After reading TFA, my faith in Gladwell was shaken. But after reading this and some of the articles that the S.H.A.M.E. page links to...

In 1999, Gladwell wrote a New Yorker article defending the explosion of ADHD amphetamine prescriptions to children against criticism from media and public figures. Gladwell's response: "...are too many children taking the drug--or too few?"

Later that same year, Gladwell published a New Yorker piece that blamed skyrocketing prescription drug prices on users of prescription drugs, not on pharmaceutical companies. New Yorker readers responded angrily, tipping off Slate.com columnist Jack Schafer that Gladwell took "speaking fees from corporations and trade associations" that he covered in print, forcing Gladwell to publicly admit that he had had indeed taken money from the pharmaceutical industry: "Have I given paid speeches to companies or industries mentioned or affected by that article? Yes I have."

By ignoring the slander and actually following the links (including Gladwell's article about drug prices), I find myself admiring Gladwell almost as much as I did before reading TFA. Okay, so he makes some mistakes sometimes, but a corporate shill? No.

TFA says "Even more appealing, this reaction occurs at low temperatures, generating hydrogen energy that is greater than the chemical energy stored in xylose and the polyphosphate. This results in an energy efficiency of more than 100 percent â" a net energy gain." Truly we will have to reexamine the laws of thermodynamics in light of this discovery!

While Dvorak is better than Qwerty, it is not the optimal keyboard layout (e.g. R is a common letter but is not on home row) and Colemak is easier to learn for those that already use Qwerty. I tried learning Dvorak and it was fairly frustrating (it didn't help that punctuation and common keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl+X/C/V had moved); you'll learn Colemak faster because it has some similarity to Qwerty. Asset is even more similar to Qwerty, but it isn't designed to be quite as fast so you probably shouldn't choose it for a world record attempt.

Of course, switching to any other layout will "reset" your speed to almost zero at first, and it could take quite a long time to reach the same speed you had with Qwerty.

In 4 years when everything has been converted is touch, you'll wonder how you ever managed with a simple "read only" display.

The sad thing is that MS could have made Win8 touch-friendly without changing everything and ignoring all known usability research; all the touch-friendly stuff could easily been added to the traditional UI. Think about it: they could add bigger buttons, swipe up/down for kinetic scrolling, tap and hold for right-click or tooltips, a resizer-blob in the lower-right corner, some multitouch gestures for quickly organizing windows and so forth (bonus points if two users could use different apps on different windows at the same time).

Instead we have... two totally different UIs, one of which is no more touch-friendly than it was before. Plus, to slow down development they told developers "oh hey, we're gonna make you learn a totally newï set of APIs too."

When I saw that the user had "several 2-gigabyte zip files downloaded separately to make it more manageable", the problem seemed pretty clear already. This software might have been over 20 GB unzipped, which is larger than the plain text of Wikipedia; how many parallel versions of how many software stacks is this? (Only games can reasonably be this large--because their size comes from media files, which are easy to manage.)

Dependencies are bad unless you have a really good way of managing them, and sheer size is bad because it makes testing very slow and difficult--and installers themselves are already difficult to get right (I therefore avoid writing software that needs any kind of installation but, obviously, large enterprise software can't avoid it.)

Any company that makes a product this large is surely drowning in technical debt. They will have to spend a lot quality time eliminating unnecessary dependencies and brittle old code. In the meantime, users will be unhappy and new customers will be few.

The 13,000 is CATF's estimate of deaths from *all* power plants in the U.S., not just coal plants.

More directly relevant is that coal plants cause 4000 deaths for every one death caused by nuclear power.

Obviously it makes a difference in general who is president. The point being argued is that the particular two candidates we got aren't likely to be that much different.

Back in 2008 I certainly thought and hoped Obama would be a big change from Bush, but it seemed like nothing changed. He continued or expanded Bush's policies of warrantless wiretapping, the Bush tax cuts, increasing executive powers (in often-unconstitutional ways, such as the war in Libya remaining unauthorized by congress), continuing the war on drugs, etc. The Wall Street "reform" bill was the smallest imaginable response to the horrendous behavior of the financial firms. Troop deployments were not immediately decreased but merely shifted around. There was that new "insurance care" bill, but if Romney had won his presidential bid in 2008, isn't it possible, even likely, that we would have ended up with something similar from him?

You mention Iraq--we hope neither candidate would start another war the way Bush did, but do we really know they wouldn't? And Obama didn't really bring peace to Iraq, did he?

Oooh, they finally managed to kill one man half way around the world from me! I feel so much safer now that Bin Laden is gone... the chance of dying from a terrorist attack may have been well below 0.00001% before but... I bet it's down to, like, half of that now!

Say... how much did it cost to wage the war that killed this one man?

The people you would approve of aren't running for office? Well gee, don't you think that could have something to do with our voting system?

First-past-the-post favors a two-party system and incumbents in particular. Right now, most rational independents wouldn't consider running for office, knowing they can't really win. That means that the independents that actually do run for office are few in number and either (1) know they can't win and just want a bit of spotlight for themselves or their message, or (2) are insane. It's no great surprise if you don't approve of any of them.

Mind you, all these single-seat election systems are very flawed: they always reject (N-1)/N of the candidates running, which means everyone that runs (apart from the forerunner) must be willing to burn lots of cash with low chances of success, which tends to favor rich people (and a few others who have either strong stomachs for failure, or delusions that they have a shot).

The other flaw with FPTP, IRV, Approval and so forth is that they assume that I want to vote for someone local. Where I live has nothing to do with who I want in the federal government! Why can't I choose among candidates across the country, or at least across the state? Give me Direct Representation! (not to be confused with direct democracy.)

Technically espionage is just obtaining secret information in an illegal manner. Whistleblowing occasionally meets that definition, too. But the connotation of espionage is "state spying on potential or actual enemies primarily for military purposes" (from Wikipedia) whereas the goal of Wikileaks is to show us secret evils that are hidden from us, i.e. its goal is whistleblowing.

Now, I'm inclined to think that WikiLeaks' release of so many diplomatic cables was irresponsible, but WikiLeaks never did what they were commonly accused of, they never simply leaked 250,000 cables--they provided access to the cables to several news organizations in an encrypted archive, and IIRC less than 1000 of the cables were actually published or summarized by these news organizations.

Some time later, one of the news organizations foolishly made the password to decrypt the archive public in a book, but by that time the falsehood that "250,000 cables were published" was a popular belief.

You may be correct that the legal papers in the case and the extradition are all legit, with dotted Is and crossed Ts, but how likely is it that international extradition proceedings would be started against a man for having consensual sex that was turned out to be a little too agressive, or without a condom? To be sure it sounds like Assange was irresponsible, but it's hard to imagine that these proceedings would have started without political motives. Have you seen Naomi Wolf's take on it?

See also

You're right that the "enemy of state" thing is overstated and hyperbolic (an eyeball grabber - "made you look!") but there is no doubt that some U.S. mucky-mucks are extremely pissed at WikiLeaks. I bet some of them would be happy to punish Assange by any means necessary, to discourage anyone else from ever leaking classified information. Collateral murder is not the kind of thing you want to be public.

One thing my uncle noticed about CFLs were that they may make incandescents last longer if you mix incandescents and CFLs in the same light fixture: the CFL has a large initial power draw, which lowers the current flowing through the incandescent in the first one or two seconds of operation, allowing the traditional light bulb to light up more slowly, extending its lifespan.

Or, you could just not worry about this weird video because it had well under 10,000 views before it appeared on Slashdot and currently has only 22 likes. And half of those likes may come from people that enjoy watching crazy nutters. The only harm comes from people believing the video, and the Slashdot crowd won't.