Note that certain mushrooms are still contaminated! Chanterelle mushrooms are still somewhat radioactive, at least the ones from Belarus, and that's where most come from. You can only eat them a few times a year, which is truly a shame, as they are one of the most delicious mushrooms that exists.

No, you fail.

Of course, if the government managed it, it wouldn't work.

So let me get this straight; You think that the government could never organize something like Slug Lanes, and yet the government is the one who set up the HOV lane on the highway in the first place. The government is instrumental in the smooth functioning of slug lanes!

You should consider taking a step back from your anti-government ideology and realize that just like any large organization, sometimes things are done right and sometimes they are done wrong. Government is no different from any other large bureaucracy.

But you also can't be constantly bothering your coworker with questions that can be easily answered by googling. You have to at least try to find an answer before asking the expert sitting next to you -- save them for the really tough ones.

There is indeed a President of Africa., and his name is President Whooooooosh!

Wrong. It is indeed an urban myth, read the damn link that GP posted!! The church example of thicker glass on the bottom is explained much more simply than by the glass slowly moving over time: Glass manufacturing wasn't sophisticated enough to make a flat piece of glass like it is today. If you were given a piece of glass with a thick side and a thin side, which side would you put on the bottom of the window? The thick side, of course, as that will offer better structural integrity.

This is a great article, so here are some of the main points for those who don't speak German:

• Birds will attempt to clean themselves with their beak and tongue even despite the terrible smell and taste of the oil. Birds surviving cleaning then generally suffer from kidney and liver problems resulting from the oil ingestion.
• On the Spain and French coast, thousands of birds were captured after an oil spill and cleaned. Of those, only 600 survived the cleaning and of those 600, many were dead within 7 days.
• The WWF confirms that birds covered in oil are generally not savable once they've been captured.
• The survival rate of birds depends heavily on the type of oil and the amount of oil that is on the birds.

The article does not report this, but other articles have noted that this oil is mostly mixed with water (more than previous spills). This could give hope that more birds than normal can actually be saved.

Alumnus shout out from Colony Manor :)

A bit off-topic, but I've flown Lufthansa and Swiss Air from Boston and New York to destinations in Europe on 4 engine aircraft. I realize they are hard to come by, and I prefer them as well.

Warning: You have detached yourself from reality. It is recommended that you re-attach yourself as soon as possible to avoid future cognitive dissonance when the death panels do not materialize, and the CBO estimates prove to be relatively accurate.

See, we Americans have a widespread cultural mistrust of government.

Don't go accusing all of us Americans of being as paranoid as you. There are plenty of us who find it perfectly reasonable for the state to ensure that weapons are only owned by people who know how to properly and safely use them.

And it's not that hard to measure knowledge of guns, especially if you force people to take a course on them (or perhaps test out of the course). You could ask about safe storage methods, situations in which gun use is legal, etc. There's nothing arbitrary about it- we rely on certifications in almost every part of our society to ensure that somebody has the knowledge they claim they have, and there's no reason that gun ownership should be any different, given the consequences to the people around the gun owner should they not properly handle the weapon.

Education, like medical care or any other service, is not a right.

What a jolly, friendly person you must be.

I don't know that much about German

That much was completely obvious from your fist post. I would add you also don't know a damn thing about Germany (it's culture, people, or political system)

The idea that Germany is in any way less free than the US or anywhere else is laughable. They have tons of political parties to choose from in each election. We Americans get 2, 4 if you include the libertarians and greens who barely ever win anyway.

Your attempt to translate Staatsangehöriger is simply ridiculous. Although German involves combining words to form new ones, the sum of the parts does not necessarily equal the whole in any literal sense. Staatsangehöriger is the exact equivalent of the english word "citizen". There is no hidden meaning to the word that is somehow meant to allow the German government to lord over its citizens.

I assure you there is no nazi influence left on the German government, other than its resistance to those ideas.

Have you looked at Bibble 5? It was just released in december, and the new interface and featureset is a drastic improvement over version 4. It's now pretty comparable to Lightroom and Aperture, and it runs natively on Linux as well as OSX and Windows. The developers focused heavily on workflow and speed issues, with an eye towards sensible keyboard shortcuts.

I'm not an employee, just a happy customer, even if I do get the evil eye from fellow nerds whenever I fire up a $200 closed-source app on my Slackware machine. :)

not totally true, if they use VOIP or IPTV then the connection is faster than the internet connection to accomodate, if they throttle, they will only throttle the internet, and not their internal services. This is how it should be to ensure reliability of the services their users pay for that require a certain speed.