Germany didn't have the power to vaporize most of the planet with the push of a button.

Well, it's good to see the Chinese government's censors are here to keep us informed about what this week's official lie is. Meanwhile in the real world, anyone discussing forbidding topics online risks arrest for "spreading rumors":

Teenager becomes first person arrested under China's new anti-gossip law

nobody gives a FUCK what you download

Try downloading The Gate of Heavenly Peace and see if nobody cares what you download.

Probably can't get them for criminal fraud, but civil fraud or tortious interference would probably apply.

Being a dick may not be a crime, but sometimes it's a tort.

Limestone is a segimentary rock. Are we sure they didn't quarry limestone aggregate that just turned into limestone blocks because of all the weight on top of them for hundreds of years?

When you have an absolute monarch, the entire population is slaves for practical purposes, even if they're not formally slaves in the sense we mean the word today.

That's the schools PR spin, but it's undermined by the fact the policy itself specifically says it applies to students:

Northern Illinois University information technology resources, including the electronic communications network (NIUnet) on the NIU campus and off-campus education and research centers, computers attached to this network, and any associated computational resource or service are for the use of persons affiliated with Northern Illinois University, including faculty, staff, emeritus personnel, and students in good standing. Information technology resources are provided by the university to further the university's mission of research, instruction, and public service. The use of these resources should be consistent with this mission, this policy, and the University’s other use, security policies, and other applicable regulations including the State Officials and Employees Ethics Act (SOEEA). Pursuant to the NIU Electronic Mail policy, the email system may be utilized for personal messages subject to the limitations set forth in these and other applicable policies and to the extent that personal usage does not interfere with assigned responsibilities. By using NIU services, all individuals, including, but not limited to, employees, students, customers, volunteers, and third parties, unconditionally accept the terms of this policy.

Unions are themselves corporations. Private sector unionization has stagnated because being in a union to often just means you end up with two corporations screwing you over.

Bah, mowing is easy. Now weeding, there's a chore I hated doing.

Yeah, well I'm sick of people learning CS in C. They don't know about manually managing the stack like they would if they'd learned in assembly.

Sheldon doesn't trust banks because he believes that ATM machines will be the first wave of the robot uprising.

String Theory has made testable predictions:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

The problem is that all of them either require particle accelerators that are far beyond our current ability to power or require measuring some aspect of space that we haven't come up with a device to measure yet.

The theory of relativity wasn't testable when it was first proposed. Part of the reason Einstein never got a nobel for it was that it wasn't until the 1970's that there was real firm experimental evidence for it.

There's a distinction between something that can never be tested and something that can't be tested now due to technological limitations.

The Candlestick Makers' Petition by Bastiat:

We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price; for the moment he appears, our sales cease, all the consumers turn to him, and a branch of French industry whose ramifications are innumerable is all at once reduced to complete stagnation. This rival, which is none other than the sun, is waging war on us so mercilessly we suspect he is being stirred up against us by perfidious Albion (excellent diplomacy nowadays!), particularly because he has for that haughty island a respect that he does not show for us.

We ask you to be so good as to pass a law requiring the closing of all windows, dormers, skylights, inside and outside shutters, curtains, casements, bull's-eyes, deadlights, and blinds — in short, all openings, holes, chinks, and fissures through which the light of the sun is wont to enter houses, to the detriment of the fair industries with which, we are proud to say, we have endowed the country, a country that cannot, without betraying ingratitude, abandon us today to so unequal a combat.

o/~ "Once the rockets go up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department", says Werner von Braun o/~