There never where smart people here, just technicians and wannabe technicians with an inflated sense of self importance.

Not true, when this site started I was a professional engineer - it's only now that I'm a wannabe technician with an inflated sense of self importance.

Good point, but I can only despair from afar at what you guys have lost and wonder why so few of you even bother to get off your arses to vote. I've also avoided visiting thanks to the TSA etc - I've soaked up enough rads without getting exposed to a radiation source set up by unqualified monkeys and not checked by any third party, let alone the consequences of maybe getting sick in a country where health care is a minor and relatively poorly funded side effect of insurance.

Maybe, but that's just a guess isn't it? Perhaps it's a good idea to let scientists take a look at it to understand what is going on instead of attempting to trump reality by some sort of political fiat. Even if some declare the climate has never changed since Genesis there's still a great deal of value for global weather forecasting in monitoring conditions in Antarctica - it's half the reason Scott etc went there a century ago after all.
King Canute's lesson to his court over how political will cannot command nature is very apt. You can shout from the rooftops that nothing is happening but there is some reason why last month was the hottest September in more than a century. Putting on a blindfold is not going to help.

The above is an answer to a question along the lines of "what do people outside of the USA think about the Tea Partiers".
It's an opinion derived from what has been filtered through the international media and should not be considered as reality.
It's how the group is presented to people who are too far away to distinguish the reality through the noise.

Either way it's not important since I don't know any more about them than what the media has decided is amusing enough to pass on and the topic should be getting kids interested in stuff via tie-ins. I'm all for it. Maths, politics whatever (since the original Dalek stuff was blatantly about fascism), if it gets the kids learning via activity that can stick more than other ways.
Maybe Dr Who could be used to show me WTF is really going on in US politics :)

I'm not from the UK, but I think "Tea Partiers" really have so little grasp on their history and US politics in general that, for example, they have no idea why the original Tea Party dressed up as Indians. The extra irony is those "Tea Partiers" that want a "strong" authoritarian government resembling the sort of thing King George was imposing on the colonies.

He also tore CUPS authors and the open source user interface authors a new one in an infamous essay

And comparing their work versus ESR on fetchmail is a classic case of glass house and thrown stones - but someone has to be a critic. Airing his political dirty linen and annoyance with investigative journalists in the "jargon file" was probably the point where he spent the capital of goodwill he had built up and was taken less seriously

Actually linux back in the day, as in about 1997, resembled this sort of thing with the animated effects available for the Enlightenment window manager - however they were designed to be very easy to turn off if you didn't want them. It even had the little window snapshot images that are in win7, and of course the multiple desktops coming with Win10 (but even twm has those).
Rob Malda had an popular web site for the Enlightenment application ePlus when Slashdot started which is why a lot of people who used it turned up in this place early on.

which you can melt down and reform to sheet/billet/whatever

Only if you've got a very hot furnace and can keep all oxygen and nitrogen away from the molten metal. Titanium is a bastard to work with which is why something so easily mined (there's a lot of it in beach sand) is so expensive.

milled titanium alloy back when I had fuckloads of money to burn

That pretty well sums up what you need to do when you choose titanium :)

If you don't like it, get off your couch and go get arrested for civil disobedience somewhere.

But that may mean travel and getting testicles squeezed by the TSA!

You didn't answer. What is your reasoning behind suggesting that their entire economy will collapse if this loophole will close?
You did write "Closing the loophole would likely collapse its economy" after all.
Insulting me for inconveniently remembering that doesn't make it go away and is rather pathetic I must say.

I'd always thought that Polar Bears would transform into Cartesian Bears.

Epoxy is a thermosetting plastic so is very unlike nylon. It's already as brittle as it is going to get at room temperature - it keeps the same toughness at lower temperatures because it doesn't have a glass transition temperature like nylon does. It's due to the two materials having very different structures. Epoxy has a lot of crosslinking, like a mesh, while nylon doesn't, like spaghetti. Cool the spaghetti down and there's a lot more resistance to it moving about on the plate until suddenly it's all stuck frozen together - glass transition temperature.
Look up "thermosetting vs thermoplastic" for some ideas. What the holders of the nylon patent know is not relevant for something made of glass reinforced epoxy resin.

It *could* be that HFCS is worse than some other sugars

The mechanism is well understood - it's twice as bad for the liver as sucrose and the same as fructose from apples etc. As for the pancreas, it's not so clear but the liver situation is bad enough.

Switching from HFCS to cane sugar is probably not a significant improvement

Beyond a certain level you are absolutely right and there are plenty of people with a vast amount of sucrose or fructose in their diets. However below that obvious level of overconsumption it appears that HFCS is causing liver damage in children. That's not a "think of the children" plea, it just hits kids harder since their livers are smaller so that's where it's being noticed.

It's a pretty nasty unintended consequence of protecting cane farmers from the free market - previously more expensive HFCS became the cheap sweetener of choice and you need a lot more of it to get the same sweet taste as cane sugar.

I don't expect an actual discussion anymore

I thought that was your aim when you replied with guesses and gut feeling without taking the majority of my short and simple post into account. Why shouldn't I object? VNC held up as an example of X - WTF?