The anaerobes have written a letter about that new-fangled "photosynthesis" mutation.

What are you complaining about? For your laptop battery to last 200 miles, you only have to be averaging 50 mph.

I'm with you on the printing press. Kosher food rules are too close to halal food rules, though. If I'd been writing it, the lone loser would've landed in a (pork) barbecue pit, or sprawled under the spilled contents of an overturned hot-dog cart.

Yeah. I'm less concerned (although still quite concerned) about them getting a "false impression". I'm much more concerned about them getting a true impression of things that are logically, ethically, or legally none of their business, and then taking actions based on those illogically, unethically or illegally-drawn conclusions.

I'm betting that with all the crap they're cramming onto the TV side of the bill we'll still come out well ahead. And that's without considering the "make me an offer to keep me from going over to [cough] DSL" negotiations.

Not that DSL is a serious competitor around here -- it seems to give about 1/5 the bandwidth for about 80% of the price -- but I don't have to let them know that I care about that.

The last straw for us was the $2.75 sports surcharge. The only sports broadcasts we've ever tuned in are on the local channels, and those only because they ran late and delayed what we were intending to watch, and we were waiting for them to end. Between that, $2.75 a month for broadcast TV (what?), various taxes and so forth -- we're just really tired of paying for stuff we don't use.

We'll see how the negotiations go. Maybe TW Business Class will start to make more sense. Or maybe it'll be bad enough to justify dropping back to 3Mbps DSL.

Do you do anything on the Internet besides stare slack-jawed at videos? If so, you'll still need to pay for Internet access, even if you're getting cable or dish TV. So saying "then $50/mo for some form of internet" seems a bit disingenuous.

As for me and my family, we'd be happy to pay $20/mo to a couple of places that provide programming we actually care to watch, rather than paying $100+/mo to TWC for an array of several hundred channels, of which we watch perhaps five, for an hour or two a day on average. In fact, we're getting ready to do exactly that. GOODBYE, bundled-and-unwanted garbage.

"The article [which was printed] was written by the evangelical author Eric Metaxas, and in it, he argued that scientists have determined that life is so improbable it must have been created."

"Krauss concluded [in a letter which was not printed] by writing that '[r]eligious arguments for the existence of God thinly veiled as scientific arguments do a disservice to both science and religion, and by allowing a Christian apologist to masquerade as a scientist [Wall Street Journal] did a disservice to its readers.'"

Perhaps the problem is that too many people in this thread are trying to anthropomorphize Edsger Dijkstra.

Not exactly. Far-sightedness is hyperopia. Presbyopia refers specifically to the loss of "focal accommodation" with age; if you have otherwise normal vision, this usually manifests itself as loss of the ability to focus on close objects.

I've been strongly myopic from childhood. Now, in my early 50s, presbyopia means that without glasses I can only focus on things about six to ten inches away from my eyes, instead of things from two to ten inches away. With glasses, I can still see normally to infinity, but I need bifocals to cover both far and near ranges -- unless I hold the target up close and peer under my glasses.

If you start out with hyperopia (far-sightedness), and presbyopia sets in, you may not be able to focus at any distance -- your nearest focus distance may be beyond infinity.

...so annoying that not even He can be bothered to try to get to the article hidden behind it?

You may have stolen it from Pratchett, but it already exists in astronomical canon.

It boggles my mind that astronomers picked this particular set of three stars, and no other, to call "The Triangle". There are plenty of sets of three not-particularly-colinear stars that deserve the title, from very large scales (the Summer Triangle) to much smaller scales (Orion's head).

Then again, the figures people see in the sky are mostly baffling to me. Give humans a random sensory stimulus, and we can't help but invent meaningful patterns in it.

...but, in terms of widely recognized asterism shape, Delphinus and Sagitta are both smaller. Sure, as the sky is officially divvied up and assigned to constellations, Crux gets the smallest area -- but those divisions seem about as respectable as gerrymandered congressional districts in the US.

The F-35 is already a resounding success at its primary mission. I refer, of course, to pork distribution.

You just need a thiotimoline target in your detector.

You're old enough to recognize Kodak's long-term dominance, but you don't recognize a reference to the "Kodak moment" marketing tagline?