A dime bag is how much you get for $10. How much you get depends on the quality of the weed.

Yep, IDTech made it between 2001 and 2005. Samsung has one, too, of lower quality (it's a TN display instead of IPS.)

Three or four models of NEC laptop (at least one in Japan in 2002, one there in 2004, and one in Europe in 2004, and maybe another,) and the ThinkPad R50p had such a panel as an option.

That "limited subset" of microbes is quite unlimited. Virtually any microbe that gets into your body proper is dangerous even the normally nice ones in your digestive system. The body is designed to keep that stuff out for a good reason. Even with a healthy immune system you can die from microbes that get in. That's why nurses are hard core about cleanliness in the hospital. And I really don't why you brought up home cleanliness. It's not my experience that nurses are more obsessive about this than anyone else.

I agree with you. I also think that revenge has gotten a bad rap from the politically correct pussification brigade, to the point where we shy away from admitting that it's actually what we're doing. If someone I loved was murdered, I would hunt the killer down and take them apart at the seams. That's revenge, but in my book it's also totally justified.

Interesting point about responsibility for crimes. That's something I've always wondered about - at what point do we stop saying "you chose to do X and will take the consequences" and start saying "you have a disorder which caused you to do X and cannot be held accountable". I think they key is identifying exactly how much choice the person had in the matter - I suspect in the future we're going to need statistical models to assign some kind of 'free will index' to each person based on their psych profile and maybe genetic factors (insert ob. Gattaca reference), which would determine their level of responsibility and freedom, as well as the consequences they suffer for misbehaviour.

Taken the Voight-Kampff lately? Maybe it's just your ugly language. "Defective". "Deformed". "Faulty". What a way to describe human beings!

And what's the point of your quest? You say: it "does nothing but weaken us, as a race". Is our race weak? We certainly don't seem to be circling the drain as a species at the moment - in fact we're thriving in plague numbers. Numbers enough to share our resources with people who can't help themselves.

Stop trying to perfect the human race. All we need is for most of us to be OK enough. And we are, more or less.

I'd say yep. I'd probably suggest he change his name and move though. I'd imagine he'd need a lot of counseling afterward.
I suppose I should have said the only good reason for prison is to stop people from doing bad things. Reducing re-offending is most of it. Making an example is a tiny bit. Min I think the latter half should be done through education.

People going around not-murdering because they could get caught and get prison time are scary either way. That type of person is a short burt of adrenaline away from murdering someone.

Stop spending ~$43,000 per prisoner to house them in Club Fed and revert prison to what it should be: Three square meals and the chance to break big rocks into little rocks.

Lesson Number 1:

In the American federal system almost all violent offenders are prosecuted at the state and local level.

Lesson Number 2:

The constitutional roots of federal criminal jurisdiction are in interstate and economic crimes. The Secret Service, for example, was originally organized to fight counterfeiting.

The white collar criminal can do enormous harm but it is often only the Feds who can put him behind bars - and keep him there.

That thought can be - disquieting - for the geek.

Because Club Fed was built for him. It's the prison farm for the financial and technocratic elite.

Lesson Number 3:

Prisoners do not remain prisoners forever. Breaking big ones into little ones does nothing to prepare them - or us - for their eventual release.
       

You say "revenge" - I would have said "justice". But perhaps they should be two separate points on the list.

We all do everything we do because of our brains, and none of our brains are perfect. The real question is whether the person is responsible for their crime. With some types of brain damage or mental illnesses then, no, of course they aren't. But you wouldn't say "This person has naturally high testosterone levels and he can't help being agressive so his sentence should be lighter". It helps us to know why some people are more agressive - but we need to accept that humans vary in what they are. Otherwise we will be on our way to diagnosing anyone who isn't a happy, uncritical extrovert as having "a brain abnormality"

Forced to chase a mechanical bunny around a race track?

I used to commute 70 miles to work daily. I found it soul crushing. IMO life is way too short to lose 3 hours of it every work day in a car. If this is your dream job, find a way to move closer to it. If it's not, then spend whatever time you have worrying about finding a closer job. Once you've eliminated the commute you can find a way to live more actively. Maybe you can bike to work like I do.

In the meantime just try to eat the best you can, lots of raw vegetables is my suggestion.

"When given two arguments, one presented by a research team from a respected univeristy, and another from a guy who admits that he might be mis-remembering his high school chemistry, I'm going to invest much more time in the latter, because it's more likely to be a good use of my time."

You mean the former right? Unless I'm misunderstanding what you consider a good use of your time.

A very seductive argument - except that it leaves out one of the most important points: the cost to society of chronically bad health. We've heard this argument in various guises many times in the past - the big polluters always used to whine about having to clean up after themselves, arguing that there was no benefit to it, only "unreasonable costs". And so on.

I don't know how much it costs society in total, exactly, but into the cost goes lost productivity due to illness as well as expenses to health care etc. Those of us who are of an older generation will remember from their childhood that the general expectation was, that when you got to around 50, you would be in decline, and at 60 you'd be almost as good as dead - now, of course, we aren't really surprised to find that many are still going strong when they are in there 60es. What has happened in the meantime is that there have been a number of public initiatives to improve people's lifestyle - anti-salt, anti-smoking and other campaings - and they have had an effect.

The reason governments do this is not to raise money, but to save money in the long term - have you any idea how much just one patient with long term health problem costs the taxpayers? It easily runs into millions, especially since you can now survive for decades with heart problems. So you should stop whining about the money this might cost you. Plus, of course, if you are not stuffing yourself every day of the week with junk food in front of the telly or computer, you are not going to be hit much by this at all. Junk food, DVDs and computer games are luxuries, despite their cheap prices, and luxuries are things you strictly speaking don't need any more than you need 3 dozen oysters or a plateful of Beluga caviar every day.

One assumes you're not going to lie to cover your own ass (whether in court or otherwise) -- I like to believe that most folks learned to stop doing that sometime in their teens. If your honor means so little to you (or if not that, than your trustworthiness to others), then have fun with that.

I don't think you can do that without violating the HDMI spec. The whole point of HDMI is to prevent you from having unencrypted HD video; if you could just toss on an adapter to go from HDMI to DVI (the latter is unencrypted by definition), then HDMI wouldn't need to exist.

What you could do would be eliminate HDMI and just have DVI, and then people who want HDMI use a DVI -> HDMI cable (which exist); this direction is trivial because HDMI devices will play DVI, IIRC. But this is sort of a no-go because people wouldn't buy a computer that "didn't do HDMI," plus at least on Windows there are probably applications that won't work without the encrypted signal path provided by HDMI. (On Linux I don't think that will ever be the case or matter.)

"The bird thing is pure BS. Besides the turbines can be placed far offshore."

Won't somebody please think of the flying fish?!