That said I have a 32gb fire sale Touchpad and love the damn thing.

That Acer is the smartest hardware configuration on any tablet to date.
A REAL FUCKING USB PORT. And it performs great and starts at 100$ under most similar products. Tough bugger too, that Dell tablet and the Galaxy pad have both broken from customer handling at the bigbox store where I work, but that Acer keeps on going despite getting more and more attention as the others fail.

And did I mention it has a real fucking USB port? Because it has an actual, normal, regulation USB. To, you know, connect peripherals.

I would agree selective breeding is a type of evolution.

I was differentiating between selective breeding and the unintended consequences of human behavior activities on other forces of selection.

The difference is the method of selection: In one case, humans are altering the environment of a species, resulting in evolutionary changes.

Selective breeding involves just that, selecting the traits you want in the animal and then breeding only animals with those traits. Selecting what you breed.

  The environmental alteration version doesn't involve any conscious desire for selection; any meddling that alters survival and breeding rates is good enough. These people aren't purposefully poisoning the water to select the fish in the river that are hardest to poison.

By the makers, yes, but at the same time cutting the drugs is part of the process once they enter the local market. The problem usually isn't high purity itself, but inconsistent cuts - perhaps the actual drug is smaller and denser than the cut, so bags made from the top of the stash are much weaker than bags made from the bottom, even though they are the same drugs from the same source. Criminalizing drugs has never been about harm reduction though, and often actively seeks to increase harm.

One thing I can't believe gets almost no attention is active placebos vs inactive placebos. That is to say, if you give a placebo that has SOME subtle but noticeable effect (it can be almost anything, so long as it doesn't actually treat the condition the subject has), the placebo effect greatly increases. Often increases exactly as much as psych meds (SSRIs in particular) are shown to be more effective than placebo. I'm fairly sure SSRI's are just active placebos, and wonder about a good number of medications.

One reason I don't get more upset when the companies release a new drug with no real difference in effectiveness from an old drug is that it might still help a number of people - only releasing such a drug will determine if it is working on the same patients. If, lets say, half of the patients upon which the old drug isn't effective are for some reason responsive to the new one, it still stands to treat half of the people currently suffering and unable to be helped by the existing medication, even though neither shows any real advantage in the degree to which it helps or the overall % of patients it can help.

As someone with a psychology degree with a strong understanding of natural selection, I've always found popular evolutionary psychology gives too much weight to propagation-neutral behaviors. They assume that "anything we see behaviorally should be seen as (directly or indirectly) part of a beneficial adaption, or we wouldn't be seeing it." This sounds great, but it's wrong.

Evolutionary psychologists are often terrible at understanding natural selection. They go on the old Discovery-channel notion of "perfect adaption." Perfect adaption is a huge pile of bullshit; anything that works well enough to plop out a viable offspring before death gets passed to the next generation. The more behaviorally complex an organism gets, the larger the package of selection-neutral behaviors, and any behavior which is oddly neutral in effect on the ability of a species to survive increases or decreases in frequency either randomly or based on factors lacking significant evolutionary pressure.

While making specific predictions based on evolutionary science is difficult at best, it's damn near impossible with evolutionary psychology. Even more than most evolutionary science it's all done in retrospective, but with only the best-guesses of cultural anthropology and cultural paleontology to guess which behaviors are being observed, and how much data is missing...

I dislike saying it, but a surprising amount of evolutionary psychology is about as scientific and testable as intelligent design.

http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1761776&cid=33330100

This is actually a lie. It's popular to say because crime shows repeat it and depict it a lot, when in fact it's only true of serial rapists, generally only violent serial rapists, a tiny subpopulation of rapists.

The vast majority of rapes are date or acquaintance rapes, and most involve poor judgement from both parties, poor judgment made even worse in most cases by intoxicants.

Sometimes, victims end up places they would normally not want to be and in company they would not normally keep due to lapses in their judgement.

Nearly all of the time, the attacker is not (in their own mind) assaulting anyone. They are usually intoxicated, often have poor judgement even sober, and have been SURE they are getting laid every since entering the empty room with the victim and starting to strip each others clothes off. Something changes, but the attacker does not want to accept that without a fight, so they push back and try to keep things moving - this is often more than enough to result in a rape. Even if the victim is slapping them or trying to push them off (this is a step past rape by shutting the ears and "keeping things moving"), this particular idiots clouded perception sees this as "hitting me first" and becomes more aggressive.

Sex and sexual communication are at the center here, it's not about power. Generally, sex an idiot convinced himself he is getting "for sure", and when things change, is willing to use force to get anyway. The force is not to exert power over the victim, it's a means for the attacker to get chickens they counted before they were hatched.

A friend of mine once told me nearly this exact same thing when I called him and asked what's up: "I have a feeling that once doing smaller and smaller lines becomes prohibitive," Only when he said it, the rest of the sentence was "I'm just going to have to suck it up and buy some more coke."

Yea, ok, it's sure as HELL offtopic. But ALL TRUE>

Hovercraft, which are neither land nor aircraft, are a 3rd category.