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Censorship

Submission + - Post Secret censored

KarmaRundi writes: According to a recent blog post, My Space is censoring the My Space version of the Post Secret blog. Post Secret is a popular blogspot blog that posts a number of post cards with secrets that people have submitted anonymously each week. Post Secret has a sibling blog on My Space with additional secrets.

Last Monday, the PostSecret Blog on MySpace was the most visited Blog on MySpace. The next day MySpace administrators removed postcards and comments from the Blog and prevented more than 100,000 people from viewing it.

Many people have emailed me concerned about what happened. I am posting a response here because I am unsure if an explanation on the MySpace Blog will go uncensored.

As I write this, the MySpace Blog is unblocked but the latest postcards and comments have been removed completely.

I will try and post more secrets on the MySpace Blog next week (November 15th) and see what happens. I hope you will email your friends about this and encourage MySpace to repost our secrets.

Comment Re:I find the obsession with tech in the class bad (Score 1) 383

> "Why poor though references..."

Yeah, and why learn to spell when you have a spell checker (except those damn homophones can still get you). I suggest you pour through a dictionary to figure out the difference between the verb pour and the adjective poor.

Why should it be a problem that kids learn to use a computer instead of learning Latin? Now if an ancient Roman were learning to use a computer and not learning Latin, that would be a problem.

Republicans

Submission + - Waterboarding, how bad can it really be?

KarmaRundi writes: "A poster on the Straight Dope message boards was curious whether waterboarding is really bad enough to be called torture. In the interest of science, he tried different forms of it on himself. Here's what he found:



The idea is that you wrap saran wrap around the mouth in several layers, and poke a hole in the mouth area, and then waterboard away. . . . So far I would categorize waterboarding as simply unpleasant rather than torture, but I've come this far so I might as well go on. . . It took me ten minutes to recover my senses once I tried this. I was shuddering in a corner, convinced I narrowly escaped killing myself.

Here's what happened:

The water fills the hole in the saran wrap so that there is either water or vacuum in your mouth. The water pours into your sinuses and throat. You struggle to expel water periodically by building enough pressure in your lungs. With the saran wrap though each time I expelled water, I was able to draw in less air. Finally the lungs can no longer expel water and you begin to draw it up into your respiratory tract.

It seems that there is a point that is hardwired in us. When we draw water into our respiratory tract to this point we are no longer in control. All hell breaks loose. Instinct tells us we are dying.

I have never been more panicked in my whole life. Once your lungs are empty and collapsed and they start to draw fluid it is simply all over. You [b]know[/b] you are dead and it's too late. Involuntary and total panic.

There is absolutely nothing you can do about it. It would be like telling you not to blink while I stuck a hot needle in your eye. . . I never felt anything like it, and this was self-inflicted with a watering can, where I was in total control and never in any danger. And I understood.

Waterboarding gets you to the point where you draw water up your respiratory tract triggering the drowning reflex.
"
Yahoo!

Submission + - Yahoo/Google results better even when they're not (scientificblogging.com)

KarmaRundi writes: Study shows Yahoo and Google search results are deemed better than MSN even when they're not.

Penn State researchers did a study and found that web searchers who evaluated identical search-engine results preferred Yahoo first and Google second even though more claimed to use Google regularly. These results, they say, provide evidence that branding matters as much on the Internet as off and that there is "carry over" branding in effect too.

Here is their method — they copied identical Google results pages ("camping Mexico," "laser removal," "manufactured home" and "techno music") and attributed them to four different search engines — Google, MSN Live Search, Yahoo! and an in-house engine they created for the study.

Then the researchers showed the faked results to 32 participants who were asked to evaluate the engines' performance in returning relevant results.

Despite the results being identical in content and presentation, participants indicated that Yahoo! and Google outperformed MSN Live Search and the in-house search engine.

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I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"

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