Heh.
You liar.

The NT examples are themselves interpretations of earlier texts .. I know all of the bible is supposedly "divinely inspired", but surely there must be a difference in "quality of inspiration" between "word of Jesus" and "word of some apostle with a cause".

The Sodom example has been explained elsewhere; wrt the Leviticus text I just want to note that these laws were never meant to apply to the gentiles.

Nope. Read what I said. I didn't consider any son being picked, but events that could move a family into the list we consider. Of those events, the case of "first a boy, second a boy" is half as likely as "first boy, then girl, OR first girl, then boy". Because of this, you will find twice as many (unordered) boy/girl in your set than boy/boy.

That is beautiful - and yes; of the three (out of four) events that can make you eligible for inclusion in the 900 (boy, then girl; girl, then boy; boy, then boy), two include a girl. What makes this counterintuitive is that you treat children as unordered, but they're not - in fact, your (boy, girl) case actually mixes (boy, girl) and (girl, boy), which are both equally probable.

And of course that would stop them once the technology is in place.

For all of ten seconds.

And I believe you underestimate the convenience bonus of having all your games on a single cartridge. :)

I wouldn't have bought a DS if it wasn't for homebrew.

I believe you massively overestimate the amount of people who would go out and buy game cartridges if they couldn't pirate, especially if piracy is so very much more convenient.

Don't worry. All that's needed for a pattern to persist is for it to be self-consistent. All the alien kid did was break the connection to his computing device. Life goes on. (See also: Permutation City)

I've been using Quodlibet as a player. It's no Amarok1.4 but it measures up pretty well.

Today's issues today.

Tomorrow's issues tomorrow.

That's great, but it doesn't make this particular decision any less nonsensical.

From my understanding, the court basically decided that while software itself was not patentable, when it was designed to run and take advantage of a computer, it _was_ patentable after all. Shouldn't by that logic any algorithm be patentable that, for instance, takes advantage of L2 cache size? Certain sorting algorithms come to mind. Believe me, I'd be happy to be told I'd misunderstood.

Yeah, XOrg is shit. I don't think many people debate that, but it's not a reason to let Microsoft off the hook.

If you are using something like Gnome or KDE, it can probably save your GUI session. Individual applications will have to deal with their contents, but many of them already do that. At least Firefox and Openoffice can restore their sessions after being terminated.

In KDE, System Settings -> Advanced -> Session Manager -> On Login, Restore Manually Saved Session. After that, you can save your session state from the logout menu or, alternatively, using a shellscript that loops every 30s or so and does

# KDE3
dcop ksmserver ksmserver saveCurrentSession
# or KDE4
dbus-send --dest=org.kde.ksmserver /KSMServer org.kde.KSMServerInterface.saveCurrentSession

Why are people reaching for the distant origin theory? I hate to break it to these people, but all the molecules necessary for life (C, H, O, N) is/was already available on Earth. In the presence of heat (energy) random molecules form. Add in a few million years, and presto life. It's simple thermodynamics. Or am I missing something?

Plasma displays still:

Suffer from screen burn

Which, you know, sucks once it happens.

The room with the big TV at my house has windows to the west, so it's very bright during peak video game time. This necessitates changing the brightness from our normal vampire-like settings all the way up to torch mode. And, when the boy was hooked on GTA IV, you can bet he'd have burned the hell out of a plasma. :)

That said, I like plasma. I like the contrast. I like the speed of it. I'm bothered sometimes by what I perceive to be a bit of a flicker on some specific colors on some sets, and I don't like the ubiquity of the shiny screens, but generally it's very good.

However, when I bought my 52" LCD a couple of years ago, all of the plasma sets available to me had less than 1080p pixel resolution. But, boy, were the plasma sets cheap. But I wanted a nice TV that would stay nice (I can replace the boards and tubes in my LCD myself, and the high-voltage circuits are simple and not very HV anyway) with high resolution and a non-glossy screen, and the wife wanted a big TV. And we both wanted a TV today, since the previous 32" Sony 1080i CRT (which was also the best tradeoff when it was purchased) had just died.

All said, for what I'm doing, I haven't regretted making the decision that I made at the time I made it for even an instant. Nowadays, I might make a different choice, but it'd probably be something closer to both a daytime LCD and a good DLP projector than any single solution.