The more these beliefs...

beliefs, you say? I don't believe that anybody actually believes all that claptrap about Xenu.. L Ron Hubbard made it all up to bilk money out of desparate people, and plenty of other folk are happy to continue the premise and keep the money flowing.. but does anybody actually believe it? I doubt it..

Colorado is (narrowly) governed by the Democrats, not right wing

Hello America!

I think you will find that both the Democrats and the Republicans are firmly right wing.

Sincerely,
The Rest of the World

Looking at the specs on the flight recorder, the 'crush force' is 5000lbs. Can anybody translate this to a depth?

Sure. 1 bar pressure is 14psi, so this is 5000/14 = 357bar. One bar is equivalent to about 10m depth of water, so the stated crush depth would be 3.5km give or take..

There are always outliers where this is going to be the case, but llikely the vast majority of school buses in urban areas could be replaced by something like this with lower running costs.

Now, you didn't say where you lived or if you had done a proper analysis of how they were collecting students.. but considering the cost of driving a bus such a distance, might it not be cheaper to collect the more distant students in a smaller vehicle?

and yet, corporations can be owned by people, and other corporations.

actually, I think it is the latter, that engenders a whole lot of mischief and should be disallowed.

What I don't understand is, that .. yes, the extortionist stole the twitter handle. but wait, if it is stolen property he can't actually use it or sell it without falling foul of the law, can he? Also, that handle is in a known position and it is under the control of a known entity who can be compelled by a court order to return its control to the genuine owner.

or do twitter not care?

In fact, we only need to look marginally further into the future to see a point where the functionality of something like Glass will be *undetectable* by bystanders *by design*. What then? Do you ban people? Good luck with trying to stop the march of technology because everyone in history who's tried has failed miserably.

Chimpanzees can out perform humans on tasks such as recognizing and remembering a larger number of items in a very short period of time. There was a story about that here a few months ago, but I don't know if that indicates intelligence.

Which us why self driving cars are better for all road users.... They won't drive at triple the speed limit.

I don't get why people think they wouldn't do that

In fact, in a world of self driving cars, I don't see why we would need a speed limit. The car can be trusted to drive within its own limits..

And if your dad had a self driving car, your brother could have helped your dad to the car and told the car to drive to the hospital.

and his brother could have told the car that it was an emergency (destination: emergency unit of hospital) and the car could have decided to drive at its maximum speed, broadcasting to other vehicles that it was doing so.

A journey such as this might attract some official attention, but assuming that the hospital corroborates the story of an emergency, then I don't see why there would be any charges..

This is not a lifestyle I want to live. I can't imagine a future population truly being happy with this either.

I can imagine being very happy that I don't have to own a car, or drive it around.
I can imagine that I will be very happy to just summon a car and tell it where I want to go, to be taken there quickly and dropped off and being able to walk away, not have to worry about parking that car, or maintaining it.
I can imagine being very happy that when I want to use my bicycle instead, I won't be cut up because some ignorant driver doesn't think I ought to be on the road.
I can imagine being very happy that when I want to walk somewhere I can cross the roadway safely wherever and whenever I want because the cars will flow around me.
I can imagine being very happy that when I get over the age that it is really safe for me to drive, I will still be able to get around just as well as I always have been able to.
I can imagine that a future population would think it strange that people like you wanted them to suffer with traffic jams and having to sit focused and barely moving while driving, and being penalised for letting their attention wander at the wrong time.

Am still shocked at this part... "Biologists have found them at altitudes of up to 4 km"

Well, life gets around it seems. Perhaps you would be interested to hear that I have seen small flying insects several hundred miles out at sea (that didn't seem desperate to land, on my small yacht).. also crabs out there, swimming on the surface, and the water was 2-3 miles deep. I don't know how they get there; presumably they don't swim up from the bottom.

People don't get it as children when it is a mild disease that has a death rate similar to riding a bus to school or high school football

The problem with that is, that the parents of the child who died now think the risk was too high.. In fact, oglaf is generally NSFW but this weeks comic is strangely pertinent..

25kW is a Fiat Punto engine - and here in London, an average house boiler thermal output. We have piped gas to every home in the UK

There are vast areas of the country that do not have piped gas. London is but a small corner!

Honest question, who uses NetBSD?

Well I do, and moreover I personally have written ~30 thousand lines of code for NetBSD which has been used in other OS projects (the other BSDs, and OpenSolaris at least - see Bluetooth code) in varying amounts, and I am certainly not the only one to have had code re-used. The NetBSD libc is being used for Android now, I believe.

Also, many companies do use it, though they don't always advertise that fact.

Seriously, after 25 years in the business I've never seen or heard about anyone using NetBSD in production ever.

The licence is liberal, and companies are not obligated to mention their usage.

They do this by asking for the receipt. They then look for items listed on the receipt, and verify those items are in the shopping basket. After a couple of checks to make sure different items listed on the receipt are in your basket, they wish you a good day and wave you on.

They are not checking you, they are checking that the checkout staff are not in collusion with thieves.. I worked in a large DIY store once, and their stated theory was that 90% of the thieves were customers but that 90% of the value stolen was staff, as the staff had vastly more opportunity.. so to keep the shrinkage down, the security watched the staff.