Well, it must have boiled leather then, right?

Let me tell you how it ends

A bunch of sniffing. About 50 pages of clothing description. Oh and a bunch of moronic idiots blathering about instead of talking with each other.

But does it have neeps?

Millennia of co-evolution is why all those soft-headed hippies are so keen on "whoa, man, natural". It's extremely thorough testing of interoperability. Not only that, it's continued refinement, of both plants and humans, so that the co-evolved plants approach ideal foods for the co-evolved humans. Ironically, rather a sophisticated scientific concept that these hippies grokked out intuitively.

That's why I smoke cigarettes. After all, humans have been using fire for a long time. And humans domesticated tobacco. So I don't see what the fuss is about.

Then again, if I wasn't a hippy, I might release that the agricultural revolution happened 10,000 years ago, and that due to the Columbian exchange, many of the foods I eat today, most of my ancestors won't even exposed to until about five centuries ago.

I guess I shouldn't rely on co-evolution after all.

I'm so glad the problems in safely disposing of nuclear waste have been solved!

Yes, because that's what is holding up nuclear power. After all, the problem with heavy metals and other pollutants used to manufacture "green" energy such as solar cells and wind turbines have already been solved, as well as the problems with mercury, other contaminants, and even radioactive materials that comes from burning coal has also been solved. Oh, and that whole CO2 thing that fossil fuels tend to emit? Also solved.

I think the Founders would be really pissed if they saw how things had gotten after only 230 years.

Before we use the Founders as some sort of yardstick, you might want to keep in mind that most of them would be shocked at the current president's ethnic and racial background on his father's side.

The Founders aren't perfect. They had some good thoughts, but they were men (and a few women) of their time.

Considering it took hundreds of years between the first European visit to the "New World", and successful, permanent colonization, I wouldn't write off the moon and Mars just yet.

An interesting theory, yes ... but not actually true. Thats been very thoroughly debunked for decades. (Heck, Snopes has a whole page on it.)

Snopes page is horrible. They seem to think that a cat and a piglet are not comparable in size.

A quick google shows a study on newborn weight in piglets that shows a birthweight of just a few pounds. Seems like a recently born piglet would be about in the same weight range as a cat. I'll admit I don't know when young pigs would be sold at market for raising, but I suspect my google search is more research than snopes did. (Another question - are modern pigs heavier and quicker to gain weight than pigs of centuries ago? I suspect so as well... Which would make this scam workable with slightly older piglets as well.)

Now the oinking and squealing objection, Snopes might have a point. But I've never put a piglet in a bag. Perhaps the darkness makes them more quiet. Or perhaps it depends on the breed.

I'm being serious. Make a super-PAC and use it in the next election season against people who introduce or push bills like SOPA and PIPA. Attack politicians where it hurts: Election year.

There's a world of difference between selective breeding and playing mix-n-match genomes hands-on via gene-splicing.

Well, to be fair, a lot of cultivated plants have some very bizarre genetics. Domestication of plants tends to favor some very weird mutations.

Take wheat. It originated as a natural hybrid between two species. Then it further hybridized with another species, gaining three times the amount of chromosomes that it should have.

Can you imagine if the same events happened in a lab tomorrow? If scientists announced that by combining three different species, they now have a food with three times the amount of chromosomes that it should have? Would you eat it?

But since it occurred through chance mutations and selective breeding, it's considered unremarkable as a food source.

I will agree that autoruns and a rootkit revealer are great tools.

I'm also fond of searching for other files created at the same time as any viruses found. I prefer to do this from a known-good computer, after manually pulling the drive. This will often find other suspicious files that virus scanners miss. Admittedly, a virus could come along that would change its creation/modfication time, but IME, virus writers don't bother doing this.

I would also add pstools to the list, especially for removal. There are too many viruses that operating with several executables. Make a batch script to: 1. copy notepad.exe to the same directory as the executables. 2. kill the offending virus processes via pskill. 3. rename the virus binary. 4. copy notepad.exe to the virus binary names. Then clean up where the virus is launched from and reboot. If notepad comes up, there's a problem. Again, a virus writer could trivially code around this problem with a hash check of the binary, but it's more trouble than it seems to be worth for virus writers.

Heck, for a "this computer is infected" problem, just search for files created around the time the problem started. The result will often find some of the viruses. Then clear out temp folders under windows, temp flash folders, and the print spool, just for good measure. Also run a rootkit revealer on the drive.

The bigger problem is often the mess that remains. File associations can be messed up. Sometimes, the machine, once infected, isn't bootable, and removing the virus often does not solve the problem (virus writers don't seem to be very good at compatibility checking their viruses).

The advantage to a wipe & reload of a computer is that it fixes all of these problems. And it's a solution I usually recommend. Plus, most people with viruses have enough crapware installed that their systems are far from an ideal state. But manual virus removals have their place, especially in the real world. I'd prefer a wipe & reload, but sometimes there's that one program people have and the install disks were lost ages ago and it's vital to their continued existence (or something along those lines).