I'm the cynical UNIX bastard ...
I tried not to be smug.

Does ... not ... compute ...

Dlugar

You have great prediction powers, O Wise One!

You do realize USA spends more money per month, just to fund the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, compared to the entire cost of building the LHC over a decade, right?

Also, the physics/astronomy community benefits greatly from the success of LHC, and the worldwide scientific community as a whole also benefits. Now, who benefits from the wars?

I wouldn't instantly dismiss spending $20B on studying mating habits of snails. Given that snails are very helpful to farmers, and given that farmers received 10 times that in aid ($258B) in a single year and the total market is about $1.5 trillion, spending a 10% of the given aid on studying how to produce better snails could provide significant returns in the long run.
If the study resulted in just a 0.1% increase in crop production, it would pay for itself in a single year!

Um, do you mean like Hollywood stars who jet around the globe to tell us to cut down our carbon footprints? Or ex-secretaries like Nancy Pelosi who want to decide what health care options we have, and how our children should be educated? Sounds like the definition of the modern liberal to me "I'm better than you, so I can tell you how to live your life". Feh.

Notice how the gold kept its value, but the paper did not. By constantly printing more-and-more money the Federal Reserve is erasing people's wealth.

While it's true that the effects of inflation are more apparently obvious when you look at the price of gold, it's ridiculous to say that it's "erasing people's wealth". Most people live relatively paycheck to paycheck, and income inflates just like everything else. If the dollar had remained tied to a fixed price of gold, it's easy to think that you'd be insanely rich--but in reality you'd just be making orders of magnitude less. Even people who actually save money typically don't keep it in dollars under their mattress. They invest it, and the interest rates they make take inflation into account. So that 5% money market account that is nominally in dollars would probably be making 1-2% if there were no inflation.

Today you have $100k. If you invest that money, or if you use it to buy a house, or do pretty much anything with it other than stick it in your mattress (or your checking account, which is basically equivalent), then next year, its value will still be about $100k adjusted for inflation. This nonsense about "erasing wealth" is complete rubbish.

As a great man once said.....

    I'm not compensating for anything, other than the fact that I can't run at over 150mph.

Christ, is this posted on the wrong site!

Most of the regular girls, Bethanie, Silly Pixie, Queenoftheonering, whoever else... They left (figuratively and literally) to Multiply quite some time ago.

Some of these guys who post journals are married - but for the larger demographic, you have better chances finding a woman in the L.A. Galaxy locker room, trying to get a peek at Beckham's bend.

The rest? Well, I have two words: Joanna Rutkowska.

"I'm a boy, I'm a boy,
But my mom won't admit it
I'm a boy,
But if I say I am,
I get it!"

And surely, that last eclipse on Heroes was the longest, rather than this one - certainly more than a few measly minutes! Not to mention the global coverage!

Obviously the result of an as-yet-undiscovered Hero with Super Solar Eclipse powers. Or maybe even something more powerful, like General Purpose Plot Device powers... though I guess that'd be redundant with just about everyone else.

(And please don't complain about spoilers... after the decline since season 1, you can't possibly complain)

Speaking of spoilers, about the only thing I liked about the dumb season 3 finale (even though I liked the season overall) was that they gave a Season 4 sneak-peak that "spoiled" the twist that Sylar was gonna figure out he was Sylar. Because if they'd even tried to pretend that was a surprise...

No, you really, really don't -- and that's very clear from your comments. We are not talking about using a copystand here. You are talking about getting accurate facsimiles of maybe 40 foot high pictures in stairwells lit by mixed light of differing colour temperatures -- and possibly no way of getting light in to cover it and fix the colour temp issues.

It doesn't matter how hard it is because solving a problem is simply not the same thing as creative expression. By your logic, brain surgery would be copyrightable just because it's hard! Do you see how ridiculous your argument is now?

Besides, this sort of thing doesn't qualify as "creative" for a much more basic reason: if you introduce originality into your reproduction, then you've just failed at your job of archiving it!

You forgot the part about blaming the rising temps on man-made CO2 emissions!!!

Yeah, of course what happened after that was people started having to resort to bartering for goods using small amounts of Gold, Kinda like what they did TWO-Thousand years ago. So you take an economy and you screw it up so badly that you have to reset it back to the pre-roman levels of commerce.

I've heard lots of news reports of Zimbabweans bartering goods or using foreign currencies, but I've never heard any reports of them using gold. Do you happen to have a citation handy?

Dlugar

Splitting a bill evenly is remarkably easy. Getting separate checks ahead of time is remarkably easy, though a bit of a hassle for the waitstaff. Splitting a bill unevenly is a bit more of a hassle - "Mr. Waiter, please take these cards: Joe will pay $14.51, of which $2.37 is tip; Frank will pay $12.97, of which $2.06 is tip; George will pay $13.61, but refuses to tip because he's a jerk; Ed will pay..."

We typically write on the back of the bill everyone's first name followed by the amount they're paying, and hand that to the waiter with the stack of credit cards (and sometimes a wad of cash). We don't bother to split it up by tip/not tip--all the waitstaff cares about is that the total amount over what the total bill is is a tip. I'm not sure why you'd want to deal with the hassle of writing that down. Works pretty easily in my experience.

Dlugar