Because breathable Earth-normal atmosphere is a lifting gas on Venus, we could make a relatively low budget colony without any terraforming. Just send a big balloon. It could ride the relatively stable upper atmospheric winds on Venus, circling the planet every 4 earth days, and be at standard pressure, so any hull breach would not result in explosive decompression.

That's actually a really good point. I wonder if there's any justification in the Policy for retroactively removing content based on current robots.txt

except for page deletion. In that case, only certain people can view the history.

That's true whether or not you watch the film, due to the nature of his option-only (no royalties) contract.

Everything is air-droppable at least once --Schlock Mercenary

Most programming confusion I've had to combat in the workplace comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of the two most basic facts of your program:

1. Where is your program's state stored? (NOTE: 90% of the time it's "the call stack" and 90% of the time that's the wrong place to put it.)
2. Where in your code is execution happening?

Threaded program generating weirdness? It's probably because you can't answer those two questions. Distributed program a mess to debug? I bet your state is smeared all over the place. Is your code a pain to port to an evented architecture? Bet you modeled your state badly. Can't map some failure to a certain, detectable set of circumstances? I guarantee your answer starts there.

For me, the answer to understanding these problems was found in functional programming. The no-side-effects stuff causes you to make all of your state concrete and also deeply understand what the call-stack does for you (or, more often than not, *to* you). The cruel reality, though, is that applying this hard-won knowledge *doesn't* seem lie in functional programming (or, at least, not LISP, Schema, Haskell, and crew).

If you're an academic, start with Hoare's Communicating Sequential Processes (http://www.usingcsp.com/cspbook.pdf), then learn Erlang (or Go, with a heavy emphasis on GoRoutines). If you're less Ivory Tower, try to grok this blog entry (http://blog.incubaid.com/2012/03/28/the-game-of-distributed-systems-programming-which-level-are-you/), then learn Erlang (or Go, with a heavy emphasis on GoRoutines).

However, for most cases, ultrasound is much preferred to drawing amniotic fluid (amniocentesis) due to the risk of introducing infection.

Really? Your grocery store doesn't have beans? Potatoes? Rice? Ramen? When my wife was in college, she spent about $30 - $40 a *month* on groceries.
    I'm not saying it's great food, but it's at least some calories.

it's the name of my late friend's Quake clan.

I thought it was the Family Guy parody, not the Robot Chicken one...

My experience working for the USPS was that the images were kept for a very short time (a day or two max) and then deleted. It is possible that law enforcement would be able to get a copy, but they'd have to be quick. In addition, the Postal Inspection Service is pretty serious about postal employees not accessing the mail except as part of doing their jobs, but I don't know whether they give access to law enforcement.

Postcards are *supposed* to have a designated address area, and a designated text area. That being said, people write all over the whole thing. It can lead to some mis-sorted mail if the address recognition software happens to recognize some of the text instead of the address. The post office does indeed collect images of the front (address side) of all mail, that's how it gets sorted. (OCR, and if the computer can't read it, it goes to a graphical display for a human being to decipher).

Movies need more action? Reminds me of http://xkcd.com/311