Pretty horrible, most likely.

From what I've heard, giant squids have large amounts of ammonia in their bloodstreams. It acts as a natural anti-freeze (the water is damn cold deep in the Pacific, it's only the immense pressure that keeps it from freezing).

The ammonia would permeate the whole thing, completely ruining the taste.

That you can be arrested for admitting to crimes on Facebook is only news these days for the people getting arrested.

Treating this story as news in this day and age smacks of the "Same old crime.... but on a COMPUTER!!!" syndrome that we've been criticising for a decade or more.

MS Word can also do formatting that both LibreOffice and OpenOffice lack.

For example, in MS, I could set it up so that when I typed "rrr " it would replace it with "REBECCA" centered on the page, followed by two newlines, then set the format for single-spaced Times New Roman with 1.5" margins left and right. It could keep that format until I started a paragraph with "st[tab]" at which point it would skip down another newline and give me italicized text with .5" margins for the next paragraph, then automatically switch back.

Oh, yeah, and if that previous paragraph when over a page break, it could automatically insert "REBECCA (cont)" centered at the top.

May sound trivial to an engineer who's just writing up some simple procedure document, but when I'm writing a play, with dozens of lines of dialog and stage directions on every page, being able to put things automatically into the right format as I go is invaluable.

And that's the thing, sure, most users won't use every bit of specialized formatting, macros, or functions on each app. But enough people do that for most companies it's worth getting MS Office rather than trying to evaluate the potential needs of each individual user.

The bacterium, maybe, but not your head. Bacterium have very, very little mass.

For instance, a single E. Coli bacterium has a mass of approximately 2.9 x 10^-13. If someone flung one at you at at .3c, it could have a total momentum of only about 2.9 x 10^-13 x 3 x 10^8 x .3 = .0000261 gm/s.

This is about the equivalent momentum of a baseball (142g) moving at .00000001838 m/s (or .018 mm/s). (This is about the velocity imparted to an average baseball by an average slashdotter. So, not very fast.)

There are some ways of studying the effects.

For example, the FAA routinely tries to smuggle fake guns and bombs onto airplanes to see how many get through.

Last I heard, that number had not changed significantly since TSA was started.

One number that has gone up significantly since TSA took over is amount of theft from luggage and at baggage screening points. As I recall, laptop thefts went up over 1000% between 2000 - 2005.

But, major terrorist attacks - yeah, it's hard to measure changes in something that happens on the average once every twenty years.

If they're passing the courses, who cares if they're attending the lectures? What are the chances that someone who can pass degree level courses through disciplined self-study is likely to be *less* of an asset to their country?

The University is treating the students like criminals because the UK Border Agency encourages this. But the UK Border Agency know fuck all about Universities, so why should we take their opinion on Universities over that of the instituions themselves? Hell, the UKBA can barely manage their own house, let alone our centuries old and rapidly losing its edge (but once world class) Higher Education system.

Everybody imagines accountancy and the legal professions to be dry, bookish jobs dealing in facts, history and obscurae.

But the truth is that those jobs are just as creative as writers, painters or musicians.

If anything, we should be paying them more!

Did you really just have an uncalled for, violent, frothing rage at people with "social ineptitude disease"? You know, it pays to look both ways before crossing Irony Street.

It got popular, because it just got sooo mucy easier to use over time, and the tools got better. Some were really, really spectacularly mature. The changes were welcomed as they made it more convenient for the knowledgeable, but things also more accessible for the novice demographic. If it had been anything other than the internet's last dirty little secret, usenet would have exploded in the next two years.

Not at all. There are a great many things that exist. Very few people have heard of every single one of them.

I guarantee that somewhere there's a tool that could make your job a bit easier that you also have never heard of.

I was wiping hard drives for years for my non-profit org by booting to Linux and using dd in a loop before someone on Slashdot asked my how come I wasn't just using DBAN. I use it now, but like everyone, including you, there was a time when I had never heard of it.

The concept of a free press being necessary for the safeguarding of freedom and democracy, and holding a nation's leadership accountable to the citizenry did not originate with the baby boomers.

As much as Thomas Jefferson made a big deal about it, it wasn't even an original notion with him. (Hint for the historically challenged: he was not a baby boomer)

The auto-parts warehouse I worked at in the late 80s had a similar system.

It actually worked out pretty well. At the beginning of each 4-hour shift, you get a series of pull tags, put them in order by aisle and shelf, then just take a cart along and do a single circuit of the warehouse, pulling the parts in order of the tags.

I think they did make some attempt at keeping things in specific order, but since it changed so much it didn't really make any difference. As long as the computer knew where everything was, it worked.

No running back and forth or criss-crossing the warehouse needed. With a modern computer system, it could be even more efficient. The computer can give you the tags in order, and different people could take different parts of the warehouse to speed things up even more.

I agree. Life is too complex to have evolved by chance. Only a Giant and a Cow can explain it. (http://www.thepaincomics.com/Science%20vs.%20Norse.jpg)

When you are complaining about how stupid other people are, you really should make an effort to use correct spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Your post failed at all three, in addition to your lack of understanding of how capital letters work.

Agreed that we shouldn't quoted figures as gospel, but I think the discrepancy is between rockets fired out of Gaza, and interceptor missiles fired in response.

What I've heard is that about 60% of missiles out of Gaza have been shot down, but that Israel is not targeting rockets other than those with a reasonable chance of hitting urban areas. So, of the missiles they have *tried* to hit, somewhere between 80 and 90 per cent are being hit.