"Well if you let the programmers run the show, things would be so much better."

Currently at #1: Rush Limbaugh's self-insert U.S. history fanfic.

I swear to you I am not making this up.

Perhaps Randall should pass on publicizing this particular honor.

The best way to handle this is for the original author of the paper that started this anti-vaccination mess, Andrew Wakefield, come out and give a public statement indicating that:

1. Apologize for the fact that his study was flawed, and explain why.

2. That no other study has established any material basis in any respect for a link between autism and vaccines or their components.

3. The original funding for this supposed research was made by lawyers who were attempting to find reason to litigate against vaccine manufacturers.

4. That many people will now die of diseases that were nearly eradicated a mere 15 years ago similar to smallpox a few years before it was eradicated.

Put that as a public service announcement on every major TV and radio channel, and online as well, as widely as possible. Show pictures of what happens when people don't vaccinate, particularly to children, the elderly and immune-compromised individuals (e.g. transplant saved his/her life, now they die). Have him make this appeal over and over again until people get this.

Even if we don't get to 100%, we owe it to everyone around us. The public health costs are staggering, and the stupidity is mind boggling.

Of course, neither political party is anything like they were when Abe was around. In most issues they have swapped position.

Actually, in most places people have been propagandized to THINK they swapped position. But when you look at how they actually voted on various subjects (civil rights laws and Internet censorship, for two of a host of examples) or how the programs they produced actually worked out (The Great Society for just one in a host of examples), expect to find that the alleged swap is mostly smoke, mirrors, and very effective political propaganda.

Interns, sure. But internships are often done through colleges that the company has a relationship with. Once you graduate, those opportunities are gone.

I love it! Did you write that?

If you're interested in the current state of the art, read this article from the Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (April 2013). It describes the hardware and software used by the Pan-STARRS team to detect asteroids automatically in data taken with their 1.8-meter telescope on Hawaii and its 1.4-gigapixel CCD camera.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1302.7281

Aggregating $19B in wealth in the hands of 50 people plus a handful of investors is indeed not the way to create jobs. It slows down the flow of money within the broader economy. I'm sure those $20M homes in Woodside and Los Altos Hills and Seacliff are worth every penny.

These megadeals also have the effect of creating a startup lottery environment where anyone can put together a ten page business plan and the "trend du jour" and try to make out like bandits. This is what led to the first dotcom crash and will also eventually lead to the second crash at some point. Anyone who makes an alternative to this content with having the user watch ads in the background every ten app starts will murder Whatsapp because $0 is cheaper than $1.

I think it's also important to note that Eric Schmidt wholeheartedly approves of this deal because I suspect he thinks it's to the ultimate detriment of Facebook, and a blessing \for Google in some ways. Much like unbridled immigration is to existing workers in this country for his business.

What is it with the constant disbelieving of Snowden?

One of the things Snowden exposed was systematic disinformation campaigns by the spooks to achieve various political goals, including the discrediting of their own critics.

Perhaps these comments are examples of such a program in action?

At present we have two parties that are both owned, for the most part, by the same people, and kept in power by gerrymandering and the systemic weakness of first-past-the-post elections.

Further, the people in control of the major parties themselves cheat when someone not of their faction tries to go the primary/caucus root. They change rules in midstream, miscount, break meeting rules, physically attack supporters of opponents, pass out bogus delegate slates, and a host of other dirty tricks.

For a list of the things the Republican have done to just one challenger in the last two cycles, check out the archives of any of the several sites where Ron Paul supporters congregate. (For example, The Daily Paul.)

The Democrats do this as well. (The riots in Chicago in 1968 were largely a public reaction to the party machine repelling a primary effort by Gene McCarthy, popular with the antiwar movement, in favor of Hubert Humphrey. The Paul/Romney nomination battle was eeriely similar.)

This has been a long known fact,

Some of this was known back in the '60s and '70s. But the federal government decided to suppress it. In particular: Any drug with side-effects that were pleasant was considered a threat to the status quo of governance - a way for productive people to achieve happiness without driving industrial profit and/or part of a Communist conspiracy to rot the "Free World"'s moral fiber.

There was a period where researchers would only get new grants if the conclusions of their studies stated that the drugs - psychedelics, marijhuana, etc. - were useless for medical purposes and/or dangerous. (The papers in Science, for instance, were often pathetically hilarious. The reduced data said one thing, while the conclusion said the opposite.)

Meanwhile the government (notably with such things as the FBI's COINTELPRO program) smeared those (formerly highly respected scientists) who had been proponents of finding uses for them (especially those who had tried to use them to augment intelligence and experimented on themselves - often with bizarre results). The most prominent of these was Timothy Leary, though there were a number of others.

Somewher in there the drugs were added to various "schedules" and banned from medical use.

After a couple years of this, with any actual benefits buried in the noise, the government declared that it was "settled science" that there were no useful treatments using these drugs and stopped issuing new permits for their use in new research projects. (It's very much like research into global warming: You can't convince people on either side because the research is suspect due to the government becoming involved and pushing its horse in the race.)

Then the government declared acts related to banned-drug trafficing, possession, and use to be "serious" crimes and imposed passed mandatory minimum sentences - recreating the scenario of alcohol prohibition, funding organized crime, filling up the prisons, and lining corrupt police personell's pockets with graft money. Then it passed RICO and created the same financial incentive structure that fueled the Spanish Inquisition - driving ever-increasing anti-drug activity and blocking attempts to repeal drug bans.

And that's where it stood for decades. Negligible work on uses for the chemicals - either by organized research or private self-medication (with drugs of uncertain content and quality).

So while Moore's Law drove the computes from giant cabnets filling floors of office buildings to chips in everything under the sun, work on a nimber of categories of drugs stagnated.

The canabinoids of Marijuana, alone, have a number of apparent (but not adequately researhed) benefits:

  - They appear to be a specific treatment for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (which, itself, seems to be a result of undermeidcation for pain - also driven by the "drug war").
  - Canabinoids (including at least one which does not produce a substantial "high") also appear to be a successful treatment for a debilitating form of childhood epilepsy.
  - Parkinson's disease eventually kills, not directly through loss of dopamine, but by the body's attempt to compensate for it by fouling up a system that uses the recently discovered endocanabinoids as neurotransmitters. (These are the chemicals that THC and its relatives mimic, much as opioids mimic endorphins.) This ends up with loss of memory and loss of appetite, and the victim starves herself to death. Canabinoids may help alleviate this and/or prolong life, (if only by reducing the tendency to self-starvation by inducing "the munchies").
  - Canabinoids have been claimed to arrest the progress of several cancers, including a brain cancer.d
  - Canabinoids have long been used for reducing the nausea of chemotherapy, easing self-starvation in cancer patients. (Similarly with side-effects of anti-AIDS drug coctails.)

I could go on.

But "more research is needed" to determine which (if any) of these effects are real, turn them into practical treatments, and deploy them. And it's not going to happen smoothly and rapidly with the government continuing to interfere.

However, the term "assault weapon" is more fuzzy, at least according to Wikipedia.

Wikipedia has it right, in its own "being unbiased in the wording" way.

"Assault Rifle" is a technical term in warfare. It first applied to a particluar select-fire rifle short enough to avoid getting hung up when popping up through the hatch of a tank to fire at surrounding infantry (or otherwise going through tight spaces), and since has been applied to others with simiilar characteristics. This trades away some accuracy for rapid fire and rapid movement.

"Assault Weapon" is a term invented by antigunners and defined in particular laws, to confuse the population about proposed gun control laws by making them appear to be banning military design Assault Rifles when they actually ban a hodge-podge of civilian guns based on some arbitrary (and juristiction-specific) set of characteristics typically unrelated to any objective standard of danger or functionaity.

The article didn't make this terribly clear, but people seem to be missing the point.

If you teach the concepts through hands-on interactive play, kids as young as five can understand the concepts underlying Calculus without too much difficulty. This also happens to be one of the best times in your life for learning, when the brain is rapidly forming new connections.

Her point is teach the concepts, teach the patterns, teach kids how to find patterns, and how to internalize mathematical knowledge.

The mechanical drudgery of formal language, writing out and solving equations, etc comes later on but builds on the fundamental understanding developed much earlier in life.