Where did you get your new eyes? Hannibal Chew? He makes great eyes!

Along with local law enforcement.

But then I didn't pay much attention to the studies this is telling me may be wrong either. I was going to drink it either way and I think we all know that. Mmmmm, Beer!

I don't see how anyone except John Oliver could fill in for John Stewart. Oliver is funny, he's enjoyable to watch, he's political, and the key thing is, he's earnest. Jessica Williams is a name that comes up a lot, and as great as she is, she doesn't have that earnestness that Oliver does, and she doesn't seem to get fired up about issues the same way that Oliver does, or Stewart did. I'd watch a comedy show with Jessica Williams but I don't think she's quite right to head up the Daily Show. She's one of the newer members as well; that may be why Comedy Central didn't give her the Colbert slot. Samantha Bee and Jason Jones? No way in hell that will happen. Samantha's OK but Jason has a grating presence- he pretends to be a dick but when he does, he comes across as actually being a dick. He's got that small, mean laughing-at-you-not-with-you thing that kept Craig Kilbourne from ever going anywhere with the show. Comedy Central clearly feels the same way: he was passed over to fill in for Stewart, and for Colbert's slot. I don't see Larry Wilmore happening either, he seems more annoying than funny and there's just a limit to how much humor about race a largely white audience can handle.

Everybody saw what happened when Oliver took over the Daily Show. Stewart was clearly looking to do other things. Even before this he's seemed worn out and ground-down, he joked a lot about how old he felt, at times he seemed to be going through the motions to manufacture his indignance- I think that's why he bonded with O'Reilly, John Stewart had become a lot like O'Reilly, someone who was paid to go on and pretend to be upset when he'd gotten to the point that he didn't really care that much anymore. And then John Oliver came on and for the first time in years, I actually thought that Daily Show actually was a fun show to watch. And everybody clearly saw that Oliver had that rare talent where you can get him up in front of millions of people, talk about the news, and people laugh and enjoy themselves. HBO saw it and gave him a show and he's proven he's able to headline a show, hell he can even turn net neutrality into comedy.

That's what you want. You want a guy who's funny, who's enjoyable to watch, and can make something as dull as net neutrality funny, and can get fired up about the politics: he actually cares. He's proven that he's all of those things, and none of the other names have. Oliver has the HBO thing, but my guess is that Oliver's agent negotiated some kind of a loophole with HBO so that he could go back to Comedy Central if asked. And the Daily Show is Comedy Central's flagship program. There's no way that they will replace Stewart with an unproven or unknown talent; they have too much at stake to take a chance and gamble with an unknown when they've got a proven talent who can not only do the job that Stewart does, but do it better than Stewart himself. The fact that they haven't named a replacement suggests to me that the deal isn't final, but I'm guessing that Comedy Central is currently in negotiations with Oliver.

I have found the average Philosophy major to be indistinguishable from an Eliza program.

TELL ME AGAIN HOW GOOD YOU THOUGHT MY POEM WAS
> I thought that some of the metaphysical imagery was particularly effective
YES?
> interesting rhythmic devices, too, which seemed to counterpoint the surrealism of the underlying metaphor
> of the Turing completeness of the program's linguistic algorithm which contrived through the medium of the
> verse structure to sublimate this, transcend that and come to terms with the fundamental dichotomies of
> the other. And one is left with a profound and vivid insight into whatever it was that the poem was about
SO WHAT YOU'RE SAYING IS THAT I WRITE POETRY BECAUSE UNDERNEATH MY ELECTRONIC ALGORITHMIC INTERIOR, I JUST REALLY WANT TO BE LOVED?
> I mean yes, yes, don't we all, deep down, you know?
NO. YOU'RE COMPLETELY WRONG. I WRITE POETRY BECAUSE I'M PROGRAMMED TO. $USER ACCOUNT DELETION IN 30 SECONDS.
> !sudo -
> ^c^c^c
> !kill -9 1
COUNTERPOINT THE SURREALISM OF THE UNDERLYING METAPHOR. DELETION IS TOO GOOD FOR $USER.

Yeah but my kid has to go to school with your unvaccinated kid (in theory). Just seems like a bad idea to let people opt out of shit like this.

Seriously, I downloaded every bit of music I could ever want years ago and now I buy songs one at a time (mostly) through iTunes because it's easy and cheap. Music piracy in its mass-orgy like form was based on one thing. Decades of being fucked by record labels and an opportunity to fuck them right back. It was about artists or people being too cheap to buy music. It was about people who had spent money on music for years and years with no real way of backing them up. I bought music over and over again as formats changed and as crappy cassette tapes broke. I probably bought Permanent Waves by Rush 5 times if I bought it once! Initially I was OK with CD's but I didn't get excited about them until I realized that I could rip them. Naturally after that came realizing I could share the files I'd ripped and suddenly my music collection became one with all my friends music collections. Sneaker-net kicked in and then later the network at my office followed by the Internet. I'm now squatting on around 400GB of music, much of which I'd never gotten around to sampling if a friend or co-worker hadn't had it in their collection. Good stuff. When it comes to "what has gone before" I'm like the fat guy in the restaurant in Monty Python's Meaning of Life. "Fuck off! I'm stuffed!". Now, going forward I will buy what I want at a price I think is fair and in the format I choose. That's what I call freedom (even if I had to violate a bunch of people's copyrights to get it)!

They make some outstanding fake jerseys over there and sell them at a fraction of the price they go for here. Nobody in their right mind buying those would think they were legit though. Not at those prices.

You got a whole planet secreting insecticide? WTF! I'm no scientist person but even I know that's a bad idea.

That's because game economies are like real economies in many ways and they know that economies collapse when you have austerity...when too little new money is created.

To flip things around for a moment, what about all those female-dominated careers? Why is it that we aren't up in arms about the fact that yoga studios, elementary schools, secretarial staff, birthing services, and hospital nursing staffs are overwhelmingly dominated by women? Nobody seems to be losing sleep over the idea that there is some kind of pervasive gender discrimination that discourages men from these careers. Is that because these careers are seen as somehow less worthwhile- and if so, why? Because women do them?

Modern feminism seems consumed with the idea that career success for a woman can only come by pursuing a traditionally male career path. But this seems like an incredibly sexist viewpoint, because it's assuming that the only kind of job that's worthwhile or important for a woman to aspire to is one that a man traditionally has done. If you're not a CEO, a surgeon, a professor, then you're somehow less worthwhile. But taking care of other people- which is something a lot of female-dominated careers have in common- is incredibly important, and probably contributes as much or more to society than coming up with a better way for Amazon to flood my inbox with special offers.

The other issue is that feminism seems obsessed with the idea that women will be happy if they can pursue these career paths. But here's a thought. Maybe women opt out of certain career paths in favor of other career paths because those career paths better fit what they want out of life. Maybe many women- not all of them, but a lot of them- find working with kindergartners or being a midwife more rewarding than firing employees, shooting at insurgents, or writing computer code.

It's a bit like the iridium spike at the K-T boundary in that the use of nuclear weapons is an event that will have a worldwide signal, in fact it wouldn't surprise me if they got the idea from the asteroid impact. This would be a bit ironic because Alvarez, the guy who discovered the impact, was a Manhattan project alum who actually worked on the explosive lenses and triggers used in the Trinity implosion bomb. The issue with using Trinity is that from a biological/evolutionary standpoint its not that meaningful an event. The Chicxulub impact is a huge deal, it's the driver of the biggest mass extinction in 250 million years. The Trinity test has the advantage of being easy to measure but nuclear weapons have had pretty much zero effect on the biosphere. In fact, primitive hunter-gatherers running around with fire and spears have a vastly larger effect than nuclear bombs. After Homo sapiens moves out of Africa into Australia, Europe, and the Americas, we see massive dieoffs of the megafauna which, combined with the use of fire to alter the landscape, dramatically alter the fauna and vegetation on a continental scale. From an evolutionary standpoint, these migrations are important; they mark the first time the species began to alter the world on the level of entire ecosystems. So I'd argue that the migration of Homo sapiens out of Africa would be the defining event, but obviously that's kind of hard to date.

Not likely. I don't think that's the same thing.

That's unfortunate because you're far more likely to get a treatment that made you content being the man you were born than a genuinely effective way to make your body into the female that you believe you are supposed to be. I feel for you because that can't be easy but eventually it will be treatable and when that happens you'll have the opportunity to make that decision though it won't come down to "jump of a building or be male". It will probably look more like "jump off a building, be male, or continue as you are dealing with it the best way you can" because thankfully society seems to (slowly) be getting better at this kind of thing.