Jon in Pasadena

Wimps. I've already switched to the hard stuff (crap day going downhill fast)

Fixed.

Yeah, well Schroedinger can both see and not see a Bills game simultaneously. Until the inevitable collapse occurs...

Grand Island was on the table at one point. Kinda lacking in ancient Jewish temple stuff, tho'

Same here. At first I tried the "tough guy" method on my son (also 3 years old) and shut him up in the bedroom at a reasonably early hour. Every evening, after much wailing ensued, he'd quiet down. Upon checking him, I found he was NOT sleeping; rather he was reading his dinosaur books. For hours. He wasn't getting to sleep any earlier, and he was missing out on family time, and most important, it was getting to where he knew more dinosaur names than me, which is completely unacceptable. So now we all turn in around 10:00 Oh yeah, as for the topic: I could give 2 ***** if somebody cusses in a documentary about war. Edit: hey whatever happened to the stevestojan filter? Did I miss the memo?

Thanks for reminding me I need to stop procrastinating my annual visit to see the doc and experience the joy of how "the other half" lives, in all it's latex-filled glory.

Good grief. DUDE, I worked for the Army on C³I, including on-site support at some of the first Cascade Peak exercises. Believe me, I know very well the advantages well-spent technological research can confer. I also know some of the guys who were consulting on SDI. You are aware, of course, that the program did run for nearly 10 years, got funded to the tune of $44B +, and resulted in plenty of useful technology, including the core of our GMD systems (PAC-3). I wasn't disputing any of that. But as for the idea that throwing more $$ at X-ray lasers in the '80's would have resulted in us having an impregnable space-based shield today to protect us from the mighty NK menace -- well, let's just say I'm more confident that a fleet of nuclear-powered monkeys will fly out of my butt and save us in that eventuality.

Eye never due that!

Government by syringes?

If it ain't spherical, I ain't interested. Next!

It takes a while to row across the Pacific. (GP can't use motorboats anymore, because those can leak fuel & oil into the water.)

Oh you know. If it wasn't for all those pinko anti-"Ronnie Ray-gun" haters in the 80's, we could have fully funded star wars. And now we'd be sitting pretty here in 2006 with Constitution-class heavy cruisers armed with photon torpedos that could take out those precision-guided taepodong2's before they crash into the ocean and scare the fish.

The real fun begins when you actually do the research to see who sits on the boards of what corporations, and you discover that its the same fat cats who are sitting on the boards of multiple corporations, foundations, etc. And they all vote each other these outlandish guaranteed pensions & golden parachute packages. (You know, kind of like Congress does.) And the poor working schmucks who own 100 shares or whatever, and receive the little proxy vote notices every couple of years, generally have no clue who these people are, so they usually just do the default thing which is to go with the "recommendation of the directors". Whee!

Word.

I not only feel dumber after having read it, I think I just took another -10 IQ point hit because I read it even after having had fair warning.

I could be wrong but weren't the Sandman guns in Logan's Run somehow keyed to the operative? It's been a long time but I thought I remembered that. HOMER! At the rate my three year old is picking up this computer thing, he'd probably take over the world before Kindergarten. (Think Stewie from Family Guy )

Well, that's pretty obvious, since if you did you'd know that ammo comes in "rounds" not "bullets" A "bullet" is just a little lump of lead. That's all it is. Your basic "round" of ammo is like a little bitty rocket engine with the bullet as the payload, a powder charge for fuel/oxidizer, a little tube of brass for a "fuel tank" and optionally some amount of thin metal jacketing wrapping up some or all of the payload. Oh yeah, and a little packet of primer (technically an initiator) to ignite the powder when struck by a metal pin. It's trivial to make your own ammo (especially if you save or scavenge discarded casings), and with a little trial and error it will be quite as deadly as the store-bought variety, but it's nearly impossible to make reloads that will shoot as accurately/repeatably as factory ammo. So your groupings will suffer. But gang-bangers seem to hit people they're not aiming at half the time anyway, so I'm not sure you'd notice the difference. Seems to me that a much more effective solution would be to just take out all the gang-bangers once and for all and be done with it.

Seriously. Why make him beg for it?

Probably about... 40. Minutes.

Yes, they'd be taking too big a hit in their takoyaki business...

What about it? I'm sure there's xxx% probability of getting hit by something massive enough to seriously fug us up, but why would that risk be "ever-increasing"? Based on the number of recorded impact events on the moon, it looks like, in general, there's much less large crap flying around now than in the distant past. If anything, it appears to me that for the first time ever in the history of the Earth, we might almost be at the brink of developing technologies capable of dealing with some of those rocks. Wouldn't that mean the risk (of life-altering/destroying event) is (or will soon be) actually *decreasing* in time ?

Poetic license.

In a related story, Kelly Holcomb was reportedly seen running around giving chest-bumps and shouting "Oh yeah, baby, who da man! Who da MAN!" after rocketing one that came very close to reaching the line of scrimmage.

Well, although I have attended several of Dr. Hawking's technical lectures on quantum mechanics and cosmology in which he meandered off on anthropic principles and such, I haven't heard him speak specifically to the point of biospheric disaster. With the caveat that I (obviously!) don't know the full context, and I could, perhaps, be convinced if he supplied a lot of strong references, this remark strikes me as rather stupid on the face of it: "Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of." Who, exactly, has unambiguously quantified the risk of all life being wiped out, much less provided an unassailable model that guarantees that risk to be a monotonically increasing function of time? No one I'm familiar with, I'm sure. Seems like a "pull that argument out of your butt" type of statement to me.

This post is dead-nuts right on. For a first bike, get something small and used and trash the hell out of it; learn how to start, stop, turn, steer with brakes, do wheelies, brakies, burn-outs, speed-shift, go uphill, downhill, on dirt, sand, gravel, mud, slush, water, ice, snow, horse-turds, fall down without getting hurt, and THEN get yourself a friggin' Hayabusa, or whatever. My first bike was a Suzuki GS 550E, and I likely would have killed myself on anything much bigger (OK, admittedly, when I got it, it was already set up for racing, with rear-sets, reverse shifter, hot cams, and all that crap, but at least the thought was there. ) By the time I was riding GSXR's I knew how to control my vehicle, and equally importantly, how to anticipate when/where others couldn't/wouldn't, and as a result, avoided countless bad situations where I could have "Roethlisbergered" myself.