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"Rather than transmitting emails to the other's inbox, they composed at least some messages and left them in a draft folder or in an electronic dropbox, AP said" http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2012/11/13/petraeus-broadwell-email/1702057/ Yea some of them may have been in the drafts folder. Sending email to your secret lover is old school and gone to get you caught. OOPS maybe it did.

In comparison, climate change, here, anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is not going to get dramatically worse, if we don't do anything about it. For example, they generally forecast the loss of about as much land over the next century from rising water levels (assuming a one meter rise) as are lost each year from desertification due mostly to bad agricultural practices.

This is a joke. This is the exact opposite of what every scientific report says.

Your post is a classic example of someone holding forth in an authoritative tone who knows exactly zero about the subject he's pontificating on.

Global Warming Threatens Our National Security IISS: âoeA Global Catastropheâ For International Security

A recent study done by the International Institute for Strategic Studies has likened the international security effects of global warming to those caused by nuclear war. [On Deadline]

http://blogs.usatoday.com/ondeadline/2007/09/climate-change-.html

U.N.: As Dangerous As War United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said this year that global warming poses as much of a threat to the world as war. [BBC]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/6410305.stm

Center for Naval Analyses: National Security Threat In April, a report completed by the Center for Naval Analyses predicted that global warming would cause âoelarge-scale migrations, increased border tensions, the spread of disease and conflicts over food and water.â [Seattle Post-Intelligencer]

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/320929_secured.html

Genocide in Sudan
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon charges, âoeAmid the diverse social and political causes, the Darfur conflict began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change.â [Washington Post]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/15/AR2007061501857.html

War in Somalia
In April, a group of 11 former U.S. military leaders released a report charging that the war in Somalia during the 1990s stemmed in part from national resource shortages caused by global warming. [Washington Post]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/14/AR2007041401209.html

Starvation
A study by IISS found that reduced water supplies and hotter temperatures mean âoe65 countries were likely to lose over 15 percent of their agricultural output by 2100.â [Yahoo]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070912/ts_nm/climate_security_dc

Large-Scale Migrations
Global warming will turn already-dry environments into deserts, causing the people who live there to migrate in massive numbers to more livable places. [MSNBC]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19479607/

More Refugees
A study by the relief group Christian Aid estimates the number of refugees around the world will top a billion by 2050, thanks in large part to global warming. [Telegraph]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/05/14/nclimate14.xml

Increased Border Tensions
A report called âoeNational Security and the Threat of Climate Change,â written by a group of retired generals and admirals, specifically linked global warming to increased border tensions. âoeIf, as some project, sea levels rise, human migrations may occur, likely both within and across bo

Legislators were persuaded of the need; passed the laws, and then the laws did not have the intended effect of fewer deaths/injuries due to vehicle accidents.

Incorrect.

This topic isn't nearly as wild as the election the year I was born. From USA Today's In '52, huge computer called Univac changed election night:

In a few hours on Nov. 4, 1952, Univac altered politics, changed the world's perception of computers and upended the tech industry's status quo. Along the way, it embarrassed CBS long before Dan Rather could do that all by himself.

Computers were the stuff of science fiction and wide-eyed articles about "electric brains." Few people had actually seen one. Only a handful had been built, among them the first computer, ENIAC, created by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1940s.

In summer 1952, a Remington Rand executive approached CBS News chief Sig Mickelson and said the Univac might be able to plot early election-night returns against past voting patterns and spit out a predicted winner. Mickelson and anchor Walter Cronkite thought the claim was a load of baloney but figured it would at least be entertaining to try it on the air.

On election night, the 16,000-pound Univac remained at its home in Philadelphia. In the TV studio, CBS set up a fake computer -- a panel embedded with blinking Christmas lights and a teletype machine. Cronkite sat next to it. Correspondent Charles Collingwood and a camera crew set up in front of the real Univac.

By 8:30 p.m. ET -- long before news organizations of the era knew national election outcomes -- Univac spit out a startling prediction. It said Eisenhower would get 438 electoral votes to Stevenson's 93 -- a landslide victory. Because every poll had said the race would be tight, CBS didn't believe the computer and refused to air the prediction.

Under pressure, Woodbury rejigged the algorithms. Univac then gave Eisenhower 8-to-7 odds over Stevenson. At 9:15 p.m., Cronkite reported that on the air. But Woodbury kept working and found he'd made a mistake. He ran the numbers again and got the original results -- an Eisenhower landslide.

Late that night, as actual results came in, CBS realized Univac had been right. Embarrassed, Collingwood came back on the air and confessed to millions of viewers that Univac had predicted the results hours earlier.

In fact, the official count ended up being 442 electoral votes for Eisenhower and 89 for Stevenson. Univac had been off by less than 1%. It had missed the popular vote results by only 3%. Considering that the Univac had 5,000 vacuum tubes that did 1,000 calculations per second, that's pretty impressive. A musical Hallmark card has more computing power.

That doesn't take away from Silver's math, though, considering that the polls all had Obama and Romney neck and neck and Obama won by a huge margin. It seems Woodbury did a far better job with an incredibly primitive computer than the modern polsters' statisticians did with today's high tech machines.

I can think of two examples illustrating problems with such laws.
1. Urinating in public can, in 13 states, qualify as a sex offense, through charges such as "indecent exposure", etc. A few links mentioning this issue can be viewed here:
http://www.forbes.com/2010/07/02/sex-offender-registry-megans-law-forbes-woman-time-children.html
http://www.economist.com/node/14164614
https://downtownathens.wordpress.com/2012/03/06/public-urination-considered-sex-offense-in-georgia-not-enforced-by-police/
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-02-25-sex-offender-laws-cover_x.htm
2. Certain interactions with a prostitute can also qualify for sex offense.
Number 1 is certainly more common, and is something nearly any good beer-drinking mammal has been guilty of. Number 2, although less common, is rather questionable. Why questionable? Figure that out yourself. But if it is to be such a grievous offense in the the U.S., it would seem appropriate to prevent U.S. citizens from traveling to nations where such an atrocious offense is legal, such as Austria, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Netherlands, Switzerland, Turkey(?) and others. And certainly anyone doing business with such perverted nations should be registered and arrested as accomplices, because anyone with scruples would take the support of such offenses just as seriously as we take pissing on bushes here -- no dubya pun intended.

I don't think Obama knew how polarizing of a figure he would be.

Really? http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan/2010/11/president_obamas_i_won_to_repu.html
"The president added, "I won. So I think on that one, I trump you."

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xdb11f_you-can-t-drive-says-obama_news
"No. You can't drive."

http://ponderingpenguin.blogspot.com/2010/10/obama-tell-gop-to-go-to-back-of-car.html
"They can come for the ride, but they gotta sit in back"

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2010/11/obama-i-shouldnt-have-used-the-word-enemies/1
'we're going to punish our enemies and we're going to reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us

Ya, that guy isn't polarizing at all...totally "work across the aisle" mindset there...clearly begging Republicans to give him some good ideas. It takes alot of chutzpah to claim the other side of refusing to work together and obstructing everything while maintaining this kind of attitude. It honestly boggles me how anyone can vote for these people.

...jobs under Obama have been going up WHILE he's been reducing gov't head count.

The vast majority of decline in government jobs have been at the state and local level. The Federal government had been on a huge hiring binge and has only recently made some tiny reductions. It should go without saying that President Obama does not control state and local government hiring.

Federal employment drops after years of explosive growth

Federal employment has fallen for seven of the last eight months, the longest sustained drop in more than a decade. The decline is tiny: Just 9,900 fewer workers in May compared with a year earlier, excluding postal and temporary Census workers, reports the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That's a fraction of the 2.2 million civilian federal workforce. . . .

Federal employment grew 13% — 250,000 jobs — from the recession's start in December 2007 to a peak last September. During that time, private employment fell 5% and state and local governments cut staffs by 2%.

The coming collapse in the state budgets

It depends where you are. In, say, New England, you're absolutely right. In the Bible Belt, though, a very large percentage of Christians believe they believe in the inerrant word of God as described in the King James Bible (because 17th century English is clearly closer to the source than modern English, or something like that).

For a lot of Christians, they kind of gloss over some important details like "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image". The best example of breaking this that I can think of is "touchdown Jesus" (so called because his gesture is similar to an NFL referee symbol): It was burned to the ground by a bolt of lightning, and the church promptly started raising the money to rebuild it. I'm almost waiting for a booming voice from the heavens to say "Did you not get the point the first time?"

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/andrewkantor/2005-12-29-camera-laws_x.htm

Just to clarify the reality here, guys.

Whatever you do, folks, do not be prepared. For preparation is terrorism and extemporaneous is patriotism.

Do not be seduced by the evil temptations of self-reliance. Trust in the one, the only, Authori tuh.

I can see your point, but I don't think this is a slippery slope issue.

Then
You're
Not
Paying
Enough
Attention

If your logic made any sense at all, newspaper articles would be replaced with pictures of smiling cartoon animals, ...

You haven't seen the re-designed The USA Today yet, have you...

I set out to find a link pointing out that it's ok to be atheist as long as you don't want to run for political office, but instead I found this. 54% of US citizens would vote for a well qualified atheist. Not enough to actually be elected (unless you could convince almost every single one of them you were the right candidate for the job), but it's a huge improvement over the results of the same question even a decade ago.

If you only knew how many certifications, and mandatory courses, and paperwork, and bullshit, and red tape that the simplest business has to deal with, it would blow your mind.

If businesses weren't so sociopathic that they don't care how many people they kill* or how much pollution they generate** (before the EPA, rivers actually caught fire), if they were honest and upstanding, we wouldn't need regulation. But the sad fact is that most corporations and a few small businesses are run by sociopaths who don't care how many people's lives they ruin.

As for certifications and mandatory courses, well, I certainly don't want an unlicensed doctor operating on me, I don't want unlicensed truckers hauling stuff on roads I drive, and I want those damned giant trucks and busses inspected. I want people building and repairing stuff to actually know WTF they're doing.

* The investigantion showed that the dozen men were killed because the company ignored the regulations

** Before the EPA the air around a Monsanto plant was so bad it would burn your lungs. Drive past one in the summer in 95 degree weather and your windows were up despite there being no AC.

According to This article at USA Today he hit 833.9 mph

Well you know what they say about slippery slop arguments

It's not invalid because it's a "slippery slope". Don't be stupid.

Fun fact, we've already slid down that slope! Both peanuts and perfume have been the subject of bans and, in the case of perfume, petitions and vocal protests -- complete with signs, chants, and picketers in gas masks. There's a whole anti-perfume movement!

Peanut examples:
http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/26124593/ns/today-back_to_school/t/schools-peanut-bans-spark-backlash/
http://parentables.howstuffworks.com/health-wellness/schools-banning-peanuts.html

Perfume examples:
http://shine.yahoo.com/beauty/perfume-ban-hampshire-state-explains-why-193100759.html
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2012-07-02/fragance-ban-allergies/55988704/1

Peanuts do not jump right off your clothes and affect those around you,

In a way they can. Imagine peanut oil from some greasy fingers finding it's way around the office -- that can actually kill someone.

Contrast the smell of tobacco smoke on clothes -- that won't harm anyone beyond a mild annoyance. Perfume comes off in higher concentrations and, yes, does cause harm.

So according to your logic getting drunk during lunch should be allowed on the job?

No. Where did you get that?
I'm starting to think that you're just an anti-smoking zealot, and not someone interested in a legitimate discussion. I have no time for zealots.

The future is now, I guess. Despite living near one of the world's largest malls, I haven't been inside one in years... not sure if this is common or not.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/26/billboard-with-face-recognition-technology-ad-women-not-men_n_1302286.html

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/03/11/db.smartsigns/

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/news/surveillance/2009-01-30-ad-privacy_N.htm

Brilliant Blue FCF Honey and Ketchup Yay!

How would people with low income, who until now have relied on payphones for the occasional call away from home, meet such an unfunded mandate?

Pay phones are quaint relics and there aren't many left. Poor folks in the US can get cheap cell phones and minutes for "free," paid for by your tax money. The program is called "safelink".

Obama, Romney eye blinks could decide election

The program he's talking about in fact serves about 12 million people which is about 4% of the population not 47%.

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/kimkomando/story/2012-06-01/low-income-lifeline-plan/55315532/1

Well there is all the damage and dead bodies that resulted from throwing the info out there.

The ones that exist only in the minds of authoritarian tools full of poutrage? Nobody has been able to point to a single person being harmed by the release of the cables. As opposed to, you know, the millions who have either died or forced from their homes from America's false wars of choice.

But you're not calling for accountability for actual suffering from actual millions of people. Says a lot about your real priorities and motives....

and 30 years later the white house has a microbrewery

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2012/08/newly-revealed-white-house-facility-a-brewery/1

assholes. I couldn't get into my bank all weekend to pay my bills thanks to you merry jokesters.

Want your own net? Suits me just fine.

I'm afraid you've got things a bit wrong.

It's also no small matter that the UK has the BBC. . . . The licensing fees you pay are amply repaid not just in terms of quality programming, but also unbiased programming.

BBC chief Mark Thompson admits 'Left-wing bias'
Mark Thompson: “There was massive left-wing bias at the BBC”

That has been found more than once, by the way.

Lastly, the UK was bombed into near-nothingness. The US never has been. The closest we've come to having to reassess economically was the Great Depression. Because we never had to rebuild from scratch, we never learned the social lessons that an experience like that offers --

19 - Ruins of Charleston, 10 - Damaged Atlanta, 7 - Burned-out Richmond

Besieged, bombarded and blocked from commerce, Charleston suffered greatly in the war. Sidney Andrews, a Northern reporter in Charleston at war’s end described it as “a city of desolation, of vacant homes, of widowed women, of deserted warehouses, of weed wild gardens ... of miles of grass grown streets.” - - The Destruction of Charleston in the Civil War

Ruins seen from the State Capitol - Columbia, SC, 1865

It's not socialism per-se that we're afraid of -- it's the idea that we aren't in control of our own fate. That we aren't individuals, but actually part of something more than ourselves, . . . .

Religion takes a back seat in Western Europe
The Europe Syndrome and the Challenge to American Exceptionalism

For us, socialism is a sign of weakness;

Soviet internationalist socialist "weakness" on parade
Chinese internationalist socialist "weakness" on parade
North Korean internationalist socialist "weakness" on parade
Polish internationalist socialist "weakness" on parade
Czeck internationalist socialist "weakness" on parade
German internationalist socialist "weakness" on parade (Same tailor as below?)
German Nationalist Socialist "weakness" on parade (Same tailor as above?)

The Big Lies of the Soviet Union

I was recently re-reading John Gross’s marvelously entertaining Oxford Book of Parodies when I came across a 1938 passage from George Orwell that attempts to explain the strangeness of

If that's what they're doing it's easily detectable.

If only someone was really looking... and there was the will to prosecute people for fraud.

You missed this? http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2012/May/12-ag-568.html and this? http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/story/2011-08-29/Health-care-fraud-prosecutions-on-pace-to-rise-85/50180282/1 "WASHINGTON – New government statistics show federal health care fraud prosecutions in the first eight months of 2011 are on pace to rise 85% over last year due in large part to ramped-up enforcement efforts under the Obama administration...."

Hey, maybe we could stop burning so much coal and switch to lower-CO2 emitting natural gas? Oh wait, we already did.

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/ondeadline/post/2012/08/in-a-surprise-co2-emissions-hit-20-year-low/1#.UFx1MI2PVkY

Or maybe we could raise the gas mileage requirements on cars?

http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/rick-newman/2012/08/27/tough-government-gas-mileage-rules-good-for-drivers-auto-industry

Anyone who thinks we aren't doing _anything_ isn't paying attention. Personally, however, I won't think we are serious until we start building newer, safer, CO2-free nuclear power plants. If you don't support more nuclear power, you aren't serious about stopping Global Warming, and you haven't studied the problem enough. Yes, I'm looking at you, Greenpeace.

Necron69

But I do know that there are currently ZERO muslims sitting outside our embassies with candles to show support for the dead and to condemn the killers

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/story/2012/09/16/libyans-express-sorrow-over-killing-of-americans/57785218/1?csp=34news

A 16% increase over 4 years works out to be 4% a year, which just happens to be a little lower than the average inflation rate over the last 4 years (yes, it's lower than that at the moment). Which means, in terms of spending power, its just maintaining the status quo.

Meanwhile, for the people actually paying for the teachers, median household income is down 7% in the last 10 years.

As for "merit-based" performance metrics, they don't measure the teacher's performance; they measure the students.

"I'm a good teacher, but my work doesn't really do the students any good. Give me a huge raise."

So the students who get the worst teachers, will be:
* Poor students, who don't have access to tutors or other extra curricular methods of learning

The students get such a great education from their government teachers, they need to hire tutors.

* Students with disinterested parents (parental involvements is one the major predictors for academic achievement)
* Students in classes of disruptive people

Obviously, you acknowledge these things are a problem. But rather than solve the problem, you want to make sure it doesn't affect teacher paychecks.

Nevermind the students. The purpose of a government school is to maximize payroll.

Police forces have to do something with all that grant money they get from the DHS. Their chosen course for a damn long time now has been to play paramilitary. Once they had all the neat toys, they had to create a justification for having them, so they started using them for routine things.

This is why I find complaints of slippery slope fallacy to be way overstated. Not enough people read history.

Amen on people not reading history, or only skimming the "revised" versions provided to public schools.

It's not all the state and local police at fault here for the militarization of the civilian police, essentially turning them into an occupying military.

The Feds only recently temporarily suspended the DoD/Pentagon "1033" program that from 1994 until very recently supplied full military weapons and equipment including tanks with .50-cal machinegun turrets, armored personnel carriers, LAWS anti-tank rocket launchers, grenade launchers, Blackhawks, Hueys, and on and on. All the local agency had to pay was the shipping charges, and of course the insurance and operation/maintenance costs. What could possibly go wrong, eh?

Here's a couple of links to stories. Google has tons more.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/11/pentagon-suspends-weapons-program-cops-military_n_1585328.html

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2012/09/14/ariz-sheriff-ordered-to-return-military-goods/57781594/1

And finally, an interesting look: http://www.dps.mo.gov/dir/programs/cjle/dod.asp

I guess one way to get around that clunky old Constitution and that inconvenient Posse Comitatus Act ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act ) is to not obviously bring IN troops, but to simply turn the existing law enforcement apparatus already around us into the military.

No convoys of soldiers rolling into neighborhoods, everyone just suddenly wakes up one day and the local police are now wearing combat equipment and patrolling in armored vehicles and you need a pass to clear the checkpoint to travel to your job. Oh, DHS recently posted a bid for tens of thousands of prefab bulletproof portable checkpoint guard shacks.

Nothing to see here, move along, move along.

Strat

Automatic can change based on the environment. Static speed bumps do not. http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2009-10-05-speedbumps_N.htm

Among other things, that process means that we can actually be sure who won.

Right, because ballot boxes magically reject illegitimate votes and are never tampered with. And of course, voters are always careful to mark their ballots in a clear and unambiguous way, so that nobody can ague about who they meant to vote for. Gee whiz, stealing an election based on paper ballots is impossible. Ask Richard Nixon if you don't believe me!

The idea that paper records are somehow more reliable than electronic ones is silly. There's something intuitive about a sheet of paper being more reliable than bits on a disk — but either can be faked. The secret, in both cases, is careful outside auditing. That's actually harder to do when you have millions of physical records that can only be organized and tabulated by (fallible and corruptable) humans.

Problems with electronic voting have nothing to do with the supposed inferiority of electronic records. It's about voting technology created by vendors who don't want to give up their trade secrets, so they can't prove that their machines can't be tampered with. If you make the whole process transparent (basically, hardware and software has to be open source, and there can be no secrets as to how the data is managed and protected) you have a system that's a lot more tamper-proof than any kind of physical record.

The dramatic USA Today county by county map from 2000 is the one that I recall. http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/vote2004/countymap2000.htm Red was used for the shock value, front page of the paper.

Darn colors are backwards. Now the R's are the bloody revolutionaries, D's fear the extremists, and want to preserve the status quo. I blame this darn map. Heh.

I have a lot of faith in the honor system. The guy behind the popular bakery chain Panera Bread made an interesting and surprisingly successful attempt to open one cafe with the honor principle in mind. Of course, I suspect demographics can have a significant effect on a physically located business, and it is a gambit, but my faith extends beyond the physical well into the realm of the digital where I think it can work just as well. There will surely be abuse, though I think if we are to even have a future, similar concepts will become much more common some day, however remote from today.

No, Mitt. There really is no "lack of scientific consensus". Two years ago it was at 97% of scientists in agreement.

-S

No, I'm saying that the default rate among the poor was flat, and it was mainly the rich that defaulted above historical rates. The meltdown wasn't triggered by the poor people.

So the rich were the ones that got subprime loans? Because it's well documented that the wave of historical defaults originated in the subprime market: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_housing_bubble#Subprime_mortgage_industry_collapse

Prime mortgages didn't default until way later in the game: http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/housing/2009-06-08-home-loan-foreclosures-subprime_N.htm

The rich people named it for them before it was even determined that it was caused by banking fraud related to loans, and not the loans themselves

I still don't follow -- you're saying the derivatives market collapsed BEFORE all the foreclosures? Because I think you'd be hard pressed to prove that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subprime_mortgage_crisis#Background_and_timeline_of_events

"The immediate cause or trigger of the crisis was the bursting of the United States housing bubble which peaked in approximately 2005â"2006.[6][7] High default rates on "subprime" and adjustable rate mortgages (ARM), began to increase quickly thereafter."

"As part of the housing and credit booms, the amount of financial agreements called mortgage-backed securities (MBS), which derive their value from mortgage payments and housing prices, greatly increase.....These institutions as well as certain regulated banks had also assumed significant debt burdens while providing the loans described above and did not have a financial cushion sufficient to absorb large loan defaults or MBS losses."

It's the same concept as a margin call. The foreclosures dropped the housing prices which triggered the defaults on the credit default swaps. The other way around makes no sense -- a CDS _can't_ default if housing values don't drop, and even if it did, it wouldn't affect the homeowner, just the bank who made the bad investment.

IMO the bigger problem is the social security number. He needs to setup fraud alerts with the credit reporting agencies. http://www.usatoday.com/money/perfi/columnist/block/2005-03-28-ym_x.htm They have links to do it for each of them.

A hacker (or spammer) with access to the PC is probably only a minor inconvenience in the scheme of life, identify theft could be devastating for years to come!

As far as the computer goes, many have already answered that a format and reinstall of the OS is a good cure, and really isn't very hard to do.

I guess this verifies that the first ant invasion I experienced at a picnic was really a denial of service attack.

Then there is the matter of time-to-live propagation issues. Do the ants that wander off never to return die of hunger, get eaten, or become political refugees at another colony?

Are the strange experiments with small frequency differences between regions of the power grid somehow tied to some conspiracy to mess with time references between people's machines, perhaps to kill traffic by messing with time-to-live handling, or perhaps identify where packets are from even when their addresses are invalid?

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2011-06-24-power-grid-appliances-electronics_n.htm

Bug spray, anteaters, fire-ants and cars are missing from the story analogy.

Obama is currently doing it.

Apparently the slashmods missed the memo: "The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that consumers can be bound by an arbitration clause in a cellphone deal or other contract even when state law permits a class-action lawsuit for claims arising from the deal."

Along with a lot of other people, for some reason, despite there being almost a dozen slashdot articles on it. Must be because I'm a troll. You know, one of those fact trolls. Damn you facts! DAAAAAMMMMMNNN YYYOOOOOOUUUU!!!

You don't get debates from liberals because you make stuff up. Dems only had a supermajority in the senate for four months, most of which were in recess. The republicans have used the filibuster (or threatened to fillabuster) nearly every bill, basically negating the majority. http://washingtonindependent.com/74033/the-four-month-supermajority Federal spending rose at anywhere between 3.2-5%, a rate below average, and if you start measuring the rate from October 2009, spending has been the slowest in 60 years http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/20/us/politics/fact-checking-obama-and-romney.html?pagewanted=all Oil drilling and fraking has been approved at a faster rate under obama than Bush II. (fraking due to technology). http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2012/03/obama-oil-drilling-up-on-my-watch/1

You probably already know this, but perhaps it would be informative to the rest of slashdot:

I have a close friend who used to be a commercial pilot. His statement on lap babies: "If anything bad happens during the flight, all the lap babies will die. The only reason the FAA allows it is that bringing a lap baby aboard a plane is still safer than driving."

http://www.usatoday.com/travel/columnist/mcgee/2008-07-29-lap-children_N.htm

You did the right thing.

It would help to know your geographic region. I'll give you Denmark and theUnited States. I specifically chose normal news sites, rather than eco- or cycling-specific news sources, but there's a lot more out there on similar sorts of movements in many municipalities across several nations, including moves to create pedestrian and cyclist only downtown regions.

Clearly it's not there yet, but we're already doing something that could be considered telekinesis.

Healthcare, like the military, fire department, and the mail, is a classic market failure. Patients put their lives in the hands of their doctor. There is no time to haggle over price in an ambulance.

Sigh, one of the greatest lies ever spoken about US healthcare. Emergency care is a very small segment of total healthcare cost (http://www.acep.org/content.aspx?id=25902). Most of the time you do have time to choose your doctor or whatnot. More importantly, you have plenty of time to choose your insurer prior to something happening. Costs are high because we're a sick country that doesn't mind spending a metric fuckton of money to extend the life of a terminal patient a few extra months. 27% of Medicare's budget goes towards end-of-life coverage: http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/health/2006-10-18-end-of-life-costs_x.htm

Bill hr254 has died in committee for over a decade.

The sludge industry makes billions spreading you and your neighbors sh!t on farm fields....and they like to do it in secret, cause, well, you know - its disgusting/revolting/dangerous/creates superbugs/un-american/u pick the description.

In the end, u r eating the end of the line of a sewage treatment plant.

I wonder how much of our healthcare problems in this country are caused by using effluent, septage, or sewage in food production for people?

I think this is as big, or a bigger issue, than GMO.

If you think GMO is bad, stop eating cheese - most cheese consumed in USA comes from GMO organisims that are centrafuged to pick out the enzyme which causes milk to curdle.

Curiosity no longer responds after firmware update

Shh. Don't jinx it. That happened to the Spirit rover, and at about this point in its mission.

Sometimes it is worthwhile to check other people's claims, because you may just learn other details while doing so.

Case in point: recently someone said "defense is 50%" of the federal budget. With a very brief search, I found that their claim was patently wrong, that it averaged "only" 24% for the past several years. But I also learned where VA/SS/welfare ranked in the scheme of things, too.

Back to Trepidity's comment a few posts up. You may not remember, but indeed, after 9/11 there were many kneejerk decisions and laws passed. This is how the Patriot Act and DHS and TSA came into existence. The only detail I'd clarify in his post is the statement that the Republicans were all over these decisions. But if you pull away the cobwebs of past memories, one may remember that *most* of our elected officials were pushing this shit. They all wanted to appear "tough on terrorism", and in some cases that their security-penises were much, much larger than the opposing party. This did not work out well for us collectively.

And yes, Chertoff and Rapiscan go back. Here's a 2010 article from USA Today describing it. You may want to look into "revolving door policy" to understand the limitations of some of these relationships. http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2010-11-22-scanner-lobby_N.htm

http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/story/2012-02-10/pew-study-inaccurate-voter-registration-rolls/53083406/1

it's not what the op claimed, but it isn't exactly refuting it either. I like how they even point to 106% of the last census (less then 2 years ago) being registered to vote in one Ohio county. At first glance, you might think well, that's only 6% over, but think of the children or the lack of children for it to be that simple.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2011-12-15/poor-census-low-income/51944034/1

Apparently you feel that making the very poor pay more in taxes is a good thing.

And no, you really don't understand what is left wing, you only know how to parrot Fox News talking points.