500ml bottles are common in the industry and correspond to a 16.9oz beverage. My conclusion is: this policy is a secret attack on the metric system.

Not true, though really, the term is "terroristic threats", as in, threatening someone in order to terrify them. The Texas Penal Code (it was convenient in Google) uses the phrasing: "TERRORISTIC THREAT. A person commits an offense if he threatens to commit any offense involving violence to any person or property with intent to ... place any person in fear of imminent serious bodily injury." I suspect the media has mangled this one, not the police, because ZOMG terrorism et cetera.

That said, the arrest is still bonkers.

I'm pretty sure most wholly-secular historians agree that Mohammed was real, and there's a general consensus that Jesus was real as well, and even the Buddha. It's the whole "divinity" question and validity of the theology associated with it that's the eminently doubtable part...

Imagine if the North Sea was actually landmass... and if you have trouble imagining, use this map.

I don't know that most people are actually concerned about VA hospitals, but you could easily justify it to a court as part of the whole "maintaining an army" thing, which is definitely something the Constitution provides for.

More of the usual bitching I've come to expect from taxes computers. Big complainers, them.

Well, yeah. Everything's bigger in Taxes.

Out of the Silent Planet sure; it's an okay little homage to From The Earth To The Moon in its own way, and also interesting as a cultural artifact of the genre just a moment before the launch of the Space Age, which would forever alter the way such works would be written (as did also the atomic age). I can, in fact, recommend Silent Planet as obscure, forgotten sci-fi novel worth reading.

But Perelandra ... well, it isn't really sci-fi or fantasy, except as a really thin veneer of that on top of some religious ruminations on matters such as: the creation of man, the Garden of Eden, the problem of Evil, and spiritual warfare. It is of some interest to the reader who is interested in Christian thought (either as a Christian or an outsider interested in how Christians think about things), but aside from some clever floating islands, its offerings to the genre of science fiction (or fantasy for that matter) are sorely limited. It has more in common with the likes of The Screwtape Letters than science fiction proper.

That Hideous Strength. It's obscure - obscure for a reason; it combines dystopian sci-fi with Christian allegory and British academic politics, so there's not a large natural audience. But it's culturally significant as one of George Orwell's inspirations for 1984, and Orwell himself thought reasonably well of it ("by the standards of books today", at least). It's also an interesting little moment before the atomic bomb but still within the realm of dystopian WWII-inspired science fiction.

Next, a government agency dedicated to monitoring body fat content for all employees of media companies. It will "create" 50,000 jobs in the federal bureaucracy. When an editor for the New York Times cheats on her diet, it will be a federal offense punishable by a fine of $50,000 or up to 5 years imprisonment. Lawsuits and lobbyists will fight over whether Twitter and Facebook qualify as a "media" company and thus whether said legislation applies to all users who have created an account on those services. The Department of Health and Human Services will decline a waiver for employees of organizations affiliated with religious groups who have religious dietary restrictions.

That's not really a terrible idea for a cash register. It seems like it would make things less error-prone, even for people who are good at counting cash. When they switched from manual price stickers to UPC barcodes, fat-finger errors in the "here let me type that price in" process became a thing of the past.

Of course, at the local Safeways, the cashier gives you back change in bills and an automatic device dispenses all the coins. This is faster than handling the coins. The self-checkout stands can dispense bills as well.

I trust Steam with my games... at least, I trust them to keep the games around longer on average than I can be trusted to keep the discs operational. There are also an operating-system lifetime issues, too.

It helps that Steam wrecking my games like this would totally demolish their primary business model (not so much with Sony).

The era of cheap gas has a few miles on it left, if the current Iran situation calms itself a little. Sure, $4 a gallon is higher than historical norms... but not by all that much, if you adjust for inflation (which is what really makes the current prices bad). Check it out. It may not be getting massively better, but there's still a long way to go before it's really panicking time for the average driver.

(Cutting back on extra trips? Sure. Looking for a more fuel-efficient car? Probably. Bicycles, high speed trains and mass transit takes over? Don't count on it, even if you like trains as much as I do.)

You should ask Japan how effective the "economic stimulus" from their earthquake/tsunami has been working out for them. Or ask Thailand about their floods. Or ask Florida about how much good old Hurricane Andrew pumped up their economy.

I mean, if your post were modded Funny instead of Insightful that would be one thing...

Maybe, but there are plenty of people who walk around working for TLAs all the time and not really trying to hide it. Perhaps they'd still like to encrypt their conversations?

Google and Facebook are more about renting your personal information - as in, here, let us send this ad to someone whose personal information matches your desired profile. No way they're going to sell their core business. :)