"No more so than the far more desperate folks here on slashdot who are ferociously denying it."

I bow before your certainty that you are the smart clued in one and everyone else is the dimwitted fool who will pay the cost at their death. (Funny how that sounds so similar to fundy Christians)

I do wonder where those extremely long lived and far more healthy vegans throughout history are. They seem to have hidden themselves very well among the miserable sick and dying everyone else whose average lifespan has increased over the past century.

We're not gonna tell your Sunday prayer group that your car is parked in the porno shop parking lot every Friday evening. But we just wanted to let you know that we could.

Have a nice day.

This is supposed to be some great revelation?

They're also the ones who can get security policy overridden so that something can be easy for them. Regardless of the problems.

"That's -40 REAL degrees (trivia: -40F == -40C), or -80F with the "Wind Chill".... "

Dammit, I've told ya ten million times not to exaggerate!

(-40 is several degrees colder than the statewide all time records in either Illinois or Indiana, and neither of those were in the Chicago/Gary region).

The US can still beat them in Eve Online, can't we?

How many times did I hear from tech pundits that the New Virtual Economy made the brick and mortar world less important? Isn't this the same?

Oh wait. There was that little thing called the dot com crash. Guess the real world capabilities still matter.

No big deal. Guess I'll just get a beer and go back to playing Kerbal Space Program, then. It's what made America great. ;)

There are several million voters in Cook County, but there's a decades old debate over what fraction of them are living.

No, you're thinking of the great state of Chicago and its suburbs.

Illinois is this tiny little place south of I-80 that no one pays attention to. Just ask House Speaker Mike Madigan. It's rumored he's even been there once, but his limo was going near 90 on I-57, so no one is quite sure it really was him.

Brings back fond screen saver memories of Opus shooting down flying toasters.

So, you don't support the right to arm bears?

That's what I'm on this vacation. It would have been my XP desktop mostly, but that had an electrolytic capacitor pop last Friday, and now fails to boot. I've been too lazy to take it apart and fix it. (I fix electronics, computers and lab gear for a living. So phooey on doing that until I go back to work January 2nd.)

Oddly, most of my laptops are far more powerful than any of the desktops I regularly use (I7s versus P4s).

This is a mission I've been watching and waiting for for a while. The original Hipparcos mission did this sort of mapping for a much smaller volume of space.

Think of this as being like how finding the precise latitude and longitude of a large number of places on earth would have been to navigators of a much earlier era. No big new ideas, but it makes navigating so much easier and precise.

This does this for astronomy and cosmology in a greatly expanded region of space.

Something some don't realize is that our measurements of distance to stars and other objects in astronomy are very indirect. We use red shift to measure it in many cases, but that's an indirect method that relies on assumptions and estimates of the Hubble constant.

We also use what are called "standard candles". These are objects we know the brightness of from the physics of the processes going on. Certain kinds of supernovae are some of the best known. But, again, like measuring the distance to the next town by how bright the streetlights are, it's indirect and can have errors from intervening dust, for example..

This will use parallax, the same method as used in surveying to find distance from the change in angle between two separated observations of a far object. It's a direct method that relies on few assumptions.

We must immediately restrict the availability of this 3D printing technology to prevent $11,900 cheap knockoff copies of firearms from flooding the streets!

"Do you think the US president is powerless when it comes to the policy of one of this executive departments?"

When the house, for example, puts the words "no money shall be spent to implement $policy.", they can be surprisingly near to being exactly that.

And Ron Paul, firebrand that he is, would have had to moderate his position if he wanted to get anything else done that had to go through congress.

Just like Obama had to. (When is Guantanamo closing? When Obama wanted to bring the prisoners to an Illinois prison he got stuffed by a bipartisan majority and had to back down. And that's an executive branch policy area.)

Yes, you can do things, but it costs political capital. And presidents who embark on radical change often find themselves short of it.

Imagine if you were able to post a link to this discussion here on slashdot from that dim and distant time of 2008 during the election with unforgeable timestamps showing that it indeed was a slashdot discussion from late 2013..

What a shift in a lot of people's viewpoint has happened.

Just after the election in 2008, I said that the level of expectation surrounding Obama was so great Superman couldn't have lived up to it. I'll revise that now, and say God couldn't have lived up to it.

I wasn't a supporter of Obama, but it probably would have mattered less than most think who won that election. My guess is that the world situation wouldn't be radically different (might be a little better, might be a little worse), and definitely the case of NSA surveillance wouldn't be all that different. It's the result of policy decisions over the last, at least, 50 years.

We've been shown once again a truth that we seem to forget every 4-8 years in the "irrational exuberance" of campaigns.

National political leaders (presidents, prime ministers, whatever) are amazingly limited in what they really can do. The existing policies, public perceptions, politics and geopolitical realities massively constrain their options for what decisions to make.

Those offices are bully pulpits, as Teddy Roosevelt said, and sometimes can move nations with the preaching.

But, in the end, it's still limited. (And you don't want to live in places where they do have largely unlimited power.)

And, when those leaders fail to live up to what is expected (often unreasonably) by those who elected them, the backlash can be ferocious.

Witness this discussion (or some of the ones while W. was in office here on slashdot).