Because that infrastructure has turned into a required part of daily life for a good chunk of people in the modern world. Like electricity and water, communications networks should be converted to the public sector. They are now too important to leave to the whims of corporations.

How do you figure *that*? SAP selling unlicensed software to customers for a profit versus Google losing a patent grant because they're not using software in the way the developer intended are two very different scenarios.

http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/04/alot-is-better-than-you-at-everything.html

I'm not a grammar Nazi, but I think you (and everyone else) can appreciate the humor in the link. "Alot" is actually two words: "a" and "lot". ;)

http://www.who.int/csr/don/2009_09_04/en/index.html (most recent as of right now)

I'd think these guys know better than anyone what's going on. It's up, it's down. Some countries have increased numbers of H1N1 influenza cases, some countries' numbers are on the decline. The *really* interesting part will come sometime between now and the beginning of next year ( http://www.cdc.gov/flu/keyfacts.htm ) when the United States "flu season" typically peaks. So many people who are afraid to call in sick for fear of discipline or losing their jobs will go to work anyways, infecting others in the closed-in environments. Thank goodness so many of us IT people can telecommute. ;)

Are you sure it isn't the Caponians? I loved that game...

Jupiter average density: 1.326 g/cm3
Water maximum density: 1.000 g/cm3 (or more commonly 1000 kg/m3)

So Jupiter is, on average, more dense than water on our planet. Though I understand that it's most likely not nearly that dense at the fringes of the atmosphere than it is on the interior, I honestly have no idea how they measure the volume of Jupiter when they make that calculation (like, are they measuring the visible parts of Jupiter that we're all familiar with, or are they measuring beyond that into some field that most of us *aren't* familiar with?)

I had a TI-99/4A, then moved to a Commodore 128, then an Amiga 500. It wasn't until I was probably 12 years old before I got my hands on my first IBM-compatible PC (a 4.77MHz machine with a turbo button that cranked it up to 10MHz), and it was a huge step back. HUGE step back. I went from (with the Amiga) a nice GUI interface, great sound and (for the time) great graphics, and moved to a machine that beeped and booped and gave me a text prompt in up to 4 colors. Come to think of it, I'm not entirely sure why I did that...

"Cared for their dead" I get. This "spiritual beliefs" stuff doesn't make sense. What proves any kind of spirituality in this situation? Posing a corpse isn't proof of spirituality, it's just proof that they moved people around after they died.