Sisyphus

I'm not sure what you mean. What kind of a theory are you talking about? "Linking" how?

How ridiculously asinine. Or it would be ridiculous, if the inevitible result wasn't too horrible to be funny.

Well, now that we've got dentistry, survival or breeding aren't at all tied to teeth, so I'm afraid we're stuck with these stupid things.

How could we be surpassed in humanitarian virtue? The word is named after us.

Obvious parallels? So it starts with harmless medical research, and then... we invade Poland?

Sure, giving them what they want is out of the question (especially if what they want is your destruction!), but giving them what they deserve is often counterproductive as well. It's a tricky middle ground. This is an enemy that cannot be deterred by threat of force, but it can be starved out of existence by lack of fuel for hatred.

It depends on the terrorist. If they are holding you ransom for something, knowing ahead of time that you won't negotiate will prevent them from trying. If, as is the case with those crazy mofos in Hamas, all they want from you is to die and they don't care if they die themselves, then merely refusing to negotiate and being tough is no deterrant at all, and probably does more harm than good, inasmuch as it pisses more of them off and actually encourages terrorism rather than deterring it.

The moon is already tidally locked to the Earth. It just means the same side of the moon is always facing the Earth. When the Earth becomes tidally locked to the moon, the vice versa will be true. i.e. the same side of the Earth will always face the moon, and the moon will not appear to move in the sky at all. They would still orbit one another, but they would both be rotating at the same speed, which is in turn the speed of revolution about each other. Kind of like as if there was a giant tether holding them together.

I would say no. The last time there was a draft (Vietnam), it worked out horribly. If they tried it again there would be riots in the streets. Even when the draft had good public approval, draftees on average have always proved far less effective and far more death-prone than volunteers. If it comes down to it, we would withdraw our forces before we would institute the draft again.

I agree with mooeypoo completely that any life we find is likely to be so different from us that their motivations would be nothing like ours and communication likely impossible. However, I also agree that if other life finds us, that does imply all sorts of things about them that make them very similar to us, indeed. They would have to be very advanced problem solvers with some kind of scientific worldview, and they would have to find us interesting and worth investigating in order to bother coming here at all. It would even be reasonably likely (though not at all necessary) that they would be social organisms with advanced "language" of some sort, so real communication would be an eventual possibility. Of course, it could also just be a hive mind that never had any need for external communication, and so never developed it. Or the reason they came might not be mere curiosity, but also to exterminate a potential rival before we become dangerous. Or they might even be Saberhagen berserkers, intelligent, self-replicating weapons gone haywire and determined to destroy all life they encounter.... but hey, whatever.

Well that's the weirdest thing I've seen in a while. It's even weirder that they seem to have know idea what causes it. Is it possible that they haven't done any genetic testing on her?!

I don't get it. 1 x 2 = 4?

Neat! I just wish there was more info on the animals themselves.

I don't think someone in their early 20s is necessarily unqualified for that kind of a job, I just think they're very, very likely to be unqualified.

Come on now, you know Bush doesn't care about stuff nations willingly do together.

Oh, so the Mets and the Braves are all-volunteer teams, then? Interesting.

Yeah, just considering how much cooler it gets at night, the oceans would all be frozen over within a couple weeks. Why.... what are you planning?!?!?

You think only since 9/11? Hell, I could "monitor chat rooms" myself just by going to them, couldn't I? There's no way this is a Patriot Act thing, if that's what you're getting at.

How long have they been monitoring chat rooms? That's always been legal, hasn't it?

Yeah, almost makes me think I'm missing something. I wonder if looking at campaign contributions would shed any light on the matter...

I don't think the leap was so much the discovery of metals as agriculture. You have agriculture, you have free time and thus division of labor (not everybody is a hunter/gatherer), and you can stay in one place and therefore have a place for more stuff (there's a point to producing more than you can carry on your back).

Either that, or he doesn't take the spending seriously as anything but pork-barrel bribes for swing states.