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The last message should be something like "What hath God wrought", or an anagram of that like "Oh. Thwart what God hug".

If Congress hadn't killed the plans for more Navy nuclear powered ships then they'd be using a lot less fossil fuels.

How's that? New submarines are nuclear, and new aircraft carriers are nuclear. The U.S. has been out of the battleship business for some time - so where are these new nuclear ships going to be? And even then, if they started slapping them on cruisers, you couldn't tell the difference in the military's overall energy consumption. And aside from the Navy's use of oil, the Army, Air Force, and Marines are more or less 100% driven by fossil fuels.

The US Navy has been researching synthesized fuels, still carbon based but derived from nuclear power and seawater, not fossil fuels. If Congress would just fund this project properly then we could see this deployed in the military very soon.

Or....Congress could completely gut every single military program and institution outside of the various Guards: Coast, National and Air. It would be more than enough for this nation's actual defense needs. Having a thousand military bases around the world and special forces deployed to 130+ countries has nothing to do with defense and everything to do with empire.

The "drill, baby, drill" people see domestic oil production as a means to stop sending so many of our warriors over to so many sandy places to die for what we can produce here.

Which is another red herring. There is no such thing as a nationalized energy sector in the United States, else the CIA would have have to overthrow its own government. Most of the oil drilled in Alaska, for example, is exported to Japan, because there is only the world oil market.

The Democrats have been openly hostile to nuclear power

As much as they've been hostile to corporate trade agreements like NAFTA and the TPP. Which is to say, not at all. Nuclear power hasn't been held back by liberals, peacenicks or Green Peace. Nuclear power has been held back by the fact that it is completely and utterly unjustifiable based on cost alone. You can't square the circle of spending 15 years building a $15 billion nuclear power plant when wind and solar are far faster and cheaper to roll out, even building in capacity across the grid to address the baseline red herring.

While many people might not like it things like domestic oil and gas production, and more pipelines, are necessary for a smooth transition away from fossil fuels.

Sorry, but I have to ask: did your eyes get a little crosseyed while writing that? We need more fossil fuel production to transition away from dependence on fossil fuels?

I'm tired of so much arguing on if CAGW is real. I want to see people discuss real solutions.

Real solutions have been around since the 70's - and sometimes the 1870's. When wind and solar are already cost-competitive with coal - and that's allowing coal to externalize most of its costs - what justification can there be for nuclear power plants? And again, we can skip the "baseline power" canard as 1) there's no such thing 2) green power generation can be spread across the grid, same as coal or nuclear 3) store excess energy for when it's needed.

If nothing else, you can use spare electricity to pump water into a reservoir, either a lake or water tower, and then use gravity to power a turbine to produce electricity. If that just sounds silly, remember what nuclear power plants do: they heat water. To move a turbine to produce electricity.

Burning more natural gas means burning less coal and oil

Until you factor in all the fossil fuels used in the production of said natural gas, in which case it's a wash. With a side order of earthquakes and poisoned ground water.

Madison was wrong.

Well, he was "only" the guy, who was writing down the items, as they were discussed during the convention. Surely, he had some insights. Maybe, you — in the 21st century — know more about the intent of those ancient legislators, but you aren't sharing... You just flatly say "wrong" — like a good little tyrant you secretly wish to be... Sigh, as they say, Statists gonna state.

Other founding fathers such as Hamilton understood the General Welfare provision very broadly.

Some citations would be useful here... As well as arguments for why we should be taking Hamilton's opinion over that of Madison and Jefferson.

But, if he was really so good, why are you proposing we "cherry-pick" Hamilton's ideas — instead of also electing the top executive ("national governor") for life — and have him appoint state governors?

I, for one, dread the thought of how this country would've looked, had that sort of tyranny prevailed — Russia, where the presudent's tenure is de-facto life-long and where he is appointing local governments even de-jure, is a very close example, actually.

Moreover, I suspect, you would've hated it too — had you even known about the man, whose opinion on "General Welfare" you advocate. You are wrong — the interpretation of "General Welfare" pushed by the Statists opens up a whole to drive a freight-train through. This was, of course, obvious for centuries. For example, that same Madison said later (1794):

The government of the United States is a definite government, confined to specified objects...If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the general welfare, the government is no longer a limited one possessing enumerated powers but an indefinite one..."

Indeed, whether it is to ban speech, confiscate guns, perform warrantless searches, seize funds and property without trials, eavesdrop on citizens' communications — the government would simply need to claim, those are done "for General Welfare". It would be a dreadfully depressing country to live in... Oh, wait...

Yes, Virginia, the United States government has the Constitutional power to tax and to spend for general welfare

Are you seriously going to argue the legislative intent with the guy, who wrote the very law? I linked to the quote already, but you are too righteous to click on some wingnut's links, aren't you? Well, here it goes by value, rather than reference:

I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.

— James Madison

Or, maybe, you are confusing "general welfare" with the Welfare-check? That must be it, Virginia... Because if Madison says, spending taxes on benevolence is against the Constitution, then it really must be...

22 trillion dollars over fifty years is 440 billion dollars a year, which is quite affordable for the US.

That we were able to afford it (sort of — the figure exceeds our current national debt), means, it is indeed affordable, no big news. The points you chose to ignore were: a) the cost of it exceeded the costs of all real wars of the Republic combined; b) the "war on poverty" is a flop — despite spending so much money, we have not achieved the goals Lyndon Johnson spelled-out, when he launched the program.

BTW, the answer to James Madison is Article

Oh, sure, david_thornley from the 21 century knows the meaning of the Constitution better, than the man, who wrote it...

provide for the common Defense and general Welfare of the United States

The interpretation you are proposing here is so wide, you can drive an air-carrier through it — sideways — and affords government limitless power. For example, NSA can claim, that their eavesdropping is for "general Welfare" (and great justice!), abortions can be banned — anything.

Or are you, perhaps, confusing the generic term "welfare" with the Welfare Program — and claiming, the Constitution's authors envisioned the program for the poor 200 years before it was (finally!) implemented?

We are semi agreeing here I think, yes he does have a right to be a dick under current copyright law.

However the girl doesn't have to write her own music just choose music which is availably legal because it is out of copyright, creatively commons licensed or similar, or just whose copyright owner chooses to allow non commercial use and being reasonable an audition isn't really commercial use even if it gets the singer a gig.
She can write her own if she wishes of course.

Secondly the composer views out of print but not out of copyright music as a gray area. So his belief is that we should respect his copyrights under the law but not other composers work. I wonder how he views his own out of print work. Welcome to civilization where in reality people obey the laws that suit them.

Maybe a classic example is prohibition, a law was put in place it was largely ignored and it was repealed. Not even mentioning the laws companies and governments break when it suits.

Millions if not billions of people infringe on copyrights which is demonstrating a lack of respect for copyright and if the people will not respect copyright as it stands, then it requires reform.

Just because the law says so doesn't mean it will be obeyed or even enforced. I live in Ireland and it works that way. Interestingly Irish Law seems to allow for restitution I have seen a number of cases where the defendant will bring money into the court for the victim of their own accord, ( appears the judge doesn't order this payment). Usually this results in a minimal or suspended sentence.

http://www.americaslibrary.gov/jb/modern/jb_modern_parks_1.html Rosa Parks broke the law when she sat down in a bus but the law wasn't just and caused a change in the law to be made. Recent copyright cases in the US have had damages awarded slashed. Civil disobedience is one method to apply pressure to get laws changed.

For a final thought the composer was willing to use and publish the girls correspondence with him which under the law is copyright to her without any payment. He could easily have given her a copy of the music she wanted. Actually she probably had it already under the circumstances she just wanted his permission to use it.
  That would have been a fair trade, she probably spent a good deal of time writing to him. Her words obviously have some value he published them and his selling price $3.99 .

If you can't say it with written words, it wasn't worth saying.

Anoka, Minnesota claims to be the early adopter of contemporary halloween in the US.

Sounds plausible. Since it is my ancestral pioneer home, I should be allowed to say the delinquents probably needed distraction. Anoka seems like Minneapolis/St. Paul's Lovecraftian "old" white trash suburb compared to other "new" white trash suburbs best left nameless. If there is a fossilized decades-old fetus to be found in a jar in a storage locker (just as an example mind you) -- it'll be found in Anoka/Coon Rapids.

Maybe its just me, but perhaps the Bush administration should focus on the US's literacy and mathematical skills compared to the rest of the globe, as opposed to our position in the world's broadband distribution.

Personally, I think the two are tightly related. There are a lot of reasons that Americans are relatively poorly educated, and the Internet's no magic bullet. But there's a lot you can do with the Internet to improve education. Unlike TV, which ended up a wasteland, there are already many good free educational resources. And anything that helps parents monitor their local schools strikes me as helpful in improving the system.

The light bulb is trivial, but it was an 'innovative idea'.

The light bulb was not trivial at the time it was invented. Neither the idea (use electricity to heat something so hot it gives bright light) nor implementation (which required years of work and thousands of experiments to get working) were in any way trivial.

In any case, this whole discussion is idotic. Base-16 numbers has been used to shorten the representation of binary strings for years. Any hex editor will show you the binary data in hex format. In fact, several applications (such as FProxy of Freenet encode with a bigger base (FProxy encodes dates into base-16 and passes them in the URL) to shorten them.

> They should pay Bill Clinton a royalty. His administration made their recent progress possible.

Hardly. Credit or blame goes to 1) Hughes Electronics Corp. and Boeing Satellite Systems for unlawfully transferring rocket and satellite data to China and 2) Richard Nixon for agreeing to expand political and economic ties with China back in 1972.

There is more to it than that. Early in his career, Eisenhower participated in a transcontinental trek that was intended to test out the mobility of military road vehicles. The expedition was a logistical disaster, not surprising given the state of the American road system in 1919.

The experience left an impression on him of the military significance of efficient mechanized transportation and may very well have contributed to his rise through the ranks as the man who could counter the highly-mobile German blitzkrieg.

So where is the festival to be?

Did Jefferson qualify his prose with "A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State" because he was feeling particularly verbose?

The founders were not idiots, and Jefferson was not an incompetent writer. Every syllable is there for a purpose.

Here's a page I found the other day, that had an interesting analogy in it: examine the sentence

A well-schooled electorate, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and read Books, shall not be infringed.

If the founders simply meant that we should have unfettered access to weapons, everything before the comma is extraneous and misleading.

It is utterly incomprehensible that intelligent people could believe that a group of founders who had just successfully led an armed rebellion drawing heavily on the grassroots arms and knowledge of arms against an officially sanctioned armed State could have intended that only arms sanctioned by a new State and controlled by them be allowed.

This is pretty old news.

And this is where the Bill of Rights failed. And here.