Thanks. The summary has a spectacularly ambiguous pronoun.

There was a deadline. People put stuff off to the deadline, especially when it means it's going to cost them money.

For comparison, this page has a graph of tax-related Google queries. Big shock: they spike right before deadlines in January and April. (That's a proxy for tax filings, for which I couldn't find a decent source. I suspect that tax filings are probably even more spread out, since many people get money back and would rather do it early.)

Combined with problems that would have caused people who tried earlier to fail, it doesn't seem at all likely that numbers would go up by a factor of 2/3. If you'd told me it was an order of magnitude, I might have been surprised. IBD has a history of a negative view of the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare") and so I'm not especially inclined to see their incredulity is anything other than ideology.

It's not squinting, it's the mental rotation. You're viewing it from a point to the south-east. The bottom edge of the rock in the photo is roughly the east coast. The notch in the lower left is roughly the Great Bight.

The distinctive northern tip of Queensland is entirely absent, and in fact the whole "north coast" of the rock is Just Plain Wrong. You really have to be kinda desperate to want to see it. But for that matter, you kinda have to be desperate to consider this news.

Yeah, I had actually intended to downplay that sentence a bit. Cremona had several great luthier families; Stradavarius got the biggest name but the others were at least in the same range. It would be fascinating to see just how Cremona came to be the center of fine instrument making.

People have some kind of innate (or maybe learned, but deep) fondness for "authentic". They'll pay for things that were touched by celebrities, as if there's some kind of magic that's transmitted through it.

These were, almost surely, the best violins available. The Stradavari family had extraordinary skill, surpassing anybody else at the time. It's remarkable and amazing that it should take us centuries to make other instruments with similar precision, balance, and quality.

But it's not amazing that we should eventually do so. There was no magic to these instruments, just tremendous hard work and a commitment to quality. These are rare, but hardly unique, especially over the course of centuries.

Let us appreciate these for what they are: remarkable artifacts of history, hand-made to extreme precision, durable enough to stand the test of time and be selected for their quality. There's no point in adding an additional layer of BS about some magic, unattainable extra that can't possibly be reproduced. It doesn't diminish the instrument, nor does it make every hack a great musician. Great instruments and great musicians will continue to make great music; surely that should be enough without sullying it with gullibility.

Has anybody tried to hook Watson up to a crossword puzzle? Its Jeopardy-answering skills should give it a substantial jump on the puzzle, and combined with the combinatorial crunching power of a computer should be able to narrow down a lot of places to the point where it can just plain guess. Which is what a lot of human players have to do when faced with overly "clever" clues anyway.

Some puzzles have extra thematic elements that would make it tricky for a computer (such as misspellings), though a lot of these are really just a matter of practice for humans as well: "Oh, this is the kind of language game you're allowed to play." A computer might not be able to induce that kind of rule, but if you code for it it can probably take some fine guesses.

Ya know... this is why I come to Slashdot: the comments that are more informative than the article. Doesn't happen often enough these days. Thank you.

There have always been strong-on-defense conservatives. Anti-communist zealots who were happy to sacrifice a lot of liberty for a little temporary safety had their biggest prominence during exactly the time that today's conservatives hold up as the ideal time of American values.

What I find interesting is the way it's costing them an opportunity to go against Obama. Obama's own party is largely unhappy about continued NSA spying. Even Dianne Feinstein, who is from very liberal San Francisco but has been a defender of the American intelligence community from her position on the Select Committee on Intelligence, finally got fed up with it last week.

Politically, it would be a good time for libertarians to try to pry liberals away from the Democrats. But the libertarians have made their primary political home with the Republicans for some time; there is a separate Libertarian party but it never fares well due to vote-splitting. Republicans won't easily be able to switch away from a position that put national security over liberty, even when they've got a golden opportunity to use it to embarrass Obama.

Since Obama himself is making proposals to limit (but hardly stop) NSA spying on Americans, in an ideal world you'd love to see everybody come together to try to reach a point where at least a majority can say, "Yeah, I feel OK about changing the situation, even if I'd rather have more security or more defense from intrusiveness." But sadly for the state of American politics, it seems mostly like an opportunity for both extremes to oppose the center.

It's interesting that they can have people so aware of the price difference when it's numerically comparatively small. It's about 2%: not trivial, but you need to be literally counting pennies to notice it.

There are, unfortunately, many people in America who do need to count pennies. But I wonder what fraction of Wal-Mart shoppers are in that position, and how many think "low prices" when they wouldn't actually notice the difference?

I mention this only because I suspect that Americans tend to put price over other considerations, including quality, convenience, and even conscience. I wouldn't tell people how to shop, but I wonder how many people might be better off (by their own measures, whatever they are) to say, "OK, I'll spend an extra eight cents to buy this package of crackers at a store where the employees seem happier" or "I've noticed that the reviews of the Wal-Mart vacuum cleaner aren't as good as the ones at the other department store; I'll spend the extra $10 and get one that does a better job."

Or not. There are surely plenty who truly do need to save the eight cents on the package of crackers, and there but for the grace of God go I. But I am genuinely curious how many seek to minimize the price simply because it's the easiest factor to optimize.

Interesting. Is that because hydrogen is diatomic, and thus always bigger than monoatomic helium even though the atoms themselves are smaller? Or does it have something to do with helium's inertness?

Like it or not, the government does exclude some speech from being "free". Threats and defamation are excluded, as is the ever-popular "shouting fire in a crowded theater". Even obscenity can be limited, though fortunately that exception has been narrowed in the past few decades.

Not that I want these to be the camel's nose under the tent. I'm just pointing out that the potential for abuse is already there. I think it's perfectly reasonable that you can't threaten somebody and call it "free speech", but it sets a dangerous precedent.

If you haven't read it, in the past couple of years his son published his fragmentary version of the Arthurian legend. His alliterative verse was better in some places than in others (I loved it when it appeared as Rohirric poetry, not so much in the plodding and interminable verse version of the Beren and Luthien story), but it really popped there. He was trying to craft, in that way he does, a version such as might have been written by the earliest Germanic invaders after the fall of Rome, and as absurd as that sounds, I thought that it worked.

Although Tolkien really was a gifted poet in so many ways, I often found his alliterative verse cloying. Modern English just doesn't have the right tone for it. His alliterative versions of Leithian and Children of Hurin don't, for the most part, do it for me.

I do wish he'd finished his Arthur story, though. That one came out last year, and it was genuinely great. He massaged various versions of the myths into one story that worked better than any of the existing tellings, and the alliterative verse really soared. (Plus, there were hints in his notes that Lancelot was destined to end up in Valinor, which would have amused the bejeezus out of me, but he never got around to writing it.)

So I'll be curious to see how I feel about this. Seamus Heaney's translation is going to be damned hard to beat. But regardless, Tolkien's version will tell us a lot about his thoughts on it, which will be fascinating. And from what I hear, he's using some archeological speculations, and I hope that there's commentary to see how much of that continues to be valid.

I respectfully disagree, but I can see why you'd think that. He has certainly made a career publishing the dregs of his father's work.

However, that's nowhere near as easy as it sounds. The handwriting is just the least of it. He's put in serious scholarly work on his father's material, comparing numerous revisions and tracing the evolution of the thought. He had collaborated with his father on the works for years: the famous handwriting on the Middle Earth maps is his, and they worked together to get The Silmarillion into a publishable form for over a decade. In fact, he really deserves coauthor, or at least editor, credit for The Silmarillion: the work was literally pieced together, paragraph by paragraph and sometimes sentence by sentence, from over a dozen different manuscript sources.

He was also a significant linguist in his own right. His work on the Saga of Hedrik the Wise is still referred to in the field. In order to be his father's amanuensis he had to speak several different languages, including all of the variations of Elvish that his father invented over the decades. (Every time the language evolved in his head, he turned the old version into Old Noldorin or Old Quenya or other such. It gives the language evolution tremendous verisimilitude, but is a massive headache for scholars.)

I'm not gonna deny that he's been prickly and has reserved a lot of the works to himself, which other scholars might have liked to have had access to. But I don't think it's fair to call him a "leech". His father made him literary executor, and I'm quite certain that his father would have approved of the course he's taken. He craved publication of The Silmarillion, and had tried for decades to get it into an acceptable form. Other papers weren't intended for publication, but they are of tremendous interest to scholars, and as a scholar himself Tolkien would surely have understood it. He specifically put many of his works in trust at Marquette for precisely that reason.

Boooooooooo ;-)