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This may revive the theory that the Deccan traps were formed at the antipode of a major eruption - the seismic waves will focus there, and could crack the Earth's crust (for a really big impact).

It seems logical, and the positions more or less fit, but the question was always whether the timing was viable.

Now, where is the crater that formed the Siberian traps. And, did it end the Permian period?

I find it even more interesting that the skeptics that have collected data and built models ended up convinced that the Climatologists are correct:
"CALL me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause."
~Dr. Richard A. Muller
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07...

It's hardly worth bothering to reply to these anonymous cowards, I'm afraid; they never admit to being wrong, and even if they did, they'd just keep on posting. Pretty much every single statement he says makes no sense.

Except for religious nuts, nobody has predicted that the world is going to end. This is an argument by the technique of wildly exaggerating what has been said, and then pointing out that the wild exaggeration is wildly exaggerated.

Again: Nobody has predicted that the world is going to end.

There's really no point in arguing these straw men.

"The objective now, negotiators say, is to stave off atmospheric temperature increases of 4 to 10 degrees by the end of the century; at that point, they say, the planet could become increasingly uninhabitable." - New York Times, on the IPCC Lima meeting, 30th Nov 2014

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12...

(You're correct that skeptics post as anonymous cowards here. The religious CAGW supports go back and moderate our posts down in completely unrelated threads if we happen to forget clicking the checkbox)

I guess the administration at Utah State University are in on the whole conspiracy against #Gamergate.

I was thinking about this the other day. I tend to wonder if it would make sense to completely immunize companies from lawsuits over failure to provide adequate steps to prevent a terrorist and state-sponsored attacks as long as they comply with any direct government instructions and regulations.

The US used to do something like this, specifically cover insurance over a specific (high) limit in the case of a terrorist attack. But it was just killed by a single republican member in Congress: Congressional Roadblock Upends Market for Terrorism Insurance even after it was passed 93-4 by the Senate and 417-7 in the house.

NY Councilmen can posture and mumble and pass laws all day long but they have no authority over the air.

Big deal.

The NYPD will just shoot you and get away with it, like Akai Gurley.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/24/nyregion/police-tactic-scrutinized-after-accidental-shooting.html?_r=0

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/nov/21/new-york-unarmed-man-shot-dead-totally-innocent

Bill Bratton, NYPD commissioner, said the victim was "completely innocent".

And still no one is in jail, let along charged with a crime.

No, not at all.

Apple didn't allow competitors with DRM. (reminds me early Apple vs PC days) Music industry decided it's better to have no-DRM + competition, than Apple only DRM. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12...

So in other words, this suit was about making money from Apple for forcing the music industry to drop DRM.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12...

First, you stated that "The hackers" are "IRL terrorists". The hackers did not threaten anyone, these "threats" according to any other (credible) source were allegedly from the DPRK. Perhaps you need to clarify?

from NYTimes:

U.S. Links North Korea to Sony Hacking

WASHINGTON — American intelligence officials have concluded that the North Korean government was “centrally involved” in the recent attacks on Sony Pictures’s computers, a determination reached just as Sony on Wednesday canceled its release of the comedy, which is based on a plot to assassinate Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader.

Second, if you really believe that the DPRK is going to launch attacks against US theaters you should purchase a globe. If you think that somehow we will have massive amounts of fake pilots storming planes to fly them into Star Theater, you should have your head examined by a professional.

I agree, the odds of a literal "9/11-style" attack using commercial jets are small. But it's credible to think that a determined group could unleash a wave of violence. It doesn't take many people to do what happened at that batman movie.

To your credit, I thought you were going to draw a distinction between "terrorists" as in those who commit acts of violence and "terrorists" as in those who make specific and credible threats to commit acts of violence. This argument is weak at best. It's true that the definition of "terrorist" is amorphous at best, and often stretched. But I think a fair definition is "someone who uses violence to achieve political goals". I would argue that squelching the movie is a political goal, because the whole controversy is about NK and Kim Jong Il. Further, I would say that the threat of violence can be just as effective as violence itself, without shedding blood.

Politicians set up the next person from their party for votes.

Vice-President is traditionally nominated for the next Presidency by the same pary — unless (like Cheney) he explicitly rejects such plans from the very beginning.

I doubt, Joe Biden will score even so much as a nomination — despite his desires — which will, of course, be even more embarrassing for the Democrats, than him losing the subsequent election.

No, I don't think, Obama sincerely cares about his nominal "Number 2"... It was a marriage of convenience — the man was supposed to "bring foreign policy heft" to the ticket. Ha-ha-ha...

No, not at all.

Apple didn't allow competitors with DRM. (reminds me early Apple vs PC days)
Music industry decided it's better to have no-DRM + competition, than Apple only DRM.
  http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12...

Wikipedia disagrees.

In short: Mr Jobbs refused to let other players in, to a point when major "music companies" preferred no-DRM to DRM dominated by Apple.

25th of September 2007 was when BETA version of amazon music came to life, but DRM free music from major players came later:

In January 2008 it became the first music store to sell music without digital rights management (DRM) from the four major music labels (EMI, Universal, Warner Music, and Sony BMG), as well as many independents.[1][2][3][4]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

Before that happened:

The music companies had argued that Apple, which dominates the digital music market with its iPod player and iTunes service, should license its copy protection software to rivals. But Mr. Jobs has refused, saying that such a move would invite several problems, including the possibility that hackers would crack the technology.

Which led to:

Now, some music executives are privately backing the idea of dropping the software from music sold through virtually every service except iTunes, in order to strengthen AppleÃ(TM)s rivals and potentially diminish Mr. JobsÃ(TM)s advantage. The major labels have been upset with AppleÃ(TM)s inflexibility on music pricing, among other issues.

From:
  http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12...

> x86: I'm pretty sure that Intel had a great deal of legal control of that market, a

And illegal control. Do look into the history of the theft of Alpha technologies from DEC that were used for the Pentium architecture.

              http://www.nytimes.com/1997/05...

And the rich get richer and the poor get poorer -- America where the Walton family (majority shareholders in Walmart) has wealth equal to the wealth of the bottom 42% of Americans combined.

If you don't get the booster, you run the risk of getting the disease and dying.

Nice way to fall for the lies. Everything is just soo dangerous and trying to kill you. The terrorists are full of these diseases and we must let the TSA inject shit into everybody who walks down the sidewalk.

So you are saying, what, because some vaccines Are not permanent, why bother getting it?

According to the CDC's site: Even though children who haven't received DTaP vaccines are at least 8 times more likely to get pertussis than children who received all 5 recommended doses of DTaP, they are not the driving force behind the large scale outbreaks or epidemics. However, their parents are putting them at greater risk of getting a serious pertussis infection and then possibly spreading it to other family or community members. So it isn't the unvaccinated that are the problem.

In a study done by Oxford University for all pertussis outbreaks in San Rafael California between March and October 2010, 81% were completely up to date on their vaccinations, 8% were unvaccinated, and 11% were partially vaccinated. So people are hyping up the fear for something that isn't even the problem. If you want a prevention, then you need to focus on making a better vaccine, not forcing more people to take risks for something that is ineffective.

That is not how viruses work. If you are immunized the virus gets killed by your immune system and you do not become a "carrier".

And here we have a completely ignorant statement from someone who wants to tell me what to put into my body. Here are some links to the evidence that you do become an unknown carrier after getting the pertussis vaccine. Acellular pertussis vaccines protect against disease but fail to prevent infection and transmission in a nonhuman primate model and Whooping Cough Study May Offer Clue on Surge

Except that in this case, it's not a valid police measure and its use has been banned for some time in New York.

it's hard to win when they are making foods addictive. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02...

Portrait monitors were all the rage back in the 90's. All the desktop publishing people used them for working with Aldus Pagemaker.

Not just India. Do a Google search for "uber driver criminal"

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12...
Uber’s System for Screening Drivers Draws Scrutiny
By MIKE ISAAC
DEC. 9, 2014

Uber uses Hirease, a private company that says it has an average turnaround time of “less than 36 hours.”
Both services do drug and alcohol testing, but neither does fingerprint testing. And they rely primarily on publicly available information.

Although state background checks for taxi drivers vary by jurisdiction, lawmakers say they are generally more rigorous than either of these services. They usually include searches of private databases like F.B.I. records, gaining consent from prospective drivers for those searches,

In California, those drivers must undergo checks by the state’s Justice Department, including fingerprint scanning, drug and alcohol testing, and searches of private databases. A check can take as little as three days, but as long as eight weeks.

(Uber defeated bills to require the same checks, including fingerprints, required for taxi and limousine drivers, in California, Colorado, and Illinois.)

http://www.nbclosangeles.com/n...
Risky Ride: Who's Behind the Wheel of Uber Cars?
How safe is Uber? The NBC4 ITeam investigates.
By Joel Grover and Keith Esparros
Friday, May 2, 2014

UberX, where anyone with a car and the inclination can apply to be a driver.

Maps: Uber Regulations in the U.S. | Uber Timeline

That's exactly what Beverly Locke did. Working with the NBC4 I-Team, Locke filled out all the necessary documentation needed to become an Uber driver. She proved she was a licensed driver with a safe car, and agreed to submit to a background check.

Four weeks later, she received an e-mail indicating her background check had cleared.

On her first day "on the job," she received a request from Paolo, a frequent UberX user, who was looking for a ride from his Hollywood apartment. He is an Uber fan.

"I use cabs a lot," said Paolo. "And, it's almost half the fare in Uber than for a taxi driver."

Who's Watching Uber?

His phone lit up with a picture of Locke, and a message that said Beverly will pick him up in three minutes.

What he didn't know is that Beverly was an ex-con with a violent past. Her 20-year rap sheet includes burglary, cocaine possession, and making criminal threats with the intent to cause death or bodily injury.

"I pulled a girl out of a car and almost beat her to death," said Locke, who described herself as a reformed criminal with a good job and a desire to make up for her past. "I do not do criminal things anymore."

NBC4 asked Locke to cancel the ride, so the former convict never actually carried a passenger. But the NBC4 I-Team found several examples in which drivers with a criminal past have picked up Uber passengers.

Tadeusz Szczechowicz drove the streets of Chicago for a year, despite five prior arrests and two convictions for burglary and disorderly conduct.

Syed Muzzafar had a prior conviction for reckless driving, but he cleared the Uber background check and was behind the wheel New Year's Eve when he was arrested for hitting and killing a 6-year-old girl in San Francisco.

And, Jigneshkumar Patel was arrested for battery of an UberX passenger, a charge he said is "rubbish." Still, the UberX driver had a 2012 conviction for DUI.

Uber declined to talk to NBC4 directly, but did send emails describing corporate policy on background checks. A message said Uber "leads the industry" with its "best-in-class background checks for drivers."

Uber also said it has a "zero tolerance" policy for drug and alcohol offenses, and said it carefully screens applicants and immedia

It would be the same thing only if the postal service derived its revenue from junk mail.

They don't, so it's not the same thing at all.

Ha ha. Joke's on you. The USPS makes its living delivering junk mail.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/20/business/seeking-revenue-postal-service-plans-to-deliver-more-junk-mail.html

Please,: let me know if the many (or even one) instances where Americans weren't tortured because America stood on some mythological high ground?

You mean like this?

With time, the 23 prisoners were divided into two groups. The three American men and the three British hostages were singled out for the worst abuse, both because of the militants' grievances against their countries and because their governments would not negotiate, according to several people with intimate knowledge of the events.

Within this subset, the person who suffered the cruelest treatment, the former hostages said, was Mr. Foley. In addition to receiving prolonged beatings, he underwent mock executions and was repeatedly waterboarded.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10...

Is that what you mean?

To be clear I am NOT at all blaming the US for the actions of terrorists. People are accountable for their own actions. But it's certainly evidence that revenge has been focused in our direction, and not in other directions, or that people weren't tortured because they stood on some high ground.

If we approached risks of Artificial Intelligence with the same attitude, with which we are told to approach the risk of Global Warming, we would've shut and banned all AI-research — and denounced any and all such researchers as death-deserving traitors to humanity — and KKKapitalist whores.

Apple could certainly pay more tax than they do (and I would totally support legal changes to require that), but to call $5.3 billion "nothing" is a bit of a stretch.

and all the ones which succeed are ones which "clearly show the incompetence and futility of the security apparatus"

Not necessarily. I could bring a high explosive into the airport, or a chlorine gas bomb, and just set it off in the terminal. That would kill a bunch of people; so much for incompetence.

This is just uneducated white-guilt garbage. Yes, it's Americans who are walking into Arab coffee shops and detonating themselves.

Actually, we use drones. We've sent missiles from drones repeatedly over the past few years, racking up civilian casualties like pinball points. We don't walk into the coffee shops to detonate ourselves; we send a flying robot.

This has happened again, and again, and again. Americans have one event to remember, which was long ago; Arabs are constantly given reason to joint the fight against America, and have a whole slew of offenses over years to remember. A protracted war will favor the Arabs, who have much more to look to when seeking their moral right to vindication.

And this is just ignorant anti-American bullshit posing as open-minded progressive thought.

Well the liberal progressives at the New York Times, the Huffington Post, and other, along with piles of conservative bloggers, are all in agreement over this bit about Obama:

It is also because Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.

Even the favorite president of the Liberal Media doesn't get a free pass on that one.

Yes, just go ahead and label an entire nation an "axis of evil", based on the demonstrably false claim that they're targeting "anyone over 18".

Do you think the Arabs aren't doing just that? Or are you sitting around thinking, "Gee, America is so great. I bet the Arabs we blew up last week, their friends and families, I bet they think America is so great, too. I bet when people tell them, hey yo, America just murdered your children, your parents, your friends and lovers, they're like, nah yo, America is straight dope, so great, wave flags!"

No, they're sitting around going, "Fucking Americans! Blew up coffee shop where my sister was! Again I have lost friends and loved ones! American evil machine is set on killing my countrymen!" It doesn't take that much effort to piss people off; look at Nidal Hasan for a good example.

You can live in your fantasy world where America's hands are clean, but reality will continue to ignore your delusions.

This shouldn't be legal just because folks were working for the government.

According to the NY Times article:

Detainees were deprived of sleep for as long as a week, and were sometimes told that they would be killed while in American custody. With the approval of the C.I.A.'s medical staff, some C.I.A. prisoners were subjected to medically unnecessary “rectal feeding” or “rectal hydration” — a technique that the C.I.A.'s chief of interrogations described as a way to exert “total control over the detainee.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...

The jigga pronunciation was apparently popular in the US in the 80s (when Back to the Future was made), and was made a standard by NIST. It's since swung overwhelmingly towards the hard g.

It looks like you're right though, the pronunciation in the movie, despite being correct, WAS the result of scriptwriters who had no idea what it was:

http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.co...

Going quite a bit off topic here, but I'll bite:

Build a border that can be enforced

I hope you're not talking about building a wall. A wall is one of those ideas that seems pleasant, simple, and realistic at a quick glance, but when you get into details it starts to break down. Even the Great Wall of China failed many times.

Rather than trying to go back to Isolationist policies, we should be looking at A) why they come here, and B) what steps we can take to diminish A. In the long run, removing their need/desire to come to America illegally will have far more benefit for everyone than simply trying to hide the problem behind a chain-link fence.

A isn't easy; a lot of people will claim "because America is the greatest country in the world!" Except we aren't turning back a tide of Canadians at our northern border, so far as I'm aware, meaning either America and Canada are roughly equivalent in greatness or there are other reasons that Mexicans are risking quite a bit to come to the U.S. While I'm no expert on Hispanic relations, it seems to me that what is happening is not so much Mexicans wanting to come to the US, but Mexicans wanting to leave Mexico and the US being the most natural choice. (I'm not aware of Guatemala offering a lot, and in fact Mexico is facing its own illegal immigrant problem with Guatemalans)

The main cause that I'm aware of is the Mexican Cartels, who mainly use drugs as their source of revenue. The surging movement in America to legalize weed is having a growing impact on that. They still have crack and heroine, of course, but these are far more destructive drugs that will result in fewer return users.

There are likely other other factors, such as poverty, especially in the border towns (driving along the highway by the border in El Paso, TX gives you an eerie comparison between Juarez and El Paso, especially when you consider that much of the El Paso side is still lower class.) Government corruption might be a factor.

For B, I already mentioned the legalizing of weed in America. If we can change the discussion of our "War on Drugs" from punishment to rehabilitation, we could lower the demand for drugs from Mexico (and other countries dealing with the same thing) even further.

For poverty, I don't have a good plan. But let's consider that fence again. It could cost $22.4 Billion to build (though the full cost is hard to figure out, apparently). A quick search tells me that the estimated population amongst the six Mexican border states was 12,246,99... in 1990. So that number's a bit old, we'll bump it up to 20M (another source says 24M by 2020, but that's for both sides of the border.) With about 27.9% being kids, that's about 14M adults, giving us $1600/Mexican adult (more, actually, as the "kids" only includes up to age 14). The average yearly income for Mexico is about $13K, so that's significant but not huge.

What if, instead of spending that money on the border, we use it to improve the cities on the Mexican side of the border? They would give at least a small economical boost, though short-term, and while improving those cities we could have US law enforcement work with Mexican law enforcement to further route the gang

Mostly right on, but the rich are largely Democrat voters and Democrat policies highly favor them...

If only that were a fact, rather than that staple of the right, a lie made up on the spot. In fact the available evidence shows that not is the truly rich heavily Republican, that they even more heavily favor Republican economic and policy prescriptions than party ID would indicate.

this is the first time i've heard this claim. reference? i know of the hand wringing about if we can trust the h/w, but i didn't see any evidence that it was broken.

Ars Technica
New York Times
rt.com

takeover of resources of a sovereign [Iraq] based on (obvious, at the time, and proven later) lies.

This is categorically false. American troops in Iraq were exposed to chemical weapons during the second Iraq war. At least six American troops were wounded in incidents between 2004 and 2011. When Bush said that Saddam's government retained caches of pre-1991 chemical weapons that he was supposed to destroy under the UN mandate that ended the first Gulf War, this is what he was talking about.

Here's a story from the arch-conservatives at the New York Times story from October of this year on the issue.

http://www.nytimes.com/interac...

No, it increased it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11...

That said, a lot of commenters are making an incorrect assumption about why there are overtime rules. Overtime rules are designed as a soft-cap for the number of hours you're going to work (but punish your employer instead of you) under the theory that if they make people work fewer hours, then there will be more jobs available. But that theory is very wrong:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

There are genuinely people who need extra hours of work because they aren't skilled enough to be worth a higher wage, so they work two jobs instead.

They word it like NASA is dumpster diving for its flight computers these days. The CPU may be from what was new 12 years ago, but I seriously doubt the physical unit is actually 12 years old.

Not yet anyways
For Parts, NASA Boldly Goes . . . on eBay

Here's an article talking about the same from 2002. Apparently there's rather low tech mechanical solutions that work quite well. Kinda like the laser potato peeler, still waiting for that and my flying car.

This was just another piece of police state bullshit rammed through by Republicans after 9/11

I seem to remember a vastly bipartisan support for these laws after 9/11... I don't think, you can plausibly single RethugliKKKans out.

Worse, Democrats had 4 years of majority in both Chambers of Congress — two of those years with a fellow Democrat in the White House. If they have not abolished these laws during the times, they are just as a guilty.

Back to my original point of the Second Amendment right — rather than state surveillance or, indeed, forfeitures — are you seriously going to argue, it is the Democrats, who champion our right to keep and bear arms? Really? Go ahead, make my day...

and civil forfeiture laws

So, the civil forfeiture is RethugliKKKans' fault too? Wow... Though reformed in 2000 (ans signed by that famous Republican William Clinton a year before 9/11), the outrage has been been with us since, at least, The Prohibition! And how neat of you to neglect to mention the IRS' newly-developed habit of seizing not just suspect cash found in a car-trunk, but bank-accounts. The New York Times article describes the practice — which greatly expanded under Obama: from 114 such confiscations in 2005 to 639 in 2012.

And the greatest money-confiscation of all? 1933, Frank Delano Roosevelt. What Party was he from, remind me, please?

Remember this next time the Republicans get on their soapbox pretending to be Libertarians.

Yeah, you certainly have forgotten everything, that inconveniences your lie-telling...

Sony's most profitable division is selling life insurance. It could be from that. http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013...

Sony's most profitable division is selling life insurance. It could be from that. http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013...

Yes http://www.nytimes.com/interac...

Compare the #1 in 1900 to the #1 in 2012.

"Ask any person that suffers shingles, virus populations in West Africa may evolve a less lethal variety of Ebola... but I am not going to bet on it."

Actually the lethal strains of EBOV are a mutation of the Asian strain we know as "Reston" which is harmless. It does not encode for selenium.

When the virus made it to the selenium rich soils of West Africa it mutated picking up the encoding for a homologue of the human selenoenzyme glutathione peroxidase (GPx3) which makes it lethal. See: http://orthomolecular.org/libr...

"The only hope for people with regard to HIV & Ebola consists of social changes an if we are lucky immunizations"

There can be no working vaccine; you can induce production of antibodies, but absent sufficient serum selenium the immune system cannot out-compete the virus foe the precursors for GPx3 and the it all goes downhill from there. One researcher has stated "Ebola strips selenium from the body so quickly it does in a day what HIV takes 10 years to do".

The hope for patients with HIV and EBOV lies in the coastal forests of West Gabon. See:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09...
http://en.ird.fr/the-media-cen...
http://www.plosone.org/article...

And if your country has oil, keep quiet about it or the US will come free the shit out of you.

The US is the world's biggest oil producer nowadays. Getting Iraq's oil back then — which anti-Americans like yourself keep alluding to — would've been far simpler by simply lifting the embargo, not go to war. Oil is much cheaper than blood — both to humans and the "evil KKKorporations"... Venezuela — not anyone from the Middle East — used to be our main foreign oil supplier, but we neither attacked it nor planned to, even though its leaders kept talking up the threat of "American invasion" to justify their own failures.

Will this stupid meme ever die? Not as long as Kremlin propagandists keep pushing it, I suppose... Meanwhile, Russia itself is busy sabotaging — and even invading — anybody with gas deposits, that might compete with Gazprom. Putin much?

The reason is because someone (a local, actually) got speeding tickets based on an officer's judgment of reasonable and safe, and the courts found the prohibition unconstitutionally vague.

http://www.nytimes.com/1998/12...

The question of interpretation is not what it would mean to you if you buddy said it, but what it meant to the people who wrote it.

You asked me, what I think it meant. My friends would've meant the same thing as the founders did — I certainly think so.

Whether to extend to TV or internet is a question of hermeneutics not interpretation

How neat of you to completely skip everything else I wrote — about only petitioning the government being protected by the 1st Amendment, and only if the petition is for redress of grievances...

If the First Amendment really does protect the right to sell (adult) pornography (a rather obvious perversion of the Founder's intentions — if we really cared about them), the Second ought to protect owning and bearing of not only brass-knuckles and swords, but rocket-launchers and tanks — and certainly "assault" rifles of any magazine-capacity...

He argues for less fidelity to it [the Constitution -mi].

Yea, sure. More like zero fidelity — the entire piece is titled: "Let's give up on the Constitution"...

The first amendment has much more limited application in semi-private environments.

What has changed to these limits since the 60-ies? Not the laws... It is just the Illiberals of the past, who enjoyed the Amendment's protections back then (see Tinker v. Des Moines of 1969, for one example — that it was about school rather than college is immaterial here), have grown-up, taken the comfortable (semi)-government jobs, and no longer recognize the Amendment as applicable in the same circumstances.

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/20...

The Russian Internet giant Mail.ru said on Tuesday that it had bought the remaining stake in Vkontakte, the country’s largest social network, that it did not already own for $1.47 billion.

Mail.ru is owned by Alisher B. Usmanov.

From http://qz.com/268023/this-puti... :

Usmanov is one of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s “oligarchs,” a group of businessmen with close ties to the Kremlin, and last year Putin awarded him Russia’s highest civilian award, the Order for Service to the Fatherland.

That ought to clear up who is running/owns VKontakte.

This has nothing to do with the race of the writers of the document or its age.

Wrong — you didn't read the full text. Here it is — from NY Times article titled "Let’s Give Up on the Constitution":

Suddenly, someone bursts into the room with new information: a group of white propertied men who have been dead for two centuries, knew nothing of our present situation, acted illegally under existing law and thought it was fine to own slaves might have disagreed with this course of action. Is it even remotely rational that the official should change his or her mind because of this divination?

See? The fact that the founders were White, "propertied", male — and long-dead — really is among the reasons brought up for abolishing the Constitution...

What do you think, "a well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State" means?

To me it means, people should be armed so they can be ready to defend their free country.

In reading any document you have to look at the intent behind the wording, and their intent is pretty clear as the documents show.

Yeah, if we applied your principle to the First Amendment, the only "free speech" rights you'd have, would be to petition the government. And only for redress of grievances. (As well as only after registering, passing background checks, and only using means available in the 18th century — such as print or personal speech — but certainly not online or TV.)

no one really argues against the entire constitution

I certainly wish so, but that's just not true:

• Georgetown professor of Constitutional Law argues for abolishing the document
• And, of course, the Communists agree.

The primary argument — cited by all such "critics" — is that some of the founding fathers owned slaves. Presumably, they'd reject the Pythagorean theorem too, because the ancient mathematician was a slave-owner. And, for one more example, the Aristotle's Logic — on the same grounds...

Such is their hatred of the 2nd Amendment and limits on the government's power (when it is in Democratic control, of course), they don't realize, the 1st will be thrown out together with the 2nd.

But, perhaps more worryingly than these fringe loudmouths, is the calm dismissal of even the 1st Amendment by the boring bureaucrats of today: “This isn’t really the ’60s anymore [...] people can’t really protest like that anymore".

Ever seen a blood drive? It's all marketing. I Get an email in my work in-box at least once a week declaring the RedCross is X days away from running out of blood and people dieing on the operating table!!!

I used to volunteer at the redcross, I never saw them get "low on blood" lol. Most went into Biohazard disposal. But the fact of the matter is, if they don't scream "PANIC" at every possible opportunity, then no-one shows up at all. The actual use of donated blood has been declining at an insane rate... down over 30% from just a few years ago.

Doubt they have plenty of blood? They actually have had a surplus for years:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08...

They still need fresh blood, it expires rather quickly after all so please donate if you can. But it's not nearly as dire a situation as their ads proclaim. The same goes for wikipedia.

Yeah I think the article is overrated. Alcohol has been around for a long time, and so has the ability to process it AND its effects on brains.

See this: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03...

Anybody remember this: http://www.nytimes.com/1993/12... ?

"Thousands of Internet tourists used their computers to tap into a central computer at Cygnus Support, a software company in Mountain View, Calif., to see the "xmastree." (The name itself is a joke to cyberspace insiders, who regularly use programs with names that start with "x," as in xterm or xwindows.)

"Two programmers at Cygnus had wired a real, 7-foot Christmas tree directly to the company's internal computer network, using simple controllers that enabled people on Cygnus Support's office network to turn the decorations, bells and lights on and off without leaving their computer terminals. The 6,000 or so outsiders who peered in from the Internet could view a simple computer rendering of the tree and check a status report to see which doodads were on and which were off, but only the people on Cygnus's local network could play with the switches."

After the states were able to set highway speeds Montana abolished their upper speed limit for a short time. Interestingly people started coming to Montana only to drive at extremely high rates of speed including some Germans who were test driving high performance vehicles. That caused some issues that caught Montana off guard. Later the Montana Supreme Court struck down the vague "reasonable and prudent" language when some guy from Montana protested 3 tickets he got under that law and a new speed limit was re-imposed.

http://www.nytimes.com/1998/12... https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Montana used to have no speed limit during the daytime but that was overturned for being too "vague" by the Montana Supreme Court. People actually drove reasonably well and there weren't any major issues with it. The major issue was the Susie safety nuts who felt that without telling people how fast was reasonable that it would confuse people, the court agreed.

Per TFA, what the Montana Supreme Court said was you can't give someone a ticket for speeding based on "reasonable and proper" since no one could determine what was legal and that allowing a cop to decide was not legal. They didn't impose a limit rather they said in absence of a clear limit you could not charge someone with speeding since they had no way to know of sure wether or not they were complying with the law.

Montana used to have no speed limit during the daytime but that was overturned for being too "vague" by the Montana Supreme Court. People actually drove reasonably well and there weren't any major issues with it. The major issue was the Susie safety nuts who felt that without telling people how fast was reasonable that it would confuse people, the court agreed.