That's what you think is the POINT of society? You have a twisted view of the world.

Nobody said she didn't have a right to do what she did. We just said it was wrong and without class.

There are a lot of rights that we don't necessarily need to invoke. Say, for example, I have a right to a seat on the bus since I'm first, but it would be proper for me to give it up to an old lady.

The Dixie Chicks took a political stand and spouted their opinion. We disagreed and decided not to give them any more money. Consequently, their tours, radio play and album sales dropped. You have a problem with that?

These actors/musicians are so full of themselves that they think their political opinions matter. This was a case where they were especially out of touch with their customers/fans.

Bullshit. The Dixie Chicks have their views and we have ours. BTW, Pelosi says it is un-American to enforce our immigration laws. How does that grab you?

The Dixie Chicks have every right to speak their mind. I have every right to disagree with them and not give them any more money.

I do take offense when Americans go off to France, for example, and criticize our President or our country. All they are doing is selfishly making themselves more important at the expense of the rest of us. Its a kick in the teeth to the brave soldiers risking their lives for our safety.

Next time Obama has a weekend dinner date in Chicago, or wants to slam Special Olympians in Burbank, think about the huge amount of CO2 that is being generated:
1) Air Force 1. A huge 747 airplane. Did you know there is also a backup 747 that follows AF1 around just in case?
2) Heavy lift airplanes (C-130s?) The president's limousines and helicopters have to be transported to the site.
3) Support staff/security. You can just imagine the huge effort required to keep the president safe and in contact with his advisors/speechwriters/teleprompter.

So, Mr. President, how about doing instead of just talking?

Vote for a 3rd party candidate, and you just might get someone like Al Franken elected.

Please learn from that experience.

Ron Paul was right. Instead of throwing your vote away with a 3rd party, work at getting your ideas accepted by one of the 2 existing parties.

For months now I've been saying that Obama was Just Like Bush. But now the Salon article clearly shows that Obama is Worse Than Bush.

We haven't yet felt all of the effects of the disastrous spending bills that have just been passed. On top of this, the money supply has increased almost 300% in the past few months. This, along with all of the spending bills will mean double digit inflation on an economy where most people are not getting raises or bonuses.

Nobody imagined (except Republicans) that we would think of the Bush term as the Good Old Days.

And that's the problem with Democrats. Instead of privately funding their stem-cell research, they send men with guns to take my money for their research.

And they wonder why I have a problem with that.

The Boeing President was so mad at Tex, that he didn't speak to him for years. This barrel roll was done in front of potential buyers, which did impress them.

Remember that a commercial airplane is not designed for aerobatic maneuvers. Which means Tex had to maintain a 1G downward force during the roll to ensure fuel stayed in the bottom of the tanks.

The President was mad because the Company bet the future on the 707. If it didn't sell (and/or if Tex crashed), then the Company would have folded.

The same thing was true with the 747, the Company bet the farm on this one too. It is such a big investment of capital, that there is no room for failure.

The economy tanked when the Democrats took control of Congress. While they are increasing the debt for our children to shoulder with their current Democrat Party Pork Stimulation bill, they waste time worrying about whether 5% of the people will be able to view their TV.

GG!

Tufte's ideas are good for presenting simple information. He gets many things right (eg if the visualisation doesn't work in black and white, adding colour won't fix it). However, many in the infovis community are outright sceptical, if not dismissive of his ideas for analysing high dimensional datasets.

Where his ideas really work is once you have "the answer" that you want to present to someone else. However, the basic exploration of the data to find interesting keypoints, is not what he specialises in. There's whole communities devoted to techniques for datamining and presentation, principly infovis/Visual Analytics.

The infovis community has been dealing with these subjects for years. There's many different visualisation techniques around. Here's a list of the past conferences and the papers:

http://conferences.computer.org/Infovis/

Plenty of good products out there, but the one that I like most is from Tableau Software (http://www.tableausoftware.com/).

I love how liberals think. They are responsible enough to decide when to kill a baby, but aren't responsible enough to use a gun for protection.

It's amazing how they can decide that "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." does not mean what it says.

So, by collective right you are saying that our rights are not being infringed by denying a DC resident to have a gun because someone in Montana can have one? Or by saying the National Guard is allowed to have guns?

What do you think the point of the Second Amendment is?

Bah. Your numbers are wacked. Defense spending is 20% of the federal budget. Medicare/Medicaid/Social Security take up over 40% of the budget.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget

How much did 9/11 cost this country? Hundreds of billions. Bush prevented another attack during his Administration against all odds. Biden predicted there will be another attack if Barry would get elected to President. How much do you think that will cost us?

War costs will continue since Barry will be moving troops from Iraq to Afghanistan/Pakistan.

Your Democratic Congress has approved bailouts since coming into power that have eclipsed the war costs.

So, how's that Democratic Congress for the last 2 years been working out for you?

And, maybe you can explain why the most liberal states (which have no war costs) are having the most trouble with their budgets?

The one thing that my friends and I still talk about was the SWG crafting system. It's been the best of the lot. The whole concepts of materials having inconsistent quality and that the quality could allow you to produce good and bad lots of the same item, or optimise for one attribute over another really set them apart from anything before or after. It was the sort of thing that made a crafter playable as a long term character because there was so much variety and constantly having to stay on top of things, compared to the grind of combat characters.