I can already afford the most over hyped school district in my metropolitan area and it didn't require me to be a big gimp.

I can pay CASH for minor hospital procedures. (HSA)

A "better" college is a dubious prospect these days.

Your lack of planning is not my emergency.

If you can't manage the boundaries imposed by normal office hours then you have failed to adequately manage your people and resources.

Most after hours work is just unpaid overtime that companies can only get away with because they have managed to get certain classes of corporate serf declared exempt from labor standards.

Overtime is a management failure.

No. The Muslims tried to conquer Europe for 1000 years. They conquered much of the Roman Empire by 700AD and managed to completely wipe out Byzantium by 1100AD.

That's what the original Crusade was a response to: a distress call from what was left of Byzantium.

Dracula is such a brutal character because he was on the front lines of the war between Islam and Europe.

The attempts at conquest really only abated once the last Muslim empire went into decline There was a famous siege marking the event. The hero of that siege has his own gallery in the Vatican museum in Rome.

There is a lot of history that gets glossed over by "religion of peace" rhetoric.

The glory days of the Ottoman Empire are what the likes of Bin Laden pine over.

The other guy readily admitted to the brutality of the Old Testament.

A big part of Xianity is disavowing much of the Old Testament.

The thing that struck me most was how Wesley had trouble getting a slot in the Academy despite being a Wunderkind. In a "post scarcity" world, they should have made more spots for recruits like that. Anyone interested in Starfleet should have been accommodated. Built more ships. Added a new wing to the Academy. Whatever.

The situation with Bashir and Bashir's dad also seemed a bit appalling. Clearly there's still an underclass that's shat upon in the 24th century. The Utopian rhetoric didn't change that.

Any Earth colony was a clear indication that there were people fed up with how things were run back on Euro-Earth.

> you cannot easily replicate the ease of use or the in-the-dark familiarity of a dedicated remote on a cell phone screen.

You simply don't need to. The cell phone screen has it's own lighting. So the "problem" you are describing there becomes completely moot.

Although this really sidesteps the real issue: multi-vendor co-operation. The cable providers really have squat to do with this problem. Hardware vendors don't want to play nice with each other.

The Soviets most certainly did have state mandated atheism. You could get sent to the gulags for admitting to or demonstrating your religious beliefs.

They even tried to hijack Xmas and turn it into a purely secular holiday.

American Xians have absolutely no clue what genuine religious persecution is like.

Well, it's reasonable for people to fixate on that which they have actually been exposed to. Fundies are a noisy sort of lot. They also like to hijack generic terms and pretend that they are the one true definitive source for dogma.

That leads to less extreme forms of Xianity being marginalized.

The squeaky wheel and all that.

Why do you expect people to assume thigns that aren't apparent by the visible evidence?

You're either doing nothing particularly interesting in which case any consumer appliance will do.

Or you are doing something inherently interesting and should not be a total rube while doing it. In that case, you should be able to deal with the iptables interface or seriously reconsider what you are doing.

There's a little issue of professional responsibility here. You should have enough pride to not want to be a menace to others and willing to do what it takes to ensure that.

The thing I took away from this is that Apple users are just stupid. They will pay extra for a 3rd party item that does something the base product already does.

So it's little wonder that Apple users spend more. They're idiots that wear thier ignorance like a badge of honor and they love to demonstrate that they can waste money.

They're the suckers that are born every minute.

My Linux boxes with SSDs boot in 6 seconds. Not that I would advocate fixating on boot times as a metric for anything but an HTPC where you're basically horseracing against the projector and the home theatre system (which is also running Linux).

...that we know of.

It's a lot like bragging about closed sourced software. Most of it was done in secret without any chance for outside review with critics likely being sent to the gulag if they dared speak up.

> This. NASA is not a political body and should not act like one.

NASA is an agency of a government that's a part of the alliance that is supposed to defend a number of countries that are likely Putin targets.

NASA should not be dependent on Russia right now any more than they should have been dependent on the Soviet Union when it was still around.

Lack of self-reliance can be a right b*tch sometimes. You never know what kind of abusive crap you will have to tolerate.

That's the thing about liberty. It means that you have to tolerate people that you disagree with and don't particularly like. It's not liberty if everyone only tolerates people with their own brand of group think. That's more like communism or theocracy.

Your intolerance is the same as his intolerance.

You beat me to it man.

The problem with "Cadillac" plans is that there is no free lunch. You aren't getting anything for free even if that's what you've deluded yourself into thinking. You still have to pay, or alternately I have to pay for your sorry *ss. Going through an intermediary insures that everything will cost more because the insurance company wants it's cut and it needs to keep it's lights on.

What I save on the difference between "good" plans and "bad" allows me to save for an emergency. It allows me to be a proper responsible adult rather than a ward of the state.

Things like being independent, responsible, and somewhat self-reliant are things neither party really wants to enable.