...says the guy who insists on posting in a fixed-width font in 2014.

You provided the wrong link. If you want to educate people on the Unix philosophy, you should be directing them here.

That was essentially England's argument in sending colonists over there for trial. Its tough to get a lot of convictions out of a colonial jury that thinks the law itself is stupid (and they had no say in it). Parliment also passed laws taking both the appointment and salaries of judges out of the hands of the colonies. That showed up as a grievance everywhere too.

He wasn't kidding in the slightest about venue being a big issue in our break with Britain. You can find the issue at least alluded to as a grievance in just about any pre-war document. My favorite is Franklin's sarcastic Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One

(emphasis his)

This is the thing that frustrates me the most about the current political situation. A few nihilists who have taken over one of our parties (the "Republican" one), are able to screw over the whole system so that nothing productive can get done. But that's not the worst part; any gamer can tell you that the world is full of griefers. The worst part is that they are getting away with this behavior because nobody blames them directly. So here you're clearly ticked, but you blame "politics". Why aren't you blaming the actual greifers causing the problem?

Hell, we're about to have an election this year, and both houses are likely to get more of these greifers. If voters don't make the responsible individuals pay for this behavior, where does it end?

Yeah, I've got a box full of old Creative Computing mags in the attic, and yeah, BASIC was my first programming language. But celebrate its birthday? Meh...

The language certainly has its place in history, but frankly I moved on a long time ago, and for damn good reason. To me, this would be like celebrating the birthday of the Hustle or Electric Slide. I might occasionally pine for the days of wall-to-wall shag carpeting, but that doesn't mean I'm about to install it in my living room again "for old time's sake". It died for a very good reason. Let it go.

Sensible. After getting thousands and thousands of zombies taken out by those damn plants, the sensible thing to do would be to subvert them from the inside.

Yes, now there are truly zombies on your lawn.

That's one of those "truths" that folks like to hide lies in. Yes, the House has repeatedly passed budgets, that is true. It is also true that the Senate has repeatedly passed budgets, and Obama has repeatedly submitted budgets he'd be happy to sign to Congress. So everyone's doing their job in good faith, right?

Clearly not. The real truth here is that the House's "budgets" have contained no attempt whatsoever to contain language that has a hope of passing in the Senate, much less get a signature from the POTUS. The House knew full well those budgets wouldn't pass when they voted for them. So pretending these were serious attempts at legislation is a flat out lie.

The Senate's passed budgets, on the other hand, quite often could get a majority in the house (and a POTUS signature). The House deals with this situation that threatens to produce an actual budget by refusing to bring them up for a vote.

So yeah, we could mislead everyone and claim the House has been trying to pass budgets, or we could tell the honest truth.

In my experience, it essentially tastes like the container it is served in (typically aluminum).

Odd definition of "Lie"

What happened was that there was ongoing funding of stem-cell research, much of it government-funded. However, there's an existing law that forbids any government funding of abortion. When fetal stem-cell research became a possibility, President Clinton issued an executive order saying that research didn't count against the law. Then he left office, and President Bush (II) issued his own order saying it did qualify (at least for any new fetal tissues). When president Obama took office, he issued his own order saying it was OK again.

Yes, all that was banned was new fetal tissue research. But that was where the new research was being done at the time, so its a distinction without much difference.

Today Congress is (perhaps inadvertently) getting around this re-funding by simply blanket defunding all government funding of research (along with everything else). This was the only kind of "budget" they could agree to. This has nothing whatsoever to do with Obama though. Sure, he signed the law for the current qasi-budget we operate under, but only because it was the best we were ever likely to get out of a House of Reps (yes, run by Republicans) that reflexively votes against anything he so much as says a kind word about.

Perhaps the Republican goal wasn't to defund stem-cell research, but that's certainly the effect. At some point incompetence becomes advanced enough that it is indistinguishable from malice.

Obama doesn't fund the government. That's Congress' job.

People like to say "Bush banned stem-cell research". Because he took an executive order to do so, at a time when Congress was backing everything he did (he did not veto a single bill during his first 6 years in office, which I believe is a record).

Obama has pretty much the opposite kind of Congress. The only blame you could possibly give Obama for this is for not pretending that he hated stem-cell funding research, thus forcing them all to pass bills requiring it. Reverse psychology is about the only thing that could possibly work for him at this point.

Which is fine, except that people are still running around playing on the things.

This isn't just an issue of a few musicians being foolish either. A lot of those old instruments were made with real ivory. That's illegal to import to the USA now, but the musicians got themselves an exemption so they could travel with these old supposedly superior instruments. So of course modern ivory poachers started making themselves fake old instruments to smuggle new ivory around.

Now this loophole is being closed a bit, and musicians are up in arms that their audiences now won't be able to hear these ancient supposedly superior instruments any more. The government may have to give in. So this isn't just about some musicians being silly. We may lose a lot of elephants over this.

Next question: Does Coors count as beer for these purposes? We know it doesn't count count as beer for personal consumption, but I'm wondering if the same principle holds for cooking meat with it. Clearly further study is called for.

Free ticket is easy. Just buy a ticket online and use someone else's bank account data (which should work in most of Europe via SEPA direct debit). Bank account data is widely availabe on the web, as this is generally not thought to be highly sensitive information. If you do it shortly before the flight, the account holder will most likely not notice what's going on to have the ticket cancelled in time.

For bonus points, you can get the ticket issued under a pseudonym and alter the boarding pass to match your real name, so whenever you get asked for ID you won't get into trouble. The only thing where this won't work is when you want to check luggage (or, when flying to the U.S.), as there people will match your ID against what is actually stored in the airline's database.

Of course, if you do this without the bank account holder's consent, this is plain old direct debit fraud. So kids, don't do this at home.

I don't think that's true. I distinctly remember seeing a shot of a mustang (not the car, the horse) with stripes on its hindquarters. These are wild horses descended from escaped Spanish horses in the western US. I distinctly remember the announcer saying their wild ancestors probably had stripes, and after half a millennium of independent evolution, some were regaining stripes.

According to this link the horses the Blackfeet used often had these stripes. Despite what their legends may say, Native Americans like the Blackfeet got their horses by taming them from this same pool of the descendants of escaped Spanish horses.

Wikipedia does say that the ancestor of the domestic horse, Equus Ferrus Ferrus, often had stripes on its shoulders.

So it sure looks like there's probably some kind of genetic usefulness for stripes in non-domesticated horses, both in ancient Asia and the modern American West as well.