George Bernard Shaw was self-employed.

Nothing redundant about it. Shooting ordinary people, or even Federal employees away from their jobs, is covered by state, not Federal laws. This is why the FBI used to investigate lynchings as "civil rights violations," and also why it was significant that Judge Roll was attending the Giffords appearance to discuss her support of the Federal judiciary, rather than just as a private citizen.

That's OK. They don't really get "the phone rang," "carriage return," or "winding a watch" either.

And I would not dig in soil that has a lot of armadillo excrement.'

Oddly enough, this has been my family's motto for five generations.

You know, I have some sympathy for your point here, but I don't see a lot of evidence, either. Back in the misty days when Thompson sub-machine guns could be purchased over the counter and Clyde Barrow toted a BAR, the cops weren't notoriously polite to the people they arrested. Apparently the widespread availability of firearms did not, in fact, prevent "third-degree" interrogations and prisoners who never even made it to booking.

I suspect our perceptions of how it used to be are based on a sort of Pleasantville image of happy white people trusting their neighborhood patrolman, who spent most of his time helping lost children with melting ice-cream cones.

After all, before all those hippie liberals got in the way, it didn't occur to most cops that they shouldn't tap your phone, turn out your pockets, hold you for days without access to a lawyer, or "tune you up" before formal questioning.. Each of those issues had to be dragged through a court before Officer Friendly gave them up.

The point? At least an intellectual exercise., and possibly a scheme that Facebook (who have stepped on their dicks any number of times over this very issue) might at least consider, along with anybody else who hosts user content and feels a need to monitor its appropriateness.

But hey, if it doesn't spin your prop, don't think about it.

I can often whistle a tune after I've merely heard it--that doesn't make me a composer.

I would argue that the simple, obvious-in-retrospect, inventions are the hardest. Complex inventions are frequently piles of simpler things organized in a new way. The stirrup, by contrast, is almost painfully simple,and is trivial to duplicate once seen, but men rode horses for some thousands of years before some gifted inventor thought of that simple, ground-breaking device.

There comes a point at which we tend to forget that things had to be invented--the lead pencil, the light switch, the telephone bell--because we have a hard time imagining their non-existence.

Yeah, I came up with the paper clip, the safety pin, and the ballpoint pen just last week. They were all perfectly obvious--once I'd seen them.

You can argue that others anticipated the work, but Shockley, et al. built working transistors in the late 40's and early 50's. They may not have been the neat little cans we're used to, never mind the photo-lithographed IC's running this computer, but transistors they were.

You know, "Blink" is superb Dr. Who, and the funny thing is that there's hardly any Doctor, or even a companion, in it, which makes it a weird introduction to the series.

It's a university, for God's sake! They're supposed to be four-eyed eggheads

Damn. "Who's," not "whose." Believe it or not, there no apparent cognitive deficits.

Actually, speaking as somebody whose recently had a stroke and has had to take unpaid leave, you might be surprised how much economic issues still matter even amongst medical ones. Your grizzly insurance is probably partially employer-funded.

Remember, some of these blind folk may have been working, studying, and paying tuition there for years, and now everything's been changed, for maybe not much reason. "Clean out your desk, Perkins--a man who can't throw a javelin better than that has no business in shoe distribution--God knows how you almost got vested in the pension plan."

Besides, schools should be concentrating on sharp minds, not sharp eyes.

Yeah, I know. I'm an insensitive bastard. But even you might have trouble after that grizzly bear bites off your left hand. Point is that there are constraints needed for a job--I suppose firemen might need to climb a thirty-foot rope to rescue panda cubs from flaming orphanages--and some are more-or-less arbitrary, and this may fall into the latter category.

You're talking to the wrong end of the horse. The NFB is suggesting that Google Apps was a bad choice for these (incidentally federally-funded) institutions.

Let's say you came to work one day and all the stairs and elevators had been replaced with climbing ropes. You'd still be a perfectly competent WHATEVER_YOU_DO_FOR_A_LIVING, but you'd never be able to reach your third-floor office, and all because you can't climb thirty-foot ropes--boo hoo, you whiner!