It's only a matter of time until people start searching for middle earth.

Middle-earth can be found in the area we now call New Zealand.

It was a one-way, three-lane road, but everybody was driving as if it were two extra-wide lanes. I don't know how it started. I don't know how it kept going.

I'm guessing it got started from people being nervous and staying away from the edges of the road and each other. Someone in the right-most lane doesn't know where the shoulder begins, since it's covered with snow, and they move a few feet away "just to be safe" which puts them into the middle lane. The other lane of traffic is avoiding the people drifting into the middle lane, and wants to avoid the median shoulder so calls it a compromise by basically driving down the center of the median and left-most lane.

The reason it continues it you end up with ruts in the snow that people keep following to get better traction.

I've seen something similar in the midwest where 2-lane highways become 1-lane highways because everyone is driving down the middle of the road to minimize the odds they slide into a ditch.

Half a billion dollars? Are you fucking kidding me?!

That only sounds like a lot. If a university with 50,000 faculty, staff and students announces a $1 million dollar upgrade it wouldn't seem too bad. Now multiply that by 6,000 to account for a US population of 300 million people and you would get to $6 billion. So, half a billion is pretty reasonable.

Also, since you mentioned iPads - there is a world of difference between enterprise equipment and commercial equipment. You might not care if your system dies due to a failed power supply, but these servers can't go down. Which means redundant power supplies that are hot swappable. Plus you are going to have multiple drives with hardware RAID that are also hot swappable. You might think enterprise equipment isn't needed or is too expensive - until you have to tell your boss 50,000 people aren't going to get their checks on time since a server went down.

So if we are using (expensive) TOW missiles to clear entire buildings, how does an AT4 cause too much damage in urban fighting? Not to mention the CS variant is specifically designed for use in an urban environment.

Also, one important purpose of the attack helicopter is to get around (over) all those OTHER pesky buildings that ruin the line-of-sight to the target. Plus, the TOW is guided, (unlike the AT4 - but not the new XM25), greatly reducing the chance of missing the target and hitting the window beside it where a family is cowering on the floor. However, the TOW range is far greater than the XM25 (4500 meters), and the explosive payload is also far greater.

Even with the new weapon system, I don't see the TOW going away any time soon.

You missed the obvious...

Oh my God... It's full of stars.

Now, I am not a lawyer, but it seems that all of your points are flawed due to one fact: You are allowed to represent yourself.

• No religious exemption needed. If you don't want a lawyer, do it yourself.
• You can hire anyone you want to testify or be your administrative assistant. They can't act in the courtroom as a lawyer or associate, but they can hand you notes on what to do/say if needed.
• No association required if you represent yourself.
• Assuming you aren't a lawyer, you have a non-lawyer representing you.

Also, as a side note, don't try turning a courtroom into a political statement. If you annoy the judge, they can fine you or imprison you for contempt of court.

Here's some big differences:

• Your cars are a lot nicer than the cars back in the early 70s. They probably have power locks, power windows, air conditioning, surround sound, far more safety features (air bags are expensive) and maybe some nice features like heated seats.
• You, and your kids, probably have a bigger/nicer TV, DVD player, satellite/premium cable, and a game console.
• You have at least one computer at home - unless you post to Slashdot from work.
• Plus, you are paying tuition/housing for two kids in college - and college tuition increases have exceeded inflation for decades.

Really, if you wanted to be in that comfortable middle class like your dad, you would probably have to give up a lot of comforts they just didn't have back then - and it's a lot nicer to have air conditioning instead of a fan.

Also, you might want to recheck your definitions. I'm guessing that you are spending a lot of money that you don't have to if you are only living a "boring" middle-class life. Or, you might not realize what a middle-class life actually is. The middle class doesn't have everything they want, but they do have everything they need - plus a little left over for nice things on occasion.

Middle-class vacations back in the 70s was loading the family in the car and driving to visit relatives and staying with them to save costs. (Although camping was a good alternative.) Flying somewhere and staying in a hotel was definitely a sign of being upper-middle-class at the very least. Plus, do you buy designer clothes or buy "regular" brands? Middle-class is picking up your day-to-day clothes at Target or Walmart, not Macy's or a specialty store. Plus, the middle class does things like clip coupons, wait for sales or other things to stretch their dollar.

My first line of defense is that I try to keep things to a minimum. If I have more than 3 things going on, I will delay most of them and do a mediocre job on the others because I'm not focused.

However, to answer your question, the best strategy I've ever used was a single notebook to track everything. Every item gets a bullet and every day gets a new page. If something didn't get done, it gets rewritten on the page for the next day. That means everything is in one place and having to rewrite the items every day is annoying, so items I don't really care about will be dropped from the list. If necessary, the bullets can reference outside information like, "Implement request in John's email 'Need a favor' received on 10/24/2010."

If you decide to resurrect an old project, you can flip through the notebook to find the bullet items regarding that project to help get yourself back up to speed.

If that statement were true, we'd be starving (needing 1.5 earths to survive). Clearly the fellow has no idea what he's talking about.

What he means is that we need 1.5 Earths to survive in the long-term.

Think of the Earth like a retirement fund. You can take out more than the interest earned each year, but that means at some point in the future the account will be at zero. In this case, we are doing things like cutting down old-growth forests to make more farmland, overfishing, and doing other things that the Earth cannot replenish or repair on a human time scale. Unfortunately, when the Earth account balance hits zero, losing our home has a much broader meaning than having to move into a nursing home.

What about the effects of cubic miles of salt water being blasted into salty vapor, that will then fall as salty rain on your fields?

Yes, but Hawking bets against himself. For example, if he feels there is a ToE, he will place a bet that there isn't. That way, he only has to pay out after having the satisfaction of being right.

We abhor unsubstantiated rules, and at age 6 she does understand the reasoning for most of the things we expect of her.

No, she doesn't. She has memorized or remembered the reasoning for those things, but she doesn't truly understand them. At that age her brain simply hasn't matured enough to truly understand. Which isn't a bad thing - it's normal.

Just a quick note writing PHP and writing Swing GUIs is not "junk". They are important tasks that need to be done and, contrary to popular opinion, are done a lot better by skilled professionals.

Also, I'll chime in and point out that having an undergrad emphasis on "security" is horrible. Security is HARD and you need a solid foundation in operating systems, networking, databases, web programming, programming languages and a lot of other areas. If you are requiring security classes instead of those other classes, you are doing the students a disservice.

I hate to be a troll but - you are an idiot.

Do you have any idea how hard some things are? Voyager is 8.5 BILLION miles away. Being able to hit it with a signal is amazing. That the signal is strong enough to be understood - that's taking it to another level altogether. There have been thousands of engineers, working for decades to get that to happen. The fact the speed of light annoys you isn't visionary, it's childish. You are upset because the Universe isn't cooperating with the miracles you think are possible. Too bad. No one has invented an everfull cookie jar, and no one has figured out a practical way around the speed of light.

Now, I'm not saying we will never beat the speed of light by finding some sort of loophole, or that we won't come to a new understanding of the Universe. However, the fact that no one has convinced you everything we know isn't wrong isn't visionary - it shows a fundamental lack of understanding regarding how science works.