I paid my $5 to sign up on MetaFilter and have been having rational troll-free discussions for years.

the damage to my hearing (after 20 years of listening to good music) wasn't repaired

I hate to break it to you, but Rush sucks. It appears that your hearing loss has been in vain.

...and I suppose a guy with a link in his sig for "get paid to take surveys online" would know a bit about this subject, no?

I'm supposed to believe a story like this coming from a user with a six-digit Slashdot ID? Likely story. Tell your grandpa you're done taking dictation for the day.

I am a native English speaker and I did not hear of habeas corpus until recently.

Dubya, is that you?

it will be useful for some of our descendants to have a record of our communications, thoughts, hopes, dreams, etc, plus the real reasons why W invaded Iraq

"He done tried to kill my daddy :("

It even fits in 140 chars. Just imagine, the memoirs of the greatest men of our generation, preserved in the twitter DB for future generations to re-tweet. It brings a tear to one's eye.

Ah, that's a good point. And to think, I was only minutes away from pressing the big, red "launch" button on my spacecraft to fly myself over there for a drink.

Your statement is one of the stranger things I've ever heard. Yeast is certainly involved in the fermentation process of wine, but they quickly die after consuming most of the inherent sugar in the grape juice and fall to the bottom of the vat. The dead yeast cells are collectively referred to as the lees and wine is, after fermentation is finished, racked off of the lees, leaving them behind.

There should be absolutely no active yeast in a bottle of wine. That is an undesirable trait to say the least. Vintners either let the yeast die naturally, or kill them by adding alcohol (to make fortified wines) or by chilling the fermentation vat (to produce dessert wines, before the yeasts consume all the sugar) - all before bottling. The only kind of wine that ends up with any yeast cells in the bottle is sparkling wine, which can accept a dose of yeast cells and sugar immediately before corking, which produces the CO2 that leaves the wine under pressure, but even those yeast cells die out shortly after bottling.

Unless you can bring me some hardcore scientific literature backing up your bizarre claim I'm going to just have to pretend you don't know what you're talking about. I'll start by saying that in my defense I just finished reading _To Cork or Not To Cork_ by George M. Taber which is nothing but a lengthy discussion about how wine ages and which closures are appropriate for proper aging. Not once in that book does it discuss wine in bottle aging due to active yeasts.

To be fair, I think that the current arrangement is probably better than if it were 60% scientists, 20% politicians, and 1% lawyers. Yes, it's fun (and easy!) to hate on lawyers, but there are some places where they are actually needed. A house of legislation is one of them.

That being said, it probably wouldn't hurt things if that 1% scientists was 5%...

It looks like Destro has finally succeeded in getting the Weather Dominator online...