Of course you need to undergo gate rape by the blue gloved angels to get the privilege of flying to Atlanta from Chicago in two hours.

Anyway Salad Express delivers fresh produce from California to New York in under 48 hours. In the hey days, Chicago to Miami was 33 hours. Chicago - Atlanta would have been some 18 hours. Instead of hating and decrying America's love for automobiles, if only the trains take advantage of them they could once again compete with the airlines.

Everyone knows by now, trains move a ton of freight 450 miles on a gallon of fuel. If they deliver you and your car from Chicago to Atlanta in 18 hours for a comparable price to airline, they would be very attractive. Don't use the old downtown terminals. Build a terminal where people drive their cars onto flatbed railcars at the I95-I80-I84 interchange south of Chicago and drop off people at a similar interchange near Atlanta. People drive their cars on to the flatbed railcars, and walk over to the passenger cars. Then drive off in the end. The weight of passengers is so small compared to the weight of the train, and the trains so damned fuel efficient, they should be able to do this efficiently. But the only auto-train from Washington DC to Florida is so damned expensive. It is a chicken-egg problem. It can become cheaper only with a good market and a good market will happen only when it is cheap.

America is no longer one nation indivisible any more. Red states have been trying to secede for quite some time now. Only thing stopping it is, some of them realize that it is the taxes paid by the blue states and the large urban pockets that are keeping the red states afloat. So they are threading the needle of "yeah, yeah, it would be great if we could secede" and at the same time sabotaging the secession behind the scenes.

For not predicting when and where the lightning is going to strike. 10 year jail sentence if no one dies. Manslaughter otherwise.

One of the biggest scams and the worst type of leeches are the companies that make these medically necessary equipment and sell to the government. Heard annoying commercials about scooters "no paperwork, we bill medicare directly, no cost to you" ads? They are the ones. They are still selling hearing aids at 2000$ apop. Granted, these are not run of the beats head phone or bose noise cancelling ear phones. But do they have to be three times the cost of a iPhone 6? Scooters at 6000$. A sonar for visually impaired people would be a gold mine to these companies. They would easily bilk us the taxpayers out of thousands of dollars for these devices.

Making them non patentable by releasing it, and making them for 60$? Surely they will find a way to add something or patent some critical part and back in the business. Some of the heart devices run into half a million dollars. If they make the money in the free market competing with other companies it is one thing. It is an entirely different thing to lobby AMA and the congress and get a competition free ride.

You are right. i am wrong. I misread the wage.

That would work out to less than 34000$ a year of full time work. Even with a 10 hr/week overtime, double time for over time it will be around 50K a year. With words like "could" and "as much as" thrown in, it is probably the maximum pay. This is not high pay by NYC standards. It just shows lots of poor people are willing to risk their life and limb for a relatively low salary.

Any pay increase to these low end workers will almost immediately be spent creating economic activity in this country, boosting GDP. Pay increases and/or tax cuts to the top end will add to the two or trillion dollars sitting in the corporate coffers uninvested because there is no good investing opportunities.

When lack of capital was limiting the economic growth it probably made sense to cut cap gains taxes and encourage investing. Now what limits economic growth is the lack of demand. Both capital and labor are abundant.

It is time to treat all income the same way, earned income, interest/dividend income, capital gains, rents ... all should be treated the same to reduce the loop holes. One concession to be given to the really long term (more than 5 years) capital gains is to allow for inflation adjustment for their cost basis.

I thought Wikipedia was spreading just misinformation and biased information. Now they are spreading actual biological diseases using Wikipedia? I'm not surprised. Internet is a lawless frontier and anything goes there.

I don't think Microsoft can help interoperability even if it wanted it, even its existence depended on it.

Microsoft is not able to ensure interoperability with its own product. Despite all that claims about backward compatibility, OpenOffice opens older microsoft files better than microsoft itself can. Microsoft had better backward compatibility when it still had the old 16 bit subsystem, and it was able to feed the incoming file stream into the old binaries through some hacked up emulator. Microsoft office files are not simple files. They are entire filesystems, its driver undocumented, unplanned, written by newbies hacking their way through. So they would just treat the old binary as a black box. Another huge wrinkle they have is munging the printer driver into their renderer. What you see is what you get, in the printer. The old file rendering will change if you change the printer. All those cruft is all encased deep inside the inscrutable binaries. But when they lost the 16 bit subsystem, they lost the ability to use old binaries as black boxes. They must have had a project to support the 16 bit subsystem itself in a hacked up emulator just for Ms-Office. Wonder what happened to it.

File formats being obscure was considered a feature and a protection against reverse engineering. So they never discouraged it and never realized it had gone so bad even they can't understand their own file formats.

So even its very existence depended on it, and they really really sincerely wanted to, still they won't be able to deliver interoperability.

Did you really just say that Oracle fixing "what" you told it do makes it better at SQL, because SQL is about the engine figuring out the "how"?

I am very good at this. So good, someone is actually paying me real good money, actual money with which you could buy other stuff, for this obscure skill. This is a great country, or what!

So you would not use your second amendment rights to stand up and protect my right to free speech? However vile and detestable it is, if you believe in the Constitution you should stand up for my rights. You know who talk the talk and walk the walk?

ACLU! They defend the right of Aryan Nation to hold marches, they file suites allowing KKK to hold rallies, they file suit to protect the privacy rights of Rush Limbaugh.

Punks are American citizens too, and they too have full second amendment rights. You don't get to decide who has who does not have the right to be armed. This is the situation all these gun rights people are taking this country to. As long as you imagine white people when you talk about gun rights, you will never see the other side. Imagine all the people *you* are scared of. Blacks, punks, criminals, insane wakcos, hispanics, South Indian Tamil Brahmin IT professionals... They all get guns. That is the natural end point for all that gun activism about second amendment.

You might live under the illusion that even when the punks are armed your superior marksmanship will save your tail. But I am sane and I would rather reduce the gun access to ALL to give the cops a fighting chance.

Even if he *was* attacking the cop, why would you think the cop was right and Michael Brown was wrong? He *could* be legitimately rebelling against what he saw as government tyranny. If he seriously and sincerely believed the cop represented government and tyranny, would he be justified in attacking the cop? With guns if necessary? Do you believe black people should exercise their second amendment rights against government tyranny?

You mean to say when those white thugs banded together around that tax cheat Cliven Bundy, they thoughtfully read all available information and THEN made their move? First report about Michael Brown, what was your gut reaction? Second amendment needed here against police brutality? Or he probably deserved it? That gut reaction defines who you are. Does not change any facts, just reveals to you who you really are.

I assume your father was white. You are talking about the time when he could have killed any black guy he did not like and nothing bad would have happened to him. Today you see white guys with machine guns refusing identify themselves or provide identity to police officers, standing on their constitutional grounds. And black boys get shot for wearing a hoodie or playing loud music.

White men gather toghter with weapons and point them at federal agents to protect a tax cheat. Nothing happens to them. Black boy walks on the street and gets shot. I will believe you truly believe in gun rights on constitutional grounds, when I see a bunch of white gun rights activists gather their weapon and stand with a bunch of black folks complaining of the heavy handed police actions. Imagine what would happen if the black folks started actually exercising their second amendment rights to fight what they see as government tyranny.

Look at yourself in the mirror and answer it truthfully to yourself: "Did I feel the urge to stand with the people of Ferguson to fight government tyranny using their second amendment rights?".

What would happen if the government of USA declares, "look guys, we are broke. You are not paying taxes to us anyway. So when it comes to patent law enforcement, you contact the people who collect taxes from you to enforce your IP rights. We are not going to spend our resources to enforce your rights, when you are not paying taxes to us ..."