I also took formal language theory and found it to be one of the most thought provoking classes I ever took as well as one of the most difficult. The bi weekly assignments would take me about 20 hours, but man I learned a lot, including how to program a turing machine, an exercise in abstraction which still blows my mind. I'd like to give a big shoutout to my professor, David Barrington, an amazing teacher who also seems to be doing very interesting work in the analysis of this paper. See links to his posts here

from the WSJ: "[A reporter asks] 'Are you willing to make an apology?' 'You know, most of the customers that have iPhone 4s think it is the coolest thing they ever owned,' says Jobs. To the customers that are having problems 'I apologize to them.'"

I'll fax you a xerox of my public key. Is analog the new steam punk?

Maybe that's because it is our fault? The third world's environmental problems didn't occur in a vacuum, you know.

Here's how the story goes: $THIRD_WORLD_COUNTRY whithers under the yoke of colonialism until ~1945-1970 when it is freed by popular resistance. The former colonial power attributes this to their own benevolence, although the bloodiness of the revolution sets the bar for violence in the country's future conflicts. It's first popularly elected leader is assassinated by a CIA-manufactured resistance consisting of mercenaries and members of whatever local ethnic minority enjoyed privileges under colonialism. A puppet dictator is installed who plunges the country into an unbridled kleptocracy. (see: Zaire, Iraq, Panama, etc)

During the 1970s, corruption is rampant and large payoffs, err, aid packages, from the West simply disappear. In the 1980s, banks and business leaders become frustrated by the cost of this ideological (anti-communist) game of neo-imperialism and demand returns on their investments. The IMF, which for all intents and purposes is the only credit available for these countries, demands sharp reductions in environmental and labor standards for any country they loan to, essentially blackmailing countries into changing their own sovereign laws enacted to afford their citizens basic protections from economic abuse. The laws in the US don't resemble anything near these policies. (see: corn subsidies, public utilities, California, etc)

A race to the bottom for environmental and labor standards ensues, leading to widespread environmental disaster. Evidence begins to accumulate that the pollution resulting from these policies is having a global effect. Clueless conservatives, railing against perceived disparities in the financing of proposed solutions (using inflammatory metrics like cost versus population instead of cost versus GDP) wonder out loud (very loud indeed) where $THIRD_WORLD_COUNTRY gets off blaming 'merica for the environmental mess they got their own wasteful, greedy selves into, while enjoying a reduced cost of living at the third world's expense.

sound boy gwan die tonight

ahh, now your name makes sense - misexistentialist

Oh please. Men are on average about 12kg larger than women and are much more prone to spousal abuse - It's because of men that domestic violence is framed as a women's issue. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, women are 7 to 10 times more likely to be injured during an act of violence, while men commit 90% of domestic homicides, and before you start complaining about the unfair treatment men get from public institutions, maybe you should have taken the time to find out that women are much more likely to be convicted for murdering their spouses than men.

Also, could you please cite statistics for the "commonly shocking occurrence" of women tricking men into raising children that arent' their own, especially in regards to the other "shockingly common occurrence" of men skipping town after getting their partner pregnant? Or women forced to raise children conceived by rape - how's that for "having no say in how the pregnancy turns out"? Just try to tell me with a straight face that men get raped by women as much as women get raped by men. You mentioned molested boys, but do you really think that it's women that are abusing them?

Your indignation at Americans not taking "men's issues seriously" and then citing examples like rape and domestic violence is absurd since those areas in particular lay bare the fact that men and women's issues are inherently different. If anything, Americans elevate "men's issues" (crime, unemployment, war) disproportionately over other pressing issues, like equality, which you seem to have a seething disdain for (is your solution to racism for minorities to "grow up and take responsibility for all the crap they do" to white people?). Nice straw man, but your meaningless call for women to "as a group decide to grow up" is childish especially since all the "crap" you mentioned is a much worse problem for women.

I wish I could mod you up. This is exactly why google and forums will _never_ replace good documentation, no matter what the apologists say. I use linux as my primary operating system, and I have to agree that this is really bug #1. There are countless distributions of linux, each with different releases running different combinations of different versions of software. This means that either:

a) I can search for my particular problem without detailing the exact distribution, version, software packages and versions I'm running and end up pulling my hair out trying to use a debian solution for a red hat problem, or finding solutions that don't work anymore because they're for old versions of my software or distribution

or

b) I can detail everything, but not find any solutions because the 8.0 solution is the same as the 7.0 one, and since noone likes to duplicate effort (especially unpaid volunteers), nothing was written for my _exact_ problem with my _exact_ system configuration etc.

or

c) I can post on a forum and wait for a volunteer to answer. This is unacceptable - I want the solution now, not in the undetermined amount of time before someone responds, which can take a very long time for obscure problems.

Add this to the crap search capability of most forums and the system breaks down into the fragmented, distributed nightmare from linux hell. Official documentation will always be relevant to a software's current release, and maybe even support some older releases too. There's no ambiguity. However, many linux developers (I'm looking at you, linuxsampler) think that web forums (or worse, mailing lists) are somehow a replacement for adequate documentation. They're not. The amount of time I spend googling solutions to what should be simple problems because of confusing, incomplete or non-existent manpages or documentation has a serious effect on my productivity using linux.

Damn why does my browser suck? link: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste

And yet there's still no viable long-term solution to the problem of nuclear waste. Let's look at the options: -burial: requires generations of stewards to maintain rusting sarcophagi. Requires shipping of nuclear waste in trucks/trains to burial site. Susceptible to earthquakes (Yucca Mountain is a joke in this regard) -launch into space: shuttle columbia anyone? -recycle into new fuel: produces.... nuclear waste. So does a nuclear plant produce less nuclear waste than a coal plant? Nice try, but no. Here's the original article [Scientific American] Apparently, radiation surrounding coal plants is worse than around nuclear plants because the radioactive particles are blown into the air or leach into the groundwater, in other words precisely because they aren't regulated for radioactivity. This doesn't mean that nuclear plants "produce less radiation," just that the high level (and more hazardous) waste produced by nuclear plants is contained on site. Right now, ALL high level waste produced by nuclear plants in the US is contained on site and piling up quickly because of NIMBYism. Chances of meltdown are certainly inflated by environmentalists, and if you ignore the waste issue, nuclear power is a very elegant solution (for some reason this seems to appeal to nerds). However, simply putting your fingers in your ears and plowing ahead with the nuclear agenda will only put the problem of waste on the shoulders of the next 300+ generations.

The problem with challenging these kinds of "blue laws" is that if you lose, then a law that used to never be enforced suddenly has the backing of a modern court precedent. This has happened in some states with sodomy laws. Civil rights lawyers just let these sleeping dogs lie and only challenge them in the unlikely event that someone today gets charged with one.

or nuclear power without any realistic long-term plan for waste disposal! [ducks]

It's an expensive habit, most of us are just trying to break even.