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You can afford to pay $12 for a box of cereal. Be honest. You could do it.

Yep.

Why don't you?

Because $11.50 of any money I spent on that fundamentally unhealthy product would go to the 1% that use their money to corrupt my government.

I pay extra for fair-trade, organic, shade-grown coffee. I pay extra for services from mom & pop stores that offer workers benefits. I pay extra for pizzas and chicken sandwiches that do not support politically activist religious fanatics like the Catholics or Mormons. I pay extra for clothes made without slave labor. I pay extra for cars that emit less pollution.

Most Americans in the 99% are just like me. They are more than happy to spend extra for something that does good in their view. But they won't pay $12 for slave-labor cereal with profits going to slavers and nutball armageddonists, and for most people in the United States that's all they are being offered.

The market, fundamentally, is neither free nor fair; and you can't buy what's not on the shelves. The corporate-owned Federal Government is doing everything it can to wipe out anything that might benefit the little guys- they won't even let farmers sell fresh milk to people who want to buy it. Because those bold libertarian heroes are protecting you from germs, see?

The latter, posting armed guards to keep people away, is clearly better.

Here is what a NPS Ranger has to say:

As a furloughed National Park Service Ranger a few answers for you.

One, all National Park Service sites, including World War II Memorial, were shut down. Currently, the Honor Flight vets have been let in by calling it a First Amendment activity, which I think was pretty quick thinking on someone's part. Other visitors have been kept out.

Two, about 3,200 NPS employees were not furloughed. Those people are currently working, but not being paid now. 2/3 of those are Law Enforcement, EMS, and fire. This includes the Park Police who cover the DC area parks. So yes, there are armed Rangers at the World War II Memorial, as well as other NPS sites. These are not additional Law Enforcement rangers on duty but actually a reduced number of the normal amount due to the shutdown. However, since they are standing at the gates turning people away they are much more visible than usual.

Three, as for websites, at least in the case of the NPS this one I know exactly what happened since I manage two sites. We didn't do anything to our individual park websites, instead a single master switch was thrown and all are redirecting to the main DOI website. This was done so that A: there was a single message going out, not 400+ versions of the message, and B: prevents visitors from misunderstanding out status and trying to ask questions or make reservations on-line where there is no one to reply to them.

Four, as for privately run campgrounds being closed. Those campgrounds are concessions within the park boundaries - just like many restaurants, hotels, shops, and recreational vendors. Their contract clearly states that when the park is closed, they need to close. If you think about it, it would be ridiculous to close the park, but then allow people in to camp there. A similar situation would an individual store owner within a mall - if the mall rules are we close at 10PM, then you need to close at 10PM. Sucks for the campground owners, but they signed the contract. Also, yes a small piece of the money earned by those concessions does go to the government, and we appreciate it - but those feed don't come anywhere close to covering the costs of running a park.

Five, the major duties of the National Park Service are to protect, preserve, and interpret the resources of the National Parks. Those duties, as well as the boundaries of the parks themselves, are determined by Congress. When Congress decides to not fund the Park Service, the only option as the stewards of these national treasures is the lock the gates. I can assure you that if we didn't lock down when there was no staff around, there would be people with metal detectors and shovels digging up battlefields, and trails being hacked across sensitive landscapes. Huge amounts of time are spent preventing people from doing stupid things - either trough malice or ignorance. And much of our budget goes to repairing damage to these sites.

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1985/who-wrote-the-bible-part-1

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2135/is-heavy-water-dangerous

It has literally never happened that a policeman commandeered a car to go into a high speed chase.

What definition of "literally" do you use?

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2247/can-cops-really-commandeer-cars

Life isn't like a Hollywood movie where policemen randomly needs to go into a high speed car chases while on foot patrol.

That it would make for less exciting movies is in itself a good reason why it shouldn't happen. Imagine Hollywood redoing Bullitt and Vanishing Point with speed limit restricted vehicles.

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1091/if-the-locks-on-the-panama-canal-were-blown-would-one-ocean-pour-into-the-other

This article says the tide on the Pacific is 20 feet higher then the Atlantic

Actually the existance of the sugar high has been hotly debated, and as far as I'm aware most of the scientific literature suggests that it doesn't exist.

Of course I think those observations are mostly about double blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trails where neither the child nor the observer knows the child has gotten sugar. I don't know if the results of this survey-based cohort study are due to the placebo effect, spurious correlations, or actual new effect.

(Caveat: I don't know that much about biology/medicine, so take all that with a grain of salt.)

In the fifties and sixties, it was one of the marketing points for Coca-Cola that its Coke would give a boost upon consumption.

Actually the existance of the sugar high has been hotly debated, and as far as I'm aware most of the scientific literature suggests that it doesn't exist.

Of course I think those observations are mostly about double blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trails where neither the child nor the observer knows the child has gotten sugar. I don't know if the results of this survey-based cohort study are due to the placebo effect, spurious correlations, or actual new effect.

(Caveat: I don't know that much about biology/medicine, so take all that with a grain of salt.)

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1172/does-the-head-remain-briefly-conscious-after-decapitation

Yes, and Manhattan Island belonged to the Lenape tribe long before Europeans came to America. That doesn't give the tribe's surviving members the undisputed right to barricade the Holland Tunnel.* Times change.

* Although that would be kind of cool.

The actions of Columbus' crew predate thay kind of fraud by a century: "buying" gold (jewels) from the Taino indians in 1492 with glass beads and other trinkets. (Scroll down to the "Samoet" paragraph)

The indians in Manhattan sold the land for the meager price of $24 to US interests in 1626. Fair or not, something you sell before protection laws went into effect is not something you expect to get back without a fight, especially when you sleep on it and let your descendants fight it out generations later. Contrast with the even weaker case of something never had a tangible sale process you can use as evidence of dispute.

The internet transitioned slowly from US military to educational, to commercial / mainstream, and now to [??]. I'd argue that the question marks stand for military once again. Given its government roots, it makes sense this ws was planned all along in hind sight. The biggie is that what Uncle Sam planned for the 'net had no expectations beyond academic espionage breaking into the commercial world.

To play devil's advocate here, if you were Korea or Russia and your information gold mines started seemingly changing hands under your CLOSE supervision... and you wanted free "labor" [information]-wise as you saw schools joining in... and suddenly thousands of corporations come to the table for a piece of your pie... and then PEOPLE you've been meaning to somehow spy on all along are all fooled... would you still let go of those perfect golden nuggets?

The Y chromosome used to just be a variant of the X chromosome, with only a few genes different; they were the same size. Over time, careless maintenance staff decided the backups were redundant and stopped keeping them. Thus something like 5% of men have one or more factory defects—most commonly colour-deficient vision, which some backward engineer decided was a feature , not a bug, and went to great lengths to distribute bad copies to other users.

On the plus side, we recently found out that the genome actually does have some documentation—well, more like debugger symbols—so it's getting easier to figure out where the important binaries are located. Unfortunately in the process we also discovered that what appeared to be severe filesystem fragmentation is actually rotational performance optimization, and most of the rest of the disk is actually a messy broth of shell scripts, not merely unallocated space as we assumed.

The sad thing is that even if we did redesign everything, it would probably be way worse than the existing codebase, particularly since we only have a tiny portion of the actual spec, which you can imagine was never exactly written down.

whose idea was it to use metal detectors as gun detectors? Time & technology change... and detection methods must change with them.

If non-metallic guns were truly viable, they would have been used 20 years ago to sneak past metal detectors and kill judges and politicians and airplane pilots. Plastic manufacturing has been around for a long time, the only thing 3D printers do is reduce the cost. There are well-funded spy agencies and a few individuals who would have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for a single gun. And yet none has materialized: [1] [2] [3]

Probably because you're using the wrong size bit for the job.

Grrr. That's one of my huge pet peeves. I know as new workers if they know that Phillips bits come in sizes. If they don't, I explain it to them and tell them not to cheat.

Or, the little bugger is so rust-caked that it has become one with the surface it fastens to. In which case, it doesn't really matter what kind of bit you use (unless it's an Easy-Out).

Actually Phillips screws were not designed to be removed. They were created after slots, because they're self centering and the bit pops out when they are torqued properly. Power screwdrivers were new and didn't have any torque control, so it was put into the head/bit combination. Which sucks, because when you remove a screw you need as much torque as it was put in with, plus a little more if things got sticky. You can't do that with Phillips.

"Hemp is of first necessity to the wealth & protection of the country." – Thomas Jefferson

Jefferson was right, and that statement far from painting him as a cokehead actually shows that he was a shrewd businessman.

These are the facts :-

1) Botanically, marijuana equals hemp. These are basically two names for the same plant.

2) Hemp was historically useful for rope, paper, and clothing, and was long promoted in Virginia as an alternative cash crop.

3) Jefferson farmed grew hemp on his Virginia farm commercially.

4) No great social stigma was attached to smoking pot in the late 1700s and early 1800s — pot use wasn't considered a problem until the early 1900s.

So, what was the problem with Jefferson's comment again?

Are you saying the oceans, which are all connected, are as much as a constant 4" different in level, say, between NYC and, oh, Denmark or Japan?

Yes. See, for example, this Straight Dope which mentions that there is a 8" difference between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans at Panama.

Clearly, the building of locks in the Panama Canal was a liberal ruse, to give the illusion of differentials in sea level between oceans, so that they might use the excuse of AGW decades later to steal our freedoms.

Are you saying the oceans, which are all connected, are as much as a constant 4" different in level, say, between NYC and, oh, Denmark or Japan?

Yes. See, for example, this Straight Dope which mentions that there is a 8" difference between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans at Panama.

This would be the same type of ultra-far right nutjob (Seriously, "The Illuminati caused 9/11?" Get bent.)

Remember when the notion that something called the "trilateral commission" made up of a bunch of wealthy and famous people were making many of the decisions that guided our lives for us was just a bullshit conspiracy? Now you can look it up on Wikipedia, and see a bibliography full of references. Out of curiosity, how do you explain the immediate removal of the debris from the site before any review could occur?

No, I don't remember that notion, because I don't spare brain cycles on loony crackpot bullshit that was debunked literally decades ago.

Nor do I have an explanation for the "immediate removal of the debris from the site" because IT DIDN'T HAPPEN. Why would I bother researching explanations for situations that exist only in the paranoid delusions of a bunch of ignorant America-hating clowns?

But don't let me interrupt your frothy conspiracy theory filled rant.

Here's a fairly good back and forth on the falsifiability angle: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=521245

Even funnier is the IPCC explicitly avoiding claims of falsifiability of the models:
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/ScientificEvidence.pdf

"The IPCC appreciated the necessity for attempting to falsify results by a process of validation from the beginning. Their first Report (1990)7 has a Chapter 4 “Validation of Climate Models”

A similar Chapter appeared in the First Draft of the next (1995) Report and, as an “Expert Reviewer” at the time, I submitted the comment that since no Climate Model has ever been validated the term was inappropriate. Somewhat to my surprise, they agreed with me. In the Second Draft, not only had the title of the Chapter been changed, to “Evaluation of Climate Models” but the words “validation” and “validated” had been altered to “evaluation” and “evaluated” no less than fifty times in the text. In addition, all references to “forecasting” and “prediction” had been removed and all model results are now “projections” whose value depends on the extent to which their assumptions can be believed. .

These practices are now standard throughout all the IPCC Reports, .In other words, the IPCC admits that Climate Science cannot meet the requirements usually regarded as essential for the scientific method. ."

screw official apps, I'm tired of commercials, and spam in real life, internet and television, so I've cut cable went 100% pirate and said fuck you to advertisers.

Is your relationship to the content parasitic on the rest of society?

when you stamp return to sender the post office will return your spam

Depending on the class and envelope markings you may just be wasting your time. If your goal is to increase costs for the Post Office, then it may be a valid strategy.

As confirmed by: Mythbusters and Straight Dope

actually, this brings up an issue that's common with all simulations that have an economic or political model - including the sims, sim city, civilisation (and clones), and so on.

they serve as a form of propaganda for particular sets of economic, political, and cultural rules, that players internalise as they play the game.

if you program the economic rules so that piracy will ruin your businness then that is exactly what will happen in the game. it says little about the real world....and it's only really obvious in a situation like this where it is a deliberately released piece of overt propaganda.

a slightly less obvious but more troubling one is the rule in Civ (etc) that democracies aren't allowed to declare war, or that military units can force workers to be content in communism. or that corruption is universal under communism but non-existent under democracy.

http://freeciv.wikia.com/wiki/Government

on the one hand, these are just the rules of the game. on the other hand, they're political propaganda about the pros and cons of particular economic models.

it's not limited to computer games, either - the earliest version of the game that was ripped off to become monopoly was actually propaganda about the evils of landlords and capitalism....at least that was the author's intention. the rules, however, taught players that monopolies were a good thing because that's how you won the game.

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2986/was-monopoly-originally-meant-to-teach-people-about-the-evils-of-capitalism
http://www.salon.com/2013/02/09/how_monopoly_turns_us_into_uncreative_capitalist_vultures_partner/

In the US, it depends on the jurisdiction:

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Do_you_have_to_be_a_lawyer_before_becoming_a_judge

and

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=67949

I think that neither Emissions per capita nor emissions per $ of production/GDP tells the whole story.

When you consider Emissions for China on a per capita basis it tends to end up being low due to the still enormous numbers of people still living essentially peasant lives. When you consider it on a GDP basis it become horrible because despite China having some of the best pollution laws in the world, enforcement and following of said laws is non-existent.

The USA has high per capita emissions due to our standard of living, but it becomes quite efficient, though certainly not world-leading, because while our emissions standards aren't as high as China's on the books, enforcement of said laws ensures that most companies pay far more than lip service to them.

Given that living as a peasant may be low pollution(though it can be surprisingly wasteful of resources), but certainly sucks lifestyle wise, but living as a an American isn't particularly nice either, I think that accepting SOME pollution increase from China as they raise the standard of living there is necessary, but should be balanced by the rest of the world shifting towards lifestyles that are still 'first world' in quality, even if we may end up dropping some of the most polluting portions.

The problem with this is that China is often not bothering with pollution control at all, with the result that the 'pollution share' of a Chinese worker making $5k/year, $20k equivalent lifestyle in the USA, is polluting more than what somebody making $250k in the USA.

It's an interesting topic when you dig into it. You get things like 1 hour of running a 4 stroke push gasoline lawn mower emits about as much pollution as 6-10 cars(4 if it's brand new).

Are you sure? Can I please get a source on that?

The following links says otherwise. (Though admittedly they are unreferenced and generally not trust-worthy).
1
2
3
4
5
6

I don't know the Schrödinger one liner. But I have kept this link in my Favorites / Weirdly Cunning bookmark bin for about two decades now, as when it is appropriate, it is always very appropriate: The Schroedinger Cat Epic Poem.

It would please me to see someone post the HTML code for the blinkin one line Schrödinger. It may also have a place in my Favorites / Weirdly Cunning bookmark bin.

And an additional request: if it be not too far Off Topic--- and I think it not be so--- a discussion by those knowledgeable about anglicization of German names (esp, Schrödinger vs Schroedinger) would be interesting at this point. Provided it was kept short. And appropriately amusing.

Only if the engine is made for it. If it isn't, you're a superstitious loon.

I wasn't being entirely serious, just pointing out your ridiculous argument with the assumption that you're either an atheist or a member of the Church of the Great Meatball. Science has placed a purported 'fact' in front of us, with so-called evidence. The dispute isn't over whether or not we can negotiate with the facts; it's over whether or not the science is correct.

In the 70s we had issues with the scientific-consensus-driven fact of Global Cooling. Skeptics held out for better research, and in turn were granted that the world is actually warming--not only is science wrong, it's completely backwards.

Nowadays, we're confronted with science that's federally funded. Science that's funded federally requires federal money to stay funded. Federal money is great because it's a one-stop-shop: You can research 30 different things on federal money. If you have oil money, they pay you to research oil things; researching medicine things is out of the question, that's not what oil money is for.

If you offend the federal money stream, you lose all your money. Publish a paper about how global warming is bullshit and the federal government stops funding all your HIV research; use non-sanctioned embryonic stem cell strains and the same thing happens. So you can now only study things funded by interested parties, which is very complex--you are limited to what you can get various parties interested in, and you have to find and convince those various parties.

There are also ridiculous logical disconnects in the science itself, rather than just the politics. For example: Stop driving cars? We want cars that eat less fuel? Are you kidding? LAWN MOWERS belch out more garbage and burn more fuel per year than ALL CARS ON THE PLANET. Lawn tools are poorly tuned and badly filtered, using two-stroke engines that burn oil by design. GreenWorks, Worx, Black and Decker, etc. produce good electric lawn care tools, which can use coal/oil burned much more efficiently and with less pollution output, or even solar (my power is 9.2c/kWh solar-wind-geo-hydro, rather than 8.7c/kWh coal).

Replacing all the lawn tools with 40V Lithium Ion tools would give a huge boost to clean air. At 1.73x10^9 gal/year (assumes 300 million population divided by 3 per household, 20 min per week lawn care, including snow blowers which are similar to lawnmowers), as much HC and NOx as driving a car 445 billion miles, and as much CO as driving 695 billion miles. The same 100 million people drive 12,000 miles annually, or 1200 billion miles. 445 billion is 1/2.7 of that, 695 billion is 1/1.7 (58%) of that. Moving to electric lawn care could cut roughly 1/3 to 1/4 of our total consumer-end-generated emissions (not so much total emissions, since coal power plants are more efficient than cars and lawnmowers, but not 100% clean; but we want electric cars, which fall into the same category of 'moving to the power grid').

By the given numbers, anyway. Which are highly confused.

But, see, I made the science argument, I supplied some numbers, so the argument is valid. The point isn't so much exactly how much switching to electric lawn care would improve the situation as:

• 1. It improves it a lot compared to cars--less, but when we compare car emissions to lawn tool emissions it's a big chunk. Even if it comes to 20%, it's a big chunk.
• 2. It's a simpler, economically cheaper alternative than replacing all cars.
• 3. Nobody talks about this seriously.

So the federal investment into electric cars based on scientific data was completely bonkers. They could have saved the economy a lot of pressure and meddling from federal money by pushing for electric lawn care tools primarily, with electric cars secondary. This would have seeded battery development, preparing the economy for a strong push for electric vehicles. T

The fundamental issue is the power of the federal government to restrict speech by a group of people as opposed to an individual. Conflating the two is completely disingenuous.

What's completely disingenuous is conflating a mere group of people with a corporation -- a legal entity, an immortal unnatural person created by state fiat..

The laws and court decisions affirming the "corporate person" idea date back to the late 1800s!

Actually, "corporate personhood" was introduced illegitimately by a court reporter.

Our Right to free speech isn't a gift that was granted to people by the government. It is instead, a strict limit on government power.

The government has broad powers to regulate commerce; advertizing time bough by a for-profit corporation is nothing more or less than commerce.

Curiously enough, yes: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2282/would-a-gun-work-in-space

The moon is probably valuated many zillion dollars, give the tidal effects and romance industry that it fuels. Who's up to catching it?

I saw this on The Straight Dope recently: What's the moon worth?

Cecil Adams also estimated its "theoretical value" at "countless zillions," but currently "not worth jack."

People seem to forget in orbital mechanics, to move in one direction, you have to displace an equal amount of mass x energy in the opposite direction.

Correct me if I am wrong, but doesn't E=MC^2 essentially say that mass and energy are equivalent?

I am guessing what people are trying to get at is that nuclear weapons are super powerful and that exploding them on the side of the planet currently facing the inside of the orbit would result in a push outwards from that orbit...

But what they failed to realize is that E really does equal MC^2. If you want to compare the energy of atomic bombs to the energy required to move the planet then you need to actually consider how much energy the planet holds in rest mass...

Rough numbers here:
More energy than all of the nuclear weapons combined:

Maximum yield of a nuclear weapon built so far is about 50 Megatons. In 2002 there were about 40,000 nuclear weapons in the world (according to wikipedia). If we assume those were all 50 Megaton weapons (a gross exageration), that gives us a total of 2 million, or 2 * 10^6 megatons.

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/archive/index.php/t-257219.html

The planet seems to have roughly 6x10^1024 kilograms of mass.
http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/earth/geophysics/planet-earth-weigh.htm

To compare like against like, we need to turn the rest mass of the planet into the same energy as an atomic bomb... so: E= MC^2 is
E=6x10^1024 x 9x10^16
E=~5x10^1041

So we are talking about using ~2x10^15 kilograms to have an effect on ~5x10^1041 kilograms.

In short, the orbital change will be so miniscule that it is not even worth calculating... especially since I do not know the math of orbital mechanics.

Cecil Adams of The Straight Dope answered the headline's question here.

... QWERTY keyboard, which by design was to slow people down...

This is a common myth, and totally fabricated.

Not even just borderline. See this:

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/3085/do-antidepressants-only-work-because-of-the-placebo-effect

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/3074/why-arent-two-by-fours-two-inches-by-four-inches

This is a urban legend. Attaching "Business Reply Mail" envelopes and cards to parcels is an invalid use of those mailings and will be discarded. You are either lying (this incident never happened) or your postman has never worked in sorting and has no clue about this.

See here and here.

If you want to piss them off, send them something nasty that will gum up the letter-opening machines at the CC company. Of course you may well end up being sued or charged with a crime, depending on the circumstance.

Some pan handlers actually make some serious dough. There was a recent article about a guy making $60k/year: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/23/shane-warren-speegle-says_n_1694577.html and according to studies, panhandling can net hundreds per day: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2255/how-much-money-do-beggars-make but most of those panhandlers will spend the money they get and not beg again until they run out.

Citation needed. Heres the straight dope on it:
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1088/did-whites-ever-give-native-americans-blankets-infected-with-smallpox

Basically, 2 military officers briefly discussed the idea in letters. Noone knows if they actually went through with it. I am not aware of their particular religious views, but certainly this was discussed in the context of a military conflict.

The claim you are making is absolutely absurd: no source, no proof, and an acknowledgement that no historian can confirm it-- but YOU have the inside scoop!

The church taught these good boys and girls in Sunday School how they should conduct themselves, and how they should view the world. Generations of Christians grew up believing that black, brown, and red men were "differetn",

This is also ignorant. Many people taught that, and christians like all people are influenced by the times they live in. Fact is a lot of the early abolotionists were christians, and views like the ones you mentioned were not unusual.

The beliefs that made it possible for good Christians to send small pox blankets to reservations.

Which, again, we have no proof ever happened, and no reason to think if it did it was civilians doing it.

2 + 2 = 5, for very large values of 2

You lose, Robin.

From the original "2 + 2 = 5 for SUFFICENTLY LARGE values of 2"

Simple to prove, with a question: "how large a cup does it take to hold 2 heaping cups of flour taken twice from the barrel?"

2 + 2 = 5, for very large values of 2

As popular as that quote is, it's highly unlikely to be real.

Your ignorance is showing.
A 17 year old girl can get on the list for having consensual sex with a 15 year old boy:
http://seattletimes.com/html/nationworld/2003101190_offender03.html

Two 14 year olds boys got put on the list for putting their naked butts on the faces of two 12 year old boys :
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2017081/Two-teenagers-branded-sex-offenders-life-horseplay-incident.html

You can get put on the list for answering the door undressed:
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2887/is-it-indecent-exposure-if-im-visibly-naked-while-on-my-own-private-property

A few more dumb reasons for being put on the list:
http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/sex_offender_registry_stupidity/

In short, sex offender lists are being applied for anything having to do with nudity and on the other being used to justify barring people from anything to do with children. It's clearly bullshit but as most people don't pay attention to how laxist laws have become on placing people on the list they are easily swayed by prosecutors looking for a cheap & easy public display of how hard they are working.

"The Republicans have the hick and religious nutter vote locked up, why court them at all?"

You can't risk that they will be disgusted, stay home and not vote. Remember when the Republicans made sure anti-gay-marriage measures were on the ballot in order to get their base out to vote.

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=285143

Perhaps if you went to the original post and followed the link and then followed the link that the author of that article provided maybe you could discover these things.

And the funniest thing is that the current QWERTY key arrangement is here due to jamming issues with typewriters. It was designed to slow down the typing speed of old stenographers to resolve the jamming issue of old typewriters when they were typed on too fast.

Actually, that's just an urban legend... http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/221/was-the-qwerty-keyboard-purposely-designed-to-slow-typists

Your article actually supports the "legend". Perhaps you are just looking for clicks or back links. Or you do not read.

And the funniest thing is that the current QWERTY key arrangement is here due to jamming issues with typewriters. It was designed to slow down the typing speed of old stenographers to resolve the jamming issue of old typewriters when they were typed on too fast.

Actually, that's just an urban legend... http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/221/was-the-qwerty-keyboard-purposely-designed-to-slow-typists

Cecil put it better than I can, so I'll just link to him:
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1116/is-hemp-nonpharmacological-marijuana-the-answer-to-our-environmental-problems

My citation was this, but I acknowledge it's incorrect. The rest of my comment still stands, however.

Good question. The answer is both yes and no.

Was Hitler a Christian? on The Straight Dope

Nope, he was a Jew.