Alexa and the Internet Archive were founded by the same guy way back when (Brewster Kahle). It makes sense that he would've used one of his company's services for the other one.

Absolutely right. I have to correct this misconception regularly.

My lessons are never the same year to year because the students are never the same year to year. Sometimes the level of the class is higher or lower, but that's not where the greatest variation comes in. Instead, what you'll find is that this year's class will breeze through some topics that last year's class agonized over, and then utterly implode on topics that last year's class found easy. What's hard and what's easy varies constantly, almost randomly. It's mysterious, inevitable, exciting, and exhausting. Based on the peculiarities of each year's students, I spend as much time adjusting every lesson as I did preparing them originally. Sometimes, it even takes more time, if I have to restructure things in a way that affects many subsequent areas.

Organic doesn't mean "safe" -- a pesticide is a toxin and made to kill, regardless of what it is made of.

And it's very important to carry this reasoning to its logical conclusion: Which plants produce these killer toxins? All of them.

Plants do not want to be eaten. Plants avoid being eaten by being toxic, and most of them are very, very good at it. Natural pesticides are no less carcinogenic than synthetics (at least in rats), but "Americans eat about 1,500 mg of natural pesticides per person per day, which is about 10,000 times more than the 0.09 mg they consume of synthetic pesticide residues."

Failure to appreciate this fact has, at least once, led to the tragicomic result of "organic" produce being far more toxic than conventional. Celery produces some nasty irritants called psoralens, which are pretty effective at warding off insects. So some organic growers chose to plant "insect-resistant" celery that's been bred for high psoralen content. Too bad these varieties are human-resistant as well. Harvesters suffered severe rashes just from handling this stuff... but that's okay, it's natural!

What we call "vegetables" are simply those plants whose toxins we can digest in the quantities we normally eat. To a deer, poison ivy is a vegetable, but fiddleheads are deadly. In fact, even some humans can eat poison ivy, being naturally immune to the problematic substance, urushiol.

I'm not sure which is funnier -- that the sentence was left in the /. summary, or that it appears in the fourth paragraph of TFA.

These are the words of someone who clearly has zero concept of the planet's past and future timelines, where we currently are in that timeline, and mankind's own history in relation to the planet's timeline.

Hint: An event that's expected to happen in 6 to 7 billion years isn't something we should worry about at all, especially when you consider that mankind has existed for 1 to 2 million years at most of the planet's 4.5 billion year history.

These companies didn't send these warning emails. Epsilon sent them for them on their behalf. There is a difference.

You have a rubbermaid to what???

Shallow moral relativism is just bullshit.

More importantly, it's bullshit that is easily refuted.

If the premise of the book is simply an admonishment to be more thoughtful and skeptical with regard to history, that's quite commendable.

But it seems more that the premise of the book is to advocate the extreme (yet fashionable) idea that historical truth is impossible. That's not commendable, because it is nonsense.

Thus, the maxim "History is written by the winners" means something completely different depending on whether you believe the former or the latter. If the former -- the realist position -- then it means that historical truth exists but it must be carefully extracted from multiple biased viewpoints. If the latter -- the postmodern position -- then it means that historical truth doesn't exist at all, so every viewpoint is just as valid as any other. (That's no exaggeration. Consider historian E.P. Sander's opinion that "No historical events can be verified, even events that we have recorded on videotape.")

So when you say:

the entire premise is that the Lotr is a lie.

that doesn't tell me quite enough about this book. Is Eskov's premise that LotR is contains many lies and must be examined, or is it that all histories are nothing but lies and you can therefore spin any event in any way to benefit any party you like?

One telling fact gives it away, I think. If Eskov wanted to demonstrate a realist position, then he could have written the book as if Sauron were a good guy being slandered by the victors. But he doesn't. He writes as if good and evil are nothing but interpretations that a historian imposes upon the record in order to elevate one side over another. This is elementary postmodern historiography: to Eskov, it seems, the opposite of Tolkien's position is not "Sauron's history was misrepresented and he was actually quite decent" but rather "history is fiction and good is relative."

And that is the subtle (and probably unintentional) sleight-of-hand that rankles me. Eskov's project was to characterize LotR as being biased by writing a parallel account in the same world. He must write The Last Ringbearer within Tolkien's fictional world for any comparison with LotR to be valid. Yet the unavoidable issue is that The Last Ringbearer does not take place in Tolkien's world. It takes place in a world where Sauron and elves and magic exist but morality does not, and that is Eskov's world, not Tolkien's world. In such a world, an account like LotR loses by definition. Eskov's project only appears to succeed because he has imported a premise that makes it impossible for him to fail, i.e., it is circular.

That doesn't mean The Last Ringbearer isn't good literature. It's a fine story in its own right, and I am impressed with Eskov's cleverness. But if he set out to write the same story from a different viewpoint, the book does not qualify. It simply isn't the same story if it does not take place in the same world. The comparison cannot be made, and therefore lessons about real-world historiography cannot be drawn.

Well, I take that back. There is a meta-lesson about real-world historiography: don't import premises that make your argument circular. Historians who believe that morality is relative automatically dismiss any moral claim as being non-historical. Historians who believe morality is objective do the opposite. Those are not historical judgments, they are philosophical judgments disguised as history. That doesn't mean that each view of history is equally correct; it means that one of those views on morality is mistaken and you ought to sort that out before you can accurately do history.

HP transferred the Alpha technology to Intel in exchange for some deals on chips and marketing. That's the last anyone heard of the Alpha.

Though, like many other DEC innovations, we continue to benefit from Alpha today. The next-generation Alpha EV8 was the first chip to implement SMT (hyperthreading). There was an internal legend as to how that came about: rumor was that the chip folks said to the compiler folks, "Hey, we just built an 8-issue processor," to which they responded, "Are you kidding? We can't optimize for that." So they thought for a while and decided to just let the CPU run four threads at once.

Such a pity. The chip was nearly finished when Compaq sold the whole thing to Intel, which promptly canceled it.

Meanwhile the Itanium, dubbed the iTanic, sank.

It was sunk out of the gate. HP grudgingly shipped various revisions of the Alpha EV7 for several years... and if you believe the tech tabloids, Alpha was so much faster than Itanic that HP declared that "not one Alpha benchmark will be released until the Itanium platform(s) is/are faster".

Doesn't it seem a bit irresponsible on the part of the museums to let those VW Bugs drive around their hallways?

You also have a problem when the cashier themselves are in the Type 1 category. This happened to me at a drugstore a while back. Everyone was standing in one line that was generally straight back from one of the cashiers. Things were going well with most of the other cashiers calling "Next". Then a few people noticed that one cashier off to the side was just standing there fiddling with her fingernails. When someone asked her why she wasn't taking any customers, she replied "Oh, you all are in her line," which naturally forced the breakup of the nice orderly queue. Ugh!