Homeopathy is obviously nonsense - less isn't more, MORE is more. But the companies that sell "homeopathic" products are among the best sources of certain herbal remedies that work just fine for me and my wife (minor things for minor complaints, with less stomach upset than aspirin, with arnica for sore muscles being the best example). Unfortunately the two concepts - homeopathy and herbalism - are often confused in people's minds. People forget how many of the older drugs have plant origins, and the drug industry would love to help everyone forget faster so they can patent more naturally-occurring compounds from sources already known to folk medicine. (Please note, I'm not talking about believing every old wives' tale, I'm talking about researching those tales and finding the nugget of validity at the core, just like the people who extracted and synthesized aspirin from the plant once used by brewing it as a tisane.)

"Accordingly, all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed." And sometimes you hope that if you can just ship that next release, everything will work out . . . .

“The best leaders are those their people hardly know exist.
The next best is a leader who is loved and praised.
Next comes the one who is feared.
The worst one is the leader that is despised

The best leaders value their words, and use them sparingly.
When they have accomplished their task,
the people say, “Amazing!
We did it, all by ourselves!”
- Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

Concur. I did Atkins pretty strictly for a year, and it is amazing how sweet fruit tastes when you only eat it rarely. Gives one a different appreciation of history and/or old literature, too, when they make a big deal out of berries and other foods each being available for a brief time of the year, and "exotic" fruits only being available after traveling to far-off lands (rather than everything being shipped halfway around the planet).

Disagree. When my phone buzzes with a text from certain people, they expect that since their phone told them it was delivered, I will STOP EVERYTHING and answer the text because they want to know something right now. They don't treat it as a short email, which is what you describe. And BTW sometimes synchronous works better and faster and enables shorter communication . . . except for those other people who seem to think that "Goodbye" means "let's change to the next subject".

My parents, as kids, came from the generation that just showed up at someone's door, partly because not everyone had telephones yet, even in the city. We wouldn't have shown up without calling to check people were home. But needing to text before a call . . . Perhaps part of the problem is that cellphones are portable - if you call someone's house, either they are home or not, and if they're not home they're not bothered by the call, but if you call a cell, you get someone wherever they are and whatever they're in the middle of. But the text is equally interrupting.

Sorry, but that's not how the phone worked before text messages, and it's still not how non-cellphones work now. (And yes, there are still lots of them, and lots of them still don't even have caller ID.) The call is the message. The receiver can suggest contact later, or in the old days hope that covering staff would pick up and take a message, which was replaced by letting the message go to voice mail . . . OH WAIT, that's the whole point, that people are discontinuing an important fallback/retry component of the communication protocol. The only benefit I can see is saving money, because it's certainly not helping make the contact easier.

You are obviously not among the elite cognoscenti, conversant with "leet speak" . . . from about 20 years ago . . . Personally I think if people can't be bothered to write at least phonetically, I can't be bothered to decode them, and I ask for translation. Since I have experience working with multi-native-language teams, I am much more accepting of grammatical and spelling errors in English - as long as they sort of make sense in the writer's own language - but I have often needed to double-check exactly what someone meant, after one apparently-minor grammatical item turned out to be a real misunderstanding (and resulting error). (And BTW I stand in awe of people who can do serious technical work in multiple languages, because my non-English abilities are conversational at best.)

I'm probably old for the Slashdot demographic, and Christopher Lee was *already* the complete embodiment of evil scary from the first old-movie-reruns that I can remember. I would totally believe that he has merely moved on to another role . . .

Ummm . . . . I think not. I've donated plenty of times out of either arm. Didn't make much difference that I could see; but then, my pressure was on the high end of the acceptable range, so maybe it didn't matter.

The question is, how many people donate blood at all? And would be willing to donate regularly? And *can*? I used to donate 3 to 5 times a year, and haven't for a few years because of medical deferral. If the full donor pool donated even once per year, we wouldn't have any shortages.

Any farmer or herder learns about breeding plants or animals: Encourage breeding of things with traits you select, discourage breeding of those without. Find instructions in Genesis 30, if you're religious. Thus, any conservative suggesting that evolution is counter to religion simply doesn't understand what he's talking about - and should be questioned about a lack of faith that God can rack up the molecules and do a near-"perfect break" rather than have to create creatures with design defects.

One might fruitfully discuss and debate sentience and self-awareness, and how humans seem to have made a quantum leap above other animals in that regard (though nature videos and pet lovers continually indicate more levels of intelligence in animals than previously thought). But that's still ongoing natural selection - SOME species was bound to make that leap, and kill off all of its competition, and since we're the ones who are left, it must have been us.

A problem, as in other European countries, is that they are facing immigration from other subcultures which DO have different values, especially about remaining distinct (not integrating socially and/or culturally).

The first is neither illegal nor immoral per se, though forcing their narrow-minded views on others is not exactly "do unto others as you would have done unto you". The second is certainly suspicious, and, since it involves a foreign country, is exactly the sort of thing the NSA was originally created to be monitoring. The third . . . yes, a lot of cash is suspicious in this day of debit/gift cards, but "structured withdrawal" is only "wrong" because a law was passed against it comparatively recently. It's like the difference between driving a little over the speed limit in good conditions, and driving drunk: one is wrong because there's a rule against it, and the other is clearly endangering both yourself and others.

If he had just set up an account and given the debit card to the recipient, like a parent setting up an account for their kid at college, nobody would have ever noticed.