There's another thing here - you don't need a completely dark patch in order for the night sky to be seen in much of it's glory. I also spent a good chunk of time in Morgantown, WV (ok, it was actually a bad chunk of time, but you get my drift). Though there was a lot of ambient light (3 lights in front of my apartment building alone, one of about a dozen in the complex), all I had to do to get a fairly good view of the sky was tromp up the hill a ways so that some trees and ground were between me and the light. Granted, this was when the lights were off in the stadium down the hill, but the point remains the same. Although I couldn't make out every feature of the sky, I could definitely see the milky way and most of the familiar northern constellations, plus occasional satellites and planets.

While it is a sad fact that you can't watch the night sky a lot of places (and it is - I remember taking a road trip from Chicago up to Wisconsin one night to watch a meteor shower), it seems to be an unfortunate necessity. Here's an analogy for those who don't get the point. If you've ever been camping, you know that if you want to stargaze, you have to wander away from the campfire. If its a group of 5 or so people camping, its a small fire, and it doesn't take you long to meander away, look up in awe, and wander back. Now increase your camp size. Now its fifty people. You have bigger fires, and probably more than one. You have enough people that at least one fire is burning all night. Increase size by another factor of ten and you find more fires. Now you probably qualify as a community. You probably have specialized fires for a blacksmith or other craftsman. You likely have dozens of fires, a good many of which will burn throughout the night. The distance you must walk increases proportionately. Now we're going to make the jump. With 10,000 times the residents of our hypothetical community, a large city would have 1000s of fires (now electric lights) to provide security. At this point - one has to travel a significant distance to really get a good look at the sky (from downtown Chicago, the distance is approximately 80 miles if you're traveling north). Yes it's sad - but in order to maintain dense civilizations that give us all the things that better the human condition, we must sacrifice some of those things. And as others have pointed out, it's not as if those things are completely gone. Take a bus or a train ride. Drive out to the middle of nowhere.

Actually, I've seen this. Fortunately, it's in the guise of a running joke over at 8-Bit Theater about the weird shit Brian's cat Charlie eats: http://www.nuklearpower.com/2009/05/16/what-youve-all-been-waiting-for/ . In all seriousness, it can be quite amusing when it shows up.

This is going to be designed for people who are actually clueless. I give you a direct quote from the page on the site. "While more searchable information is cool, nearly half of all searches don't result in the answer that people are seeking." I don't know about you, but I only fail to get the information I want if I'm looking for something really esoteric or poorly defined, like what the name of the bar is next door to where Fuddruckers used to be on the North Shore, or the name of the guy who invented the Eton Wall Game. You can't get that information on the web because it doesn't exist there (and may not exist anywhere). The problem with most of these comments is who they come from. Slashdotters (like myself), typically don't have a ton of problems with the internet. This isn't designed around us. It's designed for people who really have no idea how the whole thing works.

Anyone else find it ironic that step 3 is profit?

The word you're looking for is "baton".

Actually, the sad part is, everybody doesn't know this crucial piece of information. It's why Nigerian schemes and other e-mail junk-shit works occasionally. Because people are clearly stupid. All that said, what a way to waste a reputation for a place. The concept that you can claim all uses of an abbreviation are absurd. Just to check it out, a quick Google search also turned up Shelter Rock Jewish Center in Nassau, NY and Serangoon Junior College in Singapore.

You jest, but I can't tell you how often I operate my car radio just by feeling the buttons with my right hand and knowing the order their in. Since my focus is on what's in front of me, I'm more or less "blind" to what the radio looks like. With the growing popularity of in-dash controls for nearly everything, I can't imagine why even this wouldn't have some level of popularity.

Rockets only look like that so they can violate mother sky.

Actually, I can do "almost" anything I want with a photograph that I take. I took it, therefore, I hold the copyright on that particular photo (though not on anything in the photo). Regardless of resolution, intent, or anything else. The exceptions would seem to be the following:

1) Using something for commercial purposes with intent to hurt the offended target in a market. I can't show happy, satisfied people leaving a White Castle and tell people how happy they were they ate at Burger King. We don't really have that problem here. Google's not really treading on anyone's copyright.

2) I photograph something lewd, indecent, or outright illegal and post it in a public forum (like Google maps). If these people really wanted to keep Google away, they sunbathe nude in their front yards and Google couldn't use the pictures. And it would probably actually work, even if you couldn't look your neighbors in the eye for a few weeks.

3) I persistently seek out a single target for the purposes of my photography. Then it qualifies as stalking. Taking a photo of every house in a neighborhood isn't stalking by any measure. And frankly, stalking without trespassing or burglary is hardly stalking at all anymore. After all, look at the celebrity gossip news.

I may have missed some points, but those are the big ones. There really isn't anything illegal at all. At worst, there is a potential for civil suit, though that is minor at best.

Actually, since most restaurants, stores, etc. are private property, they can ask you to leave for any reason. Talking loudly or using profanity is legal everywhere (see the first amendment), but a restaurant can ask you to leave the premises for either of these. If you refuse, you are trespassing, and the police may be called. As to the matter of whether its right or not, proponents of smoking bans tell you the same thing - an individual's right to whatever (even if its legal, and, in the case of breast-feeding, a good idea) must be waived if it is offensive to society. Of course, what is offensive is so subjective that legislating it is a silly matter. But that doesn't stop people from trying.

It's also a tricky issue of exactly what looks like a child and what doesn't. In college, I knew a girl who used to get the child give-aways at Chicago Cubs games. She was 22 at the time, but she just happened to look really young. Additionally there are rare (but not that uncommon) diseases which preclude boys and/or girls from going through puberty (or making them appear as though they have not). It would seem to be highly discriminatory to prevent these people from doing what other people do simply based on their appearance. The long and short of this is that just because someone looks young, they don't have to actually be young. And especially in drawn images (i.e., without a story), that person could be the rare individual with a genetic disease. The laws are extremely flimsy when it comes to these distinctions. I believe (best recollection) that the law states that something is child pornography if it portrays someone acting as a child, even if no actual children are involved in the pornography itself.

I do love the people that miss the point entirely. No one argues that the earth is getting warmer. What the point originally trying to made here is that species go extinct, whether or not we have anything to do with it. Giant reptiles were an evolutionary dead end, and eventually, they all went away. Who are we to say that amphibians also don't represent some kind of evolutionary cul-de-sac? The larger point of "should we care?" is a somewhat different point. These small creatures fill some niche in the ecosystem certainly, but beyond that it is sentimental foolishness to assume that because something is alive while human beings are on the planet makes it somehow precious. Something will fill the roll in the ecosystem, and the planet will move on. Finally, the comparison to Chernobyl is just kind of a jerk move. It's kind of like saying that Jews died in the holocaust because they were sensitive to Hitler. Or that people in the world trade tower were sensitive to falling from great heights. Kind of a jerk move.