I was just confused that it was someone's first thought. Sure it'll be nice if/when it happens, but the gummed up lawnmower wasn't even on the list of uses I thought of while reading this post. I am not saying it wouldn't help, or that ultimately this wouldn't serve uses everywhere, just that the problem stated is incredibly easy to solve with very minimal effort.

That actually won't help the Carb much unless you run it after. Generally the tank isn't the problem, it is the lines and Carb.

Just wait until one sits against your zipper for a little too long, or the two sit with contacts touching.

Or, and IANAL (I am not a lawnmower-mechanic), you could stop leaving your lawnmower with gas in it for extended periods. Step one: disconnect gas line and drain gas into external vessel. Step two: start lawnmower and let run until it stops on its own accord. Or, even easier if less environmentally friendly, at the end of the lawnmowing season let lawnmower run until it stops of its own accord. No science required.

I did, at one point have the same problem (I've had Netflix for a couple years) but then I discovered that watching things that I may not watch based on the short description or picture has netted some good results. I only really watch TV if I'm pretty bored, so it isn't as if I've lost anything by watching 10 minutes and then turning it off, and I've stumbled over quite a few things I ended up liking. Hell, occasionally the girlfriend and I have a few drinks and purposely watch random shit we wouldn't normally watch, sometimes you find that movie that is so bad it is absolutely hilarious, and then have fun making fun of it, a la MST3K. To me it is something worth $8 a month, plus I am not willing to pay $70/month for cable. I can see how for others it wouldn't be as great though. There's definitely a lot of content, you just have to like the content it has. I also pay for the DVD service as well, which isn't really worth it to me because I never remember to send the DVDs back and average maybe 2/month. However I keep it because sometimes I want newer content.

For $8 a month my kid gets access to a whole bunch of PBS programming on demand, and all of the Power Rangers you can shake a stick at (seriously, there are seven lifetimes worth of the various Power Rangers, he never runs out, it is terrible). I get the first 15 seasons of Top Gear. I watched all of Weeds. The family watched the Lorax this past weekend. Me and the girlfriend watched Craigslist Joe the other day, which I thought was a pretty cool film. It is purely down to a matter of taste, for me there is tons of content on Netflix, and it is well worth my money.

Coal miners get black lung, programmers get carpal tunnel, police officers get shot, firefighters run into burning buildings, truck drivers get in accidents. Want to know the one difference between that group of people that are subject to long term debilitating disease? We don't piss away millions of dollars and then complain we can't afford health care, because we didn't have millions of dollars to begin with. It is a risk of the job that you get paid insane amounts of money for, suck it up and quit wasting all your fucking money. I am a huge football fan but these guys are seriously the biggest crybaby pussies in the world.

You do of course realize that is the logic that is used to deny global warming right? Weather is an incredibly complex thing; you cannot simply point at individual disasters and say global warming. You can't even really point to frequency either, the numbers vary so widely on number of occurrences throughout history that trends are hard to come by, other than cyclical Niña and Niño periods which are fairly well understood. Don't get me wrong, global warming is a huge threat to our ways of life, but saying it causes Sandy and causes wildfires gives the anti-science crowd fodder for the years those anomalies don't happen. Fear mongering never helps, what people need to point out are the easy to see trends in oceans rising and ice melting, things that are occurring at a definable pace and aren't subject to the seemingly random whims of the weather. Our best weather forecasting gives us about 50% certainty ten days out, we can model the oceans rising much more accurately over a much larger time period and posit the causes much more easily. People are dumb: if you tell them the world is warming up and it ends up colder at their house next year they're pretty convinced you were wrong. Look on the Facebook page of your local NWS office, or local meteorologist, and look at how often people accuse them of making things up when the computer models don't end up verifying; they don't think about how hard it is to forecast weather (my favorite thing is to show long term radar loops of hurricanes forming off the coast of Africa to demonstrate how hard it is to understand the weather between there and the Florida coast a few weeks later) they just assume nobody knows what they are doing.

what kind of island Midway is? Its mountainous right?

I totally just heard about this the other day. Wonder if it'll blow by like nothing like y2k or actually have bad effects. From what I read the choices are watch everything die, convince closed source proprietary apps to restart development and switch to 64 bit, or force it to be unsigned and break many functions that add or subtract time. Is this right?

I was thinking more along the lines of Heisenburg. As parent noted I know very little, but I was trying to make a funny about the so-called Observer Effect. I think I failed at both the funny and smart part though. :) I still think we should blow this sucker up, just to make sure we can if the time comes. To me "exploding into tiny hopefully harmless pieces" has less modes of failure than "attach rocket and try to nudge." Of course this may piss off the asteroid rights set, but they have questionable lobbying power. Are there other ideas out there I am missing out on? I've only really heard of either nudge it or Michael Bay it.

So Opportunity and Curiosity need to be on alert then? On a more serious note: theoretical physics, as little as I understand, leads me to believe by looking for them we are actively inviting them to hit us. Shouldn't we figure out how to stop them and worry about seeing them later? If we can't stop it I would contend there is no use in knowing it'll happen.

But isn't copyright infringement a civil matter? The state can prosecute you for gambling, and child pornography, but doesn't an individual or company have to file a claim for copyright infringement? This seems like a ridiculous thing for a national level government to be concerning itself with.

Wrong. They never ran the Titanic into an iceberg to test, and never ran complex computer simulations to test. Concrete and steel regularly go through both tests.

Pretty sure "our" in the Linux sense means "everyone's" so what exactly is your point?