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Monkey balls have caused the death of quite a few cows and other livestock that try to swallow one whole.

They're also inedible to humans.

If just 10% of the energy people spent on blaming others with different political affiliation was instead spent on work, growing a business, or starting a new business, most of the problems we complain about would disappear on their own.

The entire reason we developed representative government with elected officials is so we would only need to take a few days out of our lives every couple years to worry about politics. Instead of having to learn the minutiae of every political issue every day so we can make an informed decision about all of them, we choose a few people to do it for us. That frees us up to do our regular productive jobs the rest of the time. But instead of using that free time to get more work done or for recreational activities, for some odd reason we use huge portions of it to follow what our elected officials do and argue with each other about the rightness or wrongness of it. That's not our job. That's the job of the politicians we elected. We made those elected offices so everyone wouldn't have to waste time dealing with all that stuff.

Do your research before the elections and vote your conscience. Follow up on it just enough to make sure the people you voted for are doing what you expected them to do, and so you're prepared for the next election. Otherwise, get on with your life. That's how the system was designed to work. If you feel strongly enough about politics that you must follow it every day, then you should probably be running for office. And if the electorate decides you aren't suitable for office, go back to your regular job.

Do you want to know the best way to heal the political divisiveness currently afflicting the country? Get to know some people with different political opinions. Go on vacation together, go hiking with them, play some sports with them, go to a concert together, take your kids to the park together, go fishing together. Discuss anything but politics. You'll find that you're both regular people, and you have a lot more in common with each other than differences. And when a divisive political issue comes up, your imagination won't be working with a vacuum so it can run wild and cast the other guy as evil incarnate so it's OK to punch him, throw things at him, shoot him, or even think it's OK that he's been shot.. He'll be the neighbor you hang out with - a real person with a life just like you who has his own personal reasons for disagreeing with you, just like you have your own personal reasons for disagreeing with him. And maybe, just maybe, we'll be able to sit down and have a civilized conversation about how best to resolve or live with our differences, instead of calling each other stupid/crazy/evil and doing everything we can to impede each other.

About a week ago I read something about the Super Bowl's "opening night" and I wondered if it was a football championship or a Broadway musical.

How can a football game have an "opening night"?

No doubt it was a big show, but as another poster points out there was only 11 minutes of playing time. Is that true? And the hype about the commercials and the half-time show is possibly even bigger than the action on the field.

I guess the NFL has done some cool things with technology....well, not the NFL but people who partnered with them (e.g. CMU experts helping CBS's 30 robotic cameras to work as one)

It looks like Intel has taken that a few steps further for this year's Super Bowl. I would hope anyway. That was 16 years ago.

But on other tech fronts, wasn't there an article in the last year on /. about the NFL's horrible experiences with their Surfaces? And didn't announcers keep referring to them as iPads?

And dammit, I just watched a brief news clip about the Super Bowl hoping to see some of this amazing new camera technology and the only pictures of the game were still images! I should have known better than to click on a Newsy link. CBS doesn't play well with whatever extensions I have on Chrome and Firefox so I had to pull up IE to watch their report...and watch a Bud Light commercial...And CBS didn't have anything but still images in their news clip either? WTF?

Didn't the game air on CBS? Was the camera technology cool? It seems they're making it difficult to see.

Sorry for the second reply, but here is the article about First Niagara choosing pin over signature as well as their press release.

Apparently it is unique in the US in that it will *only* do PIN if you use the chip. Swiping still works for signature, of course.

Chase was almost going to but backed down at the last minute. Almost all other chip and pin are chip+signature+pin ones from my research, and it will choose signature over pin.

Wikipedia says:

A February 2011 investigative report by WTMJ-TV in Milwaukee found evidence of widespread grade inflation at the school's Milwaukee area location in Greenfield..

Yet, score inflation is common all over the academic spectrum. SAT scores have seen several rounds of inflation over time. My own university's tests are far easier at the same level in 2016 than they were in 1975. Even at the high school level score inflation is rampant.

We have decided that having students feel good about themselves is more important than maintaining academic excellence. ITT is just playing along with the cultural direction, perhaps taking it a little further than most. That just makes them ahead of their time.

This article does damn well have an illustration

Police officer fired for not shooting a suspect:
http://www.post-gazette.com/lo...
(not the Onion).

Edward Jenner developed the smallpox vaccine in 1796, from cows.

This was quite controversial at the time, because it involved injecting bits of cow into humans and... what could go wrong? Caricatures of the time show cows "breaking out" of people after the cow vaccine was given.

In religious terms, how ethical is it to inject humans with pieces derived from the lower animals? Didn't Jenner's vaccine meddle with God's great plan and pollute the integrity of the human form?

Pure ethics can be based on suffering, so there shouldn't be any problem. Later on we'll develop methods for growing organs without the animal host to reduce suffering even further.

It gets murky when you think ethics is derived from some religious dogma with irrational basis and no interior logic. Once you believe there's something special about the human form/genome/purpose, you start to have ethical pangs for no good reason.

Give it a couple of years, it'll become mainstream. Like a Christian Scientist with appendicitis, eventually everyone will see the usefulness and ethics more clearly.

Yep - CMU, like most Universities these days, are as patent litigation hungry as anyone else...

http://www.post-gazette.com/lo...

They need highly skilled ($40 to $50 an hour skilled) employees to maintain and repair them plus you need skilled workers to clean them and stock them.

No you don't. You don't need to keep someone on the payroll to do that. Stocking them? You mean load them? Minimum wage people for that.

IF something goes wrong, the robot company sends a guy out. Those things aren't some consumer device that's gonna be thrown out in a couple of years. Those things are designed to last because business people have to worry about ROI, reliability, and other factors that consumers don't think about.

And some of these robots work for the equivalent of $4/hour, never get tired or call in sick, never late, work 24 hours a day, etc ....

If there was an explosion inside the cabin or luggage compartment, there will be internal paneling, structural members, etc., blackened and bent and peppered with explosive ejecta littering the deserts of the Sinai.

That's actually part of the difficulty. The parts which clearly indicate it was a bomb because of blackened and bent pieces are scattered around the crash site, impossible to tell where they originally came from. So there's usually no direct evidence of a bomb.

What you end up doing instead is looking for areas of missing pieces from other mundane pieces of debris. In Pan Am 103, they conducted tests using mock bombs stored in retired fuselages. The baggage containers adjacent to the bomb survived like this.. The suspect baggage container in Pan Am 103 was shredded like this. Which was their basis for concluding the bomb was inside that baggage container. A falling object only has so much energy once it hits terminal velocity, and that energy is only sufficient to deform or tear metal by a certain amount. So the pieces end up a certain size on average (that's why the debris from USAir 427 and American 77 were virtually unrecognizable as a plane - they struck head-on at such a high velocity their high kinetic energy went into tearing the metal into tiny pieces).

The evidence which led to the conclusion the bomb on Pan Am 103 was in a radio were these pieces of circuit board (overlayed on top of a pristine board in this first pic). An explosive decompression and free fall from altitude would not have fragmented the circuit board in that manner. An explosion very close to the board had to have done it. The police and investigators at Lockerbie did an impressive job of evidence collection to find these pieces. As Kogalymavia Flight 9268 crashed in a desert, they should be able to recover even small pieces like this and we'll eventually know if it was a bomb.

You seem to be under some illusions about the working conditions of University professors. Most of your professors are adjuncts, working part time for less than minimum wage.

You're upset because your professor didn't contact you way before the first class to tell you what the expectations were? Guess what? The University probably hadn't even gotten around to hiring her yet. And even if they had, they reserved the right to say "just kidding" and cancel it at the last minute.

You want someone to blame for the poor quality of your education? It's not your professors. It's the "dooshbags" they are working for.

I am sorry to hear that you are out an extra $50 for the cost of a new textbook. Your professor, who makes about $20,000 a year by working at three different schools with no benefits, no job security and no support from their employer, knows what that feels like.

AEP will be buying batteries.

Mr. Powers said he sees the small commercial and residential markets being the first to benefit from battery scale-up. In an extreme example, he said, AEP’s Texas subsidiary helped develop a 4-megawatt storage battery to serve customers in Presidio, Texas, who experienced chronic power outages because a single, 60-mile transmission line extended to their town.

“What that does is provides a great deal of flexibility in terms of protecting the customers from price spikes,” as well as outages, Mr. Powers said. “What’s far off is the coupling of large batteries with power plants. What’s not so far off is helping the individual customer manage their energy needs.”

Indeed, the long-term vision for battery developers is to change the way consumers use energy. Batteries solve the problem of mismatched times of excess generation — early afternoon for solar, or sufficiently breezy days for wind — and times of peak demand — typically in the early evening for consumers.

The idea of buying cheap energy off-peak then selling back on-peak will become viable as prices of batteries come down. If utilities could pass on the costs of battery grid storage to the ratepayers I'm sure they would be very happy to do so, as they can typically get a standard profit margin guaranteed on such investments. I don't know what the threshold price would be, but it's something to keep an eye on.

Exactly! Who is the government to tell us we must have a license to drive? And so many kinds of licenses! Why can't one license allow me to drive anything?! From motorcycles to trucks to airplanes!!! What next? Will we have licenses for hunting? What if it is out of season and we're hungry? If we can't shoot it, can we go fishing? Yet another damned license?! What does it take to feed myself man!!

Why is it that all these self proclaimed "I think it's a good idea *BUT*" people always take it to the illogical conclusion?! Any laws that require mandatory vaccination, such as the one in Mississippi - they have 99+% vaccination rate!! always ties it back to the doctors, either the AMA or the American Association of Pediatrics.

http://www.post-gazette.com/ne...

go to google news

type in "shooting"

and let's dip into the ocean today

http://www.newsday.com/news/ne...

http://www.post-gazette.com/lo...

http://www.ketv.com/news/omaha...

http://www.twincities.com/crim...

http://miami.cbslocal.com/2015...

http://www.whsv.com/home/headl...

etc.

etc.

tomorrow it will be another collection of dozens of shootings

every fucking day in the usa. oh it happens in other countries. at a much lower rate. because they make guns harder for douchebags to get

the usa enjoys no amazing lower rate of rape, robbery, assault, etc., because of owning lots of guns, as compared to our social and economic peers, we are no crime free paradise. so owning a gun doesn't confer magic anti-crime properties. it does confer something though: a massive increase in homicide. pointlessly. needlessly. every little confusion or altercation in the usa has to lead to death. and this is somehow better

completely unnecessary, completely fucking stupid, and completely ok according to my fellow countrymen who are fucking braindead douchebags

we need gun control in the usa badly

and we are going to get it

you can't ward off logic and common sense with stupidity, lies, and propaganda forever

Here's one

Another

And anotherMany people would agree that “back in the day” insufficient exercise would never be a problem for kids. However, in age that dwells on video games, computer programs, and many indoor activities, children are beginning to focus more on instant gratification and less on old fashion fun (unfortunately, this includes playing outside).

Obviously, it's because kids are sitting and not moving around, but ... just read parts about "instant gratification".

News Flash: Driving a car instead of biking to work may make you fat: most drivers ARE overweight.

Oh good grief. Yeah, I see all those people saying, "Yeah, I bored, Let's go sit in a traffic jam for several hours tonight instead of going for a walk."

Computers and video games are making us fatter and more isolated: Facebook and Slashdot are nowhere near what personal human interaction can off and as a result it's making more hostile and anti-social.

Speaking of too much screen time, I need to go. Correcting the Internet every time it's wrong is tiring.

...so for just one example: you think anyone opposed to hydrofracking for any reason (ie, including "nuclear is more efficient") is a legitimate terrorist? Because the DHS does:

http://www.post-gazette.com/legal/2012/04/30/Anti-fracking-group-adds-claims-to-surveillance-suit/stories/201204300191

Anonymity != Privacy because we're in the age of big data where large data sets can be cross-correlated to profile an individual. From stores that track your cell phone while you're shopping to big chain stores figuring out you're pregnant, big data techniques are invading your privacy in more and more ways. If you think that anonymous data collection is safe, it's still data collection and despite people's best efforts, we are of course creatures of habit and your repetitive habits allow people to build fingerprints about you. If you have enough data points, even anonymous data points, you can build a profile of an individual, their habits, their likes, their dislikes and where they go on the Internet. If you can take that profile and match it against an individual using other correlating data you've been identified. This has been proven for example in the 2007 Netflix prize competition where anonymous movie reviewers were tracked down. There's lots of examples on this and over the past few years, techniques have become much better at picking individuals out of anonymous data sets.
  More chilling is a study released this year showed that using in analyzing anonymous cell phone tracking data, 95% of 1.5 million individuals could be identified.

What this means that as long as companies are able to collect data about you, whether tagged or anonymous, you're still being tracked somewhere and that is no guarantee that your privacy is protected. What has to happen to provide privacy is to stop all of the tracking and I don't see companies nor governments giving up that mechanism anytime soon.

Linked is the average tuition rise over the last five years for all 50 states. In most cases, the rise is 20-30%. In the extreme upper end, the rise is nearly 80% (I'm looking at you Arizona...). http://www.cbpp.org/images/cms/3-19-13sfp-f3.jpg This clearly outpaces cost of living growth over the last five years.

The next link is the growth in administrative costs for one example, the University of California system, which has massively ballooned over the last several decades. http://californiareview.net/2011/08/24/graph-of-uc-administrative-growth/ This is not an isolated phenomenon. While professor salaries and direct education expenses have stayed relatively flat over the last few decades (or tracked inflation in some cases), the number of, and salaries provided to, administrative positions have dramatically increased across the board at most institutions (public or private).

For further example, look at total compensation for the top university executives across the US from 2011-2012. We are compensating many university execs in excess of $500,000 a year (some over $2 mil). http://old.post-gazette.com/images5/20130513presidential_pay691.png At many state schools, with limited external funding, and tuition rise limited by law, we're still paying execs $3-400,000. What value do these people add that is worth $300,000 - $2 million?

It probably does but not in the "she was dressed like that" manner but more of a this requires further investigation manner. Given the type of weapon, a real assault rifle and not something with different trim, it was (he was a tax stamp holder I assume unless it was an illegal weapon) it would have been highly valuable. Since you are implying he was targeted now the question is how did he become a target?

One guess would be he liked to show the weapon off to just about anyone who came over and even like to show how secure it was since the criminals came prepared. This leads me to the question of why would bank robbing criminals need a fully auto weapon over the standard handgun, shotgun, or semi auto rifle? The others are much easier to come by and if planning a big heist a fully auto weapon will just eat through ammo and wouldn't be of much use unless they were planning to mow down a crowd. You also mentioned that the criminals were caught aiming it out a window which seems to indicate these aren't the real serious criminals who know to shut the hell up and be low key. Most of your criminals (99.999%) aren't like those in the movie Heat even worse is most (99%) don't even measure up to the barely competent Man in Black Robber so something does smell a bit fishy. You claim they were serious criminals but yet they seem to be exceptionally stupid, as in below the average crackhead gang banger who knows not to wave a fucking gun around where people that can turn you in can see it.

Another scenario that jumps to my mind is insurance fraud given the value of the firearm (probably at least $15,000). As such I would have looked at the connections between your father and the criminals as there probably is a very close relationship with 1 maybe 2 degrees of separation if not directly known by your father. Again this seems to fit with the well prepared but incompetent criminals. The only other scenario that seems to fit might be your father wasn't a tax stamp holder (seems unlikely) then it seems like the person who he got it from let someone else know where to get one in which case I don't have much sympathy. But there that doesn't seem to fit since how would the criminals have known to come prepared to remove a wall.

Also I tried to find some cases of a legally owned assault rifle (even ones that were previously legally owned and registered in the US) being used in crime and that seems difficult to find as I haven't come up with anything yet. This task is further confounded by the nebulous term of assault weapon which idiots in the media equate to assault weapon when they are not the same thing. Here are some of what I have found:
Assault Rifles Are Not Heavily Used in Crimes
Has any Fully Automatic Firearm ever been used to commit a Violent Crime?
Fully automatic guns in the US are highly regulated, and regulation workshardly a right wing outfit
I did find a case where privately owned assault rifles/machines guns were stolen but it seems far more common for the government to have them stolen
Feds release photos of stolen machine gunsThe one case of privately owned ones stolen. incompetent as hell
Hotchkiss man pleads guilty in theft of cop’s assault rifle, SWAT gear
Cop shot looking for stolen police rifle

Here is an example of Discovery Institue propaganda that was published recently as a Letter to the Editor. pittsburgh post gazette

It doesn't sound like it equalizes to me:
http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/local/uncategorized/pedestrians-3-times-more-likely-to-be-killed-when-clocks-change-study-says-509042/

... it appeared here: http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/business/technology/outmaneuvered-in-their-own-game-antivirus-makers-struggle-to-adapt-668510/.

I'm surprised McAfee's argument for its decline has no mention of five of the anonymous core group being busted by the feds after one turned informant.

And does this not display a flaw in their design? The fact that by design they allow for "Core Members" to be arrested and by design allow themselves to be treated as a criminal organization. They fucked themselves. How would an informant get you arrested if you're truly Anon? How would you get busted if you don't break the law? It seems fairly obvious that if you're a criminal then you're not really a core member of Anon.

The problem with Anon is that criminals have become the leadership. When criminals run the organization then no one who is truly an intellectual and who doesn't want to go to prison will be bothered to associate with Anon. Why not just join a local street gang if one wants to associate with that?

I'm surprised McAfee's argument for its decline has no mention of five of the anonymous core group being busted by the feds after one turned informant.

#0: local elections.

But seriously, if the vote were as meaningless as you dropouts like to make it out, why is so much energy being spent to deprive people of it?

The problem is that you have a handful of names, while my side has statistics like 125,000 (in just one state!) voters who would have a difficult time meeting the voting id requirements.

http://www.npr.org/2012/07/30/157594371/will-penn-i-d-law-actually-keep-voters-away

http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/local/state/air-force-veteran-testifies-voter-id-law-could-prevent-him-from-casting-ballot-646865/

http://www.democracy-nc.org/VoterIDStories.html

Another similar history lesson: demise of the Westinghouse company

Its odd, how in your gun toting utopia, the USA, which has regular gun massacres, I'm aware of very few - if *any* instances of one of the concealed carry heroes actually stopping a massacres by shooting the nutter.

Probably because they realise that when push comes to shove - they aren't John Wayne (who was a draft dodging coward anyway), but rather pants pissing blowhards hiding as best as they can.

There was just one a month or two ago at Pittsburgh's western psychiatric institute. Someone simply walked into a lobby and opened fire. Two dead and seven injured before an officer shot and killed the shooter. How many would it be if everyone else in the area was unarmed? http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/local/breaking/two-dead-seven-injured-in-western-psych-shooting-221520/ On the other hand how many would it be if the shooter was unable to obtain a gun? Food for thought.

http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/news/education/public-money-finds-back-door-to-private-schools-637038/ describes one example of a current (and recently introduced) tax loophole.

Short summary: tax credit introduced to increase funding for scholarships to get needy students in to private schooles uses the word "enrolled" instead of "attending" ... and now wealthy families already sending their kids to a private school can "enroll" their kids in public schools so that the private school can reduce their own kids' tuition by the amount of the tax credit.

That is a tax loophole which was not intentionally created.

AOL is still around, and there are still people paying for dialup service with them ... AOL's brand is so strong among the technically illiterate that some people actually thing that AOL is the "Internet," is "Email," is "instant messenger," etc.

The geek ought to have learned by now that not everyone shares his love of complexity --- or his need for or access to broadband services.

Around 74 percent of the nation's adults had Internet access in their homes by 2010, but 6 percent were still relying solely on dial-up Internet connections to go online, according to a Federal Communications Commission report that looked at broadband access.

Just last year, AOL, whose more than 3.5 million dial-up users account for the bulk of the business, added 200,000 new dial-up customers to its roster.

And while Verizon Communications provides high-speed Internet services through fiber optic FIOS service or digital subscriber lines (DSL) to the majority of its 8.7 million subscribers, the company still provides dial-up Internet to more than 31,000 U.S. customers.

Why are so many are still using the old-fashioned Internet highway?

Their reasons can range from the expense of faster services to little need to hurry up and download all those movies.

Plenty of Internet users cling to slow dial-up connections [May 12, 2012]

government's ludicrous capability
They are trying with blimps :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-altitude_airship
http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/local/region/blimp-experiment-falls-flat-308073/

I was going to say something along the same lines "that users feel safer" [in the house of their lord].

But I was also going to say "uhm... you think churches DON'T make money?!" They make LOTSA... tax-free money.

http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/news/us/family-battle-offers-look-inside-lavish-tv-ministry-634539/

Where have you been? Fucking mars?

I found those in about 5 seconds with google. Thats 100% first page results. WHAT THE FUCK DUDE? Completely fucking blind much? We've got in there convictions, tens of thousands of out-of-state residents voting, and so on? What the fuck?

The text of the article and the information in the articles it links to seem to state different things.

The article linked states:

"...the FBI returned to May First's offices, this time with a subpoena, requesting information about the server. We [the EFF] helped them respond to the subpoena and May First turned over what minimal information it had; namely that the server was running the anonymous remailer program Mixmaster"

But the link in that goes to this site http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/local/neighborhoods-city/internet-service-to-help-in-probe-of-pitt-threats-631734/
which states:

"An Internet hosting service through which at least three University of Pittsburgh bomb threats passed said Monday that one of its servers was "hijacked" and it is cooperating with the FBI.... May First/People Link believes someone illegally hacked into ECN's system, which requires members to log in, and emailed the bomb threats, said Alfredo Lopez, co-director of May First/People Link. "The problem is, somehow this joker got in, and we don't believe they had an authentic login. We think they did some kind of shenanigan to get in there," Mr. Lopez said. ...

These seem to be completely different things! The article states that they were running an anonymous remailer which, assuming it's done right, doesn't leave any trail. But the link in that text states that they believed that "someone illegally hacked into their system" and "they did some kind of shenanigan to get it"-- which could plausibly have left fingerprints, since real-world hackers aren't always the genius criminal masterminds that the movies like to portray.

Which is it? Were they "illegally hacked" using "shenanigans", or were they running a remailer open to anonymous login? Or, did they actually run an anonymous remailer, but told the FBI that they were hacked?

The text of the article and the information in the articles it links to seem to state different things.

The article linked states:

"...the FBI returned to May First's offices, this time with a subpoena, requesting information about the server. We [the EFF] helped them respond to the subpoena and May First turned over what minimal information it had; namely that the server was running the anonymous remailer program Mixmaster"

But the link in that goes to this site http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/local/neighborhoods-city/internet-service-to-help-in-probe-of-pitt-threats-631734/
which states:

"An Internet hosting service through which at least three University of Pittsburgh bomb threats passed said Monday that one of its servers was "hijacked" and it is cooperating with the FBI.... May First/People Link believes someone illegally hacked into ECN's system, which requires members to log in, and emailed the bomb threats, said Alfredo Lopez, co-director of May First/People Link. "The problem is, somehow this joker got in, and we don't believe they had an authentic login. We think they did some kind of shenanigan to get in there," Mr. Lopez said. ...

These seem to be completely different things! The article states that they were running an anonymous remailer which, assuming it's done right, doesn't leave any trail. But the link in that text states that they believed that "someone illegally hacked into their system" and "they did some kind of shenanigan to get it"-- which could plausibly have left fingerprints, since real-world hackers aren't always the genius criminal masterminds that the movies like to portray.

Which is it? Were they "illegally hacked" using "shenanigans", or were they running a remailer open to anonymous login? Or, did they actually run an anonymous remailer, but told the FBI that they were hacked?

So when the FBI uses stings to catch international arms traffickers, organized crime figures, corrupt public officials, and embezzlers, are they "morons" too, or just would-be terrorists? Your post is nonsense.

The examples you cite are generally not entrapment because the persons they catch were already doing these things before they met the FBI agents. The difference between the terrorism stings and a traditional sting can be illustrated thus:

Traditional sting: send out agents to places where drugs are sold and arrest those who mistake them for drug dealers and try to buy.

New-style sting: send agents into the community to make friends and introduce them to weed. When they convince someone to try it, they will take him to a "drug dealer" who is really a cop.

The parallel is not perfect, but I think it is close enough to show that these stings are different and the concerns some have are not nonsense.

Not to mention you'll at most catch absolute morons who at their best would simply win a Darwin Award because the kind of bozos these "stings" catch are frankly the same gullible dipshits that fall for 419 scams and other stupidity.

So when the FBI uses stings to catch international arms traffickers, organized crime figures, corrupt public officials, and embezzlers, are they "morons" too, or just would-be terrorists? Your post is nonsense.

Anyone with a brain is immune to this nonsense.

Anyone with a brain and a passing familiarity with the news knows your post is nonsense. Three weeks ago a notorious Russian arms dealer was convicted in US Federal court. Guess how they got him? If stings are good enough to take down experienced international arms traffickers, and organized crime figures, public officials, embezzlers, and others, they are good enough to take down potential terrorists. If you don't think so, please tell us why? And please, please tell us that you really believe that everyone taken down in a sting is no brighter than a hick good 'ole boy complaining about the "gubermint" and that it never works on anyone more sophisticated, and what your "reasoning" is?

Russian arms dealer sentenced to 25 years in prison

Viktor Bout, a Russian arms dealer* caught in an undercover sting by U.S. agents posing as Colombian guerrillas seeking weapons, was sentenced to 25 years in prison on Thursday by a U.S. judge in New York. . . .

Two DEA informants who posed as FARC leaders testified for the prosecution at Bout's trial. A former Bout business associate, Andrew Smulian, also testified for the government after pleading guilty to participating in the FARC deal.

  According to prosecutors, in a meeting at a Bangkok hotel with the supposed FARC representatives, Bout agreed to sell the 100 advanced man-portable surface-to-air missiles or the approximately 5,000 AK-47 assault rifles that were discussed.

  Bout was charged only in connection with the suspected arms deal, but U.S. authorities have said he has been involved in trafficking arms since the 1990s to dictators and conflict zones in Africa, South America and the Middle East.

Said to be the inspiration for one of the chief bad guys in Act of Valor

same article without a paywall: post-gazette site

And, in addition, the company who provided the service had agreed to cooperate with the investigation: http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/local/neighborhoods-city/internet-service-to-help-in-probe-of-pitt-threats-631734/ God that title is really misleading.

Bullshit. If you start charging every negligent mechanic with manslaughter then no one will want the job. You have to understand that everyone makes mistakes and if screwing up 1 in a 100 jobs leads to manslaughter charges then no one will be willing to do the work. Then everyone's car will break down.

Here's 1
Here's 2
and here's 3

Seems the bullshit you proclaimed is on your face. =D

Am I the only person that opens their new toy before leaving the store? Unless of course it has that impenetrable plastic shield packaging, because I don't carry scissors with me so I can open it without slicing my hands open trying to cut it with my knife.

Women want college administrators instead of the police involved because the former have a ridiculously low level of proof as their standard. The one in four statistic is a lie.

I didn't. I lumped in "Free to Play" games in with the "Games that Suck" games.

Well, then you're just wrong. DDO, LotRO, LoL... those are not games that suck. They're also games that have managed to be very successful with the F2P model.

You just made that up. To be "fair here" the "Tea Party movement was vocally against a black guy in the White House from the beginning.

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09067/954066-454.stm/

To quote the article:

Several hundred people gathered on the Capitol steps yesterday to protest the "B word" -- the ongoing bailout, by the federal government, of mismanaged banks, poorly run auto makers, homeowners who can't pay their mortgages and state officials who can't control their spending.

"These are people who believe in limited federal and state government, but who think government has overstepped its limited role in our lives," said foundation President Matthew Brouillette.

Speakers and participants denounced both Republicans, such as former President George Bush and U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, and Democrats, such as President Barack Obama and Gov. Ed Rendell.

They disliked Mr. Bush's action last fall to give federal money to banks that made poisonous home loans. They also criticized Mr. Obama for spending additional billions of taxpayer dollars to prop up General Motors and Chrysler, to help overleveraged homeowners trying to avoid foreclosure and to help deficit-ridden states with his $787 billion economic stimulus program.

Emphasis obviously mine.

I can keep digging up news reports and speech transcripts all day of the original Tea Party rallies and how they all dealt primarily with the need to reduce government spending, and anger over the billions of dollars being given to the people in charge of the companies that fucked up the economy in the first place.

Can you honestly back up your claims of racism with any evidence? Any at all? I know it's easy to just dismiss people you disagree with as bigots, but it's not very productive.

People take government subsidies as an article of faith for R&D but nobody can ever point out a single technology or product that would never have happened except for the government stepping in.

This argument is a logical fallacy. There are a lot of technologies that have come into existence due to government funding (which is why I assume you worded your argument this way), and to suppose that they would have found other funding sources is pure fantasy.

The United States has enormous reserves of natural gas which can be easily tapped for our transportation fuel needs.

If they can be easily tapped, then why haven't they already been tapped? Natural gas technology for cars is very old and proven. Natural gas mining has been going on for many years. Fracking is expensive. http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11243/1170956-28.stm

If green energy was economically superior, it would be kicking the butts of all of the established energy companies and the private sector would be rushing in to invest without the need for any government subsidies.

You'd have to level the playing field on both sides, because oil production is heavily subsidized as well.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/business/04bptax.html

Environmental quality doesn't mean much if you're out of work

It sure makes it a lot easier to live off the land. Unpolluted water and air means you can sustain yourself outside of the boundaries of civilization. Even in cities, it's nice to have clean air and water and freedom from disease. Of course lassez-faire attitudes are what got us into this economic situation, as money to rich has trickled out (not down) to countries that aren't as concerned with environmental quality and working conditions.

Reminds me of McArthur Wheeler: (from http://plus.sites.post-gazette.com/index.php/component/content/article/62/103182-pittsburgher-stupidity-in-the-news-the-mcarthur-wheeler-effect- )

At 5 feet 6 inches and about 270 pounds, McArthur Wheeler is an easily recognizable man — even when wearing lemon juice on his face.

That certainly came as a surprise to Wheeler, 45, of Versailles Street, McKeesport. He was incredulous in April when Pittsburgh robbery detectives told him that he had been identified in surveillance photographs as one of the two men who robbed two banks in Brighton Heights and Swissvale on Jan. 6.

"But I wore the lemon juice. I wore the lemon juice,'' a puzzled Wheeler told the even more puzzled detectives.

The detectives' confusion turned to incredulity as Wheeler explained about his would-be lemon aid.
"Someone told him that if you put lemon juice on your face it makes you invisible to the surveillance camera,'' recounted a still chuckling Cmdr. Ronald Freeman of the investigations branch.

Do any of the simulations let you decide how to rip apart the township where you're mining?

You know like send out two different letters to townspeople in order to play them against the local township that's seeking to put regulations on your drilling? Maybe imply that if the people who hold mineral rights don't get a huge chunk of cash from your business they can sue the township board?

Maybe refuse to meet with the township and just turn their own people against each other just so you can drill without local permission?

Because after reading about Mount Pleasant in Pennsylvania, I really have to wonder where someone gets that particular skill to be such a ruthless asshole.

[...] shortages of supply in commodities? On which planet?

On the third (blue) planet of the Solar System, Milky Way, liar.

It is clearly not the planet you are living on.

Oil shortages? Peak oil shortages in supply combined with unprecedented growth of oil demand from China.

Sugar shortages? Record bad weather in Brasil and a record typhoon in Australia hitting the biggest sugar production area (global warming, anyone?) hurting supplies combined with unprecedented sugar demand from India - the largest sugar consumer on the planet.

Wheat shortages? Unprecedented heat-wave in Russia (global warming, anyone?) and a wheat export ban by Russia - combined with weak wheat production elsewhere as well.

Do basic supply and demand pressures mean anything on the planet you live on? Do you know the concept of inflexible demand, where advanced countries will pay pretty much any price to get the wheat they want, even if it means that they starve poorer countries?

But you really need to address the lies of yours I've already exposed, before getting into new topics ...

Actually, I did read something the other day about the the issue of the historical wave-heights. The reactors *were* built to that standard, however (a) the exact heights of historical tsunamis are estimates, which were subsequently revised upward and (b) seismic models suggested (correctly) that a much larger tsunami than any historically recorded was a serious possibility. (Prays to Google for a reference.... Ah here we are: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11087/1135345-82.stm ).

So, *yes* it is absolutely true that the engineers designed the plan to withstand this historical maximum tsunami. But no, that does not mean the company took adequate steps given new knowledge that came to light.

What we're seeing in Fukushima is a remarkable mixture of triumph and failure of human foresight. I think we're getting to the point where it's possible to make some reasonable conjectures about the differences between the two. Before you can build a plant like this, you've got to go to extraordinary lengths to build "defense in depth" features into the design. Those measures are thoroughly vindicated by their usefulness in the Fukushima crisis. On the other hand, foresight *specific to this installation* was not nearly so rigorous. Yes, they built levees, but *no* they didn't think through what would happen if those failed. They took the vanilla design and plopped a safety fix around it, whereas it is now clear they should have made provisions for cooling the reactor even if the building were flooded.

The later we get in the process, the less impressive the foresight becomes. The basic reactor design is very well thought out; the site specific installation less so, the reaction to new develops positively bad. When in 2002 they're informed that their tsunami barriers are likely far too low, their response is practically nil, the kind of thing you'd do after a quick meeting. "What should we do about the possibility of a tsunami topping the barriers?" "Well," one guy says, "we should raise some of the pumps." The order goes out to raise some of the pumps and one pump gets jacked up eight inches. Had they, in response to this news, actually staged a drill with people alert to spotting potential problems, they might have taken measures like elevating the emergency pump and generation equipment. That probably would have seemed expensive at the time, but it would have been the right thing to do, and in the end a bargain.

This model of increasingly sloppy thinking later in a project is plausible because it fits with what everyone knows about how organizations work. Management did its homework because it *had* to do it in order to get the plant built. Now that it had what it wanted, nothing was forcing management to think in that self-critical way about disaster planning. And engineers ... well *I'm* an engineer and I know how we think. Constraints that are a stimulating intellectual challenge in the early design phase become a pain in the neck the later they're introduced, especially after things are up and running. We tend to look at those things when introduced later as less reasonable, even less *plausible*, because they're less practical to address. Recently I interviewed at a company that provides web based apps. Things went well until the designer showed me the source code. In about five minutes I discovered at least three if not more very serious security concerns. "We don'.t have that problem," the guy says. My thought is, "how do you know?" The thing is, he'd have been delighted to entertain the notion of a security problem at the design phase. Up and running with customers depending on the product that's news he doesn't want to hear.

Note the big, big difference between the kind of thought that went into early *design* of the reactors and the thought that went into adapting to news of a similar nature about the *siting* and *installation* of those designs. When the basic design was being hashed out, nobody ever said anything like, "Well, that's never actually happened before."