You're going to be brought down by what you hate. We Yanks are going to be brought down by what we love, and we'll merrily go along with it.

I've got two cats with RFID tags between their shoulder blades. The animal shelter put them in before they were put up for adoption. My other cat does not have an RFID tag, mostly because he was born in 1993.

>>-81 isn't anywhere near D.C. or Baltimore (it's mostly a mountain/rural interstate), and thus doesn't do anything to offload traffic from I-95. I disagree. I'm looking at I-81 right now from the front desk of a hotel. On any given night, there are guests at the hotel coming from Maine, going to N. Carolina, etc... They do this to avoid traffic on I-95. Having to deal with the constant construction on 81 is another matter entirely, though.

Huxley wrote of a dystopian future where people watched TV an astonishing TWO HOURS A DAY. Thank god that hasn't come to... crap.

Source for the US denying water on mars? You can detect water on mars with a telescope in your back yard, if you can see the northern hemisphere of mars. The entire northern ice cap (or most of it anyway) is water ice. Southern ice cap not so much, but the north has tons of water. We knew about this before Mariner. How to tell whether that white spot on the surface of mars is water ice or not is left as an exercise to the reader.

So the mistake in using imperial units this time would result in a soft landing?

Christmas on Mars, due out in 2003!