You forgot at least two things:

• Profit!
• CowboyNeal

I think this should be a /. survey: "What will you die from?"

Per Intel's January 2012 earnings report, their plan for this year is:
Capital spending: $12.5 billion, plus or minus $400 million
R&D spending: approximately $10.1 billion.

Which, compared to the size of my bank account, is "countless" :)

Perhaps they use a legal/union standard for their math -- 2 hour minimum for each interruption.

Me, I get paid to get the job done. If my brain starts writing an email at 10:30 pm, I'm happy to get out of bed and type it up. Saves me the need to remember to write it the next morning, and I get turn-around from others because my message is the latest in their inbox. This willingness to work on something for a tad after dinner or late at night means I go home at a normal predictable hour, see my family and spend good time with them, and have the freedom to flex my schedule.

Disclaimer: I work for a big company that values work-life balance in practice and still pays competitive wages. Your employer may vary.

Mod Parent Up. I have friends who've been waiting to adopt for years now. It's only bureaucratic red tape (that checks out potential adoptees as though they were candidates for Catholic sainthood) which has kept them from adopting. They work good /.-worthy high-tech well-paying jobs, live in a big house in one of the most expensive parts of town, and still can't get a kid to care for.

I think you elaborated a neat perspective about the difference between the two groups. Then you left me hanging with your perspective. If newborn babies are no different from a fetus -- "blank and have no individuality" and "just a collection of cells" -- when do we become human from your point of view? Is it arbitrary, or measurable, and by what standard?

Plagiarize
Let no one else's work evade your eyes
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes
So don't shade your eyes
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize
Only be sure always to call it please "research" [1]

[1] Paraphrased from Tom Lehrer's song 'Lobachevsky'.

To copy from one person is plagiarism. To copy from many is research. (citation not provided; quote is attrib. to various sources)

Interesting indeed. College calculus has trained you in statistics.

This is not a dig at you -- I just find this connexion of input and output fascinating, and wonder how common it is.

Don't forget to paint numbers on your three cats: 1, 2, and 4.

Mod Parent Up. I have but one lifetime -- and someone out there wants me to spend it all on learning Esperanto.

The older I get, the more I become aware just how much we collectively know -- and how little of it I will have time to learn, apply, and teach others. Rather than follow along in real-time with the Mars story, I'll wait for the uninformed talking heads to move on to some other story because "Mars is old now." I'll read the intelligent executive summary after the research is completed.

Democratic Decision Making -- no, it's not possible for a nation of 300 million. But try attending a town meeting in New Hampshire. They believe in democratic decisions, and much of the town will turn up to discuss and vote. (depending on the town, your math may vary). Their State House of Representatives has 400 elected members -- one for every 3000 residents. That's like having 100,000 people in Congress. (pause, shudder) This is the root of our American political system -- democracy at the lowest levels and a representative republic at higher levels.

Saw that movie last week. The footage is awe-inspiring but the text of the script leaves some serious fact-checking to be desired. At one point, it says that towns sprang up only 600 years ago. It also claims that matter and water are two separate things, and they connect with the air and the sun. Perhaps the text was accurate in Aristotelian times, but not now.

IANAL and other disclaimers. But his name was not on the envelope. He caught every piece of mail that came to his domain. Here's a more true parallel: I bought a house, which has a defined postal address. Other people used to live here and so mail comes to their name at this address. Do I get to open their mail? No I sure as hell do not. If they address it to "Occupant" or to "Person XYZ or Current Resident" then I am entitled to access it. Otherwise, since the sellers didn't give me a good forwarding address, it's "Return to sender -- addressee unknown." Since he admitted he intended to create a confusing situation, the only mail he should have accessed was anything to wesley.kenzie@lockheedmarton.com or securikai@lockheedmarton.com, or other names such as he regularly went by -- and not robert.j.stevens@lockheedmarton.com or nolan.d.archibald@lockheedmartun.com.

Incorrect. It is 450 millimeters (mm) in diameter. This translates to an approximately 18 inch diameter wafer. And that is huge. It needs completely new tools and materials handlers to be designed and tested; you can't just upsize the existing things, especially given the drive to decrease the thickness of wafers, thus increasing their fragility.

You haven't provided enough info to argue that the Nazis were Christian. "God with us" -- every monotheistic religion could say that (Jewish, Christian, Muslim, etc.). And no form of Christianity holds that you can become the Messiah -- so if Adolph started wanting that, it wasn't a "more extreme form of Christianity," it was a rejection of Christianity and a pure power grab.

... compared with the random office noises around you, a reliable predictable set of stimuli is easier to tune out. Music is almost white noise when contrasted with folks taking loud phone calls about medical problems, unattended phones ringing at their desks, and so on.