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"Google, which has been under rising pressure along with other tech companies to release diversity data"

And here:

"Put simply, Google is not where we want to be when it comes to diversity,"

Now, by in-sourcing their "low-pay employees," they are instantly closer to where they want to be.

You'll forgive me if I decline to discuss my views of the relevant NSA programs, since /. isn't exactly welcoming to opinions more nuanced than "Snowden Good. NSA Bad."

All I'll say on the subject is that there are mechanisms in place for people who feel their Government is doing wrong. He could have gone to the relevant Congressional committees or the Inspector General at NSA. He could have used the whistleblower act. He ignored all of those options and leaped straight to leaking, then further threw the baby out with the bathwater by leaking details of programs that had no bearing whatsoever on domestic civil liberties, like NSA's activities against China. In effect, he substituted his judgment for the judgment of our elected representatives, an act of extraordinary hubris in the words of Robert Gates.

In spite of everything I may have retained some understanding of his choices had he opted to selectively leak the details of NSA's domestic activities. He didn't do that though, he took as much as he possibly could and leaked it all, with no consideration for the damage it would do to American interests and national security. That may not mean anything to you but such actions have far reaching ramifications and I don't recall seeing Mr. Snowden's name on the ballot when I was selecting the people who would wield that power on my behalf.

This exact same topic was covered in Frontline's special on North Korea over a year ago. Their point of contact was Jiro Ishimaru of Asiapress who was sneaker netting USBs over the border. They even took a video of people trying to watch on a tiny screen and having to shut everything down whenever they heard someone outside.

The documentary also touched on humanitarian issues as much as it could using a secret camera. Sad stuff. Great thing to watch. Occasionally you can catch it streaming on Netflix but it seems to not be available right now.

The CO2 levels on the earth just 100,000 years ago are 3x what they are now

Errm, sure about that?

Ever see a rabbit /mouse plague?

You mean like this cyclic rat plague? If so, then no, I missed the last one and the next one isn't due for another 30-40 years.

Yes, this is a patent troll, but Apple's been on both ends of these cases.

Case in point: A few years back, Burst.com had them by the short hairs over video streaming patents - probably worth billions today - and Apple got off with only paying $10 million.

You win some, you lose some...

That song, "Peter Paul and Mary: Because All Men Are Brothers", reminds me of the new movie "Senn" which we watched last night. Specifically, the PPM lyrics of: "My brother's fears are my fears, yellow white and brown. My brother's tears are my tears the whole wide world around."

"Senn" is an impressive movie, especially considering it was produced supposedly for only US$15000. That goes to show what modern technology and an internet-connected gift economy can do nowadays.
http://sennition.com/

This is a bit of a spoiler, but the connection is because of a key aspect of the movie's plot relates to humans' feeling each others emotions and how that changes how they behave, especially in a corporate context.

Which also reminds me of:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
"In addition, Iacoboni has argued that mirror neurons are the neural basis of the human capacity for emotions such as empathy."

And some people labelled sociopaths or psychopaths may not have much of these feelings or may feel them more selectively.
"Psychopathic criminals have empathy switch"
http://www.bbc.com/news/scienc...

Yet many of our corporate and political leaders at these point may fit that description...

And what do you do with various criminals who often engage in psychopathic behavior? And by whose definitions? Put your "brother" in jail?

And in a big city, given out current economic paradigm, people may also need to learn to switch off or decrease empathy in some way just to survive thousands of interpersonal encounters an hour when walking down the street...

On this plane of existence, there seems to be a complexity of human (and other) life existing in practice at a middle ground between chaos and stasis, competition and cooperation, fire and ice, meshwork and hierarchy, and so on.
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/me...

The Lathe of Heaven (as another spoiler) has a section where the protagonist wishes for "world peace", and it is accomplished by the appearance of an alien invasion of the moon, which unites all humanity in opposition...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...

So, while we should be careful what we wish for, and things are complex, still, there are so many possible environmental menaces that more cooperation is in order, IMHO. But it is never quite so simple as "all men are brothers". After all, sadly, even "brothers" sometimes fight each other like in the US Civil War.

Still, our culture may shape how competition or aggression is expressed or channeled into more positive directions. Like Mr. Fred Rogers' sings: "What do you do with the mad that you feel?" As with Haber, a chemist can figure out a way to feed billions of people with nitrogenous fertilizer, or they can figure out how to kill large numbers of people with poison gas, or, in Haber's case, a chemist can even do both. The irony is that Haber's doing the first (to feed people) made doing the second (to kill people) unnecessary -- except that politics has taken a century to catch up with the potential of his (and others') inventions.

Likewise, even now, imagine what we could have had if the USA had invested three trillion US dollars on fusion energy research and better batteries and solar panels and energy efficiency -- instead of incurring that much and more on the Iraq war. Carter had the right idea, but he was not re-elected, even though (or perhaps because) he said:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americ...
"We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I've warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of f

how will the drones be able to fly through my pet door to deliver my bag of potato chips directly to my couch?

Oh, that is easily answered!

Step 1. Start with the pool of tech workers who have been displaced by the oversubscription of H1-B visa workers (The Pacific NW will be a great place to start!)

Step 2. Sign them up with brand new car ride-share service Druber (Drones R our Uber!) (that is, all the ones who own cars, and not those hipsters who eschew the Modern American Car)

Step 3. Using a new social networking App (DroneDrivers!), they check in at the automated, drone based delivery service's warehouse. (Let's call it DroneToHome!)

Step 4. When you order your bag of potato chips (baked of course, in olive oil, and only lightly salted), online, through the PCWS (Potato Chip Webservice), using DroneDrivers, it pings the all the Druber driver's nearest to the DroneToHome warehouse.

Step 5. Through a process of consensus, all but one of the Druber drivers decides that the proposed job is not worth their time. The remaining driver rocks up to the DroneToHome drive-through and and is handed a remote control to a drone. While this occurring, some minimum wage monkeys (formally wanna be rockstar programmers from defunct start ups) release the Kraken^W drone (that carries your potato chips) from the roof of the warehouse.

Step 6. The Druber driver then takes control of the drone, and simultaneously drives towards your house, while piloting the drone. This is achieved through the use of a special VR headset that overlays the flightpath of the drone on the surrounding view of the road, combined with a leftover Nintendo power glove that the Druber driver uses to punch virtual controls that only he/her can see in his/her field of vision[1]. The headset also incorporates a live camera feed from the drone. That camera feed also has a virtual map overlaid on the video that shows the route that the driver must take [2].

Step 7. When the Druber driver finally reaches your home, he simply flies the drone to your cat door, lands it, and in a transformer like way, converts it into a walking style robot that pushes through the cat door and makes its way to your couch!

Thus by outlawing non-direct view drone flights, the FAA has enabled at least (at least I tell you) 3 different startup opportunities!!! [3]:

1. Druber - Drones R our Uber delivery service!
2. DroneDrivers - Find the right person to drive your drone delivery!
3. DroneToHome - The only way to fly (your packages)

Notes:

[1] This step is predicated on the fact that no-one has yet outlawed flying drones while driving.

[2] A couple of months ago I was watching the NOVA program on landslides (Killer Landslides) and one fascinating part of it was film from inside a rescue chopper that showed a display in the chopper that has a live feed of the terrain overlaid with graphics showing where the roads were meant to be.

[3] Will provide future workers for Step 5.

Let me make it clear that I'm just talking about the Christian extremists.

There were over 4,000 lychings in the U.S. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and they were still going in in the 1960s.

If you want something more recent, there's for example the torture of Dilawar by the U.S. Army. Dilawar was suspended from the ceiling by his wrists for 4 days, while the Americans used him as a kicking target until he died. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Barbaric? They could give the KKK some lessons on cruelty. (Or maybe they were in the KKK.)

You know that if they got caught killing Dilawar, there must have been a lot more that they didn't get caught on. How many? Hundreds? Thousands?

Overall, somewhere between 150,000 and 600,000 Iraqi people died in Bush's Iraq war, most of them innocent civilians and most of them children. You know they didn't all die humanely.

From reading the medical reports, it seems that a large number of them died from having their houses destroyed. Crush injuries, which are one major cause of death in those situations and take two or three days, are a fairly painful way to die.

A lot of the deaths are burn injuries, over several days, which are one of the most painful ways to die in medicine, especially if you don't have morphine. In fact, burning someone to death in a few seconds like ISIS did it is humane compared to the way we did it.

Tell me again why it's barbaric to kill someone by burning him to death with gasoline in a cage in a few seconds, while it's not barbaric to kill someone by bombing his house, burning him to death, and having it take three days.

If the Iraqis did that to your wife or child, how would you respond? Maybe you'd want to kill every Iraqi you could get your hands on? Say -- do you think they feel the same way? Do you think that could be part of the reason Muslims want to kill us? Do you think that if we killed 600,000 Iraqis, some of their relatives might want to kill us in return?

Do you think it would have been a better idea not to have attacked Iraq in the first place -- not because Iraqi lives matter, but just for selfish reasons, to avoid having them attack us in return?

If you want to know what my position is (for those of you who are so dense that you haven't figured it out), I think it's wrong to kill people just for some geopolitical reason, when it doesn't protect your country or anyone else.

It might be acceptable in a just war, but Iraq wasn't it. You may have missed the memo, but all the reasons for the Iraq war turned out to be lies. http://www.pbs.org/now/politic...

I would suggest Neil Shubin's "Your Inner Fish" finds its way onto your bookshelf. Or video feed. While that's a superficially appealing way to envisage things, the fossil record of the evolution of land-dwelling tetrapods was considerably more complex.

Even with the regulations, several major brands that are considered (perhaps undeservedly) reputable were selling fakes. Imagine if there were no regulations.

Just in case anyone thinks this problem is limited to over the counter herbal supplements:

General information on counterfeit medicines
Counterfeit Medicine
Cracking Down on Counterfeit Drugs
The deadly world of fake medicine

Yes, even in the US, even with all the regulations, it happens more than most people think.

How did eyes evolve? The structures are too complex to be accounted for by traditional evolutionary explanation mechanisms.

That old chestnut? Open your eyes.

all the companies have to do now is start moving their headquarters from the USA.

That has already begun. Even with some high value biotech companies for example.

Go ahead, US.... drive all your companies outside the US jurisdiction. The rest of us will thank you.

And in fact if something like this goes through, there's going to be a huge upswing in corporate inversions. It's already been happening with American companies relocating outside the US, and that's going to get orders of magnitude worse if Obama follows through on his plan.

Why should I run an American company, when I can move the company outside the US and be in a far superior competitive position?

Genetic diversity concern research (NIH) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...

Unintended consequences (PBS) http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/harves...

Apparently the author of this article is another one of those stupid humans who have very little understanding of the benefits and necessity of oil. Too many stupid humans have this perverted belief that oil and gas make up the largest usage and benefit of oil production. "insert losing sound buzzer here" Take a good look around you right now. Almost everything in your field of view requires oil production. Your car, your computer, your lipstick, earphones, tennis racquets, life jackets, Tupperware, the list goes on. Take a look here stupid humans ---> http://www-tc.pbs.org/independ...

We have to divest ourselves from these stupid humans who pop up everywhere with their global warming anti humanity ideas. These people are brainwashed itdiots with no understanding of how the world works. They would see you living in caves and eating bugs to save their precious Gaia from their paranoid delusions. Get informed or become victims of stupid humans.

I say cut it off at the source. The fundamentalist puritanical practices can be traced back to Saudi Arabia. If you read the history of the House of Saud you will see that the got where they are by doing exactly what ISIS is doing. Enslaving people, cutting off people's heads and basically getting where they were by the sword. If it weren't for all that oil money they'd be just another tribe in the middle east, but all that oil money gave them what they needed to spread their radical version of Islam far and wide through funding madrasses and various other institutions world wide. Is it any wonder that most of the 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia? ISIS, Al Qeada, etc. can all trace their roots back to Saudi Arabia.

Here's an excerpt from Frontline on what Saudi Arabia is teaching their young people.

Thoughts on this by me from 2008: "Re: On Climate Change vs. the Singularity"
https://groups.google.com/foru...

The key point I make is that climate change, whatever the cause, is an issue about social equity and likely unaccounted for externalities. We have enough resources as a global society to make the planet work for everyone in a good way -- including those affected by rising sea levels or changes in weather patterns. Whether we choose to use those resources (or make more) to do so (including, say, via a global basic income) is a political choice. In other areas these political decisions are made all the time, like compensating people and communities dislocated when a highway or dam goes in. Personally, give the rise of solar power and also the likely rise of hot or cold fusion soon, the political and emotional capital being spent on arguing about cutting back carbon emissions seems a waste. While fossil fuels have all sorts of negatives including mercury pollution for coal, and for that reason it could make sense to tax them and redistribute the tax revenue to all as a basic income for all to discourage their use, I'd rather see this much emotion and political energy go into positives like solar research or fusion research or also energy efficiency. Indoor climate-controlled agriculture and related agricultural robotics is another big trend we could invest more in to ensure our food supply security regardless of the weather.

Or as Kurzweil said in 2011: "Futurist Ray Kurzweil isn't worried about climate change"
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/need-t...
"Today, solar is still more expensive than fossil fuels, and in most situations it still needs subsidies or special circumstances, but the costs are coming down rapidly -- we are only a few years away from parity. And then it's going to keep coming down, and people will be gravitating towards solar, even if they don't care at all about the environment, because of the economics.
    So right now it's at half a percent of the world's energy. People tend to dismiss technologies when they are half a percent of the solution. But doubling every two years means it's only eight more doublings before it meets a hundred percent of the world's energy needs. So that's 16 years. We will increase our use of electricity during that period, so add another couple of doublings: In 20 years we'll be meeting all of our energy needs with solar, based on this trend which has already been under way for 20 years.
    People say we're running out of energy. That's only true if we stick with these old 19th century technologies. We are awash in energy from the sunlight."

I would say not. In most places that I know of in the US, K-12 education is funded to a large extent by property taxes, which means that rich districts have a lot more resources than poor districts.

I did a quick search and found this very brief article about it: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/wherew...

The actual proportions and differences very likely vary greatly depending on state and locality.

I take it you don't get much international news. The Chinese have had problems with individuals in their Uyghur population, yet apart from putting the screws to that ethnic group haven't wiped them from the map.

Nobody will tie their name to the resistance. Even Benjamin Franklin knew when not to use his real name.

So how many times have organizations of the Federal Government had information beforehand on suspects and have failed to put the pieces together and act vs. actually succeeding at stopping something? They've never given any evidence that they have been able to stop anything significant based on prior knowledge and yet I've lost count of how many times they have traced back having information and the threat *still* happened.

• 
     
• Why did U.S. intelligence fail on September 11th?

•    

• The 9/11 Comission Report

•    

• The Boston Bombing Intelligence Failure

•    

• Obama calls Christmas day attack an intelligence failure

•    

• Long history of intelligence failures

That doesn't even consider the many times when there is no intelligence failure and bad things still happen. Thinking that knowing everything about everyone will prevent problems only infringes liberties with no promise of protection. At some point you have to see through the claims that ". . . if only we do X we can ensure that this will never happen again!" as being unworkable and it's better to protect liberties than to infringe them . . . including liberties of foreign citizens. Trying to blame Snowden's disclosures for why bad things aren't prevented is ludicrous.

Of course there's always the root of the problem: who effected the bad thing? We should blame the implementors of the evil rather than some fringe player . . . unless all you want is a scape goat that's in arms reach.

Your post is bull shit. The Japanese general in command of Iwo Jima told his wife he wouldn't return alive before he left. They intended to defend this Japanese island to the death while inflicting as many American casualties as possible. They considred surrender a terrible act of shame. You should look into the "Banzi" and Kamakazee attacks that occured in many places to better understand the mentality. You might also want to look into the use of "surrender" attempts as a ruse to lure Americans into firing range, or to exploade a grenade or bomb.

Iwo Jima - The Japanese perspective

... the navy had virtually no seagoing vessels available other than submarines, and that their air arm consisted largely of Kamikaze suicide units.

However, the military were still fiercely pursuing a policy of fighting to the death rather than surrendering and accepting disarmament. The professional army and naval officers could not envisage a defeated Japan in which they would be redundant and they were well aware that the Allied surrender terms would categorically state that Japanese militarism should be eliminated. . . .

It is not difficult to imagine the General's feelings about the appointment. He had followed the progress of the war with growing dismay and was well aware that a successful defence of Iwo Jima was impossible. 'Do not plan for my return' he wrote to his wife as he assumed his new command. . . . .

In the failing evening light, 50 Japanese kamikaze aircraft of the 2nd Milate Special Attack Unit from Katori Airbase, descended on the US Navy force surrounding the island. Two blazing aircraft slammed into the side of the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga causing serious damage which put her out of action for the rest of the war. Another ploughed squarely into the escort carrier USS Bismarck Sea causing huge explosions among the aircraft crowded on the flight deck and within a short space of time she rolled over and sank. . . . .

Kuribayashi radioed Chichi Jima, 'I have 400 men, the enemy besieged us by firing and flame from their tanks. The enemy's front line is 300 metres from us. They advise us to surrender by loudspeaker but we only laugh at this childish trick'.

--

You also got the numbers wrong.

"Only 1,038 of the 21,000 Japanese defenders were captured alive. " - Major Pacific Battles

The North Korean people do have access to DVD players and computers. North Korea isn't in the stone ages when it comes to some technology as some people have access to cell phones. One of main problems has been a lack of enough food and totalitarian control of outside communication like the Internet . In this Frontline report, blackmarkets items include DVDs and thumb drives smuggled from China (24:20).

NARRATOR: As they [simulator pilots] edge around the storm, Alder triggers the critical moment of Flight 447: he fails all three airspeed indicators.

SIMULATOR CO-PILOT: Okay, we have NAV ADR 1 fault. We have unreliable airspeed.

NARRATOR: The automatic flight control systems shut down.

SIMULATOR CO-PILOT: We're flying with no auto-pilot or auto-thrust.

SIMULATOR CAPTAIN: Okay. Autopilot's off. I have control.

SIMULATOR CO-PILOT: You have control.

NARRATOR: If their actual airspeed rises or falls by as little as 10 knots, they could suffer a catastrophic loss of control. But the pilot uses standard procedures, learned in training. He moves the throttle levers to set thrust at exactly 85 percent.

SIMULATOR CAPTAIN: And I'm selecting...I've got 85 percent set.

NARRATOR: Then, he raises the elevators to pitch the nose up at precisely five degrees. With engines at 85 percent power, and five degrees upward pitch, the aircraft should always settle at the same safe speed.

JOHN COX: The thrust levers themselves, the throttles, don't move. Unlike some other airplanes, where you can feel the throttle in your hand moving, with Airbus aircraft, that throttle doesn't move with auto-thrust engaged, so you have to look at specific engine power indications.

When the auto-pilot shut off, it didn't reset the throttle amount to the position, it stayed where the setting had been by autothrust.

NARRATOR: The power indication is displayed here, on the central control panel. But if auto-thrust switches off while the engines are in low power, the crew might lose track of the low thrust level.

JOHN COX: If you're very task-saturated, your concentration's going to be directly in front of you. What's the power output of the engines? You're going to have to physically turn your attention and look to the center console area..

This is not going to be done as frequently as looking at, at the things right in front of you. It, it's certainly going to be in the scan; the question is, "How often?".

NARRATOR: The aircraft is now nearer the lower end of its safe speed range. But overloaded by fault warnings, the crew might not realize they need to increase power..

Also Android wasn't a "bad" company before being bought out and whether Google is "bad" is strictly dependent on how you feel about the whole" you are the product" bit.

Compare this to Comcast whose rep is sooo bad they changed the name to Xfinity just to lose some of the negative feelings about the brand. Never had TWC but just the fact that this will make the resulting corp a monopoly for all intents and purposes (as the DSL in most areas is subpar and if the rumor going around is true DSL is being abandoned by AT&T in all but the largest markets so they can push their insanely priced wireless broadband) should frankly give EVERYONE reason to not want this to go through. When you look at how much we pay for honestly what is subpar Internet compared with a lot of the planet (even Romania last I checked had faster speeds and even megacities like NYC and LA have speeds that are a joke compared to most of Asia and parts of Europe) what we need is MORE competition, MORE lines being run, and MORE infrastructure upgraded. As we have seen time and time again monopolies give you less because they are the only game in town, the last thing we need when we've already been robbed out of nationwide broadband once already. Do we REALLY think another supermegacorp is gonna make things BETTER than what we have now?

Congratulations, someone watched the How We Got to Now episode, Cold.

Citibank is famous for helping the drug cartels launder money :
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/...

And Bank of America, Western Union, and JP Morgan, Goldman-Sacks, etc. are guilty too :
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

http://www.washingtonsblog.com...
http://www.npr.org/blogs/paral...
http://www.infowars.com/big-ba...

According to a Ken Burns documentary. an amendment was used because the Temperance Movement thought a constitutional amendment would never be repealed. Amending the Constitution is difficult and the only way to repeal an Amendment is to make another Amendment. No Amendment had ever been repealed and it was thought that no Amendment ever would be. Federal laws, on the other hand, can be repealed by any sitting Congress. The Temperance Movement thought they had certainty with an Amendment. It was never tested as to whether a federal law would be shot down by the SCOTUS. Using a constitutional amendment was a choice not a requirement.

As evidence of this in 1914 the Federal government passed the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act which nationally regulated and taxed the production, importation, and distribution of opiates and coca products. That law was upheld by SCOTUS in United States v. Doremus, 249 u.s. 86. Regulating alcohol is quite similar to regulating narcotics but the Temperance Movement wanted the certainty, or at least what they thought was certainty, of a constitutional amendment.

Sorry but the evidence does not match the idea that Congress is now viewing the Constitution differently than they did in 1920.

Shutting down air traffic after 9/11 had a measurable impact on weather over CONUS from the lack of contrails in the sky. It isn't unfathomable that ships can also have a measurable level of impact.

There was a great interview regarding this idea on PBS recently: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/ma...

Way off topic, but European diseases such as Smallpox killed Incas. Quoting: "Even before the arrival of Pizarro, smallpox had already devastated the Inca Empire..." And: "... the viruses tore through the continent, killing an estimated 90% of Native Americans."

What great news to wake up to! Hoping for many more optimism-promoting successes like this on the road to humans living in space habitats that can duplicate themselves from sunlight and asteroidal or lunar ores.

Here is a PBS NewsHour video with launch footage:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/up...

BTW, that PBS NewsHour Orion article led me to another PBS NewsHour article which formed the basis of my most recent "optimistic" Slashdot story submission on how restoring 1970s overtime regulations could boost the US economy:
http://slashdot.org/submission...

With a stronger economy, maybe there would be even more demand for space-related ventures of all sorts?

An ape who went to college: http://www.pbs.org/program/my-wild-affair/
A driving school for dogs: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-20614593
Animals don't build much, so I don't think any have build a rocket. However, multiple animals made it into space before any human did. I think building things is the main difference between us humans and other animals.

So yes I agree, humans are way too full of themselves and aren't as special as they like to believe.

Frontline did a piece a little over a year ago on the NFL and CTE: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/...

Ignore those who say they used to be our ally in Syria and we were sending them weapons and aid.

Who said that? One of the reasons we were reluctant to send aid to the so-called moderates was because we were afraid it would fall into the hands of groups like ISIS. In retrospect that was probably a mistake; of course one could go further back and say that it was a mistake to help destabilize Assad in the first place. Devil you know and all that. Did you happen to catch Assad's interview with Charlie Rose? He called this happening; he may be a scumbag but he knew his country better than we ever did. Realpolitik might have been the best play, though it's a bit late for that at this stage.

Incidentally, they're not just our enemy; they're enemies of all of civilization. You're willing to sit on the sidelines while ISIS engages in a campaign of genocide and ethnic/religious cleansing? Go watch this, assuming you have the stomach to get through it. They're barbarians and they need to be terminated with extreme prejudice.

If you can't get behind the moral imperative to intervene, well, they've killed multiple American citizens and that's all the casus belli we need.

So your complaint is that the current guy hasn't catered to your pet issues? Welcome to the fucking club dude.

Don't vote for him or his party if that's how you feel. Just don't try and claim with a straight face that there's no difference between the two major parties. There are significant differences on issues large and small. If neither one of them caters to your pet issue(s) you're welcome to vote for someone who does.

He's still bombing other countries and wants to send some troupes in.

That might have something to do with the American citizens that keep getting their heads cut off. If you think there's any President that would behave any differently you're sadly mistaken. If anything I don't think he's going far enough with those sickos; go watch this, if you can stomach it. Watch how they shoot bound and helpless people as nonchalantly as you would step on a spider. That organization is as close to pure evil as I've seen in my lifetime and if our President had the balls to actually do what needs to be done I would be the first one lining up to go over there and help kill them.

The problem is the big ISPs have already cherry picked the places they want and have zero fucks to give about anybody else so anybody that isn't already covered by one of the majors gets "Herpa-de derp's wireless shitnet of infinite pain" which believe me going back to shotgunning modems would be better!

I should know as I ended up moving to get away from a Herp-de derp WISP. These "brilliant networking geniuses" decided I HAD to "have teh viruz!" because I used like 6GB of data (running WSUS Update through a VM to gather patches to update my desktops at the time) in a week so I brought the only system I was using on their WISP... a laptop running Xandros Linux Business. I sat there with my mouth dragging the floor as their "chief networking specialist" promptly TRIED TO INSTALL NORTON FOR WINDOWS ON A LINUX LAPTOP and when I pointed out that Norton for Windows wasn't gonna run on Linux? He broke out an AVG for Windows disc LOL! Needless to say I demanded and got my money back and started looking for a new place to live the next day.

So while this is a nice idea IN THEORY in reality none of the big boys will bother, after all if they had a single fuck to give they wouldn't have already taken 200 billion in tax dollars and given us a low res Goatse in return, so what you'll get is indie WISPs that know less than your average 15 year old halo player when it comes to networking.

To put this in perspective, California is aiming for 100 fueling stations by 2024 and as of May this year only 9 actually existed.

"California, Oregon, New York and five other states pledged to put more than three million zero-emission vehicles on their roads by 2025"

http://www.usatoday.com/story/...
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb...

http://www.pbs.org/independent...

to get more fiber and micronutrients: In practice, it is what we're eating. Exercise just makes us want to eat more afterwards. Enough fiber and micronutrients shuts off our "appestat" and we feel full on less calories. See, for one example, Dr. Fuhrman's approach, which suggests people aspire to one pound cooked and one pound raw veggies every day (hard to do, but even getting close yields great benefits):
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...

That said, exercise is generally *great* for your overall health, including boosting immune function by getting the lymph moving. And outdoors exercise in sunlight under the right conditions can help with vitamin D deficiency.

See also:
http://fuhrmaneattolivereview....
"Nutrisystem, Jenny Craig, MediFast and Weightwatchers offer only traditional foods from the Standard American Diet that are known to be the root cause of obesity and other common diseases. The portions may be smaller in size and in the number of calories but their nutrition is negligible and too low as confirmed by the Aggregate Nutrition Density Index."

Getting back to the main topic, in the same way, if we were producing power locally-to-the-neighborhood like via Solar PV or maybe someday hot/cold fusion, we would be less likely to have unpaid-up-front external costs like cross-country pollution, economic risks, or maintaining the US military in the middle east. Then our economy and society would be a lot healthier. Energy efficiency also works like local energy production and so generally is a great thing. Consuming foreign il is an invitation to disaster, like the USA has not learned its lesson from the 1970s!
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americ...
"We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I've warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.
    All the traditions of our past, all the lessons of our heritage, all the promises of our future point to another path, the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values. That path leads to true freedom for our nation and ourselves. We can take the first steps down that path as we begin to solve our energy problem.
    Energy will be the immediate test of our ability to unite this nation, and it can also be the standard around which we rally. On the battlefield of energy we can win for our nation a new confidence, and we can seize control again of our common destiny."

Sadly, the USA took the wrong path to the feel-good-in-the-short-term Reagan years back then... But thankfully some people did not give up, and the cost of solar PV continues to fall and energy efficiency improvement continue to be made despite it not being a level playing field because the price of fossil fuels and nukes don't account for many negative externalities. But we could have been there in the 1980s, and saved decades of military costs and health costs and pollution remediation costs incurred since then.

The Civil War was not about the oppression of slaves (contrary to popular belief). It was about the crushing of dissent.

I never said what the Civil War was about. I was merely responding to what appeared to be a complaint about the South's way of life having been destroyed; if that's what they were referring to, much of that way of life should have been destroyed, so the destruction of that way of life wasn't a bug, it was a feature.

Sadly, although the 13th Amendment to the US constitution finally added one more freedom that the Constitution defended, the "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted" clause left a rather large loophole through which several states snuck (not that the North was a land of rainbows, magic ponies, and racial equality).

(And not that the Southern states were paragons of freedom even for white people, especially white people who wanted to teach slaves to read and write or didn't particularly want to participate in patrols hunting down runaway slaves.)

In practice, the loss of a CEO, . . . at a critical moment can do a lot of damage.

No, not really. Study after study has shown a CEO has little impact on a company's performance. In fact, the higher the pay the CEO receives, the worse the company performs.

After 12 attempts in 25 years, Congress finally repeals Glass-Steagall, rewarding financial companies for more than 20 years and $300 million worth of lobbying efforts. Supporters hail the change as the long-overdue demise of a Depression-era relic.

On Oct. 21, with the House-Senate conference committee deadlocked after marathon negotiations, the main sticking point is partisan bickering over the bill's effect on the Community Reinvestment Act, which sets rules for lending to poor communities. Sandy Weill calls President Clinton in the evening to try to break the deadlock after Senator Phil Gramm, chairman of the Banking Committee, warned Citigroup lobbyist Roger Levy that Weill has to get White House moving on the bill or he would shut down the House-Senate conference. Serious negotiations resume, and a deal is announced at 2:45 a.m. on Oct. 22. Whether Weill made any difference in precipitating a deal is unclear.

On Oct. 22, Weill and John Reed issue a statement congratulating Congress and President Clinton, including 19 administration officials and lawmakers by name. The House and Senate approve a final version of the bill on Nov. 4, and Clinton signs it into law later that month.

Just days after the administration (including the Treasury Department) agrees to support the repeal, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, the former co-chairman of a major Wall Street investment bank, Goldman Sachs, raises eyebrows by accepting a top job at Citigroup as Weill's chief lieutenant. The previous year, Weill had called Secretary Rubin to give him advance notice of the upcoming merger announcement. When Weill told Rubin he had some important news, the secretary reportedly quipped, "You're buying the government?"

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

1.4M employees, check.
$16B is for all of walmart, not just the Walton's stock. They own around half.

$8.81 moving to $100/hour almost makes the $8 insignificant, but I'll use $91.19 anyways.

1/3rd are part time.

Using 1.4M employees, that's roughly 1,867M full time hours, 467M part time hours. 2.3B employee hours/year. So increasing average employee pay to $100/hour would cost the Waltons $210B of their $8B of income from Walmart a year. For that matter, raising average pay to $12.29 would wipe out their income period. You could reach $15.77 if you theoretically turned Walmart into a non-profit.

$2/hour to the proposed federal minimum wage increase would seem doable though. It would also increase our tax base - more people paying the higher income tax rates vs the 15% max long term capital gain rate the Waltons almost certainly take advantage of.

I wish they'd focus more on things like MRSA and KPC which kills far more people in this country and are far more deadly. These diseases are easily spread and there is no cure for them. While not trying to diminish the cause to fight Ebola, frankly there are a lot of things far deadlier in this country that people should be worried about.

The cases in Texas I think can be squarely blamed on incompetence from the Dallas hospital.

In the case of KPC, Congress has basically put their head in the sand and handtied the CDC and FDA from effectively studying and fighting it, thanks to the livestock lobbies Frontline has a good episode on this. It doesn't help that congress has cut the budget of the CDC significantly over the last decade and played politics to make it difficult to study and fight the causes.

As it is, the CDC had to cut back on their research on Ebola due to the budget cuts and the delays in the worldwide community for fighting and funding the fighting of Ebola aren't helping matters either. If the Dallas hospital wasn't so incompetent, there's a good chance Thomas might have survived and nobody else would have become infected.

Walmart is hated with fury in some towns, and many proposed stores have been shot down because the city council/citizens/etc said no.
It's not a new phenomenon.

This whole situation is why we should be paying attention to the latest Nobel Prize winner in economics. He won the award for his work in "market power and regulation -- specifically how to regulate oligopolies, when just a few firms dominate a particular market and keep prices artificially high, and for situations of asymmetric information, when regulators donâ(TM)t know everything about how firms are operating".

His work applies "general regulatory frameworks to a range of industries, from telecommunications to banking".

Well, your scenario is exactly where you need to start using your real intelligence. Take for instance the conservative claim that climate scientists are just spinning their doomsday scenarios to get those "fat" research checks or to advance some other agenda.

Well, you do realize that claim originated from Frederick Seitz right? He was after all, the former president of the National Academy of Sciences, decorated by NASA and a few other organizations, president of a university and set up and funded a complete lab at another. It's not like that argument was pulled out of thin air and follow the money which is the modern version of it is only the same that was put forward by the AGW crowd and even you somewhat round about in your post. I mean if anyone who is a "denier" is a paid shill, it can work both ways.

This is where you brains are supposed to kick in when you realize that energy companies are willing and able to fund their research in a lavish style that government research simply can't and won't match.

No energy companies sponsored Seitz when he made the claim. Some of the groups that were ran with his quotes but that's nowhere close to what you are implying.

Further, your brains should be able to tell the difference between honest attempts at research vs. simple attempts to delay and undermine research.

Yes, like when the democrats checked to see when the hottest day of the year would be, turned the AC off, did things to make the room hotter, and then scheduled a hearing on global warming? And yes, that is what happened in 1989 James Hansen later said he thought it was perfectly acceptable to exaggerate because he thought the cause made it necessary or some shit like that. (Its been a while since I read the link and it doesn't resolve any more for some reason).

Oh, and I should note that Wirth left politics specifically to take a high dollar job at one of Ted Turner's charities.

So yes, don't trust everything you are told, but use your analytical skills to understand motive and source reliability.

Indeed, if I had the time to find and show the connections between the political solutions to global warming and the scams behind them, some of which is outlined in Al Gore's book earth in the balance where he chastises how the conservatives inveighed against 'atheistic communism', along with the original Kyoto accords and support for groups like Jubilee2000 and it's offshoots

Even more recently, this crap continues to be distorted for political gain.

So yes indeed, do not trust everything you are told. Use your analytical skills to understand motive and source reliability.

Nothing is as clean as you think it might be. Politics has co-opted this subject from the start.