I have also not seen anything in this category. Certainly there are some articles that many parents might not like their children to see, but education and supervision is probably a better solution than any filter Wikipedia could manage to install. Of course, boys of a certain age are going to find it regardless of what the parents do.

Many think that it's the origin of the cyclops myth. The skulls of these mammoths (once thought elephants) have very small eye sockets and a giant trunk socket. One could easily imagine that it is the skull of a giant with one big eye.

They actually are blocking an awfully huge number of videos. Even home videos with low-quality background music are blocked. But sometimes something gets through -- especially if the user makes a real effort. GEMA wants Google to either (1) come up with a perfect filter or (2) pay far more to show the videos in Germany than they do in the U.S. It should be made clear that GEMA represents basically all music labels in Germany. The money that the RIAA has already received for these videos is insufficient according to them. Google is being asked to essentially pay a second time for the songs, and pay more for Germany than they did for the U.S. At least as I understand it.

Strange: Slashdot seems to have eaten my original reply. C'est la vie.

No, Christ never said anything about beating swords into plowshares. That was from the Old Testament Books of Isaiah and Micah, where the authors were speaking about what life would be like once God's plans came to fruition: an end to war, no one will lift a weapon against each other, and so forth.

Christ, for his part, said he did not come to bring peace to the Earth, but instead to bring a sword (Matthew 10:34).

Further, Christ almost certainly celebrated the Jewish Feast of Purim, which celebrates the avoidance of a genocide. The evil Haman tried to organize a Go-Murder-Your-Jewish-Neighbors-And-Take-Their-Stuff Day, but Mordecai and Esther were able to persuade the King to enact a By-The-Way-The-Jews-Get-To-Carry-Swords Day. Haman's attempted genocide failed due to the Jews being armed. To this day, the Feast of Purim is one of the best celebrations in Judaism -- it's a day whereupon observant Jews believe they are commanded by God to get shitfaced drunk until they can no longer tell the name of Haman from the name of Mordecai. (It takes a lot of wine to get that far.) I have fond memories of being in college and Rabbi Avi walking across campus, waving his arms and calling out "WHO WANTS TO GET LIT FOR GOD? FREE BOOZE AT CHABAD!"

Further, Christ said quite clearly he did not come to change even one letter of the Law, but only to fulfill it. Part of the Jewish Law involves how one treats rodef -- those who seek to shed another's blood unjustly. Jewish Law says, point blank, to give them one warning to stop. If they don't, then all Jews are commanded to stop the rodef by any means necessary, even if it means bloodshed.

So if the din rodef is part of the Law, and that's part of the Law that Christ said he did not come to change but to fulfill... then yes. The only way you can get the idea Christ was a pacifist is if you decide he was lying about not changing the Law. Christ advocated the possession of arms, and the ethical use of the same.

You can rail all you want against weapons. Go ahead, doesn't matter to me a bit. But when you try to rewrite history in order to satisfy your psychological hangups, then I have to quietly insist, "no, that is not how it happened."

You need to re-read your Bible. Christ never said anything about beating swords into plowshares. That was Isaiah (and later Micah) talking about what life would be like in God's heavenly kingdom. Christ said (Matthew 10:34), "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword."

Incidentally, I'm a little irritated at your assumption that I'm any of (a) a Christian, (b) an American, or (c) a firearms owner. Someone asked a question, particularly with respect to whether Christ would have supported the NRA. The answer to that one is "almost certainly."

One of the biggest festivals of the Jewish year is the Feast of Purim, where Jews celebrate the story of Esther and Mordecai and their triumph over the evil Haman. When Haman plotted genocide against the Jews, Esther and Mordecai were able to convince the king to permit the Jews to carry swords to protect themselves. Haman's treachery was discovered, the Jews were armed, and those who wished to murder all the Jews in the country were too afraid to take on Jews armed with swords. This long predated Christ's ministry. Given that Christ also said he did not come to alter one letter of the Law but rather to fulfill it, it's quite likely that Christ celebrated Purim, the survival of the Jews against the first recorded attempted genocide against them, and how the civil possession of armaments let them survive.

I'm not arguing one way or another that firearms are good, bad, or the product of space aliens from Zarbnulax. Really, whatever politics you want to project onto them is your call. But when it comes to history, we have some pretty clear answers. Christ was in favor of arms and the ethical use of them.

Do you think Jesus would have supported the NRA?

Let's take a look at the text, shall we?

"Then said he unto them, But now, he that hath a purse, let him take it, and likewise his scrip: and he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one. -- And they said, Lord, behold, here are two swords. And he said unto them, It is enough." (Luke 22:36, 38)

So, yeah, I think Christ would've approved of the NRA. He directly advised his disciples to be armed. Also, "turning the other cheek" was never intended to mean passive submission to violence. The culture of the day was one where the wealthy would often slap around the poor using the right hand, but using the left was a mortal insult and would provoke a fight. Christ was telling the poor that if someone wants to bully them and shove them around, they should not initiate violence, but demonstrate their willingness to end a fight if the other guy wanted to start one -- that's what "turning the other cheek" meant.

Christ was not a pacifist. This is the guy who chased moneychangers from the temple with a whip (probably more for preying on the poor than defaming the faith), and who openly welcomed a Roman centurion as one of his followers, and didn't demand the guy give up his life of the sword. Christ's message had more to do with the ethical use of violence than it did with the total abjuration of it.

Whether climate change is occurring is properly the domain of science. Here, I think Hansen is on relatively solid footing. Pretty much all the important policymakers have signed on to the fact climate change is occurring -- as David Brin pointed out a few days ago, when the US Navy is updating its warplans to account for the Northern Passage being open, it's hard to argue that climate change _isn't_ being taken seriously by the establishment.

However, what we should do about climate change is not a scientific question. How much will CO2 mitigation cost -- not just in terms of direct and indirect monetary damages, but in terms of human life lost? Economic growth (a large part of which is driven by the availability of cheap power) has historically been the most reliable tool for improving the human condition. Without power, life is nasty, brutish and short. If CO2 mitigation mechanisms like the sort Hansen advocates were to be adopted worldwide, what would the butcher's bill be? That's an economics problem, and Hansen is not an economist. If the climatology community is going to scream at people, "well, you're no climatologist, so you're only invited to this discussion if you agree with us!", then the economics community is entirely within its rights to tell climatologists to STFU about economic choices.

Then there's the geopolitical angle. Let's say Hansen gets his worldwide controls on CO2. Let's also say that China, currently the world's leading CO2 producer, says "no, our poor deserve a better life and we need economic growth in order to provide it, if we stop building power plants we'll have a civil war and millions will die, so fuck you, we're going to continue to build one new coal-fired power plant each week." What does the rest of the world do then -- invade China to shut down their power plants? The rest of the world can't do nothing: if it lets China slide, then the next thing you know India says, "yeah, we're in the same boat, screw you guys" and the entire thing falls apart. How do you build a geopolitical framework for enforcement of such a system? Hansen is a climatologist -- he's not Henry Kissinger.

Hansen has won the scientific argument. He's losing the economics argument and the geopolitical arguments -- and deservedly so. He's neither an economist nor a diplomat, after all.

Note to the climate change looneytunes who are about to leap down my throat: I'M AGREEING WITH YOU, DAMN IT. The only thing I'm saying is that this is a big stinking problem with a whole lot of dimensions, most of which the climatology community is completely unqualified to talk intelligently about; and within the realm that it _is_ qualified to talk about it, the climatology community has already substantially won that argument.

Either go to a common law based system (the French have that...)

The French do not use the Common Law system. They use the Civil Law system, which is derived from the Napoleonic Code, which is derived from the Code of Justinian, which actually dates from well before the fall of the Roman Empire.

The United Kingdom uses the Common Law system.

The United States uses both. The federal system uses Common Law, as do most of the states: but Louisiana in particular uses a Civil Law-based system, in keeping with its heavily French heritage.

I don't see that either one is clearly superior. If you take a look at what comes out of Louisiana state courts, you'll see they're just as crazy as any other system. It's just crazy of a slightly different flavor. You might think that flavor tastes better, but I don't.

At OSCON 2006 I was delivering a presentation on a new heuristic algorithm. We implemented it in C++ and provided Python bindings for it. An hour before my presentation I was in the green room, head deep in code, getting one last bugfix in before the presentation. As I found a bug and fixed it I said to myself, "Python, I love you. You make the hard stuff so easy."

The green room immediately went quiet. I lifted my head and looked across the table and discovered Damian Conway, of Perl fame, was sitting across from me hacking on his own code. Damian looked up, looked around, and particularly at all the people who were expecting a Python-versus-Perl flamewar to arise. "What?" he asked them. "Listen, the only thing I love more than Perl is software that works well, even if it's not written in Perl." Then he went back to his code, I went back to mine, and the room resumed its normal dull roar.

There's a lot of wisdom in Conway's perspective. If you seriously believe that coding in Ruby makes you a better programmer than a Python or a PHP programmer, then I hate to break the news to you, but you've been sadly miseducated.

Yes, I know Ruby. I prefer Python. So what? My best friend knows both languages and prefers Ruby.

Children get into holy wars about code. Grown-ups are too busy writing code to waste time on such childish diversions.

Irony, thy name is...

learn history first. ... stalin died before 1950.

Stalin died in 1953.

I know my Soviet history (or at least the history of premiers) better than you do, apparently, and I think you're overdue for your Pulitzer Prize, Mr. Duranty.