There is a simple way to avoid having fb or any other social network keeping you in a "bubble". Pop the bubble! Meet people with views you don't share, and talk to them. I am "far-left" by US standards, though I believe the NFA needs to be destroyed and the ATF dismantled, because I believe in personal liberty and rights while restricting the liberties and "rights" of corporations but still believe that estate taxes are necessary to prevent certain families from accumulating all the wealth. Friends include Bush-style neo-conservatives, libertarians, and more. The up side of this is that beliefs and ideas get shared, and discussions happen. I know I've changed my stance on some issues due to discussions, and I've been told that they have as well.

As for why more liberals "unfriend" people is because I see more conservative people posting "If you don't believe then just unfriend me now." After the third one of those posts in a month, I asked a conservative friend if he really wanted me to unfriend him because I did not agree with his post; he did not and has since stopped posting those memes.

See, I think the part that everyone is missing is that by posting this on April 28th, he wasn't possibly referring to the moment of silence or the traffic that the memorial gets. And there is the context, YikYak is meant to be local, so this statement was not meant to be read by people outside the Blacksburg area. And to the staff. faculty, and students-turned-townies, this read like a threat.

So the cops investigated. They warned the campus, and the student turned himself in.

You don't seem to understand how the US system works. You might want to brush up on Article 3, and Marbury v. Madison. Now, if you don't like that the SCOTUS has review over even the Constitution, then you've had since 1803 to start an Amendment process to change that.

Until then, shouting "fire" in a crowded place stays illegal until the Court's ruling is revised or their power is amended.

Thought crime implies the person only thought about it. They didn't. They posted it in a publicly viewable site; that shifts from being a thought crime to making a threatening statement.

Because none of the freshmen, hell even most the senior grad students, were around for the original shooting. It's been 8 years, that's enough time for freshmen who were here to have graduated, and gotten done a combined masters/PhD. Eight years ago, those freshmen would have been in 5th grade, probably in another state! The community of Blacksburg, though, remembers; mostly because there was the escaped cop killer at the beginning of that term that had the campus locked down and people scared, and a student beheaded at the end of that term. The faculty, staff, and townies like me hear a threat like that and get worried.

Even the staff at NRVCS get worried, since that was another of the targets. I have friends working there now, and had family working there the day shit happened in '07.

Maybe if the anon student hadn't posted "another 4 16 moment is going to happen" (moment, wtf?) followed with "Just a warning" (okay, that sounds . . . threatening) then maybe people wouldn't have reacted the way they did.

who is fb- the father of?

No, my actual question is "can you elaborate on the reason why freep-impact was asked to stop posting in politics threads?"

Not being Jewish, but coming from a religion with very strange rules, I like this idea. Picking a name before the baby was born was a sure-fire way to piss off god and get a dead baby; insults come from there. And then there is always the southern "Bless your heart."

Instead they just ask swype for access to their "living language" database that stored things you typed along with locations to keep track of "words used in certain locales". Look back in the news about 2 years, when swype was using up large amounts of people's data plans and read between the lines a little about swypes "reason" for doing so and methods to stop the keyboard from doing it.

While the racist comments that the BBC might have been upset about (I know nothing on this point) may have been related to a nursery rhyme, his racist and xenophobic comments in various op-ed articles in sundry news papers are not debatable. He's signed his by-line.

So, when I first went to school, the school made a requirement: Win2k. Not bad, and a local store offered offered a nice deal for one with a Pentium 3, CD burner, and GeForce 400 (or equivalent which will come back to bite everyone in the ass). They provided, instead, a AMD Athlon Slot A with a passive heatsink, ZIP drive, CD-ROM drive, and Matrox G400 which was not supported in Win2k, just 98 and later 2003. So, despite me pointing this out as it continued to fail while playing video games, and the shop ignoring me and replacing a working Matrox for another working Matrox that still had unusable drivers, they eventually started trying to "fix" the problem by finding other things.

Eventually, the shop replaced the motherboard. At some point after that, the HD decided that the MBR did not exist any more. Attempting to boot resulted in nothing, but booting a live CD of Linux (someone else burned me a CD? it's been a while) would show that the drive still worked. So they added a drive so I could back things up and replaced the mobo again. Then, the computer started to really misbehave; as if crashing in every DirectX game wasn't weird enough. I wasn't a hardware geek then, so I failed to notice that the PSU was way under-spec for the system as it started (1 HDD, 3.5, ZIP drive) and after the replacements they gave me (extra HDD and a CD burner) it was really stretched. Everything would brown out a random points.

And that's where it got strange. As a note, I didn't have pets (what 1 room apartment can survive a pet?) and didn't smoke. One vacation, it was sitting in my bedroom at my parents. Plugged in, but turned off. It had been annoying me, I had borrowed a friend's game at the last LAN party to play while they focused on Smash Bros or GoldenEye or Magic games. Anyways, I walked past my bedroom at home one day, and heard a strange noise from the supposedly off computer. Windows was "shut down", not sleep/standby. Suddenly, POP, then a short burst or flame, and lots of smoke. Thankfully, the fuse for that circuit blew; or the GFCI did. Of course, the small shop swore up and down that that couldn't have happened. Did they replace everything? HELL NO, they swapped in a new PSU and refused to pay attention to lemon laws. I went about being a college student, and when I changed computers a not long later (2 years of bad behavior, and 2 years is a long time in the CompSci world) this box kept it's nickname of "The Hell Box" (I think it blew a breaker at a LAN party, too) and stayed in a closet.

Years later, when I finally got around to cleaning out my closet at my parent's, I took this old machine to practice parts salvaging. "De-soldering" components, saving any passive stuff like VGA sockets. The CPU? It was one of the first pieces used to "calibrate" my home-made reflow oven and paint scraper method of removing components. Since it worked, I think I left the actual CPU die sitting in the bottom of the oven while I messed with the rest of it. I would have snuck the slot circuit board into a wood chipper or against a grinder if it weren't for fiber glass and lungs. The HDDs were salvaged for the magnets and the pretty glass, the CD and 3.5" for motors (those strangely still work!), and the rest of was destroyed with great glee and then sent to electronics recycling as bags of components and a few circuit boards.

A friend told me the same thing. He took a job in Russia after high school, speaking only English. He said that often he had to think of the problem at the plant in Russian, because he'd only had the workings of the plant described to him in Russian. He knew that he could switch back to English, but trying to think of "the machine that strips truck tires" (the example he used, I think, because the machine's name in Russian was some compound of those words) lead him in circles.

I never had the luck to learn other languages, because ones with the Roman alphabet feel strange, and ones with other symbols make no sense. But, I don't think about most things in English; I think of them in mathmatical terms and then shift that to letters.

I doubt it. Learning languages requires either immersion at the right ages or study with immersion being very helpful. Both of those also happen to expose a person to multiple perspectives just be their occurrence. If learning a language were just about the ability to shift perspectives, every creative type who look at object A and see use Z for it could pick up a language easily. (see: PIC32 being used as a spectrum analyzer via NTSC, or junk turned into Apollo style Kerbal controllers.)

Besides, most studies like this are maps in just one direction. Take, for instance, that there is an increase in strawberry toaster pastry sales before a big storm (I forget if the study said hurricane or snow or just storms). This does not mean the bijection inverse is true; there is not always a storm happening if there is an increase in sales of said pastry.

You call a person who can speak two languages bilingual.
You call a person who can speak three languages trilingual.
What do you call a person who speaks only one language?

American.

I always found that funny. I learned Apple Basic because it was all that I had access to. I started writing my own functions, a global return array to track back through and some gotos...just like assembly which I hadn't learned then. I also found myself trying to make objects, by camel case iff needed. $ObjectName and ObjectNumber.

Moved to C++ and everything was fine. Functional programming, not so much, but that's from all the professors who drilled "variables are variable" into my head years later.

I've got one with an old DIN type pins, one with what looks like an RJ-11 connector, one with what might be PS compatible . . . they never die, they just retire to the storage bin for springs and key caps for the one that's in use.