If the set of primes is finite, form the product of all primes and add 1, creating a number not divisible by any prime (making the number formed prime by definition) yet not included in the set of all primes by construction. At this point you can smoke some weed or you can begin to suspect that the set of primes is not finite.

Let p = 10^-googolplex.

With enough patience, you can win this lottery 100 times in a row, and you can do that as many times as you like.

All this new result gives us is further evidence that in the unextinguished coincidence of short spacings, the distribution of primes resembles a random process. There's a structural reason why both N and N+1 are never prime at the same time. It appears, however, to be rather difficult to identify any other structure of the distribution of primes taking the form of permanently extinguished gap distances.

Our list of viable gaps grows thin. (I did wish momentarily to mark that up as <e>thin</e> for Elvish italic.)

First "I do", then 10,000 followers fill his shoe, then pussy-whipped and Zucker-punched. He should have ended his complaint by confessing that he feels so ruthlessly dis-empowered he hasn't had a decent erection in three weeks.

I just want a plug-in that reliably warns me:

This page contains DRM markup, would you like to [hang around] or [bugger off]?

If Google still cared about search, it would provide me an option to down-rank all DRM-containing search results. I'm not philosophically opposed to DRM. We all know that sex and money are deeply connected. But it shouldn't be the first question.

Are you rich?

Wanda should never be your top search result.

You're not trying to be precise, you're shit disturbing.

if you are born to a Muslim father, then Islam considers you to be a Muslim by birth

Since only people who accept their Muslim identity by choice give a shit about what "Islam considers" (and not even all of these, if Muslims are anything like Catholics), by this criteria Obama would only be Muslim in the eyes of a hard-line Muslim, despite not taking it on board himself (or his parents taking it on board, either).

You're operating from the "taint" school of categorization, where Tiger Woods is "black" despite being twice as Asian and just as white. Secularists such as myself consider Obama to be whatever the hell he professes himself to be, which isn't to say he's immune to what's bred in the bone.

But what is bred in the bone in his case, if we're being precise about anything that actually matters?

the cure isn't competing with the price of a dose of the treatment: it is competing with the entire cost of treating your disease until you die

Wrong, wronger, and wrongest. One imagines a "cure" is only given to people who have an actual medical problem (presumably to develop an actual cure, the mechanism of disease is fully exposed). Uncures are not so narrowly constrained.

Statins are consumed (or potentially consumed) by hundreds of millions of people with nothing more than a statistically elevated risk of possibly developing heart disease according to some rather arbitrary marker. Note that the marker and its risk levels are carefully engineered by the finest statistics money can buy to circumscribe the largest possible group of people while still achieving statistical validity without needing to conduct a trial of more than about 10,000 subjects, since that gets expensive, too (and negative results become that much harder to shuffle out of sight into a bottom desk drawer).

If pharma hits the pitch just right, they can treat 100 people to little or no benefit for every person they outright cure, and the drug will appear efficacious nevertheless through the dim lens of population studies.

In order for your analysis to hold water, you need to cure pharma of diluting immense benefits to the few into an ocean of revenues from the many.

Addendum:

It occurs to me that this definition could be modified so that a password all in a single symbol set always displays with only the * character, in addition to the new unmasking only kicking in after the first eight characters, if we wish to keep our fancy logic out from under the dim perceptions and loud scrutiny of the fangle haters.

The symbol would display as - only if different than the preceding character's symbol set. The first character would always display as *.

Password masking becomes increasingly annoying with password length, since any finger fumble becomes nearly impossible to back out with the correct number of backspace presses.

I could live with a masking system that replaced the usual * with a - when the current symbol is from the same symbol set as the previous symbol.

The password in the first line would display with the following mask.

ima6uldv8!!!
*--**---**--

For myself anyway, that would put the backspace key "back on the menu" after a finger blap.

I'd be totally happy if the enhanced unmasking only kicked in after the first eight characters.

Kunstler doesn't add much to the question posed. He burries the meat of his argument under this horrible diatribe:

You could call these two examples mendacious if it weren't so predictable that a desperate society would do everything possible to defend its sunk costs, including the making up of fairy tales to justify its wishes. Instead, they're merely tragic because the zeitgeist now requires once-honorable forums of a free press to indulge in self-esteem building rather than truth-telling. It also represents a culmination of the political correctness disease that has terminally disabled the professional thinking class for the last three decades, since this feel-good propaganda comes from the supposedly progressive organs of the media -- and, of course, the cornucopian view has been a staple of the idiot right wing media forever. We have become a nation incapable of thinking, or at least of constructing a consensus that jibes with reality. In not a very few years, the American public will be so disappointed and demoralized by broken promises like these that they will turn the nation upside down and inside out, probably with violence and bloodshed.

What did that accomplish, exactly? He sounds like a call-in radio host winding up his faithful windbags before opening the switchboard to a long queue of flashing lights. Did that actually help anyone think? I think not. It's just a long clatter of power words. If we had access to a time machine for a single trip, and we sent someone back to explain to Isaac Newton what the world looks like nearly four centuries later, there's about 49,850 words from a 50,000 word vocabulary that would serve far less well than "cornucopia" even before writing down e=mc^2 and explaining the energy content of a gram of matter and moreover, that we've already harnessed this, and we've very nearly harnessed this as well as the sun (which has, if he's curious, several billion years remaining of happy middle age). So then after drilling down into specifics for a week or three, he might ponderously observe "Now I understand. There was a temporary energy glitch circa 2030 which caused great consternation with ten billion mouths to feed and dime-store weapons of mass destruction ready to hand." He's underappreciated for his sharp ear and biting humour.

If we had an unlimited supply of oil (very nearly true if an efficient process is discovered to covert coal into oil) then we'd be game on for climate roulette. If we had any mostly unlimited supply of energy, then we'd have to start dealing with the fundamental problem that any good physicist would quickly identity as far more severe than an energy deficit: shedding waste heat from the hot blue marble. There's no future where we can continue to use energy as unwisely as we did during the global boom of the 1950s and 1960s.

Yet the real game changer, if we get there in one piece, is the transition from global population growth to global population steady-state. Rapidly growing populations have fundamentally different priorities than equilibrium populations. Personally, the thought of six billion middle class adults racking up 10,000 airmiles annually for mild respite from the 40/40/40 makes me shudder with disgust, so I'm mostly hoping the oil supply remains tight until we're ready to ante up to some fundamental societal change.

Inklings of the battles to come are already visible, if you know where to look.

How I pine for the day when that inkling was present in the story submission itself.

I don't know whether it qualifies as a fallacy, or has a name if it does; but arguments of this particular style always annoy me

It's absolutely a fallacy, which falls under many names, starting with the Straw Man fallacy.

It's so ridiculous I had to look it up again.

âoeOur goal is to make the world better. Weâ(TM)ll take the criticism along the way, but criticisms are inevitably from people who are afraid of change or who have not figured out that there will be an adaptation of society to it,â he added.

Here's another version:

People who make this kind of argument are blowhard shills (or, apparently, blowhard shill detractors).

I almost count myself as a card-carrying member of personal biometric Total Recall, and yet I'm far from immune from criticizing Google Glass.

and why the slashdot faithful are naive enough to jump all over a hot button word that willfully slants a murky fandango

Every time this kind of slashdot story passes editorial standards, somewhere a cluestick dies.

"What's genuinely difficult is that both I and a bunch of people that help make choices, genuinely care about what other people think," Shuttleworth said. "We go through a lot of trouble to accommodate other folks."

Huh, that's why I recall getting the memo from Mark early on in the Unity adoption cycle that there would be a transition period that would suck donkey balls for power users with dual-head workstations, expressing that while he realized this would highly inconvenience certain user demographics making tough decisions is necessary to future success of Ubuntu.

That's why he so cleverly timed the transition so that the users most inconvenienced could wait out the dual-head donkey-balls fiasco on a LTS release. No wait, neither of things were true. He went to no trouble to help other people accommodate themselves.

From Leading Change by John K. Potter (p.88):

One of the main reasons that vision creation is such a challenging exercise is that those guiding the coalition have to answer all these questions for themselves, and that takes time and a lot of communication. The purely intellectual task, the part that could be done by a strategy consultant, is difficult enough, but that often is a minor part of the overall exercise. The emotional work is even tougher: letting go of the status quo, letting go of other future options, coming to grips with the sacrifices, coming to trust other, etc. Yet after they are done with this most difficult work, those on a guiding coalition often act as if everyone else in the organization should become clear and comfortable with the resulting vision in a fraction of that time. So a gallon of information is dumped into a river of routine communication, where it is quickly diluted, lost, and forgotten ...

So why do smart people behave this way? Partly, the culprit is old-fashioned condescension. "I'm management. You're labor. I don't expect you to understand anyway." But more important, we undercommunicate because we can't figure out a practical alternative: Put all 10,000 employees though the same exercise as the guiding coalition? Not likely. [My emph.]

Yes, Mark, I get the necessity message, and I always have. What I don't get is all the condescending bungling around proactively communicating this vision (and perhaps offering better transition options) so that more of us could have remained in the fold.

In Shuttleworth's view, the nastiest thing that people can do is to set up unnecessary tension.

You mean the tension about whether you communicated the Unity change well enough, soon enough? Bite me. Seriously, I hope Unity grows up to become everything you dreamed it would be. But excuse me if I don't hang around in a neighborhood where roads are demolished before signs are posted.