All pints are hobbitable, as long as the beer is palatable. I excuse, of course, O'Doul's and skunky yellow mystery fluids marketed as beer.

I am not surprised. If you teach several generations of Palestinian children and international Muslim tourists that the Jews have no claim to the Temple Mount, they'll begin to wonder why Jews have access to the Temple Mount.

Isn't it cultural imperialism or something to tell someone of another faith what their faith means to them or which sites are holy to them? I'm trying to figure out how one would determine that the last remaining structure from Herod's Temple wasn't Jewish and that furthermore the Mount on which Solomon built the First Temple isn't Jewish either. So far, nothing's coming to me.

I think your categories have some overlap.

There are whole professions which involve getting hung up on these things. Three that I can think up off the top of my head are copy editors, proof-readers, and language teachers. It's probable that some of them, the bad ones anyway, spend most of their time in category 1. It's also possible that some of the folks in both categories 1 and 3 are better at their jobs because they are also in category 2.

Texas allows licensed carry in restaurants where alcohol is served, but drinking and carrying at the same time is illegal. (Carrying while under the influence is also illegal, even if you're not actively drinking.) On other other hand, it is illegal to carry a gun in restaurants and other places like bars that derive more than 51% of their income from alcohol sales. These places tend to have legal signage indicating whether carry is allowed or not. Restaurant owners can also post 30.06 and 30.07 signs specifically prohibiting licensed weapons on their premises.. 30.06 applied to concealed carry. 30.07 was added recently when licensed open carry became legal.

Do you mean the alloy would have affected the strength of the spices? I suppose that could be an issue if you use baking powder with sodium aluminum sulfate in it, but I prefer my bread aluminum free.

The convergent evolution of ideas strongly suggests the validity of those ideas. It does not demonstrate that the ideas in question must always come to light. I'm thinking about calculus, specifically. Two Europeans who had no contact with one another both developed calculus, but how many ancient cultures did not discover it? The Chinese did not, nor the Persians, nor the Arabs, nor the peoples of South Asia.

In short, just because something requiring human creativity has happened in one way (or even several ways) does not demonstrate that the laws of the universe require it to happen at all. We simply cannot know that. If, however, you are right, and certain kinds of progress are inevitable, why then we should all sit back and wait for the laboratory equipment at Intel and AMD to spontaneously generate new CPU architectures. At the same time, we can wait for the computers at Apple and Microsoft to write new software and operating systems. If we feed Linus' computer enough electricity, we'll get Linux kernel version 5, eventually. We can all take a ten or twenty-year compiler break! Wouldn't that be wonderful?

The progress in question only seems inevitable because it has already happened. We can see in the hindsight the "Of course!" and "Why didn't they think of that sooner?" moments because the logic of the thing is there for all to see. At the time it was happening, it was neither a foregone conclusion, nor trivial. The fact that several people have the same idea at the same time doesn't mean the idea itself is inevitable. The idea may be waiting, so to speak, to be discovered from first principles, but its discovery is not guaranteed.

Please let us know if you actually get an answer - even a rude one - from your posts over at Perlmonks. This experiment intrigues me.

I think I understand why comments on journal entries become impossible after a while. On a role-playing forum I frequented some years ago, the practice of posting new answers to old threads was called 'thread necromancy' and was generally considered rude. I see the usefulness of such a rule on the main news stories. The best comments are useful years after the fact, but the half-life of a normal forum post is usually pretty short.

I am not sure that journals should have the same rules applied to them. Journal entries would normally have a smaller pool of commenters and therefore a greater chance that the commentariat will be personally invested on one another. They might want to go back and discuss old issues, particularly as new people find each other read backward through each other's journals.

Anyhow, here's some fodder for your test. I'll be interested to see how it goes.

It depends on the age of the drive, the manufacturer, and capacity, I think. Mostly capacity, probably. Most of the SATA drives I've taken apart recently had only one platter. A few have had two or three.

-1 The article was submitted here by Laura Weinstein herself.

well conveniently the submitter and the author of the blog are the same person. Nice of the "editor" to put maximum trolling on the frontpage.

/ one of the worst articles I've ever seen on Slashdot. That's saying something since I was around during the Jon Katz days.

This isn't like Win 8 where you can't reach some features without going through the metro desktop. All the tools are still there, Apple hasn't threatened (yet) to prevent installation from other sources outside their app store. They aren't making you use their little app display thing (which is really the same thing as the start menu in windows) and they let you change the weird backwards scrolling they introduced.

I'm really not sure what your anger is about? That OS X has changed? It's been around for nearly 14 years, of course it's changed. Are you worried it's losing its unix roots? iOS is unix based as well!

Besides what would you switch to?

Ubuntu? It has the best support in terms of "just working" but they have ADD about their interface which has changed how many times over the last five years? And now they decided they didn't get enough derision over the Unity fiasco so they're going to go recreate it with the Mir/Wayland controversy.

Fedora/Redhat? Kind of ADD on features from time to time. Less easy to get some components working with normal hardware. Redhat especially isn't as bleeding edge. I guess if you're going linux that's the better route but either way you lose the polish.

Win7? I don't get this at all. MS isn't going to support Win 7 forever and you'll be forced into the nastiness that is whatever windows they come up with next. Microsoft is trying to recreate Apple's success with a worse interface. If you don't like Apple I can't understand why on earth you'd switch to MS.

I was getting this yesterday when reading an article on Mashible. I noticed that it stopped doing it by logging out of Facebook. Probably something I should be doing anyway to prevent them from tracking me all over the place