There is a famous live broadcast by Hitler from the 1936 Olympics. The Nuremberg rally was in 1934 and was filmed by Leni Riefenstah. I don't believe it was broadcast on TVl. Both are available today on DVD so you can judge if it is distinction without a difference.

Word. Teddy_bear's Tomato ND USB Mod FTW!

The only personal letters I've ever written were to Father Christmas, then to various old relatives after Christmas/New Year. For some reason Santa never got a thank-you note :-(

So far, I've received one personal letter.

Nobody uses facebook anymore, it's too crowded.

I'm pretty sure you meant to say that you and/or some of your friends don't use it anymore. Many people still use Facebook.

Will it eventually be possible to have a social-networking standard so that anyone can run their own server, just as with email? In that case it wouldn't matter if one friend uses facebook, another myspace, a third linkedin; they would all adhere to the same standard and so which particular social-networking service you use would become irrelevant.

PS: I apologize for being lazy but I haven't thought about this at all, so there could easily be some glaring reason why it can't possibly work.

I don't own a 10D, but I have an old 35mm SLR, and his complaint was that the old SLRs had the shutter speed on the shutter button. You could switch to 1/60 then 1/30 then back to 1/60 at under a second. I've not seen that dial on the digital SLRs I can think of at the moment, so it's a feature that's hidden. Either the shutter speed is all auto, or it's in a menu that you can't see while lining up the shot and takes longer than one second to change. How do you fix the shutter speed at 1/60, then change it to 1/30 for a single photo, then back to 1/60 on your camera?

> The last couple versions of SQL Server have allowed encryption down to the
> field level. I would be surprised if Oracle and other competitors weren't
> offering similar functionality.

Postgresql and Mysql do.

I'll do you one better, a bank I had an account with wouldn't accept passwords with ~!@#$%^&*()_+/\?|`, etc, in them. Only ([a-zA-Z0-9]*) was allowed!

In the 21st century. Pretty fucking impressive.

No we didn't. I remember as early as 1988 thinking that 1.44 MB floppies did not have near enough storage since downloading some of the new games, like Space Ace, took up 6 floppies and it took forever at 2400 baud. I also remember thinking that I hoped I had enough floppies to store it that wern't bad... because at least 20% of the HD floppies in a box always turned out to have some defect.

So no, 1.44MB floppies in the 90's were anything but "generous" when it came to storage.

C's were a passing grade for you? Wouldn't have minded going to your school... But yes, I agree with your main point. I think that kids should be motivated the same way that they will be later, and not treated like it is "expected" of them to put in their all for a reward that is not immediately visible to them.

What makes you say this is all about money? It's just as much about attention. The president and Congress spend at least a third of their time dealing with an unnecessary war. That's time they could be looking at all sorts of domestic reform programs that would improve our society in concrete ways.

Well, you didn't have to use Apple's tools. I used Turbo Pascal, Lightspeed/THINK C/C++, Absoft FORTRAN, and somebody's BASIC. And you didn't have to go through Apple's store and approval process. Those innovations came much later. The SCSI port was standard, but of course, who else used that? and keyboard, mouse etc... but it did have a standard RS-232, didn't it?

Price fixing is still price fixing.

The good in this case, is labor.

It doesn't matter which side of the cash register you are on, if you agree with others to fix prices at which you will buy something, you are violating anti-trust law.

How hard can it be to not mess up units while talking about energy and power?

How far can a 80 mph car go?

I would provisionally agree with you that evolutionary theory is more mature than big bang theory (though I think it is pretty debatable), but surely you realize that evolutionary theory has an almost exactly analogous limitation regarding its initial conditions. That is, it explains how life has evolved and diversified, but not the particular manner in which life came to be.

It is generally believed that similar "selective" pressures acted on the molecules in the "primordial soup" (or something) to favor those which could remain coherent longer and/or reproduce better, but other than demonstrating that increasingly complex organic molecules can be synthesized inorganically, we have nothing but guesses at this point about the origin of life itself. It now seems you must stop believing in evolution, because we haven't explained the origin of life a whole lot better than we have the origin of the universe!

Do you know why evolution is a ridiculously strong theory? It is strong not so much in the sense that it explains everything, but in that it could explain everything, and there is no other theory that can come even close. Many details of the history of evolution still remain fairly mysterious to us (though the rapid progress of genetic technology has made a lot of inroads), arguably at least as mysterious as the macro-history of the universe. Even though there is still a lot of debate about the details of the big bang (a debate about which I am admittedly extremely ignorant myself), I don't think anyone questions that the universe is expanding, and that it was a great deal smaller. Rejecting that is just as ridiculous as rejecting Darwinian evolution.

"Big Bang" theory is not as widely accepted (certainly according to the poll) as evolutionary theory, but I would argue that this stems from ignorance alone. Much of the current literature in evolutionary biology (not biochemistry, though) is still comprehensible to the layman (or at least someone with a Bio 101 background). The same cannot be said of papers at the leading edge of astrophysics. In that sense, astrophysics is a more mature science, for all that it is younger. High school students will be tested on evolutionary theory if they take AP Bio, but the same cannot be said of astrophysics and AP Physics BC.

Finally, I find it absurd that you claim the origin of the universe is inherently inexplicable without resorting to "magic" without any evidence at all (and probably without any understanding of astrophysics), while in the same breath claiming that anyone who does not accept strong scientific theories is a moron. What is exactly is the rational basis for your beliefs about the beginning of the universe? The only thing you can say is that you do not know, or (if you had done your research, maybe) that "we" do not know. It may even be inexplicable...now.