We've got the problem in California that there are lots of people who've come from places where mushroom hunting is a common occupation, and where there are local tasty mushrooms back in the old country which look a lot like our poisonous ones. And it's often not just one victim, it's a whole family who've been out in the woods for the day, picked the mushrooms, and cooked them for dinner. And now they all need liver transplants.

If it's night time, I'll flash my headlights at people to tell them they forgot to turn on their headlights, or to tell them to turn off their brights.

If it's daytime, I usually have my headlights on for increased visibility, and because my car has an "automatic" headlight setting that's smart enough to turn off the lights a minute after I get out of the car so I don't have to worry about whether I left the lights on.

There are some places where the police are individually corrupt and find ways to take forfeited assets for personal gain (I remember a case in New Jersey where the police chief's girlfriend kept winning auctions for forfeited property at amazingly low prices because nobody else knew it was up for bid), but there are a lot more places where the police departments are organizationally corrupt. So cops driving the cool sports cars they seized, or using seized money to justify more overtime for cops, or cops getting the cool guns from drug or gun dealers, yeah, happens all the time.

Last year I was running Firefox on Win7-32, on a machine with 4GB RAM, and it would crash five times a day. Now that I'm running Win7-64, on the same hardware but with a lot more swap space enabled, it still crashes occasionally, but maybe once or twice a week.

Back under the bridge...

Yeah, I've never been clear on exactly what stuff D-Wave does fast, or how it does it, in spite of having been to a few of their presentations, and D-Wave has always been clear upfront that their machine works differently from Shor's proposed quantum computers that sparked all the "It'll let you break crypto" interest.

But they apparently at least run some kinds of demos faster than you'd expect them to be able to do with conventional computers, and do it in ways that are interesting enough for a few big players to invest the money in more research which might lead to discovering ways to apply it to their real-world problems and not just lab demos.

Nobody doing "traditional" quantum computing has built anything that can solve problems bigger than factoring 15 = 3x5, or maybe somebody's gotten up to 21 by now. But it's still not close enough to sell anything to anybody; it's still just pure research.

I'm under 60, and I've been listening to PHC for almost 30 years. And yeah, it's not for everybody, and it takes some attention span and some familiarity with the culture that it's coming from. I'm originally an Easterner, and my family was from the Midwest rather than the North Central area, and none of them were still farmers by the time I was around.

The church I went to in Berkeley in the 70s was about half grad students and about half old-time Swedish immigrant families; Pastor Anderson was from Minnesota, and his accent was about like a typical Lake Wobegone resident, and the potluck dinners would have lots of baked goods and casseroles and the occasional lutefisk. They weren't Lutherans, but you could recognize a lot of Keillor's memes, though of course these were the folks who, after moving South from Sweden to Minnesota, decided that that was enough of that moved somewhere warm.

Oh, Right-WIng Media will happily spend 20 minutes of in-depth coverage on the Left's War On Christmas, or how clean Clean Coal is.

I did once fill out a survey on "where do you get your news" - I checked the "Conservative talk radio" box, and filled in the "Station" box with KQED, which is my local public radio station. It's Establishment Media, which is conservative, as opposed to crazy right-wing media.

If I want to listen to left-wing media, I'll turn to KPFA (here in the San Francisco area, or other Pacifica stations elsewhere, like WBAI in NYC or KPFK in LA), for a mixture of news, culture, interesting music, etc.

NPR isn't left-wing at all. It's Establishment Media, putting out the government's news as well as cultural programming. Think about any time they've talked about the war - how long was it before you heard anybody on public radio use the term "torture", except for Terry Gross interviewing book authors who use the word? For me it was about 10 years of hearing them say "Enhanced interrogation" or "Harsh interrogation techniques", because that was the language the government wants used. For that matter, how much analysis was there about whether the war was a good idea, as opposed to government-friendly discussions about whether it's going well or not.

Yes, most of the journalists on public radio are probably Democrats, but even so, it's still typically one pro-government talking head vs. another slightly different pro-government talking head.

Now, there were politicians who really hated NPR, and they tended to be Republicans, but it was as much because of NPR's elitist positions on the arts as anything else; Jesse Helms was more a "black velvet paintings of Elvis" kind of guy than a "controversial cutting-edge art" NPR fan.

I'm writing this after the game. EA's Madden thought Denver was the winner. Wolfram Alpha thought a free account didn't have enough free CPU time to get the result. So in my experience, EA was wrong, and Wolfram was correct but not helpful.

Friends of mine do a party where we do record it, watch the commercials, and fast-forward over the game, occasionally stopping if the football's interesting.

Since I'm writing this afterwards, it's not a spoiler, but while this year's commercials were below average, they were a lot better than the game.

There were some really good points to it - putting the story into coherent form requires somebody reading through immense piles of documentation to find the interesting individual parts and the interesting trends from the big pile of other data, and releasing it at a pace that's going to keep the public's attention rather than either not getting noticed or having their eyes glaze over (how much of the public actually read through the whole Pentagon Papers - or needed to do so to get the general idea of what their government was doing?)

And yes, there are parts that it's important NOT to release without redaction - the EFF's slide about "Why Metadata Matters" also means that there might be documents in the Snowden collection that are metadata about "people who are not targets and we're, like, totally not 'collecting' data on" that the government shouldn't have collected, like "AIDS Clinic A called Person X, who called Dr. D and Insurance Company I", or "Hey, Agent Smith, here's the data we've got on Ahmed A, is it enough to put him on the no-fly list?" "No, not really".

But except for any personal data that ought to be redacted, I think it makes sense to have the whole pile available to the public. The NSA's argument that it might reveal "sources and methods" just says "Hey, dude, not fair releasing metadata on us!"

If by that, you mean that the right wing uses DiFi for posters recruiting for their side, maybe so, but those are cartoon versions of her used for their own side's purposes, and the two aren't really equivalent or parallel. Darth Cheney's evil, and the left wing hates him, but he's a military-industrial-complex radical, not a social-conservative right-winger.

(I'm going to have to deviate from my usual position on Cheney here, which is to grudgingly admit that the man almost certainly doesn't actually eat live puppies for breakfast, but not to say anything more positive than that about him... And I'm a Libertarian, not a leftist or progressive.)

Cheney's not, as far as I know, a racist. He's not a theocrat. He was against gay marriage until his gay daughter forced him to reconsider his position, but he's not one of those people who are hung up about gays or who use homophobia as a way to drum up business with other right-wingers. (He'll happily use Fear of Foreign Terrorists to do that, but the business he's trying to drum up is military business, not Republicans-vs-Democrats; he'd prefer a Republican-controlled big army and intrusive spying system, but a Democrat-controlled one will do, and Feinstein was his type of Democrat.) He's not been part of the Republican War on Women. He was fine with the right-wingers' desires to militarize the border, but that was because he likes militarizing things, not because he wants to stop having cheap immigrant labor available for US businesses.

Cheney's not one of those right-wingers who say that "Government doesn't work" because they want to cut social programs and annoy progressives. He's the type of conservative who likes lots of very big, very intrusive government. The kind the right-wingers pretend they dislike, even as they help elect guys like Cheney.

The Feds really did have to raid Steve Jackson Games, because otherwise dangerous computer hackers might use their site to learn dangerous hacking techniques, like "Roll 3d6. If you get better than 15, your probe breaks through the firewall undetected!".

Donald Regan was Treasury Secretary and later Chief of Staff for Ronald Reagan, an actor who played the President of the United States.

The /g isn't strictly correct, because sometimes somebody might actually want to refer to Regan, but it's probably 99% correct.