In yet other news ... here's an idea! If you are concerned about propaganda causing your citizens to become "radicalized", why not take the most effective steps possible to prevent that? Create the most sane, free, reasonably run society in which civil rights are sacrosanct, all of the laws are sensible, and all of the laws are equally enforced.

You'll find that far fewer of the citizens would ever want to do anything to oppose that. It's more effective than playing whack-a-mole with an ever-growing list of terrorists.

I can tell if you're the sort of person who enjoys programming. I'd take a high school dropout over someone with a Master's, if the high school dropout had a substantial portfolio of open source code he could show me.

So well-rounded candidates who enjoy programming but have other hobbies are screwed?

We already knew why people/dogs do that: saliva contains blood clotting agents.

Without death, there's no evolution possible as one generation can no longer replace the previous one. Immortality would be death of the specie (*), just the same as when cells become immortal we call it cancer and the organism dies. If it happened at once society would collapse as children would no longer inherit (and be able to afford a house), you'd no longuer be able to replace your boss at work, and indeed never get a job because nobody would move up the corporate ladder... A pretty good novel about that: The Postmortal by Drew Magary.

(*) A justification is that an immortal 'specie' stays static. If another similar specie keeps evolving, it'll eventually outcompete it and beat it to death.

Want longer life spans ? Very simple: start breeding later in life and let evolution sort it out.

I was about to ask the same question. I shat for a year in a 'burner'. It took some practise and self control to get used to piss and shit separately. But also that shit-burner (a resistor in our case), stank to all hell. Normally the smoke would go outside in a chimney... Until it froze. Imagine having the smell of cooking shit all over the building. I had to rappel down the building in -65C temperatures to fix the chimney ! Complete story here.

Credited in the titles as "55MPH Briefcase", but I don't think Jittlov ever got it going that fast.

Didn't he call it "killer" or something like it, because it was so difficult to control, especially on that down-the-hill run?

(I thought of it, too, buit posted following up something early in the discussion before seeing the WoSaT posting.)

I want a flying car that folds into a briefcase like George Jetson.

Me, too.

Other "prior art" occurs in the 1988 feature movie version of Jitlov's The Wizard of Speed and Time.

See 1:05:25 throug 1:11:10

Communism was a religion alright. It has its messiah (Marx), its holly book, its apostles (Lenin, etc), its saints (Stakhanov, etc), its groupthink, its fierce opposition to competing religions, its clergy (politburo, etc) and you can find a lot of other common things. As for Lenin having no idea what kind of evil would spring up, neither did Jesus or Mohamed I'm pretty sure.

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?

and a 5 year old is fully aware that by clicking a button that says he wants more blue crystals or whatever the fuck that they are spending their parents money?

>It will never happen, but if a law was passed that when the video is unavailable, the citizen's report is presumed to be true and complete, I'll bet those cameras would suddenly get a lot more reliable.

Indeed. This is the missing key ingredient.

I once got pulled over for speeding while driving doing the speed limit. I saw the cop coming down the road toward me, and had slowed down by the time he'd u-turned and pulled up behind me to tail me. I'd been speeding before, but this wasn't what he claimed in court - he said I was doing 78 (written statement) 87 (oral statement) while tailing me on the I-5.

I'd requested the camera footage of the event, but it mysteriously wasn't available to me.

So it was just the cop's word against mine, and the court will side with a cop every time, even though there was a serious discrepancy between his written and oral statement, and his video footage wasn't provided to me.

If the law stated that the presumption would go the other way (favoring the citizen over the cop) when video evidence disappears, it would eliminate the easiest source of police abuse of these tools.

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.