Thank you for that incredibly lucid explanation. (Sorry, no mod points today, but you were at 5 anyway.)

I got the impression that the idea was to use the breast itself as the scattering medium, in an attempt to focus on something inside the breast, namely a cancer. The chicken breast was used to simulate breast material, which would probably be pretty clever if it weren't so confusing.

Chicken breast is very different from mammalian mammary tissue, but it was probably the cheapest source of meat. It may also help that it's relatively uniform, to simplify things, while simultaneously being sufficiently random at the tissue level.

Both the floret and the katana are designed to allow blades to slide along and be kicked away. A crossguard like this is often used to trap, or even snap, incoming weapons.

I like to think that the choreographers will find clever and interesting things to do with this. They always have in the past. It is a little odd that it appeared to have a metal nub near the base, where it could potentially be damaged by an energy blade, but it wouldn't surprise me if they were still able to use it to trap an incoming blade (and perhaps counter by pivoting around that point and using the crossguard offensively).

The lens flare that was there was actually well used, when the Falcon went up into the sun. It helped highlight a dramatic moment. I thought that was good work.

Once. The problem is that he over-uses the trick.

At the very least, the Democrats are fighting back with the same dubious tactic. Here in Maryland, we just squeezed out another Republican seat with some extremely sketchy-looking districts.

That's one, mind you, compared to the three or four they were finding in North Carolina. It would take decades for Democrats to try to regain control of the legislatures. It would be much better to replace the system with one less easily corrupted (or at least, less immediately corrupted), but I do expect both parties to live down to the tactics of the worst. It's what gets you elected.

The Democrats happen to be worse at it (for now), and I'd love to see them be able to use that to campaign for a less corrupt system. The trick will be getting people out to vote for it. It's not on most people's priority list. That list consists primarily of pocketbook issues.

I'd like to give PR a try, though I don't expect it to be the end of the two-party system. Minority parties tend to be subsumed into one of the two leading parties, because any vote on legislation ends up dividing people into "yes" and "no" camps. Ideally, the coalitions would differ from vote to vote, but since the best way to get to "yes" on some issue is to trade off a vote on another issue, the coalitions tend to be fairly stable over time.

The advantage of PR, in the United States, is that increasingly people are voting for party over personality anyway. Personality tends to serve mostly as a liability: if you end up calling attention to yourself it's usually for something you screwed up. In a safe seat (as so many are), a distinctive personality will help you keep winning the primary, but in competitive seats the names you remember are largely the ones who committed some terrible "gaffe" (often manufactured or blown out of proportion by the press and the opposition party).

Once elected, they tend to vote the party line. If they do anything distinctive, it's most often just grandstanding, with little effect on the legislative outcome. A good politician actually can do some real wheeling and dealing behind the scenes, getting a favorable position for their district, but the effects are usually hard to see. The most prominent things they do are to vote the same way as anybody else would with the same letter after their name.

So since we're voting for parties over personalities anyway, we might as well give PR a try. Don't expect it to cure the ills you expect it to, since what we end up with is going to look a lot like a two-party system anyway, but it will at least allow us to reconsider the system. It might even end the practice of voting against whichever politician is most easily tagged with negative personality traits, so that they can focus on the party most in line with their ideology. (I'm not crazy about that, either, but at least it's slightly more real.)

Well, yeah. The comet rotates. The direction of its rotation is east. It's as good a coordinate system as any.

Huh. I never knew that.

Well, now that's a brain cell that I'm never getting back. Now if I can just remember to call the MCI Center the "Verizon Center".

It may be that it's JUST him. No other contributors get that kind of preferred place, not even people who participate in the community. It's kind of galling to see his name pop up every couple of weeks, and everybody instantly knows that the comments are going to be primarily about just how bad the contribution is, simultaneously wordy and wrong.

Perhaps if Slashdot spread it around a bit more, it might aggravate less. Instead, it's one of a mere two dozen or so stories posted per day. Few of them will be really engaging, but here's one that we know for a fact will be "thought provoking" only in the sense that people will have to explain why his "novel" idea is novel because it's bad. Nobody else's novelties get that kind of pride of place, on a web site that used to be known for driving so much traffic it could crash a small server.

Exactly. The NSA was never supposed to be doing that. They took advantage of technological changes and played semantic games that justified all kinds of shenanigans that was at best barely within the letter of the law, and at worst completely subverted the oversight.

So, a new law was called for. Ideally, it would update the NSA's mission to the age of Internets and cell phones, and put in oversight to at least put an end to the previous excesses (though they'll surely find new ones).

Whether this law actually does that... hell, when was the last time we passed any kind of law about anything? If Harry Reid is for it, I'm sure the Republicans will filibuster it, and if somehow Harry Reid and Republicans are on the same side it would only be because the bill doesn't actually say anything at all.

Well... while there sure as hell is a problem of China's state-operated hacking, it's not going away any time soon. We're not going to war over it (either physically or economically) and any treaty we signed to deal with it wouldn't be worth the paper it's written on. While I'd love to see the Chinese at least commit to removing the line item in their budget that says, "30 gazillion yuan for breaking into American computers", they'd surely just rename it and the actual hackers would do no more than change the project number on their time cards.

So yeah, you have to harden your web sites, and start thinking about our protocols in ways designed to make it easy to recognize and divert hackers, because the hackers aren't going away. We can blame them all we like, and be right, but that and $2.99 will get you a tall latte.

Ha. Thanks. There was so much bad news from SCOTUS this year that I missed the bit with the EPA.

It still seems like a dicey thing for China to gamble on having the US fulfill its commitments. Unlike them, we're going to swap out our executive branch in two years, and there's a nearly 50-50 chance it'll be a member of the party of Ted Cruz and James Inhofe. Anything Obama does by executive action can be undone by executive action. That President would still have a hard time passing legislation, since 2016 will be voting out some of the Republican wave of 2010 just as 2014 voted out some of the Democratic wave of 2008, and even if they don't, the filibuster busts both ways.

Still, I don't know if China has any good reason to trust us on this.

I would have thought you could do it for less, since you don't have to haul the batteries around like you do in a car. Weight and volume are much smaller considerations. Any idea what it would cost for, say, a lead-acid battery?

And even at that, US$25,000 isn't all that much compared to the price of a house. The median home price in the US is $313k as of September (and that's down from $350k the previous month). It's not negligible, but it's small, and can be folded into the mortgage. It adds $70 a month to the mortgage payment (not counting the interest costs), and that's offsetting part of an electric bill that averages over $300/month.

(Speaking of which... sheesh. I pay less than $100 most months. I must be doing something right.)

This is very much a stopped-clock kind of "right". It's Congress doing nothing, by default, as per usual. Even if the bill were a good idea, there's no chance of it getting serious consideration. It's always in somebody's best interest to make sure something doesn't happen, and it's just not hard to find people to support you on that.

The only way to pass legislation now requires half the House PLUS 60% of the Senate PLUS the President, and then it has to find 56% of the Supreme Court to keep it from being overturned. Getting all of those at once is very rare.

So this isn't a sign of anybody getting anything right. It's just another instance of them failing to do anything at all. We just happen to be lucky that this one time, "do nothing" is the right answer.

Speaking of deals... how are we supposed to deliver on this? Even before last Tuesday, there was no chance of getting this through as a treaty past the Republican filibuster. Now there's less-than-no-chance, and even the most extreme overreach of executive powers can't impose that much reduction.

So how are we supposed to deliver on this deal? There's simply no concession that Obama could possibly make to Boehner and McConnell that would get the to sign off on this. What am I missing?