Read the law? Are you crazy? Without that we can't have "blah, blah, blah... Obama is Hitler, blah, blah, blah". You might think ObamaHitler propaganda is bad, but we need it. It has electrolytes. It's what plants crave. If you pull the plug on ObamaHitle propaganda, a good chunk of the economy could collapse.

The closest I came to an Easter Egg was putting the string "EREIAMJH" in code some place. I don't recall exactly. Perhaps it was off the end of the simple help text in a CLI app or something. There were a few times I'd stick that in code. It'd only be visible to somebody running strings on the code or something. It's very few bytes. No additional execution is involved. It's a Brazil reference in case you're wondering.

That poll is likely bogus. A majority of voters in Texas elected politicians who oppose such sales.

There are many cases where Congress does things against the desire of the majority. I'm sure Texas is no different in that regard.

The USA in general has more forest now then it did 100 years ago. The first industrial revolution was really hard on trees. For example, In NorCal there is a town called Guerneville. Next to the Safeway you can read a historical marker that explains it was once called "stumptown". Reason? Redwoods cut down to make railroad ties and other structures. Guerneville is now surrounded by 2nd growth redwood. It looks great, even if you know that it's not the amazing beauty that it must have been before.

goto the Bahamas or the Keys

Are you sure that won't be harmful?

In this context, Germany is not a state. In the USA (remember, Slashdot is a US web site, it's in the FAQ) you say "country" when referring to a foreign entity. Germany is a country. California is a state.

Absent interference in the market by governments and/or corporations, price is determined by supply and demand, not capability. I can't think of any rational reason for anybody to interfere with the market for PDP8s, so I'm going to assume it's a free market. Although economic theory with its neat little graphs might give one the impression that it's some kind of science, the actual shape of the supply and demand graphs (and thus the equilibrium price) are determined by emotional "ugly bags of mostly water".

Scrolled down for this. I would add, "time and testing" and "testing" usually involves wide distribution. Yes, JPEG, PNG and Open Source compression libraries have had bugs, sometimes very serious ones. I still consider it some of the best code out there. I don't think being able to read the code matters. That's a red herring, unless you need to work on it. If everybody needs to work on it, it's too unfinished to be particularly good code. The only thing I've read in some of these libraries is the headers, and mostly the comments in there. It was literally self-documenting in comments the last time I looked at it. That's some good code.

Well this one is unfortunately easy to refute with data.

From the linked article: "Al-Batouti was married and had five children".

A quick look and some googling on that was interesting. It still requires a state-level effort. It definitely doesn't sound "simple". There isn't any tech that will allow meth cookers to turn into uranium cookers, and that's a good thing.

Not to mention that many diseases were a death sentence in 1913. Sure, health care was cheap. The doctor would take a chicken in trade; but all he had was a black bag. Appendicitis? surgical mortality was much higher. Polio? No vaccine. That's why FDR was in a wheel chair. Today? We can even cure some cancers if we catch them in time. Yeah, paying premiums sucks. I just paid mine today. Hate it; but I have no desire to go back to 1913.

The design of the bombs is not the problem. Getting fissile material to build the trigger is the problem. Even a large corporation could probably not enrich uranium without attracting attention. Unless the book contains some method that Joe Sixpack can use to leach highly-enriched uranium from tailings or something, it's not a threat.

Is "quantum comuting" faster than my pickup truck?

I don't know. Have you run over any cats lately? "That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works".

It's been years since I've thought about it. When I was young and first got exposed to the whole concept of "making big decisions" I realized something. The process was like this: 1. Gather data. 2. Make chart of pros-and cons. 3. Come up with some kind of way to weight the data, ultimately arriving at some numbers that suggested the best course of action. 4. Screw it all and go with your gut.

It's obvious to think that you could cut out the first 3 steps. The big revelation for me was to realize that while steps 1-3 were important, the disappointment I felt over the numerical outcome was important too. It was like there was symbiosis between data and emotion.

An extreme example of "only looking at numbers" came to me in my late 30s. It was suggested that I should remain on the East Coast because "taxes are high in California".

I didn't realize Obama was a Republican. You do know that he attended private raisers held by Comcast executives, don't you? He's golfed with the CEO of Comcast. Oh yeah, and the current FCC chairman, nominated by Obama, has close ties to the telecom industry and has long been a lobbyist for companies like Comcast, AT&T and Verizon. In 2012 Comcast employes donated roughly 4x more to Democrats than Republicans.

But sure, keep believing all the bullshit you're fed; it will just make it that much easier for Democrats, and Republicans along with them, to screw you over.