Although we are technically in New Jersey...

Hah! You know, I would never have associated that reference with something as stupid as politics, but you know the fuck of it is you're right! I mean, the state couldn't work if people saw it for what it was, so it would have to morph or evolve to survive that eventuality. You sir or madam have given me an interesting line of philosophical thought to pursue, and for that rarity I thank you.

OK, so I know I'm not supposed to read the fucking article. But for some reason I clicked. I don't know why, I just clicked, and I read it, and I'm sorry. I understand now. I understand why we must never, ever rtfa. Because it's just mindbogglingly retarded.

Seriously, though, did anyone else read that? I'm trying, I'm really trying to just type a well-reasoned response based on logic and rationality. But there's a big part of me that just wants to grab this blithering moron by the shoulders, shake her very hard, and scream loudly in her face.

OK, to briefly summarize her position, basically she says that anyone who cares enough about their own progeny to send them to private schools is a bad person because by doing so they deprive everyone else's children of what is apparently their fair share of the love and support these bad people shower upon their own kids, and are therefore impeding the development of her utopian vision of the public education system of the far future. To make up for their misdeeds, these bad people should immediately enroll their children in whatever public school exists in their area, where the children will receive a significantly worse education for generations to come (I shit you the fuck not, she actually says it's a good thing for current private schoolers to be given a shit education for generations to come, says the kid's grandchildren should expect a poor education, but it's all for the children of the distant future, which is a new tact: fuck the children, it's for the children). Her, ahem, logic for all this is that by shaming parents (she's explicit on that, she doesn't want to ban private schooling, we need a "morality adjustment" to make people look down on it) into dumping their kids into substandard schools, it will force parents to work to make public schools "better" (a term she doesn't qualify, but based on the overall piece one can assume better means everyone learns what she thinks is right. God help us all...).

Now, I don't think she could summarize her own point that articulately, because, as she mentions with an air of pride, she is poorly educated and doesn't read, and she clearly has no talent as a writer. But that is what she says. There's a lot of attempts on her part to show solidarity with people who are in genuinely horrific schools (the kind where you can fucking die) by pointing out her own hardships (apparently there was no soccer team).

OK, so as to a solid refutation, lets start with the core concept. She assumes that full participation, every parent sending their kid to the local pub school regardless of how shitty, and participating in booster clubs and bake sales and pta meetings, will, over what she estimates to be at least four or five generations, result in some miraculous, perfect public school systems for everyone. There are lots of stupid ideas here, so let's look at a few. First, whose idea of perfect? Has our dear author not noticed that the education of children is a somewhat contentious issue? That not everybody wants their children to be imbued with the same worldview as their neighbor's kids (like, for example, the notion that once upon a time there were people who sent their kids to private schools, and they were Bad People, or don't want their kids taking civics classes that teach them that everything is as it should be and America perfected government in 1776 and never looked back, or want a decent selection of language classes, or who care more about how effectively teachers use the technology at their disposal instead of just how much tech is at their disposal, or any of a million other conflicting one-or-the-other issues)? How does our dear author plan to resolve this contentious issue? If there are an endless array of opinions as to what and how to teach, how will the system eventually evolve into the perfect system that pleases everyone? Well, it won't and can't, but that's not an issue, because our dear author only wants it to teach how and what she and her chosen authority figures say it should. See, everyone who wants to teach children anything else in any other way is a Bad Person, so we must simply shame them until they repent and accept the One Truth (and probably send social services for their kids, although there I'm just extrapolating our dear author's probable view). So from the outset, this arguement is fucking stupid because it relies on pursuing the "ideal" of having everyone in the country agree on every aspect of how to educate their own fucking children. Good luck with that.

Then there's the actual entrenched institutions. School boards do not give a shit about parents. They fucking tag and track kids like cattle without even sending home a note, continue policies despite all protest, they do not care. And crappy teachers? What, just replace them? You ever tried to get a terrible teacher fired? Hell, you ever tried to get any union employee fired, much less a union member in a government job? Unless a teacher does something psychotic like rape a student in class, they NEVER get fired (and even then they could get off the hook if they said it was a "security search" or some shit).

Then there's jist the incredibly fucked up notion that people should intentionally sabatoge their own children's future by putting them in substandard shitholes not even for the nebulous benefit of the (other) children, but for the benefits to be reaped by unspecified chipdren at some unspecified time in the distant future, such benefits never to come to pass anyway, as precviously discussed. And... You know what, fuck it, I tried. The woman who wrote this claptrap is a fucking braindead, sanctimonious, condescending, borderline illiterate piece of shit sycophant who should be tossed into a raging inferno sufficient to destroy her genetic code lest someone ever get the idea to use it for anything.

Private schools offer huge advantages over public. They're not based on political bias, they're based on customer satisfaction and delivering on the promise of a quality education. Competition means different options in teaching philosophy and methodology, cirriculum choice, schedule options, etc. Instead of arguing endlessly about the "correct" way "we" should educated "our" children (I didn't fuck your wife, they're not my kids), the actual parents can make the decision. Basically, public schools are a politically motivated one-size-fits-none shitholes which occassionally teach by accident (and are the ultimate in statist propaganda, given the aforementioned political bias).

Private schools can suck, too, but if they do, you[ve got real options, and so do the other parents. You can move your kids to any other school you choose. If enough customers are unimpressed, the private school either improves or fails, so the incentive to improve is much stronger. Public schools can perform terribly year after year and keep getting funded, because I don't have the option to not pay taxes going to the school (at least without the armed thugs of the state coming for me). And since everyone already pays for pub schools via taxes, fewer can afford private schools, which reduces income for the private schools, some go under, some raise tuition, or scale back operations to stay afloat until they can reach an equilibrium, but not before private education has become much less accessible than it could be.

In closing, fuck you Allison. Eat a dick.

What is being seen in recent days, more openly than before, is not government "corruption". Corruption implies that the system is being manipulated to function other than intended. All talk of government corruption, or incompetence, or the inefficiency of the state, these views all spring from a misunderstanding of intent. If one assumes, for example, not that the state is an organization which exists to protect the members of society, both collectively and individually, from the actions of predatory, amoral people, but rather that the state exists as the enabler of the wildest dreams of the most predatory and amoral among us, then every action undertaken by every modern goverment makes perfect sense. It is not "corruption" we need fear from government, it is the possibility of government actually acheiving its true purpose which we should find deeply disturbing.

"And when I'm swept in to office, I'll sell our children's organs to zoos for meat. And I'll go in to people's houses at night, and wreck up the place! Mwahahaha!"

-Richard M. Nixon('s head)

You can find current articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, etc stating medical items as facts that are 10, 20, 30 years or more behind the current state of research at the time.

You still see newspapers running articles saying that post-menopausal hormone supplements reduce the risk of heart-attack in women (they increase it), that plastic cutting boards have lower risk of harboring dangerous bacteria than wood (it's higher), that low-fat diets help with weight loss (they make it harder to lose weight than higher fat diets), that all fat is unhealthy (it's not), that foods like rice cakes and baked potatoes and simple pastas are great diet foods (they're terrible, they have high glycemic response, you'd be better off eating a candy bar as far as weight loss is concerned), I could go on and on. The article you reference is simply written by someone who doesn't keep up on the current state of the research.

"Current state" meaning around 2008.

I don't have time to recount all the science, but here's one link to a 2009 meta-study.

I'm not exaggerating at all. I'm not claiming my views are so well established that they're in the 8th-grade health textbook, that will probably take 100 years, but the science behind this in peer-reviewed research journals is well established. Expect at least 10 years for the media to pick up on it, if we're lucky.

One of the biggest problems with vitamin supplements is that neither the takers nor the manufacturers (nor doctors prescribing supplements) pay any attention to absorption pathways. They also tend to ignore variants, which is a problem with a broader category of nutrients than just vitamins. There is a pretty decent scientific basis for the idea that good levels of vitamins are healthy, but supplements are usually taken in ways that are likely to make things worse rather than better through crowding out other essential vitamins and minerals that get absorbed through the same pathway.

Take zinc. It was found that zinc can denature viruses, so a viral sore throat can have its symptoms somewhat alleviated by zinc lozenges. But zinc is absorbed through the same pathway as copper, and the sort of large doses of zinc that people are taking for cold remedies is probably crowding out reasonable levels of copper absorption. And guess what copper's critical for? White blood cells and your immune system, the functions that can really do something about colds. Usually there's some bit of news, that the media gets wrong, then the general public gets even more wrong, and what the average consumer does in respect to a new scientific development ends up being completely counter-productive. Thus the news that zinc can denature viruses on contact turned into people taking zinc supplement pills with ads on the side of the bottle about taking them for colds. But pillsâ"as opposed to lozengesâ"do not result in significant concentrations of zinc where the virus is, and then they end up weakening the immune system by crowding out copper absorption.

Vitamin E is another excellent example. "Vitamin E" is 8 different vitamins that serve very different roles in the body. But they are absorbed through the same pathway and are highly subject to crowding-out. Basically, due to a terminology problem that the 8 distinct vitamins got lumped together as "Vitamin E," people who take vitamin E supplements end up deficient in 7 essential vitamins, unless they're taking reasonable doses of multitocopherol supplements, which isn't what much of anybody takes.

This tendancy to lump things together has lead to another super popular modern marketing disaster, Omega-3 fatty acids. Omega-3 is not a type of fatty acid, it's a class of fatty acids encompassing many different molecules. It turns out that only the fish-derived versions demonstrate any of the health benefits, but basically every food in the grocery store touting "Omega 3" all over the label is using plant sources, where they might as well be adding a gram of canola oil or corn oil for all the health benefits you'll be getting. Everything touting the helath benefits of flax seeds have no scientific basis, the the science is quite clear that the Omega 3 fatty acids in flax do not exhibit any of the hormone-like beneficial properties such as reducing inflammation that the fish Omega 3 fatty acids have.

I strongly suspect that in the long-term it will turn out that taking appropriate supplements is a very good idea for health, but right now, the science hasn't explored the area thoroughly enough to make solid recommendations given the complexity of the subject, and what little we do know has very little effect on what manufactures make and advertise and what consumers actually take. Which probably leads to the negative outcomes.

If you want to try to figure out, based on what we know, what the best guesses might be about what supplements to actually take, try reading up on the work of Bruce Ames and Andrew Weil. They don't have easy answers, but Bruce Ames did brilliant research, and Andrew Weil makes practical best-guess recommendations based upon the current state of the science.

It's nice that you have some all-encompasimg view of every violent situation as fitting a particular course of action, as well as being sure to point out that "civillians" are the ones with this limitation (using the common definition of civillian, this does 't apply to cops and the like then?), but you clearly have no idea what you're talking about.

A violent attacker can often be swayed to back down by the threat of physical harm used in self defense. If someone tries to beat you to death, they may be detered if you pull a gun. If not, they may be detered once they know it's loaded, and you are able and willing to pull the trigger. Sure, you could shoot them dead, and if they're still able and actively attempting to kill you, you should. But maybe you would prefer not to actually kill them. Are you trying to say it is somehow better to unhesitatingly kill someone when you could try to make them stop and reconsider? Of course, only if you're a "civilian", a mere mundane.

The same concept applies to any weapon. I have a machette. I use it to open coconuts (I live in a tropical paradise. Suck it.). But not long ago, a wired tweaker tried to break in to my truck in the middle of the night. While I was in it. That kind of wired speed freak that either doesn't see you sitting in the drivers seat, or just doesn't care, is dangerous. Potentially life threateningly so. By your logic, I should have kicked open the door, and slit him down the middle. Instead, I grabbed the machette and held it up in the window, and off he ran. Because the presence of a weapon can defuse the situation WITHOUT either party coming to harm.

In short, it's a bit more complicated than "perceive mortal threat, pull gun, shoot to kill." It's "perceive mortal threat, draw gun, determine if threat still imminent, if yes aim gun, determine if threat still imminent, if yes fire gun. If you can keep a cool head, you can stop when the threat ends. If you kill someone when you could have instead de-escalated the situation by simply demonstrati g your willingness to defend yourself, is it any better than if you haul off and kill someone who no longer represented a mortal threat?

How long might it take us to become a threat? Interstellar space-faring aliens may have civilizations millions or billions of years old. They may have seen annoying upstart civilizations seem as harmless as one gnat to all the world's militaries, but then leave them alone for just a few tens or hundreds of thousand years, and all of a sudden they're some kind of annoyance. How often do they happen through this part of space? The universe is a big place. Monitoring may be resource intensive and error prone. They might just consider it good practice, in discovering new life, especially with some modicum of intelligence, to stamp it out as they find it to reduce risk to their way of life.

I'm surprised I don't see anyone here questioning this 5 zettabyte number. The biggest drives currently manufactured are 4 terabyte 3.5" drives. 5 zetabytes would require 1.25 billion of those drives. A great price on a 4TB drive right now is $190. I doubt there's enough margin in them to make this possible, but let's just say that based on the insane quantity they get them for $150 each. That's $187 billion for the drives alone, nothing for the computers and racks and air conditioning and all. The NSA's budget is estimated at 8 billion a year. $187 billion is 23 times their yearly budget. It would be about 3% of total federal spending for a year... just for the drives. Total facility costs would certainly run many times that... it would probably cost more than an entire year's military spending to build a 5 zettabyte data center.

Also, you can fit about 500 terabytes in a server cabinet. That means 10 million server cabinets. A server cabinet is about 15 cubic feet of volume. So just the cabinets alone would run 150 million cubic feet. And that's just storage, not even including computers. And it's not like you can pack them in solid, of course. If you can make a datacenter with one third of its total volume being server racks, that would be amazing. The largest building in the world is only 472 million cubic feet, this would have to equal or surpass it.

Also, the entire world wide market for hard drives is only a little over 30 billion a year... this one project would consume over 6 times as much value in hard drives as every other use in the world combined for the year.

Unless the NSA has developed their own mass storage technology that no one else knows about and is radically superior to anything commercially available, I'm guessing someone's exaggerating or got their numbers wrong.

What I think the poll options are intended to mean, for those of us into photography who keep picking at them:

1. Small format film camera
2. Medium or large format film camera
3. Permanent lens digital camera.
4. DSLR
5. Compact System Camera (or SLD, Single Lens Direct-view. The name for this category is still solidifying.)
6. Cell phone camera
7. Cowboy Neal
8. I'm going to complain about lack of options

What's wrong with what he said, for the nitpicky:
1. "Film camera (35mm or smaller film)" Nothing wrong. Covers the majority of film cameras, 35mm, APS, 110 roll film, Kodak Disc, etc.
2. "Film camera (film > 35mm)" Again, nothing wrong. Covers all the common aspect ratios of 120 roll film, including all those popular medium formats like Hasselblad, Mamiya, Yashica, Rolliflex, etc. (or many of these can take medium format sheet film). It also covers on up to viewcameras - press cameras (Graflex) and studio cameras, 4 x 5, 8 x10, etc. Or George Lawrence's 8' x 4.5' camera.
3. "Fixed-lens digicam of some kind" The nitpick here is with the use of the term "Fixed-lens," which in photography, "fixed" usually refers to a lens of "fixed focal length," meaning a prime lens, not a zoom lens. It doesn't usually mean a lens that's permanently attached to the camera. Most digital point-and-shoot cameras have permanently attached zoom lenses.
4. "Digital SLR in conventional 35mm size." 35mm is actually an unconventional size for a digital camera sensor. There are certainly several full frame DSLR's out there, but they're the high-end exception. Most are APS-C sized, and then there are the Olympus and Panasonics with 4/3, and probably some other sizes out there. While this list divided film cameras by film size into a comprehensive dichotomy, this classification of digital cameras leaves a lot of cameras homeless, that probably should have fit into this category - aside from APS-C and 4/3, there are a few digital rangefinders, there are Medium Format digitals. 5. "Micro 4/3,Q, or other newfangled mount." The problem here is the attempt to use new mounts to cover a new body type that's become popular. The name for this is still up in the air, but Compact System Camera may be winning. It's the Olympus PEN's and OM-D's, Sony NEX, Panasonic Lumix G series, Nikon 1, Pentax K-01.
6. "Whatever came with the phone." Or came in a phone. Whatever.

You are saying that those in power have sole discretion over what they "allow" you to do? That when the "wrong" guy gets in to office and starts stepping on your throat that you should somehow take solace in the fact that you voted (or, as it is more properly called, simpering, whining, begging for scraps at the master's table)? And if there is no "right" guy, just a pair of equally power-mad shills, and you're forced to decide whether you prefer the 1st or 2nd amendment? What then? And if you have a minority who sees where the bleating majority is headed, they just have to accept that they don't really have rights, because the majority said so when they voted in the "wrong" guy?

And precisely from whence does the government obtain this "right" and others of which you speak? Just because a group of thugs calls themselves a "government" does not grant them some magical rights apart from those possessed by the citizens who consent to be ruled by that government. If individuals have no right to tax their neighbors, how can they confer that right to an elected representative? Are you suggesting that might makes right? That if you can get 50.1% of a group to agree with you, then anything you and your representatives do is legitimate? To me, that sounds more like hell on Earth than civilization. Unless you redefine "right" to mean anything one group can do to another with minimal fear of reprisal due to greater number and/or better armaments, your whole argument falls apart.

You seem to be confused between the drastically different concepts of "what government does" and "what government has a right to do". By your "logic", the government has the right to do anything the government says it has the right to do. Believe that's called "tyranny".

Exactly.

I'd say about a quarter of the kids I knew in school drew pictures of guns or tanks or other violent things.

Adam Lanza was also an honer student. While about 25% of kids draw weapons, only about 10% of kids are honor students. For higher specificity on their correlational targeting, they should arrest honor students.