Oh, but you missed the best part. After everyone shouts "we are all individuals", a lone meek voice says "I'm not!".

Could you be misremembering the Eternal September of 1993? The name AOL didn't event exist until 1989. Usenet did exist in 1984, but it was over UUCP, and there were less than 1000 hosts.

Parent is already at +5, so I'll just say that it's spot on. But to make one point,

Also just like /. tends to do, the linked news article headline is sensationalized and exists just to get people to read the story.

Sadly, this is one case where every reporting of this research is just as bad as Slashdot's. The headline has cropped up in many different forms on health-related newsfeeds, and all are basically: Vitamins don't cure cancer or stop heart attacks, therefore they are worthless, The parent comment above is the first time I've read that the researchers actually admitted some benefit.

There is something very strange about Health and Science reporting, where reporters shut off their brains so they can create the most scandalous headline to draw readers. Remember two months ago when everyone was reporting the Oreos are as addictive as cocaine? It turns out that rats prefer junk food over rice (just like drugs!), and Oreos are just what they happened to use. That was the day after the government shutdown ended, and everyone needed a break from shrill political news in favor of some mindless crap news.

This brings back memories of an old version of MS Flight Simulator (2000?). Whenever you would choose an item from a main list (maybe it was US state), the secondary drop-down list of airports within that category was oddly slow, and exponentially related to the number of items in the list. I just chalked it up to a programming WTF, and something Microsoft never noticed during QA because they were testing on high end machines.

I foresee a future in politics for you. You certainly have their understanding of logic and the scientific method.

I use it for blog postings, with the tables and footnotes plugins. I also use it when converting simple text files into e-books with Calibre, which has a built-in markdown converter. I have nothing against html, but typing an open and close tag for everything gets to be tedious when you just want to write something simple, especially for tables.

I've had to edit other people's book-length Word documents before. These tend to be a mess, because many people don't know how to use styles, so the formatting is a big mess. I copied the text in Markdown, formatted the headings as H1 and H2, wrote some simple html for the embedded images, converted the document to HTML, and imported it back into Word. It sounds like a lot of steps, but I was able to do this faster than clicking on 200 pages of the Word document to fix all the inconsistencies. It goes without saying that the person got the document back, and then messed up the formatting again, because they didn't think Word styles were a real thing.

As I recall, Cory Doctorow at a book signing mentioned he used Markdown or something similar in his writings, and then kept the documents under a version control system to be able to see the changes. This is something Markdown should excel at, much better than a wysiwyg editor.

In addition to the copyright issues (which I think the parent is correct about), what about the 2257 Regulations issues? The laws in the US are pretty strict about full records being kept of the models in pornographic videos by the producers. It would seem these revenge sites are sitting ducks for child porn smackdowns.

What a pointless, unfunny comment. I don't know what a "bio-chemical reaction" is. If you mean a chemical reaction, then no, proteins do not react that way. The composition of the protein does not change, in the way that two reacting chemicals would change their bonding or electron counts. In general, the protein is simply shaped in a way that fits the molecule better than other molecules (i.e., it recognizes the molecule), holding it in place so that other reactions can happen more favorably. Metalloenzymes come closer to your notion of a chemical reaction with a protein, but the protein part of the enzyme is still there just to position the reactant close to the catalytic center.

Traveling from New York to Hungary, I have had baggage delayed twice. American Airlines had a special car drive the bags 2 hours to my location the next day, and gave a $100 reimbursement for emergency replacement of items for that missing day.

British Airways is another story. The bags hadn't arrived in Vienna when we arrived. The whereabouts were unknown, but the next day they showed up at the airport. We couldn't communicate with the airport baggage handlers directly to give them our address; we needed to fill out a form with BA and they would telex -- TELEX -- the information to the airport. Then, we would need to wait for a phone call between working hours to give them directions how to reach our address. Every day, when the phone call never arrived, we would call BA back, and discover that the information was garbled--that an address in Hungary isn't a local phone number, that it needs an international country code, that we are not at our origin since we left it via airplane so there is no point in calling it. After 3 days, the information was allegedly straightened out. From that point, there was no longer a reason for them not to call us. Since there was still no way to contact the airport, we had no choice but to call BA every few hours and plead with them to get the airport to call us. All they did was tell us they sent these pleas via telex, and it was a one-way communication so there was no way to receive a direct response. They could not or would not give us a phone number directly to the people they were sending the telexes to. We sent messages to BA customer service headquarters, since the BA staff in Vienna were not helping. Their customer service never responded, not even with an automated message.

After a week of no clothing, our own deodorant, or toothbrushes, we looked up the address of the airport on the web and tracked down a working phone number for the baggage handlers. They delivered the bag the next day, though with reluctance over the distance and the country border. We never did hear from BA customer service, and we never got a cent for the inconvenience, because we needed receipts for our items in order to get any money.

Just fuck them. I understand that the company was at the mercy of Austria's sadistic concept of customer service, but the organization should still be held responsible for those it hires or contracts. For contrast, I once complained to AA when the TV in my seat wasn't working on an international flight, and I got a $100 voucher (which I never used). No airline is perfect, but there is an expectation on customer service in fixing problems that is lacking with BA.

The article is rather light on the cons of working at home. I have been self-employed for 7 years consulting for my ex-employer. Over the years I've come across various pitfalls of being paid hourly, such as:

• - Sitting in a regular chair instead of an office chair, resulting in a year of back problems before I figured it out
• - Your coworkers think you're rich because you make a good hourly amount, without considering they get paid vacation, health care, 401k and many other benefits
• - For any errands or chores that have to be done during work hours, you're expected to do it since your family can't leave work to do it
• - You can't work after hours because you're expected to be with the family
• - You can't work after hours because there is way too much noise and interruption, and no door is thick enough to block it out
• - It's difficult to leave the house, knowing how much it's effectively costing you
• - With no place to walk to, you could go a whole day and not walk more than 200 steps
• - Less than ideal lighting and air movement
• - Time goes much slower with nobody around, and 6 hours feels like a full day
• - Vacation is unpaid, so you're less likely to take one
• - Being at home 24 fucking hours a day for weeks on end

My goal was 6 hours a day of work, and it was difficult most days to fill this amount. I got crazy after 6 years, and am now renting an inexpensive office space. It's a much better environment for many reasons, and the additional hours I can put in per month makes it pay for itself within a day. I have an office mate, and even though he works in a different field, it makes a difference having someone else around. It has been great being able to work in a real office environment, and I'm a more cheerful person as a result. Lessons learned the hard way.

I think he was doing great until the last P.P.S., when he casually suggested that he could buy westorange.gov, and then sell or license it to the city for over $28,000. If the city ever decided to go through ICANN arbitration, the impression of domain squatting specifically for commercial profit with no evidence of personal use isn't looked on favorably. Considering that the rest of the letter was satire, surely this paragraph is too. But it would be easier not to have to convince an arbitration judge of that fact.

Someone had an interesting comment in the New Yorker article:

I see that you refer to "Philomena" in your comment rather than the "Philomela" of the text. St. Philomena was a virgin martyr whose times and story are roughly contemporaneous to the composition of the book. Possibly there is some connection to the "revirginization" quotes within the lost text. In addition, the tears may refer to the liquid reputed to have sprung from Philomena's statue in Italy in the 19th century...

Also, there is more than one reference on the net. There is a Flickr image from a Sotheby's auction in 1854, which was just uploaded yesterday.

But there's nothing wrong with examining whether Java in the browser should be widely adopted. After the last merry-go-round of critical updates I deleted the Java plugin and haven't noticed a difference. The only site I encountered since then that used any embedded Java was the Taiwan Ministry of Education using it for some unimportant news ticker (which sums up browser applets in general: a distant reminder of Geocities and Livejournal). Even before then, Firefox intermittently would disable Java plugins as being insecure, so Java applets haven't been a seamless experience for a while.

I still have the JRE around on my work machine for some development tools that need it. But the usage is all local, so there is no urgent need to update. Plus, the update process has been broken in Windows 7. The update check and nag warning comes up for all users, but the installation can only be done by an admin account. Even as an admin, the update fails because it's expecting to download to a temp directory that doesn't exist. I deleted Java completely from my family computers, because I got tired of reassuring everyone that the constant update warnings weren't serious. Nobody has missed it.

I thought this was normal practice in a job search. The best chance of getting past HR is to send it to an employee at the company, no matter how vaguely you know them. There is sometimes a finder's fee to the employee if you get in, which gives them more of an incentive to follow through.

HR is crap. I think the chances have been low for a while that a human actually sees it before a keyword matching process rejects it, no matter how closely the resume matches the job description.

Link was trollbait. CBS News asserts that since the average income is $50,000, then anyone who makes more than $50,000 is not middle class. Ridiculous.