Telcos cannot function without the capability to run a telephone spying program, at least the listening-in part. And that's all they provide, besides basic records which they need for billing and for diagnostics. The federal government itself operates the facilities which actually centralize and process the data. You may (or may not) have seen some articles go by here on slashdot about massive federal data centers for use by certain three-letter agencies.

Virtually none of the carbon plants are made of comes from the soil. What most plants take from the soil is nitrogen and micronutrients. Some plants, however, actually put nitrogen into the soil. Sadly, instead of planting crops in guilds, we opted for gross machine cultivation which not only demands planting massive monocultures but which also requires using varieties bred for machine harvestability rather than optimal nutrition, flavor, or texture. It also attracts pests while failing to attract their natural counters, and in practical terms requires the use of pesticides. The pesticides kill the soil-dwelling organisms which make nitrogen "bioavailable" (packaging it in a form which the plants can use) which changes soil into dirt and basically reduces modern factory farming practices to hydroponics in a dirt medium.

Sadly, this is just as applicable to food as fuel. The only difference is that we need to eat food, but there are vastly better feedstocks for biofuel than corn.

Uh what? Biodiesel and green diesel remove varnish left behind by petrodiesel. Ethanol sucks because it attracts water and because you get poor output when you run it through an engine which also expects to run on gasoline. Running veg oil will certainly clog things up, though, or waste motor oil.

In any case, the cure for deposits from running one or the other kind of diesel (petro or bio) is to occasionally run a tank of the other. Problem solved.

That is bullshit. Biodiesel or green diesel from waste fats are pure benefit, as are biofuels from algae. Unfortunately, the best of them (Butanol) is being suppressed by BP and DuPont until such a time as they can control it completely. If that's never, so be it, to them.

'Best' how? Both of those are still soil-based crops. Algae is better because you can grow it on dirty water in most weather conditions above freezing, and it takes less processing than basically any other bio feedstock but shit.

That's intentional, because the design was given away. This is the future, and it's why 3d printing has corporations pissing themselves. If someone will give away a design for a product better than what they're selling, what chance do they have to continue to exist? Answer, none, and it's about damned time. Of course, this raises some serious questions about how we're going to distribute wealth when we don't need a bunch of slaves to stamp out widgets, and therefore we don't need slave-owners to crack whips over them. Instead of giving the wealth to the slave-owners, we might have to share it.

It costs about five to ten bucks more to get traffic with an old-school GPS, too — if you buy last year's refurb instead of this year's model. Get one with lifetime maps and you lose nothing, sometimes it's literally a styling change.

Where I live, cellular coverage is spotty. Traffic doesn't work there, but then online GPS doesn't work there at all.

One does indeed. Naturally they are all spelled out. All the hardware used on the car is "passivated" so you have to replace with like, or in some locations you can get away with stainless.

"... when lawyers aren't kept on a short enough leash"

Here is a typical joke about lawyers in the United States: There was a terrible tragedy. A van carrying 5 lawyers went over a cliff. What was the tragedy? There was room for 1 more lawyer.

The common underlying feeling is that the legal profession in the U.S. is often out of control.

This is interesting: What country in the world has most lawyers per capita? Answer: The United States. There is one lawyer for every 265 Americans.

Far more logically. Let's ask the question, what if you could grow guns on trees, surely they would not try to regulate plants, er, yeah right. So regulating weapons, how about a little question and answers time from the South Australian Police Force http://www.police.sa.gov.au/sa.... They seem to have no problem regulating all sorts of weapons, even ones that do grow on trees.

I'm going to start this post by saying I think they're all crap; $cientology, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, any and all brands of Neo-Paganism; the whole lot of them.

But there are some pretty clear cultural differences between, say Hinduism and Christianity on one side, and Scientologists on the other. While the former religions may have started out something like the latter ones (though I suspect it was far more complex than some guy sitting down and writing a religion purely out of his imagination), there are literally thousands of years of cultural and theological development behind them. They have had significant a longstanding influences on the civilizations in which they evolved (or were adopted).

Scientology can be traced no further back than L Ron Hubbard telling some of his far more talented peers he planned to create a religion to prove how easy and profitable it was. Unlike, say, Hinduism, which is a historical evolution of the Proto-Indo-European religion, Scientology has no real antecdent, unless you count the self help movement and Hubbard's fetishistic dislike of psychiatry.

Even the early Christians took the Jewish Bible, plopped a second part on it and mixed in some Hellenic philosophy into it, and thus has antecedents dating back centuries.

Because lawmaking isn't a skill magically bequeathed upon people merely because they won an election. Would you think this scheme a good idea for lawyers, doctors, welders, accountants or plumbers?

And yet, if you become large enough, you begin to warp the lines of power. Something somewhere has to give if democracy is to be preserved.

And you will replace "careerism" with incompetence. Can you imagine having a House of Representatives where no one has more than one term's experience? In the end you would literally hand over all power to bureaucrats, lobbiests and staffers, who would be the only ones with any long term experience. You would, in the end, make things worse, not better.

US student loans have various humiliating processes you can use to get some deferments, but if you never actually start making money with or without your degree you still have to pay them back eventually and they never go away and if you have outstanding student loans you can't close escrow on a home, or do some other important things.