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Wait! How come when the earth is flat that it can also be hollow with Hitler and his alien flying saucers powered by vril energy are hiding inside? http://paranormal.about.com/od/hollowearth/a/aa022206.htm

"Also AFAIR the laws of war were: 1. Soldier killing civillian ist murder. 2. Civillian killing soldier is murder. 3. Soldier killing soldier is legal if war has been declared between the two countries that the soldiers belong to."

Legal reality is far more complex than that (and so is war).

Simplified LOAC:
http://usmilitary.about.com/cs/wars/a/loac.htm

The fuel filter on my car requires a $70 tool in order to remove it.

If it's a Ford, the tool is supposed to be included with the car. That's nothing, to change the battery in a Chrysler Seabring, you have to remove the front driver's side wheel. That's just bad engineering.

Some computer manufacturers are guilty of that too. I remember in the 90's it was almost impossible to get the cover off of my computer. A friend of mine told me to buy a Dell because they are easier to take apart, and the parts are more standardized. Eventually the whole market went that way.

Most people don't work on their own cars, so why should they care about how difficult it is to repair? People who do work on their own cars, tend to lean towards the ones that are easy to work on. Ever wonder why so many kids modify Honda Civics? They tend to be easy to work on. (that's just my personal observation)

Yes, I know they do, my reference was to the drop of domestic birds in the TV show WKRP in Cincinnati. Someone didn't get the joke.

About 5 months of this nonsense left at the time of this post, and all these wacky rules can be repealed after that, thank goodness:

http://politicalhumor.about.com/library/blbushclock.htm

You do realize that most of these rules are at most rewordings and formalizations of what was already policy in 2000?

About 5 months of this nonsense left at the time of this post, and all these wacky rules can be repealed after that, thank goodness:

http://politicalhumor.about.com/library/blbushclock.htm

Is this one Bush proof?

According to Federal law the armed forces can allow drinking by service members as young as 18 on bases in or near locations where the legal age limit is lower than 21 - the military enforces the local drinking age laws. The degree to which such leniency is actually applied differs from service to service (if you're in the Air Force, you're out of luck), but the Army and marines have been pretty good about such things.

Honestly, when water isn't safe, where do you turn?

Actually, drinking too much water can be just as dangerous as drinking too much beer. People have died from drinking too much water.

I think it's extremely irresponsible of the "parents and lawmakers" to encourage behavior that may lead to water intoxication

...says Dr. Evil, pinky into corner of mouth.

Yeah, right.

What are they going to do? Get a Honeywell DDP 516, an SDS-940, an IBM 360/75 and a DEC PDP-10 and put it in four universities?

Come on...

Apparently I overstated the case a bit and while it depends upon who you ask when it comes to exactly how much more calories are burned by having more muscle tissue, one thing that they all agree on is that more muscle mass is better as part of a comprehensive weight loss or fitness program. So I stand by weight training as being a worthwhile part of any exercise program and well worth the effort. There is a decent article on about that talks about burning more fat with weight training as part of your program.

This is a transcript of MS Legal discussing a new name: (ok, it's a joke. laugh.)

SBalmer: Developers! We need a new chair, I mean a new name for the Vista code. It can't start with a V -- people already think virus with that. And it should go to eleven.

BSmith: Why don't we call it Door?

SBalmer: That's a good idea. But a web service should start with "my."

BSmith: Then call it MyDoor.

SBalmer: Web 2.0 starts with an 'i.' How do we add an 'i' to it?

BSmith: MiDoorI?

Assistant Paralegal to BSmith: Sir, that name is already trademarked.

SBalmer: Buy 'em out, boys.

It's not a myth. http://exercise.about.com/od/exerciseworkouts/f/muscle.htm
While at rest it's actually burning 3x more calories than fat but while you're moving around the muscle is contracting and burning even more energy whereas your fat cells aren't doing anything and thus overall the more muscle you have the more calories you are going to burn while active.

Check out the exercise section at about.com. For instance, there's a great low-impact cardio workout that takes only about 15 minutes, but it will leave you sweating and winded if you're bad shape.

Check out the exercise section at about.com. For instance, there's a great low-impact cardio workout that takes only about 15 minutes, but it will leave you sweating and winded if you're bad shape.

Actually, there is a fairly legit criticism of the US post office that would probably have some support on slashdot if it were more widely known. Until 1912, mail was delivered on Sundays in the United States. However, religious leaders felt that it was hurting their attendence (and subsequently, their collection plates) and appealed to the government to stop delivery on Sunday. Post offices at that time doubled as public gathering places to socialize. Supporters of no-Sunday delivery still claim that the post office is closed to prevent a government subsidized agency from forcing Christians to work on Sunday, a protection of religious freedom. That however is obvious bullshit, since the post office does not close for any other religion. Even using that reasoning, it's a clear violation of the seperation of church and state.

For more details search google or check out this article.

You can copyright a game. I remember a few years ago, Hasbro sued Kellogg for having a card matching game on their cereal boxes as part of a Finding Nemo promotion, saying it too closely resembled their Memory card game. Wizards of the Coast even has a patent for "games, published in the form of trading cards...

No, you can't copyright a game. The Kelloggs thing was a trademark claim which was settled out of court so who knows how that would have went. Your other example is a patent issue. I guess it needs to be repeated, once more, that patents, trademarks and copyright are all different things. Kelloggs link

From your wiki link:
[T]he Congregation for Doctrine of Faith ceased publication of the Index in 1966 following the end of the Second Vatican Council, largely for practical considerations

So unless this guy went to school before '66...there was no banned books list. Further on evolution anyway, the late Pope John Paul II was a supporter of the theory and believed it compatible with Catholic doctrine.

Catholicism is the IBM of religions...bad when it's dominant, but when in an a minority, it has no problems adapting pragmatic stances and using common sense to survive. And they'll both survive me;)

Just a question ... mere conjecture really ... why do people still learn latin ?

I'm told by a reliable source that it's still spoken in Brazil, Argentina and several countries in the region.

Paper recycling is pointless. It biodegrades...

Theoretically. Practically, no, not once it goes into a landfill. That's why you can still find readable newspapers from half a century ago.

As a rule, stuff doesn't really biodegrade once it goes to the dump.

Baby-boomers are not only the first generation to become dependent on cars for transportation at an early age, but also the first generation to have access to fast cars at an early age. WWII produced more than just the baby boom, it produced a generation with an unprecedented advancement in engineering capability as a result of training either from the military directly or from support efforts.

Let's look at some of the influences on baby boomers as they grew up:
- NASCAR was founded in 1947, right on the heels of WWII
- car design and marketing focused on performance during the 1950's moreso than ever before
- this leads to unprecedented technical advancements in cars, i.e. fuel injection, turbo-charging, supercharging, hemispherical combustion chambers, all of which were developed for military applications, and the market understood and demanded the benefits of advanced technology more than ever before
- the US became the world leader in gross national product during the 1950's, which led to unprecedented car production and sales, which led to unprecedented access to cars by younger drivers

There are 75 million baby boomers on US roads today, all of whom turned 16 shortly after muscle cars became the primary focus of the production and marketing of cars. You cannot apply today's elderly driver model to the elderly drivers of the next decade. Today's drivers over 65 did not drag race as kids or idolize James Dean. Tomorrow's did.

The only corporations that would possibly be taking this into consideration are insurance companies, who are responsible for billions in liability and survive by predicting driver behavior. Are any car manufacturers consulting them on the matter?

And let's not ignore the notion of turning an elderly person's car windshield into what must seem like a Star Trek helm console to them. I'm immediately reminded of an age-old proverb about teaching old dogs new tricks.

It might be a fitting omen that James Dean died in a car accident.

Please don't confuse Batman with a batman. Undignified.

But obviously the scenario you've postulated has actually happened. Bruce Wayne supposedly became Batman in 1939. Obviously we've run through many Batmen since then.

Clearly this is also true for Batman's many opponents. Not only have have they been around as long as Batman, they've changed drastically, and many times. The Joker, for example, was originally just a weirdo who liked to wear whiteface. Then, for no obvious reason, he started dying his hair green. Then he went through a sort of red phase. Then he reinvented himself as a kind of mobster. Now he's supposedly a kind of post-modern nihilist, with rumors that he's gay.

The question we have to ask is, who's going to so much trouble to create all these strange, long-lived characters with a costume fetish who spend all their time fighting each other? I suspect a broad conspiracy to distract us from... something.

I don't know why it stains so well, but you spill even a drop of it and it will never come off.

Iron is very common in ink such as the classical iron gall and black tattoo ink.

http://usgovinfo.about.com/library/weekly/aa061202a.htm

Personally I haven't seen a dime of money "re-distributed" into my pocket.

http://usgovinfo.about.com/od/incometaxandtheirs/a/rebates2008.htm If you didn't get yours, you are one of the "rich", whose excessive productivity excludes you from the welfare class.

I think I understand the thinking behind having patents - as a way to prevent others from profiting from a patent owner's hard work on researching and implementing a solution to some problem merely by seeing their solution and copying it.

HOWEVER - it seems that many new inventions come about due to the combination of current scientific knowledge, current technology and current problems. This often leads to the same (or very similar) inventions being independantly made by several people across the world without them necessarily 'stealing' the idea from one another, and yet the patent system as currently implemented appears to try and deny all except one of the discovers from using their invention.

A google search for something like 'simultaneous invention' will turn up many articles listing some of the more famous examples such as Calculus (Newton and Leibniz), the car (Daimler and Benz), the telephone and so on.. (e.g. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all or http://german.about.com/library/weekly/aa030501a.htm)

Now on the one hand you could argue that instead of bothering with all this research and risking making an unusable independant discovery you should put all that effort in to searching for and licensing other's patents (which would ultimately lead to stagnation - see Asimov's foundation series)

More likely the solution is either not published when you start the research, or (in the case of programming, much of which is researching and 'inventing' ways for a computer to do some task) you do not think of your solution as an 'invention' that has a patent but rather just 'one obvious (to me) algorithm / UI to crack this sub-problem in creating something to meet my current project's requirements'

Law, psychology, education, journalism, etc. are dominated by women. Should we expect to see male quotas there?

Don't forget about parenting. Thanks to most Fathers a pushed away from having as strong relationships with their children as mothers are by being made to feel incompetent as a parent. Of course this is just accepted and even flaunted in our culture these days, we went from having TV shows about "Father Knows Best" to having every sitcom dad being a likable but incompetent bumbler who is always saved from his parental ineptitude by the always correct super mom. Imagine the public outcry there were a movie released that took the treatment that "Kindergarten Cop" or "Three Men and a Baby" gave to men's ability to be parents and applied it to women's ability to be scientists.

his attacks on reproductive rights of women

Which attacks? And which rights, including the right of a growing child to be protected from harm?

his support for a constitutional ban on the rights of gay couples to marry

This page states differently: "On the other hand, he opposes the Federal Marriage Amendment."

Right, all they have to do is show a note from their mother telling the courts that following orders is not a crime.

I feel much better, thank you.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Principles#Principle_IV
http://usmilitary.about.com/cs/militarylaw1/a/obeyingorders.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Calley

They don't have to be worse intellectually (that is more of a moron) to be worse rulers. Bush might not be the brightest fellow, but at least he's not an economic liberal.

The Democrats had power in Congress non-stop from the 1930s through 1980, and look where the economy ended up by the late 1970s. People seem to think it's bad now, but inflation, interest rates, and unemployment were all sky high 30 years ago with Carter. Obama was rated the most liberal Senator last year, and he's going to try to bring back many of the failed policies of the 1970s.

I never much liked Bush, but he was a much better choice than Gore or Kerry, and I'd probably take him over Obama. The real problem is that we have a two party system where no candidate can appeal to the broad middle of the country, but instead candidates have to appeal to the base to have a shot at the general election.

.. as it also opens the door for the teachings of our noodly saviour

Not to pick on the Christians, but they have a long tradition in the USA of trying to twist school curriculum & resources towards *only* their message.

Whenever athiests/pagans/wiccans/other use the same loophole, the Christians tend to get mighty upset.

It's also easier because the word itself reveals its gender and there are only two to keep in mind...

Where did you hear this?

French gender is a constant headache for many students of French. Why is manteau masculine and montre feminine, when both men and women wear both of them? What's the logic behind gender in French? There's no simple answer to this question, and no simple way to know the gender of every noun other than just learning the gender with each word. There are, however, some patterns in suffixes and word endings - certain endings tend to indicate masculine nouns, while other endings favor feminine nouns. As you can see by the lists of exceptions, these gender patterns are not fool-proof, but they can help you to figure out the gender of many French nouns.

http://french.about.com/library/weekly/bl-gender-m.htm

It doesn't make any fucking sense that our own damn web clients allow the developer to disable right-click on a page.

Bookmarklet:
javascript:void(document.onmousedown=null);void(document.onclick=null);void(document.oncontextmenu=null)

I realise you probably know about this and are making the point regardless, because most people won't know that, so it's still a fair one. Agree, just thought I'd drop this in case it helped someone who hadn't discovered it yet.

Besides that, I agree with you quite a lot. I also like the way you attack the actual problem - "shitty internet experience" resulting from widespread idiocy, rather than what I see on slashdot quite often, which is literally blaming the enabling technologies themselves (Flash, CSS, JS, XML, etc), and declaring we'd be better if we'd stuck with HTML2.0. Javascript et al can be used for some wonderfully useful, elegant, discreet enhancements, and in most domains slashdotters are keen to blame the abusers, not the technology (cf: gun control), but for some reason "Web 2.0" threads tend to get overrun by purist/zealot anti- loudmouths.

...could use more officers with the ability to realistically assess their own weaknesses. Have you considered applying for Officer Candidate School?

As a matter of fact, if you give someone a set of instructions for building a bomb with the intent of the recipient building a bomb with them, you can be fined $250,000 and spend 20 years in jail.

It's been like that for over a decade now.

http://chemistry.about.com/library/weekly/aa021003a.htm

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

Note the first (originally missing) comma; it is important. It makes the phrase 'being necessary to the security of a free state' a dependent clause: a present participial phrase at that. This means it serves as an adjective modifying the noun, 'militia'. The next phrase is the same: âoethe right of the people to keep and bear armsâ is also a dependent clause acting as an adjective and modifying 'militia'.

As we all learned, a sentence is still complete even when all dependent clauses are removed. Thus, the thought described by the 2nd amendment can be considered to be simply

A well regulated militia shall not be infringed.

And the meaning of militia, according to the author at least, encompasses the idea of 1) being necessary for a free people, and 2) synonymous with the right to bear arms.

Now we can argue what a militia means. And what it means to be well-regulated. I would suggest, based on the amount of power Congress has squeezed out of its other Art 1, section 8 enumerated powers, quite a lot.

It's too bad the conservative 4 and the opinion by Scalia is shamefully similar to the twisted, biased logic expressed in various forms by one Eugene Volokh (well-known libertarian/conservative individual gun-rights proponent). Especially the semantic and grammatical deconstruction of the text itself, which was afforded more weight than several experts in English, Literature, and History.

PS. When did /. get overrun with gun nuts?

Like this?

Actually what you said is a load of crap. The last thing you want to do is sleep less There is a lot of information out there linking lack of sleep with obesity.
A quick Google turned this up:
http://sleepdisorders.about.com/od/obesity/a/sleepweight.htm
http://www.webmd.com/diet/news/20041116/sleep-more-to-fight-obesity

My Feeds: Select: All 95 subscriptions, None, Unassigned A to Z Kids Stuff children http://www.atozkidsstuff.com/atoz.xml ABC News: Top Stories news http://my.abcnews.go.com/rsspublic/fp_rss20.xml About Computing Center technology http://z.about.com/6/g/pcworld/b/rss2.xml About.com Archaeology Archaeology http://z.about.com/6/g/archaeology/b/rss2.xml All Things Digital technology http://feeds.allthingsd.com/atd-feed/ Archaeology News Archaeology news http://www.topix.net/rss/science/archaeology.xml Ars Technica tech news http://feeds.arstechnica.com/arstechnica/BAaf ArsTechnica: Security Content Security technology http://feeds.feedburner.com/arstechnica/security BBC News | News Front Page | World Edition U.K. http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_world_edition/front_page/rss.xml BBC News | Science/Nature | World Edition Science/Nature http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/newsonline_world_edition/science/nature/rss.xml Boing Boing odd http://feeds.boingboing.net/boingboing/iBag Breaking News: CBSNews.com news http://www.cbsnews.com/feeds/rss/main.rss Breitbart.tv varied news topics http://www.breitbart.com/xml/recentvideo.xml ChannelWeb Complete Feed Computer news http://www.crn.com/cwb/globalcontent/cweball/index.xml;jsessionid=L0I1HBDQISHBCQSNDLQSKH0CJUNN2JVN Christian Science Monitor | Top Stories news http://www.csmonitor.com/rss/top.rss CNN.com - Offbeat odd http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_offbeat.rss CNN.com - Politics politics http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_allpolitics.rss CNN.com - U.S. U.S. news http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_us.rss Computerworld Breaking News technology http://feeds.computerworld.com/Computerworld/News Cool Tools technology http://feeds.feedburner.com/CoolTools Courant.com - Connecticut News Ct. news http://feeds.courant.com/Courant/ConnecticutNews Defense Tech U.S. defense news http://www.defensetech.org/index.rdf Discovery News - Technology technology http://dsc.discovery.com/news/subjects/technology/xdb/topstories.xml Drudge Report news http://feeds.feedburner.com/FeedPalooza/lwDu Dvorak Uncensored news http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?feed=rss2 Engadget robots & gadgets http://www.engadget.com/rss.xml Extremetech technology http://rssnewsapps.ziffdavis.com/extreme.xml Fark.com news http://www.pluck.com/rss/fark.rss FileForum software http://fileforum.b

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Have you seen Beowulf? In 10-20 years you'll be able to reproduce your happy memories without the need for your living kin (or any storage media.) And you can make yourself better looking, too.

Also, plutonium has very little radiation emitted from it, in fact so does uranium, you can get away with holding either in your bare hand for a short period of time with no problems what so ever

Larger pieces of plutonium [238] give off sufficient heat to boil water.

They also forgot to mention that it glows red hot from its own heat. So good luck with that. :-P

it's when ingested that the problems arise.

You're probably thinking of isotopes like Sr-90 which is chemically similar to Calcium and is thus deposited into bones by your body, thus exposing the sensitive marrow to radiation.

Yes, but the perceived moral superiority of one's state has a lot to do with people's willingness to support it. I would most happily have applied my talents to supporting US military technology efforts during WWII or even the cold war, when the US really did appear to be under existential threat.

But in today's world, it looks to many of us more like our government has been picking wars they wanted to have and seeking justification afterwards ... even changing the justifications when old ones become obsolute. They use sleazy legal loopholes ("Guantanamo is outside the US, and therefore does not qualify for us legal jurisdiction") to barely meet the letter of the law while grossly violating the spirit of international treaties that specify how moral nations ought to behave. And so I can't feel justified in supporting that effort technologically.

Recent US military antics have leveraged the population's fear of from an attack that killed 3000 people to initiate a war with an unrelated country that has now resulted in the death of nearly a million people ... far more, per year, than ever died under the "horrible" dictator previously mismanaging said country.

I know there are people who feel differently than I about these events - but many also feel the same or similarly. I am no pacifist, but I feel like my current government uses kindergarten logic internationally in ways that cost millions of human lives.

That alone is plenty to keep me out of DARPA, and I suspect it is for many others as well.

If there were a real external threat, I'd be supporting my nation's efforts to fight it as would any other good patriot. Right now, the greatest threat is from within.

Yep. Unfortunately the facts don't seem to support your notion:

http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa033099.htm

There is no such thing as a bad conservative. "Conservative" is a magic word that applies to those who are in other conservatives' good graces. Until they aren't. At which point they are liberals. Get used to the hearing about how the Republicans failed because they weren't true conservatives. Conservatism can never fail. It can only be failed by weak-minded souls who refuse to properly follow its tenets. It's a lot like communism that way.

• 1 pint chocolate ice cream
• 5 scoops vanilla ice cream
• 1/2 cup light rum
• 2 tbs finely ground coffee
• Instant coffee crystals

That is not the case and here is a thorough analysis of the controversy.

Your explanations utterly fail Occam's Razor. You made a complex argument about why plant life, which feeds on sunlight, surely could have survived for an epoch prior to the formation of the sun. All of this to justify the order of two sentences. The much simpler (and more correct) answer is that whoever wrote the bible didn't know which order to write those two sentences in, and just guessed wrong.

Babel is another example that we don't really need. It's well documented how languages can form in the wild. We don't need Babel to explain this anymore. Further, Babel doesn't make much sense. Why was God who couldn't be reached by any tower so concerned about primitive peoples building a brick tower? It might have been what, 6 stories tall? At around the same time in history as this was supposed to happen, the Egyptians were somehow building much taller pyramids without God screwing with their language and as you suggest their genetic makeup.

Further, you've got a very major issue with manpower. According to the bible, Noah only came around about 9 generations before Abraham. The tower of Babel would have been closer to 4 generations I think. So assuming everyone had 5 male children who survived to procreate, which is generous I think, you've got about 650 males (only the men really count in most religious texts) doing the building. Consider the Empire State Building, which took 7,000,000 manhours to build. Building something as large as the Empire State Building would take 5 years of full time employment for this entire population. But we're talking about agrarian societies here. They don't have that much time. They also don't have machines or lightbulbs.