I do think all websites, even sites like Slashdot, need to evolve.

Beta isn't evolution. It's devolution, the opposite of evolution.

By the way, I really love the comments immutability and even the Slashdot explanation for it.

almost all of Latin America don't count

According to Wikipedia:

• Latin America population: 572 million
• South America population: 387.5 million (South America is part of Latin America)
• Venezuela population: 27 million (the only South American country that's really into baseball)

Considering all Latin American countries baseball fans except South America but including Venezuela, that's gives us a rough estimate of only 37% of the Latin American population being baseball fans. You're not helping in your 'Americans aren't insular' campaing. ;-)

My guess would be 3 or 4 years, or, more probably, 30 or 40.

This seems to me (and I can be very wrong about it, of course) that mindset (the "all costs" part, which I guess includes shooting people) is something which could explains a lot about USA culture and even the government, specially the last wars. This isn't part of my culture, the Brazilian one, so you can see where do my questions come from. Many Brazilians, maybe most of us (me included) think we have a serious gun violence problem and a good part of the solution would be having less guns, not more.

Thanks for the examples and explanations. :-) I'm not against killing as a last resort for self-defense (your own or people around you), but killing someone for protecting property, not life, is really something which I just can't agree. I'm not a Bible scholar by any means, but I do believe someone who does that (killing someone for protecting property, not life) will go to hell (if it exists, something I'm not sure). Matthew 19:24: "Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." Harm criminals, even shoot them in the legs and knock them unconscious, but just enough harm to protect you and your friends and family. I agree with you about death penalty for the same reason you stated: no justice system is perfect and sending an innocent to death row is, IMHO, something that should never ever happen.

First of all, yep, I don't live in the USA. Contrary to what you think, I never thought that USA has shooting sprees everywhere nor I said that. My comments about death penalty and etc are unrelated rants about what I don't understand about the USA culture. And I'm not lecturing anyone nor saying that Brazil is better than the USA. I'd just like to see someone explain something. And please point me where I've done this. I started my post with "As a Brazilian" parodying the way the original comment was started ("As a New Jerseyan"). Summary: you're accusing me of writing things I didn't, so I respectifully think you should keep your sactimonious feces to yourself. ;-)

As a Brazilian, I'm disgusted at how some (maybe most) Americans value and money property over life. In addition, I really don't get how a mostly Christian country likes death penalty and wars so much. "Thou shalt not kill." doesn't have exceptions I know of. Jesus never killed anyone and even healed someone he could connsider an enemy at least once.

As a Brazilian, unfortunately I need to agree with you. Our education system is improving, but too slowly for the problems and neglect we've had. On the other hand, many people who didn't valued education in the past has been valuing it now, due to the economic growth and the demand for more specialized and educated labor.

This goes against the very idea of Java: write once, run everywhere. And there is at least one compiler to native code: gcj

If vact, there is: executable JAR.. There's also Java Web Start, that allows running a Java window application in a single click from a webpage, using the sandbox security. For this two options, you need the Java runtime installed

Sun didn't care for desktop Java for a long time, unfortunately.

Then someone would use imperial units, which are less useful to almost anyone outside the USA than Mini Cooper measures. ;)

In Portuguese, "Sergey" is pronounced exactly like "ser gay", which means "to be gay". Sergey Gaylord would be quite amusing. :P

You've got very wrong information here. Just 8 million cars in Brazil? The article said 8 million cars running on ethanol, not 8 million cars overall. There are almost 28 million cars running now. 25% is the amount of ethanol in the gas sold here. 85% of the current Brazilian car production is comprised of flex-fuel cars, that run on ethanol, gas or any mixture of them.

That's right, but most of the deforestation is done for wood and to open land to cattle, not agriculture. The Amazon land is not good for agriculture.

(Reposting as myself because I posted as anonymous by mistake)

I was the anonymous coward by mistake. In Brazil, raising cattle ("pecuária") is not considered agriculture, which just includes growing vegetables).

Brazil has been using sugar cane ethanol since the 70s and we never had any food price surges because of it. Most of our car production comes with engines that can use any mixture of ethanol and gas, so you can choose the best one by cost or by ecofriendliness or any other reason. Even if the sugar price raised, we could see it as a good consequence: people would eat less sugar, less calories, maybe even eating more fruit! :-) Corn-based ethanol and the US tax in Brazilian ethanol is a something completely anti-free-market in the land that people love to quote the "invisible hand of the market" as the solution to almost anything. Go figure.

The first thing I thought: "Gran Turismo" gamer becomes "Pro Race Driver". TOCA Race Driver (formerly known as Pro Race Driver in US) is a series of games that is a direct competitor of the Gran Turismo.