Except the vast majority of gladiators were slaves or prisoners with no choice but to participate.

Some might say athletes are no different, but I'd disagree.

All else equal, taking fighting away from hockey might increase the number of brain injuries. If you take away the players' ability to settle disputes by trading blows, they may decide to retaliate in another way, such as hard checks which involve much greater force and much higher potential for brain damage.

Playing piano forces you to use both hands simultaneously. As a righty, it is a challenge for me to get the same amount of control from my left that I get from my right. No matter how much I practice with my left hand individually, I still don't feel the same power as I do from my right. This could be because most piano music has the left hand simply keeping rhythm while the right must be more expressive, leading with the melody.

Except in the case of a presidential election, if your protest vote is for a candidate with no chance, it has the potential to help elect your third choice instead of your second. This does much more damage to voter satisfaction than simply voting for candidates with a chance to win.

What America needs is a change in voting system so we don't lose information from voters who have more than one candidate they would be satisfied with.

Maybe you're talking about this story about a Japanese village that built a shrine that warned people not to take shelter at a particular hill in case of tsunami. Could be wrong, just couldn't find anything relating to Fukushima.

How many five-year-old cannibals can you beat up?

Although not LA itself, the Port of Los Angeles/Port of Long Beach could potentially experience a locally generated tsunami. There is a fault line under Catalina Island off the coast of San Pedro, and a quake of magnitude 7.5 can cause landslides large enough to generate a tsunami to affect the two ports. This, however, has not happened in recorded times and is thought to be an extremely rare event. Also, the report I read indicated not all areas of the port would be overtopped by this hypothetical tsunami.

(PDF File) From the Port of LA tsunami report:

To be fair, Horowitz at the very least agrees that only the scientific community can judge whether creationism or intelligent design are science, and he accepts the conclusion that they are not.

The summary mentioned that this newly discovered star, observed at 265 solar masses, is much larger than the Eddinton limit, which is around 150 solar masses.

Nice try RIAA. You're telling gullible nerds to generate all possible melodies and publish them, only to come in and sue them for the melodies which are already copyrighted.

The best solution for individuals wanting to learn new music, inefficient in the short term but invaluable in the long run, is to learn how to play by ear and transcribe the music yourself. But I'm sure you've heard that before. Anyway here are some sheet music sites I know of, primarily piano.

• PianoSheets.org Torrent site. Registrations are closed, but says you can go to their IRC channel to apply.
• Piano Files Digital sheet music trading site. List your collection, then e-mail others to request sheets from their list to trade for.
• GamingForce Video Game forum, but also has a broad range of sheet music. Have to register to see the forum; once you do, it's under concert hall > musician's library.

In case anyone does not already know, IMSLP is a great site for public domain sheet music.

That's not quite correct. The US will start working with synthetic life in a quarter century, while those countries who do not recognize US patents will start much sooner.

Patents are one thing that stops innovators from entering established markets. But of course it's always the evil market's fault when people don't get what they want.

I don't see how the free market is the problem. Public schools just value money more than proper textbooks. Plus, even if Texas is such a huge market, they only account for 8% of total population of the country.

Perhaps the root cause of the problem is parents sitting their in front of the television for hours every day, where they are exposed to these evil advertisements in the first place.