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So seriously, I didn't make this up... Last night I had a dream about this crazy antigravity tube. The way it worked was as soon as you stepped into the tube you were drawn into the center. When you walked into the tube they had to attach some weird pink cylinder to the ceiling of the tube to offset your mass, like the mass of objects on the ceiling made up for the mass of the objects in the tube. Somehow. Or whatever. Also there was a dragon boat you could ride on that would fly around the inside of the tube. (Note: Dragon boat didn't flap its wings, instead it had ROCKETS) Awesome! After I woke up I thought about ways my crazy antigravity tube could be made more practical, like using liquid to balance out the mass of any objects inserted into the tube rather than the weird pink urinal cake things. I was also curious about the mass ratio between myself and the pink urinal cakes but I guess my dreambrain didn't get that far. Oh well.

You mean like when Glenn Beck suggested a green movement conspiracy (being carried out under full knowledge of Obama) to push universal healthcare as a form of population control? That the Smart Grid is an evil conspiracy by the proponents of wind and solar power, and soon the evil government will make sure your thermostat is always set at 72 degrees?. That Democrats are in the midst of a power grab where they'll fire the kings of industry as they feed off the union trough, decide what syrup IHOP should use, co-opting free speech and silencing critics like Beck? And then of course there was the time he called Obama a racist. You watch Glenn Beck? Really? And you don't notice this stuff? Every single time I tune into the man it's a nonstop rant about how the evil government is part of a giant conspiracy to destroy the country, coupled with endless slippery slope arguments like "the government wants to control what goes into our food, next they'll be telling us which religions we can believe in!" etc. Oh poor country *crocodile tears* I weep for you, why are the liberals destroying you, have they no shame?

Does anyone else notice the irony of jryan showing up to whine about how the Democrats are "fiscal liberals" without ever in the history of these forums broached the issue of all the debt the Republicans racked up in the preceding two terms? jryan, I'm not exactly sure what you think "fiscal liberals" or "fiscal conservatives" are, but as far as the people who hold power in this country go the Democrats are the closest to "fiscal conservatives" at this point. At least in the previous 30 years when the Republicans are in control of the government they have racked up enormous national debt, no more so than in 2000-2006 when they controlled both the Executive and Legislative branch at the same time. Where were you then and why weren't you complaining?

Sorry, Hannity sees the world through the lens of someone who is predisposed against, shall we say, positions which require higher reasoning. These include: opposition to a scientific view of the world (as opposed to a religious one), immediate opposition to change, particularly in socially progressive areas like equal rights for gays, asserting America's military dominance over the rest of the world in the name of eliminating terrorism, and well, I can go on. Do I really need to? Tthe man is very much an anti-liberal contrarian, to the point Fox recruited Alan Colmes to be his punching bag until he couldn't take it anymore. Hannity certainly has an elitism about which people are "real" Americans (something patently obvious if you've ever watched "Hannity's America", as opposed to say, real America). He does perpetuate the myth, also perpetuated by O'Reilly, that there are "real Americans" and then there are all these evil sinning liberal douchebags who want to destroy the country, not to put too fine a point on it. So, that's what makes him a douchebag. But in HannityReality, it's not like the evil liberals are, shall we stay, making an organized effort to destroy America. Every liberal does their own part to destroy a small piece of the country. The total effect of all these people unconsciously working in concert is what's causing the problem. Now flip over to Glenn Beck's reality, and yes, there's a PLAN. A (paranoid conspiracist) sinister plan to destroy this country, being perpetrated by the liberals in Washington. People must rise up against it while we still have a little bit of America left to defend! Join the Tea Party! Become part of the 9.12 project! We can fix this! We can show the liberals they are not in control, by giving power to the Republicans, Fox News, and most importantly... Glenn Beck. Ugh.

This discussion is rather moot. Natural language in its texutal form is a comparatively low-bandwidth medium which is easily compressed. Pretty much any other medium of communication: images, sounds, video... are going to be much higher bandwidth than text.

In my mind the primary goal of the legislation was job recovery and stimulating the domestic economy, so sending the money off to China does not accomplish those goals.

I suppose it could be either depending on the circumstances. Long-term solitary confinement for months (i.e. alone in a cell, your only contact with other humans being when someone places food through a small door) sounds like hell.

Performance and reliability are very much tied to the language of implementation, although a bad algorithm in any language is still a bad algorithm... That said, C is riddled with "unsafe" features like pointers, fixed size buffers with no built-in OOB checking, and manual memory allocation. These require constant vigilance on the part of the language's user to ensure programs are correct. Java manages to solve all of these problems with a comparatively small impact on performance, and retaining a largely C++-like development environment. Java could make a good systems programming language.

Except they inherited trillion dollar deficits from the previous administration, not to mention an extremely troubled economy which isn't generating much in the way of tax revenue. Those things don't go away overnight. Being concerned at all about the deficit is a welcome change from the previous administration.

This has been attempted a few times, for example JavaOS by Sun provided a small microkernel which would start the Java Virtual Machine, so that large portions of the operating system could be written in Java itself. That didn't pan out so great.

Would? Well paygo passed now... so does that mean the healthcare bill needs to be rewritten? If so... woohoo! Or maybe Obama actually cares about fighting the deficit...

I assume you meant the relationship between Maddow and MSNBC, in which case I'll say that Glenn Beck is more aptly compared to someone like Alex Jones on the left, except Glenn Beck's audience is about an order of magnitude larger than Alex Jones. I can't think of a Fox News personality offhand who's an apt comparison to Rachel Maddow. Also, lumping Hannity and Beck together? Have you ever actually watched Fox News? Hannity is just a douchebag. Glenn Beck is an outright nutjob.

Yes, and they're also finding ways to fund them. Apparently the horrible silly stupid healthcare bill will actually reduce the deficit. They're not the Republicans, you know. They actually *like* paygo. Tax and spend! It's a lot better than don't tax and spend, which was the Republican solution to the problem as demonstrated in 2000-2006. Also: under Reagan.

Uhh, as far as I can tell Fox News thinks climate science is a fairy tale.

It's more that Fox News is trumpeting the opinion of anti-science. I'd feel just the same way if a bizarre looking creature was discovered and biologists were uncertain how to classify it or what its ancestors are, and Fox News trotted it out as proof evolution is a lie, while at the same time CNN trots out any discovery of a new species as proof of evolution.

Why?

More to the point, without government you can't have society. Society is based on the idea that the social contract is somehow enforced. Perhaps for very small groups where you have intimate knowledge of every member the social contract can be enforced with concepts as simple as friendship, trust, and the fear of being ostracized by the group, but as your society grows you really need a central authority to ensure everyone is playing by the rules.

I think it's because the primary intent of the stimulus is to create domestic jobs and strengthen the domestic economy. Accomplishing the tasks the money was actually budgeted for is secondary. Hiring people to dig ditches and then fill them back in as part of the New Deal didn't accomplish a lot, but it got people working again and becoming active participants in the economy.

While it's silly when talking heads misreport science, that's a common problem with media and science reporting in general. However, rather than just misreporting science, Fox News is actually contradicting the science. Snow on the East Coast? Clearly none of these scientists who think the Earth is getting hotter have any clue what they're talking about. Winter is cold!

On Friday Obama signed legislation which both raised the ceiling for the national debt (from $12.4 to $14.3 trillion) and, at Obama's behest, restored pay-as-yo-go legislation which was repealed by Bush and the Republicans in 2002, in preparation for creating the largest entitlement since Medicare. The new paygo legislation requires all new spending bills to be accompanied by legislation which shows how they'll be funded: either through revenue increases, spending decreases, or a combination thereof. http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2010/0213/Pay-go-redux-Can-Obama-rein-in-federal-spending Days after presenting a budget that will create a record $1.56 trillion deficit this year, President Obama vowed Saturday to comb through future budgets line by line to forestall growing deficits that began under his predecessor, George W. Bush. Legislation signed by Obama on Friday raises the federal debt ceiling from $12.4 trillion to $14.3 trillion but aims to rein in runaway federal spending by bringing back the “pay-go” rules of the 1990s – forcing lawmakers and the president to offset new spending with equal cuts elsewhere. “This isn’t a perfect world. This is Washington,” Obama said in his weekly Saturday radio address. “[balancing budgets] falls prey to the pressure of special interests, to the pull of local concerns, and to a reality familiar to every single American – the fact that it is a lot easier to spend a dollar than save one.” Republicans, who love to talk trash about the deficit now that they no longer have the power to create it, hate paygo: http://liveshots.blogs.foxnews.com/2010/02/13/potus-says-paygo-is-common-sense-rule/?test=latestnews Republicans have long opposed PAYGO because they say it enables lawmakers to increase taxes to fund more programs. A spokesman for Representative Mike Pence (R-IN) tells Fox that the Congressman believes PAYGO means “You pay, the Democrats go on spending.” This, of course, is opposed to the Republicans "you don't pay, the Republicans go on borrowing" approach to funding the government: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAYGO#U.S._Congress After the expiration of PAYGO, budget deficits returned. The federal surplus shrank from $236.2 billion in 2000 to $128.2 billion in 2001, then a $157.8 billion deficit in 2002—the last year statutory PAYGO was in effect. The deficit increased to $377.6 in 2003 and $412.7 billion in 2004.[3] The federal deficit excluding trust funds was $537.3 billion in FY2006.[7] In the first 6 years of President Bush's term, with a Republican controlled Congress, the federal debt increased by $3 trillion.[8][9]. The public debt continued to grow after Democrats gained control of Congress in 2006.[10][11]

Because certain people whose opinions about books I respect have read them, and, yeah...

If you watch the Fox News clips from the video, they are arguing the earth isn't warming because it's snowing on the East Coast.

No worries, just buy some accessories! http://gizmodo.com/5458344/ipad-kickstand-accessory-doubles-as-a-nice-leather-case-too Seriously though, the kickstand seems pretty awesome for taking the iPad on the road

I live in Colorado. You people all suck. We've probably had a good 5 snowstorms this year with 15+ inches of snow.

Society is built on a social contract. I can't imagine the social contract surviving anarchy.