What if everyone was given a nice place to live (at least a condo with community pool and laundry room), a generous allotment of healthy food (think food pyramid, 20 vegetable/fruit coupons for every meat coupon), and access to a great education, all for free.

I think people would still work, so they could buy Big Screen Teevees, fast cars, designer jeans, sweet smelling fragrances, as well as the reward of a successful career. Others, would become professional volunteers. The artists would still suffer as they tried to find originality in the sea of loud and flashy but bland consumerism. Thinkers could spend their days exploring the world of quanta, spirit, and life. Imagine the talent of professional athletes when selected from the what would probably be endless amateur leagues.

I wonder how you would go about doing a serious cost benefit analysis?

The drawback? Who would want to be a janitor? The cracked truth about our system might be that in order to have janitors we need to have homeless. Wouldn't it be great if the great social problem of the day switched from how to solve the homeless problem to how to solve the janitor shortage problem?

I gotta go, there's a waste basket at work that I forgot to empty before leaving.

Posted by Shad Muegge at August 01, 2002 09:02 PM

pulled over while doing 85 in a 55, a bit drunk, without her license.

"you don't have identification of any kind?"

"no, but i have my name tattooed over my belly button."

no ticket, get out jail free, $200 for passing go.

all lower case in homage to mr pierce.

Posted by Shad Muegge at August 01, 2002 07:04 PM

Due to the sensitive nature of these discoveries and the known critical uses of Tru64 in healthcare, military, and other arenas, SNOsoft attempted on multiple occasions to build a working relationship with HP so the information could be transferred privately. However, our well-intentioned efforts were misperceived by HP, as they responded to SNOsoft with a letter in which they accused us of attempted extortion.

Posted by GeeTee at August 01, 2002 05:03 PM

Experts have come up with two very good ideas for making wrongful convictions less likely. One is to improve the standard police lineup by letting witnesses see only one purported suspect at a time, so that they can make an absolute judgment about each one. When witnesses see six people at once, they make relative judgments, comparing the six and picking whoever looks most like the person they remember from the crime scene, rather than evaluating each individually. Conducting lineups sequentially seems like a minor change, but research by Wells and others has shown that it reduces the number of mistaken identifications—by as much as one half—without significantly reducing the number of correct ones. Ensuring that the detective running the lineup does not know who the real suspect is, and so does not make leading comments (Don't you want to look at number three again?), helps too, for the same reason that good clinical research is double-blind: otherwise it's easy to contaminate the results with intentional or unintentional bias.

The second proposal is to videotape all police interrogations, so that a reliable record exists of the questioning that produced a confession—how leading, how coercive, how open-ended—and of the suspect's comportment during it. Many police departments around the country, including those of San Diego and Kansas City, Missouri, already do this voluntarily, and police departments in Minnesota and Alaska are required by law to do it. Videotaping makes some police officers who haven't used it a little nervous. They worry that it will cost too much, that curbside or squad-car confessions will be inadmissible because taping hasn't started yet, or that officers will feel constrained from using aggressive but legitimate interrogation techniques—for example, telling a suspect they have evidence that they don't, a method the Supreme Court has upheld and Andy Sipowicz uses all the time on NYPD Blue.

Posted by GeeTee at August 01, 2002 04:57 PM

"She said 'I'll kiss you when you get back.' She wished all her life she'd kissed him. But in those days, it wasn't proper."

Posted by GeeTee at August 01, 2002 04:31 PM

According to Dr. Wegner, Egyptologists have long known, from ancient texts, that the standard form of childbirth in ancient Egypt was for the woman to deliver the baby while squatting on two mud bricks. The upper surface of the birth brick discovered at Abydos, unlike the bottom and sides, is crumbled away. "It is quite possible," Dr Wegner notes, "that the damage to the top of the brick --and another like it that has not been preserved-- was caused by its use to support a woman's feet in childbirth for a long period of time and during multiple deliveries."

Posted by GeeTee at August 01, 2002 04:11 PM

"Pakistani authorities later handed him over to their masters and they bundled him to Guantanamo prison facility in Cuba along with hundreds of other Afghan, Pakistan and Arab prisoners," the [Balochistan] Post commented.

Posted by GeeTee at August 01, 2002 04:08 PM

Clarke said the hackers should be responsible about reporting the programming mistakes. A hacker should contact the software maker first, he said, then go to the government if the software maker doesn't respond soon.

Posted by GeeTee at August 01, 2002 04:02 PM

A large body of research in psychology shows that categorizing people into groups along nearly any dimension elicits discrimination: it seems to activate an "us" versus "them" psychology. Given this finding, it would be discouraging to learn that the human mind was designed such that people cannot help categorizing others by their race. This would imply that racism is intractable. Our results indicate that mentally dividing people into different "racial groups" is not inevitable; instead, coalition, and hence race, is a volatile, dynamically updated cognitive variable, easily overwritten by new circumstances.

Posted by GeeTee at August 01, 2002 03:20 PM

The findings suggest that a drug that blocks the M5 receptor may be an effective way to reduce the risk of addiction to morphine without sacrificing pain relief, according to Basile and his colleagues. They note that the receptor is present mainly in the brain, so a drug that blocks the receptor is unlikely to cause serious side effects. Because nicotine, alcohol, cocaine and other drugs all affect similar brain circuitry as morphine, the M5 receptor may also be involved in other types of addiction, the researchers report.

Posted by GeeTee at August 01, 2002 03:15 PM

Phobics are often treated by gradually exposing them to the object of their fear in a safe environment, to erase the bad association. Lutz suggests that cannabinoid-enhancing drugs, taken at the same time as this exposure, might aid memory clearance.

Posted by GeeTee at August 01, 2002 03:12 PM

The dark, tar-like substance can be found dotted around scores of places near the Delaware River in Camden. It's hard to scrape off and residents say it only seems to materialise in the early hours of the morning.

Posted by GeeTee at August 01, 2002 03:01 PM

"We think we have the basics of what we do as humans down pat," Bump said. "We get up in the morning and make breakfast, but if you tried to program a computer to do that, you'd quickly find that what's simple to you is incredibly difficult for a computer."The same is true for Go. "When you're deciding what variations to consider, your subconscious mind is pruning," he said. "It's hard to say how much is going on in your mind to accomplish this pruning, but in a position on the board where I'd look at 10 variations, the computer has to look at thousands, maybe a million positions to come to the same conclusions, or to wrong conclusions."

Posted by GeeTee at August 01, 2002 02:49 PM

Prince Fahd was the third member of the extensive Saudi royal family to die in a week.

Posted by GeeTee at August 01, 2002 02:42 PM

"The victim Joslin then took the gun out of Stoker's mouth, saying, 'If you have to shoot somebody, shoot me,"' Alford said, citing the witness report.

Posted by GeeTee at August 01, 2002 02:38 PM

The suit seeks damages of $10 per day for each unwanted e-mail the Utah plaintiffs received from Sprint (FON), along with payment of court costs.

Posted by GeeTee at August 01, 2002 12:55 PM

The company, backed by the major music labels, is expected to announce a new pricing plan and software package beginning Thursday, according to sources familiar with the plans. Under one section of the new plan, subscribers will be able to download or stream an unlimited number of songs to their computer for a single annual fee of $179.40, the equivalent of today's $14.95 monthly fee, according to a customer service representative.

Posted by GeeTee at August 01, 2002 12:50 PM

According to the company, China accounted for 6.63 per cent of global internet traffic, second only to the US, which accounts for some 42.65 per cent of online activity worldwide. Behind China, by percentage, is Japan (5.24 per cent), Britain (3.94 per cent), Canada (3.93 per cent) and Germany (3.64 per cent).

Posted by GeeTee at August 01, 2002 12:45 PM

U.S. federal prosecutors in New York said they had charged Uzbek-born Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov over a scheme to fix two figure skating competitions at February's Salt Lake City games on behalf of French and Russian competitors.

Posted by GeeTee at August 01, 2002 10:57 AM

"There will be enormous pressure applied to them to turn on Ebbers."

Posted by GeeTee at August 01, 2002 10:46 AM

It was not known which AOL executives might be subjects of the Justice Department's investigation. Prosecutors have "not ruled out anybody," including top AOL executives, a source said.

Posted by GeeTee at August 01, 2002 10:15 AM

German women talk to other women about angst and German men talk to other men about women, according to findings of a research study released Wednesday.

Posted by GeeTee at August 01, 2002 05:08 AM