Fair enough...the **cable** is pretty nice. The ownership and the resulting price structure is the part that's not so flash. Telecom has used the doctrine of artificial scarcity to squeeze ISPs for international transit costs and put the equivalent of a banana in NZ's internet tailpipe. Here's hoping that the competition envisioned by Drury, Morgan and Co comes to fruition sooner and not later....

You know, I can see two tiny pictures of myself and there's one in each of your eyes. And they're doing everything I do. Every time I light a cigarette, they light up theirs. I take a drink and I look in and they're drinking too. It's driving me crazy. It's driving me nuts.

No, it's factually correct. Ruminant animals emit methane through belching, not farting. The methane is generated by bacteria which live in the rumen (the forward part of the stomach) and metabolize the cellulose in plant material consumed by the animal. Check the Wikipedia entry for methanogenesis.

Fuck that.

Copland (Aaron).

People have been using the postal service to commit fraud for decades, but even repeat offenders are not banned from sending or receiving mail. And when was the last time you heard of someone getting kicked off the telephone network? Just because the medium has evolved, the right of people to have access to common means of communication does not change.

Right on. I would add one more stipulation: 3) no government grants them tax-exempt status.

Nope, alpha. Cheers.

Back in the 1960s and 70s, a small factory made glow-in-the-dark clock and watch faces across the street from the bakery and kitchens for my school district. They used a paint which released tritium as it dried, and their fume hoods vented out the roof (why not? plenty of air circulation!) and the prevailing breezes carried a nice dose of alpha particles across the street on most days to settle out on the food that we were served. When somebody somewhere was tipped off that this arrangement may not have been completely kosher, some local muckrakers and a couple of curious scientists showed up with a Geiger counter. One dish in particular, sunshine cake, was damn hot and legend has it that the name alludes to its brightness....I blame all my societal maladjustment on this lapse in food safety.

Kids, don't trust the food just because the lady with the hairnet says it's OK. Get it checked out by one of the guys in the hazmat suits.

Damn straight...I had been using Skype chat for at least a couple of years before trying FB chat. I don't think Skype's implementation is anything special, but it's pretty solid and utilitarian enough that in spite of our location at the end of one of the world's longest undersea tethers, the Southern Cross Cable, I take it for granted (my wife and I use it to hail one another across the floors of our house). FB's is abysmal by comparison.

And I hope the door hits him in the ass on the way out, too.

Saying "It's like something else is heating the atmosphere besides the sun" when they're talking about the interaction of the solar wind and the magnetosphere is more than a little disingenuous....

Back-to-school time here in the Southern Hemisphere is February....Hey, come on, ten percent of the earth's population lives south of the equator!

Cheers for that clear-eyed assessment...you said exactly what I was thinking.

The ability to spend does not deserve the status of protected expression. Money is not a message -- it is an amplifier, and one which increases the noise far out of proportion to the signal. Campaign finance limits exist to prevent oligarchy.