#6 semiotix: They should change the name of Anthrax (the deadly pathogen) to "puppies", and they'd have no trouble at all getting their clearly-labeled deadly packages delivered. ("ooh, honey, did you order any puppies? Let's open up this envelope and see what they look like!")

For that matter, if they rename "suitcase nuke" to "suitcase full of perfectly normal papers", the terrists could sneak those past airport security too.

BTW, tux high-fiving a Martian is hell of sweet.

I know this is a prank, but I'm signing up anyway, on the 1/10**9 chance that it isn't.

Yes. St. Mary, mother of God, would have approved.

Cheating was never hard in high school. Not even remotely hard.

Our teachers almost always let us bring in blank paper for scratch paper to work out problems during tests, whether the test was in math class or latin class. If they inspected your blank paper, you couldn't do this, but nobody ever did.

So you go buy an extremely fine-point mechanical pencil, and some blue-lined notebook paper. Lower quality is better here; ideally you want dark blue, THICK lined paper.

Then you simply write whatever the heck you want, entirely on the lines of the paper. With careful handwriting you can do it, and it's easily readable if you had decent eyesight, but so small and low-contrast that not even the next desk over can read it. Plus, it's *blank paper*. There can't possibly be anything written on blank paper, right? The word "blank" is right in there.

If you wanted to be extra sure of not getting caught after the fact, you simply skip ahead to the questions where you need the cheat, then copy your lines into the regular spaces. It's not cheating if you write it down during the exam, right? Then erase the tiny text you wrote (make it look like you're just thinking through the problem), since you no longer need it, and all evidence that you cheated is gone.

I'm curious about the top 10 list. Slightly more people are going from my hometown San Francisco to New York, than are coming back.

Two theories:
1) They like New York better! And stay.
2) They get murdered.

This staircase is how HP Lovecraft would reach his attic. Non-euclidean and madness-inducing. :-)

Please don't stop returning found wallets just because of this! Most people are honest.. it stands to reason that most people who pick up a found wallet are probably honest enough to return it, regardless of what the cops think.

That means every arrest reduces the possibility of some honest person getting their property returned by another honest person.

Resist the power. If you stop returning found bags, the terrorists will win. And you know who I mean.

I think the defining moment came when Diane, fleeing her inner demons by running out of the classroom, almost runs straight into Mike's shiny crotch. Hooray awareness!

They played this at the Web 2.0 conference, which I attended. It got big cheers.

What the heck is wrong with promoting oneself, anyway? The alternative is, I dunno, giving to charity or helping the homeless or something. For all I know the members of Radiohead do lots of that too, but in the context of being a band, it's pretty reasonable to try to sell your stuff.

The clue that they were selling stuff was that they were asking for some money for the download. Not demanding it, mind you, but asking for it.

Which, right there, is pretty groundbreaking. :-)

One issue that's important to me, and should be close and dear to Cory Doctorow's heart, is the rumors that 4th Ed. is eliminating OGC. They won't be doing releases of any part of the 4th ed. rules under free-to-distribute style licenses, aka the OGL or Open Gaming License.

They can dress it up however they want, but if that happens, they're going to run into serious problems with people switching to other rules so they can continue to publish without being tied down.