I've been delving into Neverwinter Nights 2's toolset recently and I'm very happy with the updates they've done to it. It's tremendously much more useful now, especially with the undo function. One-shot conversations don't need you to set condition and action scripts, but the lack of a script wizard means you have to write out simple scripts. Or you can use Lilac Soul's script generator. Area design takes a bit longer than with NWN1, but the trade off of having to bake the walkmesh and texture the levels for the amount of creative freedom is totally worth it.
The past few days seem to have been pretty slow for news. You can tell when...
"Overweight nude to set art world record" is a big news item. I have been hearing a lot of positive things about Boom Blox. The Penny Arcade boys seemed to be all about it. Clinton is reported to have won West Virginia, which shows that West Virginia is a bunch of idiots if they think Hillary will actually be able to do anything at all about oil prices. (Hint: it's the weak dollar, surging demand, weak supply, and our unwillingness to use our own oil) Al Sharpton's being investigated for tax fraud in the tune of millions. Oh, and Man U won the Barclay Premiership. Fuck you, Man U.
Other than that, it seems like the same old, same old.
The Army's living conditions are deplorable shitholes (that's why you don't private contract that shit, those troops deserve better), Palestine and Israel are still fighting, the Pope is still railing against sex and contraceptives, DMX is an asshole, O.J did it (he wrote a fucking book about it. we already know he did it), people can't stop talking about their fucking Blackberrys[1][2], and a mother in Kansas City was arrested for having her 12 year old daughter trained to be a dominatrix.
Yep. Just the same old, same old.
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Slow news days...
Friday, May 9, 2008
Stupid people should be responsible for stupid pets.
This is a great example of how some people can be absolute unreasonable idiots when it comes to their pets.Jeffery Ely was driving on the night of Jan. 4 when Fester, a miniature pinscher, squeezed past owner Nikki Munthe as she was letting in her other dog and ran out onto the road. Ely's car struck Fester, killing the 13-pound dog instantly.
Now Ely is suing the Munthes for about $1,100 for damage to his car, time he had to take off from his two jobs to get the car repaired, and court fees.
Pieces of the bumper were propelled into the radiator when it hit the dog, Ely said, necessitating a replacement. Ely maintains he didn't have problems driving until after the accident and that the radiator issues were not pre-existing.
Yeah, okay. That sucks. The people lost their dog and now this guy is trying to get money out of them. However, he's not being extravagant. He's trying to replace the parts of his car that were damaged because this dog ran out in front of his car. It's not like he's suing for $10,000 or a million or anything. This seems perfectly reasonable to me.Ely said he feels sorry for the Munthes' loss but, as a dog owner himself, feels that they must be responsible for their pets' actions.
"I have complete compassion for them," Ely said. "I know how it feels. I love dogs. But once you get them, they are your responsibility."
Munthe said she has always been worried about the busy road the family lives on.
"We would have never let him off-leash because we're so terrified of this road," she said.
Then why did you? Better yet, why didn't you build a fence? Or maybe, you know, discipline your fucking dog to not run out into traffic and endanger people's lives?The Munthes have filed a $2,400 countersuit against Ely for the cost to buy Fester, the time they had to take off work for court appearances, and the cost of buying a dog to replace Fester.
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Now that's where it gets fucking stupid. Counter suing? On what claims? That it was the driver's fault your stupidfucking mutt ran out into traffic and got hit? I suppose the driver should have known that there was a dumb bitch with a retarded mongrel living there and slowed to a crawl. Once again, it sucks that this lady lost her dog, but she is responsible for her pet's actions. She obviously made no attempts to restrict the dog's access to the road via fence or some other method (electric fence) and she obviously didn't bother to train the dog not to run out into traffic. Some people are so ludicrously idiotic when it comes to their pets.
Net Neutrality
This is important. Read up, write your congressional representative.The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday introduced legislation that would bar network providers from discriminating against some Internet content.
Committee chairman John Conyers, a Democrat from Michigan, said the bill he and California Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren had introduced would require U.S. broadband providers to operate their networks "in a reasonable and nondiscriminatory manner so that all content, applications and services are treated the same and have an equal opportunity to reach consumers."
"If we allow companies with monopoly or duopoly power to control how the Internet operates, network providers could have the power to choose what content is available," Conyers said in a statement.
Verizon spokesman David Fish responded in a statement, saying such a bill would be a "tough sell" in Congress.
"Broadband deployment is a bright spot in the U.S. economy that provides high paying jobs, unprecedented infrastructure investment, and innovation. Why would Congress want to jeopardize all that with this bill?" Fish said.
At issue is the so-called "network neutrality" controversy that pits open-Internet advocates against some service providers, who say they need to take reasonable steps to manage ever-growing traffic on their networks.
Some of network neutrality complaints have centered on charges that broadband companies were engaged in anti-competitive conduct, while others involved charges of political censorship.
The net neutrality issue has been spotlighted by a series of incidents in which network operators, such as Comcast and Verizon, were accused of hindering certain online data moving over their networks, such as file-sharing or text-messaging.
Verizon Wireless is a joint venture of Verizon Communications Inc. and Vodafone Group Plc.
In February the chairman of a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee introduced separate legislation that would require regulators at the Federal Communications Commission to study the network neutrality issue and hold public hearings.
FCC Chairman Kevin Martin has said that his agency was ready, if necessary, to step in and stop broadband providers from interfering with users' access.
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Fuck you, Verizon.
Just remember, the internet is not a big truck.
Series of Tubes Dance Mix
The Daily Show
Ted Stevens' Orginal Rambling, Incomprehensible Speech
Just in time for GTA IV, Harvard book says games don't create killers.
Saying what many have already confirmed repeatedly, that normally adjusted children who can properly discern the difference between reality and imagination are not turned into violent psychopaths by video games.Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl Olson, a husband-and-wife team at Harvard Medical School, detail their views in "Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games and What Parents Can Do," which came out last month and promises to reshape the debate on the effects of video games on kids.
"What I hope people realize is that there is no data to support the simple-minded concerns that video games cause violence," Kutner told Reuters.
The pair reached that conclusion after conducting a two-year study of more than 1,200 middle-school children about their attitudes towards video games.
It was a different approach than most other studies, which have focused on laboratory experiments that attempt to use actions like ringing a loud buzzer as a measure of aggression.
"What we did that had rarely been done by other researchers was actually talk to the kids. It sounds bizarre but it hadn't been done," Kutner said.
They found that playing video games was a near-universal activity among children, and was often intensely social.
Oh, come on. We all know that video games are only played by societal outcasts while shut away in dark basements listening to death metal and ritualistically cutting themselves.But the data did show a link between playing mature-rated games and aggressive behavior. The researchers found that 51 percent of boys who played M-rated games — the industry's equivalent of an R-rated movie, meaning suitable for ages 17 and up — had been in a fight in the past year, compared to 28 percent of non-M-rated gamers.
The pattern was even stronger among girls, with 40 percent of those who played M-rated games having been in a fight in the past year, compared to just 14 percent for non-M players.
One of the most surprising things was how popular mature games were among girls. In fact, the "Grand Theft Auto" crime action series was the second-most played game behind "The Sims," a sort of virtual dollhouse.
Kutner and Olson said further study is needed because the data shows only a correlation, not causation. It is unclear whether the games trigger aggression or if aggressive children are drawn to more violent games.
Yeah, yeah. Whatever. Look, don't try and use your fancy words with their fancy definitions. So what if all those kids that freaked out, hurt others and then blamed GTA had a myriad of mental and anti-social issues. It's a thing called faith, okay? It means that I know I'm right no matter what proof, evidence, or data anyone might have."It's still a minority of kids who play violent video games a lot and get into fights. If you want a good description of 13-year-old kids who play violent video games, it's your local soccer team," Olson said.
The researchers also try to place video games in a larger context of popular culture. The anxiety many parents voice over video games largely mirrors the concerns raised when movies, comic books and television became popular.
"One thing I like about their approach is that they've tried to historicize the whole concept of a media controversy and that we've seen this before," said Ian Bogost, a professor at Georgia Tech known for his studies on video games.
The book urges a common-sense approach that takes stock of the entire range of a child's behavior. Frequent fighting, bad grades, and obsessive gaming can be signs for trouble.
"If you have, for example, a girl who plays 15 hours a week of exclusively violent video games, I'd be very concerned because it's very unusual," Kutner said.
"But for boys (the danger sign) is not playing video games at all, because it looks like for this generation, video games are a measure of social competence for boys."
What, like Seung-Hui Cho? Who many of his fellow dorm mates tried to get to play video games with them, but he refused? Nuh, uh. Jack Thompson told me he trained on Counter-Strike. Even though there has never been any solid evidence to support those claims...Many video game fans have embraced the pair as champions of the industry, a label that makes them uncomfortable.
"We're not comfortable doing pro and con. We've been asked to do the pro-game side in debates, and I don't consider myself a pro-game person. Video games are a medium," Olson said.
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Whether pro gaming or not, they should be championed for handling the issue in a level headed manner that seeks to openly explore the issue of video games potentially influencing violence.
Electric shark repellent?
Sharks a re pretty damn cool animals, and not just because of their "killing machine" reputation. For a long time, much of how sharks lived and operated was unknown. Now we have figured out a potential method of how to repel them. Which is good. It's just strating to get warm enough for swimming and I've been waiting to go to beach in my hunks-of-raw-meat bathing suit.Sharks have an innate ability to detect electric fields, useful for sensing the bioelectric activity of their prey. Researchers discovered that strong electric fields could repel these predators, most likely by overwhelming their electricity sensors.
"It's a sense we don’t have," said Richard Brill, a biologist at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Association's Northeast Fisheries Science Center and head of the Cooperative Marine Education and Research Program at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science.
A recent test showed that small disks of a rare metal alloy called palladium neodymium interact with the salt in seawater to produce electric fields strong enough to ward off sharks.
"We were just slack-jawed when we saw how well it worked," Brill told LiveScience. "I was stunned, I thought this was the stupidest idea I'd ever heard. I saw the evidence and thought, 'This can't be right.'"
To test the idea, the scientists placed the small metal disks in a tank with captive juvenile sandbar sharks. They were surprised to find that the metal had such a strong effect: The sharks generally wouldn't swim within 24 inches (61 centimeters) of the disks, or bite at bait hung within 12 inches of the disks.
Most fish cannot detect electric fields, so the metal disks could be perfect for deterring sharks without affecting the animals fishers hope to catch.
"That's the beauty of this method — it's sort of a secure communications channel," Brill said.
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Black hole rips apart nearby star.
Scientists recently got to witness a rare treat when a nearby star ventured too close to a neighboring black hole. As the star was being devoured, it let out one last large, violent burst of energy. In a distant galaxy, a star orbiting a massive central black hole strays too close to the insatiable giant and is torn apart. But before it can be devoured, the star lets out one last scream in a flare of light that slowly echoes across the galaxy. Astronomers on Earth pick up this faint call and use it to map the nucleus of the galaxy from which it emanated.
This scenario is no bit of science fiction — a team of astronomers discovered one of these rare and dramatic events while combing through the Sloan Digital Sky Survey last December. Their observations are detailed in the May issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The light echo currently coursing through galaxy SDSSJ0952+2143 likely originated as in the scenario above, with the following details: One of the stars orbiting the galaxy's central black hole likely strayed off course (perhaps after being nudged into "a fatal orbit," as Komossa called it, after interacting with another star). Eventually the pull of the black hole would rip the star apart, but before the stellar material was pulled into the accretion disk, it emitted a burst of high-energy radiation.
Komossa likens the sudden emission of light to throwing tinder into the smoldering embers of a campfire.
"Imagine a campfire which is almost extinguished so there is not much light around, and so you cannot recognize your surroundings. In a sense, that is like the core of a normal galaxy," she told SPACE.com.
"If you throw some pieces of wood into the fire, it will shortly lighten up, and you can see the environment clearly. And sort of in the same way, in this galaxy, we observed a star was thrown into the black hole, like the piece of wood into the fire," Komossa added.
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What goes around comes around.
Maybe I'm overtly cruel, but I don't really give a fuck. I hope this kid has fun taking sweaty cock up the ass for at least a few years. It would only seem just. The Pinellas County Sheriff's office said Branden Allen, 18, of St. Petersburg, Florida, a 16-year-old boy and a 15-year-old boy were arrested late Thursday on charges of sexual battery and false imprisonment.
Authorities say that on Tuesday at about 6:15 p.m., the three suspects and a female student at Dixie Hollins High School in St. Petersburg were aboard a bus that leaves the school late each day to transport students who play sports and take part in other after-school activities.
Allen boarded the bus, followed by the victim, who was taking a seat for a ride home, according to the sheriff's office. Authorities say the two younger male teens then boarded the bus and acted as lookouts as Allen "sexually battered the victim despite her resistance and protestations."
The attack stopped when other students arrived to ride the bus, the sheriff's office said. Detectives said the bus driver had left the bus, with the door closed, to round up students who were running late.
Police did not release an age for the alleged victim.
Allen was taken Thursday to the Pinellas County Jail while the two younger teens were transported to a juvenile center, the sheriff's office said.
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He sees you when you're sleeping...
The whole premise of Santa is just creepy. Some "jolly" elf that watches everyone all the time to guage whether he thinks their actions are "naughty" or "nice" and awards presents as such. The whole thing of parents flocking to malls to have their children sit on a strange man's lap. A strange man that gets paid just barely above minimum wage. It flies in the face of reason and against what most parents teach kids, to stay away and be wary of total strangers. But that stranger is okay as long as he's dressed as a fat, mystical being with a voyeur fetish. A middle-aged, stocky white man, gray-haired and bespectacled, does nothing to conceal his identity in the photos as he sexually abuses boys who may have been as young as 6.
A "BKK" luggage tag in the background indicated he was in Thailand -- the code is that of a Bangkok airport -- but the international police agency had no idea who the man was until it appealed to the public for help this week.
Within 48 hours, that move led to a cluttered apartment in Union City, New Jersey, and what appeared to be a double life.
Wayne Nelson Corliss, an actor and comedy writer who sometimes played Santa Claus and painted faces at parties, was arrested late Wednesday. Friends and neighbors said they never could have imagined him being involved in such crimes before investigators released his picture worldwide.
"He's the best Santa Claus anyone has ever seen," Stone said. "I've never seen him act in a way that was creepy or predatory toward children."
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Maybe that's because Santa Claus, even in folklore, was a pedophile? Anyways, FBI agent PedoBear here needs to have a word with the young victims. Preferably in private.
Making cents doesn't make sense.
And it hasn't for some time now. The process of making a single penny is well beyond that of a penny. Even the metal used in a penny is worth more than the actual penny. When the material your currency is made of is worth more than the actual currency, you have inflation problems. Surging prices for copper, zinc and nickel have some in Congress trying to bring back the steel-made pennies of World War II and maybe using steel for nickels, as well.
Copper and nickel prices have tripled since 2003 and the price of zinc has quadrupled, said Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Illinois, whose subcommittee oversees the U.S. Mint.
A penny, which consists of 97.5 percent zinc and 2.5 percent copper, cost 1.26 cents to make as of Tuesday. And a nickel -- 75 percent copper and the rest nickel -- cost 7.7 cents, based on current commodity prices, according to the Mint.
That's down from the end of 2007, when even higher metal prices drove the penny's cost to 1.67 cents, according to the Mint. The cost of making a nickel then was nearly a dime.
So, why not just get rid of the penny? Unless we are going to to try and freeze inflation (which is currently impossible with oil dictating the value of the dollar), the value of the penny becomes less and less. It's like the Italian Lira. Remember that shit? Where a single US dollar equaled to several thousand Lira. Just fuck the penny and round out to the nickel. Of course, congress won't do that because they're a bunch of fucking fat, inactive idiots who prefer to wring their hands than actually do anything worthwhile.Just a few hours before the House vote, Mint Director Edmund Moy told House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank, D-Massachusetts, that the Treasury Department opposes the bill as "too prescriptive" in part because it does not explicitly delegate the power to decide the new coin composition.
"We can't wholeheartedly support that bill," Moy said in a telephone interview. Moy said he could not say whether President Bush would veto the House version in the unlikely event it survived the Senate.
Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Colorado, who is retiring at the end of the year, is expected to present the Senate with a version more acceptable to the administration in the next few weeks.
The proposals are alternatives to what many consider a more pragmatic, but politically impossible solution to the penny problem: getting rid of the penny altogether.
"People still want pennies, which is why we're still making them," Moy said.
Do they really? Does anyone really give a shit about a penny? The only reason anyone cares at all is because it is worth at least something. If congress were to phase out the penny, I wouldn't blink an eye.Even Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson acknowledged in a radio interview earlier this year that getting rid of the penny made sense but wasn't politically doable -- and certainly nothing he is planning to tackle during the Bush team's final months in office.
In 2007, the Mint produced 7.4 billion pennies and 1.2 billion nickels, according to the House Financial Services Committee.
Other coins still cost less than their face value, according to the Mint. The dime costs a little over 4 cents to make, while the quarter costs almost 10 cents. The dollar coin, meanwhile, costs about 16 cents to make, according to the Mint.
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A world without bees?
This really is becoming a problem. Bee colonies have been on a decline for several years now and, so far, no rebound is in sight. This worrisome trend goes, sorry to say Pooh Bear, well beyond just honey. Bees are the primary carriers of pollen. Pollen, as we all know, is used to spread genetic material amongst plants to aid in propagation. In other words, they spread pollen to make seeds. Yes, other insects, even birds, do this, but bees are by far the largest contributor of pollen distribution. A survey of bee health released Tuesday revealed a grim picture, with 36.1 percent of the nation's commercially managed hives lost since last year.
As beekeepers travel with their hives this spring to pollinate crops around the country, it's clear the insects are buckling under the weight of new diseases, pesticide drift and old enemies like the parasitic varroa mite, said Dennis vanEngelsdorp, president of the group.
This is the second year the association has measured colony deaths across the country. This means there aren't enough numbers to show a trend, but clearly bees are dying at unsustainable levels and the situation is not improving, said vanEngelsdorp, also a bee expert with the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture.
"For two years in a row, we've sustained a substantial loss," he said. "That's an astonishing number. Imagine if one out of every three cows, or one out of every three chickens, were dying. That would raise a lot of alarm."
About 29 percent of the deaths were due to colony collapse disorder, a mysterious disease that causes adult bees to abandon their hives. Beekeepers who saw CCD in their hives were much more likely to have major losses than those who didn't.
"What's frightening about CCD is that it's not predictable or understood," vanEngelsdorp said.
On Tuesday, Pennsylvania Agriculture Secretary Dennis Wolff announced that the state would pour an additional $20,400 into research at Pennsylvania State University looking for the causes of CCD. This raises emergency funds dedicated to investigating the disease to $86,000.
The issue also has attracted federal grants and funding from companies that depend on honeybees, including ice-cream maker Haagen-Dazs.
Because the berries, fruits and nuts that give about 28 of Haagen-Dazs' varieties flavor depend on honeybees for pollination, the company is donating up to $250,000 to CCD and sustainable pollination research at Penn State and the University of California, Davis.
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Facebook makes an empty gesture, clueless politicians cheer.
What the fuck do these people not get? This is the internet. It is not a physical place. If I want to say that I'm a 60 year old Korean gay man, then I am. Yet, somehow, politicians seem to think that it is possible to regulate users on these social networking sites. You simply cannot. The only possible way I can think of is to have a national ID, a database of such IDs, and then be able to cross reference. Of course, such a system would have an extremely high potential for abuse. Even if they did do such a thing, people would just steal or "force crack" ID numbers to create new accounts.Facebook, the world's second-largest social networking Web site, will add more than 40 safeguards to protect young users from sexual predators and cyberbullies, attorneys general from several states said Thursday.
The changes include banning convicted sex offenders from the site, limiting older users' ability to search online for subscribers under 18 and building a task force seeking ways to better verify users' ages and identities.
HOW? How in the fuck is that possible? It's not. There is no way anyone can verify who you are on the internet, especially if you're careful about it. Use Privoxy and Tor as proxies, go through SSL tunnels to encrypt data, use ghost IP addys to send one-way data. There is no way anyone from Facebook can ever verify who I really am, if I am who I claim I am, and if such information is indeed legit. It is simply not possible. Among other changes, Facebook has agreed to:
• Ensure that companies offering services on its site comply with its safety and privacy guidelines.
• Keep tobacco and alcohol ads from users too young to purchase those products.
• Remove groups whose comments or images suggest that they involve incest, pedophilia, bullying or other inappropriate content.
• Send warning messages when a child is in danger of giving personal information to an adult.
• Review users' profiles when they ask to change their age, ensuring that the update is legitimate and not intended to let adults masquerade as children.
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Ooooh, how tricky. Now they can't change their age. Because, you know, it's not like they can't just create a new account using fake credentials.
You want your kids to be safe from online predators? Then fucking talk to them about it. Explain to them about the anonymity of the internet and how what is done and said on the internet is not always what it seems. If you don't understand the internet yourself, then learn about it. Have guest speakers at schools talk about the workings of the internet and potential dangers. Don't expect these sites to do your job for you, because they can't. It is, quite simply, absolutely impossible to do.
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Anti-smoking study makes useless claims.
This study is guaranteed to be used by the anti-smoking crowd as proof! that smoking is hurting the children. Yet, once you look beyond the headline (which seems pretty damning), you see that there really isn't much there.Fewer teens in towns with restaurant tobacco bans light up, study says
Now, watch the spin cycle...A Massachusetts study suggests that restaurant smoking bans may play a big role in persuading teens not to become smokers.
Youths who lived in towns with strict bans were 40 percent less likely to become regular smokers than those in communities with no bans or weak ones, the researchers reported in the May issue of the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.
Wow! 40 percent! That's a pretty significant number. But... wait... Is it really 40%? Actually, it's not.Siegel and his colleagues tracked 2,791 children between ages 12 and 17 who lived throughout Massachusetts. There were no statewide restrictions when the study began in 2001 but about 100 cities and towns had enacted a hodgepodge of laws restricting smoking in workplaces, bars or restaurants.
The teens were followed for four years to see how many tried smoking and how many eventually became smokers.
Overall, about 9 percent became smokers — defined as smoking more than 100 cigarettes.
In towns without bans or where smoking was restricted to a designated area, that rate was nearly 10 percent. But in places with tough bans prohibiting smoking in restaurants, just under 8 percent of the teens became smokers.
But... I thought 40% didn't become smokers? Now you're telling me there was a 2% difference in a study with 2,791 participants? That's a pretty small number of variation and definitely small enough to call the findings insignificant.The study found that having a smoker as a parent or a close friend was a factor in predicting whether children experiment with cigarettes. But strong bans had a bigger influence on whether smoking grew into a habit, reducing their chances of becoming smokers by 40 percent.
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Oh, okay. So that's where they got the 40%. But, you just showed that the difference is 2%? 8% smoked in areas where smoking is banned, and 10% where smoking wasn't. Where the fuck does this 40% come from? And even more curios. Why am I getting conflicting numbers from sources?Overall, 9.3 percent of the participants became established smokers over the study period, including 9.6 percent of those living in towns with weak restaurant smoking regulations (where smoking is restricted to designated areas or not restricted at all), 9.8 percent of those in towns with medium regulations (smoking is restricted to enclosed or ventilated areas, or no smoking is allowed but variations are permitted) and 7.9 percent of those in towns with strong regulations (complete smoking bans).
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Oh, okay. So, they just rounded. But they also omitted a value field of the study. But I still don't get where they got this 40% from.In towns that banned smoking in restaurants ahead of the state law, 7.9 percent of participants had smoked more than 100 cigarettes when the study began; in towns with weak laws, the rate was 9.6 percent. After adjusting for a variety of factors, such as age, race, and household income, the difference widened to 40 percent, Siegel said.
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Oh, so that's where. It only took me reading eight different versions of the same article before I found out where the 40% came from, and even then it doesn't really explain it. So, the 40% was created from adjusting a variety of factors we arrive at 40%? In other words, this is entirely bullshit numbers pulled out of someone's ass?"We already have more than enough evidence why we should pass these smoke-free laws, but certainly this study should help push them along,'' said Danny McGoldick of the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids.
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Now I see. It wasn't just pulled out of someone's ass, it was created as propaganda. Kind of like the EPA's findings that were ruled by federal judge to be unsound and misleading.From the time the report was issued, even scientists not affiliated with the industry criticized the EPA for using too low a standard for what constitutes causation rather than chance.
Osteen agreed that the agency's science was lacking. "Using its normal methodology and its selected studies, EPA did not demonstrate a statistically significant association between [secondhand smoke] and lung cancer," he said. Statistical significance is the scientific standard that separates interesting results that could be the product of chance from more convincing evidence that is likely to constitute a true association.
"EPA publicly committed to a conclusion before research had begun; excluded industry by violating the Act's procedural requirements; adjusted established procedure and scientific norms to validate the Agency's public conclusion, and aggressively utilized the Act's authority to disseminate findings to establish a de facto regulatory scheme intended to restrict Plaintiffs' products and to influence public opinion," Osteen wrote.
Since the report was issued, indoor smoking bans have popped up in hundreds of states, cities and counties. California, for example, prohibits smoking even in bars.
The blow to the EPA report could give new energy to opponents of these bans, since "the release of the original risk assessment gave an enormous boost to efforts to restrict smoking at the state and local levels," said Matthew L. Myers, a spokesman for the National Center for Tobacco-Free Kids.
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The EPA secondhand smoke report ruling is best summed up this way:It may be politically correct to attack secondhand smoke, but it is
not scientifically correct nor, in the Court's opinion, legally
correct.
The Court's ruling clearly confirms that:
concerning secondhand smoke.
preparing its Risk Assessment.
inquiry and tortured the data to reach a predetermined conclusion.
on secondhand smoke when the scientific basis for the EPA's claims
simply did not exist.
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Is secondhand smoke toxic? Yeah, it probably is. Is it the health risk that so many moan and groan about? Rather unlikely. Especially when you consider the massive amount of carbon we pump into our atmosphere, the noxious fumes emitted from vehicles and nearby plants, chemicals being dumped into our water supplies and prevalent in our food supplies. If the anti-smoking lobby would commit half of their energy and money into cutting toxic waste dumped into our rivers and streams they would probably save a shit-ton more lives than they would with a smoking ban.Bill Phelps, a spokesman for Altria, parent company of cigarette-maker Philip Morris USA, said the study shows that the reasons teens take up smoking are complex.
"There is no single reason why young people engage in risky behaviors like smoking,'' he said. "We believe that there should be a multifaceted approach to address youth smoking.''
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So, the only making sense is the evil tobacco representative? Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Dead in a can.
I'm not a fan of Pabst. It's just, to be honest, not a good beer. I'd much rather have a Yuengling. Still, this is just awesome.
Bill Bramanti will love Pabst Blue Ribbon eternally, and he's got the custom-made beer-can casket to prove it. "I actually fit, because I got in here," said Bramanti of South Chicago Heights.
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nothing after the jump
more...
Fun but not feasible.
Damn, reporters are dumb. Often times, they just don't really "get it" and spew out a bunch of boring idiotic talking points. There's no indepth analysis, no thought on the veracity of claims or any sort of journalistic "digging" that we tend to think of journalists doing. This, by far, does not mean all journalists, mind you, but it does describe quite a few of them.
What am I prattling on about? The notion that 3DV Systems’s ZCam will revoltionize gaming. It won't even make a dent in gaming, it's been done before, and it doesn't even really work very well.Soon you’ll be able to ditch your game pad and Wiimote. A new camera system for computers and consoles will track your movements in three dimensions — essentially turning your body into the game controller.
For example, play Rock Band by waving your hands at imaginary drums, or dodge punches in a fighting game.
Ummm. Yeah. No. The reason? The visual misques would be significant and would drastically affect gameplay. There's a reason why you hit buttons. They are accurate and they can't be misread. There are numerous games that have tried using cameras that have worked to varying degrees of success, but the idea is just not solid and most of the time there are numerous logistical problems with these games. One of the main issues that I forsee is the fact that having to wave your arms around and having to do noticeable movements (to be read by the camera) can be rather exhausting over extended periods of time. I don't know about other people, but I play video games to relax, not to break a sweat. If I want/need to exercise, I'll take a jog, ride a bike, or just plain work out.The ZCam could even work with current games, using software that lets it take over for mice, joysticks or other controllers.
3DV will supply the technology to companies, which are expected to sell the cameras for about $100 around the end of the year.
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And expect it to fail massively. During Johnny Lee's video where he showcased finger-tracking with the Wii-mote he made a very good observation. Sure, it looks really cool to do and it's fun for a little while, but it will wear out your arms for any sort of extended use. This device might sound neat, but it's not going to work well as it's going to make playing video games uncomfortable and exhausting. If you need a way to get the damn kids outside to play and get some exercise, just unplug the console.
What'd they give you?
"Thorazine? Haldol? Any dose is an overdose, it's elementary."
So it is, Brad Pitt from 12 Monkeys. And now we're pumping our kids with these drugs at an ever increasing rate. I remember when the ADHD/ritalin craze was just getting started. Suddenly, tons of kids that were just being kids were "hyper active" (they're fucking kids), "unruly" (they're fucking kids) and had "difficulty paying attention in class" (they're fucking KIDS!). I can understand this being a problem if you're in your 30's and you're always running around, freaking out and unable to concentrate, but that's normal for kids. Now the US has jumped guns from ADD/HD pills to full blown anti-psychotics. American children take anti-psychotic medicines at about six times the rate of children in the United Kingdom, according to a comparison based on a new U.K. study.
In the U.K. study, anti-psychotics were prescribed for 595 children at a rate of less than four per 10,000 children in 1992. By 2005, 2,917 children were prescribed the drugs at a rate of seven per 10,000 -- a near-doubling, said lead author Fariz Rani, a researcher at the University of London's pharmacy school.
By contrast, an earlier U.S. study found that nearly 45 American children out of 10,000 used the drugs in 2001 versus more than 23 per 10,000 in 1996.
Side effects including weight gain, nervous-system problems and heart trouble have been reported in children using these drugs and there's little long-term evidence about whether they're safe for them, the study authors said.
Thioridazine, sometimes used to treat hyperactivity in attention deficit disorder, was frequently used early on. Its use decreased after 2000 when a U.K. safety committee warned of heart-related side effects, the authors said.
Reasons for the increases are uncertain but may be similar to those in the United States, such as an increase in autism cases and drug industry influence.
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It's not just the ads that are pushing these drugs, it's a national attitude. Feeling down? Pop a pill and fix it. Kids driving you nuts? Give 'em some pills. It's all part of today's fast culture. No one wants to sit through therapy and find the root of their unhappiness, they want to quaff some drugs and get super happy fun time now-now quick! We don't look for real solutions to our problems, we look for a way to patch it. When that patch fails or even creates new problems, we go ahead apply more patches hoping that it will all work out in the end.
It seems that we are moving closer and closer to a Brave New World.
Sunday, May 4, 2008
Robotic animals? Truth is stranger than fiction.
The idea sounds reasonable, but the headline is just hilarious. Scientists are using robotic animal replicas in attempts to better understand and study animals. Using these robotic animals they can inflect actions and interactions to other animals in their natural environment and receive more natural responses. It's hard to understand how an animal naturally reacts when it's in a cage. One gray squirrel, its bushy tail twitching, barked a warning as another scrounged for food nearby.
It was an ordinary spring day at Hampshire College, except that the rodent issuing the warning was powered by amps, not acorns.
Sarah Partan, an assistant professor in animal behavior at Hampshire, hopes that by capturing a close-up view of squirrels in nature, Rocky will help her team decode squirrels' communication techniques, social cues and survival instincts.
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Electric cars getting sporty.
Let's be honest, most electric cars look like shit. They look like some 4th grader drawing of "the future" and then a design team decided to implement it. They really do look extremely ugly. Maybe that problem will now be fixed with Tesla's Roadster. The car goes from 0 to 60 mph in just under four seconds and tops out at 125 mph. It goes 225 miles on one charge and can be fully recharged in 3½ hours, which Tesla officials say should allow most people to drive it to work and back and recharge it at night like a cell phone.
Driving from Los Angeles to San Francisco, however, would require stopping in, say, Fresno and plugging its adapter cord into a motel room wall socket.
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That's not bad, but I still wouldn't buy one. For one, the cars cost about $125,000. Secondly, I'm not a fan of electric nor of hybrid cars. Why? Because they use up a lot of batteries. These batteries carry a lot of toxic chemicals. You hear a lot about lowering emissions if everyone drove hybrids, but no one ever seems to mention the vast amount of toxic waste that will be generated from disposing the batteries. In my opinion, the best route is by far to go with biodiesel.
Bomb ≠ Terrorists
A pipe bomb went off at a San Diego federal courthouse. Of course, anti-terrorism experst were called in. What the fuck is with people? If whoever planted the pipe bomb was a "terrorist," they suck at their job. A pipe bomb that damaged some glass. Oooooh, how scary. Get real people, this isn't terrorism or Al Qaeda or any shit like that. It's some dumb fucker with issues, most likely some kid. The bomb, which damaged windows but caused no injuries, went off about 1:40 a.m. (4:40 a.m. ET), just outside the Edward J. Schwartz Federal Courthouse, the FBI said.
The blast shattered a glass door to the courthouse and broke a window in a building across the street, the bureau reported.
The FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force took over the investigation from local authorities after investigators determined the blast was the result of an explosive device.
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Absinthe hallucinations are good old DTs.
For a long time it has been thought that the hallucinatory affects of absinthe were caused by thujone. Thujone is a poisonous chemical found in wormwood that, in low to moderate doses, can cause audio and visual hallucinations and feelings of euphoria. In larger doses, Thujone can be fatal. Wormwood was used in absinthe to give it the notorious green color that it is famed for, as well as to give it that peculiar licorice flavor.
Several scientists studying old, stored bottles of absinthe from the 1900s have concluded that the hallucinations and notorious effects of absinthe are none other than good, old fashioned alcoholism induced delirium. An analysis of century-old bottles of absinthe — the kind once quaffed by the likes of van Gogh and Picasso to enhance their creativity — may end the controversy over what ingredient caused the green liqueur's supposed mind-altering effects.
The culprit seems plain and simple: The century-old absinthe contained about 70 percent alcohol, giving it a 140-proof kick. In comparison, most gins, vodkas and whiskeys are just 80- to 100-proof.
The modern scientific consensus is that absinthe's reputation could simply be traced back to alcoholism, or perhaps toxic compounds that leaked in during faulty distillation. Still, others have pointed at a chemical named thujone in wormwood, one of the herbs used to prepare absinthe and the one that gives the drink its green color. Thujone was blamed for "absinthe madness" and "absinthism," a collection of symptoms including hallucinations, facial tics, numbness and dementia.
Lachenmeier and his colleagues analyzed 13 samples of absinthe from old, sealed bottles in France, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and the United States dated back to the early 1900s before the ban. After uncorking the bottles, they found relatively small concentrations of thujone in that absinthe, about the same as those in modern varieties.
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Hans Reiser found guilty.
Hans Reiser, fot those who do not know, is the creative force behind the ResierFS file system that is used for many Linux distros. It is regarded by many as a very fast reliable file system structure that is complete, except for a few bugs and minor security flaws. However, all of this work became horribly tarnished when Resier's wife, Nina, went missing and Hans was charged with her murder.
I don;t think many people thought he was innocent. There were just too many things that didn't add up and seemed incredibly suspicious. Him disposing of his passenger car seat, checking out books on crime scene investigation weeks just before Nina's disappearance, and Resier's insistance that Nina had fled back to her native Russia and was being protected by exKGB friends. Hans Reiser, 44, bowed his head in court as the jury found him guilty of a crime that carries a sentence of 25 years to life in prison.
Nina Reiser disappeared more than a year ago after dropping off the couple's children at Hans Reiser's home. Her body has never been found.
Du Bois argued during the trial that there was no direct evidence linking his client to Nina Reiser's disappearance and suggested the woman may be living in her native Russia or may be the victim of foul play.
But prosecutors argued the circumstantial evidence against Reiser was strong: the two were involved in a bitter custody dispute, traces of her blood were found in his home and car and witnesses testified she would never have left her children.
Also, prosecutor Paul Hora said that after Nina Reiser disappeared, Reiser threw away the passenger seat of his car, hosed down the floorboards and started withdrawing large amounts of cash.
When Reiser was arrested in October 2006, he was carrying his passport and thousands of dollars.
Du Bois portrayed Reiser as eccentric, but nonviolent, and said there were innocent explanations for his behavior.
Reiser testified his wife left his house alive and he had nothing to do with her disappearance. He said he threw away the car seat to make the car more comfortable for sleeping in and washed the car floor because it was dirty.
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There's way more than just that, but those are the main highlights. There is an older story about Reiser on Wired.com that you can read that explains the evidence against him a bit more.
Black hole on the loose.
Apparently, a black hole has been booted from its nearby galaxy by a powerful cosmic merger of two galaxies. This black hole is now racing out at speeds of approximately six million miles per hour. "We have observed the pre-merger stages of black holes," said Stefanie Komossa of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, part of the team that made the new discovery. "But we haven't seen the actual merger event."
Komossa and her team have now detected the consequences of such a merger: a 100-million-solar mass black hole in the process of leaving its home galaxy.
"The consequence was that the merged black hole, the final product, the new black hole was expelled from the galaxy," Komossa said.
"One possibility is that for a long time they just orbit each other," like binary stars, Komossa told SPACE.com.
Eventually, the orbiting black holes might interact with a star or surrounding gas which could cause them to lose angular momentum. "That would be a way to push them ever-closer towards each other," Komossa said.
Eventually, the black holes would fuse, and "in the final coalescence, or merger, of these two black holes, a giant burst of gravitational waves is emitted," she said. "Since these waves are generally emitted in one preferred direction, the black hole is then kicked in the other direction."
The "kick" the black hole receives is akin to the recoil of a rifle. It can propel the black hole to speeds of up to several thousand miles per second, according to theoretical simulations. The escaping black hole Komossa and her team observed was racing along at 5,900,000 mph.
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MySpace: a bevy of broken toys.
Good fucking god do I hate the operators of MySpace. For what it is, MySpace is useful. It provides and easy way for friends to communicate and reconnect, but it is a horribly broken and inefficient tool. It seems that the idea, ever since Turner bought MySpace, is to create as many new features and gizmos as possible. Not a bad idea, considering MySpace really is a piss-poor barebones communication hub. The real problem arises when they introduce these features that stay, seemingly, forever in perpetual beta limbo. Take, for example, the layout editor. It's pretty snazzy and offers a wide array of customization. However, it only works on Internet Explorer. Firefox, which garners more users than IE7 (according to W3C) is left in the cold, which is completely idiotic. The only reason I can see why Firefox would be excluded is if the editor is an ActiveX component. And if it is, why the fuck would they do that? Use Java or anything else. ActiveX is horrendous and even Microsoft has recommended that IE7 users leave ActiveX turned off as default.
Instead of addressing this and many other issues, MySpace has decided to ratchet up the "annoying as fuck" scale a notch or two. MySpace is now bringing you Karaoke. Thank god. That's exactly what the broken mish-mash shithole of a site needs, more useless vids of worthless idiots. You're sitting at home online and suddenly you get an irresistible urge. You absolutely have to belt out R. Kelly's "I Believe I Can Fly" and share it with the world.
You now have that ability, thanks to the new MySpace Karaoke, to be launched Tuesday by the social networking site.
MySpace co-founder and president Tom Anderson (known by many as the friend that comes automatically with a MySpace account) said MySpace and karaoke are a natural fit.
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Yes, what a good fit indeed. Karaoke, a mindless and horrendous pop culture shitfest that showcases shortcomings and inadequacy to be coupled with a site that promotes superficial "social networking" by gaining "friends" that are really useless online personas that many will never meet in real life. Yep, sounds about right.
Does anyone actually care about Karaoke on MySpace? How about being able to mail more than one person? How about better forum services? How about fixing the constant bulletin board and mail timeout errors? How about fixing the layout editor? How about enabling true layout construction for people to really design their site?
In other words: Fix your fucking stupid broken shithole of a site. Adding more features does not make it better, it just adds more broken, poorly supported features that create a horrible user experience of glitches and errors. One only need to look at Yahoo to see where this "crank out the new features" business model goes.
Yahoo plays rough and bungles it up.
Thank god. When I heard MS was back at the table negotiating with Yahoo my thought was, "why?" Yahoo has been in a complete slump for some time now (I bet they wish they had never helped Google stay afloat) and it's pretty obvious why. Yahoo simply sucks. Their interface is horrendous! It reminds me of how most webpages looked during the Dot Com Boom era when anyone and everyone wanted to have a webpage and 90% of them were confusing layouts with numerous cluttered hotlinks. Google got it right with their app interface. It's clean, easy to use, easy to navigate, and is very intuitive. (take a look at iGoogle and then look at Yahoo's user page)
I don't know who the fuck Yahoo thinks they are, but they're not hot shit. They are more like an overextended Webcrawler. (remember Webcrawler? no? yeah, that's point) Yahoo does have a lot of services, most of which don't seem to work very well. Kind of like what is happening to MySpace. Yahoo has also been rapidly losing money and is becoming more and more unusable with each and every new feature they roll out. Hardly the type of business that can hold out on a buyout.
I can see why Microsofy wants Yahoo. It's much easier to purchase an existing infrastructure than to build a new one. Thing is, MS can and should be patient. If Yahoo wants to play hardball, let them. Playing hardball also means that if they fuck up, they will suffer for it. It seems that suffering is exactly what Yahoo has to look forward to.Microsoft Corp. has withdrawn its $42.3 billion bid to buy Yahoo Inc., scrapping an attempt to snap up the tarnished Internet icon in hopes of toppling online search and advertising leader Google Inc.
The decision to walk away from the deal came Saturday after last-ditch efforts to negotiate a mutually acceptable sale price proved unsuccessful.
Microsoft was willing to pay $47.5 billion, or $33 per share, up from the bid's previous value of $29.40 per share, according to a letter from Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer to Yahoo Chief Executive Jerry Yang.
But Yahoo demanded at least $53 billion, or $37 per share, according to Ballmer. That would have been nearly double Yahoo's stock price of $19.18 at the time Microsoft first made its bid a little over three months ago.
So, Yahoo got greedy and wanted a sweet severance package. Who can blame them? The problem is that Yahoo was unreasonable. Now that MS has balked at the deal, I imagine they won't be very likely to rekindle it anytime soon. I don't think this means that MS will try and build their own network, as that would be very costly to implement. Instead, I believe MS will sit back and wait. They have Windows 7 (Vienna) in the pipes with Gates talking about Live! interface to stream desktop setups to toher computers (nice idea, but it won't work in fiber-less America). MinWin (a component of Win7) sounds promising, especially in the field of gaming where freeing up as much resource as possible is the ultimate goal (hence why most gamers are miffed that DX10 will not come to XP). The decision to walk away came as a surprise, given that many analysts believed Microsoft wanted to close the deal badly enough to either sweeten the offer or pursue a hostile takeover — a risky maneuver that would have required shareholders to replace the Yahoo board that spurned the bid.
But Ballmer said he concluded that pursuing the hostile option through a so-called proxy battle was "not sensible."
The software maker conceivably could renew its bid later this year if Yahoo can't bounce back from more than two years of financial lethargy.
Should Yahoo's turnaround efforts flop, many analysts believe the company's stock would sink into the mid-teens and open the door for another takeover offer that would be more difficult to rebuff.
For now, at least, Microsoft appears to believe it has enough internal weapons to chip away at Google's dominance of the booming Internet ad market.
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Yes, internet marketing. I'm sure that's exactly what MS is thinking. Why do market analysts always think in such minuscule buzz terms? The availability to Yahoo's network provides much, much richer possibilities than just advertising. Which was failing and will most likely continue to fail. MS will renew interest. The real question: will Yahoo go bust before MS makes that next deal.
Why Ben Stein's movie should be expelled.
There's been a lot of flap over Ben Stein's movie, "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed." I don't understand why. I would think that it would be pretty easy to see why Intelligent Design is not regarded as science. Then again, I think it would be easy to see why American Idol and reality TV is idiotic bullshit tripe. Yet such TV fare is wildly popular. Which, I guess, makes perfect sense why people don't see ID as philosophy instead of science.
If you've seen Stein's "Expelled," or even if you haven't, I would suggest giving Alan Boyle's great article, "How science gets swiftboated," a read.
By the way, science uses the scientific method.Scientific method refers to the body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. It is based on gathering observable, empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning. A scientific method consists of the collection of data through observation and experimentation, and the formulation and testing of hypotheses.
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Intelligent Design has no empirical evidence to support it nor does it have any way in which to measure a single one of its claims. ID is not and never will be science nor scientific. It's time to stop teaching religious philosophy in scientific curriculum. No wonder our education system is lagging so far behind in the sciences.
Saturday, May 3, 2008
Suborbital rubbernecking.
Remember when commercial space flight seemed like a joke? Well, it's close. Possibly closer than you might think. Like, 2010 kind of close. A California aerospace company plans to enter the space tourism industry with a two-seat rocket ship capable of suborbital flights to altitudes more than 37 miles above the Earth.
The Lynx, about the size of a small private plane, is expected to begin flying in 2010, according to developer Xcor Aerospace, which planned to release details of the design at a news conference Wednesday.
SpaceShipTwo is being developed on the success of SpaceShipOne, which in 2004 became the first privately funded, manned rocket to reach space, making three flights to altitudes between 62 miles and 69 miles and winning the $10 million Ansari X Prize.
Powered by a hybrid engine -- the gas nitrous oxide combined with rubber as a solid fuel -- SpaceShipTwo will be flown by two pilots and carry up to six passengers who will pay about $200,000 apiece for the ride.
Like its predecessor, SpaceShipTwo will be taken aloft by a carrier airplane and then released before firing its rocket engine. Virgin Galactic says passengers will experience about 4-1/2 minutes of weightlessness and will be able to unbuckle themselves to float in the cabin before returning to Earth as an unpowered glider.
Xcor's Lynx is also intended to return as a glider but with the capability of restarting its engine if needed.
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Start saving your money.
And with the power of the sun...
We can power the world! Well, that's the idea, at least. But we may be bungling it up. Seems that some of the top minds in the world of energy (scientists, not CEOs) think so, or are at least worried about it.Nuclear fusion is shaping up as one of the longer-term investments in the power portfolio. For the next few decades, cleaner coal, biofuels, nuclear fission, geothermal, wind and solar power will be much bigger factors in the energy equation. Theoretically, fusion could provide clean, cheap and abundant power - that is, once scientists solve all the technological challenges associated with controlling the nuclear reaction that fuels the sun.
That's what the $13 billion ITER project is all about: By 2016, a huge magnetic containment vessel (also known as a tokamak) is to be built at a facility in France. Researchers will use that tokamak to test their concepts for sustaining a fusion reaction.
But at a time when other countries are putting more resources into fusion research, less and less U.S. funding is going into developing the technology for extracting power from a magnetically contained fusion plasma, Kulcinski said.
He said his own program has had a lot of success in magnetic fusion development, but "we're in danger of losing that now as resources get pulled away and faculty retire or die off or whatever, and we're not replacing them now with people who are looking down the road at the end product."
By the time magnetic confinement fusion is ready for commercialization, perhaps a generation from now, America will sorely miss the scientists and engineers who should have been trained for the task, Kulcinski said. "It's very ironic: The closer we get to that, the more it's collapsing," he said.
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There's some more interesting stuff in the article, such as discussing other forms of fusion and so on. The premise does seem rather dire. Especially if you consider that many are trying to slide our education backwards by demanding religious philosophy be taught in science curriculum. Science teachers having to use code words for scientific theory in science class? Yep, we're screwed.
What they really do at work in Japan.
Japan is a strange place, or so I am led to believe. It is, after all, the birth place (only place?) in the world where you can buy used school girl undies in vending machines. Alcohol? Vending machines. How fucking cool is that? You can even buy lingerie in a vending machine. They gave us anime and great suspense horror movies like, "Audition." They are a nation that self-admittedly has a Lolita fetish, and so many more really, really weird fetishes. It is also the kind of nation where a man was demoted for logging 780,000 porn site hits.A Japanese civil servant was demoted for logging more than 780,000 hits on pornographic Web sites on his office computer over nine months, an official said Friday.
The man, a Kinokawa city government employee in western Japan, visited porn sites from June 2007 to February 2008, city official Tomiko Waki said. The man's name was withheld.
To give you perspective, there's 273 days between June and February. At 780,000 hits per day that equals out to 2,857.142857142857... That's a lot of porn. And the repeating 857 is just weird. My guess is that he's some kind of space alien/robor super-masturbator.Despite his frequent porn viewing, none of his colleagues noticed his activities, which he apparently conducted throughout the workday.
Along with the demotion, he received a 20,000 yen ($190) monthly pay cut, Waki said.
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That's kind of fucked. If he was able to click that much porn and still do his job well enough that no one noticed, he should get to keep it. It's like the policy of being high at work should always be; if they can't tell, you win. So, to this masturbatory man of bull-like penile strength and fortitude, I commend thee.