Hmm, I wonder what the impact of fining a governing body whenever its legislative arm makes an unconstitutional law would be. If you, say, issued a fine of 0.001% of their next budget if a law is struck down by SCOTUS, and the money was distributed to all of the other governments in the USA (1/3 to the federal*, the rest to the other states), would people start caring if their representatives were passing stupid laws?

*If it *were* the federal government that passed it, the money should probably be split amoung the states of all of the lawmakers who voted against the bill.

Anywho, random thought.

Telling us doesn't do much; on the other hand, the Government has opened up a public consultation on the matter, so telling them might make things happen. Just make sure you keep it reasonable and rational, or you might end up being counter-productive.

Free OS-related seemed the closest for me. I have Wikipedia's random article URL as my home page - it throws up some interesting stuff sometimes.

Random article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random

Armageddon and other Hollywood flicks have lead us to believe that we have the power to blow apart masses thousands of kilometers wide, which I really don't think we do.

Th-thousands of kilometres?! Good god, how many rogue planets are there? Earth is only 12,000km across.

No, the asteroid that is likely to have wiped out the dinosaurs and created the K-T boundary was estimated to be about 10km in diameter, and that impact is estimated to have had the power of about 100 trillion tonnes of TNT - about 2 million times the size of the largest nuclear bomb ever tested (Wikipedia link).

No comment on whether that would be feasible. It's within the realms of possibility with current technology, but would be incredibly, ridiculously difficult. Still, saving the species may be worth it.

The rear half of a mutant rat, with a nice green-brown mold for extra flavour. Delicious. Unfortunately breakfast was interrupted by the other blokes digging a pit under our position and I lost it in the ensuing fight.

Now, with that out of the way, I too dislike feeling like I'm a pretend character, essentially because I tend to get too sucked in if I allow it. I like my life, I don't want to feel like I need to be someone else to enjoy myself. But I play games to explore other peoples' minds - the minds of the game designers and developers.

Different people have different reasons for playing (or reading or watching). There is no one true way, and I reject any attempt to impose your preferences on my enjoyment.

Finally, his code seems typical of what I've seen from good LISP programmers -- including even at times myself. Poor documentation. The code is simple, elegant, and should "speak for itself". Well it doesn't. Not to someone trying to maintain it.

C programmers -- perhaps because of the nature of the language -- seem less prone to this particular trap, though still bad.

Most likely because it's much easier to verbalise what a small segment of C is doing compared to a small segment of LISP. When writing C, I usually have a mental running commentary of what each line of code is doing. When writing LISP, I found that thinking about what it was doing in English was only stuffing me up, and I really had to let go of that kind of 'verbal thought' and think quite differently - in some ways more mathematically, but in some ways unique to functional programming. All this does make it a little more difficult to write comments for LISP, since 'shifting gears' to write in plain English is a much more difficult leap.

Of course, religion based ethics say no. But what about your own, non-religious ethics?

I can't speak for the GP, but my own non-religious ethics would definitely say no. Using disproportionate influence gained in a manner that is against the agreed-upon rules to do something that affects those who followed the rules and would not want that outcome is not just - when there is general agreement that the rules are appropriate, then breaking them is not the right thing to do, no matter what you believe will result. Unless the rules are clearly unjust, work within them for change.

Followers of Abrahamic (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) religions do what they feel is the good thing to do. Good and evil - morality - requires an absolute arbiter, which they have in their god. I do not believe in a universal arbiter, therefore I do not believe in good or evil. Instead, I see actions as right or wrong - justice as best we can see it with our imperfect understanding. We may not get it right every time, but in accepting that our notion of justice is imperfect we have the capacity to learn and improve.

Are these the designs that you're looking for?

Yup, one of the funny little twists that result from relativity is something that happened 630 million years ago also happened just now from a different frame of reference, and both are entirely accurate. So from the perpective of the right frame of reference (in this case, it would involve something travelling at 99.9999999999999% of the speed of light from our frame), this is a recent event.

saying that there was a mistake in the system.

The glitch was "We hadn't realised how many people we were going to piss off with this." I particularly love Amazon's response to the request for more detail in the second link in the parent.

Yeah, I second that. Apparently they're only happy with the Japanese making new toys if they stay in their own country.

So far as I can see, democracies have never had anything to do with the will of the public, just the will of their elected (from a pitifully small selection of) representatives.

Here's a rarely acknowledged truth about democracies:
The main strength of democracies isn't that you can choose who get's in to power. It's that you can easily kick leaders out of power.

The true strength of democracies is that they don't descend into civil war on a regular basis whenever a leader like Nixon or Bush comes along. The idea that you can choose who replaces them is cute, but doesn't really stack up all that well with the facts and, really, isn't nearly as important.