Robotech was great. When I was in high school I tried to get my hair looking like the hair from the guy that comes back to save the Earth on RDF 3 (the expedition back to Earth that gets horribly mauled by the aliens). Ah, the things we do in puberty :)

I loved that - the double meanings in almost every sentence, the hilarious take on nationalism. Wow.

I also liked Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, and Transformers :)

I propose we immediately isolate the carriers of "fattening disease".

After all, it's infectious and it creates more casualties than ebola and the black plague combined! And since we don't know the vectors yet, other than "fat women", we should isolate anyone with a BMI over 25. In any case they shouldn't be allowed to travel. I mean, it might spread to Europe. Or even Africa, which has so far been mercifully untouched by "fattening disease"!

It's probably due to a horrible installation-image from her workplace. I'm using Windows 7 with 4GB, since 2 years ago, and I never had disktrashing. I regularly have Visual Studio, one or two databases (oracle, MSSQL), MS Word and numerous browser sessions open at the same time without running out of memory or slowing down my laptop noticeably.

Given the nature of the site, it's a bit risky to assume the sellers are fine, upstanding businessmen who would never ever dream of helping their reviews a bit...

It rather depends on what you get hooked on. If you get hooked on heroine or morphine (which is worse, I've understood), you're only going for the fix after a while, so unless you have a trust fund you will run out of cash due to lack of income.

If you come over to The Netherlands you can buy 'em right in the city center - leaves and everything on 'm. You can draw thea from the plant and use that. And due to all that nice agricultural expertise we even managed to increase the THC count to the level of a harddrug, so I'm pretty sure you're not going to have to concentrate it - it's going to be pretty dangerous if you do that to plants with 18 to 20% THC in the tips already.

The *know* it, but they don't *like* it. It's like stepping into a plane while the stewardess is reciting all the security stuff: nice, but I'd rather not hear it. And I especially wouldn't like to hear the list of unresolved issues with the plane, right before we lift off.

Buying customers can't back out, so you can list all the bugs in detail. Feel free. But I'd be careful with prospects. Especially non-technical purchasers.

That's already happening a bit. Vineyards are starting to return to Northern Europe, for instance. But if we take Norway as an example, the main problem isn't just the cold, it's also the lack of useful real estate. In Siberia it could be very different but you'd have to want to live under Putin.

Unfortunately, the size of the area under threat is rather larger than the area you could move to. And people would also have to move through inhabited areas that aren't really all that happy with the current influx of refugees. But I guess the Norwegians would be happy to have a bit warmer climate. Won't do much for the lack of light in the winter, though.

Very right. Every time I interview for a consulting assignment, it's exactly the same as applying for a job. If you're bad at getting your first job, you're going to be much worse at getting hired as a consultant. What experience do you bring to the table for dealing with the problems the customer can't solve with his own employees?

I can't find the reference right now, but if the average temperature of the planet increases by 4 degrees celsius, large swathes of this planet's real estate become uninhabitable. There's about 2 billion people living in that zone that have to get out, or die. Do you think an iron fence will stop them at the border? Not a chance.

And if the temperature rises enough to release the methane gas in the seas in the arctic, the whole process will accelerate beyond our power to control it.

Now, this may or may not happen. Chances are, if we do nothing it might not happen. The odds don't seem favorable though. In any case, gambling with the entire area of this solar system we can actually inhabit seems like a rather stupid proposition.

You could, but there's an even chance it's dead :)

Just this week I read an article describing a study that had the following results: of the mice that were given antibiotics that killed the clostridium bacterium, 99% developed an allergy to nuts.

This year there's a rash (:P) of articles showing that the immune system and gut bacteria are much more interconnected than previously thought.

You may have Godwined the conversation but it's probably justified. Except it's not nazis, but more likely fascists (though the distinction is probably pretty moot if you live there, but I doubt we're going to see industrial death camps (you need math and chemistry for that)).

Why fascists? Because their social composition is made up from the same type of loser. The people joining ISIS are not, in the main, very successful with their lives. Petty criminals, dropouts, etcetera. And ISIS gives them the chance to become part of something larger, where they can say "Fuck you, I may not be good at math - but you know? We'll just BAN math!".

They can rape and loot and mutilate as much as they want, without sanction. They don't have to listen to all those people who have more power because they are whiter, or smarter, or richer, or all of them combined - they can just grab a gun and feel power in their hand. It's the old attraction of the small worm aspiring to be a big dragon.

Wombs don't produce unthinking slaves. They can create a large amount of children that will turn into discontent youth later on, but if ISIS wants to hold power somewhere, that doesn't work so well for them - it only helps them when it's in someone else's territory where the discontented youth will see them as the solution, not as the problem. The Arab spring is all well and good when you're profiting from it, but not when it happens to yourself.