Call me Canadian but I would prefer that none of my neighbours had assault rifles. Just seems to me the odds of people dying goes up in direct proportion with the number of those weapons existing in my vicinity. 20 years ago I was pretty regular guy. Some issues with depression but nothing major and certainly I had no criminal record. Had I lived in the States and been so inclined I could have legally gotten possession of an armory worth of weapons. Then one day the psychiatrist I had been seeing prescribed Imipramine, one the old-school anti-depressants. I was unlucky enough to be genetically disposed to jump into full scale mania for six months because of this drug until the connection was made. I know, bad psychiatrist!! During the mania I acted entirely irresponsibly and had very little self control. I can only imagine what could have happened had I had access to weapons while I was in that state. And unfortunately that is the reality for the human condition. Sometimes regular people go nuts. And sometimes nutty people go nuttier. The more guns there are around the more opportunities there are for bad things to happen. And having assault rifles circulating in the civilian population just seems unwise to the extreme.

In yesteryear harmful mutations were selected out. Nowadays we can accommodate more and more disability with technology and social support. Probably someone could work out the date, but it's inevitable that without selection the human race genome will eventually degrade to making a pile a protoplasm with all accrued genetic damage. It's either select out or die out. Helluva choice I know, but..

That plus there are huge number of chemistry tutorial sites on the web. A kid with a genuine interest in the topic could learn everything that would appear until the university level. Maybe even better than regular school if self directed learning is an option,

has great high school chemistry courses on DVD. Buy them when they are on sale. Wonderful products.

www.caffeineweb.com I was on Lithium for a supposed bipolar condition when the problem was a caffeine sensitivity. A big waste of a quarter century.

I imagine most slashdotters would barely slow down their reading before checking the correct answers for this test. I forget sometimes most people aren't like that.

ya, and what happens if you have a fire and all your equipment melts?

A few weeks ago I read an investigative report on repair shops in Britain. Aside from over charging and finding non-existant problems they looked at and copied information off the computers that were being serviced. Have reason to trust anyone that you give that kind of access to. Then trust, with as much verification as is economical and doesn't unduly make the service provider think that you don't trust them, since unwarranted distrust chips away at the relationship.

My experience with online back-up has been good as well. Considering most office people only generate at most a GB or two of unique data per month it's economical. Ghost a back-up drive for the OS and programs and you're set.

Within a couple of years kids will be able to carry around and exchange thumb drives large enough to hold ALL of the music produced in the last decade. Aside from cavity searches how exactly is the RIAA expecting to stop that kind of sharing activity?

There's an add-on for Firefox that makes SQlite use fairly painless: SQLite Manager. Brilliant work.