links for 2009-04-20

"Is it fashion’s passion for the 1980s? Or just a strong statement from women who have had enough of girly dresses? Whatever the reason, the pantsuit is back." Fashion for women.

How large are your internal memory storage.

"Members of the Screen Actors Guild will now have their say on a proposed new contract with the major Hollywood studios, after a majority of the union’s national board voted on Sunday to accept a deal that is little changed from what the studios offered 10 months ago."

So much for that whole it's effective and has been barely used.

"If a security guard at Best Buy asks to see your receipt, you have two options. You may voluntarily agree to be searched. Alternatively, you may say no and simply walk by. The guard must have some reason to believe you stole something before he can search you and refusing to allow the guard to check your bag is not a good enough reason on its own. There must be something more." Important to remember.

Not legal to stop you however claim may not be worth much.

A writer's war against retailers checking his bags when exiting a store (ala Costco, WalMart, Sam's Club, etc.)

Pretty cool.

XKCD book, totally buying.

"Holocaust deniers aside, the world is not ignorant of the systematic Nazi slaughter of some six million Jews in World War II. People know of the gas chambers in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen; many have heard of the tens of thousands shot dead in the Ukrainian ravine of Babi Yar. But little has been known about the hundreds — perhaps thousands — of smaller killing fields across the former Soviet Union where some 1.5 million Jews met their deaths. That is now changing. Over the past few years, the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum and research center in Israel has been investigating those sites, comparing Soviet, German, local and Jewish accounts, cross-checking numbers and methods." Good and valuable research.

"So: two two-hour sessions a day, with six applications of the waterboard each = 12 applications in a day. Though to get up to the permitted 12 minutes of waterboarding in a day (with each use of the waterboard limited to 40 seconds), you'd need 18 applications in a day. Assuming you use the larger 18 applications in one 24-hour period, and do 18 applications on five days within a month, you've waterboarded 90 times–still just half of what they did to KSM. The CIA wants you to believe waterboarding is effective. Yet somehow, it took them 183 applications of the waterboard in a one month period to get what they claimed was cooperation out of KSM. That doesn't sound very effective to me" I am dumbfounded.