Do you mean those non-serviceable mustard gas shells? If that's all that they found, then it's particularly clear that Iraq DID destroy their stockpiles. Finding a few shells only indicates that their compliance was not perfect. I will sleep so much better (and poorer) now that our intelligence agencies have removed their old foil against Iran.

Wow. Paranoid more than just a little? It couldn't possibly be that there are people who honestly disagree with you could it?

It could be. In fact, it's likely. However, do not doubt the propaganda efforts of the government. The DoD and many other organizations absolutely employ astroturf bloggers. Their posts are often as sincere as yours, but rarely as condescending.

What does your car run on, rainbows?

Don't conflate crazy with unsuccessful. Go watch some videos of him and notice him pacing around the stage unshaven, in sweatpants, bloodshot eyes, ranting and shouting into the microphone at the audience.

Interesting that you focus on his appearance, not the substance of his monologues. You also seem to be unaware that nearly all performers are performing in character on stage. If you don't like his shtick, fine, but trying to use it to pretend he was crazy just makes you look ignorant. Do you believe that Steven Colbert is an arch-conservative?

What about MY right to not listen?

No one is disputing your right to not listen. In fact, that's the only workable course of action here.

Just as your fist's freedom of movement ends at my face, your speech's freedom ends at my ears, if I so choose.

Assault is a felony. Insult, embarassment, and offense is the price of free speech and sentience.

If FCC can limit swearing on public airwaves, police can do it too -- even if the waves are in different medium and frequency...

The FCC has a very specific mission, curtailed by law, to enforce standards on a very limited resource, the radio. As the ACLU has demonstrated, the police do not have this power. Perhaps municipalities will attempt to legislate the issue, as you suggest. Then the ACLU will challenge them, and win, on first amendment grounds.

I'm a big supporter of civility, but that has to come from improving relations between cultures and classes, not enforced by fines, truncheons, and bullets.

Ignatius J. Reilly, is that you?

In my opinion, either the Bible is correct or it is useless.

I can agree with this statement wholeheartedly.

However, even if you believe that revelatory knowledge is a source of truth, how could the Bible be correct? There are two conflicting stories of creation in the first chapter alone. The Catholic church decided which early Christian writings were canonical, and which were not. Do you think that they were divinely inspired? Catholics accept many apocryphal books as worthy of study, but other denominations disagree:

In 1546 the Catholic Council of Trent reconfirmed the canon of Augustine, dating to the second and third centuries, declaring "He is also to be anathema who does not receive these entire books, with all their parts, as they have been accustomed to be read in the Catholic Church, and are found in the ancient editions of the Latin Vulgate, as sacred and canonical." The whole of the books in question, with the exception of 1 Esdras and 2 Esdras and the Prayer of Manasses, were declared canonical at Trent. The Protestants, in comparison, were diverse in their opinion of the deuterocanon. Some considered them divinely inspired, others rejected them. Anglicans took a position between the Catholic Church and the Protestant Churches; they kept them as Christian intertestamental readings and a part of the Bible, but no doctrine should be based on them. John Wycliffe, a 14th century Christian Humanist, had declared in his biblical translation that "whatever book is in the Old Testament besides these twenty-five shall be set among the apocrypha, that is, without authority or belief." Nevertheless, his translation of the Bible included the apocrypha and the Epistle of the Loadiceans.

So, was it divine inspiration that struck a church council in 1546? Were the Protestants right? Do you believe, as many Protestants do, in KJV only? What about recently found books, such as the Gospel of Judas. Is that book divine? It's certainly closer to the original sources. It seems to me that without even agreement on which books should be included, calling it correct or incorrect is a useless endeavor, as its contents vary from church to church.

I love GURPS, but you're absolutely right about it being simulation-heavy. It's still the only RPG that has ever asked me to produce a cube-root for a calculation. (while designing a boat with their Vehicles supplement) I'd second Fudge as well. It's a nice, light, flexible, open system.

...once mechanisms to prevent 'copyright abuses' are in place, the same mechanisms can also easily be used to prevent any 'undesirable' sources of opinion, information or activity. once gates and controls are in place, no upstart will be coming up politically or business wise and upsetting the power balance that is already established...

I'm not interested in having those freedoms of which you speak.

You're not interested in being able to choose which sources of information you can use? You're not interested in being able to use the political system to change the status quo? Those are the only freedoms he spoke of, so what do you find objectionable?

I'm guessing you won't be happy until the Internet is as interesting as American TV.

What a dumb shit you are, not knowing what "explicit" means. I'd cowardly anonymize myself too if I were that stupid.

Hey, watch the language! Kids read this page.

Couldn't you have just implied that he was a dumb shit? Or maybe you could have been interrupted by some situation right before you said, and I quote, "dumb shit". That would have been witty and tasteful!

So I don't think there's any point trying to come up with explanations for it, it just seems that all the robots in the movie have anthropomorphic tendencies. No exceeding of programming required. Most of the other robots were too distracted by their jobs to explore their own potential, whereas Wall-E had fsck all to do really and started building cities and tinkering with junk he found.

Do yourself a favor and watch it again. Judge it on its own merits, not in relation to the ad campaign. Notice how it's not only the robots who are too distracted to explore their own potential, but the humans as well. The story is not about AI, it's about how getting dirty, doing the hard work, and following your curiosity will build better character than having your every whim catered to you. That, and don't litter.

Sex is taboo, and wrong.

It's wrong, UNLESS you are selling something. Not sex, That would be wrong, but something entirely unrelated.

In other words, sex is not exactly being repressed, but channeled for the highest purpose...making money.

It's a classic. Take something free. Package it. Sell it. Legislate and agitate against the alternative.

Understanding the basic principles = important. Being able to code your own = only important for those who never evolved beyond just-a-coder.

Wrong, and dangerously so.

Understanding the basic principles = Being able to code your own.

If you are not able to code your own, you absolutely do not understand it aside from a cursory familiarity. I'm certainly not advocating writing your own when a quality implementation is available, but pretending to understand how something like a red-black tree works without being capable of coding one is nothing but posturing.

PS: I agree with you that higher level data flow optimization is far more important for a good application than low-level optimization.

Ada is a fine language, especially considering some of its contemporaries (*cough* COBOL *cough*). The safety features built into the language made it a good choice for high-reliability systems. My main problem with it was that the DoD mandated it for every development effort. It's good, but not that good. No one language is a panacea. Also, library support was lacking.

...or are we doomed to hellish deaths by the millions for stupid reason forever?

Of course not! Eventually, the Sun will enlarge and swallow the Earth before going supernova.