...when should we throw our end-of-the-world parties?

I did, too. And they didn't have a discussion page like wikipedia ;)

Seriously, though... it's true. Kids today appear to be interested primarily in wast^H^H^H^Hspending their time playing Halo 3 or CoD... they aren't even curious about how the game works, let alone curious about "boring science" stuff. I grew up more similar to how you described. Scientific-ish family, there were random books that were pretty interesting to read if you were "taught" to be curious about things and ask questions. If you were taught that life was being a vegetable in front of your favorite entertainment - computer games, TV, movies, or what - why would you want to "waste" your time being curious about condensation instead of gaining valuable xbox points(!!!1).

It seems that "entertainment" has begun to replace curiosity. As long as we're entertained, we don't care about intellectual stimulus, don't ask about how things work. Just "eat."

And even our entertainment seems to be going that direction. Seems that stories about respectful human beings working hard in life just isn't "fun to watch" anymore. They'd rather watch J. Lopez fall down.

Bill available for free:

every citizen must pay special tax of $1000

Bill available for a fee of $200:

Exempt from paying the tax are...

If that worked, everyone would be giving out the wrong address. Also, people move all the time. It's a bigger PITA for the state to track you down than they're willing or able to deal with. Since they're the more powerful party in this case, it becomes your problem. Remember, poop rolls downhill.

Dear City Council of Schenectady

I would like to recommend to you an interesting article.

The subject is a result of my study "Location, timer settings and defusing codes of explosive devices located in various public buildings of the City of Schenectady".

I'm convinced you would be very interested in the information contained therein. I am willing to sell you a copy of said article, but considering its literary and informational value, I estimate it to be worth $10mln.

Simultaneously I would like to state I have no connection with manufacturers of these devices nor people who planted them. This is merely an scientific work of an informative study that should be of interest to all citizens of the city.

Faithfully, yours, ...

I'm not so sure. The behavior of electrons is not well-known: it's not even certain whether they have internal structure or not. However their behavior in an electric circuit is well-described by very old physics. Likewise the formation and evaporation of micro-black-holes is not very well theorised, however their essential and most threatening property - their gravitational attraction - is very well-defined, even at masses as low as those of protons. Whether these black holes would mass less than that, I don't know.

THIS is why Apple had to go with AT&T and not Verizon. Verizon may have the better network on paper, but I'm sure they would have buckled under the bandwidth issues presented by the iPhone explosion, just like AT&T. At least AT&T had the sense to listen to Apple about how the phone should be bundled, and now they are reaping the rewards.

They all suck, but I have a special dark place in my heart for Verizon's shitty behavior.

I'd say that depends on the minimum requirements but that is neither here nor there. Even if you meet the minimum requirements you will find that the manufacturer won't have bothered to make your old hardware compatible with vista aka win7.

The reason is simple, windows has horrible hardware support. Instead windows relies on third parties to patch this hole.

Microsoft includes usable support for little to no hardware but then wants to blame its system instability on third party drivers. Saying windows has superior hardware support because of third party provided software is akin to saying a game is hassle free because third parties have made cracks to bypass the DRM.

"'out of the box' support in Windows"

I'm not sure I've ever seen a PC that didn't have windows preloaded have 'out of the box' support. Third party driver downloads have always been required. In most cases a disc (or downloaded with another machine and put on disc) is even required to get on the internet to download the other drivers.

Out of box is where you install, boot up and the hardware is functional. I let Ubuntu slide on Nvidia graphics and some wireless stuff because it detects the need and downloads it and installs for you. With that slight exception (you could call that part of the automated install process) your Ubuntu linux system is probably either going to be fully functional and supported out of the box or not at all.

Several year old is a bit of a red herring as well. The vast majority of one year old and nearly all three year old hardware works with linux out of the box.

I enjoy Mythbusters but that is one thing that annoys me about it (and plenty of other Discovery/History/etc. shows) - they split the myths into separate segments, intertwine them, then waste quite a bit of time rehashing what they're trying to accomplish and what they've done so far.

A while back, I recorded a show on the history of the Great Wall off History Channel, and I found I couldn't watch it - the new facts trickled out at a rate of one every five minutes (it seemed). The three hour show probably could have been compressed to half an hour or less.

But it also helps to remember that the Catholic Church used to sell "indulgences", forgiveness for a sin purchased before committing the sin.

I would imagine anyone sophisticated enough to make the weapon would also be good enough to come up with the cure or vaccine whatever before they released it. And that's just the obvious surface level.

And if it was just an economic weapon, designed to just make money or injure/cause economic losses, but not destroy the target group (or most of them), you wouldn't have to worry about it as much, because you would have wagamed the spread of it in advance anyway, into your own population or demographic, like sacrificing pawns for greater advantage..unless it was ethnic-specific, which is the most common of these sorts of "theoretical" weapons that have been talked about before.

  Because you could sit back and just watch it unfold, come up with some "lock the borders down" response that you claim made you avoid much of the spread. Perhaps anyway. I don't flat out reject the notion that biowarfare agents could not or would not be used based on the "you'll infect yourself" counter argument, I've thought about this a lot before.

Here's another one why I have this view, suppose you or your group "didn't care at all" if you got infected, or if everyone got infected, maybe you WANTED that to be the case. A one way ride for *everyone*, let the FSM sort it out. Mad jihadis or even madder "the human species is the cause of all the world's troubles" folks could do it, an aggressive and faster form of the human voluntary extinction idea.

There are more. Just too many possible scenarios where some justification in the minds of the weapon's creators could occur for me to just dismiss the possibility of such weapons being developed or used, and given how much better and easier this tech is today compared to a few decades ago...feelin' lucky? I know I'd bet a year's pay that all these treaties "banning" bioweapons and so forth are a buncha paper, and the labs just got buried deeper.

And also. bioweapons are called in slang "the poor man's nuke".. for a variety of reasons.

Yeah! is not like tectonic plates are communist or something. Remember to double check a map before the launch, you know /s

500 feet underground * total area of Rusia it's a good bite to the earth's mass, that alone would create all sorts of havoc, as in polar axis swift and a chain reaction of nice 9 grade quakes everywhere.

He should pay to re-train the entire government technical staff.

vulnerabilities exist. this is true of all systems, no matter who uncovers them

therefore, an intelligent organization: a bank, a military, a government, will have a system where private disclosure of vulnerabilities results in a reward for the discoverer

if you don't have such a policy, a discoverer might turn to finding reward in your vulnerability with your enemies or criminality instead

unfortunately, the discoverer must consider the possibility that if he divulged the discovered vulnerability quietly, the organization he penetrated might find the least costly solution to the problem to be the the disappearance of the discoverer

such that the most moral and safest approach for a discoverer is to go public with the vulnerability instead. which of course invites the wrath of the organization penetrated. its a no-win situation for the moral discoverer of a vulnerability, such that there is constant pressure on white and gray hats to go black

SO your argument has a good flaw as well....

No, it doesn't.

I believe he did state that the new wall would continue to improve the value of the property - which is true. It is an investment in the property itself - not a furnishing.

You're still comparing a wall vs many copies of a copyrighted work. No matter how much you massage this analogy, it still sucks.