It's more than that disaster waiting to happen. There's a load of scenarios possible, and ALL of them are possible only due to idiots allowing patenting of genes.

- GM Monoculture gets hit by disease: global short-term problem.
- Everything else gets hit by disease manufactured by GM manufacturer. World Domination, but probably suspicious.. There's a short story "The Calorie Man" by Paolo Bacigalupi which describes this.
- GM crops cross pollinating everything else, making it impossible to NOT buy patented GM crops (because everything else will be illegal). Likely but rather slower scenario, will also leave most of the worlds food supply in the hands of GM companies.

I'm pretty sure there's much more of those.

Patents on genes are at least as harmful as the ones on software. And in fact, the whole patent system must be abolished. Such a mercantilistic monopoly-generation-system just has no place in a free market.

Yes, but that patent was granted illegally. Every software patent, actually, because the US Patent Law states that mathematics can't be patented. So I wouldn't be worried to violate something that's illegal per se.

Oh well, 9/11 was the Reichstagbrand of the Fascist States of America.

The only thing I wonder about is that there aren't half a dozen uprisings and civil war going on, with a dozen domestic terrorist attacks every day -- with the express goal of liberating you from your fascist regime. Instead all you've got is some lone madmen and a few FBI fabricated "foreign" terrorists. Must be working well, then.

Well, I've been using it since 1996, and at that time it was better than this Windows 95 (Or MacOS 8 or OS/2).

It does not? Well, my experience is somewhat limited to wine, but as far as I can see, those pesky needed add-ons like DirectX, PhysX, and especially .NET or GFWL break applications all the time. I've got a lot of broken Windows applications (which worked at some point) due to some add-on library update by another application.

And in my experience, Linux breaks a lot less upon upgrades. Not the least because it has a package management.

Can imagine that. The first barbarian to use a baroque weapon.

I also prefer the Light Sabre

yes they are useful in 1vs1. Behold http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTVC25hYJaY
Now imagine one of those guys with a shield & sword. I wouldn't want to be that one.

Nope. Polearm beats sword (or sword & shield) always. But unless you're wearing hardened armour, projectiles beat polearms every time, whereas against projectiles your chances with a shield are much better.

A katana is basically the same as a long sword. Both have equal length and equal weight.

So, no, your sentence is utterly bogus.

In fact, I'd take the long sword any day, especially if both weapons were originals from, say, the 15th century. Because the japanese steel is incredibly brittle, whereas the european very resilient. You can break a katana by hand, but you can't break a long sword (it just bends, sometimes 180 degrees or more, and snaps back).

Because somewhere around 1400 they started harding plate armour, which made it impenetrable by longbows. That is a reason to ditch the shield.

Agincourt is a very nice subject.
- It was the last european battle ever won with bows.
- The english had one (1) bowman killed by a french hand-gun (just to make clear, that these were around, and had been since 1320 or so, but their impact was rather low).
- Ther was a mounted mercenary troop, some 500 men, which "appeared to be immune against arrows" as the english chronists remarked.

And the third thing is precisely the point. They had hardened armour. And this spread rapidly throughout europe, and a few years later, _every_ newer plate armour was impenetrable to most projectiles. By 1470 these things could held up a crossbow bolt shot from a 450kg crossbow at 10 metres. Or a bullet from a hand gun.

Of course, you don't need to pierce the (plate) armour to affect the wearer. There's always little armoured places, like the chain mail below the arms, or visors and such, and finally, with mounted troops, the horses. But that Azincourt was the last battle where bows really ruled says something.

Actually, they're all 2.5kg (about 5 pounds, a measurement which, in that context, actually makes some sense since its just as archaic), an most of them do pretty much the same damage (more or less. Halberd or Lucerne Hammer to the unarmed head are deadly anyway; Lucerne Hammer to the unarmed leg will pierce it, but a Halberd will cut it -- probably apart).

The differences come into play when we're talking about armour-piercing, however, for that to matter, you should have ditched D&D long ago and switched to Hârnmaster (or taken the real thing into your hands).

Absolutely. Polearms, arkebuses, crossbows, muskets, rifles, swords, longbows. Just about anything that was invented before 1871 (if my law says I can have these, without any licence, I don't see why I can't take them onto a plane) .

Besides, I already did fly with my longbow and a dagger; on a Cessna 174 though, and the pilot also had his own longbow with him. No use trying to use the bow during flight though, you cannot get it out of the luggage compartment even though it's open to the cabin, and the cabin is too cramped to string it, and finally to draw it. Well, maybe we need a bigger plane to go bow-hunting out of airplanes...

I mean, this is only a court order, against sites that have _not yet_ been persecuted for copyright infringement. So how can the court order this without at least opening a case against them? This sounds wholly illegal to me.

Actually, it's not really "edged", it's rather pointy. I know the poleaxe and the lucerne hammer sometimes get mixed up, but it's really quite easy: The Lucerne Hammer has a point, and no axe blade. A sharp point. Like this http://www.myarmoury.com/albums/displayimage.php?album=13&pos=27 or this http://www.myarmoury.com/albums/displayimage.php?album=13&pos=28

And yes, it actually is my favourite too, not just because I AM from Lucerne. The background is a bit shite (was on a public event):
http://kendra.shakolam.ch/gallery2/d/9291-2/DSC_76420001.JPG