Kind of like avoiding smoking in bars, you may find that the choice simply becomes "don't go to bars." On the other hand, you can tell a smoky bar upon stepping in the door, so those are easy enough to avoid. However, with concealed carry laws, you have no idea if anyone is carrying while drunk until it has become a situation unless the bar has a very clear sign on the door.

Due to a number of court challenges, there is no local governments that are allowed to practice such restrictions anymore, because "there is no 'reasonable' restriction in the eyes of those who wish to [oppose] these laws, save for complete [legalization]." See Heller vs. DC, et al.

Okay, maybe that's a bit too far. Most gun-enthusiasts support restrictions on felons and the mentally ill owning guns, but there are a good number of true gun-nuts that don't, and politics over the last decade has pushed further and further to the fringe on the right. Witness the latest law in right-leaning Georgia to allow concealed carry in bars where people will be intoxicated while armed.

I mean, why did anyone think that was a good idea?

The article talked about 1983. In 1981, you could get the Cadillac of ASCII terminals, the Ann Arbor Ambassador, for about $1000. In today's terms, you might call that a dumb terminal, but in those days, dumb terminal was an LSI-ADM3A, and Ann Arbor Ambassador was the hacker's choice. The LSI ADM-3 cost about $1000 in 1975.

See: http://terminals.classiccmp.or...

You also had bitmap terminal options like Bell Labs Blit/Jerq and BBN Bitgraph that had Motorola 68000s but used them as display processors, sort of like an X Window System terminal, but with their own custom windowing systems.

By 1983, Sun, Apple, and dozens of other companies were selling fancier personal computers with UNIX and other OSes based on the Motorola 68000 series and other CPUs, but their cost was more like $10,000-$30,000.

In your opinion, but you've already established that meat wasn't something you really cared for to begin with.

Don't get me wrong, there are a few Chinese vegetarian dishes I like and many more Indian dishes, but any good dish is a celebration of its ingredients. No dish should be able to taste the same if you add or remove any one ingredient, because if done properly, a dish enhances the flavors of all of its components. If it does taste the same, then there's probably just some component smothering the other flavors, and I can't imagine that any such dish treats its vegetables any better.

I think you should talk to people who have different life experiences from you rather than just imagine motives for them that cast them in a scary light. I've wanted to go lacto-ovo vegetarian for health and environmental reasons, but I've failed three times. It's not that I didn't want to like vegetarian dishes; it's that I just never stopped wanting the meat dishes too. It's far harder to give up something you enjoy than it is to find joy in other things, and when it comes to food, nothing is quite as tempting as the dish you can't have but want.

Just ask anyone on a diet.

I know of a few authentic places, where they have the Chinese-only menu, but that's not the point. Meat has a distinctive flavor. Unless you do something absolutely horrifying to it to suppress it, you are simply never going to make a dish where it tastes the same with or without meat.

Because people like meat, and you aren't going to get some people to switch until they can get the experience of meat. The problem is that the primary consumers of vegetarian meat substitutes are people who don't like meat.

Imagine if we were talking about giving up chocolate. People could tell you that there's all sorts of yummy, fruit flavored alternatives out there that have "great flavors and textures all their own" and "can satisfy the appetite." But none of them are chocolate. They don't compare at all when you've got that craving, even if they are nutritionally equivalent or better.

So then someone invents carob bars, and all the chocolate lovers look askance at it, while the non-chocolate people are split between those that embrace the new "tastes just like chocolate" treat (which it doesn't) and others are just so puzzled why anyone would want chocolate in the first place. Is it any wonder it fails to attract people who are okay with chocolate?

It's the same with meat substitutes and meat.

Good for you. I'm reminded of a quote from a comic I read when someone expressed shock and incredulity that another character had not seen Star Wars. Her response was simply, "Your life experiences are different from my own." What you are basically saying here is that you don't really like meat all that much and it was no big sacrifice to give it up. That's not the case for everyone.

I find the switch to a meatless diet extremely hard, and I become just absolutely ravenous when I go more than a few days without it. I've tried three times for all the good reasons that you mention, and I just get a craving that cannot be satisfied by anything else.

As someone who likes meat, I find that statement laughable. If the vegetables in the dish are the most interesting and delicious part to you, then that's probably true for you. However, while I do enjoy many vegetarian Chinese and Indian dishes, I will NEVER confuse them for those with meat. The taste of the meat is not found in the meat itself but also in the sauces.

The article says: "how could a siphon possibly work by a difference in pressure when atmospheric pressure is the same for the liquid at both ends of the tube?" It does work by a difference in pressure, just not a difference in atmospheric pressure. The liquid falling out of the exit end of the siphon causes a difference in pressure.

That is a view and a choice that I can respect, but why should you cheer the possibility that no one be able to choose any other way? That those who want more life be denied it?

Like a lot of the elderly people you mention, I think I too would choose death over prolonged suffering, helplessness, and a lack of ability to accomplish much more than running the bills up for my family. But I don't think I would choose death until that was all I had to look forward to, and I would be happy for any medical advancement that pushes that inevitable time back and that preserves health into those latter years.

And if the generation after me is able to live forever, I will not begrudge them that just because it was too late for me. (Okay, maybe I'll be a tad jealous.) However, I'd oppose any efforts to stop it with what's left of my life.

Also fixed in Lion, according to the link, for those of us still using older Macs.

There is plenty of capacity in St Louis and room to build more.

The cost of the pipeline is much more than the cost of a refinery. The 'surplus capacity' claim is total nonsense. The tar sludge isn't anything like the crude that the existing refineries process. There would have to be major upgrades in any case. And building a two thousand mile pipeline costs a heck of a lot more than any refinery would.

The decision was made years ago: No pipeline.

Not announcing the decision stops the Koch bros and the Keystone corp from starting their appeal. Its like an administrative filibuster.

There is already a pipeline that runs to St Louis, the only reason to build the second pipeline is to sell the sludge to China. Having that option available will allow the price to be jacked up when the sludge is sold to the US market as it will fetch the international price which is a lot higher than the refiners currently pay in St Louis.

There is absolutely no reason for the US to OK a pipeline that will increase the cost of supply to the US market. The only reason the GOP backs the pipeline is that the Koch bros stand to make $100 billion from the increase in the value of their shale tar sands.

It is a purely tactical decision because nobody outside the GOP wants the pipeline built. Everyone who wants the pipeline will vote GOP in November whatever the decision. Obama could make a short term political gain by announcing that there will be no pipeline but that would allow the appeals to start. Better for the country to wait until there have been some GOP deaths on the SCOTUS.

What the hell... WHY?

I used to live in Portland for about three years and regularly drank the tap water The idea that I was drinking water straight from an open-air reservoir post-treatment nauseates me. Why would anyone want this?

One of the other functions notebooks occasionally fill is as evidence in patent hearings. If that's a consideration, pencils are a no-no because things can be changed. Yeah, I'm at the "get off my lawn" age these days, but best practice for patent cases is still bound notebooks, numbered pages, ink. If you screwed something up three days ago, you don't erase and fix, you redraw on a new page with the current date and refer back as "corrects version of this on pg 23." For personal use, that's overkill.

I ended up with a piece of home-grown Perl/Tk code that lets me do notes from the keyboard, simple drawings with the mouse, paste in pictures and files, etc. Uses what appears to be the old xterm "fixed" font because at one point I planned to have a version that multiple people could view across the network and I wanted pixel-level sameness across locations. Multiple colors because as you say, sometimes that helps with clarity (and if I go back to add another observation on an existing page, I use a contrasting color for the text). Every line of text or drawn element gets timestamped and recorded -- that's for my own use, and is certainly not good enough to stand up in court. No limit to how far a page can grow down or to the right, which creates its own set of problems. I'm probably the only person in the world that would find it useful, but it does get some of the job done.