If Douglas Adams were alive, he'd put that in a book. That is so Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.

I can't speak for him, but *I* did. And when I need prints on real photo paper, I take it to one 'a' them there Kodak kiosks. Dye based printers are scams, pure and simple.

And it turns out that it wouldn't be the first time the firm did this. Sony started out as a radio repair shop in a bombed-out department store.

They don't weigh, not because the rule doesn't apply, but because people don't go very far above the limit often enough to bother breaking out the scales. Take a look at the thing. Even if it weren't a cannon, I think they'd break the scales out for that.

Neither necessarily follows as a consequence of personhood. Children cannot be held liable in civil suits and in most cases very young ones cannot be held criminally responsible, not because children aren't human, but because they can't reasonably be expected to take a responsible, independent part in human society.

Welfare for animals is not a consequence of animal personhood, but a consequence of humans taking animals from their natural environment. Once you have custody of an animal, by the norms of our society you are responsible for that animal's welfare. When I catch a fish which I don't plan to release, I pith it with a sharpened screwdriver, not because the fish has human rights, but because letting an animal die a slow and painful death when it's easy to kill it quickly and painlessly is needlessly cruel.

Well, what about people with aphasia? Do they lose their human status because they can't use language? Also, when reasoning about the abstraction capabilities of great apes it's important not to reason from assumptions. I've had the good fortune to work with primate field researchers, and there's good reason to believe that chimpanzees (for example) plan ahead; this necessarily involves a concept of "self" and "other", "now" and "in the future", all of which I think can reasonably be called abstractions, in fact I'd say they're the key ones. "Freedom" means nothing to an animal that has no concept of self or future.

It's seems perfectly plausible to me that an adult great ape might be a "person" but a blastula with a couple of dozen cells is not, nor a one ounce fetus at the end of the first trimester. The baby's brain at birth will weigh more than a dozen times that at birth.

The interesting thing is when researchers did plots of estimated ages of paleolithic skeletons, the population showed exponential decay from the age of maturity. For modern populations in advanced societies the # deaths vs. age of death curve is relatively flat until you start getting into the 60s and 70s.

What this tells you is that paleolithic people didn't die from age related causes. They got picked off by accident, mishap, violence or infections that cut down people in their prime, so it made no difference whether you were 16 or 30, your chances for surviving another year were the same.

So this kind of makes sense; he's looking to move into a population which does not die from age. It's the kind of thing that makes intuitive sense, but often doesn't pan out. What *might* make sense is a counter-intuitive move: fasting, or intermittent fasting where you fast on alternate days. This reproduces the way paleolithic people consumed calories: not three meals a day on the clock, but feasting after a kill and making

Taking HGH is just proof that having money doesn't make you smart or well-informed. He is going to need that cancer cure soon if he keeps that up. His plan is like pouring oil on a smoldering fire and hoping they develop really good fire extinguishers soon. It also seems very un-paleo to me. Paleolithic people went through periods where they had plenty of HGH (feasting) and periods with low HGH levels (fasting). Some researchers believe the fasting period confers many aging related health benefits.

A simple spanking is not "physical violence".

No, it's aversive physical dominance. Any more hairs you would like to split, or are we done now?

Aversive: the recipient is not pleased about it.

Physical: there's a smacking sound.

Dominance: the recipient's preference in the moment doesn't count for shit.

Maybe he or she will thank you later with a greater understanding of the situation. Or maybe not.

To my mind your story could be an argument for more effective barriers. If you're going to make a barrier to enforce safety, go big or go home. Otherwise you're just conducting a first lesson in Jr Steeplechase.

I think the issue is, Japan is, geographically, significantly closer to NK than is the US. And is a smaller target. They don't care about us, they care about their own country. Although NK's threats of attacking the entire US are fluff, they could reasonably be expected to have enough firepower to damage Japan.

Part of the problem is the paleo enthusiasts and other fad diets are that they don't have the courtesy to test these things on their own, which can end up influencing the food supply for the rest of us. Full fat content yogurt can be nigh impossible to find in some places because of years of preaching about the dangers of fat.

I'd guess you could successfully hijack a plane with a cannon that was small enough to hand-hold, provided someone else smuggled the shot and powder onboard. Presumably we're talking about a very light cannon here, otherwise it'd exceed the passenger's carry on weight allowance, which is usually about 20-30 pounds.

But that's not the real issue. The real issue is the balance between the thought and expertise we're willing to pay for in an inspector and the common sense you expect from passengers. You *could* in theory pay enough (both in salary and delay) to hire inspectors with the training and education to make a determination whether a historical firearm presents a potential threat, or you can have a simple rule of "if it looks like it can shoot, you can't carry it on," and expect the public to figure out that they should ship their cannon rather than stuff it into their

Anyone on /. who does not know what ddos means should be condemned to a lifetime of reading DOS boot disks in binary with a plastic monacle.

...too many torrents of The Interview?

Actual parent of kids who turned out be civilized human beings here.

I never felt resentful when ivory-tower experts had an idea about child rearing, because I could always look up their sources and decide for myself whether that evidence was credible. Often I didn't find their claims credible, but other times I did. The problem with the self-appointed "experts" who have no evidence to support this claim. These come in two flavors, those who recast parenting fads as "science", but actually have no evidence to support their claims; and "traditionalists" who advocate corporal punishment. The traditionalist's evidence tends to be, "Dad used to whup the hell out of me, and look how I turned out." Well, you seem OK, but so do a lot of other people who were raised completely differently from you.

The truth is that most people seem to turn out more or less OK. I believe there's a powerful tendency for kids to grow up average-ish that thwarts every parenting philosophy, and rescues kids from some truly awful parenting.

I had a friend growing up whose mother "taught" her children to be careful with fire by burning their hands on the stove when they were toddlers. This was before mandatory reporting, so nobody realized on her youngest that this was the third toddler she'd brought into the emergency room with serious hand burns. She also beat her kids with a razor strap whenever they annoyed her -- who the hell kept a razor strap in their house, even back in the 60s? In the summer she kicked her kids out of the house when she woke up at 7AM and wouldn't let them back in until 7PM, not even to use the bathroom. They used to shit on the street, until my Mom found out and let them use our bathroom. Families in the neighborhood fed them like stray cats. You'd think kids raised that way would be totally dsyfunctional adults, but in fact these kids all grew up to be, apparently, normal. Just like my brothers and sisters. We grew up in a tight-knit, permissive household where physical punishment was never used, and we turned out to be normal, law-abiding adults.

I'm not saying parenting doesn't matter. I'm saying relax and enjoy one of life's great experiences. Do your best to do what's right, but don't worry when people tell you (as they will) that that's wrong. There's more than one way to do it, and you can recover from a few mistakes, or even a lot of mistakes. Parenting is one of the few endeavors where sincere effort counts in itself.

> What's he going to get to do in 120 years that he - with all his money - can't do in 80?

I'm thinking, prove that it can be done. That would be a good thing. And what techniques were used, of course.