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Wrong!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/19/darmond-speers-dad-spoke_n_363477.html

Try again.

Isaac Asimov didn't use twitter.

"I've already researched that claim in another post in this thread. In summary, PETA operates shelters of last resort, they try only take the desperate, referring adoptable animals to other shelters."

Bzzt. Wrong.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nathan-j-winograd/peta-kills-puppies-kittens_b_2979220.html

That's just one of many. Their apologists claimed that the animals were sickly but that was a lie. The majority of animals that PETA euthanizes are healthy and adoptable.

Go drink your latte and bugger off.

PETA puts animal welfare above that of humans

Well publicly yes, but privately they actually don't. It's pretty well documented that they don't.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nathan-j-winograd/peta-kills-puppies-kittens_b_2979220.html

Could have something to do with PETA killing more animals than just about any so called "animal shelter" out there.

I was reading a commentary a while back about a veterinarian who had some dogs that she gave a clean bill of health and were well mannered to be adoptable. She heard good things about PETA (who hasn't?) and sent them there. Turned out later that PETA euthanized all of them. PETA's reasoning is that they want to end the ownership of animals as pets, and euthanasia is preferred over adoption.

I can't be assed to find it right now, but you can start here:

http://www.petakillsanimals.com/

PETA not just kills but also neglects and abuses:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nathan-j-winograd/peta-kills-puppies-kittens_b_2979220.html

PETA has killed 29,426 dogs, cats, rabbits, and other domestic animals.
So how is that caring for animals?

People in this day and age believe that electronics are immoral. They live in the same world we do, though I sometimes wonder if they perceive it the same way.

Freedom is about allowing people to live the way they want to live, believe what they want to believe and live the way they believe is best. So long as their freedom doesn't harm someone else, I believe in freedom.

(But there is an answer to your question. You'll have to do the math yourself, I'm on my third glass of wine.) A 2005 Harris Poll found 90 percent of adult Catholics support contraception, just 3 percentage points lower than the general adult population.

It is up to private property owners ( or supposed to be ) whether to let oil pipeline through their property, not up to govt.

Go go gadget government! http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/texas-judge-rules-in-favor-of-transcanada-in-eminent-domain-case/2012/08/23/87744776-ecda-11e1-a80b-9f898562d010_story.html http://www.businessweek.com/news/2013-09-27/keystone-pipeline-eminent-domain-foes-seek-nebraska-court-order http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/26/oklahoma-keystone-pipeline-tar-sands_n_937748.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/keystone-xl-pipeline-is-issue-of-property-rights-for-some-ranchers/2012/07/27/gJQAqlQgDX_story.html http://leg.mt.gov/content/Committees/Interim/2011-2012/EQC/Meeting-Documents/January-2012/public-uses-eminent-domain.pdf

Kansas is excluded because Keystone XL uses the existing Keystone segment for that state, but I'm willing to assume that they had the government come and turn out people who didn't want their farms and ranches divided in half by a pipeline back when that was built too. God forbid they spend the extra few bucks to make the pipe go along property lines.

Please look at the scum who cut off children's heads in CAR to understand what real tyranny is.

Yea, good thing we don't have reactionaries calling for someone to be hanged without due process like this guy (Former CIA director James Woolsey) or this guy (Former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton). (Yes, they're former ... do you really think their replacements are any better? That's what's really painful

I'm sure Amazon will see that these tests will help their deliveries and therefore profits. So they will be more than willing to help the US taxpayer to pay for it.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/17/apple-corporate-income-tax-rate_n_1429955.html

Odd that the FAA didn't put a test area near Deer Trail, Colorado. I wonder what they're afraid of.....

Cheers,
Dave

Groupon logic is horribly flawed. They actively encourage vendors to sell under cost, with the hope that customers will return. There's always a chance they will, especially if you treat them well. There are numerous stories online about how the vendors are totally screwed.

http://posiescafe.com/wp/groupon-in-retrospect/

In this blog post, Groupon takes 100% of the sale, promising that customers will always buy more than the ad (and they didn't), and wouldn't limit sales, so they were giving away everything for every Groupon customer for months.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/22/groupon-cupcake-deal-need-a-cake-bakery-rachel-brown_n_1108676.html

In this story, the story is similar, where far too many customers were sent in, and the vendor was pressured to sell at materials cost, which almost killed them.

Now, in The Brick case (TFA for those not paying attention), the company made the mistake. They were able to limit their losses by resolving the discount problem.

There were several other comments here. One says "what if they bought 100 mattresses?". Well, there's no indication of that in the story. Others are first-hand accounts of the way the company operates, which has included blatant false advertising and other deceptions. That would indicates the real truth behind TFA was intentional. If I, an average consumer, see that I get an outrageous discount, I'll probably go add more items so I can get the better deal. Great. But their plan is to now bill me for the difference.

Some people have said the problem was caught before anything shipped. Great. So cancel the order, and work with the customer. I have seen that happen before. It's not unreasonable. "Sorry, due to a technical error, your order has been cancelled. Please place your order again."

The Brick went totally the other way with it. "Hey, we screwed up and applied the wrong discount, pay this new amount. We don't care about the receipt being the legally binding contract. You owe us." I have seen that before too, usually with con artists who get to exert some sort of leverage. I've mostly heard this with moving companies. "It will be $5,000 to ship your belongings from Point A to Point B." When the day comes for delivery, since they have all of your possessions in their storage yard they demand more for whatever fees they decide to apply.

You get it at car dealerships too. "$22,500 out the door" and hours of dealing with them over paperwork becomes "$22,500 plus tax, tag, dealer prep, showroom fees, and whatever else is now $33,999."

I've heard many stories about car dealerships taking your trade-in car, which they offer to "wash, detail, and inspect", and when it comes time to close the deal and you're presented with a new price *and* an insulting trade-in value, your car is no longer on the lot. It's been "sold", which usually means moved to another lot. So before you've signed the paperwork, you're stuck between walking home or accepting their offer. I've known people who had to go as far as to call law enforcement to report their car stolen, just to get their old car back.

Personally, I've never had to go that far with a car dealer. I trust them less than a thug who says he wants to steal my wallet. At least the thug is up front about what they're going to do. I demand to know what they will give me for my trade-in before I do anything else. Once I was offered $100 trade-in on a $10,000 car. Ok, so you're a crook. I'll go buy elsewhere.

Of course, all of those are dirty tactics, and the company will deny any knowledge of such activity ever happening, but they still do it. So TFA about The Brick isn't some sob story about a company being screwed by the customers. It's a sob story of a con gone bad.

Oh, look. An NSA shill posting AC on Slashdot. Didn't see that coming!

Name a single innocent person who has been affected by the NSA.

Besides everyone that has the constitutional right to not be searched without probably cause and warrant? How about the companies that were being spied on for economic purposes? Were they big winners from that? No? How strange.

How about the big tech companies (such as anyone in cloud computing or cryptography) that took a major hit as a result of the leaks? You think they are happy that they are losing money now that people know how insecure these systems really are? How about Google/Yahoo/Microsoft/etc. that are suffering the same backlash on top of needing to invest a lot more resources to fix holes that the NSA was exploiting? What about RSA?

How about Lavabit and Silent Circle? These are just two examples of businesses that were dismantled because of legal pressure. They are completely legal businesses.

How about anyone that isn't actually doing anything wrong, but our government decides to harass/blackmail/defame anyways? We know that the NSA will find your porn and be more than happy to tell everyone about it. Blackmail is NOT OK!

We also know that the NSA has been writing and distributing malware. How about TorMail or any other (legitimate) service provided by Freedom Hosting? We know that the FBI confiscated the servers, but the NSA helped with installing malware on any connection and siphoning data regardless of whether or not the user was attempting to access a legal service or not. Hell, we even know that the NSA took part in hacking consumer Tor nodes to initiate a MITM attack in the hope that they might be able to track someone unrelated.

I think I've made my point. I could keep going, if I had to. There is a hell of a lot of people being wronged by this program, but lets turn your own game on you.

Name a single innocent person who has been affected by the NSA.

It's your turn. Name a single person or incident that has been stopped, hindered, or investigated in relation to terrorism from the NSA's programs. Trick question, we already know that there isn't any These programs have nothing to do with terrorism, so get your head out of your ass and stop pretending that it's OK for the government to infringe on our rights for their own personal gain.

It's not stupid, the people in Washington DC are stupid. They're the lowest common denominators elected by a public that's too busy lusting after their "hot cousin."

The document is not flawed nor are the principles it outlines. What's flawed is people who are too inattentive to become informed on the issues and actually hold their elected representatives accountable. These elected officials no longer fear the electorate because over 70% of them are re-elected. That allows corruption and other presumed perks of seniority to corrupt our land and to create pieces of shit legislation that allows these practices to continue. I've said it before, we need to return to the Stocks where we can lock these retards up for a couple of days and allow people to throw rotten tomatoes at them.

If you dry up the source of information that has allowed Google to dominate Internet search then it would hurt them financially. The biggest fear for them would be tougher privacy laws. Right now the Class Action E-Mail/Wiretapping case doesn't look too good for them so there may be some changes in the future for gmail users. The NSA fiasco with Snowden means that more people are asking pointed questions and Google and all the others who make money off of your personal data have to do a little walk on the tightrope. On one side they've pushed legislators away from enacting tougher privacy laws but now they're information has been hacked by the NSA yet they condemn that. The only reason Google exists is that it can mine information efficiently. Throw a few lawsuits and some new legislation into that mix and it suddenly gets very cloudy for them. Take a look at Google Glass for example, right now the thought of millions of people with always on cameras can become quite disturbing especially since you don't know where those images are going or what they may be used for. Sure there's the augmented reality take on it, but how will society take to it in the long run?

It's about not having to upgrade the power grid to meet the increased demand from all the new users. There are just more people using power. We need to either generate more power or use less of it. Banning incandescents is one way to use less. There's also a big push for more power efficient set top boxes that was mentioned on /. a few days ago. Basically you're damned if you do or don't. If you don't use less power then you're going to start having brown outs or you're power bill is going to triple as we burn more oil to generate enough power to meet your needs.

The grandparent's point is that rather than throwing up our hands and saying "fark it!" we should be looking for solutions. I'm inclined to agree. The assumption is we're always broke, but I don't see a lot of evidence of that. What I do see is the 1% hoarding cash.

That cannot be argued, because it is totally backwards! Do you have any idea how much tax revenue both Apple and Google ALONE bring into the state?

Not enough.

Apple and Google employees with their free lunches. ... Meanwhile the politicians in Washington cry "Let them eat cake."

Actually, Republicans want to teach those lazy kids a good responsible work ethic by making them sweep floors for their school lunches.

"we have rovers on mars that draw penises"

      Link or it didn't happen.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/24/mars-rover-penis-draws-nasa_n_3148422.html

unfortunately it did.

There was an article about this less than a month ago in the huffington post... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/20/iphone-kill-switch_n_4308924.html

If well deserves some kind of punishment, i wonder how much punishment gets people that do real damage and actual consequences, like drunk drivers (that may have killed several people), rapists, or even people that beat others leaving them maybe permanently injured (and lets not touch the consequences of lying to the congress or stealing trillons). What used to be a practical joke it seem to worth more than things with real life consequences in the actual society.

Please try to contribute more. GPs comment was admirably strident but lacked substance and subtlety; your post is as useful as saying 'I agree'.

For my part, I still find it hard to take the likes of Google seriously as a defender of privacy. Their recent CEO said terrible things:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/04/google-ceo-eric-schmidt-privacy_n_776924.html

• "With your permission you give us more information about you, about your friends, and we can improve the quality of our searches [...] We don't need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you've been. We can more or less know what you're thinking about."

• "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place,"

• "In a world of asynchronous threats, it is too dangerous for there not to be some way to identify you,. ... We need a [verified] name service for people, ...Governments will demand it."

Though he has been wise, too. From the same article:

"I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time,"

The point being: Google and the rest of the ad-funded online companies profit from our personal data, and have an interest in the erosion of our privacy.

Whether they like it or not, they have a motive to stop government surveillance of the internet simply because it threatens to make people less willing to share personal information on the internet.

Invasion of privacy is bad, whether it's the government that's doing it, or the people.

So what's news, the OIL lobby pays politicians to shutdown ethanol production as this would cut into their profits.

'"This issue affects chainsaws and chain restaurants," Rob Green .. said at a lunch hosted by the American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry's top lobbying group`. ref

FWIW, Stalinism is alive and well in Russia today.

Hostess management put Hostess out of business.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-macaray/labor-union-hostess-twinkies_b_2161368.html

Hostess was in the business of selling sugar and fat in the fattest country in the world, a task akin to selling dung to dung beetles, and they foundered anyway.

As far as anyone can tell, edX is surviving on investment money (such as this one). Schools join the consortium by putting up more investment money.

They're burning through this money with no clear business plan; specifically, they don't have a product to sell.

On top of this, edX at least seems unconcerned with the quality of their offerings. For example, their course offerings aren't searchable by keyword (that I can determine), you have to slog through the entire catalog to see if they have something with, for example, "neuroscience" in the title. Having found a neuroscience course, the introductory video tells the prospective student nothing about the course - it's completely useless.

Pointing this out to them, they said that there's nothing edX can do - Harvard is responsible for that course, and edX is only being used as a marketing vehicle.

Other players are making innovative changes in infrastructure and technique. None of this is happening at edX or Coursera - it's all videotaped traditional lectures. There's nothing that distinguishes the big MOOC product in a business sense; ie, nothing that says "our product is better for *this* reason".

As an outside observer, the big MOOC players appear to be living a bubble similar to the 2001 tech bubble: lots of hype with no clear business plan.

My thoughts exactly, to that end it seems now the thing to do is to discredit Snowden who I consider a true patriot.

If Snowden is a patriot in your eyes then surely he is a unique patriot. What other "patriot" can you think of that left the country where he performed his "patriotic act" and now has a constant guard of KGB officers (FSB) to protect him? Ah, the key is you left out the word "American." So you don't regard him as an American patriot, but to use your words, as someone who worked to "expose what the NSA was up to to the world." So in your mind patriots steal American intelligence information and release it to the world. Based on your account name and post, British Leftist I presume?

The fact that he wasn't motivated by money isn't necessarily creditable to him. Many foul deeds have been done for ideological reasons. Snowden's acts resemble nothing so much as those of Kim Philby who betrayed Britain and fled to Russia where he was feted and revealed to be a KGB officer. Snowden is the Philby of our day, having not only harmed American intelligence, but also visiting the worst ever loss for British intelligence. (You can probably add Australia to that as well.) Nobody should be surprised if he meets a similar end to Philby.

Now here is something interesting, it may be that the ones to feel the eventual sting coming from this massive loss of intelligence information won't be Americans, but mainly people in other countries. The NSA revealed that it has had a hand in foiling 50 terrorist plots worldwide, and few of those were in the US. Terrorist groups have already started to exploit the information that Snowden leaked by changing tactics to avoid detection. Now they are in a better position to carry out their plans over the next several years - and that is the timeframe for many of their plans: years. The real party hasn't even started yet. That means more bombs exploding overseas. Will it be another London bombing, or Madrid, or one of thousands of other examples? Will the next plot in Germany or Sweden succeed and kill hundreds? Only time will tell. One thing seems likely - in the future various people are likely to look back at Snowden's leaks and think to themselves, "It seemed like something to cheer.... at the time." Of course now it is too late. Snowden's existing and future leaks will have committed us to a future he chose in an undemocratic, vigilante fashion. Who voted for Snowden to oversee this? Nobody. But you will get to live with the consequences none the less - he chose for you, not even consulting you or your representative in government/parliament/ legislature. Perhaps the most ironic thing is that Snowden is now living in Russia, and the Russians are using information he leaked to upgrade their internal surveillance apparatus to make it more effective. Snowden has been hoisted on his own petard.

Well, if someday you are in the tube on the way to a football match, or in a pub enjoying a game of darts with some friends, and an extremist with a suicide vest that slipped by busy MI5 agents comes in and detonates himself, you'll know who may have helped the Jihadi avoid detection.

Cheers.

My thoughts exactly, to that end it seems now the thing to do is to discredit Snowden who I consider a true patriot.

If Snowden is a patriot in your eyes then surely he is a unique patriot. What other "patriot" can you think of that left the country where he performed his "patriotic act" and now has a constant guard of KGB officers (FSB) to protect him? Ah, the key is you left out the word "American." So you don't regard him as an American patriot, but to use your words, as someone who worked to "expose what the NSA was up to to the world." So in your mind patriots steal American intelligence information and release it to the world. Based on your account name and post, British Leftist I presume?

The fact that he wasn't motivated by money isn't necessarily creditable to him. Many foul deeds have been done for ideological reasons. Snowden's acts resemble nothing so much as those of Kim Philby who betrayed Britain and fled to Russia where he was feted and revealed to be a KGB officer. Snowden is the Philby of our day, having not only harmed American intelligence, but also visiting the worst ever loss for British intelligence. (You can probably add Australia to that as well.) Nobody should be surprised if he meets a similar end to Philby.

Now here is something interesting, it may be that the ones to feel the eventual sting coming from this massive loss of intelligence information won't be Americans, but mainly people in other countries. The NSA revealed that it has had a hand in foiling 50 terrorist plots worldwide, and few of those were in the US. Terrorist groups have already started to exploit the information that Snowden leaked by changing tactics to avoid detection. Now they are in a better position to carry out their plans over the next several years - and that is the timeframe for many of their plans: years. The real party hasn't even started yet. That means more bombs exploding overseas. Will it be another London bombing, or Madrid, or one of thousands of other examples? Will the next plot in Germany or Sweden succeed and kill hundreds? Only time will tell. One thing seems likely - in the future various people are likely to look back at Snowden's leaks and think to themselves, "It seemed like something to cheer.... at the time." Of course now it is too late. Snowden's existing and future leaks will have committed us to a future he chose in an undemocratic, vigilante fashion. Who voted for Snowden to oversee this? Nobody. But you will get to live with the consequences none the less - he chose for you, not even consulting you or your representative in government/parliament/ legislature. Perhaps the most ironic thing is that Snowden is now living in Russia, and the Russians are using information he leaked to upgrade their internal surveillance apparatus to make it more effective. Snowden has been hoisted on his own petard.

Well, if someday you are in the tube on the way to a football match, or in a pub enjoying a game of darts with some friends, and an extremist with a suicide vest that slipped by busy MI5 agents comes in and detonates himself, you'll know who may have helped the Jihadi avoid detection.

Cheers.

Unless you're in the "aristocracy"... then you can get away with theft:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MF_Global#October_2011:_MF_Global_transfers_client_account_funds_to_its_own_account
And even killing people:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/12/affluenza-defense-probation-for-deadly-dwi_n_4430807.html
Or a favored corporation - then you can get away with money laundering by just paying 11% of your profits.

They don't really need to assume that we are morons. We prove this every day, unfortunately:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/30/edward-snowden-poll_n_4175089.html

Kind, sensible people every day stand idle while sociopaths lie blatantly to their faces, because they want to believe so badly that these agencies behave like they do.

NSA IS the government of the United States.

No, the NSA Surveillance Destroys Diplomacy and Democracy:

How do democratically elected officials (the president, congressmen or senators) get control of a stand-alone secret government bureaucracy that was operating long before they arrived and will survive them after they've gone? A bureaucracy that knows everything there is to know about them, too?

They don't. They can't. So the surreptitious, illicit actions of a US spy agency can undermine the diplomatic work of months and years. And the president - the elected official chosen to lead the country - is so hamstrung by the NSA that he cannot stop the interceptions and order an immediate investigation.

No, France, Germany, Mexico, Brazil, and Britain aren't the enemies of the US. But some of the people in those countries are.

Interesting spin. So how does monitoring 35 world leaders fall into that "the bad guys are amougst us" line.

There are many reasons that nations spy on each other besides being an enemy. Although all of our nations are basically open, they are not necessarily completely transparent. Being able to understand your allies, the pressures they face, the practical considerations is important if you are going to engaged in coalition diplomacy

In other words, the NSA Surveillance Destroys Diplomacy and Democracy:

How do democratically elected officials (the president, congressmen or senators) get control of a stand-alone secret government bureaucracy that was operating long before they arrived and will survive them after they've gone? A bureaucracy that knows everything there is to know about them, too? They don't. They can't. So the surreptitious, illicit actions of a US spy agency can undermine the diplomatic work of months and years. And the president - the elected official chosen to lead the country - is so hamstrung by the NSA that he cannot stop the interceptions and order an immediate investigation.

I hate to reply to an AC, but I hate wrong information more.

Multiple stories corroborate that the actual number potentially losing healthcare is one million, not the five million the AC suggested. These are policies that don't meet the ACA's minimum coverage levels, and thus are no longer allowed to be offered.

This has been a point pounded hard by those on the right ("If you like your plan you can keep it" was a lie!), wanting to point to people losing insurance. The left's typical response is that the plans are junk plans, and folks are better off being forced to get a real plan. Since those arguments are all over the web, I'm going to skip past them. Visit Google News to find them if you have missed out.

As is often the case, reality isn't simple enough to be captured in a sound byte. The law had a provision to grandfather old plans:

So what happens to the plans that don't meet the new minimum standards? They will likely disappear. A handful of existing plans will be grandfathered in, but the qualifying criteria for that is hard to meet: Members have to have been enrolled in the plan before the ACA passed in 2010, and the plan has to have maintained fairly steady co-pay, deductible and coverage rates until now.

What insurers have done is made sure no pre-2010 plan stayed in effect (yes, they cancel millions of plans every year), and for the few that have they have made sure the co-pays, deductibles, and coverage have changed significantly. Why would they do that? Well there are a about 4 million people on junk plans. How bad are these plans?

One example: the "Go Blue Health Services Card'' for which cancer survivor Donnamarie Palin of New Port Richey has paid $79 a month. For that, she gets $50 toward each primary care doctor visit, $15 toward each drug — but zero coverage for big-ticket items like hospital stays.

Get in a car wreck, no coverage. Get cancer, no coverage. Need a wart removed, no coverage. Break your arm, no coverage. Yeah. That bad. But they have one thing going for them, they are cheap. $79/month if you don't understand what you're (not) getting seems pretty cheap compared to hundreds of dollars for real insurance. In plain, simple terms these people were going to get a price hike. Now, you're an executive at a health insurance provider faced with the prospect that 4 million people are going to get letters saying "Your $79/month policy is going away, we'd like to offer you a $450/month policy, but it covers a lot more!" Yeah, that's going to lead to lots of bad press on the evening news.

But the way ACA was written had a convenient out. Make sure the law forced the cancellation of the plans, and then flip the narrative to say the government is canceling your plan. It should be no surprise that it took insurance executives about a nanosecond to figure this out and set the wheels in motion. Just make sure no plan qualified or could be grandfathered in.

Now that the Scooby Doo "how did they do it" moment is over, there is one bit left to tidy up. The savvy reader will notice 1 million Californians had their policy cancelled, but o

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/10/18/the-other-side-of-obamacares-oregon-success-no-one-has-bought-private-insurance/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/20/oregon-obamacare-website_n_4308629.html

The number is so dismal because the Oregon website was worse then the National website. Not because people dont want it as the linked article implies.

Nearly 25,000 individuals and families have so far submitted hard-copy applications, Cox said, with nearly two-thirds of those applicants eligible for Medicaid, a federal-state healthcare plan for the needy.

But none of those applicants has actually been enrolled, with manual processing of the paperwork slowing the process dramatically.

Separately, about 70,000 residents have signed up for Medicaid by responding to letters sent by the state to more than 200,000 people deemed eligible for the program by virtue of their receiving food stamps, Cox said.

Oh wait look who submitted it, cold fjord our resident republi-troll. Hey Cold Fjord... Fuck Off.

My point being that anyone who claims the purpose or net result of 'religion' is naturally harmful is either a liar or a fool, because religion is what feeds and shelters a vast majority of homeless people being fed and sheltered. Not trying to disparage atheists at all, although after re-reading my post I can understand where one might see that implication. Mea culpa.

There may be religious people in the organisation, but it's not a religious organisation. It's not always the same the other way around: two atheist groups were prevented from helping out in religious soup kitchens this year.

I'll agree that's a good ol' fashioned dick move; when it comes to taking care of the less fortunate, there shouldn't be such a thing as 'competition,' only co-operation.

How many atheist/anti-theist soup kitchens have you ever seen?

This is because it's rarely done under the banner of atheism. It's also worth noting that there are many more religious people than atheists in the US so they have more resources. There's a discussion on the topic here.

To directly answer the question, here are some examples of secular organisations helping the homeless:
Feeding America
The aliveness project

There may be religious people in the organisation, but it's not a religious organisation. It's not always the same the other way around: two atheist groups were prevented from helping out in religious soup kitchens this year.

No, I do not believe it. I believe that you just made it up. Do you have a citation? Because a Google search finds nothing except a law banning "aggressive begging" (blocking traffic, badgering or pursuing people, loitering next to ATMs, etc.).

I wouldn't go so far as to accuse him of just making it up. There are several places he might have picked up the idea. Some, the courts overrule the laws or parts of it. Some are just proposed. Some require a permit to 'gather' (eg more than 5 people). On Thanksgiving, the church should have 1 person with food in the park. 4 at a time, the homeless could come over. Then, walk away and 4 more could come up. I think the homeless should not be able to look at each other either ;) Get a permit right? I believe in the Orlando case, the problem was, you can only get a permit twice a year for each park so you have to move around. Are the activist intentionally getting in trouble making their point? Sure. Does feeding the poor in the same park, week after week, putting wear and tear on the park? Sure.



Orlando, FL
Raleigh, NC
Las Vegas, NV
Los Angeles, CA
Philadelphia, PA
Dallas, TX
Houston, TX
NYC, NY
USA Today
LA Times

"You are correct, but there are still broad classes of people who are unable to own firearms... As 3D printing becomes more commonplace, these people will be able to obtain firearms for themselves."

Yes, but they are prohibited anyway. This has little or no bearing on their situations. They can make a firearm more easily by simply going to the hardware store. I don't see this as a valid argument. More on this below.

"I am personally not worried about it, as long as law-abiding citizens are able to legally own and carry firearms. There will be no epidemic of violence as long as this remains the case."

I agree completely.

We are adding whole classes of "mental illnesses" to prohibited categories.

You should view this as a big problem, not a good thing. Have you heard about "The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition" (often called "DSM-5"), which came out this year? It is used as the standard for diagnosis by psychiatrists. According to the manual, YOU are probably mentally ill (and that could conceivably be used as a reason to deny you access to weapons).

According to the manual, nearly all women suffer from Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder. It has expanded the definition of "autism" to a ridiculous degree... to the extent that just about anybody could be said to be autistic.

Even professional psychologists think it's ridiculous.

Just about every bad mood can now be called a "mental disorder".

If this doesn't bother you, it should, for the reasons at hand if for no other reason. If everybody is a criminal, nobody may have guns. If everybody has a mental disorder, nobody may have guns. Etc.

http://news.firedoglake.com/2013/08/28/nsa-has-been-spying-on-members-of-congress-for-a-long-time/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/20/russ-tice-nsa-obama_n_3473538.html

Interview with Russ Tice:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFt22SI70DE

People will reflexively scoff at this, but it's Puritanism. If you're a good God-fearing person, you'll have willpower and be able to lose weight. If you're fat, it's because you're a bad person. Doctors have prescription power because they're a different kind of better person. Why should a good person give a bad person something that will encourage them to still be a bad person?

Americans (at least) refuse to accept how pervasive the basic concepts of Puritanism are in our society. The "head & up, good, below the head, bad" attitude is everywhere and irrational. Read some Thaddeus Russell before you disagree.

So this medicine show is what they kicked a bunch of little kids out of their rehearsal space for? Well, I guess it is a sort of song and dance routine.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/05/chris-matthews-ballerinas_n_4392440.html

Mandela paved the way for future greats like Julius Malema (may Allah exalt him beyond the status of a syphilitic camel someday) and the advancement of SA into the paradise it was always meant to be. Modern tribalism brings the community of South Africa together - in celebration of casting off the shadow of apartheid, and in non-consensual sexual activity all across the nation.
 
  Proof is abundant that black leaders can turn a formerly thriving but unfair country into a far more equitable ghetto.

I though Saddam Hussein killed all the Mandelas back in 2007...

I don't know if I'd call three cars catching fire after being in accidents "a spectacularly catastrophic event". It's certainly more publicized, but it seems to me there are gas cars that catch fire, which does happen much more frequently.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/02/japanese-submarine-world-war-ii_n_4375090.html

Well to be fair corporations do pay taxes.

Huh. That's news to me.

English is not context-free. Begging the question, for example, is an expression with multiple meanings, the correct one of which must be deduced from said context.

Sure, but that's irrelevant. That's how most people make sense of other people who are otherwise not making sense. "Begging the question" has never (correctly) meant "raising the question." Next you'll tell me "I could care less" means "I couldn't care less." Oh, "but context!" is a cheap, meaningless argument.

But hey, feel free to take it up with any of these other folks:

* Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage. If you misuse it in court, I'd love to see you say "But context, your Honor! And for my next argument, I'm going argue about what the meaning of the word 'is' is."
* Zoe Triska: "In the long run, misusing phrases like 'begging the question' doesn't make you sound smarter. It makes you sound dumber."
* The New York Times, which felt the need to come clean on their occasional abuses of the phrase.

Where were we? Oh yeah, context. Sure, from the context surrounding the phrase, everyone will be able to figure out what you meant. And a good fraction of them will know you're using it incorrectly and think less of you for it. As Zoe said above "In the long run ... [i]t makes you sound dumber."

Knock yourself out. I could of gone on irregardless, but I could care less. I won't wait with baited breath for your reply, because for all intensive purposes I'm done. (Context: See how dumb misused English sounds?)

Back to the topic at hand:

But even if you overcame that problem, the light would still be bouncing between the walls of the core, and thus traveling a longer distance than the mere length of the fiber.

That's true, especially for multi-mode fiber. For single mode fiber, the fiber plus cladding act more like a wave guide, because the diameter of the fiber is small relative to the wavelength of the light.

I don't claim to be an expert though. I've just been reading up online.

In any case, the mere fact you have to bend the fiber optics at all implies the light contained therein isn't going in a straight line between repeaters.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/03/health-care-costs-_n_3998425.html

http://kff.org/health-costs/

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2012/10/health-costs-how-the-us-compares-with-other-countries.html

I'm glad you base your outlook on your anecdotal evidence. You're part of the problem.

It's called a Hollerith card tabulating machine. I can make you a good price!

NSA PROCUREMENT OFFICE (EQUIPMENT DIVISION)

Mr. Kyosuke:

Thank you for your recent letter offering a good price on a Hollerith machine. I regret to inform you that the NSA already has several of these in its possession that were purchased at an IBM auction of surplus machines that had been leased to the German government in the 1940s. We have made many custom improvements to the German machines over the years and would not think of wasting them on something as trivial as contracts.

However, as replacement parts for these machines are in short supply and knowledge of their purpose is a forgotten state secret we have sent agents from the Procurement Office (Human Division) to collect you and your machine. They are at your front and back doors now. Please cooperate with them fully to make this easier on everyone.

Again, thank you for contacting the NSA and helping us keep you safe.

The original model held that psychotherapy could cure depression. Talk to your analyst once a week and after years of treatment you got better.

Then it was discovered that low norepinephrine caused depression, and tricyclics fixed that and cured depression.

Then it was discovered that low serotonin caused depression, and SSRIs fixed that and cured depression.

Then it was discovered that low dopamine caused depression, and MAOIs fixed that and cured depression.

And recently, the The New England Journal of Medicine reported depression meds have no effect.

One last question... just one*.

Is psychology evidence-driven, or belief-driven?

(*) This isn't just me asking. Here's a quote from the The New England Journal of Medicine article:

Evidence-based medicine is valuable to the extent that the evidence base is complete and unbiased. Selective publication of clinical trials — and the outcomes within those trials — can lead to unrealistic estimates of drug effectiveness and alter the apparent risk–benefit ratio.

(**) Also, I have no meaningful training in science or statistics. If you want, you can win the argument by pointing this out in your response.