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This is so "well known" it was even covered on Nova.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/evolution/decoding-neanderthals.html

The real reason beer was important was that it was clean water. brewing beer kills off most of the bad things in fresh water supplies.

During the construction of America's Transcontinental Railroad, a similar phenomenon was noted with regards to tea. The Chinese workers would prepare large containers of tea in the morning, then drink it lukewarm throughout the day, as their main source of hydration. And while tea leaf extracts have some antimicrobial properties, it was primarily the boiling process which sanitized the water, reducing the outbreaks of dysentery that were common among other workers.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/tcrr-cprr/

Lemmie guess. Obama will help push through sin tax penalties for industry on gasoline and diesel... then will stand for a moment poised to funnel it into the Algorian Fantasy Options like solar and wind --- because he's a slow learner. Then someone will whisper in his ear, "we tried that already" and he will instead toss the money into the air and it will flutter down into personal tax credits for everyone. Like the Bush Beans, only this cow will be milked quarterly. There will be lots of flowery language surrounding this voter kickback, how free money is "helping to offset the cost of fuel" and how everyone in America is now a "personal stockholder in the energy companies."

A socialist page from the Chavez playbook but it will have a cute and catchy American name.

And the energy corporations who have not done so already will move to Qatar. Then Al-Qaeda militants will surface in Qatar, who'da thunk it. The rest is history, again.

Or president Obama could stop with the floundering and fleecing already, and offer tax credits to encourage the building of clean energy alternatives that will actually scale to meet current levels of demand. Not easy to do, but easy to figure out since there is only one to choose from.

Nuclear fission (someday Thorium or fusion --- there is not enough time to dork around at present). I'm talking about a 100% nuclear powered North American electric grid with ~50% additional baseload capacity to finally realize electric cars and trucks. And I'm talking about a real interim solution for the storage of spent fuel until it can be bred back into the cycle. And making breeding a research priority too.

Basically I'm talking about turning back the clock to a time after the "eternal" Texas and Oklahoma and fields had dried up and before the "eternal" Saudi oil fields were discovered. In the 1960s and early 70s no one believed that North American oil could sustain us any longer, and no one was imagining that coal would scale without environmental suicide. We were about to invest in nuclear energy --- all the way. If we had we would be at the 150% mark already. We'd have "real" electric cars already. This country would be a very different place, and the world would be a more peaceful and better place.

But instead we turned our attention to colonizing the Middle East. First by enabling the oil-rich Saudi Arabia to evolve into the space age feudal system it is today... later, by managing and transmogrifying existing regimes through OPEC-bribes and armed conflict.

In 1977 President Carter declared a moratorium on reprocessing spent nuclear fuel. For no damned reason at all that made any sense. Storing spent fuel forever was now the 'only' option. Concerned about proliferation he said, as the rest of the world set about to take the lead in breeder technology. On that day every nuclear engineer in the United States' jaw dropped to the ground in astonishment.

Might I be so bold as to suggest that oil money and influence played a part in this.

In 1979 The China Syndrome movie happened and Greenpeace happened. Despite the stern businesslike wording of Greenpeace's Wikipedia page concerning nuclear energy, how it is not the best option for the future... I must point out that they must have hired someone to write that. Because they have been emotionally, hysterically and shrilly against nuclear power for 35 years. BUT. While they have demonstrated a firm and 'manageable' resistance to oil production (without fronting any other options, that's someone else's job)... when it is time to move against nuclear energy their own money, energy and resources to wage these battles seem to have known no bounds.

Might I be so bold as to suggest that oil money and influence played a part in this.

Since Carter's mistake... Chernobyl and Fukushima (really bad) have happened and Three Mile Island (close call, still bad) has happened.

One day, you think it's cool that you've been "painted" into a video game...until you realize that same technology can "paint" you right into Exhibit A: The murder scene.

How long before innocent people are framed? Judges can't even understand how the internet works. You think they're going to grasp this and give you a fair trial?

Already, people are routinely convicted based on bullshit forensic pseudoscience: PBS Frontline: The Real CSI [torrent]

They do not have a working bomb but they certainly have a program

Even the U.S. and Israel admit Iran has no nuclear weapons program.

Link 1. Link 2.

What fantasy world do you live in where Iran is a peaceful loving nation?

Reality. Feel free to visit it any time.

The United States has: overthrown Iran's democratically elected government, backed a torture loving dictator in the Shah, shot down an Iranian passenger jet, backed Iraq when it attacked Iran, committed an act of war with Stuxnet, has either assassinated Iran's nuclear scientists or aided our client state Israel in doing so, and has spent years violating international law over the nuclear weapons program we admit they don't have.

What Iran hasn't done:

Overthrown socialisticy democracies in favor of capitalistic dictators, launched two illegal wars of choice, set up a world-wide torture regime, set up a world-wide system of gulags, shredded it's own Constitution to deal with a "threat" less severe than a slip in a bathtub, and engaged in illegal covert wars across the world with drones.

Stick that in your jingoistic, American-exceptionalist ass and smoke it.

I think this hits the nail on the head. It's not about lack of focus, it's about lack of interest, and classical music doesn't suddenly get 'cool' because it's on Twitter.

If you want to sell classical music to people, get them interested in it - get them involved in making it. Teach them the history - there's so much history there, and it brings it alive. Listen to Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony. Now learn the story behind it and listen again:

http://www.pbs.org/keepingscore/shostakovich-symphony-5.html

Teach them that classical music still gets made, and new things happen:

http://www.npr.org/2012/05/13/151712146/first-listen-hilary-hahn-and-hauschka-silfra

...so in case you can't tell, I'm a classical music fan. I wasn't, actually: like a lot of people, I had nothing against it, but didn't know a lot about it. Getting involved got me into the music. I have my issues with the idea that classical music needs 'saving', but I think more people could be fans and it's only about getting them interested.

Speech, in this context, is anything that conveys an idea. A drawing or cartoon can be speech. Your right to fly the flag is covered under free speech. A picture can be speech. Art can be speech.

Imagine banning great works of art like Venus emerging from the sea or David by Michelangelo, just because genitalia is visible. Books have been banned from some libraries because these images were included and classified as "porn". [Citation]

Ah, France. You’re so dynamic and quick to embrace change From the Toubon Law to propping up Minitel to the stoic way you embraced labor regulations aimed at easing ridiculously high unemployment by making the first two years of employment somewhat more flexible with your non à la précarité movement... (Does make for decent wine, though, and likely will for centuries.)

We've surrounded Iran with dozens of military bases, crashed their economy and currency with sanctions, illegally threatened them with military force, and committed multiple acts of war on a country over the....nuclear weapons program both the CIA and Israelis admit they don't have.

So when does Iran get to threaten the United States for being in "material breach" of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which requires disarmament for countries already in possession of nuclear weapons?

But there is another issue here, one that is hardly ever mentioned and that's the coining of the term "innovation." This word, which was hardly used at all until two or three years ago, feels to me like a propaganda campaign and a successful one at that, dominating discussion in the computer industry. I think Microsoft did this intentionally, for they are the ones who seem to continually use the word. But what does it mean? And how is it different from what we might have said before? I think the word they are replacing is "invention." Bill Shockley invented the transistor, Gordon Moore and Bob Noyce invented the integrated circuit, Ted Hof invented the microprocessor. Of course others claimed to have done those same three things, but the goal was always invention. Only now we innovate, which is deliberately vague but seems to stop somewhere short of invention. Innovators have wiggle room. They can steal ideas, for example, and pawn them off as their own. That's the intersection of innovation and sharp business.

That's good because preserving student's privacy is more important than preserving tax breaks for the wealthy.

Don't presume my politics, or that using in-house IT staff provides any guarantee of improved student privacy.

Quick cites: "...It would require the DOE to create a web-based point for authorized researchers to gather aggregated data as well as a âoeresearch engine,â allowing access to âoestudent levelâ data...."

"Harvard University raised concern on and off campus with the revelation that the administration searched e-mails for leaks to the media during the cheating scandal revealed last year...."

"U. of Iowa Ceases Sending Student Data to Sheriffâ(TM)s Office Over Privacy Questions"

and my favorite...a school administrator spying on his students (see interview at 4:37).

Slashdot should stop the Iran bashing already

So, when the Iranian government imposes yet another new repressive measure to build on its existing repressive measures against the Iranian people that result in death, mutilation, torture, and other atrocities, your concern is that people on Slashdot don't criticize - don't say harsh things against the Iranian government? I think there is a word for that, Mr. Liberty.

If you think the Iranian government is for peace, you aren't listening carefully.

All Iran is saying,
is give cutting people into pieces a chance.

Iranian Women Prisoners Detail Torture

Iran as continual regional menace
Iran's Menace in Azerbaijan
15,000 Elite Iranian special-ops 'head' to Syria ---- Iran confirms it has forces in Syria ...
Gulf states lash out at Iran 'interference'

The six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) said in a statement that Tehran's actions were threatening regional security and stability.
The GCC said it "rejects and denounces" Iran's "continued interference" in their internal affairs and Tehran must "immediately and completely stop these actions and policies that increase regional tension and threaten security and stability".

Iranian Bomb Suspects 'Targeted' Israelis, Thai Police Say
Report: Turkey thwarts Iran weapons shipment to Hezbollah
      Why Hezbollah is sitting on 40,000 rockets and missiles ...
            Iran and Hezbollah: The Balance of Power Shifts in Lebanon
Afghanistan war logs: Iran's covert operations in Afghanistan
Iran Steps Up Threats to Rub Out Israel

Discussing the record of Iran's actions and behavior doesn't constitutes "warmongering."

Which bankers? They're not on Wall Street.

PBS disagrees.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/untouchables/

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

As per usual the Slashdot socialist class gets everything wrong.

Excerpts from the "commie" past of US (i.e a more sane US):

Brooklyn Bridge

Route 66

Golden Gate Bridge

Hoover dam

Moon landing

Frontline recently aired an *excellent* documentary on the striking rise in climate change denial in the U.S. and links it to this very thing (and Donors Trust makes an appearance in the program too). It shows just how damn effective these shadow money groups and the billionaires behind them are at driving public opinion to suit their interests. I highly recommend viewing it. Only an hour long: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/climate-of-doubt/

In the USA a convicted felon is not even allowed to vote.

That is a serious shortcoming of the democratic process in the United States, as US federal and state governments seem hellbent on creating as many of these ineligible voters as possible, by way of, (for example):

• Using plea bargains to convict innocent defendants
  Utilization of bullshit forensic "science" in courtrooms [Torrent]
  Maintaining the highest incarceration rate in the world
  Prosecuting kids under child porn legislation for "sexting"
  Failure to guarantee adequate job skills training and rehabilitation programs to inmates, thus fostering high recidivism
  Overzealous prosecution
  The War on Drugs

Further, ex-convicts still have a stake in American society, and as long as they're expected to pay taxes, I believe that they should have a say in how it operates. I think that this is something that should be of concern not only to convicted felons, but to every American who is not above the law, and is therefore eligible to be branded a felon.

Love that you mentioned yachts:

http://www.nationalreview.com/campaign-spot/270855/corporate-jet-tax-rerun-yacht-luxury-tax

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/government_programs/jan-june96/budget_01-01.html

I included news sources from two different slants, didn't know what one you would distrust more.

As one article said, "If you want less of something, tax it more". If you are going to tax sales more, you are going to have LESS THINGS SOLD.
Again, awesome for the economy.

However, all of that said, I would be willing to accept a national sales tax if we taxed EVERY transaction, including bank deposits or stock purchases.

ACTUALLY..

the drones like the predator rely on satellites for control.. .. this actually means that if the pilot turns too sharply (which the drone allows him to do) he can lose contact with the satellite and.. therefore, control..

doing a barrel roll is very unlikely!!

i imagine 'losing control' of the drone because you turned its little satellite dish away from the sat probably wont get you a medal... well, perhaps some Iranian guy may get one!

Actually, they showed just this kind of a mistake on a recent PBS Nova episode Rise of the Drones. The pilot banked too hard and the video feed was disrupted, but he was still able to send controls to roll back out of it.

Where evolution falls flat is trying to claim that...an ape evolved into a human. There is no solid evidence to show that a species can evolve into a different species...We see no evidence that a dog can evolve into something other than a dog.

Huh? No evidence that dogs can evolve into all the different types of dogs, in addition to wolves and coyotes? Really? Also, nobody but creationists claim apes evolved into humans. I'm guessing, though, that you also ignore evidence that apes are genetically very similar to humans? How do you eat with your head stuck in the sand all the time?

Textbook publishers have taken note and have pandered (AFAIK). This has been going on as long as I can remember:

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/need-to-know/culture/texas-school-board-approves-controversial-textbook-changes/954/

However, I think publishers have more ability to cater different print runs nowadays, but it's still a huge problem for millions of Texas school children and possibly more.

But we get the point.

It's very well established that banks committed fraud. It's very well established that the US Government protected these very institutions when they were knowledgeable of the fraud being committed.

It's also very well established that no one's going to criminal court. Wall Street and Washington D.C. have been coupled together in such an orgy of conspiracy that neither will willingly do anything to jeopardize their sybiotic relationship.

There has already been real-life testing of biological attacks. The ones we know about took place in the 50s and 60s. The US Navy released bacteria in a cloud off the coast of San Francisco to see what would happen. The bacteria they released was "mostly harmless" but killed some people with compromised immune systems. Some other government scientists spread bacteria around the NY subway system to see what would happen. Was hushed up for 20 years and sounds like trooferism but it really happened: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/weapon-secret-testing/

These days, it's easier than ever, and containment is way harder. Take some flu, for example - by the time the host has symptoms, it's been contagious for days. Far too late as infected contagious hosts have all interacted with the public - public transportation (all kinds - planes, trains, automobiles, boats, etc), crowds, etc.

Hell, people have been known to get ill from taking a plane trip (doesn't help that the air is dry which helps the flu spread), and highly contagious diseases often get alerts a few days after the flight (stuff like TB).

In the 50s and 60s? Not so much - travelling was much harder and ocean voyagers were so long that if someone got sick and infected people, you'd know long before the other port was in sight.

These days, one infected person can infect a whole plane which can then infect another country and it spreads very rapidly.

The whole world is literally smaller - it doesn't take long for any pathogen to easily travel around the world.

There has already been real-life testing of biological attacks. The ones we know about took place in the 50s and 60s. The US Navy released bacteria in a cloud off the coast of San Francisco to see what would happen. The bacteria they released was "mostly harmless" but killed some people with compromised immune systems. Some other government scientists spread bacteria around the NY subway system to see what would happen. Was hushed up for 20 years and sounds like trooferism but it really happened: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/weapon-secret-testing/

Had we let the "market" take its toll the entire world financial market would have collapsed. All of the banks were over-leveraged in the shadow markets of CDOs et al. Everyone had a hand in the cookie jar.

Also, they did let Lehman fail. And that's when they realized they had to fucking act and fast.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/money-power-wall-street/

GS was one of, if not the major player in the 2008 meltdown.

The DOJ criminal division hasn't done a thing to prosecute any of the heads of Wall Street firms that have destroyed the lives of millions by engaging in fraud but is willing to destroy the life of a promising young men for a victimless crime.

See: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/untouchables/

Thankfully, Lanny Breuer resigned after this documentary came out but it seems like the DOJ is rotten to the core. Eric Holder needs to go next. Obama should get someone in there to clean out the stables.

I've read that you're not worried about climate change as you believe transhumanism will prevail and we will shed this 'natural' world like a used husk by 2045.

So what happens if we don't actually achieve the lofty heights that futurism promises us? What happens if those extrapolations I've seen actually reach a dead end instead of allowing us to last forever and there is no distinction between man and machine? What if we ultimately turn out to be forever mortal individuals and now depend on a decrepit husk we left for ourselves? What then?

The Iranian government despises western civilization, the people not so much.

Because the carriers are gonna buttfuck us with ever worsening caps instead of spending any of their massive profits to lay the lines we already paid 200 billion plus to have laid down?

All this "in the cloud" horseshit requires that we have a steady, reliable, fast and CAP FREE net connection or at least caps that are sane and which go UP in time. What we are seeing is the exact opposite with many places giving crappy caps to start with and as they oversell the shit out of their lines the caps get smaller NOT bigger. Everybody said "Oh the carriers won't want to lose all that business with the 6 strikes law" bullshit the carriers WANT THE EXCUSE because it gives them a legal reason to punt anybody that dares uses even half of what they pay for since they can just say "Oh he's a pirate...what? Prove me wrong!" and will kick you to the curb.

All this cloud shit is gonna die a VERY ugly death as the carriers cut the bandwidth, in my own area the carriers steer the shit out of you, use THEIR VoIP? NO cap, Vonage? Cap. Use THEIR PPV? NO cap, Netflix? Cap. These carriers, who ALL have interest in media companies BTW, sure as fuck ain't gonna want people spending all their time on the net instead of buying TV packages so any of this stuff that they don't get a check from is gonna be so bandwidth starved it'll end up costing you more to play some game in the browser than it would to just go buy a fucking boxed game and have it shipped.

I have seen the future that this corporatism shall bring and it does truly suck. i know I ended up paying more in bandwidth charges than I did for the fucking games i bought during the big Steam Xmas sale, I don't even want to know how much of a bill I would have gotten if everything was run over the net.

PBS Frontline Documentaries are some of the most respected in the world. Making silly assumptions without having any knowledge isn't supporting transparency either.

Trying to block someone from free speech (especially truthful speech) out of fear is the exact polar opposite of what Assange and Wikileaks supposedly stand for. But that is exactly what Anonymous was doing in going after PBS.

Terrorizing people into not speaking the truth is not something that should be celebrated or endorsed.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/wikileaks/interviews/julian-assange.html

> besides, if the universe were expanding and protons weren't, i don't think our meter sticks would be expanding.

Perhaps you are missing the fact that the meter sticks are made of atoms, not protons. An expanding electron shell, and resulting inter-atomic distance might go some way towards explaining the meter stick phenomenon.

But just to argue the other side as well, astronomic evidence suggests that the universe is expanding. That we can tell this means that we have some metric that is NOT expanding. In this case, the speed of light.

So perhaps we can use the speed of light to determine if atoms are changing size relative to the speed of light ... traversing them, perhaps?

Frontline aired Untouchables, a story about how the DOJ has failed to prosecute any bankers following the financial meltdown. It clearly made the case that the DOJ had very little interest, or at the very least, made almost no effort in pursuing criminal charges against the people involved in what amounts to be the biggest case of fraud in history.

Yet they rabidly prosecuted Aaron Swartz where it wasn't even clear that any criminal charges were warranted. I believe this paints a clear picture as to what kind of justice system there is in the United States. BTW, if you haven't seen the documentary Psywar, I highly recommend it.

Nobody else watched "Decoding Neanderthals" on Nova?

http://video.pbs.org/video/2323758207

Wright's version of modernism was very much rooted in 19th century America. In the land, in the American culture, in the idea of home and domesticity, in warm materials that came out of the earth, wood and stone and so forth. The Europeans had a whole different set of priorities.
They were really Utopian socialists. They wanted to remake the traditional family. They envisioned a whole modern culture in which society itself would change. Wright was trying to create a different kind of architectural expression for a traditional culture which he very much believed in. ---- Paul Goldberger, Architecture Critic

Fallingwater Interior

This Mobius strip looks more like a pavilion design for a World's Fair.

If I am reading the renderings correctly, it does not have an unbroken interior. Navigating from one "room" to the next looks to be quite a hike.

I don't see how you organize the interior space that is any way livable.

I realized this was a tall order when I asked you and because I knew you didn't have data to back up your assertion. The reason is nobody collects really good statistics. Criminals who know they're going to commit crimes with guns often take steps to remove serial numbers and thus traceability. But that is not by any means all criminals. Some people bought guns with no evil intent and only ended up committing crimes with them later when circumstances they did not anticipate happened. (Arguments are the immediate causes of about 30% to 40% of homicides but that doesn't apply to a number of categories of gun crime). Of those who do acquire guns with bad intent, most of them buy them one way or another.

The trouble is that the information is largely not collected in the first place. Most guns involved in crimes are never traced with respect to how they were acquired. However, according to this: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/guns/procon/guns.html only about 10% to 15% of guns used in crimes are stolen. The rest are purchased. There are no really reliable statistics detailing how many of these purchased guns were purchased legally versus illegally.

Those data are pretty old, but I doubt that stat has changed markedly.

Also see this study from Maryland https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/Publications/abstract.aspx?ID=242922

“guns sold in Maryland during the 1990s had at least a 4.7-percent chance of being recovered by police in association with a crime somewhere in the Nation within 10 years. Handguns sold in the Baltimore area had a 3.2-percent chance of being recovered in Baltimore within 5 years” “Most guns recovered in crimes had been sold by a relatively small proportion of dealers located in or close to urban areas.” “The simultaneous or rapid purchase of multiple guns by one individual was a risk factor for gun trafficking related to their criminal use.”

According to http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/ascii/fuo.txt based on survey data of prison inmates,

In 1997, 14% of State inmates who had used or possessed a firearm during their current offense bought or traded for it from a retail store, pawnshop, flea market, or gun show. Nearly 40% of State inmates carrying a firearm obtained the weapon from family or friends. About 3 in 10 received the weapon from drug dealers, off the street, or through the black market. Another 1 in 10 obtained their gun during a robbery, burglary, or other type of theft.

Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) didn’t go extinct because they were outcompeted. They weren’t a separate species. They were a subspecies of Homo sapiens. Our superior numbers drove them into extinction, not our ostensibly superior technology, intellect or planning.

Our Paleolithic ancestors said, “Me love you long time,” and they simply disappeared into our gene pool.

Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) didn’t go extinct because they were outcompeted. They weren’t a separate species. They were a subspecies of Homo sapiens. Our superior numbers drove them into extinction, not our ostensibly superior technology, intellect or planning.

Our Paleolithic ancestors said, “Me love you long time,” and they simply disappeared into our gene pool.

Please do me a favor. Don't go to the Grand Central Station with a geiger counter. Also stay away from Capitol Hill i D.C. and any other granite or marble building.
Also bananas could be scary to look at, and flying to the east coast would also be a no-go.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/interact/facts.html

I wouldn't have you ramp up that nuclear fear too high, or you might be a part of statistics.

Radiation is all around us, and the scientist are not even sure it is a bad thing.

Only in the narrowest possible definition.

They're still government properties, their frequencies, brands, copyrights and studios belong to the taxpayers, who paid to develop all of it. They'll be on the block soon, just like many municipal water utilities and public power utilities already are. More of the neo-liberal hogwash about how private industry is always more 'efficient' somehow will be used as the justification, or maybe "deficit reduction".

You are dead wrong. According to PBS themselves, they are not and never have been part of any government:

PBS is a private, nonprofit corporation, founded in 1969, whose members are America’s public TV stations -- noncommercial, educational licensees that operate more than 350 PBS member stations and serve all 50 states, Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam and American Samoa.

.

NPR is a "privately and publicly funded non-profit membership media organization."

Both organizations get a significant minority of funding from the Federal government-funded Corporation For Public Broadcasting but neither NPR nor PBS is owned by the Federal government any more than the multitude of private organizations which receive some Federal funding. They probably wouldn't exist today if they hadn't been funded by the CPB and if the CPB stopped funding them altogether, they would suffer greatly. However, no part of the Federal government can sell either PBS or NPR and even if all Federal funding were cut off, they'd still have a chance of surviving on their other sources of funding.

http://video.pbs.org/video/2247683791/

That is a pretty interesting show about the giant squid (they also briefly discuss the completely fucking scary looking colossal squid) . DVR the discovery channel nonsense, watch this show, then skip thru the discovery channel show just to see the video. Or just find it on the net somewhere...

Have you ever been homeless?

No. Nor do I have any family members that are homeless. I do have family members with mental illness, including one who very well might be homeless if not for friends and family.

I have been homeless.

While I appreciate your experience, the fact is that most homeless that you see "littering the street" are indeed either mentally ill or substance abusers, or both. There are many others who fill shelters, live in cars, etc - but I think that in this context, we are mostly talking about people with an untreated disease.

In short: Get bent you ignorant prick, you're pulling shit out of your arse, typical slashdot armchair sociologist, you're worse than any homeless person I've ever met.

I'd like to see your source of information, then. I'm just repeating what I saw on PBS.

I guess you think "all niggers are lazy thieves"? No, of course not, that's racist? Then why the fuck would you think in much the same way about homeless people?

From :

What are the greatest causes of homelessness? ...
For singles, the three most commonly cited causes of homelessness are:
  * Substance abuse
  * Lack of affordable housing
  * Mental illness

Guess PBS is racist now?

This is also very interesting : http://video.pbs.org/video/1150578495/

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/secrets-viking-sword.html

So you would apply that to your land? It is registered in the form of a deed. How about your car?

Apples and oranges - There is no Constitutionally guaranteed right to own land or cars. There is a Constitutionally guaranteed right to own and carry guns.

[a car] is registered as well as has a license and in most, if not all states an insurance requirement.

Right, registered and licensed... by the states. I shouldn't have to explain to a fellow American the difference between state government and federal government, assuming said American actually passed 9th grade Civics.

Personally, I believe we need to treat guns the same as we treat automobiles.

You can believe a banana is a yacht for all I care - your opinion doesn't change Constitution law.

Require that the owner is trained and licensed to use them.

And the government does such a fantastic job of ensuring every motorist is fully qualified to take the wheel of a 2-ton death machine, right? That's why we have so few traffic deaths, right?

See what I did there? Yea ya do.

Make sure they are insured for when they are used on a person that that person or their survivors can get something more than they currently are getting (nothing).

Like in California, where a criminal can walk into your house and rape your daughter, but if you shoot him he can sue your ass into oblivion. Great concept.

FYI, there is a bevy of civil case law in which a person was wrongfully killed (i.e., not in the process of breaking the law), and their estate made out like bandits. The OJ Simpson civil suits are a prime example of that. Therefore, the idea of "gun insurance" is not only asinine, it's redundant.

Identify each guns ballistic characteristics at the time of manufacture and tie it to the last registered owner for easier identification of the responsible party.

Protip: Stop getting your 'facts' from cable dramas - the vast majority of 'forensic science' is fraud and not based on anything scientific, save DNA evidence (and they tend to fuck that up from time to time, somehow).

In short, take it from a right to a responsibility with real world consequences when that responsibility is violated.

Taking it from a right to, well, anything else, would require a Constitutional Amendment. Good luck getting 2/3 of the states to sign on for that one.

If you have a better idea, please elaborate. For some reason completely oblivious to you, preparation against catastrophic events costs money.

Well, then. Let's see what we have here:

1) Reduce the number of aircraft carriers from 10 (+3 under construction) to 5
2) Spend less on military than the rest of the world combined. Reduce the amount by half.
3) Stop waging war in Afghanistan. Pull out of Afghanistan entirely and bring our people home.
4) Stop the war on drugs. Release everyone jailed for non-violent drug-related crime.
5) Stop the war on immigrants. Allow an easy and expensive path to citizenship. (Note: Our population is declining and we need more taxpayers.)
6) Stop the war on tourism. Disband homeland security, allow unencumbered and easy travel within the US. Redirect the TSA money away from worthless scanners and put it towards intelligence.

That's just off the top of my head. Search for "ways the federal government can save money" and get a zillion hits. Google is your friend.

(Ending Saturday delivery of mail would save an est. $1.7 - $3.1 billion alone. How much did you say those satellites cost?)

The current situation has a long history in a multi-billion-dollar ripoff of the taxpayers and customers of these companies. Cringeley wrote an amazingly prescient article on the hows and whys we have what we have today (I believe it was even featured here a few years ago when it was published):

The $200 Billion Rip-Off: Our broadband future was stolen.

This all is nothing new, it was planned in the 90s, and we have pretty much the implementation of that plan today.

Does it piss you off? It pisses me off for sure. How do we go about fixing it?

1) Stop supporting the companies that screw us and found/support companies which do it right.
2) Get your friends/family/neighbors/community to vote out the bribed politicians that either enabled it, or turned a blind eye to it, and vote in politicians who are not bribed and will actually fix it.
3) Be willing to suffer for a while for a better future. The companies who perpetrate these scams set it up such that people will accept the suboptimal crap they are peddling because they won't take the inconvenience of being without said crap for a short enough time to send the message that the situation will change, or else.

But no, human nature (and American culture itself) dictates that nothing will change; the telcos have already won.

The California brown-outs were caused by Enron and others manipulating the energy market, which was a direct result of deregulation. The reality is that for the most part deregulation in various industries has made a few people very rich, but has been a bad thing for consumers.

That is not what caused the brown-outs. Sure Enron and other made money from it but they did not cause the problem. The problem was caused by the state government. Traders like Enron used state laws to do what they did. Partial deregulation was in fact reregulation. The new laws stipulated that electrical generators could not also own the electrical distribution cables. Also while generators could raise their prices to distributors, those distributors could not raise their prices to energy users without government permission. Consumer rates would be frozen With energy traders such as Enron buying electrical units prices went up which left distributors up a tree, they had to pay higher prices but could not raise their prices. That wasn’t deregulation!

Policy Debate: Has Deregulation Caused the Energy Shortage in California? "As an economist, whenever I hear the word "shortage" I wait for the other shoe to drop. That other shoe is usually "price control." So it was no great surprise to discover, after the electric power shortage in California made headlines, that there were price controls holding down the price of electricity to the consumers."

"Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas and Electric were required to charge consumers no more than 6.5 per kilowatt hour until March 2002. Because this rate had become much lower than the market rate, both utilities began to lose vast sums of money because they had to purchase power at the unregulated market rates."

Do you still want to call what happened in CA deregulation? If so then you don't know what deregulation is, which the removal of regulations without other regulations being added. However you're not the only one to think that way. To most reporters as well as the public the problem in CA was deregulation, that everything was deregulated when it was not. Sellers to end users could not raise prices but generators and trades not only could but did raise their prices to those sellers.

Falcon

No I figured it was yet another country getting what they paid for while we get fucked by the corps and end up on the short bus to the info superhighway.

Despite what Wolfram & Hart...err I mean Goldman Sachs says we have actually paid over 200 billion in the form of massive tax breaks and other incentives to get nationwide fiber over a decade ago, what did we get? A low res Goatse from the ISPs who gave their CEOs bonuses with the money.

Scream socialism all you want but the ONLY WAY we are gonna get nationwide fiber is to nationalize the system, have the states lay it just like the roads, and then lease the lines to the companies who will have to compete for customers. because we are already falling behind the rest of the planet, hell Romania is kicking our ass when it comes to bandwidth, and we have already seen that rather than lay lines the corps will just put ever nastier caps while pocketing the profits. You can't have a free market when most people are stuck with a duopoly at best, most with only a monopoly, so we really have no choice but to nationalize the system.

After all if 200 billion in tax breaks and other incentives couldn't get the ISPs to lay down shit what makes anybody think they will just because their customers want netflix? They know they have you by the balls, so it'll be ever nastier caps and ever worse service while the rest of the world passes us by.

I'll just leave this here http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/climate-of-doubt/