This is pretty spot on. The whole issue appears to be the tendency of some people to try and condense the truth into a general statement, such as, "fleas on rats spread the bubonic plague." Of course the truth is more complex and may not be fully understood, but I don't think serious scholars ever asserted that fleas on rats were the only mechanism by which the disease was spread. The important part of the theory was that fleas on rats on boats brought the bacteria from China to Europe and then facilitated its spread.

Several of those may not currently be on Netflix, but they have been in the past and may be in the future. The selection rotates. I watched Sideways on Netflix, I'm pretty sure I've seen several of those titles on there before. If you want to have Hollywood's entire back catalog available to you then there is simply no service that offers it -- not your local rental store (if you even still have one), not any streaming service, and not traditional cable/satellite TV.

As the guy who doesn't know that the Academy Award is an Oscar, I think you're being disingenuous when you pretend to care about it. So what, Netflix isn't for you, but to argue that it's a substandard service is just asinine. If you go to a video rental store, for the cost of a couple movies you could cover a whole month of Netflix. Furthermore, for me, if I go to the local rental store, I've already seen almost everything they have that's not a new release (which cost more). Netflix has tons of foreign and indie films that interest me. They're producing original content and some of it is superb (House of Cards).

I don't like to buy movies because I don't usually watch a movie more than once. That's why Netflix is a great deal for me. It's not the greatest service if you're looking for something specific -- but all those things I've seen in theaters or in the past. Sometimes I cancel the service for a while (usually football season) but I've always started it back up again.

House of Cards: Present.

Netflix provides more quality entertainment for your money than any other service. If it weren't for sports I wouldn't even have regular TV.

Also, you won't find any of the top 200 movies on IMDB on regular TV, either, nor would you care to. When's the last time you watched Citizen Kane? Wizard of Oz? Also, being the huge movie buff that you apparently are, you should know that the Academy Awards and the Oscars are the same thing.

Btw, #5 and #6, on the IMDB top 200 are on Netflix: Pulp Fiction and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. That's just from taking a quick look at the list. In fact, I see several others on that list that I recall seeing on Netflix.

Yeah, this is basically how I feel. I use Ubuntu with XFCE. I don't even have Unity installed so it doesn't bother me any. The main reason I use Ubuntu is that I can easily find answers with a quick Google search when I run into problems. I just don't have time to spend hours dealing with minor driver issues or finding out why my OS isn't playing nice. As much as the idealistic "fragmentation leads to competition which leads to more and better options" sounds nice, I think it's good that Ubuntu provides a more accessible option for people who want to use Linux without devoting their life to it. That's not to say that I think all the other distros should just go away and Ubuntu should be the one Linux to rule them all -- I just think the community's recent hostility toward Ubuntu and Shuttleworth is a case of cutting off its nose to spite its face. It's almost as if these members of the community don't want Linux to be successful outside of the server space.

Maybe CentOS will succeed in getting the community behind it while simultaneously extending Linux's popularity beyond its current niche, but I fear that if Red Hat succeeds in making CentOS more popular and accessible then the community will just turn on them the minute they try something new.

While your snark does a great job of insulting the anti-dodgeball crowd, it does little to argue against "liberal" education policy as a whole and tells nothing about your own position. It's easy to attack a strawman, especially when you don't explain your own beliefs to open yourself up to criticism.

Your attacks are weak, also. If you believe that selective pressure has caused certain human populations to become more or less bright, as a group, than others, then you know jack shit about evolution and the human brain. Homo sapiens haven't even been a species long enough for such selective pressure to have any meaningful effect on our various populations. We are, inherently, no more intelligent than cavemen. The difference is the environment we're brought up in. Is there variation within our populations? Sure. But when it comes to cognition that variation is extremely acute - right handed or left handed, for example.

I'm no fan of certain liberal hysterics your post attacks (see my sig -- it was too long and the author's name is cut off; it's Stephen Jay Gould), but I'm even less of a fan of bullshit. Your post stinks of bullshit.

I was steered into "gifted" classes as a child but math never came as second nature to me. I don't have Asperger's syndrome or anything -- I never read particularly fast or could effortlessly absorb patterns. What landed me into the gifted program was the fact that I came from a family of educated individuals. People who spoke English, not some broken dialect that violates basic grammatical rules. They also imposed high expectations, taught me much through travel, and made a point to buy me books rather than toy guns.

Excluding those very rare individuals who have some disorder like Asperger's, children generally have approximately the same academic potential. They're like seeds from a tree. Minor genetic variation exists among them and some really are more predisposed to success than others, but much more important than predisposition is the environment in which they're grown. "Gifted" children in the United States aren't neglected because the vast majority of those who will test as gifted will have one common factor: they come from educated families. Having opportunity doesn't make one gifted.

Sticking around hasn't helped Manning any.

I think you're looking at "consequences" as a very black and white thing. Snowden is facing the consequences for his actions -- he's exiled from his country and may never be able to return. He's already sacrificed so much to do the right thing. Sticking around to be persecuted wouldn't help out any. He took the risk of being tortured, imprisoned, and even executed. Isn't that enough? That's the most we ask of our soldiers and then we declare them heroes -- we ask that they risk their lives. We ask that they risk sacrifice, not that they do sacrifice. Kamikaze pilots and suicide bombers have no place in the defense of our country. Why should the whistleblower be so self-sacrificial? Why is he not a hero for risking his life when that's the standard of valor we place upon ourselves?

It's not just a tax write off. By keeping his money in the foundation and the investments of the foundation, its a tax shelter.

He's no more altruistic than the big pharmaceutical companies. It's not really altruism when you stand to make a large profit. Gates just figured out that the charity business can be an extremely successful one -- it gives one the ability to strong-arm entire nations all while immune to criticism under the protection of "philanthropy." The Gates Foundation, like similar foundations, exists so those of his lineage will all be filthy rich no matter what and no individual will be able to screw it all up for the rest of the family. It's like a trust fund designed to last centuries rather than decades.

Your attack on televangelists is irrelevant. They're much more an analog to Gates than a dichotomy.

Treaties like that caused WWI.

However, if you've ever been to a Californian art gallery, you'd know that they do sponsor plenty of really crappy art.

There's no empirical evidence to back up this claim. Even those religions which were used as a form of control were usually not created for that reason. Sure, it could be argued that Confucianism fits your model, and probably a few others, but I sincerely doubt Jesus of Nazareth went around preaching about peace and love so Constantine could use his ideas as a form of control ~300 years later.

Religion is not a thing that was invented in one part of the world and spread from there. Many religions throughout the world developed completely independent from each other at different times. Personally, I think most of them were inspired by something good. But many ideas can be warped and perverted and turned into something terrible -- I doubt Marx would approve of Stalin's version of Communism just as I doubt Jesus would approve of American Evangelicals' version of Christianity.

Maybe, although you're consciously unaware of it, your body craves the carbohydrates, proteins, and lipids that cheap pizza provides. And then other times, despite the fact that it's dinner time, you had a late lunch and you don't currently need any energy input, especially considering that you haven't used much energy sitting around browsing Slashdot.

There may be randomness in decision making sometimes, but basing a decision off of 'this is what I feel like' isn't random, you're just not making a conscious effort to employ logic (even though you probably do without realizing it).

Such as drinking crap like Tab or Mountain Dew. It may give you kidney stones, do a poor job of hydrating, lack vital nutrients, and only contain monomers which provide nothing more than short term energy, but it tastes sooo good.

I think you're both right, both saying the same thing, the OP just did so in a more cynical fashion. The important thing that the headline muddles is that there are no actual transitivity violations being observed, only seeming transitivity violations, so headline proposes something false ("why transivity [sic] violations can be rational').

Journalism wouldn't be interesting if the journalists understood the important minutiae of the scientific journals they refashion into pop articles.