So nearly every country in the world has provisions to search you as you enter from abroad (returning citizen or visiting alien). Even the US by default assumes that all searches as you re-enter from a foreign state are reasonable (look it up). Beyond that, I just gave you two very simple, very reasonable justifications where "merely traveling justifies reasonable suspicion" i.e. visiting family with known ties to terrorism and visiting a country which either sponsors or is saturated with terrorism.
" even travelling to a so-called "terrorist state" seems flimsy to me, as there are millions of innocent people within these nations, and only a small percentage are engaged in terrorist activities"
No, you are flat out wrong. Yes, there are innocents in countries like Syria and Iran, but most people flee from those countries and never return. People who go back and forth to those countries (outside of government sanctioned diplomats, military, etc.) typically have connections to powerful people in that countries government or faction and are very likely suspects for terrorist activity, spying or other nefarious activities. Thank sanity it is not up to you to protect the world from foreign threats, as you are woefully ignorant of how the world works. You might want to educate yourself on the topics at hand before throwing out a theoretical argument that has neither basis in reality or logic.
Change the language to any worker who earns money that contributes to the companys bottom line, and put some language about attempted subversion of the law being punished with a mandatory 10 year prison sentence felony conviction.
It is far past time to pass a law that limits CEOs pay to 10x the average pay of their employees in cash and the rest in company stocks that can only be sold 10% per year, requiring CEOs to focus on the long term health and viability of their company, not just short term gains...
These guys got away with shit under Obama, but I suspect that Trump will authorize a black bag to put two between the eyes of each member of this group using Delta Force or the Seals. They may have giant Epeen when it comes to hacking, but they have to live somewhere on this planet, and when they get found, no one is going to protect them because they are shitting on everyone...
If Trump is really smart, he will declare them terrorists and televise their execution the next day with the message to others that the US will come and kill you if you pull this shit, so don't.
Honestly, liberals are what is ruining Hollywood (movies & TV) today. Liberals by definition feel their way through life instead of thinking their way through. Go watch the first season of The Walking Dead and then (if you can survive it) the first season of Fear the Walking Dead. TWD must have had some input from someone with a brain because the characters are complex (not all good or bad) and they make reasonable choices. OTOH, FTWD is ridiculous, many characters are liberal stereotypes (the soldiers, police, gun owners, gun objectors). The show had great source material, but instead of working to build realistic characters in TWD universe, they instead chose to barf their liberal agenda all over the sad excuse for a story (or they are incapable of controlling themselves).
The really successful movies out of Hollywood in the last 15 plus years have been superhero flicks because they have predefined cartoon villains that Hollywood cant really screw up and don't offend their liberal bias (excepting a few, like Iron Man 3 who completely pooched many things due to the obvious liberal bias in the writing, including the Mandarin, because a person of Chinese ancestry couldn't possibly be evil). 99% of the original Hollywood movies in the last 40 years depict villains as some kind of white male who is either a corrupt corporate type (Avatar etc) or a US soldier or some kind of crazy Christian (rock of ages, Red State, Salvation Boulevard, Higher Ground, Tyrannosaur, The Ledge etc. http://archives.relevantmagazi... ) Those are the boogeymen for the liberals in Hollywood, and it is ridiculous to the rest of us. In the real world (outside of the massive liberal echo chamber, you know where there are history books to study) the majority of villains in the real world are: politicians (Hitler, Stalin Mao etc were all politicians, yet liberals want powerful government to save us from ourselves and care for our every need, so politicians can't be villains), criminals (liberals believe that criminals are just ill and need to be rehabilitated, rather than evil that need to be punished or eliminated from society), atheists (liberals love these morally relativisitic God deniers, but they have killed about 200M people in the last 100 years http://www.conservapedia.com/A... ) and radical Muslim terrorists (note they are MUSLIMS, no other religion comes close to the 30,000 plus murders committed by radical MUSLIMS in the past 17 years in the name of Islam http://www.thereligionofpeace.... or the 30% acceptance of radical violence by the US Muslim population). You may not like it, but that is the reality. The one movie that had a Muslim as the villain that I am aware of (True Lies) has been blacklisted by Hollywood (you can't buy it or stream it on Hulu, iTunes, Ultraviolet, Netflix, Amazon and it is not available on BluRay or 4K, only it's original DVD release as of a few months ago).
Even if you are going for pure fantasy, there are many villain tropes to draw from in literary technique/history and yet liberals seem to be incapable of creative thought outside of their fascist, limited worldview, and that is what is killing the quality of movies.
There is not enough information in this article to draw a conclusion. If, for instance, you found out that this guy was vising Syria or a surrounding country repeatedly and his brother is a high ranking officer in ISIS, it becomes extremely reasonable to want to know what this guy has been up to. Or alternatively, intelligence sources may have implicated him regarding terrorist activity, but without sufficient evidence to arrest the guy, and they are using this as a reason to arrest him and take him out of play while they search his house and associates. The bottom line is you and I don't know all the facts, and if you routinely travel to a terrorist state, I think it is reasonable to expect to be thoroughly searched when you return to your adopted country. It is akin to visiting Nazi Germany mid WW2 and being surprised that you get arrested and searched when you returned to the UK... People need to get their heads on straight before they get them cut off.
The solution is not to give up vulnerabilities that the CIA and NSA discover and want to weaponize, the root of the problem is the most incompetent administration in 50 years (the Obama administration) being completely clueless about cyber security and letting our state secrets out. That shit would never have been hacked by the Russians and dumped into the wild if the incompetents at the CIA and NSA had air-gapped their stockpile and put people in prison for 10 years or more for moving the files to a networked location except for specific conditions and actual use where multiple sign-offs and precautions would be required. Those who were in charge and those who were responsible for the security measures at the CIA and NSA when these secrets were hacked/leaked should be fired and charged with criminal negligence at least or maybe espionage/treason.
I agree, Trump should just take all authority from congress and the supreme court. It would be far more efficient./sarc off
There is a reason that we have the government run inefficiently, but the hacks that I pointed to above were for the most part foreseeable and preventable, had competent people been in place. However, when you appoint people based on their loyalty and service to your lordship Obama instead of competency, you get the shitstorm of failure as we saw. And after the fact, if you give less than a year to someone who would have been executed (like the Rozenbergs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ) in the past for treasonous espionage, you are pretty transparently a failure on the topic across the board.
"Picking up on themes advanced by the Obama administration"
Yeah no, but nice try. The Obama administration has the worst cyber security record of any administration, especially when you consider both public and private hacks where the government should have stepped in (i.e. hacks by other countries against US companies or government contractors). Remember the Chinese OPM hack? Yah, that was under Obamas watch. 21 million plus personal records exposed. Remember when the Chinese hacked and stole plans for stealth drones and other military aircraft? That was Obama too. Remember the DNC hacks? Yah, that was on Obamas watch as well (sorry, Trump wasn't even elected yet). There is a list as long as my arm proving that the Obama administration was absolute shit at cyber security and he basically just shrugged and did nothing besides blabber.
It remains to be seen if Trump can get the federal government IT and contractors to get their shit together on this issue, but dont piss down my back and say it is raining. If he starts firing department heads or charging federal employees with criminal negligence where appropriate, we might see the epidemic of hacking fall off somewhat as industry standard measures get adopted and enforced across the federal government.
Sorry, the first article that you cite is looking at the legality to RECORD a phone call, which is not the same as LISTEN to (or as I termed, monitor). Furthermore, even most (or at least my) two party consent states have an exception for citizens recording their calls when there is an expectation that a crime is being committed or will be captured by recording the call. Further, if the common number I have causes my phone to ring when the phone that I have provided to my child also rings and I pick up but stay on mute and listen in, I'm pretty sure that since I was called as well and both phones belong to me and ring when that number is called, there are no issues as long as I don't record the call (it is akin to picking up the extension on my land line). Any adult calling a child should expect zero privacy.
"...our culture's disgusting history of treating children like subhumans that are their parents' property, and which is exactly as stupid as it sounds."
Children are not subhumans, they are sub-adults (thus the term child, meaning immature or irresponsible). Treating children like property was a convenient way of looking at it from the point of law. What would be even stupider would be giving children all the rights of an adult: want to drive at 11yo, sure, here are the keys; want a pistol, sure, here's some ammo; want to kill your liver with alcohol, sure, here's a bottle of Jack Daniels; want to get married, sure, go for it; want to destroy your lungs with smoking (pot or tobacco), sure, take a puff... The reality is that children start off completely dependent on their parents for protection and instruction, and when they become adults, they are (supposed to be) self sufficient and capable of making reasonable, responsible decisions on their own. Before they are adults, children are incapable of making decisions without the supervision and review of their parents, but it is only a digital state (child or adult) in the eyes of the law. In reality, there is a transition that each parent must both meter and foster so that when a child reaches the legal age of adulthood (18 in the US), they are ready for the rights and responsibilities that they inherit. Will I be monitoring my child's phone activity at 17.5? Probably only minimally if at all. Will I be monitoring their phone activity at 12? You bet your ass.
The bare fact remains that no one will love or care for you like your parents. Not the government, and certainly not strangers. Just look at how many children have been abused or died in foster care (government parentage) and the appalling percentage that is compared to biological/adoptive parents. There are exceptions of sociopathic parents, but those are few and far between. The most common examples we see today of children not being cared for by the parents is when the parents are drug or alcohol abusers, which physiologically prevents the natural parenting instincts.
Children are immature and irresponsible by definition, and they need protection and instruction, not power (in the form of adult rights and freedoms). Children need to learn (or at least have the chance to learn) the value and practice of self control, moderation and maturity before they can be trusted with the power that we give every adult in a free society. Giving children power (in the form of rights, freedoms or otherwise) before they are mature warps them and often prevents them from ever becoming mature (see 99% of child stars in the last 40 years)... Anyone who says otherwise is either a child themselves (over or under 18) or an adult who has never had children (and thus is completely ignorant on the real practice of raising children and has no business commenting on the matter.) Child psychologists and "experts" who have never had children crack me up and should never be taken seriously, it is like trying to listen to a college professor teach a programming course without ever having written a single line of code.
Bullshit, you just did disparage workers who work with their hands, and unlike you, I actually engaged in manual labor and made my opinion based on my own experience. I never said it was a virtue, just that it was valuable and should be respected. You may want to check and see how much plumbers, electricians, roofers, machinists et al make. I suspect that their annual income for the good ones are easily comparable with your salary as an IT professional/software engineer (most of Slashdot). Additionally, they are very unlikely to be replaced by H1B or fired by a megacorp.
"The fact is that some jobs ARE better than others and ARE more desired than others and ARE paid more than others which (usually) leads to a higher quality of life for the worker and his/her family. Sending kids off to a work camp rather than science camp is NOT a good thing for those individuals even if it is a necessary byproduct of our flawed economy."
I don't disagree that some jobs are more desirable than others on a per person basis, and that some jobs are menial, but your attitude is menial=manual and you are just flat wrong. Just admit that you have zero experience in manual labor and are ignorant and haven't really thought about how much your plumber makes (you know, the one you paid $150 for 30 minutes to fix the drip under your kitchen sink. Consider the possibility that you might be ignorant and prejudiced against people who work with their hands.
In the USA, backbone data is cheap, the cable companies are a monopoly with built out networks that are 10+ years old, and they are raking in the cash with no price regulation and minimal oversight. It is high time that laws were passed to:
1. Determine a fair pricing model and require that where there are less than 4 ISPs available. Net neutrality is really about the quality of the product and what exactly you are buying every month. I am surprised no lawsuits over net neutrality have been filed over bait and switch yet. 2. Use anti trust laws to break up cable companies into cable providers and internet providers sharing the same lines owned by a third company that maintains and owns the lines. 3. Protect internet access in the same way that the federal laws currently protect US mail (both privacy and penalty wise) both the privacy of email and browsing.
Typically, 3 strikes laws don't go far enough, and that guys first two strikes were probably violent felonies. In a perfect world, we would go back to the old days where we had almost zero prisons, and zero recidivism. The cost of convicted criminals to society was their crime, a few days in jail/court hearing followed by a long drop with a short rope. The crime rate was also massively lower because most people were smart enough to see crime didn't pay and any idiot who committed crime didn't live very long. (please don't barf your revisionist history BS at me, I have dug in deep enough to know what it is, that crap was all pulled out of some pointy headed professor's ass based on the logic that crime could not possibly have been that low, so we must add a few zeros and estimate that unreported crime was massive).
The entire BS of coddling crime and treating criminals as though they are sick is just stupid. Everyone makes choices every day and then you live with them. Criminals chose to break the law, and in most instances chose to hurt people in some way, and when they get caught, they should be severely punished or outright executed, not to reform them but to protect the rest of the citizenry from them going forward and as a deterrent to others considering crime.
1. Pro tip, don't poke rotting corpses exposed by melting ice. 2. Bacteria and viruses exposed by melting snow (supposedly under sunny conditions) don't last very long under the UV bombardment, so even if the Andromeda Strain does get released, it will most likely be destroyed by UV radiation long before it can infect someone.
I hear California is so full of shit that they are trying to take the left wing nuts and split the state so the normal people in California don't have to suffer this stupidity. http://sfist.com/2017/03/26/la...
Are we taking bets on whether rocket companies choose leftie California or normal, business friendly California?
With all that is out there lurking for children to prey upon, you can sure as hell bet that I will be monitoring MY phones that I pay for and I buy service for that I allow my minor children to use. Please point to the US law that makes this illegal because there is not one, it is not a gray area at all. Children only have a small subset of rights, and privacy from monitoring by their parents is not included. That common law goes back hundreds of years in the US and thousands of years before that in Europe.
"At least we didn't cozy up to the religious right, spawn the TEA partiers, and elect a cheeto."
So instead of cozying up to the religious right (the group of people who founded, and fought and died to create the country that you live in and benefit from http://www.freerepublic.com/fo... ), spawned the Tea party (a grass roots set of peaceful organizations fed up with Washington politics and liberal overreach who left their protest and event grounds cleaner than when they arrive http://www.thegatewaypundit.co... ) and elected president Trump (the only non-politician citizen running for the office this last election cycle). Instead of doing all that, which you somehow think is horrendous, the left spawned:
There seems to be a large contingent of rabid fascists on the left and an even larger cross section of lefies who are so secure in their moral superiority that reality cannot intrude. The fascist left had better tone it down or they may end up facing the national guard and lead bullets the next time they try to violently assault someone else's freedom to assemble/speak. The rest of the left had better start paying more attention to reality and pull their heads out of their collective echo chamber (or their asses, I can never tell which is which with them).
Based on this comparison, I will take the conservative approach any day of the week and twice on Sunday. You should focus less on name calling and more on staying abreast of actual actions committed by these groups, both left and right.
That is straight up false. There is exactly $0 in oil subsidies as defined by dictionary.com:
-a direct pecuniary aid furnished by a government to a private industrial undertaking, a charity organization, or the like. -a sum paid, often in accordance with a treaty, by one government to another to secure some service in return. -a grant or contribution of money. -money formerly granted by the English Parliament to the crown for special needs.
Oil companies are allowed to deduct their operating costs just like any other company and not pay taxes on losses JUST LIKE ANY OTHER COMPANY, including the one that you work for. They are further allowed to use the same tax structure that all US corporations are subject to to maximize their deductions and minimize their tax liability. Unless you don't take any deductions on your taxes every year (I know you take deductions you are eligible for because you are not a drooling idiot), don't expect others to not take deductions that they are eligible for. Also don't try to redefine an existing word to mean something that it clearly does not in common usage just to make your argument sound valid, that is underhanded and deceitful.
Furthermore, consumers are basing their purchases of energy based largely on cost. When the cost of solar is less than the cost from the utility, they switch (as I have done) to solar. If gas becomes expensive, they want to know why and lightweight, less safe vehicles that get better mileage start to sell better. The economy is made up of millions of intelligent beings making billions of deciscions every day, which is why free market forces quickly shift to new optimums far faster than government regulation ever could (just look at the adoption rates of smart phones since 2007 that incorporate features that the public wanted, including web browsing, camera and video, music playback etc.)
Um, try again, I have been an engineer for 20 years and have a PhD and taught undergraduate courses for 4 years (quit because the pay was low and the politics at university are BS). Those years of manual labor taught me to appreciate my work as an engineer, but also not to look down on those who do work with their hands because it is hard work and it has value as well. Someone built the house you live in, you call a plumber when your drains have issues or a roofer when your roof leaks. Your attitude speaks volumes about the problems in our society right now, both in the labor market and the general lack of respect for blue collar workers.
In the US if you refuse to pay regular employees, the Feds come sniffing around looking to charge you with fraud and other nasty things... Contractors can be out of luck, but even they have fairly decent legal recourse that 95% of the time comes out in their favor in court and usually awards them legal costs and punitive damages for bad faith behavior, especially if they have a reasonable contract.
After going through this once as a contractor, I now insist on weekly paychecks, with no more than a 7 day delay from invoice to paycheck, and if it doesn't show up, I stop working and start looking for my next engagement after I call the client offering to come down and pick up my missing check, assuming they can't find it/in the works/other BS excuse for not having it.
Not paying your legitimate employees for hours worked should never be a negotiation tactic. Most companies are smart enough to know this.
Ok, so we have established that you are a snobbish dick and your kids are probably entitled assholes to whom you have handed everything they ever wanted and will completely fall apart at the first sign of difficulty. You and your ilk looking down on manual labor is part of the reason why we have so many people graduating from college who are educated far beyond their intelligence. We have an entire generation of millennials who should never have pursued a college degree in the first place, are saddled with crippling college loans, and who are not suited for complex jobs in the first place. Most of them would have been much better off going to trade school for 6 months and landing a job as a machinist making $65k/year after 5 years instead of living in their moms basement with massive loans hanging over their heads and no way to pay them off.
Did you have something to contribute to the discussion?
Fossil fuels are a finite resource in the same way that a dead whale is a finite resource to a colony of ants. Sure, it will eventually run out, but in the mean time it will last generations, and when it does run out, it will not be sudden. When resources start getting short, then let market forces move the energy base to other fuel types/solar/wind etc. That will happen on it's own with no intervention or interference by government or activists. It is not about pro/con, it is about what is feasible. I bet you $5 you live in a grid tie house. For a mere $25,000 you could have solar panels installed and a lead acid battery bank take up one of your rooms and then you could be living the dream of independence from fossil fuels... Why haven't you done this? Because it is not a good idea, it is expensive and right now, electricity is readily available from the meter relatively cheaply and reliably. Yet you are arguing that we as a society should do exactly what you are unwilling to do with your own money.
In terms of pollution, that has for the most part been resolved in the US (in terms of real pollution, if you are a CO2 is pollution nutbar, please stop breathing i.e. polluting). However, China is polluting all over the place, and real, serious pollution. Please go over there and tell them how to run their country, seeing as they are real polluters by about 100,000 x the US (the air is unbreathable in many cities in China, rivers are polluted with heavy metals and other toxins etc...)
Geothermal and hydro are both niche applications because they just don't have the potential to generate that much power. With geothermal you are limited to areas where you can access close to the high temperature mantle, most locations don't have access or it is prohibitively expensive or difficult. With hydroelectric you are similarly limited by the water flow available both in volume and drop in elevation, there simply aren't that many sites available to develop into Hoover dam-like applications of flow and height (and thousands of acres that you can flood upstream without consequence).
The caveat here is that just because you don't like an idea as a politician (or individual) doesn't mean that is a bad idea, it is entirely possible that you are an idiot and it is you who are wrong. There is an entire section of the population who are like this. They have a set of beliefs that they FEEL are right, regardless of facts or statistics, and they believe that they hold the moral high ground, so they must be right and anyone who disagrees is not only wrong but evil. They live in their little echo chambers where all their friends parrot back to them the same beliefs, and they shout down the opposition wherever it pops up. If they don't get their way, they violently riot (i.e. if someone is going to speak who they disagree with, or if an informed jury of citizens decides in a way they don't like). I will let you figure out who I am talking about, but it shouldn't be difficult if you are paying attention.
Spoken out of admitted ignorance. Solar creates a lot of pollution in the creation of the panels (some of the chemicals used are very toxic) and energy storage is not trivial. If you want to get technical, fossil fuels are solar energy too, just chemically stored at a very high energy density compared to chemical batteries, and we use fossil fuel because it works at any time as needed.
It has been said before, but the problems with solar energy are significant: Random, cloudy days that cut your generation potential by 50% or more 50x lower energy density when storing electrical energy in batteries than chemical energy very high energy losses when compressing a gas to store energy low energy density when storing energy kinetically
If someone tomorrow commercializes (i.e. comes up with a solution that can be manufactured in scale, not just some lab experiment) a way of storing electrical energy efficiently that comes anywhere close to fossil fuels, solar will take over the planet in a few years. If not, then it won't.
Slashdot Mirror
So nearly every country in the world has provisions to search you as you enter from abroad (returning citizen or visiting alien). Even the US by default assumes that all searches as you re-enter from a foreign state are reasonable (look it up). Beyond that, I just gave you two very simple, very reasonable justifications where "merely traveling justifies reasonable suspicion" i.e. visiting family with known ties to terrorism and visiting a country which either sponsors or is saturated with terrorism.
" even travelling to a so-called "terrorist state" seems flimsy to me, as there are millions of innocent people within these nations, and only a small percentage are engaged in terrorist activities"
No, you are flat out wrong. Yes, there are innocents in countries like Syria and Iran, but most people flee from those countries and never return. People who go back and forth to those countries (outside of government sanctioned diplomats, military, etc.) typically have connections to powerful people in that countries government or faction and are very likely suspects for terrorist activity, spying or other nefarious activities. Thank sanity it is not up to you to protect the world from foreign threats, as you are woefully ignorant of how the world works. You might want to educate yourself on the topics at hand before throwing out a theoretical argument that has neither basis in reality or logic.
Change the language to any worker who earns money that contributes to the companys bottom line, and put some language about attempted subversion of the law being punished with a mandatory 10 year prison sentence felony conviction.
Nothing to see here, just more of the same.
It is far past time to pass a law that limits CEOs pay to 10x the average pay of their employees in cash and the rest in company stocks that can only be sold 10% per year, requiring CEOs to focus on the long term health and viability of their company, not just short term gains...
These guys got away with shit under Obama, but I suspect that Trump will authorize a black bag to put two between the eyes of each member of this group using Delta Force or the Seals. They may have giant Epeen when it comes to hacking, but they have to live somewhere on this planet, and when they get found, no one is going to protect them because they are shitting on everyone...
If Trump is really smart, he will declare them terrorists and televise their execution the next day with the message to others that the US will come and kill you if you pull this shit, so don't.
Honestly, liberals are what is ruining Hollywood (movies & TV) today. Liberals by definition feel their way through life instead of thinking their way through. Go watch the first season of The Walking Dead and then (if you can survive it) the first season of Fear the Walking Dead. TWD must have had some input from someone with a brain because the characters are complex (not all good or bad) and they make reasonable choices. OTOH, FTWD is ridiculous, many characters are liberal stereotypes (the soldiers, police, gun owners, gun objectors). The show had great source material, but instead of working to build realistic characters in TWD universe, they instead chose to barf their liberal agenda all over the sad excuse for a story (or they are incapable of controlling themselves).
The really successful movies out of Hollywood in the last 15 plus years have been superhero flicks because they have predefined cartoon villains that Hollywood cant really screw up and don't offend their liberal bias (excepting a few, like Iron Man 3 who completely pooched many things due to the obvious liberal bias in the writing, including the Mandarin, because a person of Chinese ancestry couldn't possibly be evil). 99% of the original Hollywood movies in the last 40 years depict villains as some kind of white male who is either a corrupt corporate type (Avatar etc) or a US soldier or some kind of crazy Christian (rock of ages, Red State, Salvation Boulevard, Higher Ground, Tyrannosaur, The Ledge etc. http://archives.relevantmagazi... ) Those are the boogeymen for the liberals in Hollywood, and it is ridiculous to the rest of us. In the real world (outside of the massive liberal echo chamber, you know where there are history books to study) the majority of villains in the real world are: politicians (Hitler, Stalin Mao etc were all politicians, yet liberals want powerful government to save us from ourselves and care for our every need, so politicians can't be villains), criminals (liberals believe that criminals are just ill and need to be rehabilitated, rather than evil that need to be punished or eliminated from society), atheists (liberals love these morally relativisitic God deniers, but they have killed about 200M people in the last 100 years http://www.conservapedia.com/A... ) and radical Muslim terrorists (note they are MUSLIMS, no other religion comes close to the 30,000 plus murders committed by radical MUSLIMS in the past 17 years in the name of Islam http://www.thereligionofpeace.... or the 30% acceptance of radical violence by the US Muslim population). You may not like it, but that is the reality. The one movie that had a Muslim as the villain that I am aware of (True Lies) has been blacklisted by Hollywood (you can't buy it or stream it on Hulu, iTunes, Ultraviolet, Netflix, Amazon and it is not available on BluRay or 4K, only it's original DVD release as of a few months ago).
Even if you are going for pure fantasy, there are many villain tropes to draw from in literary technique/history and yet liberals seem to be incapable of creative thought outside of their fascist, limited worldview, and that is what is killing the quality of movies.
There is not enough information in this article to draw a conclusion. If, for instance, you found out that this guy was vising Syria or a surrounding country repeatedly and his brother is a high ranking officer in ISIS, it becomes extremely reasonable to want to know what this guy has been up to. Or alternatively, intelligence sources may have implicated him regarding terrorist activity, but without sufficient evidence to arrest the guy, and they are using this as a reason to arrest him and take him out of play while they search his house and associates. The bottom line is you and I don't know all the facts, and if you routinely travel to a terrorist state, I think it is reasonable to expect to be thoroughly searched when you return to your adopted country. It is akin to visiting Nazi Germany mid WW2 and being surprised that you get arrested and searched when you returned to the UK... People need to get their heads on straight before they get them cut off.
The solution is not to give up vulnerabilities that the CIA and NSA discover and want to weaponize, the root of the problem is the most incompetent administration in 50 years (the Obama administration) being completely clueless about cyber security and letting our state secrets out. That shit would never have been hacked by the Russians and dumped into the wild if the incompetents at the CIA and NSA had air-gapped their stockpile and put people in prison for 10 years or more for moving the files to a networked location except for specific conditions and actual use where multiple sign-offs and precautions would be required. Those who were in charge and those who were responsible for the security measures at the CIA and NSA when these secrets were hacked/leaked should be fired and charged with criminal negligence at least or maybe espionage/treason.
I agree, Trump should just take all authority from congress and the supreme court. It would be far more efficient. /sarc off
There is a reason that we have the government run inefficiently, but the hacks that I pointed to above were for the most part foreseeable and preventable, had competent people been in place. However, when you appoint people based on their loyalty and service to your lordship Obama instead of competency, you get the shitstorm of failure as we saw. And after the fact, if you give less than a year to someone who would have been executed (like the Rozenbergs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ) in the past for treasonous espionage, you are pretty transparently a failure on the topic across the board.
"Picking up on themes advanced by the Obama administration"
Yeah no, but nice try. The Obama administration has the worst cyber security record of any administration, especially when you consider both public and private hacks where the government should have stepped in (i.e. hacks by other countries against US companies or government contractors). Remember the Chinese OPM hack? Yah, that was under Obamas watch. 21 million plus personal records exposed. Remember when the Chinese hacked and stole plans for stealth drones and other military aircraft? That was Obama too. Remember the DNC hacks? Yah, that was on Obamas watch as well (sorry, Trump wasn't even elected yet). There is a list as long as my arm proving that the Obama administration was absolute shit at cyber security and he basically just shrugged and did nothing besides blabber.
It remains to be seen if Trump can get the federal government IT and contractors to get their shit together on this issue, but dont piss down my back and say it is raining. If he starts firing department heads or charging federal employees with criminal negligence where appropriate, we might see the epidemic of hacking fall off somewhat as industry standard measures get adopted and enforced across the federal government.
Sorry, the first article that you cite is looking at the legality to RECORD a phone call, which is not the same as LISTEN to (or as I termed, monitor). Furthermore, even most (or at least my) two party consent states have an exception for citizens recording their calls when there is an expectation that a crime is being committed or will be captured by recording the call. Further, if the common number I have causes my phone to ring when the phone that I have provided to my child also rings and I pick up but stay on mute and listen in, I'm pretty sure that since I was called as well and both phones belong to me and ring when that number is called, there are no issues as long as I don't record the call (it is akin to picking up the extension on my land line). Any adult calling a child should expect zero privacy.
"...our culture's disgusting history of treating children like subhumans that are their parents' property, and which is exactly as stupid as it sounds."
Children are not subhumans, they are sub-adults (thus the term child, meaning immature or irresponsible). Treating children like property was a convenient way of looking at it from the point of law. What would be even stupider would be giving children all the rights of an adult: want to drive at 11yo, sure, here are the keys; want a pistol, sure, here's some ammo; want to kill your liver with alcohol, sure, here's a bottle of Jack Daniels; want to get married, sure, go for it; want to destroy your lungs with smoking (pot or tobacco), sure, take a puff... The reality is that children start off completely dependent on their parents for protection and instruction, and when they become adults, they are (supposed to be) self sufficient and capable of making reasonable, responsible decisions on their own. Before they are adults, children are incapable of making decisions without the supervision and review of their parents, but it is only a digital state (child or adult) in the eyes of the law. In reality, there is a transition that each parent must both meter and foster so that when a child reaches the legal age of adulthood (18 in the US), they are ready for the rights and responsibilities that they inherit. Will I be monitoring my child's phone activity at 17.5? Probably only minimally if at all. Will I be monitoring their phone activity at 12? You bet your ass.
The bare fact remains that no one will love or care for you like your parents. Not the government, and certainly not strangers. Just look at how many children have been abused or died in foster care (government parentage) and the appalling percentage that is compared to biological/adoptive parents. There are exceptions of sociopathic parents, but those are few and far between. The most common examples we see today of children not being cared for by the parents is when the parents are drug or alcohol abusers, which physiologically prevents the natural parenting instincts.
Children are immature and irresponsible by definition, and they need protection and instruction, not power (in the form of adult rights and freedoms). Children need to learn (or at least have the chance to learn) the value and practice of self control, moderation and maturity before they can be trusted with the power that we give every adult in a free society. Giving children power (in the form of rights, freedoms or otherwise) before they are mature warps them and often prevents them from ever becoming mature (see 99% of child stars in the last 40 years)... Anyone who says otherwise is either a child themselves (over or under 18) or an adult who has never had children (and thus is completely ignorant on the real practice of raising children and has no business commenting on the matter.) Child psychologists and "experts" who have never had children crack me up and should never be taken seriously, it is like trying to listen to a college professor teach a programming course without ever having written a single line of code.
Bullshit, you just did disparage workers who work with their hands, and unlike you, I actually engaged in manual labor and made my opinion based on my own experience. I never said it was a virtue, just that it was valuable and should be respected. You may want to check and see how much plumbers, electricians, roofers, machinists et al make. I suspect that their annual income for the good ones are easily comparable with your salary as an IT professional/software engineer (most of Slashdot). Additionally, they are very unlikely to be replaced by H1B or fired by a megacorp.
"The fact is that some jobs ARE better than others and ARE more desired than others and ARE paid more than others which (usually) leads to a higher quality of life for the worker and his/her family. Sending kids off to a work camp rather than science camp is NOT a good thing for those individuals even if it is a necessary byproduct of our flawed economy."
I don't disagree that some jobs are more desirable than others on a per person basis, and that some jobs are menial, but your attitude is menial=manual and you are just flat wrong. Just admit that you have zero experience in manual labor and are ignorant and haven't really thought about how much your plumber makes (you know, the one you paid $150 for 30 minutes to fix the drip under your kitchen sink. Consider the possibility that you might be ignorant and prejudiced against people who work with their hands.
In the USA, backbone data is cheap, the cable companies are a monopoly with built out networks that are 10+ years old, and they are raking in the cash with no price regulation and minimal oversight. It is high time that laws were passed to:
1. Determine a fair pricing model and require that where there are less than 4 ISPs available. Net neutrality is really about the quality of the product and what exactly you are buying every month. I am surprised no lawsuits over net neutrality have been filed over bait and switch yet.
2. Use anti trust laws to break up cable companies into cable providers and internet providers sharing the same lines owned by a third company that maintains and owns the lines.
3. Protect internet access in the same way that the federal laws currently protect US mail (both privacy and penalty wise) both the privacy of email and browsing.
Typically, 3 strikes laws don't go far enough, and that guys first two strikes were probably violent felonies. In a perfect world, we would go back to the old days where we had almost zero prisons, and zero recidivism. The cost of convicted criminals to society was their crime, a few days in jail/court hearing followed by a long drop with a short rope. The crime rate was also massively lower because most people were smart enough to see crime didn't pay and any idiot who committed crime didn't live very long. (please don't barf your revisionist history BS at me, I have dug in deep enough to know what it is, that crap was all pulled out of some pointy headed professor's ass based on the logic that crime could not possibly have been that low, so we must add a few zeros and estimate that unreported crime was massive).
The entire BS of coddling crime and treating criminals as though they are sick is just stupid. Everyone makes choices every day and then you live with them. Criminals chose to break the law, and in most instances chose to hurt people in some way, and when they get caught, they should be severely punished or outright executed, not to reform them but to protect the rest of the citizenry from them going forward and as a deterrent to others considering crime.
1. Pro tip, don't poke rotting corpses exposed by melting ice.
2. Bacteria and viruses exposed by melting snow (supposedly under sunny conditions) don't last very long under the UV bombardment, so even if the Andromeda Strain does get released, it will most likely be destroyed by UV radiation long before it can infect someone.
I hear California is so full of shit that they are trying to take the left wing nuts and split the state so the normal people in California don't have to suffer this stupidity. http://sfist.com/2017/03/26/la...
Are we taking bets on whether rocket companies choose leftie California or normal, business friendly California?
With all that is out there lurking for children to prey upon, you can sure as hell bet that I will be monitoring MY phones that I pay for and I buy service for that I allow my minor children to use. Please point to the US law that makes this illegal because there is not one, it is not a gray area at all. Children only have a small subset of rights, and privacy from monitoring by their parents is not included. That common law goes back hundreds of years in the US and thousands of years before that in Europe.
"At least we didn't cozy up to the religious right, spawn the TEA partiers, and elect a cheeto."
So instead of cozying up to the religious right (the group of people who founded, and fought and died to create the country that you live in and benefit from http://www.freerepublic.com/fo... ), spawned the Tea party (a grass roots set of peaceful organizations fed up with Washington politics and liberal overreach who left their protest and event grounds cleaner than when they arrive http://www.thegatewaypundit.co... ) and elected president Trump (the only non-politician citizen running for the office this last election cycle). Instead of doing all that, which you somehow think is horrendous, the left spawned:
-The sometimes violent/rapist Occupy movement that caused mass disruptions and cost large cities millions of dollars to clean up after http://www.nydailynews.com/new...
-The violent, rioting, police and law and order hating, racist Black Lives Matter group who were founded on a lie in Fergusun http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfro... went on to inspire a man to mass murder police officers in Dallas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and generally hate law enforcement http://dailycaller.com/2015/08...
-The left has spawned violent riots over conservative speakers http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/01/...
-The left has disrupted and shouted down conservatives and their events and violently attacked Trump supporters. http://www.theblaze.com/news/2...
There seems to be a large contingent of rabid fascists on the left and an even larger cross section of lefies who are so secure in their moral superiority that reality cannot intrude. The fascist left had better tone it down or they may end up facing the national guard and lead bullets the next time they try to violently assault someone else's freedom to assemble/speak. The rest of the left had better start paying more attention to reality and pull their heads out of their collective echo chamber (or their asses, I can never tell which is which with them).
Based on this comparison, I will take the conservative approach any day of the week and twice on Sunday. You should focus less on name calling and more on staying abreast of actual actions committed by these groups, both left and right.
"Government is already providing oil subsidies."
That is straight up false. There is exactly $0 in oil subsidies as defined by dictionary.com:
-a direct pecuniary aid furnished by a government to a private industrial undertaking, a charity organization, or the like.
-a sum paid, often in accordance with a treaty, by one government to another to secure some service in return.
-a grant or contribution of money.
-money formerly granted by the English Parliament to the crown for special needs.
Oil companies are allowed to deduct their operating costs just like any other company and not pay taxes on losses JUST LIKE ANY OTHER COMPANY, including the one that you work for. They are further allowed to use the same tax structure that all US corporations are subject to to maximize their deductions and minimize their tax liability. Unless you don't take any deductions on your taxes every year (I know you take deductions you are eligible for because you are not a drooling idiot), don't expect others to not take deductions that they are eligible for. Also don't try to redefine an existing word to mean something that it clearly does not in common usage just to make your argument sound valid, that is underhanded and deceitful.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/d...
Furthermore, consumers are basing their purchases of energy based largely on cost. When the cost of solar is less than the cost from the utility, they switch (as I have done) to solar. If gas becomes expensive, they want to know why and lightweight, less safe vehicles that get better mileage start to sell better. The economy is made up of millions of intelligent beings making billions of deciscions every day, which is why free market forces quickly shift to new optimums far faster than government regulation ever could (just look at the adoption rates of smart phones since 2007 that incorporate features that the public wanted, including web browsing, camera and video, music playback etc.)
Um, try again, I have been an engineer for 20 years and have a PhD and taught undergraduate courses for 4 years (quit because the pay was low and the politics at university are BS). Those years of manual labor taught me to appreciate my work as an engineer, but also not to look down on those who do work with their hands because it is hard work and it has value as well. Someone built the house you live in, you call a plumber when your drains have issues or a roofer when your roof leaks. Your attitude speaks volumes about the problems in our society right now, both in the labor market and the general lack of respect for blue collar workers.
In the US if you refuse to pay regular employees, the Feds come sniffing around looking to charge you with fraud and other nasty things... Contractors can be out of luck, but even they have fairly decent legal recourse that 95% of the time comes out in their favor in court and usually awards them legal costs and punitive damages for bad faith behavior, especially if they have a reasonable contract.
After going through this once as a contractor, I now insist on weekly paychecks, with no more than a 7 day delay from invoice to paycheck, and if it doesn't show up, I stop working and start looking for my next engagement after I call the client offering to come down and pick up my missing check, assuming they can't find it/in the works/other BS excuse for not having it.
Not paying your legitimate employees for hours worked should never be a negotiation tactic. Most companies are smart enough to know this.
Ok, so we have established that you are a snobbish dick and your kids are probably entitled assholes to whom you have handed everything they ever wanted and will completely fall apart at the first sign of difficulty. You and your ilk looking down on manual labor is part of the reason why we have so many people graduating from college who are educated far beyond their intelligence. We have an entire generation of millennials who should never have pursued a college degree in the first place, are saddled with crippling college loans, and who are not suited for complex jobs in the first place. Most of them would have been much better off going to trade school for 6 months and landing a job as a machinist making $65k/year after 5 years instead of living in their moms basement with massive loans hanging over their heads and no way to pay them off.
Did you have something to contribute to the discussion?
Fossil fuels are a finite resource in the same way that a dead whale is a finite resource to a colony of ants. Sure, it will eventually run out, but in the mean time it will last generations, and when it does run out, it will not be sudden. When resources start getting short, then let market forces move the energy base to other fuel types/solar/wind etc. That will happen on it's own with no intervention or interference by government or activists. It is not about pro/con, it is about what is feasible. I bet you $5 you live in a grid tie house. For a mere $25,000 you could have solar panels installed and a lead acid battery bank take up one of your rooms and then you could be living the dream of independence from fossil fuels... Why haven't you done this? Because it is not a good idea, it is expensive and right now, electricity is readily available from the meter relatively cheaply and reliably. Yet you are arguing that we as a society should do exactly what you are unwilling to do with your own money.
In terms of pollution, that has for the most part been resolved in the US (in terms of real pollution, if you are a CO2 is pollution nutbar, please stop breathing i.e. polluting). However, China is polluting all over the place, and real, serious pollution. Please go over there and tell them how to run their country, seeing as they are real polluters by about 100,000 x the US (the air is unbreathable in many cities in China, rivers are polluted with heavy metals and other toxins etc...)
Geothermal and hydro are both niche applications because they just don't have the potential to generate that much power. With geothermal you are limited to areas where you can access close to the high temperature mantle, most locations don't have access or it is prohibitively expensive or difficult. With hydroelectric you are similarly limited by the water flow available both in volume and drop in elevation, there simply aren't that many sites available to develop into Hoover dam-like applications of flow and height (and thousands of acres that you can flood upstream without consequence).
The caveat here is that just because you don't like an idea as a politician (or individual) doesn't mean that is a bad idea, it is entirely possible that you are an idiot and it is you who are wrong. There is an entire section of the population who are like this. They have a set of beliefs that they FEEL are right, regardless of facts or statistics, and they believe that they hold the moral high ground, so they must be right and anyone who disagrees is not only wrong but evil. They live in their little echo chambers where all their friends parrot back to them the same beliefs, and they shout down the opposition wherever it pops up. If they don't get their way, they violently riot (i.e. if someone is going to speak who they disagree with, or if an informed jury of citizens decides in a way they don't like). I will let you figure out who I am talking about, but it shouldn't be difficult if you are paying attention.
Spoken out of admitted ignorance. Solar creates a lot of pollution in the creation of the panels (some of the chemicals used are very toxic) and energy storage is not trivial. If you want to get technical, fossil fuels are solar energy too, just chemically stored at a very high energy density compared to chemical batteries, and we use fossil fuel because it works at any time as needed.
It has been said before, but the problems with solar energy are significant:
Random, cloudy days that cut your generation potential by 50% or more
50x lower energy density when storing electrical energy in batteries than chemical energy
very high energy losses when compressing a gas to store energy
low energy density when storing energy kinetically
If someone tomorrow commercializes (i.e. comes up with a solution that can be manufactured in scale, not just some lab experiment) a way of storing electrical energy efficiently that comes anywhere close to fossil fuels, solar will take over the planet in a few years. If not, then it won't.