The second planet now known to be wasted by humans.

So fire all the cops, firemen, garbage men, and teachers in your community if you think it will just improve your tax return, and still keep you just as safe from criminals, fires, cholera, and idiocy.

Internet-pedantry, where either 1) pedantry is misapplied because the word in question does not have a single, precise definition to be pedantic over, and both the the original and the "pedant's" "pedantic" correction are correct or 2) pedantry is possible because the word does have a precise technical definition, but the "pedant" has no idea what that is and is wrong while the original usage was correct.

For how long are 15,000 watts expended? Power usage isn't meaningful in this context. Need a duration to get energy.

It may have been the way one of them was planted underneath a Russian flag at an international event that did it.

My gun only provides you transportation to heaven and hell.

Yeah, maybe just indications of one or two more pressure cookers embedded among dozens of people.

The point of that rambling was just that these psychotics may have been Chechens, but not all Chechens are psychotics. The uncle is clearly Chechen but not psychotic. I should add no Czechs are Chechen.

and that right there discredits your rambling post.

Why?

Psychopaths like the Tsarnaev brothers, the Columbine killers, the 9/11 terrorists, the Koch brothers, etc. are either total predators like Tamerlan or Eric, with a bizarre interest in family hierarchy, a fascination with determining who is and isn't related to you, a desire for stirring religious hatred, and no altruism, empathy, or moral center to be found; they can also have only one allele like Dzhohar ("Johar", whatever), who was maybe an asshole with a superiority complex, but was also quiet about it. He was easygoing enough to form relationships with individuals in both allelic subpopulations, normal and psycho. They'll hang out with you and your other unsuspecting friends, smoke weed with you once a week just like normal Americans, etc. etc., but they'll also carry pressure cookers full of nails into dense crowds of strangers for you if they feel strongly related to you somehow.

The uncle, Ruslan Tsarni, looks like he's carrying normal alleles at this locus. He announced to a mob of reporters that he thought his older nephew was up to no good. He said that his nephew Jahar was a loser for doing what he did, announced he should turn himself in, and ask for forgiveness from the wider population of Boston. He said the brothers "brought shame on their family and upon the entire Chechen ethnicity." It might run in his family, but I don't think the uncle is as interested in seeing people run into trouble just for not being related to him.

Hopefully we decide not to waste another decade. This is not the time to go off fuming about how everyone in Chechnya is carrying this psychotic gene. Everybody there would be dead. Comfort with inhibiting the reproduction of people unrelated to you runs in families all around the world. It occurs in legislatures everywhere. It preserves itself by making you cause problems for people who don't have it. But it has to self-regulate in any wider human population, Chechnya or Boston or wherever, or it goes extinct along with the rest of the genome in the region.

Hopefully we won't see this as an excuse to waste another decade with more political 9/11-style bullshit against one particular religion or another. This was in the end a story of two bungling religious-minded psychotics, with a "mastermind", a "pushover with no conscience", and a shared comfort with mass-murdering a dense unrelated-looking crowd in a city far from home.

I'm quite interested to hear what, if any, new and interesting things people are doing with their 1 and 2gbps fibre connections, in Google neighbourhoods and in Japan.

While incremental increases in speed are nice, big jumps like this make whole new uses possible. For example before ADSL and cable we could do most of the things we do today just slower, but usable quality video wasn't really feasible, certainly not on-demand. I have a 120mbps (10mbps up) connection which is great for video on demand, and synching large files with Dropbox etc, but mostly it just lets me do the same old things, but quicker.

Are there any interesting new ways of using the internet that are coming out of these super high-speed areas with their 1 and 2gbps fiber connections. I'm especially interested in the effect having a symmetric connection of that speed, I can see it making video conferencing much, much nicer.

Seriously, what else could *possibly* motivate AT&T to announce "Austin" rather than one of the hundred other similar markets they could be moving into? Are they looking forward to making half as much revenue as they would if they entered a city with no gigabit competition? Are they proud that they'll be increasing the maximum speed available to Austinites by 0% rather than increasing the maximum speed available in another city by 9900%?

Of course not. They're showing Google, "moving in on our turf won't be profitable, because we'll try to undercut you every time you make a move, so you might as well give up and leave us with our oligopoly."

It'll be fascinating to see what Google's response (both in terms of words and actions) will be. Does "don't be evil" include "don't concede to evil"?

My cousin is going through boxes in the garage to get all my dead uncle's "I HATE FRANCE" shirts. We're selling them online once the washing machine finally gets the meth sweat.

This has damaged my relationship with my French bulldog as well. She is contacting her lawyer in Paris after having seen a picture of herself holding a demeaning sign online.

There seems to be a lot of hyperbole going around about Glass, almost makes me wonder if it's Google stirring things up to get more press.

Glass is going to have really interesting effects on how we treat public spaces, but I don't think it's going to destroy privacy for ever in the way some seem to fear.

People are already getting used to the idea that people have cameras ready in their pockets, and are more aware that what they do might not just be seen by others, but may be recorded. I don't think it's going to utterly change behaviour in truly public spaces for most people. Although I fully expect there to be lawsuits, punch-ups and altercations over one off events where people get freaked out because some Glass-wearer is staring at a woman for too long, or watching kids play in a park.

I also expect a lot more "semi-public" places like restaurants, pubs and bar to implement more formal "no-filming" and "no Glasses" policies. These are places that people go to relax and expect a certain level of privacy, and which are private property. Most places I know would probably ask you (politely) to stop/leave if you were constantly filming other patrons with your mobile phone. The same will happen with Glass. No great change here.

Basically it just comes down to people behaving with civility and respect to one another. New norms of society will be worked out and we'll adapt, just as we have with every other technological advance.

Some people will behave like jackasses to each other, just as they already do, while the rest of us get on with being polite and considerate of others.