It always amazes me that Europeans can figure out how to be patronizing from below.

Not to put too fine a point on it but at least we have probes to lose...when you're launching so many, I guess an error is almost bound to happen. The US has launched something like 60. Britain what, 6? 8?

Last time I checked, Britain even had fucked up Beagle 2 without any 'conversion error' to blame it on?

(FWIW as far as paper sizes are concerned, perhaps we should ask the question the other 'way around: the US standard (based probably on the British standard) was well-established when everyone felt compelled around 1930 to pick up the Germans' system of A4, etc. Why adapt something new when a well-established standard was in place?
Even now, European book printers recognize that the ISO standard is really too narrow for standard book production, and use 'metric-measure' versions of traditional proportions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canons_of_page_construction)

...that these are the same guys who just voted themselves a raise.*
*non-coincidentally, many of them had their salaries raised to $174,900/year, because $175,000/year is the next income tax bracket.

Damn shame slashdot doesn't have editors.
Maybe we should consider some? I mean, it's no FARK of course.

I read this, and am absolutely amazed and impressed at her brilliance. She really was a credit to the human race in general as so many of the Nobel Prize winners have been historically.

And then I see that our President got a Nobel for what, again?

Clearly you have a vested interest in the elitist patriarchy that believes they get exclusive power to decide the meanings of words.

Perhaps using 'descent' instead of 'dissent' wasn't simply a moronic Left-Wing protester so ginned-up by their rage that they made what amounts to about a 3rd-grade homonym mistake, but was in fact a PATRIOTIC OWS'ian effort to rail against corporate America's lockdown on something as fundamental as the definitions and use of our language?!

"Is it worth being cured of addiction if, losing the addiction, we also lose part of who we are?"

Having 'lost' a few friends to chemical addictions over the years, it's fairly obvious that losing a part of themselves or changing their personality forever really isn't something they're concerned about in the first place.

In point of fact, of course, anonymity isn't a 'right' and never has been. In fact, the bulk of human history has been one in which people know the people around them very well (and by that I mean know them, their parents, their extended family, etc.).

In fact, anonymity was regarded as SUSPICIOUS. If nobody knew you at all, how could they know what to expect from you?

While I suspect that the bulk of /. modernistas would shudder at this level of 'public knowledge, personally, I strongly suspect that's one of the actual drivers behind what people tend to call a drop in 'decency' between individuals today. Anonymity makes it incredibly easy to be selfish and entirely self-interested. After all, who's going to know? (And deep down, I think most of us believe/know that it's wrong to be entirely selfish.) Even better, today you can go further than anonymity to MANAGING your image - you can be an entirely selfish, greedy prick but drive a prius (thus you 'care' about the planet), twitter about how you're supporting this or that cause (with some tiny amount on kickstarter) or facebook to make sure some trivial gesture you make is noticed by everyone.

I think what makes people uncomfortable with a loss of anonymity is that with knowledge comes judgement. As much as you might stamp your foot and say "don't judge me" that's precisely what people will do based on their accumulated knowledge (often collectivized by gossip, of course). Is it always fair? No. Often, for example, the sins of the parents are by implication linked to the kids (alcoholism, domestic abuse, sexual abuse, etc)* creating what might be a vicious, inescapable cycle.
*of course, I watch with some amusement as we're starting to find genetically inherited markers which DO indicate these tendencies move in family lines...

But personally, I'd FAR rather live in a small community of people who've been there a while, in which we ALL know each other to some degree and have a reputation to uphold, than to be 'totally anonymous' in some faceless city/neighborhood where everyone's a stranger.

I think the fact that nobody's buying Win8 is less of a "Flop of the year" and more of a "pretty much the same as everything since Win98 except perhaps Win7".

My point is that 'flop' probably implies surprise. Nobody who watched Idiocracy, and then saw the Win8 UI has been surprised that consumers have pretty much been running directly in the opposite direction.

The point you're addressing - and meanwhile ignoring the substance of my questions - is almost as trivial as the point you made.

I think the above poster him/herself missed the point of the question, which was (in my reading) a question about why Americans value protecting their children from nudity more than violence; if one was cynical, it could be seen as a tedious re-hashing of the old "why Americans are bad and Euros are so much better" point, namely that the US is prudish about nudity (while 'sophisticated' Euros aren't) and disregards violence (which 'sophisticated' Euros feel is much worse).

There are lots of deep explanations but I think the simplest are:
- the US was founded, generally, by religious conservatives; thus even today religion - and the sensibilities of the faithful, for those who themselves aren't - looms larger culturally in the US than Europe.
- the US hasn't had a significant war on its soil for nearly 150 years, and certainly never one in which whole cities were firebombed, or whole ethnic groups nearly exterminated
- the US has historically been much more spread-out, and simple geography has meant that individuals have historically had to take a more active role in protecting themselves; couple that with a culture in which hunting has been much more significant (WI alone has something like 600,000 registered hunters) and therefore guns are far more familiar as useful tools ...I think those combined has left the US with a distinctly different approach to violence/guns and nudity/sex than Europe.
Personally, I find it interesting to explore this stuff with my European friends, until some asswipe from one side or the other starts injecting the almost-inevitable 'why our system is so much better than theirs' that quickly destroys the value in such a discussion.

Personally, I suspect that MOST TV advertising is not rigorously measured in this respect. Does a 30 second Nike spot during the superbowl REALLY convince enough people (who weren't going to buy Nike anyway) to buy Nikes, such that the margin gained from those shoes exceeds the cost of the $1 million ad?

Once you start to question this, the whole card-house of advertising, big-money television, and ultimately the wealth of both sports teams (who make a significant chunk of their revenue on tv deals) and Hollywood becomes even more shamtastic.

There's a fine line between panache and smug.
People hate smug, so that's a really really good way to lose one's public support.

It just makes my point all the more relevant.

You hand all your pictures to someone, and then are surprised that they might change the rules to their benefit?

And you call me a moron? Hahhaahah.

I am in no way a climate scientist, so if someone could please explain this article to me, I would appreciate it.

1) It says "Coral Reefs Could Be Decimated by 2100" but then the first sentence is that "Nearly every coral reef could be dying by 2100 if current carbon dioxide emission trends continue" - decimation is 1/10, significantly different from "nearly every". Is this just sloppy language or which is correct?

2) The article says "No precise rule of thumb exists to link that figure and the health of reefs. But the Carnegie scientists say paleoclimate data suggests that the saturation level during preindustrial timesâ"before carbon pollution began to accumulate in the sky and seasâ"was greater than 3.5." and "In the absence of deep reductions in CO2 emissions, we will go outside the bounds of the chemistry that surrounded all open ocean coral reefs before the industrial revolution," meaning the reefs are "...toast". But then it also says "...No precise rule of thumb exists to link that figure and the health of reefs..." - first, a rule of thumb isn't precise (again, just bad writing?), second it doesn't seem that there's a question of precision here - there's simply no actual connection, just a hypothesis that's incredibly vague based entirely on inference?

3) The article says that the inescapable conclusion is that the reefs "...are toast." Yet ""There is a very wide coral response to omegaâ"some are able to internally control the [relevant] chemistry," says Rau, who has collaborated with Caldeira in the past but did not participate in this research. Those tougher coral species could replace more vulnerable ones "rather than a wholesale loss" of coral. "" - So really, while the currently-flourishing varieties of coral ARE optimized for the high-pH ocean, there are already-extant species that are more durable. So again, we're not talking about the 'loss of all coral' as the article implies, but more like 'a loss of the current varieties of coral that can't tolerate the coming change'?

4) As I understand it, corals are some of the oldest organisms on the planet, both individually and as a species. These organisms have survived far, far higher planetary temperatures and conditions which - to humans at least - would have been considered uninhabitable. The quote "[But] an important point made by [Caldeira] is that corals have had many millions of years of opportunity to extend their range into low omega waters. With rare exception they have failed. What are the chances that they will adapt to lowering omega in the next 100 years?" seems disingenuous. We KNOW corals have adapted to broad conditions over the history of the earth. As we're seeing with other ocean species, more durable, more tolerant, and simply tougher species (which have been marginalized by the species who have successfully adapted energetically and efficiently to today's 'optimum') are doing much better. In essence while some species bet their genetic currency on adapting supremely to current conditions but with little ability to operate outside them, others hedged for the long game remaining marginal species but having a greater ability to tolerate changes. Isn't that kind of how evolution simply works?

All in all, this article seems long on speculation, self-contradictory, and (sadly, typical) climate-FUD more intent on histrionics than presenting facts and reasonable hypotheses.

How do we teach people idiomatic content now. I know there are German phrases that translate into nonsense in English and vice versa, but you can translate the "meaning" of the idiom. The whole point of the new semantic engine being created by Google is that the relationship of words and groups of words will be preserved. When a Doctor yells for Dabigatran in an ER because he thinks his patient is suffering from a nonlocalized DVT, his staff knows what's happening and how to respond. I (a person off the street) can look up Dabigatran and DVT in Google and I instantly know the problem has something to do with a blood clot that's traveled someplace it ought not to be. Another search and I find out the bad news places it could go would be the carotid artery or the pulmonary vein. A semantic network would have all these things related and through the interaction of a human being would be able to provide the necessary information to explain what a sentence means. There are something you can't easily translate from language to another, however you can at least describe the context. I can write something in Common Lisp, that save peeking and poking, you cannot duplicate in Basic. However spoke human languages for the most part have sufficient semantic richness to describe complex ideas. Those languages that lack sufficient complexity can in most cases be easily extended to add new meaning... Look at how much Latin, Greek, German, French and Gaelic there is in English. We add words easily to grow the language. Most languages support this feature.