Computerizing sign-out of books does make some sense. Once the system is set up, there is much less labor involved in tracking which books are out and when they are due back. The switch to this system may allow the library to be managed by a staff member part-time, rather than a full-time librarian.

It's not clear that the biometric ID is better than using a library card with a barcode, but perhaps the biometric system is cheaper since you don't have to print and issue library cards and deal with lost cards, etc.

You can compare back as far as 1984. The EPA has a website which publishes fuel economy ratings for just about everything on the market. They have updated the older cars to the new standard, to allow apples-to-apples comparison.

Your information is out of date. U.S. copyright terms were extended by the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998. Assuming the copyright was renewed by 1965, its term was extended for 95 years from the date of publication, so the copyright will expire around 2032.

Not only will The Hobbit's copyright not expire in 2012, but in fact with rare exceptions no copyrights will expire in that year, or in any other year until 2019. The change in copyright terms was motivated by the then-imminent expiry of the copyright on Mickey Mouse.

It seems kind of naive to assume that a nuke would be a useful solution to this problem. Do you try to seal a leaking pipe in your home with TNT?

Amendment 2 is legit. Novell did eventually find a signed copy in their own files.

SCO's claims were just plausible enough to get past the mechanisms for weeding out nonsense. Also, they managed to drag out the cases in discovery and by filing for bankruptcy just before the Novell case came to trial. Bankruptcy puts an automatic "hold" on court cases.

The Earth isn't even the only body in our solar system to have had liquid water. Mars has had liquid water in the past. Some of the moons of Saturn and Jupiter are believed to have subsurface oceans.

You're right that it's not easy to get anywhere close to the speed of light. Travel at close to light speed may well never be practical. You overstated the case, though, when you wrote "nothing with enough mass and complexity to be alive, much less intelligent, can travel at anywhere near c and hope to survive". The main limitation to traveling at close to light speed is just the energy supply that would be required. You have to accelerate for a long time to get anywhere close to c.

Interstellar communication is not as impractical as you think. Read Carl Sagan's novel Contact. He talks a lot about how a civilization might structure a message to be useful. Back and forth dialog isn't really possible, but you can broadcast a primer that teaches a language, and the transmit whatever information might be interesting to the recipients (eg. an encyclopedia, or various books). It might take the recipients many years to fully decode and translate the message, but so what? They have time.

Well, only the usual attempt to mislead that underlies most marketing. By using words that make the process sound more technical, they help convince naive buyers that they need this service. A more honest description of the services offered would probably inspire slightly fewer people to buy it. Hence, the attempt to mislead is intentional, but not especially severe.

Who decides who is working as an enemy combatant? What is the due process that ensures this decision is correctly made, and corrects it when (not if) errors are made?

Think about this the next time you leave the US on vacation. You have no way of knowing if you have been somehow designated an "enemy combatant".

No, a completely closed metal cage doesn't need to be grounded. You only have to ground the cage if the device inside has some other connection to ground.

The quiet parts are supposed to be quiet, but they are also supposed to be listened to in a theatre with good acoustics and a completely silent audience. If you've ever sat in a symphony performance with someone nearby moving around you'll know how much even a small amount of background noise interferes with the quiet parts of the music. When listening to the music on CD, one often just doesn't have a quiet enough background to appreciate the quiet parts at their intended volume.

Unfortunately, the majority of computer users are jackasses, and do better with the menus.

Lonely people are more likely to be depressed and to spend time on the internet, and they spend proportionately more time browsing sexually gratifying websites, online gaming sites and visiting online communities. No surprise there.