"Luddism has always been a lame and deep-down hypocritical option"?

The Luddites were not hypocrites -- they were starving. The knitters' livelihoods had been destroyed by the machines, and the only safety net offered was a noose. Byron commented

Some folks for certain have thought it was shocking,
When Famine appeals, and when Poverty groans,
That life should be valued at less than a stocking,
And breaking of frames lead to breaking of bones.
If it should prove so, I trust, by this token,
(And who will refuse to partake in the hope?)
That the frames of the fools may be first to be broken,
Who, when asked for a remedy, sent down a rope.

The benefits of new technology must not go only to the rich and powerful. I'm a techie, but would side with the frame breakers unless we can spread the wealth around.

"...how charged this event was but also of how the moment was diffused."

Is the American language moving toward treating defused (removed the fuse, disarmed) and diffused (spread more widely) as the same word? For me they're even pronounced differently, but perhaps they are becoming fused.

I'm not surprised by WolframAlpha being able to what Mathematica has been doing for years: solve equations.

My first question was "Is Shanghai North of Delhi?". Humans would say no (as it is just barely further from the Equator but way Eastward) and I wondered how WolframAlpha would think. I got

WolframAlpha isn't sure what to do with your input.

My second question was "Is the wrist distal to the elbow?". No more technical than calculus, and there are more people out there (doctors and anatomists, etc.) who could say yes than people who grok equations.

WolframAlpha isn't sure what to do with your input.

My third question was "Are Indians clever?". I didn't expect a great answer, but what I got

Input interpretation:

India | population || Clever, Missouri, United States | city population

Result:

1.17 billion people || 1242 people (2004 and 2007 estimates)

was a complete natural language failure.

If I want to ask the questions WolframAlpha seems to expect, I want a formal language to ask them in, rather than guess how it will understand natural English. If my questions need natural language, seems I need to learn the subset of it that WolframAlpha understands. I don't have the learning time.

Suppose we take this from the angle that sex is basically a good thing. (Like food, of course, it requires judgement, but it's a good thing. And some people, perfectly healthy, need it just as much.)

Some girls lack sexual confidence because they are (for instance) a shape that Rubens would have liked. A plump woman who knows what she wants and how to work with potential partners to get it is as sexy -- even in today's America -- as a skinny one, but a plump teen is discouraged from acquiring that knowledge and those skills by today's body fashions. Initial response, before she has them, is discouraging.

Put on a fashionable avatar: she can learn how confidence works, and probably transfer those skills to the face-to-face world. I would guess that she then has better sexual experiences than her sisters without confidence, who let boys use them (contemptuously) in exchange for the attention. But research which only asks "is she at risk of sex?" cannot answer that, because it ignores quality.

Sex is not a risk.

Food is not a risk.

Junk sex is a risk, like junk food, but research should focus on how people learn to handle those risks, not on whether they starve themselves successfully.

Live cheap or die.

... than to curse the darkness?

It might be a big help to watch it in the daylight of your adult consciousness.

"They simply don’t understand that they have a network, nor do they realize the unlimited potential of one."

Heh.

I understand that I have a network, I understand the amount of pain and tech support that it took to get the web access working properly through it, I find the manual unreadable although I am a mathematician and work with software, and no way am I going to risk my web lifeline by messing about with the settings.

User ignorance is not the problem. Usability is.

I guess "forward" really is taking over from "foreword", if Joan and Rush agree on it.

You'll never get convince birthers with just facts.

Proclaim that Obama was not merely born in the USA, he and his mother were immaculately conceived there, and you'll be talking their kind of language.

If Byrd really "hoped and prayed that this day would never come," he was a better example of religious irrationality than the Creationists. Never come? Immortality is neither likely enough to be worth hoping for, nor a wise thing to pray for.

"Between 2003 and 2007, rape cases rose by more than 30 percent, kidnapping or abduction cases rose by more than 50 percent, while torture and molestation also jumped sharply."

Or at least, reported cases rose sharply. Traditionally, Indian women in many groups don't leave the house without male permission. Wouldn't you expect an increase in the female workforce, women who go out every day, to result in more women reaching the police and reporting abuse?

If there is more awareness and more freedom, a spike in reports will happen even without "a spike in violence against women". Maybe the violence got worse, maybe the violence decreased: we only know the violence became more visible.

Surely a coup d'etat (financial or otherwise) involves a change in who owns or controls the state, not just an exercise of that ownership or control? What exactly is supposed to be new, as distinct from newly visible?

If they owned the place last year, as Dick Durbin said, how is it a coup for them to own it now?