How is it odd? We have no idea how rare it is. It could be quite rare indeed. Granted, I think it's *likelier* that it's moderately, but not *exceedingly*, rare, that there's probably a lot of life out there, but all millions of light years away from each other, and that ftl travel is likely going to remain forever in the realm of sci-fi, so they've just never been able to interact. But it's certainly not impossible to *imagine* the possibility that there's very little life out there because the properties required are just rarer than we might anticipate, without needing to bring a God in. After all, it's 100% likely that life evolved here, because if it had been somewhere else instead, we would have been talking about it from there.

I do, sometimes, depending on the laws. I certainly do have a problem with people blindly following laws that really should be abolished - one great way to effect that sort of change is to gradually have more and more people think the laws just aren't worth following, then people start to think they also aren't worth enforcing, then after long enough, the law turns into one of those laws that ends up in one of those "10 laws you can't believe are still in the books" lists.

I'm not saying in this particular case that we don't need laws regarding immigration - I think we do. I think the current set is kinda broken and a little bit racist, but we do need some kind laws. I'm just saying in *general*, the fact that a law exists, doesn't mean that it should exist, and for laws that shouldn't exist, not following them is *great*.

I was wondering why BitTorrent was teaming up with Coke to offer free rural wifi...

It's not a matter of females needing a male's protection. It's more a matter of females needing protection *from* males. It's not the woman's fault that men are a lot more likely to be violent dickbags, nor that men, specifically the violent dickbag ones, are a lot more likely to do awful things to a lone woman in a bad neighborhood than a lone man, given the choice.

I'm as much for the concept of gender-based chivalry dying as anyone, but he has a point with that one (to be fair, it's not fun being a single male at night in a bad neighborhood either, but I imagine it would be even less fun to be a woman.)

If I'm 90 and still with it mentally and physically, as I certainly would *like* to be, please don't kill me.

On the other hand, if I get into a terrible car crash tomorrow on the way to work, despite being quite young, if I'm in severe pain, unlikely to ever not be in severe pain, and basically crippled to the point where I can't do anything, please do kill me.

I don't see where age (*directly*) has anything to do with it. Obviously the chances of your life sucking too badly for one reason or another go up with age, but that's only on average.

I *hope* to live to 100+, taking full advantage of my retirement for as long as possible, and dying without ever suffering from dementia or anything else enjoyment-of-life-ending.

A couple years ago, I got served somebody else's summons. Apparently, there's someone else in the same city with my same first and last name (not the same middle name, though, or even the same middle initial). When that person failed to answer the summons at his residence address, they found *my* workplace address and gave me the summons. The guy they used to give the summons then stated that, no, I was totally the same guy (most likely because he didn't actually go check, because screw that, he had better things to do than his frelling job). So *I* had to get a lawyer to defend myself against the accusation of being a person I wasn't. (Thankfully, my mom knows a lot of people, including at least one lawyer who wanted to help out her son for free, or I would have been spending hundreds of dollars to defend myself in a case I had absolutely nothing to do with. Still tons of fun, though.)

So, given that, I totally support this.

Agreed, other than the "stop thinking about work" part. I find that when I'm stumped on a problem at work, like 75% of the time I think of a solution while relaxing at home. Then I quickly (less than 5 minutes) write down my thoughts about it and email them to myself, and *then* I stop thinking about work. I don't *do* work once I'm out the door, but that's no reason to stop *thinking* about work. If you don't even want to think about your job, you probably don't have the right job. (But if you're being forced to *work* more than what was in your contract, you also don't.)

So, yes, their company sucks. Yes, all their products suck. Yes, the world would probably be a bit better of a place without Java in it, but I think you're being just a *tad* bit hyperbolic, or are you literally saying, given the choice between a world were 11 million people didn't die in the Holocaust, or one with no Java, you'd choose the latter?

I would mod you up, but I don't have mod points at the moment. So I will instead comment that this is entirely accurate: when I say that I xerox'd something, I have absolutely no clue whether the machine I used to copy a paper was actual a Xerox brand machine. When I say I used a kleenex, it's extremely *unlikely*, in fact, that I actually used a Kleenex-brand tissue.

On the other hand, when I tell someone to google something, I mean use freaking Google, not anything else. Because everything else freaking blows. (I tried using duckduckgo once, a couple years ago. I liked what they were doing, but I realized after a couple weeks that like 75% of the time I just ended up putting !google in the search if I actually wanted decent search results, so I said screw it and went back to Google.)

If your supermarket doesn't carry the kind of mustard you like, you can find another supermarket. If none of them around you carry the kind of mustard you like, you might pay more in shipping, but you can probably still get it shipped from somewhere else where that mustard is more popular.

If your ISP blows, you can... move to a different city. Maybe. If they aren't the only ISP there, too.

While I agree that this stunt was kinda idiotic of them, I would like to ask: if you have monthly data quotas, why the frack do you have your iTunes set to automatically synch off my butt while you're connected over 3/4g rather than only on wifi? You kinda deserve it at that point.

I do! By which I mean actually a bunch of renamed pictures of goatse and tubgirl... :p

"If you want entertainment, then you really ought to pay the creator of that entertainment."

The problem is that by paying for cable, that is *not* what you're doing. It's several steps back from actually paying the people creating the content, to the point where they get basically crap-all out of it. I would *love* to pay the people responsible for creating the content; I have less love for the concept of most of my money going to the people screwing us over at [whichever one cable company your area happens to be allowed to purchase cable through.]

Wow. That does kinda blow, but sounds like an even better reason to *get* Cyanogen. Note: those "standard installation instructions" only work on a particular, rather small subset of Android phones. Cyanogenmod itself works on a much larger subset, though I think still not all of them, I have no idea if the Galaxy S Captivate is one of them or not. (Though it looks like the answer is yes?)

I installed Cyanogenmod on my previous phone that was stuck on 2.3 (and full of crapware I didn't want)... I had to first root it and install a bootloader, which was a bit of a pain to get working, but totally worth it.

It's here. You're welcome.