Actually dinosaurs evolved from reptiles, not the other way around. Hence the "age or reptiles" coming before the "age of dinosaurs". Reptiles couldn't compete with their more advanced, probably at least somewhat warm-blooded relatives, and lost their position as the dominant class of land-dwelling animal life.

And of course birds are descended from only one small class of dinosaurs that included such notable examples as the T-rex, the vast majority of dinosaur gene-lines vanished forever, and it's hard to look at a chicken or sparrow and not feel that it's been much diminished from the former glory of it's ancestors. But I'm sure some descendant of the squirrel monkey will do justice to the primate gene line after the next great extinction event.

...the somewhat tounge-in-cheek poster from cold war has this covered in its last step:

o Bend over and kiss your ass goodbye

The Keurig 2.0 has the "only drink liquids specified by the manufacturer" part down already.

Well, technically they only control the container which creates a solution from whatever liquid you put into the coffee maker.

You would, for example, be perfectly free to put beer in your Keurig to brew coffee with.

Or pee in someone else's.

Because cowering under your desk will protect you from a nuclear blast!

That's got to be one of the more effective fear-mongering campaigns ever deployed - got a whole generation indoctrinated from childhood to cower in fear under the skirts of a commensurately empowered government.

And these are normal activities for an average home user who just want's to be able to watch cat videos at whatever hotspot they happen to be connected to?

The point of tools like this is to simplify things for people who don't know or care about the details - the technological 99% if you will. If you actually know what you're doing there are absolutely far more powerful tools available, should you have the need for them. But would you really want to inflict those eldritch horrors on your grandmother? (the one who has trouble using email, I'm sure the leet hacker one wrote her own tools from scratch.) Or really, on anyone else you end up playing unpaid tech support for?

you get your hand held, and a blow job, while your machine is fixed

Wow, where do I get one of those cards?

My machine would constantly be broken. ;-)

I agree. I can't wait for Fox News to be taken off the air.

Not specifically - but any situation that requires per-customer infrastructure buildout or otherwise benefits from network effects or economies of scale will tend to naturally form a monopoly, even without government interference. And when deploying and maintaining such infrastructure requires digging up streets or hanging stuff on utility poles, the local populace (by way of government) has a vested interest in minimizing redundant infrastructure and the associated risks and inconveniences of maintenance. Which pretty much translates to accepting the inevitability of a monopoly, and at least strapping some regulations on them in th process. Of course regulatory capture tends to undermine those pretty quickly.

Personally I think a better way to handle such natural monopolies might be to separate infrastructure from service: There's one power line company, one dataline company, one waterline company, etc. But all of them are prohibited from selling any services to customers - instead they can only rent customer access to service providers (probably at a flat rate, with mandatory service availability - that's the price of getting the monopoly). Slightly complicated for things like water and power where there's not really a 1:1 correspondence between source and sink, but flow metering is already in place, so really it's mostly a matter of just making sure the incoming water/power is meeting the required quality standards.

That wouldn't totally fix the problem, but at least it would help avoid regulatory capture since you've got competing business interests lobbying different sides of the regulatory debate. Might be able to improve things even further by having the -line companies not actually own the infrastructure, instead being essentially a deployment and maintenance company hired by the government to service the infrastructure - not unlike road maintenance crews. Get too greedy and the city/county can just fire them and hire a replacement: the infrastructure belongs to the people. You'd probably have some tragedy of the commons issues there, but carefully incentivized contracts could probably keep that to a minimum, and it's not like the current situation is leading to companies falling all over themselves to properly maintain the infrastructure.

Sounds like some good meat that bears at least a passing resemblance to the wild game we're designed to eat. I envy you your source.

Considering the papers were eventually published anyway, it's hard to see how there's a huge problem here.
"Impactful papers don't always get in biggest journals" isn't the same as "peer review has a problem."

Wow! My life is great now!

That doesn't even make sense. If you're interested in science and finding out what is true and accurate, then stick around. If you just want to insult people when facts don't go your way, please leave.

Well yeah, that sounds so easy lol. Why don't we do it today?

I believe the most common solution is a covered box with fairly high side.

I volunteer at a cat rescue and sanctuary where the cats roam freely, and we use giant totes (>25 gal) in our main area filled about 1/4-1/3 of the way up. We still have some spill over because there are so many cats (mainly when they jump out, not from digging), but it's a sprinkling instead of a beach. High sides are a good way to go.

Our smaller rooms use normal litter boxes, but again only filled about 1/3 of the way. Still not much spill over, but that could be because they're mostly kittens and don't have as much digging power. Most people that suffer from litter going all over are filling it too high, so it may be as simple as just putting less litter in the box at a time.

The cover, however, might not help. The adoption counselors recommend against covered boxes: while it might seem useful to humans (between extra protection against spilling and odor filters that can be put in the top) it isn't that enticing to cats (I can't remember exactly why.)

How hard is it for people to learn this ultra-simple rule. Sorry to be the grammar nazi, but every time I see this it drives my parser up the wall.

all on it's own.

Aaarrggh!!!!

It's completely automated

Correct. "it's" is a contraction of "it is".

a tiny chip holding up it's little metal finger

Aaaarrrgghh!!!! Doesn't make sense: "...holding up it is little metal finger".

And to address the article itself, who even needs cat litter and all that nastiness in a house? Just let your damn cat out! They will never, ever soil in the house given a choice.