See the second link under the "Advanced" filter: Apparently reading level is not based entirely on the quality, density or accessibility of ideas in prose, but in the element of situational humor as well.

Throughout history, every library sale and used bookstore has had its opportunistic patrons, only difference here is that knowledge of the medium is no longer required. What before could only be accomplished by a select few bibliophiles, every patron can now perform. The constant "Oh look dear, see if that nice gentleman over there with the scanner can help you find what you need." factor can't help morale much either.

That would explain the uneasy feeling I get when misspelling a word, usually before I've even had a chance to look at the screen to see what was typed.

"After reading this book and applying the principles it contained on increasing one's abilities..." Great that these inmates were able to do some good with this program, but it is based on Scientology, there is nothing misleading here.

Not to mention the fact it won't take ISP's long to optimize for these kinds of tests, rendering results less than meaningless.

No, those kids and neighborhoods are all the worse for their own neglect of their own obligations to their families and futures. Parental discipline and example only go so far -- whether one is a good person or not lies entirely on the flame that burns from within.

Usually a man's expository mode is much easier to judge than his private life, as the quality of a man's work stands on its own merit where the quality of his parenting can only ever be told through subjective accounts, often one-sided and thus characterized by omission of crucial detail.

So left-right (analytical thinking, creativity) balance is cited as increasingly crucial to success in the marketplace, and has been shown to deteriorate when influenced by the promise of monetary gain. Interesting -- if one thought for one moment that given a random sample of the population, the mere promise of financial reward could somehow enhance those qualities. But in science it is often necessary to demonstrate a principle, however obvious, before moving on to more interesting experiments. Any meritocracy should provide numerous tools useful in identifying those few individuals naturally exceptional in this area (absent any incentive), and whose attention top employers will naturally compete for (often financially). For the talented, financial reward is not a stimulant, but potentially a retainer and definitely an enabler -- it ensures these individuals' needs are met outside the workplace, so they are better able to focus on the higher level problems at hand. It would seem the question here becomes: how do organizations identify, attract and foster this talent amongst the general workforce, knowing financial reward is not the answer? It would seem we should continue to focus on predisposition, identifying those individuals demonstrating a high degree of interest in an array of left-right subject areas, and an ability to attack problems in novel ways.

SMTP message bodies are quite often HTML. POP and IMAP may suffer the same fate as NNTP in another 10-20 years if the signal-to-noise ratio continues to diminish (goes from 99% to 99.999% spam). BitTorrent uses HTTP for tracker communications, but will never be considered mainstream while it is primarily used for copyright infringement, and IM clients may not be running on port 80 yet but they are increasingly using HTTP (if not HTML formatting as well), specifically to minimize the barrier to adoption posed by firewalls. So these examples support the spirit of my previous observation quite well, thanks.

All of which (except SSH) typically run on port 80 -- we routinely teach our firewalls the difference, and that it no longer matters...

The jury has been out on that for a few hundred years now. Consider 1.) An unenforceable (de jure) law ultimately rewards the dishonest while punishing only the honest who confess their crime (Hobbes). And 2.) From a political standpoint, unenforceable legislation creates the appearance of real moral authority without risk of alienating those constituents who would be punished if were enforceable. Public disregard for enforceability therefore promotes dishonesty of both the citizen and the official -- exactly the sort of business an ethical society should avoid.

Bottom line: race and gender *do* matter. What would become of our beloved Chocolate Factory if it became known that Willy Wonka exclusively used male Oompa Loompas in his production lines?

A variation on this theme, how about displaying an additional desktop from the current user session within a nested X server (a-la Xephyr)? Granted we don't yet have hardware acceleration in Xephyr, but all in good time...

Nytimes.com may succeed, but as a wsj.com subscriber myself, somewhat disappointed with an increasingly noisy site and "front-page" opinion content a-la News corp, I may have to switch.

Ok this may not be quite newsworthy but, it's Sunday right? Anyway, the energy consumed by 26 million CPUs running at or near 100% utilization for 15 or so minutes each day translates to a considerable corporate carbon footprint. It *must* be possible to halve these requirements without impact to actual gameplay.