>The laws against battery apply as much inside my own home as it does in a public place.

Non sequitur. You'll note that any laws against battery within your home are state laws, not Federal (unless your home happens to be on Federal property, e.g. military housing).

>The loan Is a subsidy.

By definition, a subsidy does not need to be payed back, whereas a loan does. jav1231 used the wrong word; get over it.

In addition to the point others have already addressed that we do in fact know exactly how plants convert CO2 to O2, the process is no panacea. The carbon doesn't just disappear -- it needs to be stored somewhere (google "carbon sequestration"). In the case of plants, it is stored in the plant itself; when the plant dies, it's all released. Thus the net benefit of plants for reducing carbon is actually 0, so naively emulating plants gets us nothing. Even worse, reforestation is no solution -- it merely sequesters the amount of carbon released due to deforestation. In order to sequester the carbon released by the burning of fossil fuels, we'd have to reforest the planet to a level much higher than it was when humans came into existence. I'm no atmospheric chemist, but I would think this would result in increased oxygen levels, which could have disastrous consequences.

The problem is that we have released a whole lot of carbon that *used to be* sequestered (as fossil fuels). Fossil fuels were created at a time when the climate was very different -- much hotter, etc -- and so cannot be reproduced naturally now.

>However, some people with children prefer to live outside of the urban areas where schools are becoming penal facilities.

Sure, there are valid reasons for having a long commute; I never implied otherwise.

I also have a child, and I find it's more important to actually spend time with her than to sit in traffic for hours each day. Not to mention that the money saved on gas, insurance, and vehicle maintenance could make a significant dent in the cost of private school tuition.

>20 minute commute? What metropolitan area to you live in?

I live in a city with 1 million people, and my commute is under 20 minutes. Ten of those minutes are spent driving through the campus at 20 mph.

I used to live in a city with a metro population of 2 million (and huge traffic problems, due to it being on a peninsula with two bridges -- no, not San Francisco, but the traffic patterns were similar), and I had a 15 minute commute.

Living far from work is a choice, one which I choose not to make. You can, too.

>it was just a few years back when we though 128bit keys were unbreakably long. Now 2048bit is standard

No one *ever* thought 128 bit asymmetric keys were relatively secure, and no one would consider 2048 bit symmetric keys to now be standard. You compared symmetric key lengths to assymmetric key lengths. Really.

>400 reps, unpaid. Most of them are retirees, own their own small business, or work flexible hours.

How many single mothers? How many people from poor families? How many, say, don't have enough money to own a home? But don't mind me; continue bragging about your unrepresentative democracy.

"Nazi" not so much:
your parent's complaint's correct.
You forfeit your card!

Since your comment is still rated as insightful, I'll jump on the "you're full of crap" bandwagon; hopefully someone will correct your moderation. I had cable internet in Germany in 2006 and 2007. I had slightly higher speed compared to what I have now in the US for slightly less cost (even after converting currencies), and I had no bandwidth cap.

Yes. Unlike Firefox, it's built-in. If you want to devise your own method, you could use the built-in GreaseMonkey work-alike (I'm not sure whether GM or Opera's UserJS came first) to implement it.

It depends on the nature of the ruler. We're not talking about SR and inertial reference frames here; in GR and non-intertial reference frames, one *can* determine the nature of the space-time rotation without stepping outside the FoR.

Except that according to GR, the pebble actually is a different length at the top of Mount Everest than it is at sea level.

Does that apply if the customer only leases the cable box?

That's an interesting question. I suppose it hinges on the legal definition of the word "possesses".

does that mean that if I let other people use my linux based computer, I'm obligated to let them know it uses linux and that they can get the source code from me?

You have not distributed anything, so the terms of the GPL do not apply.

I prefer, "Hear here!", since that is a grammatically correct sentence all by itself.

It is your regulation, Sire. No ballet in your opera.