> As an example, you say that this study from a Canadian university is racist and has been debunked extensively, which is clearly total bullshit.

The study was published in "Intelligence", which is a journal for the "International Society for Intelligence Research."

A quick google for "International Society for Intelligence Research racist" shows that recipients of it's "lifetime achievement award" and board members are widely criticized as promoting junk science, white supremacy, and furthering nazi concepts on race.

Let's take a look at some examples.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

According to sociocultural anthropologist Francisco Gil-White, in publishing studies financed by the Pioneer Fund, Linda Gottfredson is part of a concerted effort to legitimize racist ideology through pseudo-science, together with an assortment of other people with inadequate or completely missing scientific qualifications for studying human intelligence"

Rushton has been discredited for over thirty years and he's viewed as nothing more than pseudo-science fuel for white supremacists like you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

And his co-author on that paper? An idiot who thinks racists like him are "the next galileos." https://www.google.com/search?...

He's so desperate to spread his bullshit that he paid to have a booklet about his work mailed to professors around the country

Rushton is a racist - this is both well known and extensively documented by comments he's made publicly and white supremacy publications he's contributed to. His science is beyond junk.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The man has been repeatedly and thoroughly discredited scientifically as ignoring evidence that doesn't fit his prejudices, his testing methods as biased against black people, and using non-equivalent groups.

He was president of an institute classified as a hate group. He speaks routinely at eugenics conferences and has published articles in white supremacy magazines and online websites.

For most meetings, I write on the agenda, then scan it, and almost never look at it again. For meetings I chair, I have an outline of the agenda on my laptop (omnioutliner) and add children bullets as needed. For research, I use Moonreader or Acrobat to capture/export highlights & comments.

"Most bike accidents happen to inexperienced riders and/or idiots."

There is absolutely no evidence to support this incredibly victim-blaming comment. There is plenty of evidence to refute it, if you simply google the phrase "cyclist driver fault study"

Examples: http://www.executivestyle.com....

http://www.nytimes.com/2000/05...

http://www.theguardian.com/lif...

You're a classic victim-blamer. See, it's those other, stupid, slower, more inexperienced cyclists who get hit. Not you. You're experienced. Dressed like a dayglo traffic cone clown. Covered in lights.

It would be really nice if someone would do something meaningful w/ all the code for PenPoint --- it was one of my favourite operating systems, and amazingly capable for its time, and interface-wise, is still nicer than pretty much anything other than the Newton OS, or NeXTstep (or maybe HP's NewWave).

For those who don't remember it: http://www.digibarn.com/collec...

"Starvation mode" has been shown to be a myth. It comes down to basic math, calories in vs. calories out.

If you eat less and work out more, you lose weight. You do the opposite, you gain.

There's no way for the body to "magically" get fat when eating less. That violates the laws of thermodynamics. Sure, the rate of how quickly you gain or lose weight may change (e.g., when you eat less or change your macros to consume less sugar, you may find yourself being more lethargic in the short term until you get used to it, and so you will burn fewer calories). Or, as you lose weight, you need fewer calories (because there isn't as much of you to support).

But a calorie is a calorie and reducing ~3500 calories results in about 1lb of weight loss. Is it exactly 3500? No. Why? Because there are so many other variables at play. But is it closer to 3500 than, say, 500 or 10,000? You bet.

Two things I came across recently on this topic: 1) Walmart has recently been taking right around the full corporate tax rate (31% is what they paid in the last year on record, iirc); 2) the guys and some expert types at Freakonomics or PlanetMoney or SomeOtherMoneyNerdBlog recommended reducing the corporate income tax rate to something like 20-25% AND closing loopholes. The consensus was that this would get corporations paying their taxes here, because it would be close enough to what they're saving by cheating, factoring in costs for legal liability and the PR hit. BUT they all agreed this would never happen because one side would fight the loopholes and the other side would fight the tax decrease and, well, it's not always election year but IS always fundraising time.

"If they spend $1.4M and got the rand() function, then terrorists might be able to exploit it to escape random searches." Like lining up sequentially with 2, maybe 3 people?

I live in New England, haven't owned a car in roughly a decade and have been commuting 20 minutes each way every day for work by bike in addition to whatever other daily transportation i need, and own/use snow tires for said bicycle. I also own a nice road bike which gets ridden on weeknight group rides and weekends. I started out on a $350 hybrid I bought from REI on special, and it lasted me several years and thousands of miles, until I decided I wanted something better.

So yes, I do actually know what I'm talking about. And incidentally, Minnesota has more bike commuters per capita than many much warmer locations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

There have been dozens of studies over the years showing that riding a bicycle for transportation, even slowly, brings health benefits over people who sit in their cars for transportation: https://www.google.com/search?...

Oh, and which is it? Everyone flying along so fast they'll fatally injure pedestrians they smack into? Or people who "toddle around with their heartrate under 100bpm so slow it doesn't do them any good"? Hmm?

Please, save the "you want to put grandma on an iceberg" crap. I wasn't advocating forcing people onto bicycles. I'm saying driverless cars aren't going to fix problems with congestion and pollution.

"Of course, the obvious question is: Will the bike stop at stop signs?"

And yet 99.9% of pedestrian injuries and deaths are caused by motor vehicle drivers, who also blow through stop signs and run red lights.

Where were the jokes about autonomous cars running red lights, and how cities won't be the same without cars speeding, running red lights, not stopping for pedestrians, double parking, making turns without yielding to oncoming traffic, etc?

When a bicyclist doesn't stop for a pedestrian, they bump and (both, probably) fall down. When a car doesn't stop for a pedestrian, the pedestrian ends up in the hospital, or dead.

A bicycle costs $500, emits no pollution, uses little roadway, doesn't cause wear and tear on infrastructure, generates no noise, and provides health benefits. An autonomous car costs....probably $100,000 minimum, uses a huge amount of energy/emits pollution, causes wear and tear on infrastructure, generates a lot of noise, and results in more sedentary behavior.

Do we really think the future is 200 bicycles for the price of one autonomous car?

How about back in 2006?

With only a PCB-trace antenna and one ethernet port, that is nearly useless.

Which do you think is computationally more expensive? Crawling a website, or serving the website being crawled?

Here's a hint: aside from the fact that one involves repeatedly parsing a scripting language, database calls, logging, etc and the other requires little more than generating URLs and downloading them....one involves random access retrieval and the other involves writing the stored data.

Also: the different in computing power between laptops and servers of similar age is less than an order of magnitude. Server equipment typically runs further from the bleeding edge than retail/consumer equipment, and often is kept in production much longer than consumer equipment.

He didn't "commit suicide as a result of prosecution for his attempt to free scientific literature."

After a prior similar episode which earned him a visit from the FBI in which they told him they'd caught him doing something illegal, declined to prosecute him but warned him not to do it again......he trespassed repeatedly onto the MIT campus, into buildings, into network closets, where he installed unauthorized computers. He then worked to intentionally bypass the network registration system, and then further to avoid MIT's network engineering group as they tried to figure out where his equipment was installed.

His data-dumping efforts were so aggressive that they interfered with JSTOR services for thousands of researchers around the world; his 'free the research' stunt actually interfered with their ability to work. Despite bringing JSTOR's servers to its knees, he installed a second laptop because the first wasn't pulling data fast enough. JSTOR attempted to block his system, but he kept changing IP addresses to subvert the ban, and finally, JSTOR had no choice but to block the entire MIT network.

JSTOR is not some evil "take guvvmint-paid-for research and hide it behind a paywall." JSTOR is a service which archives journals and then provides storage and searching across them all, to institutions which could never afford the journal subscriptions themselves. They're not-for-profit. The fees they charge go directly to paying for the capital and operating expenses necessary for storing, cataloging, and making available for download, millions of papers - and the inherent overhead in doing so.

To what goal, I might add? He would have ended up with a directory of PDFs. Now what? They have to get indexed, a web UI needs to be made, someone has to pay for all that server hardware and bandwidth and electricity and the people to maintain it all. Maybe we could set up a non-profit organization to make that all happen?

Oh....wait...that's...JSTOR.

Does anyone now realize that his stunt was just that? A publicity stunt? A fucking tarball of PDFs doesn't help academic researchers. The whole point behind JSTOR was to collect research, store it, and make it available both at affordable rates and in an accessible way.

This was like going to the village cooperative farm chicken coop (where people pay a small fee to house, feed, and care for their chickens), blowing up the only bridge to the farm to stop the police from getting to you (but also keeping all the townspeople from getting to the eggs they need for food), throwing open the doors to let the chickens out, and then being proud of yourself for "freeing the chickens so everyone can have a chicken."

Let us be absolutely clear: there is extensive proof of all of his crimes, and nobody has argued he did not commit them. The argument from some has been that somehow these crimes were legitimate or honorable.

He was offered plea deals, and even if it had gone to trial - as a white-collar, white male criminal - he never would have received the maximum sentencing. People saying "he would have gone to jail for 40 years" clearly do not spend any time reading the news, because prosecutors almost always ask for maximum sentencing, and rarely do they get it, EVEN FOR MURDERERS. It's highly likely he would have been given little more than parole.

Lastly: Swartz had a history of mental illness and suicidal thoughts - some of it public and irrefutable. He did not commit suicide because he was prosecuted. He committed suicide because he had a history of suicidal thoughts.