It's not quite your stated ideal, but I'm happy with XBMC running on a rooted Apple TV. Cheap, easy and the videos look fantastic (without having to run iTunes or transcode anything!).

Why do you say ESR is more stable? It sounds like it's more for a controlled and long update cycle.

For example, from here:
ESR FAQ

"The ESR will not have the benefit of large scale testing by nightly and beta groups. As a result, the potential for the introduction of bugs which affect ESR users will be greater, and that risk needs to be understood and accepted by groups that deploy it"

HFA or Aspergers is really very different than the severe autism you are describing - the autistic spectrum is vast. And there are all kinds of problems people have - if you draw the line at autism (including HFA, which can be mild enough to go undetected), what else will be enough? Blindness? Risk of anger issues? A high likelihood of anxiety disorder?

And if six months is fine, how old is too old? Or does age not matter?

A society can be judged by how it takes care of its weak and vulnerable.

It's difficult to fathom how the authors interpret the data on page 14 as *not* supporting the hypothesis that there is a male/female variance ratio of about 1.1. Figure 1A is a bell-like curve which is clearly centered around 1.1. In Figure 1B, almost all of the points are below the 1:1 line, whereas if you plot a 1.1:1 line, its a perfect fit for the data. In Figure 1C, the x value where the regression line intersects a zero gender gap (i.e. no evidence of cultural bias), is at a variance ratio of about 1.1. All of the evidence the authors present points to an underlying variance ratio near 1.1, yet somehow they conclude the opposite.

That's interesting. In the USA almost all Swedish policies are seen as left-wing. That is to say that conservatives think Sweden is all godless government control and leftists think it's policies are sensible but too socialistic to gain popular support here.

However, privatizing Social Security is seen as extremely right wing. Investing our main retirement fund in the stock market would be a huge boon to companies in the short term, but who knows what the effects would be in the long run? All US liberals (equivalent on a good day to EU Social Democrats), socialists, progressives, most moderates, and even a good portion of conservatives want social security to remain a state entitlement program.

"Shoemakers should be run by shoe guys and software firms by software guys." That's called workers' self-management. It is best implemented through industrial unionism, anarcho-syndicalism, or a network of co-operatives.

The problem with corporate capitalism is twofold. One is that management (the so criticized MBAs) have a class interest separate from both owners and workers. There are cases where management will act to retain their own wealth and power even at the expense of overall efficiency. They are also not necessarily the most knowledgeable about the core work of the businesses they run; much of business school is unscientific trendy buzzword compliant model building and improperly contextualized case studies. The business world chants the mantra, "a manager is a manager". The assumption is they can run any firm regardless of actual knowledge of the technical and social aspects of a particular market. Workers end up with clueless destructive bosses.

The other main problem with corporations, from the perspective of the worker, is the market itself. The short term interests of shareholders often drastically differ from the long-term interests of workers, consumers, and society at large. Investors ignore systemic risk that can destroy whole economies, sell off valuable assets and cut R&D for short term gains at the expense of long term viability, move production to whichever nation can do the work with the lowest human rights and environmental protections at tremendous social cost, etc. This system is clearly sub-optimal, to put it mildly.

If workers want to have a say in their conditions and want to retain the value of what they produce without bosses and investors taking most of it away in profits, than we need to organize a union. The time is long overdue for an IT industry union.

I got expelled from high school three times, so that's as far as I got, but my experience was that schooling is anything but "book learning". The books you could read were censored and academic work mostly consisted of regurgitating what you were told.

And when you do freak out it will be too late.

Is that 40 mSv absorbed dose, or is that measured outside your shielding?

It sounds like a lot, given that radiation workers have a dose limit of 50mSv per year, and 100mSv over a year is positively correlated with cancer... :/

Also 0.01 mrem is not 0.1 Sv (try 0.1 uSv). Given that 1 Sv starts to cause nausea, 0.1 Sv per banana would be bad. ;-)
Getting the prefix or scaling wrong seems to be happening all over the place. NHK said that the two firefighters standing in the water got between 2,000 and 6,000 mSv in one of their news stories, I'm hoping that was a misprint.

Posters are asking where the money will come from. I doubt this is what congress and Obama have in mind, but here are some ideas.

Tax oil and cut subsidies to highways and airports. Fossil fuels have negative externalities and should not be supported by the state. Right now driving and flying are artificially cheap due to public funding of roads, street signs/lights, airports, security and traffic cops, etc. Not only should subsidies end, but a tax should be placed on carbon intensive travel to reflect the true social cost of driving and flying (loss of liberty/privacy due to the TSA and traffic cops, deaths from accidents, health costs from pollution, climate change, other environmental effects, etc).

The US government could also reduce it's dangerous empire. The USA has hundreds of military basses and spends more than the rest of the world combined on the military. It's time to put the interests of domestic social spending ahead of suppressing self-determination in the developing world. Military spending was a proxy for high tech development throughout the cold war. If we could invest in science and engineering to blow people up, we can certainly invest in science and engineering for green transportation and energy.

The USA also has the largest prison system in the world. Releasing those who committed minor crimes, especially consensual crimes related to drug use or sexuality would go a long way to reducing state costs. Better to spend $15,000 to put someone* on welfare or $20,000 to put them through community college than to spend $40,000 a year to incarcerate them.

*usually someone young and "of color".

Concerted activity is protected regardless of the medium of communication. In order for workers to organize to improve their lives, they must be free to discuss wages or conditions without facing retaliation from their bosses. In practice this is rarely the case, especially since most workers lack a union to back up their rights. It's good that the courts didn't take capital's side for once.

I'm pretty sure that god is not the gold standard when it comes to PageRank. Yup: god — top hit, wikipedia.

Capital generates no wealth. "Without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn." Labor creates all wealth. Yes we can be more productive with better technology, but capitalists: private owners, managers, and investors do not create better technology, they only charge us for the "right" to use tools that our class (the engineers, miners, teamsters, fabricators, chemists, programmers, etc) created in the first place!

Moreover, capitalism is highly sub-optimal for creating "wealth" in the form the most advanced technology, best satisfying human needs, and minimizing externality costs. Market demand is all based on short term individual profit. Basic science that benefits all of industry/humanity and takes decades of investment generally needs to be paid for socially, not by through market investment. (Universities, national labs, NASA, the military industrial complex, etc). Human needs are not well satisfied by a system that gives more "votes" to the small class that has the most dollars while letting poor kids go uneducated, sick, and malnourished. Under capitalism, firms have an incentive to externalize as many costs as possible and force third parties to pay for things like pollution, systematic risk (bailouts), etc.