Any case where someone actually warned the FBI about someone and they caught them in advance won't get the massive news coverage of a successful terrorist attack. So you only remember the cases where they fail.

Moreover, if the FBI is warned and catches someone ahead of time, and does prevent a terrorist attack, it's going to be hard to prove that anything was prevented unless the FBI catches the guy red-handed. Otherwise be prepared to see headlines "FBI destroys life of innocent man based on word from dictatorial foreign government".

And the next day you walked into your son's room, but instead of smoking he was studying for a test. You then forced him to study from then until 6 AM, whereupon he went to school and failed the test he was studying for because he fell asleep in the classroom.

That'll teach him!

Many Europeans know another language because they live close to a border where the people on the other side speak a different language, or they even live in a country where the people have more than one native language. They know another language because it is directly useful in their everyday life, not because knowing another language is good all by itself or because of indirect benefits like knowing the meaning of new words that are related to that language. The US is pretty big and it's a lot more common to live far from a land border (or to only live near the border with English-speaking sections of Canada.)

Googling up the American Botanical Council shows that
1) they're unimportant enough that Wikipedia does not have an article aboutf them or their magazine
2) They are not part of any professional botanical organizations
3) Their facebook page calls them "Your source for reliable herbal medicine information" and shares links for organizatioins whose descriptions include phrases such as "holistic" and "alternative medicine".
4) Their own homepage is clearly aimed at the herbal medicine crowd and even includes a disclaimer that "The information on this site is intended for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for the advice of a qualified healthcare professional". Their magazine is called HerbalGram, for pete's sake.

I dare you to read their own site's news page at http://abc.herbalgram.org/site... and conclude that they are anything but a bunch of alternative medicine crackpots whose belief about the Voynich Manuscript should be taken as seriously as their belief that it's worth giving a presentation at an aromatherapy conference.

All this injection stuff is to spare OUR feelings, not the prisoner's

Who are you calling "we"?

The reason that "we" try to use humane methods in executions is that there are death penalty opponents who like to call every method of execution inhumane as a way of nickel-and-diming the system to destruction. Occasionally a court disagrees with them, which leaves us with one completely arbitrary method that is established as legally permissible because it's "humane". That's the reason we use lethal injections and not the guillotine--pressure from opponents. I would bet that most supporters of capital punishment wouldn't care about the difference.

The difference is nonsense anyway. Sure, that punishment isn't the absolute least painful execution possible. It harms the prisoner. But it harms the prisoner overalll less than, say, a year in jail, and nobody thinks it's inhumane to put someone in jail for a year (or to put someone on death row for a period that is pretty much guaranteed to be longer than a year), and it's a small amount of extra harm compared to the harm caused to him by, you know, being dead.

It isn't really clear that they did in fact lie to Congress.

From your own link:

The attempts to parse his answer to Wydenâ(TM)s question as being technically truthful don't work and he should stop trying to claim that he didn't lie. But a dispassionate view of these circumstances shows that there are times when honesty is not always the best policy.

In other words, even your link admits that they lied to Congress, the link just tries to argue that lying is justified.

Everyone is responding based on knowing that the patent troll's claim of patent violation is probably bogus. But the question is over whether the FTC even has jurisdiction over claims of that type. Whether the claim is bogus doesn't come into effect at that stage--you can't say "the FTC can stop the patent troll's lawsuits because their claim is bad", since whether the claim is bad is something that gets decided in the lawsuit (or in the agreement to avoid the lawsuit).

Here's an analogy where the claim is not bad. The police accidentally blow up your house looking for marijuana. Your lawyer tells you that even with the drug war the way it is, a lawsuit is reasonable. So you tell the police "pay for for the damage caused by blowing up my house, or I take you to court". However, at this point the government steps in and says "you are charging people money to blow up your house. By selling the service of letting people blow up your house, you are violating the zoning laws, permit laws, and a whole bunch of other laws related to running businesses. If you try to charge anyone for blowing up houses, including the police, we will put you in jail."

Should they be able to say that? Of course not. There's a difference between selling someone something as a business and "selling" someone something when you are asking them to pay to cover damages. While we may informally say "the patent troll's business is lawsuits", as far as their legal claims go, they're just sitting on the porch and someone else damaged them, and they're only asking anyone to buy a license because that's how you pay for the damages.

I'm not a lawyer so I don't know if that argument will ultimately win in court, but they at least have a legitimate point.

Almost any political position is believed by its followers to be something that affects people's lives, and thus can be spun as affecting health care costs. It's just as easy to do it for the other side. Just take the standard political argument and tack on "so it affects health care costs". For instance, conservatives say that the costs hurt the economy. Well, in a worse economy, people have more health care problems (for hopefully obvious reasons). So food stamps increase health care costs because although they provide food (reducing health care costs), they also harm the economy by a marginal amount (increasing health care costs). If the latter effect is larger, then food stamps are a health care disaster.

And it's unlikely that the study which claimed that cutting food stamps increases health care costs by 15 billion took into account the possibility that paying for food stamps hurts the economy and health care costs are larger in a worse economy.

I can claim that gun control decreases health care costs (because it reduces gun violence and victims of violence use hospitals--this has been claimed for real). I could on the other hand claim that looser gun laws decrease health care costs (because people can use guns to protect themselves from criminals and people hurt by criminals use hospitals). Maybe we need stronger drug laws (stoned people don't take care of themselves very well) or weaker drug laws (the drug war sends people to prison where health is bad and they can't earn a living when they get out since they have an arrest record, making them poor, and so more likely to have high health care costs).

How about arguing that censoring video games reduces health care costs? (fewer teens will become criminals if you censor games; less crime means fewer people sent to hospitals by criminals). It's all about disguising a political position as a nonpartisan one, not about health care.

Ellsberg himself is on record saying that Snowden did the right thing and that doing what Ellsberg did would no longer have worked:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/daniel-ellsberg-nsa-leaker-snowden-made-the-right-call/2013/07/07/0b46d96c-e5b7-11e2-aef3-339619eab080_story.html

Which can be worse than a merely inaccurate one. First of all, TFA says nothing about changes in the past 20 years, and many of the things described in the article have manifestly not just been made up in the past 20 years. Do you really think Mexico would have let you take biological specimens prior to 1994? Second, the tone of the summary implies that these experiments are being restricted because they are "scary stuff". Only a minority of the experiments described in the article are associated with scaring the public, such as the GMO one, and even that explains that Kickstarter came to that decision after consulting with scientists, rather than just banning such things because they sounded scary. In fact, the spin of the article is completely opposite from the summary--the summary implies that these restrictions are caused by hysteria, which really isn't in the article at all.

A quirk of U.S. copyright law kept 10 stories out of the public domain, on the basis that these stories where continuously developed.

1) This conflates two things: the normal 1923 limit which kept 10 stories out of the public domain, and the "continuously developed" idea which was used to keep the characters (not the stories) out of the public domain based on the fact that the stories are not in the public domain.
2) Neither one of those two conflated ideas is a "quirk of copyright law". The 1923 limit is well-known and can't sensibly be called a quirk. The "continuously developed" idea is something that is not a quirk for the opposite reason: the Sherlock Holmes heirs pretty much made it up.
3) The judge ruled against the "continuously developed" idea on the grounds that copyright doesn't work that way. Only the incremental changes made to the characters in the last 10 copyrighted stories cannot be used, but the characters themselves can be used as long as only story elements from the public domain stories are used.

Technically Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet counts as a non-malevolent computer, although in practice, media often doesn't take the same attitude towards robots and towards computers in general.

That motherfucking website has, if you examine the source, Javascript at the bottom which loads more Javascript from google-analytics. There's a comment of "yes, I know...wanna fight about it?" which pretty much indicates that the site creator knows he's being a motherfucking hypocrite by putting that on a website whose supposed point is that that sort of thing is a bad idea.

(Of course I put google-analytics as 127.0.0.1 in /etc/hosts, since I see no reason to ever want to load anything from there, even if for some reason I have to turn ad blocking off.)

If the price of the long warranty is equal to the cost of the warranty to Apple, they'll just bake it into the price. If the warranty is a high margin item whose standard retail price far exceeds the actual cost to Apple, Apple can't just raise the price by the standard retail price of the warranty--raising the price shifts the demand curve and reduces the total number of Apple products sold (something that does not happen if the warranty is sold at the same retail price but as an optional item). Apple would instead be forced to raise the price by a smaller amount that is closer to the actual cost of the warranty, so as not to reduce sales too much.

Imagine that they were selling iPads but had a deal where you paid an extra million dollars to get them gift-wrapped. If the government forced them to gift-wrap every iPad, they could not raise the price by a million dollars.

I wouldn't want to work for an employer that would consider anything I've said "unacceptable".

If work was something we wanted to do, it wouldn't be work, it would be hobbies. The whole idea of work is that you do something you otherwise wouldn't because people are willing to pay you for it.

Nobody wants to work for a bad employer, but most people want to be without money even less. People work for assholes because they need the money, not because they want to work for assholes.