This (second from right) is my favorite. You do need glue or tape to make it, which may disqualify it depending on how purist your rules are.
The one in the photo has a straw for a fuselage, but you can make it from paper by folding a long strip of paper into a three-sided prism and taping or gluing it shut. The two ring-shaped wings should be slightly different diameters, and the plane should be launched small ring forward. It is amazingly stable and I could throw it farther than any competing plane in my class. I'm not sure if it would travel the full length of my elementary-school gym, but it wouldn't surprise me if it did.

This "slippery slope" meme seems to be the libertarian's favorite argument against any legislation, but how do things actually happen in the real world? Certain people behave in ways that happen to be legal but which most of us find immoral (which, in fact, most of the perpetrators would find pretty nasty themselves, if it were to happen to them). So, we change the law and ban something. Libertarians immediately extrapolate the new legislation to a ridiculous extent (straw man argument) and thusly "prove" that even the non-exaggerated legislation is wrong. The rest of us ignore the screechy libertarians, and wait for any actual *evidence* that the new law is abused, and, lacking such evidence, sleep soundly at night. Many countries in Europe have limitations on public speech that would give a U.S. constitutional fanatic a brain embolism, and yet magically Europe persists in being a place of open discourse, not a police state. So, relax, and give some thought to the people that some of these "dangerous" laws are actually meant to protect.

http://www.viruscomix.com/page329.html

Apartment with thin walls.

Shouldn't we also acknowledge that the root cause of this kind of misery are people who'll believe whatever they read, without any due diligence? If we were to apply scientific publishing standards in the news -- that is, whenever you're writing based on someone else's words, name your source -- then any allegation could be tracked back to whomever made the initial comment, or it would dead-end at an anonymous post. A non-anonymous poster can then be required to either produce their evidence or to retract/apologize/pay damages; anonymous posts can be used as a starting point for an investigation (this is precisely what anonymous tip lines are for) but should never be considered evidence of anything in and of themselves.
Seriously. If you get an anonymous email accusing your next-door neighbor of being a child molester, are you going to go over there to beat him up? Anyone who has actual evidence of something like that should be talking to the police, not sending anonymous messages and forum posts around. Whenever I see anonymous accusations, I treat them with a lot of suspicion.

Technically, you didn't -- the crew compartment survived the fuel tank explosion; the crew were still alive until they hit the water.

How did that cold-hearted garbage get modded "insightful"? Maybe I'm really, really unusual, but I do, in fact, care about all those 7 billion. Sure, I can't keep up to date with every facebook page on the planet, attend every wedding and every funeral, sit by every bedside, etc. etc. etc. In fact, I can make a substantial difference in only a handful of lives, and the rest of humanity is utterly beyond my ability to help. And yet, I care about them.

90% of American university professors are sympathetic to Che, Castro, or Marx? You sound like an Eastern European who hasn't yet adjusted to life in the West. Support for USSR-style Communism has never been more than marginal in the West, partly because people here just plain don't like that ideology, but mostly because we really, really hate totalitarianism.

I figure a good on-line news source is worth at least $5 a month, but my total news budget would end up being a lot higher if all the good news sources would go the paywall route -- I'm not going to blindly trust any one news source, I like to skim at least half a dozen on a regular basis. As long as even the paywalled sites let me at least scan their headlines for free, I guess it wouldn't be too bad.

The jury is still out on that. In China they went with regulating reproduction, but in Europe and Japan fertility rates are falling on their own. My personal theory is that it is actually possible for entire nations to come to their senses and start behaving responsibly, and those non-enforced low fertility rates could be evidence of that, but of course it remains to be seen whether the current demographic trends will hold long enough to really make a difference.

I'm quite shocked by the US where they catch a drunken bozo for the 5th time in a month and he still is allowed to drive to work and back.

It depends on which state you're in. Here in New Jersey, a first DUI conviction will cause your driving privileges to be revoked for 6 to 12 months; a second conviction is 12 to 24 months; a third conviction means you lose your license for life. The law does not provide for exceptions for people who need to drive because of their jobs or because of disability.
At least, that's how it was when I took my NJ driving test back in 1998. IANAL, etc.

I'm personally pretty pleased with Firefox and found every new release to be an improvement so far. The fact that sometimes a configuration setting disappears from Preferences and then has to be set through about:config, it's not ideal, but not exactly a big deal either since I only have to do it once.

Regarding the awesomebar, though -- using the "oldbar" extension I can get the old, sparse look back, and using a few about:config changes I can get most of the FF2 behavior back, but the one thing I always wanted the FF url bar to do is simply sort the drop-down by access time, so the least recently used ones are on top. Mozilla always did things this way; at some point I submitted a patch to mozilla.org that implemented the same behavior in FF2, but it never got picked up, and we got the "you'll learn to love it, trust us" awesomebar instead.

I've used FF3 for as long as it's been out, and it still bothers me that selecting a url from the url bar drop-down doesn't just move it to the top of the list immediately. Add an about:config setting to get us that behavior, and I'm sure that a lot of the awesomebar-related whining will stop.

I guess your idea of "actual information" is not the same as mine. Maybe I'm naive, but I have a hard time even imagining edit wars over things like the carbon cycle, the climate of Buenos Aires, Winston Churchill's alma mater, or the progression of the U.S. GDP or unemployment levels.

If you can provide some actual examples -- as opposed to saying "I can think of half a dozen articles" and then not citing a single one -- I would be interested to hear about them. If I'm really so seriously misguided, I'd like to know.