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Europe, Africa, and Asia, especially during some of the Roman times (e.g. some info here)

Smoking is also one of the top causes of impotence in men.People are so focused on cancer that they forget all of the other problems smoking causes.

Over the long term, it's 100% certain that smoking will reduce your quality of life in some way: cancers: lung, throat, mouth, etc ..., impotence, reduced cognitive function, emphysema, clubbed fingers, and on and on and on ...

They have changed it since the story broke (looks like they added more disclaimers). You need to go by the screenshots or try the wayback machine maybe.

Also this isnt the only site: http://swampland.time.com/2014... There are at least 15 others.

Also this is clearly intentional, systemic behavior:
http://swampland.time.com/2014...

Look at the domain names and other sites, they are even more deceptive than this one. Still spottable? Sure.

There are various proposals around to eliminate cash. Eliminating cash would eliminate lots of crime

There are various proposals around to eliminate cash. Eliminating cash would allow the government to better track everything you do.

FTFY

"Your citations include a single internist who has no scientific research to back up his claims and is widely regarded as a quack and a website which stuck 'As seen on CNN' on it's home page, both of which are trying to sell weight loss solutions."

Considering how much of what many cardiologists do is essentially a scam, I guess the bar for medical practice is pretty low, whoever you call a "quack".
http://www.healthleadersmedia....
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...

And even some oncologists, too:
http://nation.time.com/2013/08...

That said, let us look as the site you dismiss based on it saying the related doctor (Dr. Esselsytn) has been on CNN:
http://www.heartattackproof.co...
"Former President Bill Clinton on CNN credits Dr. Esselstyn with helping him regain his health."

Another quack? Bill Clinton is an example of how improvement is possible by changing what we eat.

I think you've also missed my point that we try to regulate the wrong things. For example, if everyone has a basic income (social security from birth) people would have more time for home cooking. Or, if we subsidized fruits and vegetables instead of meat, dairy, and grains, again we might have a much healthier populace. See:
http://www.seriouseats.com/200...
"The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has posted an easy-to-understand visual on its site that shows which foods U.S. tax dollars go to support under the nation's farm bill. It's titled "Why Does a Salad Cost More Than a Big Mac?" and depicts two pyramids -- subsidized foods and the old recommended food pyramid. It's interesting to note that the two are almost inversely proportional to each other."

Also, if US Americans got European-length vacations, they might get more outdoor activity in the sunshine, which might improve their health by exercise and vitamin D. As well as being less stressed and have more time for learning about cooking and health and doing gardening.

Anyway, good luck in your own continuing researches into improving health. You make a good point on how surveys on happiness across the decades might be biased by social expectations; I can hope you are right in this case!

Lots of new species are discovered.

Here is Time's top ten for 2013. I assume there where more than 10 to choose from last year. PLus prior years. For how ever long you are considering. Must make hundreds of 'new' species. Now convince us ALL of these have ALWAYS been here and noone noticed. Surely some of these new species may actually be NEW.

http://science.time.com/2013/1...

None of those count because you didn't see them arise, right? Just have faith :P

Not because of environmental liabilities or because I hate greedy oil companies.

But because it is a ploy to export our oil to where they can get 300% more profits than in the US.

Oddly, this gem of unregulating oil exports is also hotly contested political item which is mysteriously being debated at the exact same time as this. Now why is that?

Easy the pipleline is a way to triple our gas prices or at least move them closer to $7.00 a gallon as petro companies can sell it to China for $9.00 a gallon instead of selling it to Canadians and Americans for $3.50 a gallon. Right now we just do not have the capacity to move oil in one big central location to the scale that the oil pipeline does.

With the pipleline and the oil company's lobbyists for unregulated crude exporting we are screwed. Add to that the fact that most westerns live on the east or west coast while our food is produced in the middle in Mexico, USA, and Canada and we now have hyperinflation overnight as the price of milk, eggs, and even your starbucks coffee doubles!

Well, we can certainly act according to whether politicians do anything about this. If none of them strike back at the NSA, then we're screwed, but if some of them take action we can at least reward them.

Time has the text of a resolution the RNC just passed, which calls for action by Republican legislators in very stark terms. The RNC is as "inside the beltway", disconnected from voters, and generally unconcerned with the sort of issues that make Slashdot as it's possible for a human to be, and yet even those buffoons are up in arms about this.

This is just a call to action, not a bill, but the RNC is usually who the GOP listens to instead of the voters. I'll quote the whole thing below, but they outright call these programs unconstitutional and they call for them to end, with no mention of national security or terrorism. They're also using interesting language: calling for review in a public court, not a secret court.

Let's see whether the DNC does something similar, and what congresscritters do as a result. I'd actually be surprised if there isn't at least a bill voted on to end these programs, which if voters actually care they could hold their local critter to accout for.

Resolution to Renounce the National Security Agency's Surveillance Program

WHEREAS, the secret surveillance program called PRISM targets, among other things, the surveillance of U.S. citizens on a vast scale and monitors searching habits of virtually every American on the internet;

WHEREAS, this dragnet program is, as far as we know, the largest surveillance effort ever launched by a democratic government against its own citizens, consisting of the mass acquisition of Americans' call details encompassing all wireless and landline subscribers of the country's three largest phone companies;

WHEREAS, every time an American citizen makes a phone call, the NSA gets a record of the location, the number called, the time of the call and the length of the conversation, all of which are an invasion into the personal lives of American citizens that violates the right of free speech and association afforded by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution;

WHEREAS, the mass collection and retention of personal data is in itself contrary to the right of privacy protected by the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution, which guarantees the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures, that warrants shall issue only upon probable cause, and generally prevents the American government from issuing modern-day writs of assistance;

WHEREAS, unwarranted government surveillance is an intrusion on basic human rights that threatens the very foundations of a democratic society and this program represents a gross infringement of the freedom of association and the right to privacy and goes far beyond even the permissive limits set by the Patriot Act; and

WHEREAS, Republican House Representative Jim Sensenbrenner, an author of the Patriot Act and Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee at the time of Section 215's passage, called the Section 215 surveillance program "an abuse of that law," writing that, "based on the scope of the released order, both the administration and the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) court are relying on an unbounded interpretation of the act that Congress never intended," therefore be it

RESOLVED, the Republican National Committee encourages Republican lawmakers to enact legislation to amend Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act, the state secrets privilege, and the FISA Amendments Act to make it clear that blanket surveillance of the Internet activity, phone records and correspondence -- electronic, physical, and otherwise -- of any person residing in the U.S. is prohibited by law and tha

..."Steve Jobs take credit for other people's work in this video, just like always", scubamage

1:18:20: "Remember when you use a Macintosh, these are the people that did it and they're sort of hiding out in that ROM", Steve Jobs

Wow, where to begin.

First of all, in-store credit vouchers are not "their own currency" at all. They're just U.S. dollars with restrictions on where they can be spent. They'll always be worth the same amount in dollars because they're not a separate currency at all. other currencies values are tracked separately from each other. Yes, a particular currency can be tied to another currency, but at any point, that tie can be severed. A voucher's tie to the U.S. dollar can NEVER be severed because it IS U.S. dollars.

All cryptocurrencies that follow the same architecture of bitcoin by their nature are controlled by 51% of the owners of the currency. Just because a company creates a new currency and blesses it by accepting it at all their terminals doesn't mean it's controlled by them, as long as it follows the bitcoin architecture.

I was VERY skeptical of bitcoin until I read this article by Marc Andreesen: http://techland.time.com/2014/...

Yes, he has a lot invested in bitcoin companies which gives him a bias and some of his arguments are in my opinion flat out wrong, the majority of what he says does sound very interesting and gave me a new perspective on the currency.

Porn may tip the favor for a particular coin but there is one market that can make Bitcoin or any given altcoin an huge (relative to current) market.

Marijuana is a Schedule I drug no matter what any State's laws say. This Federal classification means that banks cannot do direct business with dealers, transporters, processors or growers of it. Several publications have covered this problem.

People in the trade are either working in very grey banking situations or dealing with large amounts of cash. Having to pay your $20,000 taxes this quarter with a duffle bag of twenties is a perfect situation for robbery. Pot dispensaries on Colorado, USA are starting to figure out that they don't need banks to deal with Bitcoin or other altcoins. Right there could be a real Business-to-Business revolution for digital currency.

Sure, today a digital coin is mostly useful for transactions. A business would have to convert between cash and coin at the ends. And even when you can go bitcoin from customer to suppliers for your business you'll still need to get out cash.

Not only is this the coldest winter in years, but it's not done yet ... not by far. This is one for the record books and hopefully will smash that global warming myth back to where it belongs. Hell, I've shoveled about 1 foot of global warming off my driveway in the last week.

Hearing half a conversation can be very distracting, it's how we're wired.

It would probably help if every time there's a hurricane like Sandy, Katrina, et. al. there wasn't some global warming advocate on TV arguing that this was evidence of global warming. You can't taut every weather event that supports warming as evidence and then turn around and dismiss every weather event that doesn't jibe with the narrative.

If you are suggesting that the unusual extremes we're seeing in winter weather patterns are not an indicator of global warming, you have more to learn.

Really?

So the recent polar vortex is an indicator of global warming?

What about the decreasing frequency of such really cold weather in the US? If extreme cold weather is indicative of global warming, wouldn't the relative lack of such extreme cold weather indicate otherwise?

As others have pointed out to you, your belief has all the characteristics of a religion.

And how does your religion account for this:

Another Ice Age?

In Africa, drought continues for the sixth consecutive year, adding terribly to the toll of famine victims. During 1972 record rains in parts of the U.S., Pakistan and Japan caused some of the worst flooding in centuries. In Canada's wheat belt, a particularly chilly and rainy spring has delayed planting and may well bring a disappointingly small harvest. Rainy Britain, on the other hand, has suffered from uncharacteristic dry spells the past few springs. A series of unusually cold winters has gripped the American Far West, while New England and northern Europe have...

. Indeed, you don't get those craziness in any Muslim culture with well-educated populace

No they just fly planes into buildings

An IP address is not a Social Security number or a fingerprint. It, in the words of Judge Gary Brown of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, "provides only the location at which one of any number of computer devices may be deployed, much like a telephone number can be used for any number of telephones.".

I was in grade school in the sixties, and we were taught two indisputable scientific consensus facts:

That the great ice age was coming. In the early 70's, this was on the cover of Time Magazine.

Are you sure you remembered that correctly?
http://science.time.com/2013/06/06/sorry-a-time-magazine-cover-did-not-predict-a-coming-ice-age/
http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2013/06/04/the-1970s-ice-age-myth-and-time-magazine-covers-by-david-kirtley/

And if you think that you were taught in the 1960's that Thomas Malthus essay PROVED we would all starve to death by the year 2000, well, you need to go find that teacher and have your grade changed to "F".
Thomas Malthus wrote that essay in 1798, and it had been debunked long before our great-grandparents were twinkles in our great-great grandparents eyes.

Actually, the loss for 2012 was for two years' worth of payments, so it's more like a $2 billion loss for the year. I could also get into how Congress decided that Saturday mail delivery is a service that no American should do without (even though that alone would turn around the $2 billion deficit), they cannot shut down individual post offices, and cannot allow shipment of alcoholic beverages.

What people don't realize is that while the USPS doesn't take taxpayer money, and hasn't for more than 30 years, they're still entirely run under a mandate from Congress, and cannot make substantial changes to their operations without Congressional approval. When people complain about socialism, or complain about capitalism, they don't see the giant mess that can happen when an organization is effectively subject to both. They have to do inane shit like constantly renaming post offices, but are prohibited from doing the kinds of things, like offering new services, or cutting costs, that would actually bring them into the black.

In theory. Remind me who was Time's Person of the Year in 2001? Osama Bin Laden, naturally?... no, it was Rudy Guliani. And here is a USA Today article from beforehand on their connundrum, on the difficulty of making the obvious pick. So, it's pretty clear Snowden isn't considered as radioactive as Bin Laden, anyways.

According to the more informative Time article, it's entirely software-based, and the whole shebang has Intel's backing.

Amazon is responding by offering some affected customers refunded shipping costs and provide gift cards. http://nation.time.com/2013/12/26/ups-blames-bad-weather-more-packages-and-online-shopping-for-delays/

Any refusal to sign something by the monarch would lead to an unprecedented constitutional crisis, possibly resulting in the end of the monarchy but in practice this is never going to happen

It has happened in Belgium where King Boudoujn refused to sign the law about abortion.

So if they wanted, I am sure the UK politicians would be able to find a way around it as well.

I provided 5 links that claim losses due to spying.

Exactly, just like in the case of Brazil you can link to claims. In the case of Brazil it was an unnamed government official twisting the knife. In the case of Cisco it was a company executive making excuses. Maybe it was true in Cisco's case, maybe not. Did any of their customers directly tell them that? Is it in writing? Or is it an easy excuse to deflect blame: "Look, it's not our fault! It was NSA! Our products aren't overpriced! We didn't make a bad bid. The stagnant economy is having no effect on our growth. Don't downgrade our stock rating."

Something to chew on: Snowden Hasn’t Hurt Trade Talks, Official Says

The response to the rest of your post is "You are a Shill", followed by "more Shilling", and finally a "Fuck off Shill". Go pound some sand, and have fun doing it.

Ad hominem, invective, no logic.

This is interesting, did you know the packets you are sending could be passing through Iceland and Belarus? That could mean that your email and and internet posts pass through the internet spying equipment of Russia, Belarus, Sweden, Germany, France, Denmark, Canada, and the US. I wouldn't be surprised if China could work its way in there too. How big do you think your dossiers are by now?

As the AC says below, this is not the only victim but the first major one to be published in detail with the exact verbiage because of the NSA. This should also make you question all of these reports claiming "economic recovery" in the US. It was reported back in June when the leaks first came out that CISCO lost numerous contracts due to the NSA. [snark]But of course we are all just crazy conspiracy theorists, so the facts below are nothing more than racist attacks against Obama [/snark]

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/how-nsa-mass-surveillance-hurting-us-economy
http://business.time.com/2013/12/10/nsa-spying-scandal-could-cost-u-s-tech-giants-billions/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/08/07/nsa-snooping-could-cost-u-s-tech-companies-35-billion-over-three-years/
http://www.storyleak.com/nsa-spying-us-companies-billions-american-job-loss/
http://www.informationweek.com/cloud/infrastructure-as-a-service/nsas-prism-could-cost-us-cloud-companies-$45-billion/d/d-id/1111178?

The debt owned by the public equates to 12 trillion which is something I'd call huge.

Interestingly, U.S. household wealth topped $74.8 trillion this year, making you wonder if those debt hawks are squawking about a problem that's not as bad as it sounds out of context.

-l

Yes, women rule over us. That's why they make more money than men, dictate what men must look like with fashion magazines, hold 90% or more of the political positions, and head up most corporations.

Well, Never married women have earned more than never married men for decades.

Women are the primary writers for fashion magazines, and designers of fashion clothing and accessories -- The looks are due to the fact that women and men both concentrate on women's chests and waists (so much for "male gaze").

Women are not only the majority of voters, they are also the majority of swing voters therefore politics will bend over backwards to advance women's interests while leaving men and boys to tough it out on their own. That's why even though men are over 80% of the homeless and over 80% of the victims of violent crimes, there are a plethora of women's shelters and few if any for men. The corporations and politicians will bow to quickly dodge any accusation of sexism, even if unfounded; That's why affirmative action and title IX still exist even while women are the majority of graduates and degree earners and even the president has spouted the wage gap myth despite all evidence proving that it does not exist -- Women do have babies.

It's interesting you'd frame the issue as one of women ruling over men as being obviously farcical. Well, it is. Realize however, that the Patriarchy Theory is equally as moronic. No one is trying to say that women are holding men back, the men are clearly not holding females back either. Men and women value their time differently because men and women are different and make different choices at different rates, especially concerning risk taking. So, the more risky job paths that take you to the top of the market are occupied by primarily men, even though equal opportunity is given to both men and women. Likewise most risky low tier jobs like sewage treatment technician, garbage person, janitor, coal miner, construction worker, etc. are all male dominated jobs. Over 90% of workplace deaths are men... Should we be doing something to get more men and women in jobs they don't want? You want to write code? Sorry we need more women coal miners. You want to be an engineer? Sorry, we need more male romance novelists. If 25% of the applicants are female, you wouldn't expect 50% of the top positions to go to women, eh?
1 == 1; 50% == 50%; 25% == 25%; 10% == 10% This is equality. Proportional representation according to proportional effort and risk.

No one's saying women are ruling over men. We're saying that men have issues too. Women's rights are Human Rights. Men's rights are Human Rights too. Don't conflate Feminism with Equality. Feminism is an ideology. Rights activism doesn't need ideologies. Women's rights doesn't need feminism.

So, your stance is completely unfounded and wrong. Let me guess, a feminist told you those easy to believe lies?

"If you believe in being good, then you're a Christian!" Would you believe this crap?
"If you believe in individualism, then you're a Satanist!" Would you believe this crap?
"If you believe in racial equality, then you're a KKK member!" Would you believe this crap?
"If you believe in gender equality, then you're a Feminist!" Why would you believe this crap?

Additionally: If you don't think companies don't break their necks to avoid feminist ire, then you haven't been paying attention to the fact that feminists petitioned Facebook to allow them censorship powers, Norton and other web filters have considered Men's and Father's issues websites to be hate-speech? I wonder where they got that idea? Certainly not from

There's cooperation and there's Cooperation.

http://business.time.com/2013/12/09/att-to-shareholders-no-nsa-snooping-data-for-you/print/

Games could serve multiple purposes: out of band communications (i.e. not phone, email, or mail), rehearsals, and recreation. Since the Caliphate is going to be a while in coming they have some time to kill.

I don't think there is any surprise that WoW or similar games would have broad appeal, even among terrorists. After all, the Harry Potter books have been among the most popular reading for inmates at Guantanamo Bay.

What Prisoners Are Reading at Gitmo

... Harry Potter. He may not come riding in on the back of a hippogriff to free his favorite captives from their own version of Azkaban, but he shows up once a week on a cart of books from the prison library, offering an escape of the imagination treasured by many. Indeed, the Harry Potter series has been one the most popular titles among the 18,000 books, magazines, DVDs and newspapers on offer from the prison library at Guantánamo.

Other offerings in the library started in 2003 include the The Lord of the Rings trilogy, the Twilight series and a self-help book called Don't Be Sad. Prisoners don't browse the shelves of this particular library; instead, they wait for a weekly visit by a cart of books prison officers think they might be interested in. There are mysteries and books of poems, copies of National Geographic magazine (a favorite), dictionaries and science textbooks. If the prisoners see something they like they are allowed to check it out for 30 days.

The library's offerings now span some 18 languages including Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, Pashto, Russian, French and English. Officers scan newspapers to stay up on the latest titles and try to meet requests from prisoners — though finding books in their native languages can sometimes be a challenge. "I tell ya, Dan Brown's been beating me up lately," says Navy Lt. Robert Collett, who as the officer-in-charge of detainee programs, is known as 'Dean of Gitmo U'. "All his books are very popular, but we don't have all of them in Arabic." When the military has trouble finding a title in a certain language, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) sometimes steps in. Martin De Boer, ICRC's deputy head of the regional delegation in D.C., says his group sometimes sends its representatives in far-flung places to local stores in order to answer requests for novels in Uzbek or magazines in Bahasa (the language of Indonesia). "Access to books and news from the outside is very important to the prisoners mental state," says De Boer.

Taylor Wilson: "At 14, Taylor Wilson became the youngest person ever to build a working nuclear fission reactor-and he did it in his parents' garage. Since then, Wilson has invented a low-cost radiation detector for use in counterterrorism, conducted research on medical isotopes for cancer treatment and become one of the foremost proponents of using nuclear power to safely meet the world's energy needs." Taylor's Nuke Site

The full US healthcare system is a mess just from rules / billing / pricing stand point.

http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2136864,00.html

It especially does not offer any better explanation than "Android devices using iOS user agents."

Quite the opposite, really.

I'd like to know what percentage of Android users who are not Slashdot users even know that you can do this.

I doubt it's quantifiable, but considering that 0.01% of the US population is still over 3,000,000 people, I'd venture a guess and say: lots.

Bad jokes aside, here's the research bit:

Per this Time article, Android phones make up about 51% of the US mobile phone market. If we take the figures from Wikipedia, there are about 327,578,000 active smartphones in the US. If we divide 327,578,000 by 51%, we get 167,064,780 Android phones currently active.

If even 5% of those Android users know how to switch user agents, that's still 8,353,239 people.

That's more than the entire population of my home state.

Yes, children are expensive, but $400,000 per kid is WAAAAAY high for the average American. It could be $400K if you:

*Buy all kinds of useless crap they don't need to raise an infant (especially for their first child),

* Buy a HUGE SUV for your 1-2 kids when all that is needed is an average sedan (gotta keep the kids safe),

* Pay for designer clothes (that no normal kid before 12 gives a crap about) instead of the cheaper Wal-mart or 2nd hand stores fare,

* Send their kids to expensive preschools (which do nothing for them long-term, academically),

* Shower them with gifts and spoil them (as a substitute for real relationships),

* Take long, exotic vacations with them to everything from Disneyland to other overpriced money sinkholes too often,

* Pay for them to be on club sports teams, and tack on expensive extras like the pro sports trainer so they can play football or baseball better than the Joneses down the street,

* Give them their own, individual technology package and then fund the monthly costs (and in some cases then pay for counseling because your teenager is a technology recluse),

* Send their kids to private schools (vs. public or charter),

* Give them their own car at 16...

The list goes on and on of how parenting gets to be more expensive than it should be - and it always goes back to bad decisions by the parent(s). Raising a child can be done at a fraction of the $400,000 cost. (Don't get me started on the $200K ripoff for a four year education... you'd better have some Ivy League paper in your hand and some super networking opportunities in hand for that kind of scratch. The mistake is magnified 10X if you have $200K in student loans when you're done...)

Time magazine also painted a skewed picture of the positives of the childless life (login necessary for full article text). It was full of logic holes.. down to the assclown representation of the parents in the picture.

I don't mean this as an attack on the parent poster, and my response is off-topic. I'm just tired of the general, growing representation that parenthood is a waste of time or the wrong thing to do. In a nuclear family setting, it's an experience that cannot be duplicated. It's the only life pursuit worth doing (while everything else you touch/buy/create/assemble - including your own body - rots and crumbles after you're gone). It is the forging fire that make life interesting, full of real growth opportunities.

Anyone that 1) is married and capable of having children and 2) intentionally skips parenthood out of convenience is cheating themselves - regardless of their rationale for doing so.

Abbot man Textor twittered some very offensive tweets about the indonesians âoePoor old bugger SBY is confusedâ and also said ministers looked like a Philipino porn star. How does Textor know so much about Philipino porn stars? http://world.time.com/2013/11/22/aussie-pm-advisers-best-twitter-rants/

"yet no one would argue for the return of child labour."

Well, no *sane* person, anyWho... http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2075859,00.html

Sleep tight!

Well, except when the escape :

http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,2041628,00.html

Panda's tend to not eat people.

Figures don’t lie, but liars figure. Maybe for corporations who are riding stock market prices at their highest level ever inflation is nominal but the average American knows differently

It seems strange that this kind of data isn't already publicly available. Putting it on a website is certainly more efficient... wait, HealthCare.gov.. well, maybe it'll be more efficient, it's a different department. But what bothers me is the illness portion of it, are they talking flu or incidents of cancer? If it's the latter then they need to first publish the information about the TSA employees in Boston and possible radiation exposure due to nudeo scanners. Of course the TSA says "uh huh" and says there's no correlation. Having the raw data of TSA employees and incidents of cancers or other diseases in comparison to the general population
would help in either affirming or putting to rest that what these folks are doing is not harming their health or the health of the traveling public. I would also carry it into the various branches of the Military as well and not just look towards the private sector as being the worst offenders when in fact some of our weapon systems have been know to kill our own members of the military. So, if they're going to do it, do it across the board and don't just single out private industry..

http://swampland.time.com/2013/11/04/a-persistent-feathered-threat-to-u-s-air-superiority/

"In part, that’s because in past efforts, the Air Force required a pilot to be able to blast through the cockpit canopy as a last-ditch means of bailing out."

“Combining efficient bird strike protection and TTC [Through-The-Canopy] ejection are novel and contradictory requirements,” a 1990 Air Force study noted, “since the tough materials which resist bird penetrations also resist ‘punch through’ ejection.”

I'm only knowledgable because I read articles on strange subjects.

The rumors I heard suggest the new CEO will be a strong contender from the 'unnamed' list: Clippy.

The NSA’s new data-storage center in Utah has suffered a series of mysterious meltdowns in the past year.

Officials told the Wall Street Journal that 10 fiery explosions, known as arc-fault failures, have ripped apart machinery, melted metal and destroyed circuits. The repeated meltdowns have delayed the opening of the one-million square foot facility by 12 months.

But the Anonymous GP may be right suspecting, the failure is deliberate... Obama's personal favorite healthcare model — as well as that of the rest of the Left — is "single-payer" (a.k.a. "Medicare for all"). Perhaps, it was calculated by our benevolent and sophisticated Democratic overlords, that the failure of Obamacare will make introducing the outright Socialist construct more palatable to the electorate.

So stubborn he's repeatedly signed various bills for spending cuts

What cuts??? Seriously, I quoted you the budget -- no cuts have occurred. Simply reducing one program while increasing another is not a cut. I'm talking about a cut in total spending. I might also add that the "cuts" that have occurred (such as the Sequester) are largely irrelevant, because they're a drop in the bucket of total spending. What Obama has done is largely lip service.

the only "more taxes" that have been passed are (a) allowing the Bush-era tax breaks to expire on some tax brackets, (b) allowing the economic recovery tax cuts (you know, the ones Obama signed) to expire, and (c) the whole ACA-fine as a tax

There are more taxes embedded into ACA than you acknowledge. It's not just the "fine as a tax". That's not even the biggest: http://jeffduncan.house.gov/full-list-obamacare-tax-hikes

The investment income surtax is the largest tax hike in that bill.

*I* am the one suggest we cut spending and raise taxes.

And my counter-point is that we already did the latter, but not the former. I've yet to see you prove otherwise.

Would that be with or without the "Emergency" spending on the Afghanistan War?

Without. The supplemental spending has ended, check the budget. All annual war spending currently amounts to somewhere between ~60 billion and ~120 billion:
http://nation.time.com/2013/01/07/the-cost-of-a-post-2014-u-s-force/
http://journalistsresource.org/studies/government/security-military/us-military-casualty-statistics-costs-war-iraq-afghanistan-post-911

And that number is trending downward.

Actually figuring out *how* to get to those levels is the hard part and getting buy-in is the even harder part.

That's fantastic thinking -- let's start that conversation. Republicans have tried to put entitlement reform on the table many times (since the bulk of our spending is Mandatory spending), but the Dems won't even approach that debate in earnest.

Again, childish response. Democrats act like dicks, so we have to too.

Whoa whoa whoa, huge difference. This isn't just "you guys were mean, so we'll be mean too". It's not "you obstructed our bills, so we'll obstruct your bills". They actually passed an entire program on their watch. "Tit-for-tat" would be repeal of the program. At a minimum, the Democrats should find reasonable middle territory and be the ones to give ground by saying "while we won't repeal, but we're willing to reform" -- they haven't even done that though (remember, the Republicans second and third budget proposals during the standoff weren't even asking for repeal, they were asking for changes or delays in the program -- none of that got traction either). So until the Dems stop continuing to be childish, I'm afraid I don't see a 1-to-1 comparison here. The only thing I agree on is that the demand for straight-up repeal was stupid. But they backed off of that demand relatively quickly.

Really, your argument doesn't explain why not a single "reasonable Democrats" voted against the bill. No, it was lock-step partisanship.

They did. 34 Democrat congressmen voted against it. It barely squeaked through the House.

You do realize, btw, the whole government shut down thing was just an act by Republicans to appease their constituents and keep their jobs and not an attempt that they thought had any

Elon Musk

Musk put about $100 million of his own money into SpaceX. $4-500 million has come from NASA.

Bell Labs

They closed up shop specifically because it was becoming impractical for private companies to make those big gains anymore.

xerox PARC

Up util the mid 70's received huge amounts of funding from DARPA.

Is the government the ONLY one that spends on basic research with no immediate application? Absolutely NOT!

While this is technically still true, this isn't the mid-20th century anymore. That's the exception, not the rule. Keep in mind that that research funding came from an environment of high taxation leading to research being the best way to at least keep some benefit in house.

Wow, your going to go there, you picked about the worst cases you could. I could bother doing the same thing with coal and quickly show far worse pollution and death figures, but you can google that all by yourself. So let's take your worst case scenario and run with it (you have researched these things, right?). How many people were killed in these or all other nuclear related incidents? How much actual damage was done?

Now compare those numbers to your favorite form of green energy, how about windmills? Go on, google this and tell me how it compares. Why don't you compare pollution figures while your at it. Remember your windmills require the very rare earths that come from these types of mines.

Okay, now that you've bothered to do a bit of research scale your numbers of for world wide power and tell me what they would look like. You see, if strip mining is done in a place like Greenland they will bother with these pesky things called environment regulations. The Chinese don't do that and as a result they have cornered the market. You can't get rare earths from Unicorn farts and rainbows, you have to get them out of the ground. Better we do the mining, so that it can be done responsibly.

A couple of years ago we were told that the brain was hard wired to be significantly over-optimistic (see this TIME article or Google "optimism bias" for more examples). Now we're told that the opposite is true? What gives?

NYC and London are roughly the same size (~8M people).

NYC has about 175 pedestrian deaths per year.

London had 77 in 2011, which was an unusually bad year (so the figures are in lots of newspapers). Paris is similar.

NYC is apparently the best in the US, but not so great compared to similar cities in Europe.

I also found this: http://newsfeed.time.com/2010/09/08/the-worlds-most-deadly-cities-for-pedestrians/ (surprised to see Copenhagen there).

You might find This wikipedia page and these three articles interesting

Well, I guess that is a start but I think there are more relevant information in the same speech as well as others.

BTW, the Green eggs and ham was about his kids watching on CSPAN and it was timed to be right before their bedtime. He was reading them a bedtime story and he concluded the story with âoeBrush your teeth, say your prayers, and daddyâ(TM)s going to be home soon.â I do not see the problem with that seeing how he wasn't able to leave the senate floor.

http://swampland.time.com/2013/09/25/ted-cruz-reads-green-eggs-and-ham-on-senate-floor-and-thats-not-the-weird-part/

Yeah, cost of repairing small damage just goes through the roof if you do this.

So what happens if you put in flat rechargeable modules like the flat 6v batteries in Polaroid SX-70 film packs, in various places (upgraded of course), like attached to the back seat on the trunk side, or just use arrays of Li-ion batteries all over the place? Not embedded, as small modules that can be replaced as they fail?

For perspective take a look at this. Banning books based on how well they conform to social norms is not good.

Well then, it's a GOOD THING I SAID THE BOOKS AT ISSUE SHOULD NOT BE BANNED.

Not once, but twice. I'm *still* calling them out as vile shit, and that has nothing whatsoever to do with your list. Deal with it.