No. Being accepted as a diplomat to a country is an agreement between the two countries. I don't think the British would be too keen on this.

Not to mention it would make Ecuador look like a joke. Ecuador is alread putting their necks out enough for this guy.

I'm ok with that as long as it plays the backing music to My Second Wife by The Residents over and over again while it's recording.

GoogleScope. Street View of the world through the eyes of a sniper.
GoogleShotglass. Street View through the eyes of a drunk.
GoogleCokemirror. Street View through the eyes of a drug addict.

Disclaimer: I have not seen the film and probably won't see it anytime this decade.

I hate to tell you but maybe the 11 year old demographic is the target audience at this point.

I know that us middle aged geeks have become accustom to Hollywood trying to string us along but maybe they're finding the gulf between the camps of the younger consumers and the disgruntled middle age so-and-sos a bit wide so they're finally giving up. After all, your parents went to films they had no interest in but you did. I can hardly imagine the thrill my parents felt by me dragging them to great spectacles of cinema like The Dark Crystal and The NeverEnding Story (and these were the good ones!). Now it's your turn to ante up for all kinds of inane crap drummed up by some ex-advertising executive who's decided to try his hand at film making.

The sooner that people start to realize that Hollywood (and pretty much all major entertainment industries) sees the aging consumer as a second class market the sooner the aging consumers will let go of pop culture. And it's a good thing too. It's not like there isn't a market for the adult consumer, it's just not the same market as what you embraced 20 or even 10 years ago. Comic book/fantasy-adventure movies just aren't going to target the adult market, at least on any great scale.

Jack is what the 14 year old kids drink. But since this is for high schoolers it just migjht fit the bill.

If you're going to have Coke you need some Jim Beam to go with that.

Ask them what their expectations are and work from there. Everyone's ideas on what computing is or should be are different.

But I would suggest that if coding is going to be part of what this club is that you get a group consensus on what kind of project they'd like to do and start something on SourceForge or the like. It'll get some public recognition even if it's not too great and people will see their name on the web. People like that kind of thing.

I do a public astronomy outreach with my local amateur astronomy group. It's nice to work with the public and get some recognition even though I'm not great at it. It's one of the few reasons I still set up my equipment on public nights. I'm more comfortable working within the group but it's still nice to be part of a bigger community through public participation.

Is asking for a popular democracy to resort to fact-based reasoning too much of a stretch?

If people use fact-based reasoning even for a few decisions a day entire markets would collapse, there would be social upheaval and politicians would have to run for their lives.

Everthing on Earth came from space.

The idea that a civilization would use a rock that fell from space to make some trinkets doesn't seem too earth shaking to me.

I've never heard of the guy and was looking a bit into his stuff on Amazon. How "humorous" are his writings?

Amazon does it just fine.

Haven't the Native Americans been punished enough by the white man's foolery as it is?

It didn't do anything for David Crosby or Jerry Garcia.

I wouldn't worry about another great bombardment from the asteroid belt. It has a total mass less than 1/10th of 1% of that of the Earth and Ceres makes up a quarter or so of that. We might get dinged a bit but I find it unlikely that something is going to change the orbit of Ceres and send it into the orbital path of the Earth but at the same time not having enough gravitational effect to pull Earth from its own orbit. Much less something being able to strip us of our moon but leaving us unaffected.

Not to say it couldn't happen but it seems so remote that I wouldn't put any money on it.

True but it may not have to be a direct collision. I wonder how close a one solar mass star would have to get to Earth to pull us out of orbit enough to effectively turn Earth into a lifeless planet.

Does anyone have simulation software that could be used to handle these kinds of questions? Windows/Linux/OSX, it doesn't matter.