They're equally to blame: http://www.federalbudget.com/

They need to be cut equally. Military corporations and those who work for them are not entitled to continue to suck at the public teat any more than the exploiters of social programs any more than Veterans who weighed the odds and volunteered. Entitlements and wasteful spending must be limited no matter whether you like the group getting the money or not.

"I would like to do all kinds of fun stuff with my kids, but there are two hold ups. The main one, is that kids just aren't that interested in science. They barely pay attention when we have to derive something, they do not know how to study anymore, and if anything resembles hard work to them, they turn away from it."

GIVE THEM HOMEWORK AND LET THEM FAIL. FFS, there's the real problem. Maybe failure will make them realize they have to work and even get the parents motivated too. Instead we make excuses and let these kids skate on through.

"One last item that I'll add, is that educators (in the states at least) do not make enough money to justify the position. The first year I started teaching (just a few years ago), I brought home about $22,000. For what I have to deal with, and the amount I actually work to teach my students, I figured I was almost making minimum wage. I make less than our gym teacher, who sits on his ass all day, and has for the last 10 years while half our students are overweight."

Apparently you failed to do your homework too. That teachers aren't paid well is well known, and has been for 50 years or more. You still chose to go into teaching however... As for teachers in general, when they continually fail to show enough integrity to stand up to school boards and parents and instead let little Johnny make it to his senior year without being able to read adequately, maybe they are being paid exactly what they are worth. Instead there is this new idea that you have to make it interesting, entertaining, inspiring, etc. Screw that, you're not a dancing clown and you're not a babysitter - give them the material, explain it a couple times on the board, and give them homework. If they can't pry themselves away from the TV or the PS3, THAT'S NOT YOUR PROBLEM. If you accept that responsibility then you may as well pay food and rent for the kids too.

I didn't say anything about this case being justified. I just commented on how deeply we can be attached to using various technologies.

I notice that many of the respondents think that he can just use email/skype/etc, but all those are services controlled by other people too. Yahoo and Skype can cut you off just as easily as facebook can. Many ISPs block the email ports, so you often can't just run your own email service on your own computer, leaving you with limited options. While many seem to laugh about this guy losing his facebook, how many of us would freak out about losing access to our Gmail accounts and all the info stored within?

Do you have family thousands of miles away in a foreign country? 20 years ago instead of facebook keeping you close with your family and friends, you just didn't talk/see them. Going abroad meant saying goodbye. You didn't call them but for holidays if you could even afford it - it cost anywhere from $1-5 or more a minute to call overseas. I was in Petrozavodsk Russia in 1995, at that time it cost about $2.50 a minute to speak to my family in the US.

For most people, facebook is a unique little addition to their everyday life and a way to see what Johnny from 3rd grade is doing these days. For others, it's a lifeline to their family and culture from vast distances away. I think we need to be aware of that when we consider just how much affect the internet and facebook has had on the world.

Are you that clueless? Or are you being deliberately obtuse?

The FCC is appointed by elected representatives of the people, they can be unappointed at any time if the people elect new representatives, or if the people apply sufficient pressure to the existing representatives to act. The FCC gets its mandate from the government.

By your reasoning, the fire department and the police are not "the government" because they're hired positions instead of elected. Besides the Chief/Sheriff/Commissioner in some cities/counties, the rest are all appointed positions chosen by elected officials. Are you saying that police officers have no authority because they were not elected?

Nitwit.

Nice cop-out. That position suggests you don't really know how to explain it and rather than admit it you want to be superior. Generally the only other type of people that take that position are successful yet egocentric people who already feel superior and feel that explaining things to the plebes is beneath them.

I'm not a mathematician, I said that early on. However I am well versed in behavioral linguistics.

Add 5 to 0? No. 5x5 is a representation of 5 groups of 5.

An equation is a representation of mechanical action (albeit non-physical)where a number is the material in which we shape and adjust using various tools. (Showing your work in math is key, the complicated equation can be broken down into it's constituent portions, each with a specific mechanical action that it represents) Whenever we deal with an infinite sequence like pi or something else, we truncate the sequence in order to have an "end" to the mechanical action and then come up with a result based on that truncated result.

The problem with moving the decimal is that your not moving it back (from left to right) position, you're moving the entire sequence forward - .9 becomes 9. 0.09 becomes 0.9 - and an infinite sequence will never complete the mechanical action of moving forward without truncation. That's why the proof fails. This issue probably doesn't come up ever except in the situation where one tries to prove 0.9999...= 1. At any other instance, and for all other things we truncate or round an infinite sequence at the decimal place which is most convenient for accuracy.

I swear I hit the preview button...

Well, we don't. We take it to a particular digit then round off because a computer would endlessly calculate it.

Again, we round it at some point based on the level of accuracy we require. .3333333 x 3 =/= 1

Bad example. Infinite .000... still equals 0. The point is that the proof is faulty in that the technique of multiplying both sides by 10 is assumed completed when, by virtue of being an infinite number, it simply can't. A completed operation of multiplying .999... by 10 assumes that at some point the operation ended at some unspecified point. You can't even plug this into a computer because someone would have to sit there for all eternity holding down the 9 key.

I'm not even close to a mathematician, so forgive this possibly very stupid question:

How can you multiply .999... by anything at all? If the sequence is infinity, then any application of task or step can never be completed as it would take infinite time to perform the calculation.

I think you're getting the order mixed up. (or maybe I am) But I saw/heard the label before I saw the media start looking for examples (IE, the gun-toting racist hicks comments while the black man carrying the weapon was edited out of the photos) Their very involvement against the health-care bill was called racist, they were called racist because of their supposed anti black-man-for-president attitude before Obama was even elected.

With all due respect to your wife (and I mean that), if she's never been to a rally herself, then her assumption that the tea-party is racist is based on one or two things (or both,): that it's racist because it's primarily white, and/or that it's racist because friends/media told her so and gave carefully chosen examples/pictures to prove it. Her assumptions are based on the same type of racist myth-perpetuation that makes all Italians into mobsters and all Mexicans into violent cartel members. I can only hope she researches more into it.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a huge tea-party supporter - I'm pro gay-rights, non-christian, and pro-choice. But I do support some of what they stand for (just as I support things the Ds and Rs stand for) I also defend these parties from unfair characterizations and I think that this is one of those instances - and a particularly evil and malicious one at that.

Looks like you caught on to the point of my post, though you seem to see less malice in the characterization of the Tea Party as racist. I disagree regarding that.

I don't think you're going to find an older person - white OR black - that doesn't harbor racial animosity on some level. In fact it has been said by many different people that we all harbor at least some prejudice against those that are different from us. The point is that just because there's a large group of predominately white people, it doesn't mean that group is racist.

Absolutely. Another factor is experience and empathy - My father grew up and has lived in a 99% non-black area near the Canadian border in the midwest. His experience is different so he can't relate. I cringe when I hear some of the stuff he says, but its ignorance and he'll likely never be able to understand some things about white privilege. (But he can tell you all about the silly arguments and problems between the German, Swede, Finnish, and Norwegian cultures he grew up around)

But again, a group of mostly white people is not racist because it's a group of mostly white people, and though you call it a generalization, I stand by my first statement that people who claim otherwise are racist themselves.

Decided not to moderate and simply prove you wrong. One idiot making stupid comments doesn't mean the tea party are racists as a group no more than some leftist anarchist looting stores makes all liberals into whackjobs. Frankly, I call anyone who says otherwise a racist themselves.

http://www.bvblackspin.com/2010/04/15/black-tea-party-member/
http://www.theroot.com/views/black-tea-partiers-speak
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/09/black_tea_party_express_tour_t.html
http://www.theroot.com/views/should-black-folks-give-tea-party-second-look?page=0,1&hpid=topnews
http://www.theroot.com/views/who-you-callin-uncle-tom
http://www.azcentral.com/community/phoenix/articles/2009/08/17/20090817obama-scene.html (this is the article that MSNBC cut apart to show gun-toting crazies at tea party rallies - except that it was a black man carrying that weapon freely and nobody thought he was a danger, kinda shoots your theory down doesn't it?)

Certain groups are terrified of what the Tea Party stands for, and they've played the race card in order to try and stop it. The fact that you believe it and espouse this shit means you're just a mindless patsy that can't think for yourself.

Anon sounds bitter. Teachers unions are diabolical because they use kids as their pawns.

Give us more money, or your kids will suffer. Hire more of us, and your kids will stop suffering in larger classes. Fire us, and your kids will be traumatized.
Give us more money, or we strike and you get to stay home from work and take care of the kids, etc.

And teachers get decent pay, but they do get great benefits. My grandmother got $40k/year and full medical until she died. My dad was also a teacher, but he's only getting $35k/year retired. Both of them teaching in small districts in Rural Midwest. And let's be honest, I've never seen ANY teacher complain about having a 3-month vacation in the summer.

As for taking homework home, I don't buy it. As someone who grew up with family inside the education system, the only teachers I saw taking work home were the ones who didn't manage their time well. The rest of the teachers got the stuff done during their open period.(and I'm not talking about their lunch)

As for discipline, in the 80's many Unions deliberately forced school-boards and administration to take responsibility for discipline because the teachers couldn't handle it, didn't want to, or were afraid of lawsuits.

Unions are also the ones, like in this article, that refuse to allow any objective testing of students. Instead the students' scores go down year after year, which the Union then claims means they need more money - again using your children as pawns. To them it's not "no child left behind" it's "no teacher revealed as incompetent."

"Equality for all races is still not fully achieved, a century and a half after people first began fighting about it."

People've been fighting about it for a lot longer than that. It's just that somehow the world has decided the US has to solve the world's ills in the mere 200 years they've been here - despite the rest of you lot having been around quite a bit longer.

The US has become the world's bloody soap-opera. I've had countless students from all over the world mention Obama (or Bush, a few years ago) but they don't even know the name of their own countries leader. Scary that they expect more from the president of a country that until now they've never been to, than the leaders of their own.