Seriously, if a bunch of people can make a living by being horribly inefficient, then surely some smart engineers can extract the valuables from this by building a good process?

I mean, even if you improve organization a little, and you build a furnace with a rudimentary smoke filter, this situation would be immensely improved for everyone. Those people make a better living, and the smoke coming off it wouldn't be half as bad... (Although, if someone would actually build that, it would be reported as 'Western company builds world's dirtiest recycling plant in Ghana').

Why else would someone put cheese on a dead body?

Perhaps as a final act of revenge? The archeologists should prove that it is particularly stinky cheese to make that plausible.
Or perhaps it is the ultimate preservative: bacteria rather starve to death than eat a dead body covered in that cheese.

Why are people afraid of alien life forms? Would it not be just as likely that earth life is the more dangerous one?

Earth life is so contageous that it conquered even the most inhospitable corners of this planet. For every niche, we have some microorganism that can thrive there.

And the final punch line is that earth has plants. They can create a very toxic and reactive gas called oxygen! We can essentially poison entire planets using self-replicating weapons called plants.

Thanks for the info. I can't give you any mod points though! Maybe someone else can.

In any game, I never like it when people get more powerful than me, simply because they pay more. It's a game, not real life!

Games are no longer primarily about friendly competition between players. It's now a source of income for the developers, so much in fact that the competition (which once was the whole point of games - even in the pre-digital era) has been sacrificed to generate more income.

yor students shud wrte thR essay bout d evoluation of language, UzN a modern txtN lngwij, lol!
Oh, U ask bout reading, not writiN. ZOMG!

The Dutch disagree. In the #1 biking country in the world, everybody rides the upright bike. It's more practical (easier to balance, with more space to carry groceries or other luggage, and an optional extra passenger on the back) and safer (much better overview of the traffic, and easier to look behind you).

Btw, the real revolution is taking place in China, where millions of people are zooming by on electric scooters. Some little startup who builds bikes in a shed in the USA is not gonna make any impact on the market for electric two-wheeled vehicles.

It's like proposing to the East India Company to build a modern mammoth tanker. They would not understand why anyone would want to transport such quantities of material across the ocean. You can't really blame people for not having a clear vision of the future though.

I disagree.
Firstly, we have some exciting missions to planetoids. Pluto and Ceres are about to be visited (spacecraft is already on its way).
Secondly, the ISS is a great success of global cooperation. And now it is being supplied by commercial parties, at lower cost than ever. And the fact that it's up there (it's huge in comparison to anything else we've put in space) is a sign we're moving forward.
And then the Chinese are breathing down the necks of Western space agencies, and catching up quickly. Thereby ensuring that we don't get lazy.

And finally, I really believe that this idiotic Mars One program can be a success. The global budget for advertising is simply insane, and if they would only capture 1% of the advertising money, they can totally build a Mars mission. It needs to gain popularity, but in this modern age, that is not rocket science.

Sure, the massive budgets of the golden days of the space race are over. It's all a bit more sensible now. Until the entertainment industry steps in!

This map is very useful for countries/regions without any protection against the sea. In the Netherlands, far better maps are available anyway, which take all the major (and minor) dikes and protections into account.

In the Netherlands, the height of literally every square meter is mapped already (probably because the Dutch built the land themselves).
Here's a more detailed map of the Netherlands, with all the major dikes on it: http://www.floodsite.net/junio...
You can enter any postcode (zipcode) and get the elevation here: http://ahn.geodan.nl/ahn/viewe...
According to this site, Dutch maps have 8 pixels per m2, while the NASA/SRTM gadget seems to have 1 pixel per 100m2 or so: http://www.ahn.nl/bestellen/ke...

Yes, but while it is a good idea, it could also be political suicide. If a politician is the reason that the security/safety rules became more reasonable, and if an accident happens soon after (no matter how unlikely), that will immediately be blamed on that politician.

While it is incredibly annoying (and expensive!) to have these TSA screenings, it is better for the political careers of all those in charge to steer away from the topic, or to make the rules even more strict. Better safe than sorry.

Btw, in reply to the OP: many citizens demand risk avoidance, not risk management. Screw the costs - the costs are paid by someone else (they think).

In 2006, the food index was only 127. Yet, there were 15 large scale riots, 9 large scale strikes, 6 wars, of which at least 2 new wars in 2006, and countless other conflicts not mentioned on the wikipedia page about conflicts in 2006. And I just picked a random year.

Conflicts (general): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
Strikes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
Riots: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
Food index: http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsi...

Don't worry. There will be another war. And one after that. And one after that. I don't know when, or where... but I seriously doubt that we'll get global peace anytime soon.

There is a discussion topic about the Beta. It is only about 5 items down from this one. We all get it: you don't want the Beta (and I share your feelings, btw). But can we please just keep on enjoying Slashdot too?

Frankly, they probably came from very good design schools, but the organization behind those projects made 1 critical error: They put design before functionality. (I use the word design as meaning only graphical design, not engineering design).

A good design starts off with a set of boundary conditions, and I think that those were not defined according to the wishlist of the most registered users, for example because slashdot doesn't know its users, or because it was just defined too loosely.

I'm writing UNESCO World Heritage Centre to preserve the Classic right now!
http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/