Oh, that SO. Egg on my face. But you can see where I was coming from I hope: if this were a teacher, it would seem like a rude accusation.

I think for a lot of people, being awoken from a certain kind of deep sleep can be disconcerting regardless of how it's done. It wouldn't necessarily lead to yanking someone by their hair, but I think a concern about a startled and panicked reaction is valid.

While I agree that in the context of being a nitpicky academic writer one might need to cite sources for even such banal claims, the failure to cite sources would STILL not constitute plagiarism. It would just be an unsupported assertion.

These are not second cousins. As several people have pointed out, there relation - such as it is - is not by blood, which means they are NOT COUSINS under any normal definition of the term.

Due diligence is all well and good, but suggesting that someone check the laws "to be safe" when you obviously have no idea what the laws are strikes me as going out of your way to give advice you're not qualified to give.

Really? What state considers a relationship with your uncle's wife's nephew to be incestuous?

Got it. I'd go with Wikia. Huge userbase, free, and the toolbar that they put at the top of all their pages isn't too intrusive.

Doesn't sound like he has a Dell, unless he's mistaken about it being an MSI.

While I doubt there's any good reason not to feed your child nori, I don't think the naturally occurring levels of iodine in something like sea vegetables are going to have an effect in iodine-131 uptake. There's apparently been a run on iodized table salt in China, which also has no effect on radioactive iodine contamination. Might as well pee on a wildfire. Except, in the case of North Americans and Chinese, there's no wildfire to pee on.

I mean no disrespect, but I find this "to be safe" line of reasoning to be pernicious. Putting up ineffective defenses against non-existent threats doesn't make anyone safer.

Yeah, I figured it was something like that, just couldn't puzzle it out. Long work week I guess.

"indecently owned" - I'm trying to decide whether this is a typo, and I can't figure out what the intended meaning was, or if it's a phrase I've just never heard before. What does it mean?