When the airline execs arrive for the hearing, I would first make them wait through two or three arbitrary postponements of the starting time, telling them that "unexpected rain in Seattle" is "holding up delivery of needed equipment". Much later, I would have the session suddenly adjourn for the day. As the execs grumpily start making their way back to their hotels for the night, I would have armed guards force them to stay in the darkened hearing room, angrily reminding them that any complaining would be grounds for spending the night tied up with duct tape.

As I pass out bottled water and bags of stale chips, I would run each attendee's Amex Black for the required "convenience fee for overnight use of Congressional facilities." Before locking them in for the evening, I would make sure that several bigscreens were operating in the room, playing CNN Headline News at earsplitting volume.

By the time the bailout hearing actually commences the following midmorning, the airline folk will have spent an unprecedented 24 hours living a passenger's life. The hearing itself would consist of a scowling committee chair glaring down his nose at the supplicant airline representatives, intoning "We're sorry, but this is not a compensation issue..." With that, he would summarily send them home empty-handed. Touche!

"I know dozens of Democrats; some Christian, others not. But I don't know one that "hates" Christians. So what the hell are you talking about?"

You don't have to look far, Every thread in this forum that touches on religion of any kind eventually degenerates into a hatefest on how stupid and evil Christians are. It's grating, and I speak as a Unitarian.

"I am curious. Have you no Dawkins or Hitchens fans at your church? "

Lots of them, but we can discuss differences in faith without the ad hominem attacks, subliterate flames and random doggerel that pass for argument around here. Perhaps it's the age difference. All of us in our congregation actually lived through the Sixties, and some of us go back a lot further than that.

This phenomenon has been noted many times on the interwebs: if you're a psychotic violent loser who is lacking female attention, being convicted of some horrifying crime, even one against women, you will automatically morph into a chick magnet. As you languish on Death Row, you will be deluged with marriage proposals. If you manage to have an as-told-to book about the injustice of Pig AmeriKKKan justice written on your behalf, your fame will go into overdrive. Look this up under "Mumia."

Families this size are certainly not for everyone, but only on Planet Liberal would liking lots of kids be "selfish and creepy." Small wonder that you people can win an occasional election only in event of total disaster, and that you automatically start losing again as soon as a little happiness creeps back into our lives.

I'm the oldest of eight. At the time, right after WW II, this was considered perfectly normal as people caught up on long-delayed family life. So were we "borderline selfish and creepy" in those days?

"Hmm, well, I, for one, am a little disappointed by the unstimulating responses to what I thought was an extremely stimulating article (my opinion, obviously). Some people found it overdramatic and pretentious."

This is the fundamental problem in having a science fiction author, whose world is science, trying to communicate with a bunch of English majors who were brought up by their Boomer parents to regard science as a threat ("Genetically engineered corn - ewwww! Burn the witches!"). Folks, words like 'monotonic' and 'pyroclastic' have precise technical meanings that, when understood in the context of Brin's poetic usages of them in this article, would make it possible for your ideology-fricasseed brains to actually comprehend what he was trying to say.

When I was a young whippersnapper, finding information about any subject meant leaving the house and driving to a public building called a "library" where information resided in huge stacks of printed books. Because you had to look things up manually, at a relatively high cost-of-your-time per search, casual browsing was much less common than it is today. In fact, the old-style printed encyclopedias existed mainly as the one place in the dead-tree world where it was relatively easy to have a search lead to an expanding skein of other, increasingly speculative searches.

Search engines have now made it easy for us to winnow the information available online and draw conclusions from its diversity of bias. Now imagine the potential of an Internet that contained all of the information in printed libraries! What the government needs to do for us is not vainly try to outperform Google in searching and serving data, but to exercise its legal function: fix the intellectual-property mess that keeps us from putting entire libraries online. Develop, say, a simplified legal framework for giving authors an automated share of search engine ad revenues, and the techies will happily implement it.

"That is truly a load of shit!"

...is that I just struck a nerve.

"Republicans will, without exception back President Bush on this, as they have on everything else. "

Actually the right is steaming because, while Bush has pardoned all those drug dealers and real estate scamsters, Ramos and Compean still rot in prison. There are still calls for impeachment over this issue.