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neoshroom wrote:

Here's what the Encyclopedia Galactica has to say about alcohol. It says that alcohol is a colorless volatile liquid formed by the fermentation of sugars and also notes its intoxicating effect on certain carbon-based life forms.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy also mentions alcohol. It says that the best drink in existence is the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster. It says that the effect of drinking a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster is like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick.

Thats the difference.

That's also the difference between Wikipedia and e2, with Wikipedia being the much stuffier of the two.

While both Wikipedia and e2 have entries on alcohol, e2 also has:

Mixed drinks you come up with when you're drunk

Drink from the cup as if it's already broken

You love these machines. These machines are dead: a love story.

Until today, it really pissed me off that I'd become this totally centered Zen Master and nobody had noticed

No damn you, it's nothing like a chess game

How Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man have sex

Don't kill your invisible husband to see what he looks like or you'll sob your heart out. But don't worry about the millions of invisible men coming to attack your village because they won't kill you if you don't know how to fight them.

How to build a maze for your cat

and

If cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl

So while Britannica cowers in fear its for-profit model is obsolete, and Wikipedia editors waste half their productive time engaged in endless flamewars e2 is still where all the fun is at.

neoshroom wrote:

Here's what the Encyclopedia Galactica has to say about alcohol. It says that alcohol is a colorless volatile liquid formed by the fermentation of sugars and also notes its intoxicating effect on certain carbon-based life forms.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy also mentions alcohol. It says that the best drink in existence is the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster. It says that the effect of drinking a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster is like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick.

Thats the difference.

That's also the difference between Wikipedia and e2, with Wikipedia being the much stuffier of the two.

While both Wikipedia and e2 have entries on alcohol, e2 also has:

Mixed drinks you come up with when you're drunk

Drink from the cup as if it's already broken

You love these machines. These machines are dead: a love story.

Until today, it really pissed me off that I'd become this totally centered Zen Master and nobody had noticed

No damn you, it's nothing like a chess game

How Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man have sex

Don't kill your invisible husband to see what he looks like or you'll sob your heart out. But don't worry about the millions of invisible men coming to attack your village because they won't kill you if you don't know how to fight them.

How to build a maze for your cat

and

If cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl

So while Britannica cowers in fear its for-profit model is obsolete, and Wikipedia editors waste half their productive time engaged in endless flamewars e2 is still where all the fun is at.

neoshroom wrote:

Here's what the Encyclopedia Galactica has to say about alcohol. It says that alcohol is a colorless volatile liquid formed by the fermentation of sugars and also notes its intoxicating effect on certain carbon-based life forms.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy also mentions alcohol. It says that the best drink in existence is the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster. It says that the effect of drinking a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster is like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick.

Thats the difference.

That's also the difference between Wikipedia and e2, with Wikipedia being the much stuffier of the two.

While both Wikipedia and e2 have entries on alcohol, e2 also has:

Mixed drinks you come up with when you're drunk

Drink from the cup as if it's already broken

You love these machines. These machines are dead: a love story.

Until today, it really pissed me off that I'd become this totally centered Zen Master and nobody had noticed

No damn you, it's nothing like a chess game

How Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man have sex

Don't kill your invisible husband to see what he looks like or you'll sob your heart out. But don't worry about the millions of invisible men coming to attack your village because they won't kill you if you don't know how to fight them.

How to build a maze for your cat

and

If cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl

So while Britannica cowers in fear its for-profit model is obsolete, and Wikipedia editors waste half their productive time engaged in endless flamewars e2 is still where all the fun is at.

neoshroom wrote:

Here's what the Encyclopedia Galactica has to say about alcohol. It says that alcohol is a colorless volatile liquid formed by the fermentation of sugars and also notes its intoxicating effect on certain carbon-based life forms.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy also mentions alcohol. It says that the best drink in existence is the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster. It says that the effect of drinking a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster is like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick.

Thats the difference.

That's also the difference between Wikipedia and e2, with Wikipedia being the much stuffier of the two.

While both Wikipedia and e2 have entries on alcohol, e2 also has:

Mixed drinks you come up with when you're drunk

Drink from the cup as if it's already broken

You love these machines. These machines are dead: a love story.

Until today, it really pissed me off that I'd become this totally centered Zen Master and nobody had noticed

No damn you, it's nothing like a chess game

How Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man have sex

Don't kill your invisible husband to see what he looks like or you'll sob your heart out. But don't worry about the millions of invisible men coming to attack your village because they won't kill you if you don't know how to fight them.

How to build a maze for your cat

and

If cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl

So while Britannica cowers in fear its for-profit model is obsolete, and Wikipedia editors waste half their productive time engaged in endless flamewars e2 is still where all the fun is at.

neoshroom wrote:

Here's what the Encyclopedia Galactica has to say about alcohol. It says that alcohol is a colorless volatile liquid formed by the fermentation of sugars and also notes its intoxicating effect on certain carbon-based life forms.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy also mentions alcohol. It says that the best drink in existence is the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster. It says that the effect of drinking a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster is like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick.

Thats the difference.

That's also the difference between Wikipedia and e2, with Wikipedia being the much stuffier of the two.

While both Wikipedia and e2 have entries on alcohol, e2 also has:

Mixed drinks you come up with when you're drunk

Drink from the cup as if it's already broken

You love these machines. These machines are dead: a love story.

Until today, it really pissed me off that I'd become this totally centered Zen Master and nobody had noticed

No damn you, it's nothing like a chess game

How Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man have sex

Don't kill your invisible husband to see what he looks like or you'll sob your heart out. But don't worry about the millions of invisible men coming to attack your village because they won't kill you if you don't know how to fight them.

How to build a maze for your cat

and

If cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl

So while Britannica cowers in fear its for-profit model is obsolete, and Wikipedia editors waste half their productive time engaged in endless flamewars e2 is still where all the fun is at.

neoshroom wrote:

Here's what the Encyclopedia Galactica has to say about alcohol. It says that alcohol is a colorless volatile liquid formed by the fermentation of sugars and also notes its intoxicating effect on certain carbon-based life forms.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy also mentions alcohol. It says that the best drink in existence is the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster. It says that the effect of drinking a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster is like having your brains smashed out by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick.

Thats the difference.

That's also the difference between Wikipedia and e2, with Wikipedia being the much stuffier of the two.

While both Wikipedia and e2 have entries on alcohol, e2 also has:

Mixed drinks you come up with when you're drunk

Drink from the cup as if it's already broken

You love these machines. These machines are dead: a love story.

Until today, it really pissed me off that I'd become this totally centered Zen Master and nobody had noticed

No damn you, it's nothing like a chess game

How Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man have sex

Don't kill your invisible husband to see what he looks like or you'll sob your heart out. But don't worry about the millions of invisible men coming to attack your village because they won't kill you if you don't know how to fight them.

How to build a maze for your cat

and

If cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl

So while Britannica cowers in fear its for-profit model is obsolete, and Wikipedia editors waste half their productive time engaged in endless flamewars e2 is still where all the fun is at.

Actually, everything2 is much broader. And it's not particularly vulnerable to vandalism and POV article mauling, unlike Wikipedia.

Once you create a decent writeup no one's going to come hack it up or vandalize it. And it's tolerant of multiple points of view without having to endure endless flamewars to get your POV heard.

It's a pity that e2 hasn't recieved half the attention Wikipedia's got. Oh well, I guess that's what e2 gets for having a higher barrier to entry (actually having to create an account) and demanding quality contributions from every editor.

As for me, after a year on Wikipedia, I'm going back to e2. It may take more initial effort to write up something decent enough for publication on e2, but at least once I do it I can be sure no one's going to fuck with it and I don't have to constantly defend my writeup against endless hordes of trolls.

I agree that Wikipedia isn't such a great analog to the Hitchhiker's Guide, but sites like Everything2 and (perhaps not surprisingly) the Hitchhiker's Guide (H2G2) site are.

"Porn for women" has been around as long and been more widely available than "porn for men", yet no one complains, does studies, or even talks about it. But, that is ok because porn for women isn't pictures, it is words. And, we all know that reading books and stories doesn't effect the thoughts and minds of people unless there are pictures, right?

Interesting point. I guess the difference is that if you're reading a book with no pictures in it, you're probably considered emotionally old enough to handle the content in a mature and responsible manner.

Incidently, this is pretty similar to an article on E2 I was reading today, about how books are rarely censored compared to films, games and so on (a good case in point is that the book Fight Club teaches you how to make bombs; the film version was edited to take out a few of the necessary steps).

PKD must have had confused Stanislaw Lem with the collective communist conspiracy that is AntiORP.

-Don

Top Gun, you say?

Right, I've always found the following writeup on everything2.com, particularly enlightening, not to mention very funny.

A Former Navy Pilot picks the movie "Top Gun" to itty-bitty pieces

The m stands for micron.

Linky!

Centurion: What's this, then? "ROMANES EUNT DOMUS"? "People called Romanes they go the house"?
Brian: It, it says "Romans go home".
Centurion: No it doesn't. What's Latin for "Roman"?
Brian: (hesitates)
Centurion: Come on, come on!
Brian: (uncertain) "ROMANUS".
Centurion: Goes like?
Brian: "-ANNUS"?
Centurion: Vocative plural of "-ANNUS" is?
Brian: "-ANI".
Centurion: (takes paintbrush from Brian and paints over) "RO-MA-NI".
"EUNT"? What is "EUNT"?
Brian: "Go".
Centurion: Conjugate the verb "to go"!
Brian: "IRE". "EO", "IS", "IT", "IMUS", "ITIS", "EUNT".
Centurion: So "EUNT" is ...?
Brian: Third person plural present indicative, "they go".
Centurion: But "Romans, go home!" is an order, so you must use the ...?
(lifts Brian by his hairs)
Brian: The ... imperative.
Centurion: Which is?
Brian: Ahm, oh, oh, "I", "I"!
Centurion: How many romans? (pulls harder)
Brian: Plural, plural! "ITE".
Centurion: (strikes over "EUNT" and paints "ITE" to the wall)
(satisfied) "I-TE".
"DOMUS"? Nominative? "Go home", this is motion towards, isn't it, boy?
Brian: (very anxious) Dative?
Centurion: (draws his sword and holds it to Brian's throat)
Brian: Ahh! No, ablative, ablative, sir. No, the, accusative, accusative,
ah, DOMUM, sir.
Centurion: Except that "DOMUS" takes the ...?
Brian: ... the locative, sir!
Centurion: Which is?
Brian: "DOMUM".
Centurion: (satisfied) "DOMUM" (strikes out "DOMUS" and writes "DOMUM") "-MUM".
Understand?
Brian: Yes sir.
Centurion: Now write it down a hundred times.
Brian: Yes sir, thank you sir, hail Caesar, sir.
Centurion: (salutes) Hail Caesar.
If it's not done by sunrise, I'll cut your balls off.
Brian: (very relieved) Oh thank you sir, thank you sir, hail Caesar and everything, sir!
The scene cuts to a very tired Brian finishing off one last iteration of ROMANI ITE DOMUM. The camera zooms out to show the castle covered entirely in ROMANI ITE DOMUM
Brian: Finished!
Roman Soldier: Right. Now don't do it again. (Wanders off)

It treats the web and APIs as just more objects and places, and is a platform for writing and sharing your own code to manipulate those objects and places

I've heard the mushrooms [in Super Mario Bros.] to be more of a phallic reference, but that's about it.

Then read this criticism.

Please be aware that your take on twins studies is apparently ill-informed.

In actual fact there are links in intelligence as well as personality in twins studies. They are not perfect matches, but strong correlations.

Since you seem to feel that others should read psychology textbooks, allow me to provide a reference.
http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=116249 3
If you prefer dead trees, Steven Pinker's book, The Blank Slate, addresses this question, among others.

Feel free to read with attention and come back to the discussion better prepared.

PS You can get similar effects on a Linux box by catting various files to /dev/audio; /dev/hd0 or /dev/random for instance. Here's a good reference. I actually tried piping the mouse to audio once and got something like the results described; I was on the verge of recording some "mouseophone" music when I think I got bored and went on to something else.

You mean like the Gameboy Player addition for the GCN?

Yeah, but you'll probably still have to leave your GameCube hooked up, as the Revolution isn't expected to have the GameCube High Speed Port through which the Game Boy Player sends input, video, and audio data. In addition, a lot of Game Boy titles don't work on the Game Boy Player; most notably, these include 8-bit games that use an external keyboard, 8-bit games that use the early 4-player adapter, those that use a tilt sensor, sun sensor in the Game Pak, and a few titles that rely on FMV. Details in Game Boy Player@E2.

Given the Revolution's aim to be able to emulate many (or most) of the older games for their older systems, I suspect you won't have much of a problem with your desire.

For one thing, only NES, Super NES, and N64 were announced, not Nintendo arcade systems nor handheld systems, and even among those, only games published by Nintendo were announced, as Nintendo may be having trouble getting other publishers signed on to re-release their games on Revolution Live Arcade. And will I be able to play homebrew?

And disgratulations (conpropulations?) to Everything2, the practically forgotten early attempt to pull off what Wikipedia has actually done. If you want to actually learn about Everything2, you really should just look it up in the Wikipedia.

Well, mauve is the color indicator that there is going to be a mind-flayer attack! Believe me, you don't want to see mauve coming up on the old monitor!

Could be worse.

Maybe soon it will be.

Why? You can't survive off of antimatter. O2 is rather helpful in that sense.

The typical Singularitarian answer would probably involve you uploading your consciousness via a Moravec transfer into a robot, which would then be able to survive off the antimatter without any need for oxygen. Or something.

Did these guys hire the Boo.com crew for their business plan?

The Penalty for Homosexual sex in public is death. According to Shariah, you need 3 witnesses of the act, which makes it pretty clear that you can't enfore this law in the privacy of your own home, and Islam regards privacy of the home as an important rule. Islam is clear that you can't go into people's homes to enforce all laws in private. Go home and worship idols, eat pork, or do anal sex if you want, nobody will stop you.

Shariah does allow adoption, although it prefers someone from the extended family. The prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) was an orphan, he had to be taken in by an uncle, so of COURSE adoption is allowed. Here's a fatwa Islamic Ruling on Adoption and Islam's stance on Adoption.

It is NOT permissible for a Muslim to lie, unless threatened by death for telling the truth. "Taqiyya" is a Shi'ite thing where they are afraid to pray differently around Sunnis. It does not usually allow a Muslim to lie to non-Muslims, and lying is a major and hellworthy sin. I resent the notion that you can't trust any Muslim. Didn't that sort of thinking lead to the Holocaust? (Besides, "Kuffar" is the wrong word anyway.)

Christians believe they will dominate the world. Oh God, I better lock my doors and avoid those Catholic neighbors of mine. /sarcasm Hindus believe they will dominate the world, some Jewish leaders think Israel will as well. Why single Islam out?

Beating up the editor is regrettable, and I'm sure the Muslim leaders condemned it. If the same gay man went to the Vatican, would it be all that surprising if someone attacked him? I dunno, I'm not familiar with the incident.

I don't care if you aren't Muslim, or you dislike Islam. That's your opinion. Just don't smear all Muslims because you don't understand them. You don't even know what a dhimmi is, and it's irrelevant anyway because there is no Islamic state today.

Oh, that's easy. Just look here. http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=176815 9

Why install Linux on a dead badger? How else to take advantage of all that bloat...

After reviewing the link... now again remind yourself about the petabyte. We are talking a helluva lotta data.

But as far as the article for this story goes, my bullshit detector is fully lit. This is the kind of stuff best presented to the PHB crowd with nice Powerpoint presentations; we techies are way too laid back to get excited over this.

This reminds me of this story written by someone who works at an activity center for kids aged 10-14 in Denmark. His belief (formed by direct experience) is that video games, notably RPGs, help not with learning math or history, but with something much more important...how to work with others as a team and get to know eachother as equals, rather than "bullies" or "nerds."

From the article on teamwork:

They began asking for - and offering - help, and they learned that the best person for a job is not always or necessarily "me". They saw that acting as a group rather than as four individuals sometimes got them through some pretty nasty situations.

And on getting to know eachother:

This did not happen overnight. But as a year passed the changes became visible, not only in game but in the real world too. The bullies bullied less, and the "too quiet" kids began to speak up. The fights subsided and the older boys stopped taunting the younger ("Hey, we're all gamers, right"), and some of the lonely kids became friends with their fellow-gamers. It wasn't all peaches and cream but it definitely got better.

My first machine was a ZX Spectrum 48K back in 1984. After getting bored with the first batch of games, I wrote my first BASIC program, a telephone directory application. String arrays! Saving to/load from tape! Yay!

The Speccy is also responsible for introducing me to Tolkien, via The Hobbit.

Since then... Amstrad CPCs (Sorcery!), 286, Sun workstations (in college), 486, etc. My current main machine is a Thinkpad X31 which is just the right size (and color!) to run spectemu on.

By the way, the Spectrum is, as far as I know, the only machine to have had a song written about it.

While antigravity is a cool SciFi story device, it is quite possible that attempting to implement an antigravity device is like pulling yourself out of the swamp by pulling at your own hair like Munchhausen, or like protecting yourself from rain by sitting in an open boat on a lake.

Now even when Dr. Felbers calculations are true, you'd first have to find a star speeding at a speed of 57%+ of lights speed(or accelerate one yourself :-P), then you'd have to get in front of it, and in order to avoid the star smacking right into your spaceship, you'd have to have a speed of 0.57c already. Moreover(guessing), when you'd accelerate over 0.57c to take advantage of it, as you move away, the antigravity cone probably would loose focus and dispel just like gravity with a spread function of 1/r^2, quickly rendering it useless unless you'd just float along with the star.

obLinks: Google "pushing gravity" or (http://everything2.com/index.pl?node=pushing%20gr avity) predicts similar behavior on a small scale and provides a simpler model for working out strange gravity effects.

"Nobody will ever need more than 640k RAM!" -- Bill Gates, 1981

Islam does ban idolatry, but it is not clear if pictorial representations of human figures including prophets are banned. It's pretty much the slippery slope argument and pictures of prophets would be the first step. There's plenty of disagreement about this among Islamic scholars both modern and historical.

Iconoclasm is common in Christianity, in particular of the Orthodox and Calvinist type, too. The Bible forbids the making and worshipping of graven images, and there is plenty of disagreement about what that means too. To Calvinists it basically means that God is only manifested in his words, and anything imputed to God beyond his words is idolatry.

In the Netherlands, itself home to the Iconoclastic Fury of 1566, the crime of blasphemy fell into desuetude because of a landmark court opinion in 1968 that embodies a cynical kind of Iconoclastic reasoning: the court argued that it cannot impute attributes or opinions to God, and therefore declared itself incompetent to judge whether some description of God is blasphemous and deferred the case to God. This is an elegant line of reasoning in dealing with heathens and heretics, and one that is consistent with freedom of religion: let God/Allah judge them.

Well, that's kind of a harsh judgement considering that both the creators of Resident Evil and Silent Hill stated that they were consciously trying to imitate American forms of horror. (In the case of Resident Evil it was Dawn of the Dead in the case of Silent Hill it was modern American horror literature, which is why you find things like Matheson St. and Bachman St. in the original Silent Hill.)

Somewhat whiny, yet funny E2 writeup on the subject:

I will REMOVE the fucking toilet seat if you don't shut up

Okay, so coal mining is 45 a year...

Then we've got deaths from the pollution - 563 annually in Pittsburgh alone. Sound like a lot? Compare it to 22000 annually in the US, plus many more in the rest of the world.
(if you don't like my sources, get your own

Then on top of that, we've got the deaths from simply working in the dangerous environment that is a coal plant.

As some random person wrote for their high school paper, Nuclear Power: Safer than Peanut Butter! (yes, they do back that up!).

An excellent writeup on the Uberman sleep schedule can be found here.

In the past I've restricted my sleep to as little as three hours a night for several weeks without ill effects, but I've never tried the Uberman sleep schedule. Now that I'm older, I seem to need my sleep much more desperately than I used to (I get physically ill if I get less than five hours sleep per night), so I doubt I'll be trying it anytime soon.

I have a friend who decided to try it during his long period of unemployment (in fact, I first heard of it from him), but he dropped out after a few weeks. I suspect that he just enjoyed sleeping too much to give up so much of it. ^_^

The major place user submitted id3 databases fall flat on their faces is in the cataloging of classical music - some of the schema people use for that stuff is quite simply insane - movement names in the author fields, a lack of comprehensive composition names in the track field (ie, naming the first movement correctly and naming the second movement ii. allegro and that's IT), a total disregard for performers, no standard for capitalization, disparity of composer name formats. There's nothing even approaching a standard for such things and you end up doing it ALL by hand.

Just saying, if all you're worrying about is changing a genre field for every album you rip, will, it could be a helluva lot worse.

I actually wrote a basic guide to get through this particular minefield; it's over here on E2.

The Inuit have an absurd number of words for what we call snow.

Not really. Various Inuit dialects have a lot of compound words, analogous to English snowdrift, snowflake, snowball, etc. You might find the E2 article and the Wikipedia article interesting.

Similarly, it is not clear that everyone in the world takes 'length' and 'angle' to be significant.

Especially to the Pirahã.

Except that it is not so *tightly integrated*. I would certainly argue that this phrase could be read "near", and there are certainly plenty of other people who write of the
tight integration of explorer and the kernel. And if you don't agree, well then who's splitting hairs :-P

Seriously, I use Windows, Solaris and Linux daily and the latter two almost exclusively
without a GUI. You cannot tell me that KDE or Gnome are part of the OS.... GNU/Linux/KDE?

While the face of RISC may have changed, it's still RISC. Instructions are still of fixed size and take one cycle to complete. In the G4, anything that takes more than one cycle to complete is in the FPU, which is a coprocessor, or it's a vector operation, and it's in the velocity engine.

I agree with you about intel's future, unless maybe they come up with a decent bus (sometime next year) or just license AMD's :)

Yup...

http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node=Extractin g%20sunbeams%20out%20of%20cucumbers

I find it amusing that my post was modded insightful, though :p

"There is so much land available in the entire globe that I don't see how warlords can use the strength of weapons to take over"

WTF? - that's a complete non-sequitur. How does there being lots of land stop weapons being useful. Here's a hint - it's hasn't up to now.
Aside from that, so what if there's lots of land on earth? There are lots of people too. The density of people on the land is increasing, since the number of people is increasing, and the part of the land that is useful to us is decreasing (desertification, salination, erosion, pollution, etc)

Humans are a minor part of the balance

Not true anymore. Welcome to the anthropocene era.

You can't fight a global war with knives, and you can defend yourself much easier in communities against warlords if you take the machine guns and flamethrowers out of the equation.

Nobody said anything about a big "global war", just local war everywhere. Warlordism is implausible? Go look at the early history of ... anywhere.

The environment continues to fix itself -- yesterday's doomsdayers are silent because they were wrong. Today's will be silent tomorrow -- they'll be wrong, too.

The ones who weren't wrong weren't silent - the chap who successfully predicted the USA's peak oil, and has predicted the world's peak oil soon now. Anyway, that's another non-sequitur. It's equivalent to saying "The candle didn't go out this minute. Those who predicted that it would go out were wrong. Therefore it will never go out."

Changing the subject but I followed your link to the Polybrominated biphenyls. I find this sentence as very odd:

In 1973, however, several thousand pounds of PBBs were accidentally mixed with livestock feed that was distributed to farms in West Central Michigan, USA.

I found more about it here, what an odd chain of events. I'm sure those with tin foil hats would have a different opinion of what really happened.

The McCain-Feingold bill (a.k.a. Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2001) did impose some limitations that might be fairly said to be limitations on political speech. Specifically, there is a provision that prevents other political groups (e.g. 527 committees) from airing "issue ads" around election time. From the Brookings institution analysis:

Electioneering Communication: Restrictions on Corporations and Labor Unions (sec. 203)

Corporations and labor unions are prohibited from running or indirectly financing electioneering communications identifying or targeting a federal candidate within 60 days of a general election. Only a corporation or labor union's registered PAC may fund such activities with hard dollars.

Now, of course, it doesn't actually prevent people from voicing their views, but it does in theory make it harder for citizens to have their voices heard during the most crucial time (usually FEC restrictions are put on candidates, not all citizens). It's debatable whether this is limiting money or limiting speech, but it sure looks uncomfortably close to effectively limiting political speech to those of us concerned with protecting the 1st amendment. One instance in which this came up was in 2004, when the conservative group Citizens United tried to get the FEC to stop Michael Moore from running adds for his movie Fahrenheit 9/11, claiming it was clearly political content covered under McCain-Feingold.

All that being said, Russ Feingold was the only person in the U.S. Senate to have the balls to vote against the USA PATRIOT act. In a time when other politicians were pandering to hystaria and rushing to take what they knew would be (at least in the near term) a popular position, he stood up for principle; he stood for liberty. So, yeah, I don't think I agree with that part of McCain-Feingold, but it's just foolishness to suggest that Feingold has not been a defender of liberty.

> Where did you hear that Jobs is a Buddhist? I"m not seeing a
> reference to it on Wikipedia. I saw one link suggesting he is
> Lutheran.

Here is a list of Buddhists on Wikipedia, Ctrl-F in your browser and search for Jobs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Buddhists

Google has plenty of references to it including everything2:

http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=17468

"architects"? Is that even a word?

Yeah, whatever happened to that?

Although, I agree that Wikipedia would be a better choice.

"Tessier and Ashpool climbed the well of gravity to discover that they loathed space. They built Freeside to tap the wealth of the new islands, grew rich and eccentric, and began the
construction of an extended body in Straylight. We have sealed ourselves away behind our money, growing inward, generating a seamless universe of self."

http://everything2.com/index.pl?node=Tessier-Ashpo ol

Well, there's Everything, which is like a very loosely administered Wikipedia. But, like Slashdot itself, it's full of random crap, lame jokes, and a few nuggets of useful information here and there.