...there are regions of India the size of Canada where you really shouldn't try it.

Canada has more than three times the land mass of India.

Additionally, the section of Manu Smriti that you cited is this:

8.359) A man who is not a Brahmana ought to suffer death for adultery (samgrahana); for the wives of all the four castes even must always be carefully guarded.

That pertains to infidelity, not homosexuality.

Slashdot doesn't render properly in Safari 4 or Firefox 3.5 beta4 either - the comment titles and scores aren't displayed anymore

The comment titles and scores are being rendered (highlight the page with ctrl-a), the problem is with the CSS - the background image that runs the length of the div element containing the title is being overwritten. This:

.comment div.title { background:#044 url("//c.fsdn.com/sd/article-title-bg.png") repeat-x left top; }

get's overwritten by this (appears further down the document):

.comment div.title { background:#fff!important; }

You'll notice the issue doesn't occur on some of the alternative stylesheets (Ask Slashdot, YRO, etc). In the meantime, you can hit 'change' in the threshold form to set things straight.

> This left the shortest dial time area code for a statewide code as 201..

Have you ever actually seen a rotary phone? Dialing "0" is the slowest digit of all. It's placed after the "9".

Keep in mind that he said that statewide area codes (ie. area codes that every phone number in the state used) had to have 0 as the middle digit. So while 201 wouldn't be faster to dial than 212, it is the fastest statewide area code (since 1 wasn't available as the first digit).