Who are these "centrists" you keep talking about? Your argument appears to be the same one tea party people use with RINO and Liberal which is you define those categories as slur you use against people who think differently than you.

Your argument is silly. Republicans had filibuster proof control of Congress and the presidents office for 6 years, the policy at the time was tax cut and spend. The democrats had similar control though less sure (2 independents) during the first two years of Obama's term, their policy was mostly tax and spend though the republicans wouldn't let them do the tax part so it became just spend. The last time real negotiating took place and centrist views dominated was during the Clinton administration when Republicans controlled congress (during Gingrich's term) when neither party got what they wanted but they managed to balance the budget, eliminate welfare and reduce military spending to workable levels.

My impression of the tea party is that originally it was a group of people that were mad about out of control spending. Almost immediately it was taken over by fringe Republicans like the Koch organizations and it turned away from balanced budget toward tax cuts and no compromise government shut down. Around the same time the anti-Obama language (birthers, etc) drew in all the stormfront and other racists and rather than turn them away as kooks the tea party embraced them but works aggressively to keep them out of sight on TV (but are very apparent if you go to any actual rallies). I'd be a tea partier if they were actually interested in a balanced budget and doing whatever it took to get there (including raising taxes) but the whole idea of responsible governance isn't what the tea party is about, nor has it been since about 6 months after it's founding.

You don't honestly think that contract was totally preplanned for years and that the government always purchases rockets in blocks that large do you?

IMO that contract originated because ULA went to their government handlers and cajoled them into releasing the RFP before SpaceX could qualify. It is my understanding that the government does buy rockets in groups, but a 2 year 20 rocket group is unheard of and that this was the largest rocket purchase the government has ever made. ULA's salespeople will have personal relationships with all the contracting people in government. My bet is that ULA hoped by locking SpaceX out of the market for 2 years they would go bankrupt before they could go after another contract.

There should be a massive investigation going on for how that contract originated, why it's so large and what the relationships are between the ULA people and the government contracting officers.

I thought ULA convincing the government to advance purchase 2 years of launches (2billion dollars) a month before SpaceX qualified their rockets was an accurate picture of how Lockheed and Boeing intend to compete which is they intend to use government to prevent SpaceX from competing.

I see this as very similar to the parallel construction method. The DEA likely has controls on the information and logs requests to see it, by paying the Amtrak employee separately they can argue they never looked at the passenger information because it's not logged in the request. The defense can't say they used improper search methods because the log shows they never accessed it.

I'd be willing to be someone is in jail right now because of this information being accessed outside normal channels and had the defense known about it they would have been able to get the evidence thrown out.

Only if you are Sara Palin. (I'm not sure you understand the distance involved)

Seriously though, it's actually probably cheaper to lay it across the equator than try to put a cable across the bearing straight. The ocean is pretty turbulent in the straight, it's pretty turbulent any time you get closer to the poles. There were articles the other day that global warming has opened up so much water this summer north of canada that they've had 15' (3m) waves. You need calm water (including underwater currents of which there is a big one in the straight) when dropping miles of cable to the bottom of the ocean.

Consider for a moment you're in water a mile deep laying cable. The total suspended amount of cable from the boat to the bottom of the ocean is more than 2 miles, and with the armoring and other features may weigh several thousand pounds and have enough cross-sectional area that a couple mile per hour current passing over the cable could capsize your ship, drag the ship under or shear the cable in half. The forces they deal with when laying the cables is HUGE without waves and strong ocean currents. They need massive boats, calm waters and very careful monitoring to put these cables down. If you tear the cable in half while laying it you've got to find the end, drag it and several miles of cable off the bottom, cut the end and resplice everything including the power and armoring, water proof the splices and then relay the whole thing along with continuing to lay new cable.

Where possible they run the cable over islands to make the runs through the ocean shorter. But trying to lay the cable across the bearing straight would be a major challenge. It would be an even bigger challenge once you got it across the bearing straight to get it anywhere because it's about 2000 miles from anything on either end and it would come ashore in some of the most hostile territory on earth (such as all the ground being permafrost which means you can't really bury the cable).

Non-custodial kidnapping is the most common kind of kidnapping. Something like 99.99999% of all the kids on milk boxes are custodial kidnappings. But Christ, you're his Dad and he's 15, they could have asked him.

The world's gotten a bit insane.

Yes, A LOT. I'm not sure of the rule number, but the minute you think you've listed all fetishes you didn't actually get them all.

Loli, Vore, TS, transformation, gassy, and on and on and on.

I will be highly surprised if the quantum effects ever let them get close to one atom thick, at that small electrons start doing very weird things that are hard to compensate for. We've pushed process technology just about to it's limit.

I'm willing to bet that the light skin adaption was acquired from Neanderthals, not evolved by Homo Sapian. We know that the first humans remains found in Europe were dark skinned. All the human groups that encountered Neaderthals and the Denisovans have light skin (Europeans, Russians, Northern Asian). The gene that causes white skin is highly dominant, even with only 5% neanderthal DNA we still carry it.

And the average white collar worker you are comparing against works far more than the 2080 hours that is the standard non overtime hours in a year. Considering the average white collar office worker is working 50 hours a week 52 weeks a year without vacations (2600 hours a year) teachers have it seriously easy given the total pay and the time off.

Everyone wants to be paid more but for the most part teachers have it pretty easy. Most of the teachers I knew wrote lesson plans once and used them every year for subjects that don't change (history, match, science, health, etc) Their only out of class work was grading papers. Heck, maybe you were one of the better teachers that was constantly writing new lesson plans and stuff but if you did you were the exception, not the rule. As one of those white collar workers pulling 50 hour weeks, only requiring 990 hours of time for $52k a year is a total joke IMO. You won't find a lot of sympathy from my side.

Discount the news due to the source even though the news can easily be validated with the easiest of Google searches. Great demonstration of your bias. Cheers!

We measure and effect and we call that dark matter because it exhibits gravitational effects but we really have no idea what it is or what's causing it. It could be super strings or worm holes or even singularities far from other matter.

This is the problem I have with the entire speculation about Dark Matter, we have no idea what it is. People spend a lot of time talking about it like we know what it is and what it means and all that and it could be nothing more than isolated gravitational anomalies like super strings in interstellar space that we've located. We need a better understanding of how prevalent these effects are and a lot more data about the entire phenomenon before we start theorizing about what's the cause.

In about 6 years Solar PV will be cheaper than Coal.

It's funny that as Solar PV gains traction all the people jump out of the woodwork trying to tell everyone how horrible it will be. In 10 years Solar is going to totally dominate all new power generation (all the dirty coal generation is going to be decommissioning as fast as they can bring new solar plants online) and the challenges it's intermittent generation presents will long be solved by the market.

But people like you and the power company sock puppets run around screaming how the world is going to come to an end (the grid will fail, we'll have rolling blackouts, etc) and that the only solution is to use government regulations to stop Solar.

He's correct and the article you point to doesn't say what you think it does.

Utility grade PV is cheaper than nuclear power without subsidy. With continued price drops that solar has been experiencing for the last 4 years Utility grade solar PV will be cheaper than coal by 2020.

Companies like First Solar have their entire production for the next 4 years already sold to utility scale power plants. A Utah power company just purchased all the power out of a solar plant being built nearby because it was the cheapest power available.

http://thinkprogress.org/clima...

You aren't considering weather.

It rains a lot in Florida, Southern California on the other hand is a desert and it almost never rains. So even if Florida is slightly further south and gets a little bit more direct sunshine more of that sunshine likely reaches the ground in Southern California due to the lack of cloud cover.