Franklin's:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/wallyg/2571265145/

If you get modded to oblivion it's because you didn't mention Star Trek once!!!

Space western? Roddenberry pitched TOS as "wagon train to the stars" and a Star Trek book by that name was written by Dianne Carey.
Bad guy who will do anything to get what he wants, ethics be damned? The Most Toys (Bad guy was Saul Rubinek, see the movie "Unforgiven")
Strong, capable, confident female characters? Doctor Crusher, Captain Janeaway, Uhura, etc etc??

Turn in your nerd card, heretic!

If they think tweets are worthy of being archived why not just archive every blog and comment in existence? Many of those offer far more worthwhile insight than 99% of tweets.

I remember in school students and sometimes teachers occasionally mocking the customs of past cultures. There was always that subtle arrogance that we're somehow more enlightened than people were 500, 1000 or 2000 years ago. The problem is that people confuse technological advancements for intellectual and philosophical advancement. I'd argue that socially and philosophically humans have progressed little over the last few thousand years. Certainly there have been some cultural shifts, but I'm hard-pressed to see any fundamental shifts. I do think we may be close to one, but judging from what I see on Twitter and Facebook I'm not particularly optimistic.

With the massive proliferation of every last inane comment preserved for posterity I can only imagine how utterly stupid we are going to look to people of the future.