What could possibly go wrong?!

It's replicating the performance of the NES, but it's using an ATMega644 with twice the memory of the 328 and overclocked to nearly 30 MHz.

The ATMega328 only has 2KB of RAM - the 32KB is its Flash storage which holds program data since the microcontroller is Harvard architecture. The NES had 2KB plus 2KB of video RAM, plus RAM for the sprites. Even with the ATMega's higher clock rate I think replicating the performance of the 6502 in a video game system with it would be a challenge.

"Unruly youths" is journalism code in Europe for "gangs of young Muslim men."

I often see Boston get singled out in comparisons of this sort, most likely due to the unfortunate fact that the limits of the actual legally defined "City of Boston" are quite small compared with the metro area, and that the area contains a couple predominantly black neighborhoods that have been in a constant state of gang warfare since time immemorial. It takes a great statistical leap of faith to extrapolate that anomaly into how "safe" or "unsafe" the entire city of Boston is- if one were so inclined one could take the entire Boston Metro area into account and the per capita muder rate would drop through the floor. Don't expect anyone at the Harvard Crimson to acknowledge that detail, but they'll certainly use the statistics as an argument to get more gun control legislation passed -- as if anyone in Roxbury gives a fuck.

A planet of slums is hardly the dream of the environmental movement, Stalinist or otherwise. If anything it's the endgame of neoliberal economics -- a world of billions of poor ruled over by a godlike wealthy elite is its apotheosis.

Yeah, but sewage contains a whole lot more than just human shit, and there's an enormous volume of the stuff. The difference between a nutrient and toxin is often just a matter of degree. But if you're convinced that fertilizer and raw sewage are equivalent in practice, why not route your dwelling's sewage outflow pipe into your garden and tell us how it goes?

For curling!

The Olympics generally attracts a larger share of female 18-49 viewers than most sporting events, therefore many advertisers produce advertisements that cater to that demographic. In turn, the network plays its part in the symbiotic relationship by showing Olympic programming that will attract as much of that demographic as possible. The Canada/US hockey coverage was preempted simply because prime-time ice dancing draws that demographic's eyeballs and prime-time ice hockey does not - I don't think there was anything "botched" in the way it was covered, at least from NBC's point of view.

Alan Greenspan, a long time Randist, had the same opinion about fraud in financial markets. He essentially argued that there was no such thing as "fraud", and that anything done within the bounds of the "free market" was a valid expression of the mechanics of that system, whatever those mechanics may be. It does work out well if you happen to be the one committing the fraud, and for an Objectivist the line between "I have the right to keep what's mine" and "I have the right to take what's yours" seems like it would be an easy one to cross.

I went to school in a relatively affluent suburb of a large Northeastern city, and many of the bullies I had the displeasure of dealing with were considered to be the best and brightest in the student body - straight A students who excelled in math and science. I on the other hand was a fairly ordinary student who was much lower down the socioeconomic ladder, and made a good target. Of course bullies like that are much less violent and more cunning - they're not into physical violence so much as what might be called psychological violence. Escalation to physical violence did happen on occasion however, and bullies like that are much better at making sure they cover their tracks and have the authority figures on their side. Almost all went on to college, with Ivy League schools and engineering giants like Stanford and MIT being well represented. They're now our society's doctors, lawyers, scientists, and politicians.

One could make the argument that the also had "social problems," but it may be a more subtle issue as to what they were. It is clear that many of them were the children of parents determined that their offspring were going to achieve great things in life, and it may be they were brought up in this environment of "specialness" to the exclusion of any form of moral compass or ethical standard. I turned away from academic pursuits and the love I had once had of the sciences for a long time after that experience, because I felt if these were an example of the kind of character one needed to have to excel in those areas, I concluded the whole enterprise was built on a faulty foundation and the sacrifice of one's morality too great a price to pay.

I should have qualified my statement by saying "Commercial manned spaceflight corporations." Unmanned spaceflight is a obviously a perfectly viable area for commercial ventures.

A number of airlines have gone bankrupt due to crashes, particularly low cost carriers such as ValuJet. The ones that are still around are the ones that crash infrequently enough and have revenue streams great enough to cover the insurance costs, a cost which is made more manageable since the chances of a fatal accident per flight are extremely low. What might the insurance costs be in a commercial space-flight venture, if the chances of a passenger being killed per flight were say, one in 50?

NASA had originally planned to do dozens of flights per year - the logistics of turnaround on the Shuttle turned out to just consume too much time, particularly due to the fact that even with a "reusable" spacecraft it was essentially being rebuilt every time it was turned around. For example, even though the landing gear were rated for say 10 flights they would be stripped down and refurbished after every launch. Same goes for the thermal protection system, the main engines, and hundreds of other functional units. NASA's fastest turnaround performance was in 1985, with 9 flights that year. Next year was Challenger. When something goes wrong and people are killed, who wants to be the person in management who ends up having to say "Yeah, we could have refurbished that part, but we needed to shave a day off our turnaround time"?

How are for-profit corporations going to be any faster at turning around a space vehicle than NASA? Even though manned spaceflight went on hiatus after Challenger and Columbia, it did continue after a time, and all the costs involved in the recovery, analysis, and remediation of the accidents were eventually footed by the US taxpayer. With a for-profit corporation, one fatal accident and you are finished, if not from the legal costs of the inevitable lawsuits, then from the loss of market share in what will most likely be a rather limited market. If you're going to drop $200,000, why do it with the company that killed people? Of course, perhaps companies like Virgin Galactic have figured something out that NASA was unable to figure out during the 30+ years of the Shuttle program. Then again, it's not like the current private spaceflight corporations have exactly been racking up the numbers of completed flights. It's a money pit, if there is no longer the political and/or economic will in the US to continue manned space flight for reasons of national pride, technological research, or scientific discovery, I don't think one should expect for-profit reasons to continue doing it to suddenly materialize. I'm of the opinion that you'd probably have more luck opening a transatlantic steamship line.

Only masochists and lunatics try to wade through The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged. I prefer to get the abridged version by listening to Rush albums from about 1975 to 1982, when they started dabbling in New Wave. Synthesizers are collectivist instrument really, if you think about it. Early on though, they wrote like 4 Randian rock operas! Anthem of the heart and anthem of the mind......eeeeeeyow!