Why are you excluding extractive industry? That makes your point extremely disingenuous. What percentage of the Amazon is being deforested by indigenous peoples as compared to loggers working to build you cheap Cost Plus World Market furniture and lots of space for cattle monocultures? Try again. Science has already identified ecosystems' Achilles heels. The problem lies not with the science, but the politics and the unwillingness of the populace to do what is necessary to fix the issue. Insightful? Hardly.

Nor will anyone, as that is what the democratic process is all about. Candidates like him I am not worried about - I am more worried about the mainstream morons and nutjobs that represent the "middle". They are the ones who keep voting in morons and nutjobs going all the way back to Nixon.

Ron Paul may be extreme, but he is hardly a nutjob. I doubt that a pure libertarian stance would ever be enacted. However, the amount of tax money misappropriated, lost, unaudited, burned, spent on hookers for the Secret Service... shouldn't the government be held accountable for the necessary burden placed upon its citizenry? Do you think that, perhaps, some common middle ground could be achieved? Take this speech from Pete DeFazio, my favorite local Rep made about trying to pass an audit of the DOD:

DeFazio addresses House committee that blocked Pentagon audit

I am all for moderate amounts of taxes spent frugally and appropriately and in a completely transparent and open manner. I am not for blindly dismissing ideas from the right simply because they are on the right.

Are YOU a doctor who can speak to the physiological effects of a drug that alters brain chemistry combined with lack of sleep, near constant terror, and easy access to firearms? If not, then perhaps relating to your field trip to Africa to combat in Afghanistan isn't such a great analogy.

Forget all y'all - LHA for real pirate cred.

I lol'ed. I guess no one with mod points today has a finely tuned sarcasm meter.

Bing? you mean THIS Bing?

Of course this is true, but how about potatoes grown on land seeded with radioactive cesium and strontium? I am guessing their activity is considerably higher. Kids these days. the USSR goes away and everyone forgets anything to do with radiation and dying in mushroom clouds, unless it involves using rad-away after eating some mole rat or mirelurk meat and gunning for super mutants.

Spinal Tap much?

the lack of netflix support...

If by "Fan base" you still mean Universities and school systems who are still under contract to replace Apples with more Apples.

...there's another Ghetto Bird for Ice Cube to run from?

the only thing that moves 120 miles an hour or more in the Army are helicopters and privates after the constipatory effect of MREs has worn off.

It seems the bigger looming issue is the fact that games for computers regardless of OS are becoming afterthoughts to the juggernaut that is Xbox and Playstation development. Who is really calling the shots for game releases anymore? The computer as a game machine is mostly a platform for WOW or SC2, and many times the titles released these days are afterthoughts from the console world (COD, BF2, Practically every Bethesda title). Yeah yeah, linux lacks games, but this is mostly due to absolute crappy support from Nvidia and ATI and the fact most games are written with DirectX in mind, not OpenGL. Good gaming on linux is a developers choice, and many choose to ignore it or blatantly sabotage it.

See? C'mon kiddies! This is why you don't run off of non-magnetic media! Always have a huge electromagnet nearby and be prepared to yank your RAM and huck it into formic acid when the jack boots come for your prOn!