bascule

The story in the Times indicates his torture also lead to a number of false positives, i.e. the information obtained under the duress of torture was unreliable, even for the individual you're using to make the argument. Is it your contention that one success trumps all the failures?

Some of Ron Paul's leading supporters are Alex Jones' army of conspiracist moonbats

Very high. If you're like most people you bought matched drives from the same batch, and probably installed them new. RAID-5 ensures drives are exposed to the same environmental conditions and the same sort of read/write load. Because everything is so symmetrical between all the drives, there's a good chance drive failures will be too. Whatever problem caused one drive to fail is likely exhibited by the other drives in the same batch, especially if they've been subject to the same environmental conditions and load. Couple this with another problem: after installing a replacement drive, all drives in the array will be under load as all data across the entire array is read off the original disks and the parity data recalculated and written to the new disk. Placing disks under load for such a prolonged period of time, especially when an extremely similar drive just failed, is a great opportunity to bring about failures in other drives. All that said: RAID is no replacement for backups. If, for whatever reason, a software problem corrupts your filesystem, your RAID will happily write out the corruption along with parity to ensure that your corrupt filesystem is safe from a single drive failure. But it's still a corrupt filesystem...

Penn & Teller. There are certainly times when I'm like "Oh jesus, why are you saying that?" I saw their Vegas show recently (for the second time in 3 months or so) and they started going on about Al Gore and global warming being a bunch of "bad math" But umm, all that said... I really like their unique blend of rationalist libertarianism and having a skeptical attitude about all things both scientific and (especially) unscientific/pseudoscientific.

Hmmm... http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article3086937.ece Yeah, this case certainly isn't as cut-and-dry as presented in the OP...

Several people are working on collaborative P2P backup software. The general idea is to use a distributed hash table (sometimes called a tuplespace) in conjunction with erasure coding. This means that peers housing a copy of a portion of the data you've backed up can go down, but thanks to the erasure coding none of your data is lost. You might check out http://allmydata.com. They're doing something similar. In terms of "danger", you'd hope their software signed (and hopefully encrypted) your data with a key held by you. Otherwise, yes, there is potential danger with data tampering.

The problem with "You" as the person of the year was that it was grossly misunderstood. In context it meant you as a member of a citizen media / participatory culture. It did not mean everyone in general. Time was trying to make a statement about how in the new media anyone can participate, however not everyone chooses to. That nuance was lost on the readership as a whole. I'll conceed that when Harry Potter is making points about the cultural mainstreaming of anal sex.

I'd say it's a toss up between and

I think you missed the point of my post. The point of the Establishment clause is to keep religion out of government and the government out of religion. While the Establishment protects the religious from government, it also protects the government from religion.

The true intention of the Establishment Clause of the first amendment was to prevent the establishment of a national religion. This obviously benefits freedom of religion, as a national religion could leverage government support to abolish all others. James Madison, the author of the Bill of Rights, was adamantly opposed to any religious involvement in government. Take, for instance, the issue of Congressional chaplains. Madison had this to say: The phrase "separation of church and state" was plucked from the writings of Thomas Jefferson, but entered the national discourse through the verdict of the US Supreme Court case Everson v. Ewing, which concluded:

My #1 problem with Ron Paul: He doesn't believe in evolution, or rather he believes it's an "interesting theory" but "just a theory" blah blah blah.

Chess is inferior to Go!

I have a hard time accepting the idea of Huckabee as some sort of all-embracing candidate. Between his rampant homophobia, dismissal of evolution (coupled with a literal interpretation of the Bible) and his desire to completely reform the tax system, he seems like, well, not exactly someone who'd be appealing to the political mainstream. Not to mention lying about his theology degree and pardoning a rapist he thought had been newborn in Jesus.

For the record, from the verdict of Everson v. Ewing:

Glad to see the O'Reillys are winning the WAR ON CHRISTMAS Yes, let's acknowledge its historical importance as the birthday of Mithras

Can I pick Cymbaline as the Floyd's most underappreciated song?

You admire Roger Waters for his vocal talent? I'll admit he's an interesting vocalist with a unique voice. I could say the same thing about Geddy Lee. They certainly don't rank among the foremost in my personal pantheon of vocalists though. I'd rate Gilmour higher than both. David Gilmour has a less... shall we say abrasive voice, and in his heyday had one of the most beautiful falsetto voices ever. For example: Fat Old Sun and The Narrow Way (both songs he wrote, by the way) But, just for contrast: Waters vocals on If (particularly if you've ever heard him perform it live) were awesome Roger Waters doesn't exactly have a falsetto voice, at least as far as I've ever heard him sing. He has excellent range, but when it comes to higher pitch, his greatest talent is probably his girl-like scream. Which is pretty damn cool, at least in songs like Careful With that Axe Eugene and Run Like Hell

Forgot 'em. Must've been too much Brain Salad Surgery. I think most non-casual Floyd fans prefer Meddle. Might have something to do with Echoes... ...and One of these Days... ...and a Pillow of Winds... and Fearless... and San Tropez... ...but hopefully not Seamus Leave it to Floyd to torture a dog in the name of music

I think he also proved if you're a vegan who starts eating nothing but McDonalds, you might begin to suffer organ failure.

I don't actively dislike Radiohead. I certainly don't understand people's obsession with them. You can certainly say I don't appreciate how "brilliant they are." There's a few songs I like... Creep... High and Dry... Radiohead tries to be experimental prog rock. My favorite band is the greatest experimental prog rock band of all time... Pink Floyd. I like a lot of other prog too: King Crimson Yes Jethro Tull Frank Zappa Genesis Dream Theater Umphrey's McGee

You can compile BASIC to a native executable. You can do the same thing with Python. Check out py2exe

...again. http://money.cnn.com/2007/12/11/news/economy/fed_rates/index.htm Wall Street cries as the decrease was lower than expected. Well, that's certainly not in the spirit of Laissez Faire capitalism. If you buy mortgage backed bonds, and they turn out to be worthless, isn't that sucks to be you? Apparently not in America. Here the federal government bails out the rich, and the common joe eats the bill. Suck it, America.

Well, glad you people enjoyed the article, but.. No responses to the OP? Whatever happened to Mokele?

Because if there were no Universe, we wouldn't be here to care... PROBLEM SOLVED! Can I have some of that money now? But seriously, it'd be nice to observe some particles theorized by various quantum gravitational theories...