I don't want to own a gun. They're dangerous and I don't want one of the damn things around a house.

However, I think that we've got to expect political instability ahead, and I want to be able to defend my family. Just like in the LA riots, the police will be overwhelmed.

I think George Lucas hit on something when he said we are at a loss because we don't own the right to our own image. Photographers should not magically have the right to take pictures of whatever they want, or whoever they want, and then own it. I prefer a privacy-based society.

Pigs are intelligent, thoughtful animals, and often nicer and smarter than most human individuals. Bacon is tasty. Apparently, human meat tastes very much like pig meat. We have barely glimpsed the culinary possibilities of cannibalism.

If the terrorists want to blow something up in the USA, they're going to be able to do it. We're an open society. That means you can buy the ingredients necessary to build a car bomb at Wal-Mart, Pep Boys and CVS within about an hour.

I don't think any government on earth is competent enough to monitor all of its citizens all the time, so I think we should probably take a view similar to the one people have in Israel. Security is tight, but you know there will be attacks and that life is never certain.

This might be an irrelevant question, but what are the policies of other superpowers (China, Russia, India, EU) toward torture? Is there a web site that lists these somewhere, and who watches the watchers?

The term "sheer genius" is overused here.

They look really cool. I wouldn't pick one up, but they're graceful and beautiful in the water.

Here's the thing with net-savvy writers. People who hide behind cutsie little log-in names and slam our hard work after reading three paragraphs used to be able to revel in their anonymity and self-anointed expertise. Well now the writers can actually read the posts, and have the option to respond.

Let's actually talk about the work.

You assumed I wanted a repetition of the past.

What I want is quality, not a string of cliches.

You, like all writers, must face criticism. It is not personal, even if you try to make it so.

I respect Iron Maiden's work. It is musically respectable. I don't like it however. That also is not personal.

Did anyone else notice the excerpt is overblown trash? It was a collection of cliches that read like something out of a high school lit mag written by the guy in the Iron Maiden tshirt who always played D&D.

The most recent NCVS data (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2003) indicate that men commit 79% of assaults and robberies. Arrest data show a nearly identical pattern, with men comprising 77% of those arrested for assault and robbery (FBI, 2003).

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2294/is_11-12_52/ai_n15395183

They didn't have data for bums.

We need device convergence here.

A laptop, a cell phone, a watch, a camera, and an ebook reader? How about an Asus Eee with a webcam and an eInk display instead.

The experience of quietly sitting reading a book is something that can't be replaced easily with an e-book reader.

I think Sue's completely right on this one. Books require no plugs or wifi.

If you aspire to such grandeur as eating five portions of fresh fruits and vegetables every day or paying health insurance premiums, you'd better make close to $100K.

Ain't that the truth. It seems to be getting worse, too. $20 used to buy what $50 seems to now.

What good things come from payday loan companies?

If there are none, why do we allow them to exist?

It seems an extreme response to yank the site, instead of forcing it to remove specific documents. Or am I a clueless ingenue without a nose for modern life here?

"No Gods or Kings, only Man."

And humankind is doing such a great job...

I don't buy it.

This is either a "signal" to China or Russia to back off, or there was something on that sattellite we're not supposed to know about.

Whether that's super-secret optics that can measure penis length from space, or some kind of elite breeder reactor, I don't know.

You know, this comes from the genre of postmodern stories that all try to be clever, but cannot hide the fact that they're the same product.

No new ideas. A slightly new combination of steampunk, cyberpunk, post-apocalyptic, and the characters are neurotic slags of exactly the same nature as you'd find in a soap opera from corporate America.

Does anyone seriously think this comic says anything profound, or important past Friday?

20 years ago, I was that kid. This isn't easy to say but...

I think the cop should have been more respectful. I think skateboarders need love because most of us kids, then or now, come from families in various stages of disrepair. He should not have taken down the kid even if he was being annoying.

However, he was right. Skateboarding can wreck many public areas, surprisingly. If you learn to live carelessly, passing the buck onto others for your bad behavior, you never fully figure yourself out.

It might have been a mixture of asshole and love, but at least the love was there somewhere.

"If you are capable of putting away your gun for a few days, why don't you? "

I think the point of having guns is as a deterrent. People around here keep their hunting guns locked away all season, but hanguns are kept at the ready in case the city's crime wave explodes outside its boundaries.

Did you know that not all neighborhoods have the same chance of crime occurring in them? That some areas are small communities where people don't want to be raped, robbed, and beaten? That when they defend themselves, they're not taken advantage of?

I'm not a big fan of guns, at all. But I've seen why people carry them and have stopped being critical of guns as a result. You can't end violence by disarming everyone.

Deep sea suicide bombers?

Borrowing a page from Jonathan Swift, maybe we should just eat the fat people. Problem solved.

Freedom means the ability to eat yourself to death if you want to.

It also means the rest of us shouldn't be obligated to pay for your medical care or burial.

Something about this law grosses me out, and I'm not that fat... yet.

He needs another $10m to expand the house and move the guest quarters another 2 miles from the master bath.

A mirror:

http://technical-writing.dionysius.com/resources/NIS_Options_Analysis_Outcome.pdf

It's the documents you don't see that hurt you worst.

Less consumable junk, less landfill.

If you've ever socialize with a pig, you may never eat bacon again. They're intelligent, expressive animals.

New url for earth abides:

http://www.amazon.com/Earth-Abides-George-R-Stewart/dp/0345487133/

I find DRM insulting because it always wastes my time, uncompensated, for something that rarely works and never deters pirates.

That's not to say I'm against Intellectual Property. I proudly support it. I don't support the parasitic industries that rise up around it, nor do I support their insipid products, which is why I have not bought a CD from a major label since 1992.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald's_Restaurants

A helpful link. Numerous people burn themselves similarly with hot liquids in the home, and have no one to sue for it.

http://www.kidshealth.org/parent/firstaid_safe/emergencies/burns.html

If you're looking for good guys and bad guys in this world, I suggest dealing instead in shades of gray, because that's all life offers.

I think Jeff makes an interesting point, one I'm not sure how I feel about. Those are the delicious ones.

Personally, I'm all for isolationism. As far as I can tell, 99% of the world are crazy, stupid and/or really mad, and they're going to go on starving themselves into submission, killing, bombing, or starting corrupt governments.

I just don't care, and I think that's the moral high ground. Fix yourself, fix your family, fix your neighborhood, village, town or small city, but leave the rest of the world to its own devices. Nobody likes a teacher's pet.

The reason they have such a EULA is for the irrational people, such as someone who would sue McDonald's because their coffee is too hot.

If you read the legalese, it says that the site cannot directly incur damages to you, which is roughly equivalent to what the law says but is a clarification that could help protect from a lawsuit.

I'm more miffed by the tendency of every service-style website to want me to have a specific login for that site, and to send me their "newsletter," which is usually a bunch of spammy business monologue and a few links to 0.25% off coupons.

New genetic evidence, however, backs up a chilly northwestern arrival to North America from Siberia about 12,000 years ago, via a temporary land bridge spanning the Bering Strait. The findings further challenge an alternative idea that humans sprinkled in to both North and South America on open sea voyages 30,000 years in the past.

http://www.livescience.com/history/071127-genetic-bridge.html

Looks like they got here first, Spock.

I think this is a response to what happened when we got all the evacuees from Katrina here in Houston. The murder rate doubled in many areas, as did pedophilia, rape and other crimes. No one seems to care about the quasi-victimless crimes, like drug use, but many people are annoyed at the violent crime. It's an interesting response, because I am willing to bet their next response is to require any state sending evacuees to do the same.

What a strange world we live in.

Forgive me for saying this, but this style of ad has been done before. Furthermore, it didn't have much effect back then, and probably isn't now. People need to be receptive to the message before it's going to take any effect.

You can't just bludgeon them with emotion and induce them to care about something they don't. Yep, it's one of the downsides of freedom. I wonder if humanity will get it together before we wreck our environment? Practical answer: "probably not."

We're also awash in such emotional calls to action. Lost kids, charities, jailed terrorists, etc. The population is overdosed on this stuff and it's not working.

Oh, a sexual reference. We should all be interested, because it's forbidden.

Seems immature to me.

Artistic content: zero
Learning: zero
Betterment of humanity: zero

Summary: zero.

They only hold off if you're un-hypoglycemic enough to shout, "Don't tase me, bro!"

It's OK, the Russians and Chinese are both getting more militaristic, so these missile silos won't be lonely for much longer. I even wonder how many of us want humanity to survive such a conflict.

I'll take the Mafia code. The "Cowboy Code" reads like gov't propaganda.

If we don't agree, we label it Pseudoscience and never attempt to find a solution. How perfectly Stalinist.

Well, that'll save the world. If the other 6 billion people just do the same to their 17,000 square foot garages, we'll have the environmental catastrophe licked in no time.

Actually, Jenkem is real. The BBC reported on it, but only in Africa. The Sheriff's department has been spending too much time reading the internet, and the editors here need to read more carefully, as there's no indication Jenkem is smoked, only inhaled.

The whole thing makes me wanna barf, as does the thought of more of my tax dollars going to save idiots from themselves. Stop drug enforcement now.

Meditation isn't religion. It's just calming your mind and making your thoughts deliberate and un-neurotic. A neighbor of ours used to do it and it kept her good and sane through some hard times.

Um, neither of those *novels* were ever published in a *magazine.*

Both authors started out publishing serials.

You didn't notice the point, which is that most of today's writing is crap, and that's why the readers aren't there.

If literature and sci-fi want to continue existing, they have to get more relevant to their readers' lives.

Let me know when someone writes online Sci-Fi as good as "Stranger in a Strange Land" or "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" I haven't see it, with no lack of looking!

This one struck a nerve for me:

http://www.chrisblanc.com/blog/culture/2007/10/15/blog-action-day-the-environment/