Nazi propaganda must be beaten, not hidden. The best way to discredit an idiot is to hand him a microphone and let him speak.

Further, hiding it makes it impossible for later generations to recognize the very seductive ideas when they reappear, later, without the "NAZI" label on them.

It's a classic example of the adage about being doomed to repeat history if you fail to learn from it. How can you learn from it if it's censored away?

That's quite true. I didn't see San Francisco till around 2000. But I have to say that all the talk about starving artists and such is really off base. Without Silicon Valley, San Francisco would just be another urban place with character like say, Seattle, Washington or Portland, Oregon. It has a decently developed culture for a US city. But it's nearness to Silicon Valley (and to a lesser extent Hollywood to the south) is what gives it notability beyond that.

From my point of view, what is special about Florence and Silicon Valley is the trade/industry. The Renaissance followed from that in Florence. It'll be interesting to see what follows from that in Silicon Valley. Already, we seem to have some significant stuff in space flight, for example.

Finally, I imagine that artists in Florence probably were complaining about the merchants, cloth finishers, and bankers too.

The US had Nazis from before they became really unpopular and they never became a problem. So why did the US fare better than the Wiemar Republic which got overrun by them? Here's a clue: it wasn't too much freedom.

I have too much of a sense of proportion. Or maybe it's my excessive modesty? Too good looks? Totally impartial viewpoint? Rugged individualistic lifestyle? Nah, it's people who get a little taste of hypocrisy and then go on a huge bender. I get that you don't understand your problem. I'm used to that.

But since you asked so nicely, look in the mirror. Give that guy a punch for me.

You also have to benefit from that sales tax. My take is that New Jersey will miss your sales tax more than you will.

Well, the Nazis of Germany certainly put a high priority on banning other peoples' propaganda so there must be something to it.

That would be equivalent to making it illegal to borrow against your house to fund a political ad, but allowing other means of funding.

The thing here is that the corporate personhood argument applies because the corporation (here, Citizens United) was being blocked from speech that was otherwise legal. The corporate personhood argument wouldn't apply, if nobody was allowed to do the speech in question though obviously other First Amendment considerations would apply.

Your concerns are justified. I revel in that opprobrium. I was tempted to suggest Gilroy as an alternate locale - it's the garlic capital of the world!

My observation remains. If the place is too expensive for the starving artist, then they should move some place where it isn't. Or maybe get a better job. I don't like paying a lot for things either. But to whine to the point of advocating harmful social policies because a not-particularly-useful lifestyle no longer is economical in a particular place? GTFO.

The people who are the best in technical fields tend to have well developed social intelligence as well as being technically brilliant. These aren't either-or abilities. The lack of social or emotional skills is a cognitive deficit.

As one who moved to Silicon Valley (which looks to me like one big Aspergers ward B-J ) and socializes with many of the founders of the compter industry, I can tell you that there are a lot of unquestionably "technically brilliant" and wildly successful people who would be textbook examples of Aspergers' "sufferers".

My own opinion is somewhat between yours and that of the previous poster: I suspect Aspergers' people primarily do well with computers because it's a field where the "missing social skills" are not an impediment to success.

The various levels of social-skill blindness, and the resulting stronger focus on the functionality that IS present, may also help more with the programming somewhat (if only by reducing distriction from anthropomorphizing the machines), or it may simply be irrelevant. I suspect it helps some - more than lack of communication with the Pointy Haired Bosses hurts - but that any such effect pales before the "something interesting I can do" effect.

Yes, social skills can help in teamwork, organizing and finding financing for companies, and in finding problems that technology can solve and earn a profit doing so. (Example: Social media.) On the other hand, building technological prosthetics to help replace the missing functionality can also help lead to success. (Example again: Social media.)

[reference to graph with post-vaccination bumps in Measles incidences and a recommendation for a second, booster, dose at the start of the third bump.]

Maybe this is just the half-time of the shots, and it's time to refresh? I.e. "2014, third dose recommended"

I suspect the second-dose recommendation was driven by the detection of substantial numbers of Measles cases among those vaccinated a few years previously, indicating that the immunity from one dose wore down after a few years.

I also suspect that we'll get a third-dose recommendation iff a similar number of cases is detected among those who had two dosesk (of non-defectivek vaccine, properly spaced).

The proper signal comes, not from the overall infection rate, but from the infection rate among those already vaccinated.

From an LA Times story:

Earlier this week, fears emerged that thousands of people might have been exposed to measles when a sick UC Berkeley student traveled on the Bay Area Rapid Transit system.

And from the story it referenced:

In yet another sign of the perils and irresponsibility of the anti-vaccination movement, thousands of riders of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system are being warned that they may have been exposed to measles -- a disease that was declared eliminated in the U.S. in 2000 but has since returned.The latest threat comes from an unnamed and unvaccinated UC Berkeley student who apparently contracted the disease while traveling in the Philippines during an outbreak there. Public health officials in Contra Costa County say people who rode BART during the morning or evening rush hours from Feb. 4 through Feb. 7 may have been exposed by the carrier, who is unidentified.

That could be hundreds of thousands of people.

(The estimate was later expanded to millions. Also, this "patient zero" infected four of his family members in addition to any he infected on the BART or elsewhere.)

There's more than fuel efficiency to consider when comparing mass transit vs. private automobile transportation.

Slashdot moderators have absolutely no intellectual honesty.

Shashdot moderators have no CONSISTENCY. They are randomly selected and only get to moderate a small number of posts each.

Further, they each get to chose which postings they moderate. People with different idea systems and hot buttons will chose different postings.

To expect "intellectual honesty" in the moderators to be visible as some visible, rational, consistency among moderation of diverse items is to expect that the readership of Slashdot to be suffering from such extreme group-think that they all moderate identically (excetpt for their choices of what to moderate).

It's not just San Francisco, but the whole San Francisco Bay area. In fact, most of the really important areas like Palo Alto, San Jose, or Berkeley are a fair distance from San Francisco. Your struggling artists can live elsewhere in the Bay area.

Why don't we decide on a handful of strong PRNGs, and make every major OS use them exclusively,

Maybe because if somebody then breaks one or more of THOSE they have a zero-day exploit for EVERYTHING.

While we're at it. why don't we standardize on an operating system, and version, and stop all this diversity? After all, if a committee comes up with a pick how can any individual or team invent anything better?

Genetic engineering is getting to the point that we can soon modify our children so they all have the same immune system - the best one we can find in the wild or tweak up. Why don't we do that too? After all, you'd NEVER see a disease mutate so it's fatal to everyone with that flavor of immune system, would you? B-/ (You know, like the corn blight that was fatal to the cytoplasmic male-sterile corn that was virtually all that was grown in the US in the early '70s, and nearly wiped out the crop for a year or two?)

Of course the REAL reason is because it's a FREE MARKET. Companies who's management thinks they have a better design for a random number generator get to deploy their own choice, and the customers get to decide whether they want to trust their data and critical processes to that OS or switch to some alternative (either immediately or after they pick up the pieces from the LAST set of exploits...)

In other words, I did consider opportunity cost, we just disagree on what it would be.

I'm deciding for others what? I'm not deciding what they watch or do. I merely have an opinion on what I think most people would be doing in the absence of watching football. I still think the replacement activity for football would be watching people on some sort of field or room chasing a ball or perhaps a puck around.

You're just punishing them too obviously. The room 101 way would be to put them in personal protective equipment and stamp this on their forehead. They can still, for now, participate in society, but they'll be properly ostracized. Maybe we'll even occasionally make them a target of the Two Minute Hate.