Good Point! No absolute positives in the responses.

I've pretty much given up on incoming calls on the land line at this point and don't give the number out to anyone.

What I need is some sort of small mac based program that answers my land line on the second ring and then plays a random series of chat-bot style queries and responses that I will record in my own voice.

Bonus points if the software can detect pauses from the other caller before playing it's responses. Extra bonus points if the software can detect the asking of a question by the caller. Extra extra bonus points if the software can also record both sides of the call so I can listen to the hilarity later.

I am upset about these kinds of situations not only because it's a clear abuse of power but also because thoughless actions such as these waste millions of taxpayer dollars.

Here's what I think could work as a deterrent to abuse by government officials...

For every lawsuit that is lost by the city, county, state in similar matters... the offending department has their next yearly budget reduced by half of the judgement. So if the police department does something bad and ends up settling out of court or loses a court case to the tune of 1 million... then their next yearly budget would automatically get reduced by 500k.

There has to be some sort of penalty to government workers that is more meaningful than just dipping into the general budget (our tax dollars) to pay for mistakes.

I hate to break it to you but America's pilgrims were not America's revolutionary founding fathers. See most of us here on this slashdot world wide web site tube thing have been a book learnin' for quite a while now.

What we are witnessing in Texas is a increasingly desperate grab at relevancy by the religious zealots. The want as much control of the public school system as they can possibly have but it won't work in the end.

Whispering in children's ears that all that "science" stuff just might be a lie or that the country was founded by god-fearing conservatives is what the zealots imagine will make kids more open to their religion but it won't.

The zealots themselves don't even bother to pay heed to their own teachings... and god help us all when they finally lash out like a rat backed into a corner

Creationism and Evolution can indeed exist together and I have no problem at all with the idea of "intelligent design". Personally, I've learned that there is more to life than meets the eye and science fiction is, I believe, a very healthy mind expanding way to look at life. My problem with creationism being taught in schools is that Christians want to insert their beliefs in our text books and nothing else.

I think it would be great if science teachers could theorise that super-intelligent aliens were responsible for life on earth or could talk about the plethora of creation theories that the world's many religions believe in.

There are quite a few that talk about exactly how the universe and the planet earth were created and it's great to think about.... as long as your "higher power" could just as easily be Nyx, the goddess of the void as it could be Jehova the Christian god that brought our universe into being then why not?

It's pretty obvious now! We live on a metric planet, eh?

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