The traditional Jewish observance of Christmas is to go out for Chinese food and a movie. (At least in SF and NYC, perhaps other areas with large Jewish and Chinese populations.)

Diwali celebrations have the good cookies.

And while celebrating spring colors and throwing paint around are cool, witch-burning not so much. (I'm getting that phrase from the Wikipedia article, though she's described more as a demon than a witch.)

Mardi Gras is only partly related to Lent; apparently there are also African traditions of having feast in the spring and using up the meat. (Having a big party to finish off the things you're not going to eat during a long solemn fasting holiday is kind of missing the point.)

Also, Mardi Gras roughly tracks with Chinese Lunar New Year, because it's a fixed number of days before Easter, which was originally celebrated based on the Jewish lunar calendar, though the Romans munged the date into their solar calendar system, and the Jewish calendar's leap-month approach to keeping lunar and solar calendars aligned probably doesn't match whatever the Chinese calendar does.

So does Slashdot have any plans for a mechanism for stopping comment spammers like that one other than modding them down?

I've worked at a large company for many years, and the way our bureaucracy has worked things out between management, union, and non-union folks is that we get a small set of US national holidays off, plus three floating holidays that the company can't tell you when to take and four or five more that they can, in addition to however much vacation you get (based on seniority.) So typically if you're Jewish you use those three days for the high holidays, if you believe in Columbus you might take Columbus Day off, if you believe the President you might take Presidents' Day off. Some years they'll tell us when we have to use one of the normally-floating holidays, e.g. if New Years' is on a Tuesday they might tell us to take Dec.31 Monday off.

It works for me. I don't feel the need to take Columbus Day off, and I'd rather not take Winter Skiing Holiday on the same weekend that everybody else is there.

Yeah, but the Republicans have moved far to the right (or at least the vocal Tea Party types have, as opposed to the corporatist party machine which is really in charge.) Not only would they not want a pinko liberal like Nixon any more, they wouldn't even want that notorious leftist Barry Goldwater.

Remember the Shrimp?

Sure, and the Texas school kids get Texas Independence Day off, celebrating a bunch of illegal immigrants trying to overthrow their government. And while Delaware doesn't get a school holiday for Dec. 7 (ratifying the Constitution), or for whatever day the invading Dutch overthrew the Swedes, we did get a couple of school days off in the fall for teachers' union meetings. Cinco de Mayo nominally celebrates a successful battle at the beginning of an unsuccessful war against the invading French Army, but Mexicans view it as mostly a beer company holiday.

And no, Presidents' Day isn't a bona-fide holiday; it's a consolidation of the old Washington's Birthday and Lincoln's Birthday holidays, turned into a Monday holiday for convenience. (Washington wouldn't have minded that much; he'd already changed his official birthday by 11 days to reflect the 1753 calendar change.) But Cesar Chavez is a local hero, and legitimately deserves a holiday.

Sure, but they need the extra time for patching up everybody injured by idiots in hunting accidents.

Come down to Palo Alto for World Music Day in the summer; there's always a large French music jam.

And there is a French consulate in SF, and a reasonable choice of French cocktails at the bar around the corner.

I'm still wondering what country you live in that doesn't have an insane government. (That doesn't mean I'd prefer to live in Egypt than where you are, or that Egypt isn't more insane than your country or the US, but the bar's set pretty low here...)

There are lots of different evolutionary hypotheses. Some propose that it's more gradual, some are more about punctuated equilibrium. There's even one that said evolution happened really really fast one week in 4004 BC, and then stopped, with a glitch a thousand or so years later destroying most individuals of most species.

If you were a high school teacher teaching kids about critical thinking, how would you compare the different theories, what kinds of facts would you line them up against, what kind of predictions would they make about the fossil records and radiocarbon dating? What would it say about the spread of DNA markers to people on different continents, or the commonality of organ structures and biological processes between different kinds of mammals and reptiles?

If you were a politician trying to use education policy to get religious people to vote for you by promoting their religions, would you want high school teachers to actually "Teach the Controversy"?

Friends of mine moved from Texas to New Jersey, and nearly got killed a bunch of times before they learned local driving practices. In Texas, when a stoplight turns green, you want to hit the intersection at warp speed. In New Jersey, a light turning red means only three or four more cars can turn left. The two just don't mix very well.

If I remember correctly, the 3M speed definition was 1 MIPS, not 1 MFLOPS. The first machine I used that met the definition was a Sun 3/60 with an 8-bit 1152x900 screen. (I've got a Sun 2/50 in my attic, but it's only 1024x768, and I'm not sure if it was a full MIPS or not; 10 MHz 68000.) I may have also used a 1280x1024 screen on some larger Sun machine.

In 1993, I switched over to an organization that used Wintel laptops. While we got screens with 16-bit and then 24-bit and 32-bit color fairly early on, I didn't get a work machine with more pixels than the Sun3 again until maybe 2009 or 2010. Since then, we've finally started supporting 1920x1024 screens, but for desktop use I'd much rather have a portrait-mode screen. So it's really annoying that most tablets are only 1024x768 or less.

Obama has had at least two American citizens assassinated, one of whom the 16-year-old son of the other in a separate incident, and neither of them had been convicted of treason nor sentenced to death by a US court. So your trust is highly misplaced.