Assuming that 21 1/3 firkins are in a barrel, and 121,000 seconds in a fortnight, you have approximately 25.8 million firkins of oil dumping into the sea. That's a lot of firkins. Oh, and the Library of Congress has 5,960 furlongs of shelf space.

According to Wikipedia, it's about 10^9 Libraries of Congress, not including images.

WTF? The fuss makes no sense for a number of reasons: 1) A former high-level Google official has emailed other high-level Google officials through his Gmail account, and is probably friends with them.
2) High-level Google officials will be interested to see what the CTO of the Executive Branch is up to, no matter who that CTO is.
3) This needs to be kept an eye on, but is not indicative of endemic corruption by any stretch. Get a grip, folks!

Are we arguing philosophy or practice? In practice, any government will go against its principles, especially those without outward accountability (like a totalitarian regime). But fascism, as a political philosophy, upholds the rule of law, and that was the point I was trying to make. Saying that anyone non-fascist wants the President to remain within the confines of the law is ridiculous and an abuse of the term.

Ugh, no. That's not it, either. At the risk of being misinterpreted as defending fascism, let me just say this: the ONLY governments that ignore the rule of law are tyrannies. Julius Caesar's rise to power was illegal; Auschwitz, terrible though it was, was not. Fascism actually highly values the rule of law. The strict militarism, the demands for obedience, and extreme nationalism philosophically cannot allow for legal malleability, even at the top. Petty monarchs of ages past and dictators of today break their own laws with regularity, but such countries are no more fascist than someplace like Kyrgyzstan is democratic.

Except that then you get people like you saying it's a terrible thing, thereby rendering any argument resulting from the advice, whether it's valid or invalid, ineffective, dismissed as mere propaganda. The comments in this thread show that.

Yes? Strategic communications is something anybody that deals with media engages in. Coverups? Those are bad. Getting a positive story out? Not bad. If all anyone hears about is death, but not the reasons why, of course people will turn against whatever is causing the death. There is a complete story and Red Cell seems to simply be offering advice to governments on how to present the positive spin; the negative spin didn't need any more help.

Humbug. My complicated interests include philosophy, astronomy, and politics. My simple interests include mashing a keyboard sequentially to make a little man move on a screen (WoW), beer (a properly aged Gulden Draak is delicious), Canadian music and travel.

Non-nerds tend to be interested in complicated things, too: politics, guns, cars, and sports (yes, it's complicated). The difference between them is the esoteric nature of the interests. Not esoteric? Normal. Esoteric? Nerd. To say otherwise is to live with a sense of superiority to which you are not due, at least not for those reasons.

To list the problems: wrong "your" (should be "you're"), beginning a sentence with "but", misspelling "Slashdot[t]ers", change of number (either singular "Slashdot[t]ers/Geeks" or plural "yourself"), and comma splice at the end. As well, I don't believe "grammar" is a proper noun, but I'll overlook that and "Geek" in deference to style.

It's a saying that means, as was said above, "to detain someone in conversation against their wishes". It carries the imagery of forcing someone into a space the size of a buttonhole so you can have your conversational way with them, no butts required.

Props! And shooting in non-script order.

Wait, what? "If this becomes cheap enough for car travel..." What Londoner would want to drive a car around Beijing? Or Delhi? Still, I'd love to see Eurasia become a unified economic powerhouse! An analogous situation in the US would probably be if it decides to invest in North America. I can see the headlines now: "Washington bails out Mexican railway industry! Senators cry foul!"

First, it was Kay Bailey Hutchison (no "n" in Hutchison). Second, the bill can be found here, on THOMAS. Although the text of the bill isn't up yet, the introducing language is up. It's bill S. 3068, if anyone cares.

Third, this is not a good idea. If there was ever a time to grow our spaceflight industry it's now, at the inflection point. Saying that it will lose us space is just silly: who do they think we will contract with after Soyuz? Arianne? This is exactly how you win space, by spurring private sector investment in space transportation for its own purposes. Rocketry is mature enough for the start-ups, so get NASA to do things others cannot: major spaceflight research. Look at what Bigelow is doing with inflatable modules and is planning on doing going forward. If we can get such major tech in the hands of industry and provide a guaranteed market, I think we're well on our way to owning spaceflight.

Well, a 1967 VW Beetle weighs 840kg, or 0.84 tons. 6*10^8*0.84 = 714,285,714.3 VW Beetles.

You're right: the government doing its twin jobs of saving taxpayer money while implementing public programs and protecting the populace from hucksters is pretty great!