If juries are ever outsourced to internet discussion groups, we're all screwed.

Judge: Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, have you reached a verdict?

Foreman: Yes, Your Honor, we have.

Judge: I direct the clerk to read the verdict.

Clerk: We, the jury find the defendant to be a n00b.

Judge: Very well. It is the judgment of this court that you are sentenced to 15 years of hard pwnage.

Back when Doom was big I spent an unhealthy amount of time in that world. One evening driving through downtown Atlanta I caught myself scanning -- completely automatically -- the high-rise condos and watching out of the corner of my eyes for incoming fireballs.

Also, the "all politicians are scum" belief is the exact thing that Obama is hoping to buck. Trust me up until this year I was right with you on that.

I'm ready to be convinced otherwise, but I think it takes a certain kind of person to make it through the gauntlet of election to high office, and that's the kind of person who puts winning first. The nice ones get pushed aside in favor of the ones willing to do what it takes. (A big tip o the hat to rare exceptions like former President Carter.)

how un-Bushlike

there should be a competition to see who can cram the most sex toys and porn into the most suspicious looking bag

Yeah but then you'd never hold public office[1] and they'd like that. Don't do it, Takuan, we need you, now more than ever.

[1] Well, except in Berkeley.

@ #13 KeithIrwin:

Yeah, melatonin is really some pretty serious stuff when taken orally.

A full dose straight out of the bottle (3mg I think, I don't have the bottle in front of me) leaves me wasted for a full day. I have to split the tab in thirds for a dose that doesn't completely do me in.

you....spread....Hedera....Helix.....???

I just sped things up a little. It would have gotten there eventually.

My sister went to William & Mary, which is one of the older schools around. The place was sporting some awesome ivy patches growing on the hundreds-years-old walls and buildings. I took a few cuttings and transplanted these in random locations around the student neighborhood at Georgia Tech. Fast forward ten years, these had taken root and spread gloriously.

Have they not figured out where kids come from?

If they don't like kids ... stop making them!

Oh but that requires planning and self-control. Nvm. Gom jabbar: FAIL

@17:

Seeing as War tends to be a pissing match between two people who happen to have thousands or hundreds of thousands of surrogates to do their pissing for them, why not just lock the two primaries in a room to either work their crap out or finish one another off?

Sounds about right to me. Most people don't want to take us to war.

I'm betting the incidence of antisocial personality disorder is much higher in the ranks of our politicians than in the military.

Some people enjoy killing, others reluctantly do it after attack.

I've seen stats on how many enjoy the killing, it's less than 2%. Who's that author ...

http://www.amazon.com/Killing-Psychological-Cost-Learning-Society/dp/0316330116/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1212101474&sr=8-2

The primary motivator for most people is fighting for your comrades. That and acting with honor in front of your troop.

From the woman that said:

"Young people talk to me about what to do if they're being pressed for sex? I tell them (what I believe): oral sex is a hundred times safer than vaginal or anal sex. If you're in a situation where you cannot get out of sex, offer a blow job. I'm not embarrassed to tell them."

Wow, wrong on so many levels, not least of which is rewarding bad behavior.

I would expect a kinder euphemism from you Takuan

"Intraspecies predator"? Obeying a macabre Right-Hand Rule?

We're back on Mars !! YAY! And what a beautiful landing, just ONE degree off true! Simply amazingly fantastic :)

Kind of gets you right there.

Or in your case, Spock, I guess that's right here.

why is this awesome?...... because it is REAL. We all are born with a sense of wonder, we owe it to ourselves to do the work to keep that sense.

Hear, hear.

Every single launch still does it for me. "CAPCOM: Close and lock visors and initiate O2 flow." Holy cow!

Excellent audio interview with Dr. Saper on NPR's Talk of the Nation Science Friday:

http://thin.npr.org/s.php?sId=90769113&rId=5&x=1

"Buchen-Walt"

Mauschwitz

Actually, being killed by a large feline is one of my preferred death scenarios. It's quick, it's dramatic and, if a cat's going to eat your face anyway, it's more dignified if it's not an orange tabby.

Just be sure to say yes in response to I can has cheezburger?

Self-preservation is in the cells themselves. I look forward to death as an exciting adventure, but I'm still going to scream if a tiger jumps out at me.

Yep. Facing your fear works great for irrational fears, but like Antinous said, it's in our cells. The genes of anyone not responding with vigorous avoidance to the idea of their end have long since been asked to leave the pool.

what is the cure for fear?

Which leaves ... a river in Egypt? Show me another way if you can, but I've looked and I haven't found it.

Ridley Scott got it exactly right in Bladerunner when he had Rutger Hauer saying "not ... yet!"

#16:

The only Disney product that I ever liked was Hayley Mills. Maybe it's a gay thing.

#19:

I am straight(?) and I don't like Disney.

I'm straight and I liked Hayley Mills. Major childhood crush on this Disney hottie.

How different to grow up in the age of the intertubes.

what is the cure for fear?

Count coup on a nation with enough bombs to atomize you ten thousand times over?

No, that's been tried, didn't really work out well for anyone.

Is this present incipient police state their legacy? Anything but death?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terror_management

Terror management, literally, as government policy?

And of all the people who do not wake in time to interrupt the Plan?

Sadly, we may never know.

lunatic Iraqis

correction: '...lunatic SAUDIS...'

Sixty-two thousand four hundred repetitions make one truth.

It almost worked on even you for a second there.

I couple months back I caught myself almost making the same mistake. I decided from then on that every time I hear someone talking about Iraqi involvment in 9/11 I'm going to say out loud, "there is no connection between Iraq and 9/11". A little self-counter-programming.

There's a reason I removed all stuffed animals save my teddy bear from my room as soon as I became fully cognitive. I dislike things staring at me when I wake up.

Exactly. What did you your waking interrupt that they were just about to do?

/me shudders.

How about accepting the fact that other people can have view-points that are different than your own and that it is out of your control?

Sitting still, shutting up, and accepting the status quo is just what the government wants, and if we do that then the government has already won. Or maybe the terrorists have already won. Errr wait ... who's the enemy supposed to be again?

(And, please, different from, not different than. If people keep saying different than then the Chicago Manual of Style will have to list it as a valid formulation and those of us who prefer the old form will be stuck with the new one for the rest of our lives.)

(I guess that makes me a Fiscal Moderate, a Social Liberal, and a Grammar Conservative.)

#8:

You are looking at pictures of your grandma

And loving it!

I have friends who need insulin, etc. who could easily have died in there.

I take your point, but just for the record, it takes weeks to die from lack of insulin, especially if you aren't eating anything, such as when you're trapped in an elevator. The dehydration would get you long before the lack of insulin.

However, if you'd taken an insulin shot before you left your office, so it would be kicking in about the time you got back to your desk to sit down for a working dinner, then you'd really be up the creek. Convulsions in under two hours as your brain shut down from lack of glucose.

Back in the day when torture was an alien horrifying thing that only happened in corrupt nations on other continents, I read about torturers using insulin injections for just that effect.

Maybe they're just setting him up for a character arc. First he's totally anti-Linux, but over time he comes to see the tragic error of his ways ...

@ #5: I thought Steve Jobs was known to grok every now and then.

Errr, sorry, I agree with his sentiment, I just thought it was funny to replace the word man with another word that could also be taken in a gender-biased way. Maybe only if you're in junior high school, though. I was going for friendly laughter, sorry if I didn't get there.

# 1

I must object to the use of the patriarchal and phallocentric term "staff" to refer to humyn beings in general. In our post-feminist and enlightened times, I'm sure you would agree that the term "humoform" is an entirely more appropriate and gender-neutral term, especially since we now know there is absolutely no difference between males and womyn at all. Thank you.

In fairness to Heathrow, I passed through T5 today and had no problems whatsoever. I cleared border security and baggage reclaim in less than an hour, which is certainly better than I've ever achieved at T4.

Getting through check-in is hella easy if you've had 15-20000 useless bags sidelined and cleared out of your way.

the sign is a useless punishment

I don't agree really with that. It basically means that anyone who knows this isn't going to associate with him, and in a society where no one can stand alone and we all depend on each other for life, this amounts to a major hit. Shunning and expulsion from community are major punishments.

China to world: "Don't photograph my house!"
Internet to China: "Hello, Barbara!"

One hopes.

Why can't the US get out of everybody's business and clean up its own back yard?

I think you hit that nail on the head. Take the fight overseas to keep 'em distracted at home.

What I wish I'd been hearing the last six years:

"America stands for a world in which there is no torture. In which no man, no woman and no child needs to fear arrest and torment at the hands of any nation, anywhere."

Oh what a wonderful world that would be. Could have been that way, too.

I like this quote in the NY Times article:

“I think the analogy with sports doping is really misleading, because in sports it’s all about competition, only about who’s the best runner or home run hitter,” said Martha Farah .... “In academics, whether you’re a student or a researcher, there is an element of competition, but it’s secondary. The main purpose is to try to learn things ....

Doctor Farah, what planet are you on, and where can I buy a ticket? It sounds like you're in a better place.

That's really cool, WV peeps! I was conceived in your fair state.

Lucky you, and excellent post, Xeni. Those photos really capture the feeling.

Anybody here ever walk out underneath the New River Gorge bridge? You can go all the way across in the supporting understructure. There's not much between you and six hundred feet of open air but walkway and a few girders. The view doesn't suck, and it kind of feels like Darth might pop out and say "search your feelings ... you know it's true" any moment.

There's nothing much to like about West Virginia except clean air, trees, trees, more trees, mist in the morning, cool moist air when other parts of the country are melting, a relaxed pace of life, honey-gold sunsets over endless rolling mountains and some of the best whitewater on the planet.

As far as I'm concerned, West Virginia + high-speed internet access actually does equal heaven.

Yeah I'm a tree-hugger. Sue me.

Instead he invariably replaces "not-knowing" with prejudiced certainty.

WTF. There's only one right way to look at a painting? Speaking of "not doing nuanced" ...

No doubt it was a courageous act Joel, but the attention your getting here is from the choir, we already know what evils AT&T are pushing. I wonder if you didn't burn a bridge prematurely in the sense that now other potential interviewers may be hesitant to let you stand back up on the soap box, thus limiting your potential audience.

True, although I have the feeling this move was a one-bullet gun no matter which major media outlet he chose to fire it on.

... which brings us around once more to why network neutrality is so important.

If we're going to grant you the privilege of connecting your network to our public discourse, so that we may reap the benefit of that connectivity and you may attempt through competition to retain our business and earn a profit, you're going to have to agree not to filter our discourse in any way.

Major cojones, Joel. Bless you for speaking up and being articulate, reasoned, and cool-headed about it.

So, you're assuming AT&T will permit these pixels to move over their netwerkz ...

I think it should be lit up inside like a neon tube.

@Bonzo McGrue

I look forward to the time when "America" is an aspirational word again. Too many blemishes lately. I love my country, and I want it back, please.

It may come back for Americans regarding America, but I don't think it will come back in the eyes of the rest of the world. A big part of why they saw us that way (pardon me while I generalize about billions and billions of people) was that we were so much more powerful than them and to see us as anything other than well-intentioned was intolerably scary (not to mention that we actually did rescue Europe in WW2, quite heroically and at great sacrifice).

The power differential now is nowhere near as big as it once was. Post WW2, Europe was in ruins; now they have banded together in ways that strengthen their collective position. The Soviet Union was crippled by Communism; that's been replaced by a stronger capitalism. China, once lagging, is now strong in both military and economy.

Add to this the fact that all the good will built up in and post WW2, built up in freeing Eastern Europe from the Soviet regime, and resulting from the Sept. 11 attacks was squandered by our misguided national leadership, and it's hard to imagine a likely scenario that restores us to or position in the world.

Remember when you were little and you heard about strange faraway places like Chile and Venezuela where people got kidnapped and tortured by their own government? How bizarre and horrifying it seemed.

Did you see the price on the George W. Bush poster? $Free.

Vibrator and sex-toy shops are springing up just over the border in Florida.

To be fair, police encounters produce good outcomes in, what, 99.9% of cases? Or as good as can be expected.

Yes, there's nothing to see here. Move along. Here, have a Soma. "A gramme is better than a damn!"

Cpt. Tim: You made a valid point, and I didn't see anything about drawn guns in this incident.

I'm responding more to the general notion of police encounters and their effectiveness in producing a good outcome. The right thing to do, as apprehendee, in a you-passed-the-Gom-Jabbar kind of way, would be to respond calmly and rationally, following instructions, possibly getting on the ground. Still, everything about the whole notional encounter scenario seems designed to produce anything but a calm and rational response. Would I even be able to think straight? Would I even understand what they were trying to say?

It seems like what would be needed is someone on the police side who can "act calm to get calm", but how often does that ever happen.

I'm hoping if it ever came to it I'd have the sense to hold still and keep my mouth closed, but I guess you don't know until you try it.

just sayin

as was i

It also appears that while there may have been a better way to deal with the situation, they did do all they could to calm her down

Has anyone noticed that running and yelling with guns drawn and getting all up in someone's face does not produce a calming effect?