Back when I was in elementary school we wrote cuneiform on clay tablets. Gilgamesh was always checked out, although there was a lot of debate as to whether it was suitable for a school to have.

Sorry, but it is explicitly stated that the prints themselves are not stored. Not sure exactly how this works but presumably it measures a few parameters and makes a hash out of that.

Why does everyone pick on aspartame, it's just a couple aminoacids that happen to be neurotransmitters reacted with methanol... what could possibly be unhealthy about that?

sorry but citation needed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoosexuality_and_the_law

if the cow was electrocuted it wasn't kosher

I read an interesting article in Science a few months back, where they had a computer model predicting that more malnutrition in south asia would occur if americans ate less meat. The logic was roughly that vegetarian diets in our culture rely on soy and rice, which are staples in asia, and much of which is produced here. This would cause price increases, and result in less available funds to provide fish and other seafood there, which are the primary animal protein sources, leading to vitamin deficiencies. Cattle and hogs eat primarily other grains, or graze on grasslands not suitable for rice production.

damn, I really hate rabbits, but I hate vegetables too!

dreamscape? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamscape_(film)

well for starters, say you have sattelite photos of what the oil slick looks like, for the past several weeks. Back in the dark ages of slipsticks and vacuum tubes you would have a couple of really smart people to to a chalk board, draw lines tracing the photos, and try to think where is this shit going to hit land worst, what are the bird/fish/etc populations, how do we minimize damage. Now, together with NOAA and USGS you can do a CFD simulation, try to get much better estimates, allocate resources better for the cleanup. You are still fucked in the ass, but it might not bleed so bad.

no offense but I consider spiegel.de about as trustworthy as fox news, just the other end of the spectrum, if you ever want a seriously critical (sometimes overly so) look at german media go to medienkritik.typepad.com

not for the cow.

I went to the local texas land and cattle once, and ordered a ribeye. The waiter quickly said "can I get you anything, ketchup, salt, some sauce to ruin the steak for you? I burst out laughing, he said no one had ever noticed before.

dont forget the classics: http://art-bin.com/art/omodest.html

goldman sachs ate all our profits...

The definition of some words as "bad" and others as "good" is more or less arbitrary and generally classist. For example the expletive in question, shit, derives from old english (http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=shit). Oddly enough the polite words such as feces seem to derive from latin. The vulgar word (in the literal sense, meaning of the common people) became considered impolite, as it sucks to be a common peasant. Now hundreds of years later in a society that prides itself on not having nobility, and helped the french decapitate most of theirs, we still cling to the idea that vulgar words are bad, and latin and greek ones are better, to the point that we allow the FCC to regulate speech and the press on the flimsy excuse that the airwaves they regulate are a scarce resource. Don't you just hate people sometimes?