Becoming infected by a website is possible, but most web-based malware involves third-party code, not a passive exploit. Unless you're running an ancient browser, you're going to be prompted before it runs anything like that. First of all, you won't need to run third-party code to download a torrent. So don't do it. You can minimize the chances of web-based malware by downloading the torrent directly from a reputable torrent indexing site, like Pirate Bay. Make sure you don't click on the plethora of fake "download" links and ads. Finally, if you're running a modern OS like Vista or Windows 7, don't run your browser as administrator or under an administrator account.

My money would be on executable files in the torrent. You shouldn't have to run an EXE to watch a movie. A legit release will just be the media file, like AVI, and a readme. If you're pirating software, watch out for any other executables like keygens or installers, but in that case you're going to have to at least trust the cracked software. Look for releases from a "reputable" group at the original source, like a torrent or newsgroup posting.

Academic point: media files *can* cause viruses or other malware if they exploit the software that is reading them.

Yes, the vast majority of infections come from directly running an exe file or a tainted installer. But everyone knows not to run weird exe files. That's where exploits like buffer overflows come in. They can use malformed data to trick the program into running arbitrary code.

That said, that type of thing is extremely rare and usually patched quickly. Keep your media player up to date and you should be fine.

From what I can tell it's an issue with the feed reader. If you look at the RSS feed, you'll notice the deleted posts aren't actually there anymore. It seems that once Google Reader gets a hold of an item, it leaves in in the list forever, regardless of whether it's been removed from the source feed.

You're probably thinking of Mark Kistler, who had two drawing shows on PBS. He was really goofy with sound effects, had a creepy mustache, and drew futuristic/fantasy landscapes. That subject matter lended itself well to his basic lessons of perspective and shading.

His show in the 80s was called The Secret City Adventures and his show in the 90s was called Mark Kistler's Imagination Station.

(I loved that show, by the way.)

I'm not exactly a fashionista (I still despise brown shoes with anything else black, and the powers-that-be tell me this is ok now), so take this with a grain of salt.

In general, I think socks should roughly match color with and compliment your pants, and not match color with but still compliment your shoes (unless your bottom half is all black, that's ok).

For white socks, your choices of bottom are jeans, athletic pants, or shorts. With shorts, the socks are ideally athletic length (ie, not really visible) or ankle length. The shoes will often guide that choice. With jeans, length doesn't matter so much, but it probably makes more sense to wear a longer length so your legs don't show when you sit or your pant legs otherwise ride up.

The shoes should be extremely casual or athletic shoes. If you're going to wear white socks with dress shoes, I would do so only with white dress pants (and probably white shoes) and only if you really want to go there.

In practice, I only wear white socks when I need to do laundry. With jeans, I wear blue/grey solids, argyle, or other simple patterns, and semi-dressy black shoes (loafers). For my dressier black pants, I wear black or dark grey/blue socks and dressy black shoes (usually still the loafers, but sometimes actual dress shoes). If I'm going brown with jeans, then I keep the socks either blue (not grey) or khaki-colored. If I'm wearing khakis I always go darker brown shoes/belt and I keep the socks khaki-colored.

When I'm forced to wear white socks, I only do so with jeans, and I only wear casual shoes.

Oh, and I'm straight and taken, but thanks for asking.

I've advocated for non-votable follow-up questions or comments on the original question since the beginning of QL. The Stack Overflow platform allows for it and I think it works well. I find that the answers section is heavily abused by people asking follow up questions, or just writing comments without actually answering the question. It clutters the answers section and attracts frivolous downvotes. The answers section should be for genuine attempts at answering the question, and personally I think non-answers or follow-up questions placed there should be deleted by moderators on sight.

The problem would also be mitigated if we could just edit our posts indefinitely.

Interesting question, and I'm trying to kill time at work. So.

Assume a spherical villain falling straight down.

Gravity accelerates an object at a rate of 32.174 ft/s^2 , so the downward velocity of the villain after t seconds in ft/s is 32.174 * t.

Distance traveled by a falling object is (1/2) * 32.174 * t^2 .

Hence, after 5 seconds, the villain is traveling at about 160.87 ft/s, which is not quite terminal velocity (around 180.45 ft/s), and has traveled 402.175 ft.

Now assume the villain fires straight up and is using .45 ACP FMJ ammunition. According to Wikipedia, that ammunition has an initial velocity of 830 ft/s with a test barrel length of 5 inches, and a mass of 15 g.

Since the villain and gun are traveling at 160 ft/s, the actual initial velocity of the bullet would be 670 ft/s.

Assume the bullet incurs no wind resistance. The same free-fall equations apply to decelerating the bullet.

Just eyeballing it, it would only take a bit over 0.6 seconds for the bullet to reach the villains starting point, and the bullet would only have decelerated a bit over 19 ft/s in that time. The bullet would still be traveling at about 650 ft/s, and at 15g would possess about 294 J of kinetic energy, compared to 477 J possessed by a round fired from a standstill.

After 5 seconds, then, the kinetic energy of the bullet would be decreased by about 40%. I'm guessing that would still be enough to injure someone, but I'm not sure.

What if the villain fell even further? He would reach terminal velocity of about 180.45 ft/s after about 5.61 seconds and a distance of 506.03 feet, and would continue at that velocity. A bullet fired at terminal velocity would have an initial upward velocity of about 649.55 f/s.

An object initially traveling at 649.55 f/s would take about 20.19 seconds to completely decelerate, and would have traveled about 6,557.64 feet.

The villian would fall 506.03 feet in 5.61 seconds before reaching terminal velocity, and could cover the additional 6051.61 feet in about 33.54 seconds at terminal velocity.

That means if the villain fell for just over a minute before firing back up, Bruce Willis could reach out of the window and pluck the motionless bullet from the air.

I text in the driver's seat when the need arises (like quickly texting someone to tell them I'm almost there so they will be outside), but I keep my phone on my lap and I only pick it up, read it, or type on it when I'm at red lights.

It was added recently.

http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2009/09/21/welcome-to-2006

My dad always had great taste in music, and I credit him for shaping my own. I remember the time he decided my brother and I'd had enough Vanilla Ice and shattered the CD on the kitchen floor (alas, MC Hammer did survive). This was after I tried to tell him that, actually, Queen/Bowie could have ripped off Vanilla Ice. I was six.

I don't necessarily listen to all of these artists on a regular basis, but I'm fond of all of them.

My earliest and most pervasive musical memories are listening to pre-Sergeant Pepper's Beatles tapes in the car. All the power hits with catchy choruses, perfectly crafted intros and bridges, and those tight trademark John/Paul harmonies. He would make mix tapes without all the throwaway tracks. He always liked McCartney's songs better than Lennon's.

Eventually he played the rest of their records more and more. I still remember what, I think, was the first time I ever heard Magical Mystery Tour.

In the mid to late 80s, he was still in his 20s and listening to a lot modern rock. Lots of The Police (their later stuff, mostly; I discovered his tapes of the earlier stuff later), Queen, The Cars, Dire Straits, Tears for Fears, Genesis, David Bowie (almost exclusively Ziggy Stardust). He always had a knack for good musicianship and good engineering.

I still listen to a lot of Ziggy. The Police, Queen, The Cars, Dire Straits, and Tears for Fears are all over the radio, but I recently listened to Day at the Races and it brought back a lot of memories.

My mom, coming from a vocal and folk guitar background, loved James Taylor in the 80s. That guy can write a song.

My dad followed a few solo careers, mostly Sting, Paul Simon, Paul McCartney, and Peter Gabriel. I never liked Sting's early jazzy stuff, but in the 90s I was into Soul Cages and Ten Summoner's Tales. He played a lot of Graceland, McCartney, Peter Gabriel's first self-titled, and So.

My dad also liked a lot of mainstream jazz. Being a vocalist himself, he was into Harry Connick, Jr. Not being much of a vocal jazz fan, I now find him to be merely tolerable. His big band was HOT, though. I also remember a lot of Duke, Ella, and Oscar Peterson. It wasn't until later that my brother introduced me to Miles.

Jazz no doubt made up a large part of my early musical exposure. In the first days of learning trombone in the 5th grade band, I kept trying to swing the eighth notes.

Ages 8-12 or so were mostly lost to the local top 40 station, hence the Vanilla Ice and MC Hammer.

My dad was always more into the softer side of the rock spectrum. He never was much into Led Zeppelin. When I was in 7th grade, there was a new classic rock radio station in town. My dad and I were listening to it in the car one day when "Satisfaction" came on, and he realized that I didn't know who it was.

I started listening to that station and familiarized myself with all the cliche classic rock station bands: Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stones, The Doors, Pink Floyd, Van Morrison, Lynyrd Skynyrd. This was before classic rock stations starting playing bullshit from the 80s like Def Leppard.

Somewhere around that time, my dad heard about the Dark Side of the Moon / Wizard of Oz thing, and we watched it in our basement, loudly, on the nice stereo. I guess DSotM was so ubiquitous to him that he never thought to play it for me before then. Eventually I got into The Wall, no thanks to him. He always thought it was too depressing (and it is; it's like the Schindler's List of music).

Despite my initial fondness for classic rock stations, only a few bands really stuck with me (other than the ones my dad already listened to, like The Police), namely Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. I actually can't stand the Stones or the Doors anymore.

I'm afraid that specifically identifying the user would deter people from down-voting at all, even if it is justified, and result in a net loss of usefulness there.

A good compromise might be to show someone's voting history on their user page. Not what they voted on specific items, just an aggregation of all of their up/down votes. It might deter some people from constantly down-voting everyone if it shows on their user page that their vote history is 10-239.

Probably the best approach to this problem is to hide the ratings from the public. Rank the answers in some way, but don't show exactly how that ranking was reached.

This would immediately accomplish two things:

1) People couldn't look at an answer's existing rep to decide how they should vote

2) People might be less likely to give a frivolous down-votes if they know it won't just show up and make the answer/user look bad

Answers could simply be ranked "up minus down", like it is now, but I'm seeing some additional opportunity to assign some kind of relevancy value to individual votes. For example, a vote might only count as half a vote if it comes from a certain person.

How could that be decided? Examining someone's overall voting habits and look for positive/negative patterns.

1) How closely did their votes matched the community as a whole? If you down-vote an answer, for example, but 10 other people up-voted it, your "community score" would be 10% and perhaps your votes wouldn't count as much. It would be sort of a meta-moderation.

That sounds good in theory, but it could easily turn into sort of a group-think/tyranny of the majority situation.

2) How balanced are they in their ratings? If someone has 100 down-votes and only 5 up-votes, maybe those down-votes shouldn't count as much. Encourage people to give up/down votes equally (or in a ratio close to the overall site ratio?), and reward those people with higher relevancy scores on their votes.

3) Look for the mass snap judgment voters. Maybe someone has 100 votes, but 95 of them were down-voting one user's entire answer catalog. You could easily argue that person's votes should have a low relevancy score.

4) Sheer volume of votes given could have a positive effect on your vote relevancy score. Give more clout to someone that has been around awhile and has passed out a large number of votes, positive or negative.

Unfortunately, these are considerably more difficult to implement than a simple "up minus down" score. Rather than counting votes, you would need something to continually go through users' vote histories and recalculate their relevancy scores. You could avoid that by making a vote's relevancy score immutable, calculated only at vote time.

Hiding the rankings would be easy, though, and wouldn't require any tweaking of the ranking algorithm.