Shortly after pressing submit, I realized that I made light of the difference between adjectives and adverbs when I first commented on the adenoidal Fermions. Like the difference between ovaries and testicles, people tend to insist upon the distinction even when it isn't terribly germane. Either type leads to adenoidal behaviour patterns.

"Recently a conversation with Prof. Huffman here indicated that he has recently been working on a machine with similar objectives."

A more thoughtful presentation might replace the second "recently" with "lately" or similar.

Beyond English department embroidery, there's little to fault with Nash's composition. His argument develops logically, his sentences parse correctly, he sticks to the primary points, and he's clear both about the potential significance and the nature of the mechanics involved.

This particular English department suggestion made me laugh out loud. How is it that adjectives became spin one-half particles? There are two distinct recent events in his sentence (the work and the discussion about the work). You suggest his presentation is weak because the cognitive Boson (recentness) wasn't recast as Fermionic when appending the -ly affix. When writing to the NSA, which is notorious for using seven levels of Fraktur script to distinguish algebraic levels, one presumes they can't keep two verb instances straight in a simple English sentence.

In high school I was given a composition exercise to write a paragraph on camera assembly. We were given the steps as a mishmash. It was an exercise in achieved logical order.

My solution:
The A goes into the B.
The B goes into the C.
The C goes into the D. ...
QED.

I varied the "goes into" part appropriately. In fact, I wrote very nice sentences. What I did not vary was beginning every sentence with "The". My English teacher was so annoyed with my stylistic uniformity he docked me severely. I could only raise my eyebrows and file his feedback in my Twilight Zone folder. We weren't given any objective function on the benefits of faux variation of form upon correct assembly, yet we were expected to engage in the art of embroidery nevertheless.

Nash made a pretty good start there. If he had received a one sentence answer (with or without confounding word repetitions) explaining that the class of LFSR ciphers (or whatever refined class is most suitable) are known to have a weak of the following nature, expressed perhaps with a supplemental equation or three, it would have been very interesting to read Nash's next response.

The next NSA response (if they were willing to engage in such a dialog) would likely have been "you're still on the right track, but the bar is higher yet".

One needs to realize that Nash is precisely the person the NSA doesn't wish to encourage to clear any bars for which they do not yet know the solution, as he was not of the right temperament to nurture in house, and not in any way predictable out-of-house.

Pedantic interjection: Oh look, I did something terrible and inconsistent with my compound adverbial prepositions in my previous sentence. Here I'm using my hyphens as instruction prefetch markers to the front-end sentence parser ("in house" hardly needs a hint as situated).

If I were in the NSA, however, I would use a regular hyphen where it appears as a prefetch hint, and a Fractur hyphen when used in a capacity that maps into the semantic parse tree. That place is packed with pedants. If you don't keep your levels straight, conversation degenerates and no ciphers are broken.

The summary text did a great job of explaining the history I already know far too well, while doing nothing to convey the pretext for the zombie resurrection. Isn't this the kind of teaser you see on the cover of celebrity magazines (stacked as high as carried children can't grab candy) at the grocery store checkout counter?

Originally I came here because the real world pisses me off when I walk into a convenience store and marked prices are MIA, while quantities and ingredients are obfuscated by maximal signage, and loyalty card prices displayed for pallet quantities in 96 point Helvetica (I'm exactly as loyal to my local gas station as their price/quality/service mix is competitive against convenient alternatives).

Bad, Slashdot, bad.

I could never figure out why all the websites sprouted "share" buttons. At first I could only vaguely guess what that meant. Promote? Draw attention to? Provide testimonial? Spam your nearest and dearest?

Finally I figured out that the root system for the word "share" is the soil of quasi-victimless theft. We don't really care when we lend a book to a friend that the author gains no recompense in tangible currency, since the author is almost certainly being screwed by the publisher anyway, and who wants to support that? And peer-to-peer is giving it to the man in general (which I say not entirely facetiously).

A better word than "share" might have been "perkolate". African dictators also like to distribute the goodies within their close circles of cronies. We are all alike, at heart. Now the sharing generation has no idea what an asset actually looks like and can't figure out how to draw the knife. My confusion about the word "share" was thinking it made some kind of deeper logical sense to anyone else. No, it was just a term to fudge matters all along.

So what is the problem here? There are possessions that can be either cloned (photographs) or partitioned (the $300 bottle of balsamic vinegar). For everything else, you negotiate, then sign a settlement contract. Or is the question about how to navigate these dark waters without disturbing your fudgy new-age embrace of neo-communism? If your needs go way beyond what is codified by law, you could always hire The Adjuster.

The fire scene is where her husband, Noah (Elias Koteas), the insurance adjuster of the title, comforts a new client in a manner that is not entirely reassuring. As Noah is fond of saying, "You may not feel it, but you're in a state of shock." [Noah is] "just sorting things out, deciding what has value and what doesn't." Hera [his wife, the censor] replies: "I know what you mean. It's the same thing I do."

The movie seems to turn (if one can hazard a guess) on the notion that material division tends to be far from the central matter.

It is called build up your damn infrastructure. Stop taking our money and using it to give the excutives bonuses, and start investing in infrastructure. ... Fuck them in the skull.

Nothing is more aggravating than the alpha dog that sits around licking its balls.

John Donovan wrote on a company blog that data traffic on AT&T's network has grown a staggering 20,000% over the past five years

Wow. That's the ball-lick hall of fame.

Normally I presume that "skullfuck" precludes
          <invisible tag="sarcasm/">whoosh</invisible>
so I had a good ROTFL moment.

Complaining that the new reactors are also water cooled is a lot like saying a car's engine can't possibly be effective or safe because it's based on the century-plus old principle of a piston-driven combustion cycle.

Suppose the Hindenburg accident had never happened and the hydrogen blimp survived its perilous infancy, only to have several spectacular Hindenburg incidents decades later, on much safer designs replete with the benefit of experience and refinement, but also against a much larger operational fleet.

Then a voice pops up saying "Let's finally stop calling the hydrogen blimp a modern design". Part of what this conveys is the notion of "knowing what we know now, we would never have gone down that design road in the first place". Maybe there's no amount of prudent refinement that makes hydrogen blimps a completely safe venture.

A common use of the word "modern" is to encapsulate that our designs consider the full system (environmental, political, social) far more than they once did. Once upon a time, Captain Rickover and the Cold War completely obliterated less dramatic manifestations of the public good. "OK, we're up against the Ruskies, and this looks good. Any objections?"

PWR and BWR reactors are the main operating principle of the reactor - in both cases, obligate water cooling for a full week after you slam on the brakes.

Why doesn't that sound "modern" to my jaded ear?

You say that "you like being alive", but given that you are trying to circumvent dying I'd argue that you are not happy with being alive.

The word "job" is often used to mean just the responsibilities and the primary compensation. Language as metaphor, you know. Implicit counterfactuals abound.

I've had a ScanSnap for several years, and I second that it has never jammed once. On average, the OCR also works pretty good, but I had many small complaints and with a little polish it could be great. Not holding my breath, however.

I'm not presently up to date with the OCR software bundle right now. After an initial push, I've let the paper stack up again. Another push coming soon.

One thing that really bugged me as a hardcore nerd is that in duplex scan mode it doesn't auto-cancel bleed-through. If the paper is too thin or transparent, your OCR on both sides is crap.

Seriously, if you've scanned both sides of the page, cancelling out bleed-through has to be a heck of a lot easier than echo cancellation in telephony systems.

Probably no one expected that the criminals behind vast malware trojans would adopt open source methods to make their malware more dangerous, but they have.

That's just idiotic and the whole article reads as an advertisement for Seculert

It's beyond idiotic. This kind of language might have been appropriate in OMNI in 1978 to describe an outburst of creative thinking by Robert Trivers in the early 1970s.

It would also have been appropriate in the same issue of OMNI to run an article about a race of beings—not nearly so clear thinking as Robert Trivers—who survive by drinking the fear of others.

True, but public opinion isn't changed by the fact that 0.2% of the vote went to Generic Third Party #17. Not even a little bit.

You can't back that up, I don't believe it to begin with, and the argument from continuity suggests it's not even logically possible, not to mention the problem with induction.

There exists threshold j below which your vote matters not at all in the minds of dullards who believe this. At some point you have to cross the dullard threshhold. Only a non-dullard can move the dullards. But even the non-dullard concedes that there exists k much less than j below which his inductive impetus is wasted. Only a double non-dullard can move the non-dullards. But even a double non-dullard concedes that there exists m much less than k ...

On a more practical basis, there was a time in the nineties in a Canadian election where the dismal third option failed to clear a threshold I didn't even know about: percentage of popular vote which granted them official party status and the resources which flow from that. All the idiots were saying "don't waste your vote" over votes this party desperately needed to clear this bar.

The big one in America, of course, is excluding Ralph Nadar (or anyone like him) from the presidential debate. I think that's the worst possible outcome of all, because it grants the asylum complete control over the speaking points. All you have left are two candidates promising the same small opposites. We're left arguing over the colour of the paint rather than whether to adopt a gasoline or diesel engine.

These throw-away votes don't decide between the donkey and the elephant, but they have a big impact on whether good candidates, or at least strong voices for a different future, bother to show up at all.

I believe America should outlaw two party debate in presidential elections. There should always be at least a third voice who gets equal time, selected by whatever mechanism proves workable. (This is probably a long term arms race where the incumbents constantly work to scupper whatever worked the time before.)

In fact, I wouldn't mind having an entire panel of third party voices who collectively get 1/3 of the total debate time. They can have a bidding system among themselves for who gets to cut in on which issues.

Your rule of thumb is a good one for people who don't wish to think. Not even a little bit.