I miss the good old days, when you knew to blame everything on the Axis of Evil, and you could solve all our problems by bombing Iraq.

It's to help decide "whether" to bomb someone.

Space heaters are fire hazards.

I think the PIAP activists have started eliminating the competition.

Maybe we can get the FCC to take that on next!

Up with service! Down with monopolies! Up with net neutrality! Down with regulation! Up with Pluto! Down with Kim Dotcom!

Wait a minute - Today's stories leave me feeling edgy and confused.

What jurisdiction do they have anywhere?

sweet! does this mean they're going to upgrade my internet connection to morse code soon?

can't wait.

They are a private company that has a published set of terms and conditions.

Can a baker, florist or photographer put forth a set of terms and conditions with regards to what kind of events they will provide services for?

The courts have been saying no for a while now in the case of some events they may disagree with: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/....
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

It is an interesting world where some people/companies are compelled to provide services equally (if they want to remain in business), while others are given a pass.

I'm still waiting for a case like this to happen in the US as it would be rather entertaining viewing: http://www.nationalreview.com/...

The last quarter or so of the patterns deal with interior space, but i think you might find it problematic to just apply them in isolation.

The patterns are meant to be applied in order, from largest effect with least detail, to smallest effect and highest detail.

So, for instance, if you take room that doesn't have "light on two sides"

http://www.patternlanguage.com...

there may not be much you can do, interior design wise, to save the room, without first trying some of the suggestions he has for how to deal with the lack of windows...

One other AC posted this, but it will probably stay buried at zero.

If you're interested in why some spaces feel nice to you and others don't, there's a series of books you want to read, by "Christopher Alexander"

The first one is "The Timeless Way of Building". The next is "A Pattern Language"

This guy was writing about the human factors in architecture -- why certain spaces make all people feel good, and how that developed over human history, and how it's largely been lost in modern architecture.

His next book, "A Pattern Language", enumerates 253 patterns his team rediscovered that help resolve social problems in architectural spaces.

The problem he noticed is that people could understand if they felt good in a space or not, but it was difficult to predict ahead of time if a building would have this quality or not. And that's obviously a huge problem if you want to build things that people love, because buildings are expensive and stay around a long time. Just cloning old buildings that people like doesn't quite do it either - because people didn't really understand what made those spaces great.

This series of books is what the Gang of Four looked at, and one of them said "hey, this applies to building software also - when the problem looks like this, there's a pattern that can be implemented many different ways to address that problem".

Thus, the design patterns movement in software was born.

If you're at all interested in houses, cities, planning, design, etc, I really recommend the books.

However, read them before you buy/build your next house -- not right after you just moved. You'll start to find explanatinos about where you currently live that explain why you don't use or don't enjoy certain things, and you'll be frustrated and want to start changing things :)

Is that you Gecko45?

and give them grounds to point the finger at the west and say "See, they are a bunch of infidels that deserve what they get!".

Eating pork, drinking alcohol, not praying to Allah five times a day and allowing my wife to drive and not cover her face head while I draw a cartoon about Jesus, Moses and Mohammed walking into a bar is plenty enough reason for them already.

When you are dealing with hyper-sensitive people you have two choices:
1) Change your entire lifestyle so as to walk around on egg shells and hope and pray they don't get offended, or
2) Live your life normally and require them to develop a thicker skin.

There was a time in this country where #2 was actually the norm, alas people like you however keep trying to push us harder and harder towards #1.

But then, it's easy for me to say that... I am an adult, I simply do not get offended regardless of what someone says about me or something that I care about. It's part of being an adult.

Know what we call people who freak out at every little thing?

Children... and Democrats... but mostly children.

Also missing are Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan: http://www.cnn.com/2014/09/23/...

Clearly his Peace Prize protects him from condemnation.

Wouldn't it be useful to see if and how the murder rate in the US is distributed... and see if perhaps in a country of more than 300 million there might be pockets which are the source of a disproportionate murder rate to?

Or do you want to ignore the fact of the low murder rate in easy to legally get a gun Plano, Texas (.4 per 100,000) and the high murder rate in the hard to legally get a gun city of Detroit (54.6 per 100,000)? The numbers are striking: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

In fact, oddly enough those places with the highest per-capita murder rates in the US tend to have rather strict gun laws full.

Maybe, it's more than just laws about how easy or hard it is to get a firearm?