There's no explanation. Not only is it an idiom, it's really not considered completely correct -- "informal" is what the dictionaries call it. Personally, I avoid it in writing if not in speech, but it's fairly common in the US, at least. I think it was originally dialectal, meaning it originated in one particular region of the country.

Looks like someone read "micro" and thought "milli" again (they used 1000 times too much vitamin D in the mix).

Same thing that happened in that tragic accident that killed all those racehorses some months ago -- someone was supposed to put N micrograms of selenium in their supplement, but instead gave them N milligrams. They died a horrible death.

Maybe we should consider changing one of these prefixes so they don't both begin with "m".

Graffiti 1 is, imo, still the best quick way to get text into a portable device.

Then you must never have tried Fitaly. This is a tap-optimized soft keyboard. I used it on a Tungsten T|3 for several years; it's easily more than twice as fast as Graffiti.

While the layout could perhaps be improved further (another layout called Opti II is probably better), the concept is sound. It does take a little practice to get fast, but so what?

The big problem, IMO, is that the market has decided it doesn't like styli. I don't understand why; fingers are much too large for accurate tapping. Oh well.

I don't think HP is a great company anymore. But they might manage not to screw this up completely.

The alternative was for Palm to be dead in the water. No one is buying their phones (I think Sprint even stopped selling them). Who would buy a phone from a dying company? Who would write an app for such a phone?

I'm not dancing in the streets, but I think it's a better outcome than appeared likely yesterday. HP will at least create the perception that a deep-pocketed player is committed to the business. There's some chance that will bring back some app developers who are frustrated that they can't get noticed on the iPhone app store.

I don't know that the Pre is a "geek-attractive device" anyway. I like it well enough, but if I had wanted a phone to hack on I would have gotten an Android.

As a Pre owner, I find this a relief. I was worried Palm was just going to fade away.

And I'm glad the buyer has no existing smartphone business, so WebOS will be its sole platform.

So the iPhone in question was stolen property, and Gizmodo has effectively admitted to purchasing stolen property, and knowingly having purchased stolen property.

Agreed. Ironically, in this case the crime was so public that the confiscation of the servers to look for additional evidence is probably superfluous. I don't even see how it matters if the defense manages to get said evidence suppressed.

Who's to say it isn't a credit card number stealing web site disguised as a web site "designed to 'educate users about the dangers of phishing'"

Even if this one isn't, you can be sure those will start to appear now.

What I don't get is why they don't (AFAIK) put an optical coating on the glossy screen. This would be the best of both worlds: deep blacks and less glare. Optical coatings used to be standard on high-end CRTs.

Or am I wrong, and they are optically coated and I haven't noticed? I don't own one.

I'll just comment that it's pretty sad when anybody who doesn't want taxpayer support of religion is dismissed as a "leftist".

I didn't intend the term "the left" as a dismissal, and I don't understand why you think I did. I agree that "left" and "right" are very broad-brush concepts, but I think they can be useful nonetheless. In any case I lean left on many issues myself; this happens to be one where I disagree with the mainstream left, and I think it's an interesting one.

First, a lot of vouchers would end up subsidizing religious education. Previous posts have covered this issue.

I addressed it too, you may notice. I'm not denying there will be some of that. What I question is people's priorities when they say it's more important to prevent that than to have successful, effective schools. I would happily accept a few more parents sending their children to religious schools (as some already do) in order to have the Jaime Escalantes of the country teaching calculus and other hard subjects to many thousands of kids who currently never have a chance to learn them. Doesn't that sound like a good trade to you too??

Please read TFA, if you haven't already, or read it again. Look at the incredible damage that's being done by the current system.

I agree that charter schools are a step in the right direction, but I don't think they're enough. The power of the teachers' unions has to be broken.

Schools do not just appear. They take a great deal of financing and legal paperwork. Your dream of grassroots school systems sprouting up is fantastically misguided.

The existence and history of the homeschooling movement indicates very much to the contrary. What is a homeschooling household, but a grassroots school sprouted up around a single family? A properly designed voucher system would encourage groups of parents, when they feel they have no better alternative, to homeschool their kids together. That's a school! The vouchers would help with the cost of educational materials, and what more is needed?

You seem to have absorbed the idea that education is something that comes only from large institutions. The truth is, education is a thoroughly individual activity that requires nothing but access to information and to people who already understand that information. In this Internet age, those things are more readily available than ever.

Chiefly because exposing school systems to a competitive market implicitly accepts that some schools will fall into even worse decay that they currently are. Poor schools become poorer, with little funding to hire better teachers or acquire better books.

As schools are not objects which can house an infinite number of students, some students will be forced to attend those schools caught in that downward spiral

This doesn't make any sense. There's no limit on the number of schools that can be created. Vouchers make it easier for parents to remove their children from failing schools and put them in better ones. Poorly run schools will quickly lose all their students and shut down. It's the current system that keeps failing schools in operation, not a voucher system!

Gradillas has an explanation for the decline of A.P. calculus at Garfield: Escalante and Villavicencio were not allowed to run the program they had created on their own terms. In his phrase, the teachers no longer "owned" their program. He's speaking metaphorically, but there's something to be said for taking him literally.

In the real world, those who provide a service can usually find a way to get it to those who want it, even if their current employer disapproves. If someone feels that he can build a better mousetrap than his employer wants to make, he can find a way to make it, market it, and perhaps put his former boss out of business. Public school teachers lack that option.

There are very few ways to compete for education dollars without being part of the government school system. If that system is inflexible, sooner or later even excellent programs will run into obstacles.

I've never understood why the left, which has supported the idea of a single-payer health care system, can't get its head around vouchers, which amount to a single-payer education system. No, a voucher system isn't perfect; yes, there will be abuses. But look at the ongoing train wreck of a system we have now!

In a voucher system, Jaime Escalante would have been massively successful, probably at the top of an organization teaching thousands of students. So what if some fundamentalists use their vouchers to send their kids to religious schools? Vouchers would finally give us a way to end the culture of mediocrity that has such a death grip on our schools now.

We can't even simulate mouse brains with full fidelity despite have computers capable of simulating many times the number of neurons a mouse has.

I'm not at all convinced we are anywhere near capable of simulating all the neurons in a mouse's brain. There's reason to think that individual neurons are far more complex than is commonly appreciated.

For instance, people have long tended to think of neuron firing as binary: the neuron fires or it doesn't. This view is built in to the computer models we call "neural networks". But I have heard it argued that there is a lot of important internal detail in the sequence of spikes we call "firing": that there is information encoded in the sequence of interspike intervals, and that dendrite trees encode and decode this information.

I think that would be slightly better, but the way I have it is quite usable -- considerably easier than C-x o.