In that context, it's childish emotional abuse at best. Violence would be if they all ganged up on Billy and beat him with chairs (maybe I went to a bad school)

BoingBoing doesn't owe you anything. Time for a mass unbunching of panties, no?

Well, they mostly did use regular non-moving car bombs. The thing is that a bus was heavy enough to break through most of the security barricades of the day, into Army barracks and whatnot, when a car would have bounced off.

The protocol for that was usually either that your car was nicked from your house or that you were carjacked- you lost your car, but you were OK. The bus drivers weren't allowed off the bus.

You'd have 96 years before the First Crusade, it'd be OK.

Using buses as bomb delivery systems is nothing new- it was done here in Northern Ireland for 25 years. The methodology was usually i) put bomb on bus ii) tell driver and tie him to his seat iii)tell driver his family will be shot if he doesn't drive the bus wherever you want the bomb to go.

Hate to say it folks, but this technology would have saved a few blameless bus drivers.

What I think she's trying to do is limit the fear of failure. What no-one other than Rowling has pointed out is that 99% of these students have *not* encountered failure in any concrete sense in their own lives, and have had fear of it used as a stick to motivate them since they were barely more than toddlers. Certainly at that stage in my life, I was much more afraid of failure than of death.

Economic reality is stopping them from doing that. That, and the fact that as soon as they collectivise, they'll be shut down by loggers and the government. Bootstraps much?

The small-c conservative meme that we must be tolerant of intolerance, lest the intolerant lose their shit, is very very strange.

Dreads are an entirely different proposition in terms of the only rational argument here, hygiene. Even then, though, if they are properly tied back and covered in the same way that all long hair in a kitchen should be, there's no reasonable objection beyond "I just think it's icky." Which is fine. Reasonable people are beholden to let you have that idea, but not to allow you to get people fired.

The Dublin accent sounded like the bizarre Hollywood Oirish that turns up in TV, which is to say wildly inaccurate; the Belfast one was completely incomprehensible, but the only known American who can get it right is Dustin Hoffman. Even Liam Neeson can't do it perfectly, despite being from another city in the same county, Ballymena- their accent is very different. There are quite a few Belfast accents, despite it being a small city on the grand scale of things, which is one of the reasons that it's only really possible to learn it from a native. FWIW, Hoffman's recorded snippets of Belfast are old-fashioned South Belfast.

The English ones were all right, if forced, and the Scottish one had one good Glaswegian vowel.

I'm sure the American ones were great- sure yez all sound alike anyway ;P

God save us from Loughborough Polytech. The idea that phone transmissions *wouldn't* increase alpha waves is pretty nuts- alpha waves are basically just generalised electromagnetic activation associated with attention. They fluctuate very substantially all the time. Hell, I can increase people's alpha activation *just by talking to them*!!! So can you.

The delta-wave study has a little more interest, though.

Sounds pretty accurate to me- I have friends who've spent a great deal of time in northern Tanzania. The Maasai do indeed drink a mixture of milk and blood as a dietary staple- protein without having to slaughter your precious cows.

Sometimes, when people who have no first-hand experience of the situation are fanatically defending their monetary support of organisations who have murdered your family members within the last 30 years, it's tempting to shout.

I have close friends whose families were IRA soldiers in the 1970s, and even they hold considerable contempt for the blind cheerleading of Irish-Americans like Jeff. Nearly 2,000 civilians died during the Troubles, of a population of less than 1.5 million- a price Jeff's willing to pay for my freedom. How nice of him. The PIRA campaign entrenched unionism to the extent that it has prolonged partition, as well as sectarianism which will likely persist for another century.

@Jeff: As a genuine Irish person, I should probably inform you that there's no such thing as the Irish Orphans' Fund. The closest thing is the late-Victorian Irish Soldiers' Widows & Orphans' Fund, which paid donations to the families of Irish soldiers serving in the British Army. I don't know who's really been getting hold of your money, but it's always worth doing your research. If you want to help Irish kids in difficulty, donate to Barnardo's in Ireland.

I'm not the world's biggest fan of Anon, but it's not fair to say that they had a campaign against feminist bloggers. They had a campaign against a woman who publicly posted that she wished her teenage sons dead- she felt that, because they were male, they would inevitably grow up to be violent rapists. Her posse defended those views, and got a ragging for it.

This isn't strictly news- it's been known for a long time that in, for example, Ancient Greece, blue and shiny bronze were regarded (and maybe therefore perceived) as exactly the same colour.

The whole idea of calling a policeman "sir" is freaky to me, and it would bother the majority of cops I know too. Perhaps it's a cultural thing, but here everyone would expect to be called "sir" by the police, unless they were being a spectacular arsehole while being arrested (and that included the heavily-armed police who were a routine thing when I was a kid). The police called you sir, and the Army called you "mate", and you avoided being conspicuously friendly to either.

The notion of police officers as public servants rather than enforcers of the penal codes seems to have lapsed in the US, if it ever existed.

I believe you posted #34? Apologies if it was tongue-in-cheek!

#34- so, do you have knowledge beyond Scripture of the nature of Hell, or do you just really hate radiatiors?

My favourite Aberystwyth headline is still "Local Woman Dies", from this summer. In which a local woman, late middle-aged, unremarkable in any way, died of natural causes. Brilliant. 'Course, the year before, in the Aberaeron paper (tiny tiny village) we had "INSIDE A WEST WALES CRACK DEN". That was pretty good.

"Why no, I assumed you were talking about the incident at My Lai when an elderly woman fell over, and was helped to her feet by a GI."

BrookSP- I'm not a fan of libertarian politics, but surely giving the federal government *more* oversight and control over your private business would be a bad thing? Or are you the sort of libertarian who likes corporate freedoms, but not personal freedoms?

@ Zuzu- that's just what I was trying to say- I assumed that since DCER didn't recognise the situation as not being zero-sum, they wouldn't understand the term!

Precisely. The Coke analogy is mightily flawed in that it is a finite resource- what is happening is that this "McDonald's" are trying to serve all of the Coke (for the analogy, there is infinite Coke) through a single 5mm pipe, while still promising free refills to everyone. A thirsty person arrives. and "McDonald's" blames him rather than their pipe.

Buckshot's called buckshot for a reason :)

Jeff- your concept of "before" the universe is meaningless, since there was no time for such a phenomenon as "before" to exist. And you can't claim that God is outside the universe- for if that is true, either the universe is not the universe or God is not God.

Natural selection can be and has been directly observed- surely a creator who sets up a self-replicating system capable of endless complexity without interference is more perfect than one who has to perform a miracle every time two moths have sex?

"Science" does not "claim" to have *any* answers- it is not a monolith but a process of constant enquiry whose primary goal is to prove itself wrong whenever possible, in the hopes of eventually achieving understanding rather than "simple" faith.