Would a dog be any less happy in a freakshow? I don't begrudge the woman her money, but the reasoning seems a little unsound. It'd probably get lots of attention and as a valuable item would get well looked after, too.

Earnest - that's exactly what Credit Unions are for!

Not having to leave room to stash the pilot sure makes things easier!

It waggled a bit just after they planted it - things still have mass and momentum on the moon - that's all it'd need to waggle.

That's how the Oyster card works in London - you have a card and keep recharging it.

That site though - some clever ideas but the webmaster needs to learn about optimising pictures for the web - 600kB for a small pic is absurd.

Seems fair. Then again, most people wouldn't want to see me running around shirtless anyway. That doesn't stop me in the garden or at the allotment when it's hot, but I wouldn't inflict it on the general population.

Eau you have Cats - would that be Chateau?

Which end of teens makes a difference - there's a world of difference between thirteen and nineteen. Neither is great as an age to start having kids, but one's far far worse than the other.

Don't write off bird flu yet. It's happily evolving in the Far East and will be along eventually.

Now, there's a point - how do creationists view the emergence of new strains of virus? It's hard to see how they can say it's all pre-existing.

You can't "decimat(e) up to a quarter of the population".

To decimate something means to kill one in ten, from the Roman military punishment.
The question is, if a pandemic comes, will the world be better or worse for it? Population crash would be very disruptive (quite apart from the suffering) but would it leave a simpler more open world with less competition for resources?
At present people live in areas which are not really suited for humans because of overcrowding. Would they be free to migrate into areas freed up by the death of half the world's people?
Or, would the turmoil that follows such a fall lead to more and bloodier wars than we've ever seen?

Our downstairs loo flushes with 2 ltrs on half flush, 4 on full. I don't recall ever having to flush it twice, which is lucky since it's fed from a 200 ltr rainwater barrel and it's been dry here in Shropshire for weeks.

And ain't it a nuisance having so many variants.

Robertson and Torx would cover just about everything except for fine cabinetry, for which slotted still looks nice.

In the 80s I used to visit deBeer's London Diamond Sorting Office to service equipment. They had boxes of uncut diamonds lying about - looks like swept-up broken windscreen. With a lump of blutak on the bottom of my toolbox I could have had loads out of there, but (apart from being wrong) I'd never have been able to sell them.
They had a whole corridor of Bridget Riley paintings - wonderul to dawdle in front of.

One of the most galling things for athiests is to have our ordinary rational behaviour claimed as being religiously inspired by some theists.

I don't go round not murdering people because my culture's Christian heritage forbids it, I go around not murdering people because it's not a nice thing to do. I'm nice to strangers and to people who need a hand because society works better that way rather not because my world outlook is coloured by my society's dominant religion. You only need look at the commonailty throughout almost all religions and non-religions of certain basic modes of behaviour to see that it's not down to divine inspiration - if it were you'd have to admit that all religions are the same under the skin.

OK, AWH, so if you allow screening for congenital defects, what about birth accidents? Many people with cerebral palsy get that way because of a complicated birth. Would you bang them on the head? What if it wasn't apparent until the kid's one or two years old?