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Anyone habitually shooting snakes is a douchebag of the highest order. They're wild animals that are pretty much harmless unless you go out of your way to piss them off, and most of the poisonous American varieties are rattlesnakes that will warn you so you don't step on them accidentally.

The reason people kill snakes is because of the known history of people dying of snakebite. This is not an urban myth or old wives tale. It has even prompted medical research resulting in such things as antivenom, which is even the subject of publication by the World Health Organisation. What would they know? We'll just take your word for it that snakes are harmless, despite the world health organisations efforts at improving antivenom for what must be no real reason.

I don't bet the life of my children on the hope that they've properly understood instructions on how to deal with snakes and follow those instructions rather than their curiosity if faced with a snake.

The Nazgul didn't get flying mounts in the beginning because they weren't going into combat. They were moving, to the extent possible, in secret. They didn't need flying lizard things, and if they had set out on flying lizard things in the first place, then everyone within sight of their flight path would have been immediately alerted to their actions.

But Tolkien's notes said that the idea of mounting Nazgul on the Fell Beasts was completely new at the time of the War of the Ring (these still-unpublished notes, kept at Marquette University, are excerpted in Hammond and Scull's The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion).

It still doesn't mean that they couldn't have been mustered in time to drive off the eagles.

At any rate, sitting in Rivendell trying to decide whether to summon the eagles (who might not come) for a head-on charge straight for the mountain, neither Gandalf nor any of the others there could have known what might have been awaiting them had they tried such a reckless move straight into the heart of the enemy's territory. They also didn't yet know that Denethor was coming under Sauron's control, and would have possibly, unwittingly provided early warning via the palantir. They would have sacrificed any hope of secrecy - and secrecy was the one thing that gave them hope of success.

Gandalf himself also didn't dare to bear the ring - this means Frodo would have had to come with. As the burden began to weaken him, could they really trust that he wouldn't drop it, or fall? If they lost the ring from that height they'd never find it again.

And it still leaves the problem of what happens when they actually reach Mordor. They'd be seen in advance. There's a fair chance Sauron would know they had the ring with them, and with no secrecy to their movements a good chance he'd figure out what they were up to. To dispose of the ring they'd still have to land on the mountain and drop the ring in personally - just tossing it down would carry too great a risk of it landing on rock instead of in lava. So they'd be met with Sauron's entire army.

The Nazgul didn't get flying mounts in the beginning because they weren't going into combat. They were moving, to the extent possible, in secret. They didn't need flying lizard things, and if they had set out on flying lizard things in the first place, then everyone within sight of their flight path would have been immediately alerted to their actions.

But Tolkien's notes said that the idea of mounting Nazgul on the Fell Beasts was completely new at the time of the War of the Ring (these still-unpublished notes, kept at Marquette University, are excerpted in Hammond and Scull's The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion).

Phil Plait of the Bad Astronomy blog recently published a book, Death from the Skies , about human extinction scenarios — some of them preventable, others not. The inevitable ones such as proton decay would take many billions of years, but some, such as gamma-ray bursts, could theoretically come at any time.

http://isbndb.com/d/book/x_power_tools/prices.html

I strongly suggest that you check out ISBNDB, which is an online database of ISBN numbers. You wouldn't have to go look up numbers in-person, thereby removing any possible blame from yourselves.

I wouldn't be surprised if the Coop attempted to challenge the ISBNDB, however....

I'll give a free pro Datalogic USB barcode scanner (I've a few spare ones I acquired ages ago and haven't used) to anyone who can come up with a simple Windows application that reads barcodes, submits them to http://isbndb.com/account/dev/api/20-structure.htm l, and builds a simple text file with all my books in there. I've got hundreds of books to take to the Charity shop, and I'd like to itemise them all - and I can't code for toffee.
Can anyone help me out?
http://www.eblong.com/zarf/bookscan/#quick suggests it's trivial via Perl for those that can use it... barcode AT infobubble DOT co DOT uk if they can...!

ISBNDB make all their data available through a web service as well. That's a killer feature as far as I'm concerned.

ISBNDB make all their data available through a web service as well. That's a killer feature as far as I'm concerned.

I just found this a few minutes ago, and it looks pretty cool. ISBN DB lets you feed in an ISBN via simple HTTP GET and it sends you an XML-format file with all the important card-catalog type information about your book. It wouldn't be too hard to combine that capability with a little script that'd read the ISBN barcode from your barcode scanner, download+parse XML, and save to a MySQL or other database. You'd still have to manually enter location data (shelf number or however you decide to organize things) but it'd save you a lot of time typing author/title/date/etc.

No, it's only $16.47.

That said, I'm happy it never really materialized. Having a universe with a human population spreading effectively in it summons an eerie image on a spherically expanding brain-tumor to my mind...

...anyone interested in nuclear propulsion and the most avant-garde of rocketry, read about "Project Orion" if you already haven't.

http://isbndb.com/d/book/project_orion.html

Ringworld a rip-off of Halo? LOLS! Dude Ringworld was first published in 1977, making it older than Microsoft and the XBoX by a number of years