This is the answer, more or less. For small-to-middling forums, reducing spam is pretty easy. A few volunteers to delete the ones that get through suffices for the rest.

It breaks down to 1) keep out easy drive-by spammers, which means registration with a valid email address and some kind of barrier to detour the smarter bots (ReCaptcha and the like); 2) filter posts through Akismet or similar method; 3) have a community large enough and engaged enough to want to zero out spam posts.

The third step is the hardest, and has nothing to do with spam posts.

And with Net Neutrality, if you don't get good government-regulated service... what?

Or are you pretty confident that the FCC will handle regulating the Internet as well as they do, say, terrestrial radio and broadcast TV?

Yeah, because Rails is being used everywhere.

I doubt that most of the "scalped" tickets are actually sold by scalpers. Most are probably sold by friends and employees of the event and/or venue.

Think about it--before tickets go on sale, roadies and janitors get a chance to buy premium seats at face value, maybe even with an employee discount. The performers don't care, the venue doesn't have to pay employment taxes on this unofficial employee benefit, and the employee gets some extra cash.

This.

It's the perfect computer for a significant chunk of the population. Email, Web, photos, videos. Takes up little space, and doesn't need to have a nerd peer up its asshole every 6 months looking for malware cancer.

Having a way for people with simple needs to get quick medical attention and out of the waiting rooms so that people who do NOT have simple needs is a good idea.

It doesn't matter if the good idea comes from a source you think is compromised. The good idea stands on its own merits.

This is like the self-checkout line at grocery stores. I say they should go for it.

Once they sort through all the science images, that might happen.

Those science images, is there nothing they can't do?

I bet they've got a science pole, too.

I had to deal with a PDF form that used all kinds of whizzo crap. Uploading of files, submitting to a server over the Internet, really flashy stuff.

It didn't work at all on a Mac, and worked poorly on a PC.

God save us from developers who read "How To Be An Unleashed Javascript PDF Dummy in 21 Days".

1) People skeptical of the solidity of the science in AGW are not 9/11 conspiracy theorists. You're comparing one to the other because it makes your argument simpler. It's a meaningless and dishonest comparison. The questions don't go away simply because you call the questioner a Nazi.

2) It's not just the emails, though they are somewhat damning. People are looking at the code, and they're looking at the provenance of the information as well. It's not encouraging. It's certainly not "settled science". It looks more like "settled results".

3) Any rebuttal that begins with "you have to have a Ph.D. to understand why this number should be a 3 instead of a 4" smells funny. I don't have to have a Ph.D. in astrophysics to understand the basics of absorption line spectrums, because the explanation is straightforward and well understood. Hiding behind credentials is not a substitute for understanding thoroughly enough that you can explain the hows and whys and defend them.

I'm actually of the opinion that carbon emissions are not good, and we should do something about them. Carbon emissions make a fairly good metric for efficiency, and encouraging efficiency is a good thing. I object to grand, sweeping changes negotiated in the political sphere because once you introduce politics you can't disentangle it. Especially inside the global political sphere. Carbon emissions become a club to wield against political enemies and defend political interests, and it becomes decoupled from the environmental good.

So I'm in favor of continuing study of climatology, and to continue to work on the climate models. This is good science that we need to know. I'm in favor of establishing some kind of baseline to measure carbon emissions so we can make something like informed decisions. I object to climatologists needing to come up with doomsday scenarios to justify their funding, and I object to emissions legislation whose primary purpose seems to be redistribution of wealth. I don' think this makes me a 9/11 conspiracy theorist, nor a birther. Yet I think the current state of climatology is full of holes concealed by a lot of hand-waving.

Do they put something in the water cooler at Facebook HQ?

BTW, the "News Feed/Live Feed" thing is a piece of shit and whoever came up with it should be wrapped in barbed wire and shot into the sun.

Facebook used to be pretty nifty. Now it's made of AIDS. Fuck it.

All they need is a dozen "flashlight" applications, some Tetris clones and a Winnie-the-Pooh theme and you've essentially duplicated the Blackberry App World.

Not to mention that getting carcasses off the road benefits everybody. Who cares if it was tenderized by a Dodge?