Him and millions of other people who realize that a posted sign saying "Please don't hijack the plane" would be about as effective and far less annoying than homeland security.

Fixed that for you.

3-d is the past, upwards and onwards!

(Actually, I'm not kidding. The brain is a 4-dimensional circuit/computer. In addition to being spatially extended in three dimensions, computations are also temporally extended (thus adding a fourth). What might be an atomic instruction on a modern "2-d" CPU could require all four dimensions of the brain. Think in terms of remembering a word, or the lines to a poem. You get the first part, and some aspect of that influences the trajectory of the system to move to a state that represents the next part, and so on. There is a dynamic feedback loop which is extended over (and reliant on) time. Cf. dynamical systems theory.)

_Bush_ was a bad president?!

You obviously never had the honour of serving PRESIDENT LINCOLN. That man wanted his morning bath YESTERDAY, and IN BED, and yes with PLENTY OF BUBBLES

and woe upon the unfortunate aide in his bedroom at the time if he didn't. They didn't call him a "great" man for nothing. You think that hat was for show?

In honour of PKD (RIP)

This morning I was woken by my TOSHIBA(TM) alarm clock which I had been careful to put $200 (MSFT) in the night before to assure it would function. I get out of bed, and after sliding three bills into the slot by the door, am allowed to enter the REL33V(TM) toilet. I fumble for my credit card, and slip it into the slot outside the vault door surrounding the commode. I don't take my time, as I know that every half-minute $33 is being deducted from my account. I flush (an addition $10), and proceed to the shower. After making sure to put at least $40 in each of the three separate slits (for the owners of the waterworks pipes, the heater, and water utilities, respectively), I take my three-minute REF(TM) shower, and swipe my card through the towel machine to get a size-F DRY-O(TM) towel (I'll splurge today). I pay again to get the door to open so I can leave the bathroom, and then have to toggle some quarters into the WAR-DROBE dresser I have so that I can open the sock drawer to extract some fresh clothing. I forget my sweater and have to spend another $30 to reopen it and retrieve it.

I go to the kitchen (3 doors; $7.50) and carefully count out the $5.00 coins the refrigerator expects. I take out two eggs (knowing that a large sum will be extracted from my account for the decreased weight of the refrigerator), and phone my girlfriend to ask to borrow 25 grand so I can use the stove-top burner for 10minutes, but realize that I had not paid my protection money to the mafia (hey, it's just business) last week, and that their ubiquitous jammers were preventing me from using any communications devices. I forgo watching COMCST(TM) TV today, as I know that I can not afford to flip to the two channels I would want to see anyways. I look at my watch (an antique--none of the ridiculous monthly fees that the new ones require) and realize that I must be going. After paying my SAFE-U front door $50 to stay locked for the day, and another $10 to close behind me, I make my way to the street.

I would pay to use the sidewalk today, but since I couldn't afford to use the stairs which lead to it, I have to wait to slip through onto one of the cheaper walkways with someone else who comes down. That takes roughly 20 minutes (charged $5000 from local AC company for my ambient body heat in that time). I get to work and pay to get through the door. The mandatory coat-hanger costs me another $50, and to get my seat out I have to mortgage my third nephew. I would sit down, but that may crinkle my clothing, causing me massive penalties when I returned them in the evening, so I just stand there doing nothing for 8 hours while money is constantly being deducted from all my accounts like melting snow in the spring. It's amazing anyone has any money left (except the corporations).

Oh, not a bad price at all! Only $250,000,000 (I assume USD?). Man, I remember back when I was kid and you could buy a car (yea, you remember those things from history podcast?) NEW for $40,000. Those were the days.

No, no, no. Didn't you read geekoid's post? Obviously, he is jealous of sonnejw0's intelligence/knowledge, and so is trying to enact revenge by MAKING sonnejw0 stupid! See, a single equals-sign is the ASSIGNMENT operator (shame on you slashdotters for not catching it quicker!)! If he wanted to make a statement about him being stupid he would have had to say "Sonnejw0 == stupid".

Considering that even networks comprising little more than a motor neuron, a sensory neuron, and an excitatory interneuron (a la Aplysia) can `learn', why is this surprising/interesting?

Now, if you want to talk about the maintenance of actual `human-like behaviour' being reason to rethink the position of veggie-people, I'll be willing to talk. But a vegetable is a vegetable--there's a reason we don't treat vegetables like we do humans.

No, that's entirely sound. But trying to pick out (natural?) kinds based on words is a pretty silly idea from the start. It becomes even more painfully obvious when people realize that there is more than one language and `yours' and `theirs' don't always match up. And then trying to pick out (natural?) kinds based on conceptualisation in the first place fails as well, since there are multiple cultures, which may again have different views on the matter.
BUT, I would argue that picking out a range of ages based on two iterations of counting through all 10 of your fingers is a more natural and universal concept based on sounder and more natural terms than is the age range defined by the affix to numbers between 13 and 19 in English :P I guess the question is whether 13-19 has some other, more sound basis. For instance, some important biological function being mostly present in 13-year olds, but less so in 12, 11, 10-year olds. Not that language is based on useful functions though. I agree that, in many cases, it is not.
I guess all of this is (though interesting) totally tangential. In this case calling the 10 and 12 year old `teens' is more appropriate than calling them `pre-teens' because then all the more inapplicable associations with `pre-teen' (still unable to operate computers, etc. because they are 5yrs old) may have been misapplied. Had the child been 15, or 17, or 19 years old the story would not have changed much. But had they been 5, and been able to work out the cell phone usage and facebook etc., that would have been amazing in its own right. So, in the context of this story, they fit more into the `teen' category, than the `pre-teen' category. Though, I guess here `children' may have been sufficient.
Whatever :P

Only (?) in English do the words that refer to that adolescent age group and the endings of the number words for 13 through 19 match up.

No, no...I was confused at his post too (wow this guy reads too much SF!) but then I realized that his first statement is not about the existence of advanced civilisations, but rather suggests that an advanced civilisation will have more of the tools and ability to solve these problems. He is suggesting that WE need to focus on such efforts as nanotechnology and such, because once we're one of those `high tech civilisations', doing physics will be easier. To an extent I think he's got a point; we can certainly do much better physics now than Gallileo (if only because of apparati), and nanotechnology may indeed allow us to build larger (or smaller) and more stable structures, which may be necessary to directly detect some of the more elusive universal secrets.

There's also the view that that entire framework for statistical analysis is fatally flawed. An argument to that effect (available publicly from his course website):
http://www.indiana.edu/~kruschke/articles/KruschkeBayesianDataAnalysisDraft.pdf
Hope the uni servers don't get slashdotted >.>;

Oh noes! So, what if someone with some REAL terrorist intentions got ahold of one of these radios, and actually did his research, and got on the ATC frequency and navigated a plane into something important like

At least he's not a square :P

I don't see why your qualification of LA leads to your conclusion that how it is, is how it must be. Have you ever heard of Tokyo? Even more so than LA, it is cities within cities, back to back, for hundreds of kilometers. And THEY seem to do just fine (though, granted, it takes more than "two light rail systems and a couple of buses"). Your point regarding deliveries, services, etc. is taken (and it is indeed true that this is the case in Tokyo as well--deliveries are done by people in personal vehicles, be they mopeds or trucks), but the primary mode of moving people is public transportation. It requires scores of rail lines criss-crossing, constantly running, on accurate schedules, and bus systems fanning and overlaid on top of those, but it works. And they don't seem to have a problem with it. As many have realized, it is primarily a mentality problem.

(There, fixed that for you)

I'll keep my castle *insecure* primarily with... ALL OF THE ABOVE! w00t!

(Disclaimer: not suggested for those who wish to keep insurance premiums down)