We've managed to get to the point where it's no longer mandatory for women to wear dresses and high heels everywhere. Can we please move on and also stop requiring men to wear suits and ties? If you're looking for an engineer, look for an engineering degree. If you want to hire a model, look for someone who looks good in a suit. Confusing the two is just unprofessional.

Maybe I'm just lucky, but I never had anything stolen or destroyed from my checked luggage. Even so, I try to travel light and cram everything into my carry-on... So I won't have to wait for half an hour or an hour at the carrousel, and so I won't have to pay the $25 or more per checked bag.

How would you know Anonymous has no vested interest? You don't even know who they are. It worries me that people refer to Anonymous as an entity, rather than a mask of anonymity that could be worn by anyone or everyone, and that people ascribe lofty motivations to what is just another bunch of ACs.
Also, lack of vested interest, proven or not, is no guarantee of benign intent. I was falsely accused of several acts of vandalism once, back in school. Once the accusation was made, the entire class believed it and turned against me, and several came forward in following days making additional accusations. I didn't do any of those things but that made no difference to the court of public opinion. Now, you could argue that a bunch of stupid naive kids can't be expected to make sound judgements as to what is true and what is false, but unfortunately most adults are just as credulous, and for anyone to throw accusations about in public can create a dangerous situation. Not something I'd applaud the way I see people doing here. The place to find truth is in a proper court of law, not the court of public opinion.

Hmm, if you're trying to argue that Revenge of the Sith isn't our generation's greatest work of art, shouldn't you try to come up with counter examples that are actually from, you know, our generation? Something bothers me about eldavojohn's summary... Titian: 1488-1576 Bernini: 1598-1680 Monet: 1840-1926 Picasso: 1881-1973 Pollock: 1912-1956

"There was no deregulation"? Keep repeating that to yourself often enough and maybe it will become true.

The Glass-Steagall repeal did happen. The failure to properly regulate derivatives markets did happen. And only in a true right-wing fantasy world would *even less* regulation lead to more smaller entities, instead of fewer bigger ones.

Fortunately, back then you couldn't patent a concept

Not true. In Richard Feynman's memoirs (either Surely You're Joking or The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, I forget which one), he tells that after the Manhattan project, he and his colleagues were asked by managers to come up with ideas that they could patent. Feynman, half in jest, tossed up a few including "nuclear-powered aircraft" ("nuclear-powered ship" was already taken). The patents were applied for, and were awarded, and a few years later, Feynman was approached by an aircraft manufacturer, who assumed, given Feynman's name on a nuclear-aircraft patent, that Feynman was an aviation and nuclear energy expert.

Now this story is merely amusing, since even today, nuclear-powered airplanes are completely impractical, but still, I'm reminded of this anecdote whenever I hear people claiming that the phenomenon of stupid or obvious patents started only recently.

It was so depressing, I was down for days afterwards. I decided never to read anything by King again. (His Dark Tower series is also seriously depressing, but I wouldn't call that sci-fi.) As for hard sci-fi, I'd say Frederick Pohl's Man Plus.

This (second from right) is my favorite. You do need glue or tape to make it, which may disqualify it from the record books, depending on how purist your rules are.
The one in the photo has a straw for a fuselage, but you can make it from paper by folding a long strip of paper into a three-sided prism and taping or gluing it shut. The two ring-shaped wings should be slightly different diameters, and the plane should be launched small ring forward. It is amazingly stable and I could throw it farther than any competing plane in my class. I'm not sure if it would travel the full length of my elementary-school gym, but it wouldn't surprise me if it did.

I use MapDroyd for this on my Android phone (free), and CityMaps2Go on my iPhone ($2). Both are very basic -- no navigation -- but they have nice integrated UIs for selecting and downloading maps. You won't be able to load the whole world, but I loaded NYC, all of NJ, and all of the Netherlands, using county/province level maps (which have perfect detail; I feel no need to get the city-level maps at all), and all that fits in a gigabyte or two. If you plan ahead and download only the maps for the areas you want to visit, a 16 GB iPhone or an Android with a 32 GB SD card will take you a long way.

This (second from right) is my favorite. You do need glue or tape to make it, which may disqualify it depending on how purist your rules are.
The one in the photo has a straw for a fuselage, but you can make it from paper by folding a long strip of paper into a three-sided prism and taping or gluing it shut. The two ring-shaped wings should be slightly different diameters, and the plane should be launched small ring forward. It is amazingly stable and I could throw it farther than any competing plane in my class. I'm not sure if it would travel the full length of my elementary-school gym, but it wouldn't surprise me if it did.

This "slippery slope" meme seems to be the libertarian's favorite argument against any legislation, but how do things actually happen in the real world? Certain people behave in ways that happen to be legal but which most of us find immoral (which, in fact, most of the perpetrators would find pretty nasty themselves, if it were to happen to them). So, we change the law and ban something. Libertarians immediately extrapolate the new legislation to a ridiculous extent (straw man argument) and thusly "prove" that even the non-exaggerated legislation is wrong. The rest of us ignore the screechy libertarians, and wait for any actual *evidence* that the new law is abused, and, lacking such evidence, sleep soundly at night. Many countries in Europe have limitations on public speech that would give a U.S. constitutional fanatic a brain embolism, and yet magically Europe persists in being a place of open discourse, not a police state. So, relax, and give some thought to the people that some of these "dangerous" laws are actually meant to protect.

http://www.viruscomix.com/page329.html

Apartment with thin walls.