I semi-agree. I think the worst part is that when I wrote the test "What do you do at a stop sign?" and "How much do speeding fines increase in a construction zone?" counted for *exactly* the same. One of those should be an insta-fail.

I remember those ads for HSBC bank (but I forgot the name of the bank as soon as I left the hallway, and I was in that airport twice a week for months).

And I remember thinking "wow, that bank must make a great deal of profit on every customer... I don't really want to be one"

That's an interesting point. The test files for our software include 100% random files of 1k, 2k...2^n k bytes, which I imagine is exactly what random noise could look like on the hard drive.

And who knows what they would've been able to trade for food (which is the standard model for an expedition landing in a less technologically advanced area). At an antelope for a metal bar, they could survive quite a while (try building metal bars with Y-150K technology).

> though easier at the end of the series than the begining

That bothered me too, my best explanation is that the Marines would normally have police-style bullets (slower, emphasis on not ricocheting) to put down mutinies on an aircraft carrier. As the show progressed (especially after meeting Pegasus) they could be replaced with armour piercing bullets when needed.

Once upon a time, I rigged my Guitar Hero controller to play 32 different chords: guitar poseur (requires a USB guitar hero controller plugged in, error handling is non-existent).

I used to live a short walk from downtown in a Chinese town of several million, and one day my walk to work was blocked because a donkey cart spilled and covered the dirt road. One building I worked in had no running water, a bowl in each room was filled with water carried by hand. This was 3 years ago, everyone had cellphones and plastic shopping bags were slowly covering the entire countryside.

90% of China is so different from the west that comparing city sizes is near-pointless.

I had a similar problem, the first "daylight" bulb in 2007 (from amazon.com) is far and away the most glorious bulb in the house (and it comes on instantly). The 3 "daylight" bulbs I got in 2008 from different companies were uniformly cruddy.

I wonder if the me-too vendors of crappy lightbulbs caught on that "daylight" was a word without a clear definition that would confuse people.

I AM MODERATING YOUR POST.

Of course here we have the observation changing the experiment: you can't moderate after commenting and you can't take a second candid picture (and many of my best shots are candids) if this works.

I imagine breaking the speaker is even easier than that. This is even sillier than DRM where you need to build something (or at least get something working) to break it.

But on the plus side, it ruins candid photos.

"unless you limit public urination to pissing in someone's mouth, it really isn't anywhere near as hygenic as breast-feeding is."

I'm having a hard time deciding where I stand on this. Can someone put it in a car analogy?

I think the key (at least in the public example) is how much good is done by the action. Even if you are offended by public nudity, you'd make an exception to allow a paramedic to rip off a woman's shirt to stop bleeding from a gunshot wound.

And I imagine most people agree that the nutritional needs of babies come above the emotional needs of occasional uber-prudes.

Not that any of that applies to the facebook example.

I really think that you need to use the length of the longest citation cycles to get a good idea of where the crackpot-clusters are.

The assumption being that the good journals outnumber the bad journals, so even if crackpots can take over one or two, the longest cycle they can get is 2, whereas over time all good journals will tend to link to most other good journals.

And it's there that the El Naschie papers fail. Most of the sections quoted by that article fail to adhere to basic standards like "explain the appearance of all magic numbers":

He then suggests quitting at the second stage of this iteration and getting
"2×2×17=68"
of something -- but it's not clear what, nor why the number 2×2×17 should show up.
But never mind! He then notes that 68 is
"1/2(1371), where again 137 is a rough approximation to the reciprocal of the fine structure constant. "
Of course, can always find some formula linking any two numbers, and the possible meaning of this formula linking the numbers 137 and 68 is not discussed.