Whenever an authoritarian demagogue tries to justify a power grab by telling you, "Think of the children," look them in the eye and respond, "I am."

Bots and other bad actors thrive in free (as in beer) environments, for reasons that should be obvious. If we want to do anything meaningful about them, sites will need a nominal but real fee to use.

It's not what anyone wanted, but "free" was always inevitably going to lead to the Internet becoming a dump. The free ride is over.

If and when you find yourself in a jurisdiction where some sort of age verification law is in effect, just remember that it's very unlikely that the law will require the date to be given in the Gregorian Calendar. There are many other possibilities, and as an example, here's a website that can convert your birth date into the Hebrew Calendar. This has many advantages: first, the date is written from right to left, not left to right, which should have interesting effects on any software trying to use it. Also, of course, the names of the months are different as is the year number. And, just to make things even more confusing, the conversion is different for different years, largely because some of the months have a different number of days in different years to avoid certain holidays landing on the wrong day of the week, and Hebrew leap years are done by duplicating a specific month. I'm sure that there are other examples, but this is the one I'm familiar with. Feel free to list other interesting possibilities.

No, the judge isn't lying to the jury, the judge is reading a set of jury instructions that were agreed on by all of the lawyers involved in the case during a conference with the judge. And, each of the instructions is in written form and must be read out to the jury exactly as written. If one or more of those instructions includes a statement that under certain specific circumstances that the jury MUST find the defendant guilty, that's what the judge tells the jury, no ifs ands or buts.

People don't even want to work in the office. Why expect someone to come in for an interview?

Just make an in-person interview part of the hiring process. If they want to know why, give them some mumbo jumbo about security requirements. And don't worry about chasing away legitimate applicants; if they're not willing to come in for an interview, they're unlikely to make good employees.

Those monkeyflowers better watch out for tiger lilies

Yes! If those monkey flowers make too much trouble, Tiger Lily will pluck them all.

Just to toss in a bit on film trivia, those recliners were invented by Alan Hale Sr., who played Little John in the Errol Flynn version of Robin Hood, and was The Skipper's father.

I too am retired, but at the end of my career, I was doing mostly tech support by phone. Not in the phone firewall, or reading cheat sheets to callers, but at senior level, where either the cheat sheets didn't help, or, more likely, where the juniors had picked the wrong one. That meant that I actually had to know how to fix things on my own rather than hoping that I could guess which canned response would work, and an AI probably wouldn't be any help, because if it could fix things, the junior wouldn't have needed my help.

A couple things to consider on that:

• Once again the percentage of eligible voters who bothered to vote at all in the presidential election was small
• As in the other elections where Trump ran, many people were casting votes against someone as much as they were casting them for someone. In 2016 Trump won largely because of the avalanche of anti-Clinton sentiment that came from Republican regulars who very much did not agree with his platform. In 2020 Biden won in no small part in response to the disaster that Trump created in his first term. Then in 2024 the quick switch that the democrats pulled to change their endorsed candidate caused a large number of otherwise reliable democrats to not bother showing up at all.

  I would much rather go nearly anywhere in Europe.

  If we were to go back to the topic of the IgNobels themselves it would be interesting to know how many people actually traveled internationally the last several years to attend in person. I've read about them regularly but never considered going in person; I'm not sure I even knew before reading this that they were previously hosted in the US.

That might depend on how widely we define "arena rock". Yeah there aren't a lot of "rock" acts - by the traditional definition - that are selling out huge stadiums but there are plenty of other acts that are. Between various pop princesses, nostalgic rockers from the past, comedians, and even politicians we have plenty of non-sporting events selling out the hockey, basketball, baseball, and football arenas.

That said, while the tours pay the artists better than media / streaming revenue - and by a huge margin - the artists get but a small fraction of the ticket price. Prices keep going up, and at some point the fans won't pay it. Ticketmaster doesn't seem to have a plan for this, they seem to exist in an alternative reality where all fans have unlimited funds to see their favorite artists.

Why don't these projects get into Xray lasers or radio wave lasers?

We've been using them for almost half a century. There's even a special name for them that you might be familiar with: Maser. They work quite well in communications and have probably a large number of applications that I'll let you find for yourself if you're interested.

Of course it's well known how much money some artists make through their tours. People are willing to pay the price to see them, so good for those artists.

However, at what point will it no longer work? At some point the prices will be too high to sell out arenas. Big acts have been able to demand $1,000 or more for the best seats at giant arenas. Like so many others I can't name a single act that is active currently that I would pay anywhere near that much to see. If prices - and fees - keep going up the number of people in my camp will increase. Maybe the premium experience will be enough to offset that, but at some point demand side economics will take over.

If I can buy every single album, LP, single, and special edition an artist has ever released for less than 1/4 of what a ticket goes for - or for that matter less than just the fees for a ticket - the system seems a bit broken. Sure the live experience is different but is it worth that much?

I doubt that you've ever bothered to try to understand my posts, preferring to assume that I wrote what you wanted me to, but let me assure you that your apparent assumption is completely wrong in this case. I have never written or implied that I know the answer to that question, and your claim here that I have just goes to prove that you can't be bothered to understand what's written before making a "reply" that only goes to show your own ignorance.

Just because we don't understand or experience other higher or lower realities does not mean they do not exist. Besides, we have evidence that they do, it's just that fundamentalists refuse to consider examining the evidence and refuse to question thier own assumptions and beliefs.

The same could be said about atheists.

That is unless anyone has definitive and incontrovertible proof to the contray. I'm sure we'd all appreciate seeing it.

Remember, the lack of proof that something exists is not, in itself, proof that it doesn't exist.

I can remember when they did this with glass bottles, back in the '50s and '60s, but it was called a deposit. You paid a few cents more when you bought whatever it was, usually soda, beer or booze, and got it back when you brought in the empties, even if it wasn't the same store you bought it from. There were even homeless, or nearly homeless people salvaging them from dumpsters to buy food or whatever.