Admittedly this data is a bit old, but it does come from WHO (and not just some blog):

http://www.who.int/mental_health/media/chin.pdf/

Suicide rate among people aged 25-34 is 15.1 per 100,000.

You do know that Foxconn's suicide rate is much lower than the China national average, right?

retcon: retroactive continuity

Rewriting history. "No, it's always been that way!"

I couldn't agree more. I own a Kindle (several actually, among several members of my family), and just recently an ebook came out from one of my favorite authors. It was the latest in a series, and I was going to buy it anyway.

Just on a hunch, I checked on Amazon ($12.99), then checked on Baene-books.com ($6.00). You can guess which store I bought from. The Baen e-Book also came without DRM.

People will buy e-books, if they're sold at a reasonable price.

At first it was just the kindle versions, but Penguin has now chosen (in the past week) to not send ebooks to Overdrive, in any format.

I hope you've finished Ghost Story then, because Penguin has removed all of their books from Overdrive: http://www.kindleboards.com/index.php/topic,92091.75.html/

And Obama just told us that he can build a new department, completely out of congressional oversight, and then bypass the congress when they don't confirm his choice to lead it.

By the way, Obama thought that convening the congress every third day (pro forma sessions) to eliminate the possibility of recess appointments was just fine when they did it to Bush in 2007-08.

He took the line in The Princess Bride that went something like 'they had the best swordfight ever', and turned it into the best sword fight on film I've ever seen.

Cary Elwes and Mandy Patinkin practiced constantly for that fight scene, during breaks in filming, and it shows. Nothing beats doing something for real. Saying "we'll fix it in post" using CGI has become a crutch, I think.

Granted. But KOTOR 3 (if written like KOTOR) would have just had one character, one story. Now, I've got 8. Eight full storylines, written and voiced with good voice actors, with more freedom to go places than I ever had in a KOTOR game.

I know it's 'the thing' to trash the game du jour, but this is getting ridiculous.

I would. In a heartbeat.

Nothing that a spell check can't fix? Eye don't think ewe know what a proofreader does.

Novell's suit was precluded because of the anti-trust federal suit which was in progress. When that suit was completed, it was then allowable for Novell to file, and they did.

I kid you not, the real reason that we're graduating people who can't read? Lower and middle schools are promoting children who are failing for two reasons:
1. to preserve their "self esteem" 2. holding back children reflects poorly on the school

Then, when the kids get to high school, they can't be sent back to the schools that didn't teach them, and it's now the high school's problem.

Ah, the ubiquitous assumption that student's grades are a function of teacher quality, and teacher quality alone.

I hate to break it to you, but there is a substantial fraction of kids who just don't give a shit. You can be the best teacher in the world, but if there's no will from the student to learn, they won't do well.

An education is like a stool. To get a good, solid one, you need three legs: a committed student, a good teacher, and supportive parents.

Wow. The problem with Fukushima was a quake larger than anyone ever anticipated, along with a tsunami far higher than anyone in Japan saw coming.

If the quake had happened by itself? No issue. If the tsunami had happened by itself? A likelihood that power would have been interrupted temporarily, but not an issue.

I am with those who insist that the main technical problem with nuclear energy is a sound regulatory framework. I don't see it. And without it, it is unsafe technology.

Your thoughts on risk assessment are part of what makes our society so litigation intensive - if one child gets harmed by something, no matter what the rate of incident is, by God, sue those people into the ground, there should be NO harmful incidents using product X! I don't care if there's a 0.00001 incident rate, we need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars fixing the problem!