"in Oakland, according to reports from IndyBay, as protesters unfurled two giant banners reading "TECHIES: Your World Is Not Welcome Here" and "Fuck off Google", "a person appeared from behind the bus and quickly smashed the whole of the rear window"

"So we'll continue to work with the city on these fees, and in the meantime will fund MUNI passes for low income students [an existing program] for the next two years.'"

One of these groups is judged by our society as being "evil" and the other as "progressive".

You've got to be kidding, right? Imposing beliefs on children is EXACTLY what schools do, every day. Ever hear of political correctness?

That is one genius sig.

No, he's right, the 17th Amendment has turned the Senate, which was originally intended to represent state vs. state, into a second House of Representatives, where Senators are simply elected at-large. This was a huge weakening in the careful balance of power that existed between the states and the federal government.

The counter-argument is any semblance of a balance of power between the states and the federal government was thrown out the door anyway by the Civil War. The northern states did not allow the southern states to withdraw from the union, beat them in the war, and then dictated the terms by which they could rejoin (their state constitutions had to be rewritten.)

Yeah, but a broken DIGITAL clock is wrong .... oh, darn.

You've got the right concept (separation of POWERS), but the wrong adversaries (church and state). The church has no civil power at all. The separation of it from the state is to protect the church from being corrupted by the state.

The adversaries the founders had in mind were the co-equal branches of government: executive, legislative, and the court. Each of these branches does have significant power.

Grrr. If you can't (won't?) state your opponent's point of view accurately, then why would you ever expect to have a decent conversation?

A good point. When I took geometry in HS I didn't like it and resisted learning it. It all seemed like just a bunch of arbitrary axioms that one memorized in order to solve puzzles, to my way of thinking. Later on in my education I ran across Euclid's Elements, and the way he put those axioms together into a logical system was a thing of beauty and elegance that I understood intuitively. Same content, but I only had the aptitude to understand it one way, but not the other.

Learn to manage money, or it will manage you.

Coding is training for the mind. It's not strictly necessary for everyone, but it is broadly beneficial to everyone. What it teaches is the practical use of simple abstraction. Like learning music, it's good for you, even if you never get paid.

The moral is to not use a Registrar that allows domain updates from any IP. easydns.com, for example, can be configured to allow DNS updates only from a list of known IPs. That would stop this kind of deviltry in its tracks.

There is no equivalent in the Windows world to the signed source repositories of Linux. Windows keeps itself updated through signed updates, but does nothing about the other thousands of applications and libraries that are installed. There's probably a good reason why this rogue FTP app isn't in a repository, those evil library files would have to be included in the dependency manifests for all to see. These things survive in Windows because users are forced to install everything from the untrusted web.

I cannot count the number of times I've read some book, article, or comment where the equivalent of a "then magic happens" explanation appears under the rubric of "evolution". Admittedly, not being a scientist, I am limited to popularized accounts, but I don't think it's too much to expect that if there is a clearly known mechanism that is easily reproducible, then authors should be able to describe it to an intelligent layman in a way that makes sense and is understandable.

Speaking off the top of my head, I would say that easily 80% of popular proofs for evolution are no proofs at all, but simply bald assertions: "See this lifeform here, it has this little knob on the end of its whatits. It evolved that way so it could feed better."

I don't know whether it's laziness or what, but if you want to prove something, you have to be able to show it -- ALL the steps, from here to there -- and reproduce it -- ALL of it, under controlled conditions. You can't just say, "because evolution".

Personally, I think there must be some form of self-organization at work. The problem with Darwinian evolution is that it is based on selection of attributes that randomly arise over time. As a theory to explain the system-of-systems we see all around us, that is an awfully thin basis. One has to presume that merely by chance some beneficial attribute arises that just happens to be useful in surviving some random environmental chance. You start adding up all the chances of chances, and pretty soon life looks literally impossible.

But what if there is some undiscovered mechanism of self-organization that is self-directing the adaptation of life? Something inherent in the nature of the structure of matter itself. Why DO plants all grow towards the sun? Maybe it's not because it has anything to do with reproduction, but because that's what the stuff that plants are made of self-organize to do, naturally.

Anyway, just a thought.

Though it deserves high marks as a toy, as something to learn how to really play on, it suffers from several sins, and I wouldn't recommend it as a way to learn.

- Focuses the attention on your hands, exactly the wrong place, as you point out. (For the non-guitar players: looking at your hands while you play is like looking at your fingers while you type. If you do that, you will never be able to type quickly. Or play proficiently.)

- Teaches TAB notation, which is an inferior way to model music (no markup for timing, keys, phrasing, or expression, and is usable only if the musician knows the song in advance, and is using a guitar.) TAB is very limiting, I'm exceedingly sorry to see it being so widely adopted. Musicians who learn how to read real music scores can reproduce any song, on sight, in real time, whether they've heard it before, or not. And yes, there is even a notation in traditional scores for showing guitar players which fingers to use.

- Teaches nothing about how to work with a stringed instrument, the strings are just for show. Pressing a button is not the same thing as holding down a string.