Looks like Justin Bieber wins against Wikileaks:

http://www.tomscott.com/stupidfight/#wikileaks-vs-justinbieber

Up until a few weeks ago, possession of crack cocaine (but not powder) carried a minimum five-year sentence.

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d111:S.1789:@@@D&summ2=m&

Not only was the minimum sentence a ridiculous circumvention of our judicial system, having it only apply to crack cocaine possession unduly targets low income users/addicts (who statistically tend to be underrepresented minorities).

Let's hope there aren't any murders near the Coca-cola bottling plant!

People tend to forget that the citizens are the government. It's not "you vs. them." If you don't like something "the government" (aka "the people we elected") is doing, get involved and fix it. Whining about "tyrrany" and mailing teabags doesn't count.

When I moved to Taiwan, I found that there are trash cans next to every toilet, for that specific reason. Apparently a while ago their plumbing just couldn't handle toilet paper and the older generations still have the habit of trashing it.

It's really gross, but you don't need to leave this planet to find that.

The satellites' orbits (which you calculate your position from) are calculated from the ranges to a network of ground stations with really expensive receivers mounted to bedrock. I heard through the grapevine that a couple sites in Chile slipped a few meters and that made the orbit products that geodesists use really crappy unless they took those sites out (because they assumed the old positions). The real-time orbits (less precise) that are broadcast from the satellites are produced by the Department of Defense, and their sites are usually on US military bases. Their orbits (and therefore any of the military equipment that depends on the real-time orbits) probably weren't affected by the quake.

We have satellites doing centimeter-level laser altimetry with millimeter-level orbit determination flying around the globe every few hours measuring ocean height. When the data from those no longer correlates with the amount of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, I will stop concerning myself with AGW. Same goes for the glacier ice levels.

Until then, you can talk about how much snow or the local temperature until you get bored. AGW doesn't try to predict any of those. It predicts that the amount of GHGs in the atmosphere will increase the temperatures of the global climate (over decades). All the other anecdotes are secondary.

Actually GLONASS is so different (uses a different reference ellipsoid, for starters), that only recently has anyone been able to add GLONASS measurements to GPS and not made the resulting solution worse. But hopefully that will change. With GLONASS modernization, they're supposed to make it all more GPS-like (use WGS-84, switch from FDMA to CDMA, etc)

An engineering grad student is a machine that converts booze into code.

Youtube is nice because it's accessible from a lot of places that other flash videos aren't (iPhones and AppleTVs come to mind, for me at least)

i wish my local weather video podcast used youtube instead of its own proprietary flash video player, so i could watch it on my iphone instead of having to use a computer.

also, during the campaign, the obama camp released an iphone app that had youtube links to all of their latest ads and video press releases. it was actually really useful for me when i was running around canvassing for them.

Won't this be sealed with their record when they turn 18? Isn't that the point of sealing the record?