I'd imagine they could do a decent job recruiting outliers from among the GNXP readership...

Sega Genesis was before Super Nintendo 
 
As I recall, Sega Genesis held its own against the Super Nintendo pretty well, despite the fact that the Super Nintendo was clearly a superior piece of hardware. Remember Sonic the Hedgehog? That game was damn popular.

Just over 53% of the population of China or 690 million people are able to speak Mandarin, according to the Xinhua news agency. In China's cities, about 66% speak Mandarin, while only 45% speak it in the countryside. Around 70% of people between the ages of 15 and 29 speak the language, while only 30% of those over 60 can speak it. 
 
They must be confusing speaking it as a primary language with being able to speak it at all. Damn near all Chinese can speak Mandarin, with the exception of a few old people and some ethnic minorities. I've been out to some pretty bumblefuck parts of China and was still able to communicate.

How about encyclopedias? It used to be that libraries and educated people would spend a lot of money for a good encyclopedia. Now people go online and look at sites for free. 
 
If you started charging, say, $5 for a lifetime subscription to Wikipedia, and also increased the price of Britannica by five bucks, would people start flocking toward Britannica?

In other words, FREE caused people to choose an inferior product more than they would have if the prices were both positive. Thus, in a world where there is more FREE stuff, the quality of stuff will decline. It's hard to believe that this needs to be pointed out. 
 
Is there a single real world example of this? I can't think of one. Certainly the opposite trend dominates - people flock to overpriced junk because they use price as a heuristic for value. I'd imagine they'd do the same even if the alternatives were free instead of merely cheaper. If you gave away rustbucket cars to anyone who wanted them, would it put a dent in BMW sales? I doubt it.

Even sticking with just information, per Chris Anderson, look at what movies you can download without cost on a peer-to-peer site or whatever -- they mostly all suck, being limited to the library of DVDs that geeks own. Sign up for NetFlix or a similar service, and you have access to a superior library of movies, and it hardly costs you anything -- it's just not FREE. Ditto for music files you can download cost-free from a P2P site vs. iTunes, or even buying the actual CD used from Amazon or eBay. 
 
Ummm... I realize this is tangential to your main point, since movies and music are generally not intended to be "free", and are subsidized by the people who actually buy the stuff, but what you write here is totally wrong. I can find any song I want on BitTorrent. You can get the whole discography for almost any band all in one go. I've even found obscure shit from the 60's for my parents before. I'm no classical music connoisseur, so I'm not totally certain about that (like if you want specific recordings etc.) but my guess is you can find it. I bet an enormous fraction of recorded CDs are available on BT.  
 
Movies are even easier. Any major movie is online. Foreign films are easy if you speak the language the movie was recorded in and can use the sites in that language, and probably even if you can't. 
 
I'd like to see stats, or failing that, examples of stuff that is hard to get online for free, if you want to make this argument. 
 
I'm not too impressed by the chocolates example either. You're talking about trivial items (a piece of candy) and trivial sums of money - the psychology involved is interesting, but I'm not sure the results generalize to more important decisions. Also, IMO, Hershey's Kisses are not exactly "crap", and in fact I prefer Hershey's chocolate to a lot of the more expensive stuff. If the experiment in question had used candy that actually tasted like crap for the "free" choice, I suspect the results might have been different. 
 
I can also think of counter-examples. Tap water is basically free and generally safe to drink, but lots of people buy the bottled stuff. You could probably dress yourself entirely with free T-shirts with ugly logos, and while some geeks do this, most people do not. Etc. 
 
But in general, you can imagine the quality level you'd enjoy from a free car or an all-volunteer police force. 
 
It seems like you're getting two different arguments mixed up here. Saying that free stuff tends to be crap (or simply not exist) because people usually don't want to expend lots of effort to get nothing in return is... well, not exactly news, and in fact I agree that "using free to grow your business" is in general a stupid idea and has failed in most cases where I've seen people try to implement it. But that's different from saying that giving things away would lead to an a
More....

Urumqi is generally considered the furthest city from water, not Kashgar. 
 
It's less a story of developers wanting to develop than it is a story of China trying to smash the indigenous Uighur culture and further strengthen the Han grip on Xinjiang by sending in Han migrants, just as China is doing to Tibet. See the section of the NYT article about areas deemed unfit for Uighur architecture. The part about Chinese officials suffering sleepless nights over the thought of Uighurs dying in an earthquake is also classic.

Wikipedia actually has some pretty good stuff up on the history and regional variation of the Chinese language - probably as much as you'd be interested in knowing without actually speaking or reading any Chinese.

As I recall, Godless was the hardcore warblogger of the GNXP blogspot days - his opinions on the war and a lot of other things changed very radically (IMO, for the better).

This is interesting, I've actually thought about this problem before. I tend to also use a logarithmic sort of scale for ranking girls, and that seems to be the general method for most guys, but then I've also known guys who gave out 10s to almost any attractive girl - maybe they were reserving the fine detail for the lower end of the spectrum (perhaps that was the best they could get)? 
 
On a side note, recently an acquaintance of mine was confused by an American TV show she saw (I live in China) where an ugly man was called a 3 by women and an attractive man an 8, and she had no idea what the numbers meant - evidently the 1 to 10 scale for attractiveness does not exist here.

As far as all this is Lander a liberal, is he a conservative, is he a White Person, is he a blah blah blah - is it at all possible that he's just pointing out a trend and perhaps doesn't have to be making some big political point to be making with all this? Is all observational humor necessarily political to you guys?

Lander's latest observation is especially acute: "Appearing Empathetic with Personal Anecdotes of ?Poverty?. There's nothing quite as enraging to someone whose father didn't finish high school to listen to a trust fund baby whine about how hard life on the Lower East Side is. And I have. 
 
Your father not finishing high school ain't exactly the greatest sob story I've ever heard either. ;)

I seem to remember reading a theory once that while close inbreeding is undesirable because of the increased likelihood of receiving homogeneous deleterious recessives, that distant outbreeding might also be undesirable because it might break up groups of genes that only confer a fitness advantage if you have the full set (although, this is not likely the mechanism at work here, but anyway...)

All of them except one are either about a) sex/porn, b) intelligence or, c) race. The outlier is about atheism. 
 
So this is the "Core business" of GNXP? ;-)

A mother that could demonstrate to her partner that he was, indeed, the father would have a reproductive advantage over women who could not demonstrate this. 
 
Yeah, but a mother who can cheat effectively (i.e. get the best genes in a one-night stand with the alpha male and then use one of the betas as a meal ticket) arguably has a greater advantage.

I was surprised by the number of blonds/albinos I saw when I went to Indonesia, and there did seem to be more as I moved further east into the more Melanesian parts (though I saw at least one blond in Bali, and yes I'm sure he wasn't a tourist).

Could leftists, socialists, pacifists, feminists, etc. not have something like what we saw with the test on the brains of pedophiles(lower grey matter content in certain parts of the brain.) Being on the far-right seems to be explainable from a darwinistic point of view(I am not.) But what is the reproductive benefit to being a pacifist or a part of any other other strain of the far-left?

The most accomplished group of Brown mathematicians pre-Independence were called the Kerala School, so even if they don't have lots in quantity, these were the guys who figured out infinite series for trig functions w/o calculus. 
 
Uhhh... don't believe everything you read on Wikipedia. ;-)

I've never seen results showing that there's a correlation between visuospatial ability and mathematical aptitude, and I highly doubt that this is true. I think you'll find more high verbal, low visuospatial types in the upper echelons of mathematical talent...

In addition to the sweet potato, I believe that there's also some dispute over the coconut and the calabash (both found in both Old and New Worlds in pre-Columbian times), though evidently the people who study this kind of thing figure these might've been able to float in the open ocean from Polynesia to the Old World or vice versa (unlike the sweet potato, which has generally been accepted as proof of pre-Columbian contacts although this hasn't been widely acknowledged).