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yourdadonapogos(tick) seems to have issues with max lengths on handles here

I chose strange because strangelets are awesome

Ruby on Rails is awesome... the best web development framework I've ever seen. There's also AJAX on Rails so you don't have to deal with any nasty JavaScript yourself.

The last date I read was 2010...

Tom Cruise doesn't believe in antidepressants because he thinks all your woes are caused by the undead souls of aliens killed on earth millions of years ago by the alien overlord Xenu, who take the form of thetans who inhabit your body and cause you harm. Drugs can't get rid of thetans! He just reached OT-VIII, you would think he'd figure out by now that scientology is bullshit...

What happens when a developer wants to torch a forest and the Sierra Club shows up and paints flags on all the trees?

I'd suggest FreeBSD, but that's just me

I thought this was awesome: http://www.freestarmedia.com/hotellostliberty2.html

Amendments banning flag burning have passed the House three times since SCOTUS ruled it constitutionally protected free speech. They've always been shot down in the Senate. Stupid as this is, there's really nothing to worry about. Even if it somehow miraculously passes the Senate and is signed by bush, there's no way it will pass the 3/4ths of state legislatures required to become part of the Constitution.

A few days after posting this I watched the Connections episode on the radiometer and realized everything I just posted was wrong... ugh

I think what you're wondering about is when the symmetry between the Higgs boson and the electron/neutrino were broken... the particles take on different properties as the universe cools... As to at what temperature these particles begin behaving identically, I haven't a clue... but that's what the physics experts are here for... the Higgs boson is, of course, theoretical until it can be detected in something like the LHC

I've certainly seen the psychosomatic potential of the human body outperform my expectations in the past... hundreds of days sounds like a bit of a stretch, though

Explained how, with one of thousands of potential Calabi-Yau spaces?

Dennett's Consciousness Explained is a great read on the issue, especially since Dennett attempts to contrive an empirical theory of the mind.

I think what you're looking for is "Cognitive Science"

Or as simple as a device with small squares of paper colored white on one side and black on the other, arrayed around a spinning mechanism. When the device is exposed to light, the mass of the photons reflected by the white side is enough to push it around.

The fundamental basis of all of this is symmetry, or rather the appearance of a fundamental lack of T-symmetry in the way the universe operates. I was merely speculating as to a possibility of how T-symmetry could be restored in the wake of the simultaneous rise of entropy (via the second law of thermodynamics) and order (via evolutionary processes). I have no figures or substantive proof of this, but I think it can safely be said that the amount of entropy life processes must create to increase order is gradually decreasing as we grow increasingly efficient. The Von Neumann Universal Constructor, once implemented, will bring about a new age of efficiency in creating order. One possible speculation from this is that once an entity emerging from the evolutionary process will eventually reach the "break even" point, perhaps eventually overcoming the second law of thermodynamics itself and generating spontaneous order for free. But that is, of course, a completely speculative extrapolation and has nothing more to do with the truth than the Laffer Curve. Anyway, you're not going to conjole anything out of me that will make you happy. It's more a philosophical/metaphysical question than a scientific one.

Red herring anyone? But my point is I trust a federal judge's opinion on the law much more than your armchair lawyering. The Fourth Amendment says: And sneek 'n' peek is a provision allowing searches without warrants. It's really just that simple...

The ACLU was wrong? Gee, at least one Federal judge doesn't think so The "sneek and peek" provisions (which don't sunset) are blatently in violation of the Fourth Amendment.

None. Everything is clearly stated as hypothetical/conjecture. On a side note, the plural of hypothesis is hypotheses, not 'hypothoses' That sounds more like a boldface lie than a hypothesis... So any unsubstantiated hypothesis is immediately pseudoscience? If that's how you feel go ahead and move the thread, but in my experience most cosmological theories are highly speculative...

Primary hypothesis: The evolutionary process (and the order it garners) will eventually overcome chaos/spontaneously broken symmetries in shaping the future cosmos Conjecture: Humanity and its descendants will able to anticipate/avoid any future cosmological events which would completely annihilate its existance AND/OR there is other sentient life in the universe which will do so (i.e. genes/memes have the potential for immortality, so let's briefly assume they are immortal) Conjecture: Consciousness will control everything within the universe but will eventually encounter the unknowability of the universe's origin per Godel's incompleteness theorem Secondary hypothesis: The collective consciousness encounters the ultimate unknowability about the universe, deems the whole exercise pointless, and commits suicide, either by restoring the universe to a state of perfect symmetry (which must inevitably break spontaneously for whatever [unknowable] reason) or God elicits a CPT(and whatever else is significant)-symmetrical negation of the entire universe, ushering in a causal reversal in which the universe deconstructs itself and returns to a state of perfect symmetry (which spontaneously breaks again) Given this model my two cosmological hypotheses would be: 1. Spacetime is a deterministic loop; the same events play out over and over again ad infinitum 2. Spontaneous symmetry breaking is non-deterministic and therefore every 'universe' born out of the breaking of perfect symmetry is chaotic and unique; therefore the universe is an enormous causal chain in which it is created and destroyed in an infinite number of ways The bottom line (conjecture): Evolution is intrinsic to the structure of the universe. Consciousness will greedily consume more and more matter and produce more and more memes. Eventually it will spread to the point that it attains cosmological significance.

I think recently the religious have tried to blur the distinction between patriotism and religion. Especially when you have certain presidents saying things like: "I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God." -- George H.W. Bush To me American patriots are those who uphold the Constitution and the liberties it provides in any way shape or form. This includes the members of the armed forces, the ACLU for upholding the Constitution in court, every hippie who has ever protested for a rights violation of any kind, and every strict Constitutionalist civil libertarian. Needless to say this definition of patriotism doesn't mesh well with the groupthink of modern day "patriots" who think patriotism means decorating your car and house with lots of flags and showing thoroughly unapologetic support for the government even when it seeks to undermine Constitutional rights. There's been a lot of that going on lately and most "patriots" don't seem to care one bit. If anything, they look at groups like the ACLU fighting the unconstitutional provisions of the PATRIOT act as being somewhat traitorous.

Or to put it another way, string theory suggests a black hole may be nothing more than an inflated string... but to accept that you'd first have to believe in string theory...

What changes is the brain. As neurons grow increasingly less able to transform and rearrange with the passage of time, the desire for novelty is lost and the desire for the static and routine increases, and thus brash liberal youths grow into cantankerous old conservative men.

I think the words you're looking for are "discrete" versus "continuous" Loop quantum gravity presupposes a discrete universe