I really don't get it: more than 50% of the US population is against a tax raise for the 'filthy' rich which only constitutes a maximum of 3% of your population... Why do those (more than) 50% care for those 3%, they certainly don't care for you?....

The answer is simple: More than 50% of the US voting population believe they actually are filthy rich, but experiencing temporary cash-flow problems. That is, they all plan to be in the top 3% within the next year or so.

Ah, the sweet seductive myth of a classless society and economic mobility....

And that's not even the most preposterous thing that most Americans believe.

The sooner instagram dies the better. There are great cameras in smartphones now, it's crazy people want to make their photos look like crap with filters.

How dare they want something that you don't want! They must be stopped!

Absolutely correct! For all we know, the correlation could be the other way around: Violent criminal behavior causes lead poisoning. For example, when someone gets all criminally violent at me I shoot him full of lead. QED, cogito propter unum. In your face, "science"!

I remember the broom exercise at school. Funny, isn't it? Big strong lads can't do it for more than 45 seconds. I thought I'd try it myself given that I'm not 12 any more. I got bored after 5 minutes. Sure, my shoulder aches a little bit, but I reckon I had another 10 minutes of holding my arm out, stock still.

Same here. I'm in terrible shape, haven't been to the gym in over a year. Picked up a broom just now and held it at arms length with one hand out to the side for 5 minutes, which seems long enough to prove the point.

As a teenager I heard a similar challenge involving holding the empty hand horizontally at arms length for five minutes. After 25 minutes without the slightest tiredness I got bored and quit. I figured I was just too skinny or something -- twiggy nerd arms must be easier to hold up than big muscly jock arms.

I'm pretty sure this "can't hold arm straight out for n minutes" is pure myth. Strange that so few people actually bother to try it.

If it is on XP you have a lot more security issues than this card though.

Such as?

I have a few XP systems that are still getting regular automatic patches and updates from Microsoft. You seem pretty confident that all XP systems are vulnerable, so you must be aware of something specific. Care to share?

1 PFLOPS is an arbitrary threshold or milestone. It's not a barrier because nothing special happens at that point. The speed of light is a barrier. Even the speed of sound is a barrier. 10^n somethings per whatever is rarely if ever a barrier for any positive integer n.

It says it uses the Android kernel and drivers to be compatible with the hardware, so will OEM(s) shipping devices with this OSes fall foul of Google's anti-fork rules[1] for Android?

The Android kernel is a derivative work of the Linux kernel, so it's GPL and Google can't prevent anyone from forking it.

Post on Wikipedia without logging in, and unless you have something really productive to say, you'll probably be reverted

More succinctly: "Post on Wikipedia, and you'll probably be reverted."

Seriously, change "virii" to "viruses" or "loose" to "lose" and watch your edit get reverted because "either spelling is acceptable" and your edit doesn't "focus on content". Even the simplest, most obvious and least controversial corrections raise the hackles of writers/editors who have staked their wiki-territory and will defend it to the death.

That's because the water from outside an airport is exploding water. You need to get your water for $5.00 a bottle inside the airport so that you get that special non-exploding water.

One time I bought the special magic $5 bottle of water in the airport only to have it taken away by "security" goons at the boarding gate. Better safe than sane!

Agreed: Routine daily driving does nothing to prepare you for emergencies.

A few hours of high performance driver training each year will do far more to prepare you to react to traffic emergencies than an hour or two of daily commuting will. In your first HPDE course you will learn just how comically bad you really are at driving. Yeah, yeah, you're a great driver, top 5% ... you still suck.

BTW, it turns out that in "must stop now!" situations in a modern car with ABS you're almost always better off mashing the brake (not break) pedal all the way down as quickly as your reflexes will allow. What you do with the steering wheel at that point is pretty important and takes a lot more finesse. If you're already in the middle of a curve you have to be careful, but you shouldn't be driving so fast that you don't have plenty of traction left over for emergency maneuvers. Even if a collision is inevitable and acceptable (it's just a dog) you still want to slow down as much as possible first.

Radio waves are slower than light, period

???

Radio waves are electromagnetic radiation, which propagates through vacuum at the speed of light.

HR 313: criminalize any drug activity by U.S. citizens overseas, even if legal in the foreign country

I haven't dug into the full text of the bill, but the summary on govtrack clearly does not agree with your summary.

"Drug Trafficking Safe Harbor Elimination Act of 2011 - Amends the Controlled Substances Act to provide that anyone within the United States who enters into a conspiracy to possess or traffic in controlled substances outside the United States, or who aids or abets others in such conduct, shall be subject to the same penalties that would apply to such conduct if it were to occur within the United States. Excludes simple possession of a controlled substance from the application of this Act."

The law would only apply to people conspiring or aiding or abetting within the United States. It also explicitly does not apply at all to some drug activity ("simple possession", whatever that is).

So as long as you wait until you're out of the country before you begin conspiring or aiding or abetting, then you're clear of this law. You can still fly to Amsterdam with intent to toke up. Just don't make specific plans with anyone else (that would be conspiracy) to do anything more than "simple possession" before you leave.

Mathematicians in Love

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