Rectal extraction.

The next exciting and up-to-date town-hall meeting discussing government's use of technology will be...Webpage Layout: Tables or CSS?

And they don't get angry at other cells for not following the rules.

So, the objection is that the administration is allowed to choose which information it thinks is relevant to developing and promoting a health care plan? This differs from governments' usual way of making policy how, exactly?

I see the point that they're imposing some limits on how the conversation goes, but did anyone really expect anything different?

My point is just that there's a vast distance separating this kind of rinky-dink maneuvering from the government's having somehow actually succeeded in making the conversation take only the shape that it favors.

It's kind of tiresome to continually read Americans complaining that tiny annoyances (or imagined biases and conspiracies) amount to political oppression. We have free speech in this country; it's no use complaining that the government isn't cooperating in our exercising that right in the way we would find most convenient.

It's no use, in the first place, because doing so will change nothing, and second, because those private individuals who have helped advance the national conversation in various ways at various times would have accomplished nothing if they had spent their time whining on public message boards about how the government was not broadcasting their message. That's the argument not of an activist, but of a loser.

Got something to say? Find others who will help and make yourselves heard. (Oh, and don't expect much except to be in it for the long haul with marginal success, if any.)

Am I the only person who's concerned that the Whitehouse has been allowed to be the moderator of such discussions?

Are you saying it's impossible to put your own video on Youtube (or elsewhere) detailing what you think about this or any other political issue? If not, I'm not sure how the administration has been "allowed to be the moderator of such discussions." Could you explain?

Better than being followed around by an assigned state-licensed Public Warning Engineer.

Like most natural human languages (those spoken by beings who are trying to communicate with one another and who exhibit the power of judgment), English allows some variation in what elements of sentences go where. No competent English-speaker who hasn't remained retarded in their sexual development at the anal-retentive stage, or developed a weird fetish by the daily practice of putting parentheses around symbolic expressions to coerce mechanical systems into evaluating them in the preferred order, could ever actually misconstrue this sentence as you are doing or pretend to be doing.

It's ironic that in a comment on a story about the joy of pattern-making and pattern-recognition, you should reveal the ugliness of pattern-enforcement. Don't, for the love of humanity, be a lexer (of any languages but those that need it), and don't go around insisting others think like machines.

Did it leave a silver lining?

Could we please start treating "serious gaming" like the oxymoron it should be?

One word: baccarat.

It's when you reply to a string of earlier messages and place your reply on top, so that whoever reads will have no idea of the context.

What's top posting?

Let's all go into comp.lang.c and start top posting to threads. They LOVE IT when you do that.

Looping constructs: "Sit on it and rotate!"

Or the syntactic sugar shorthand: "Sit and spin!"

Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed. The ability to boost the capacity of your online operations is insignificant next to the power of the Force.

Or so they tell you.

On Vent....

What's a scientest?

A scientest is someone who works in a scients departmint, duh.

15 minutes later, Alpha reports:

"Warning. There is another system."