So don't elect politicians. Pick a regular bunch of people who've never held office before. Get them to sign a binding contract that if they're elected they will disband the NSA. Then elect them. It's entirely possible. We have the _ability_ to do so. We just don't have the collective will and agreement to actually do it.

The voters have _all_ the say. The voters can elect whoever they want. The problem is not a lack of control, the problem is that about half the people abdicated their responsibility and control, a large percentage of the remainder do not actually study the issues in depth, and the remainder are too fractured in their opinions to agree on any one candidate or set of policies.

If we could get everyone in the US to agree that NSA surveillance was bad, and then only support candidates who agreed with that position, then we could end it about 5 minutes after the next election. (Well, about 5 minutes after the new people got sworn in anyways.) The problem is not the system, the problem is the people. And sadly it's probably harder to fix that problem than it would be to reform the system.

Because i generally have no problem going to sleep with the lights on, but often have a tough time getting up in the morning. Having the lights on when i wake up in the morning helps with the staying awake process... a little. (I think i might also have originally gotten into the habit during i time when i was single and lonely. Having the lights on seemed more... cheery somehow. That's obviously not a problem at this point however.)

Given how quickly and deeply i can fall asleep under various circumstances, that i can get up to deal with things like cats throwing up and then go back to sleep right away, can shift my sleeping schedule forwards or backwards with ease, and get by on a couple hours of sleep if i want or sleep for 8+ hours without interruption if i let myself, my girlfriend is convinced that i have some kind of sleeping superpower :)

Two years ago i slept with the lights on all the time and was 175 lbs. (79 kg or 12.5 stones for you metric types ;)

Then i got a new girlfriend, who prefers to sleep with the lights off. Since then i've gained 25 lbs.

Yeah yeah, correlation is not causation, and anecdote is not evidence. And in this case the difference in weight is presumably due to going out to dinner with her more and going out to exercise by myself less. (I'm working on trying to change that now, but progress is slow =P)

But in my individual case either having the lights on was not helping me at all, or if i'd been sleeping with the lights off at my previous level of food intake and activity i would have ended up looking like a stick.

Well if your cat doesn't like it there's not a lot you can do about that (not nothing, but not a lot.)

However since our cats like it just fine i've found it superior in a number of respects. The pine pellets we use are better at odor control, it's much easier to clean the cat pan, and there's no cloud of clay dust when pouring it in. The one aspect that is _not_ so good is that when the pine pellets break down into sawdust the sawdust gets tracked all over. We put a pad under/in front of the cat pan and that has helped some, but not eliminated the problem. But overall we're pretty happy with the stuff.

But as Mark Twain used to say "any quote sounds more profound when attributed to Mark Twain."

I'm not sure if it was the person who submitted the article or if samzenpus decided to condense things, but the quote is straight from the article, except for removing one sentence from the middle:

"Details of how the attacks could be executed were kept under wraps while solar panel monitoring kit vendor Solar-Log distributed a patch for the flaws."

Which wouldn't be that big a deal, except that the part included in the Slashdot blurb refers to the "eponymous management system", which makes absolutely no sense if you don't include the name of the software/company.

Well tastes differ of course, but Spider-Man is supposed to be the "everyman" hero. And not even a regular "everyman", a smart but kind of dorky and awkward "everyman" who just lucks into his powers.

Superman is born with his powers (but doesn't consider himself "special" despite that.) Batman develops his "powers" through hard work and dedication. (Obviously being rich helps a lot, but also obviously not every rich person can become a superhero.) Captain America is, generally speaking, rewarded with his powers because he is at heart a great person. Or along the lines of the old adage, some are born great (Superman) some achieve greatness (Batman, Captain America) and some have greatness thrust upon them (Spider-Man.)

If you take Spider-Man and make him less dorky and awkward he seems a bit less like the everyman, at least to the dorky and awkward people who comics are (or at least used to be) most popular with :) If you change his backstory from "stumbled into powers" to "was destined to gain his powers from his parents", then you're really changing his character type, even if it's not immediately apparent. He's no long the type of character that became popular with his fans in the first place and, as you say, if the everyman wasn't your type of superhero to begin with then there are already a lot of other options.

I'm obviously at in advantage because i live in SoCal, but when i switched to T-Mobile at the start of 2010 i thought their 3G network was pretty good. When my phone started malfunctioning in... mid 2011 i think? and couldn't hold a 3G connection anymore, i thought their Edge network was slow, but i made do. When i got my new phone in late 2013 i thought 4G was blazing fast. Fast enough that i don't even bother switching to wireless at home. (That choice is influenced by being on the $30/month unlimited data plan and the fact that our wireless router can be a bit wonky at times.)

I haven't found anywhere outside in OC or LA where i can't get signal, except for some spots near the top of the Runyon Canyon Park, which i can live with. When i was on 3G or Edge there were a couple buildings that i couldn't get signal inside of very well (unfortunately one of those buildings was my office =) but since switching to 4G that problem seems to have disappeared.

(Except for the lunch room at work. I can't get signal in the lunch room. No one, no matter what their carrier, can get signal in the lunch room. They must have built it out of lead or something.)

(random musing: I like pink motorcycle lady, and don't remember anything distinctive about her voice at all. I don't really think she's any better or worse than CZJ was.)

I'm judging this based almost solely on the trailers, but the new Peter Parker does not seem dorky enough. He looks like they tried to make him into a hipster instead. The CGI in the trailers, especially for the second movie, makes me think "video game" more than "action movie". And all in all i just don't see the point of Spider-Man reboot so soon.

I've seen all the Marvel movies (great.) I saw Man of Steel (okay movie with significant problems that have already been hashed over.) I saw Wolverine (not perfect, but a lot better than the Origins movie). And i'm going to go see Days of Future Past. I have almost zero interest in seeing the second take of Spider-Man 2. Nothing this review has said really changes my opinion (i don't think Spider-Man really needed that much shading) and some of the things i've read in other reviews have helped bolster that opinion. (Rewriting Spider-Man's backstory via his parents to make him a "destined child" kind of strikes me as wrong.)

"but their ID-checking gun seems to default to an unfireable state, which might not always be an attractive feature."

I'm sorry, but that's the _only_ feature of this gun vis-a-vis a regular gun. The whole point is that it has to be "activated" by some specific method before it will work, in an attempt to verify that only the "right" person can use it. The details may differ, whether using a watch such as in this case or other proposed methods using fingerprints or other biometrics, but the fundamental concept is that the gun doesn't fire unless that condition is met.

Why in the world would you pay extra for a gun that checks your ID, but then decides to default to a fireable state even if you fail the ID check? If that's what you want you could just get a regular gun that doesn't bother checking your ID to begin with.

If you don't like the fundamental concept, don't buy the gun. If you don't like the idea of laws being passed in relation to this concept then write to your congressperson and/or vote for someone else. But complaining that the gun does exactly what it is designed to do is just dumb. (And needless to say, harassing and/or threatening employees of the company that sells them is just insane.)

Hey mom? Sorry to bother you, but AOL got hacked, so could you please change your maiden name? I need a new answer for my security question.

No, it doesn't. Velikovsky theorized that Venus was ejected from Jupiter. We have no good theories for how or why a gas giant would spontaneously produce and then eject a smaller terrestrial planet, not to mention no physical evidence that i've seen that it has ever actually happened.

What is going on here is that some of the material in Saturn's rings has accreted together into a moonlet. It's already been theorized that that's how at least some of Saturn's other 100+ moonlets were formed. The only reason that this is at all a surprise is that A: there's still enough material left in the rings after forming all the other moonlets and B: that we're caught it in the middle of the process . And as for (B), i haven't seen any estimates of how long it's been going on, but i suspect that it's been taking place slowly over millions of years, and we're only seeing it now because we've finally gotten sensitive enough instruments in the right position to detect it.

If so then in one case we have a tiny moon, one of over 100, being formed by a known method over a period of millions of years. And in the other case we have the 2nd largest terrestrial planet, one of just 8 planets total, being formed by an entirely unknown method over the period of a couple thousand years.

The first case provides absolutely no support for the second case.

As for "Hot Venus", that doesn't really provide any evidence for Velikovsky unless you don't believe the greenhouse effect exists.

And i don't know what radio signals from Jupiter have to do with Velikovsky's theories of planetary formation, so i can't really address that.

Oh sure, they're _interesting_. But lots of people make interesting predictions from random theories that aren't based on any solid evidence. Some of those people we call science fiction and fantasy authors, and others we call crackpots, depending on whether they think their "interesting predictions" are actually the truth or just a form of entertainment.

You're only half right. These days no one has a problem with proposing that myths may be based on scientific realities. There have been intriguing proposals about the relation between the myth of Atlantis and the erruption of Thera, a similar or identical link to the parting of the Red Sea, and several interesting theories about what might have inspired the various deluge mythologies.

The problem with Velikovsky is that his proposed solutions were batshit crazy. If the Uniformitarians were insisting that 2 + 2 = 3, then Velikovsky was right that they were getting it wrong. But his proposed counter-solution was that 2 + 2 = 10000!

We have pretty good evidence that the solar system is in a fairly stable situation in regards to the major bodies. There's certainly no astronomical record of any significant changes for the past several hundred years. (And i suspect much longer if one takes Chinese astronomical observations into account.)

But we are supposed to believe that between about 10k years ago and approximately 1 AD, the solar system underwent a MASSIVE reconfiguration. One or more new planets were created and several planets, including Earth, significantly changed their orbits, involving several VERY close passes between those planets. Then after all those planets finished swapping places and crossing paths with each other they just settled down into a configuration that just coincidentally also could have been stable for the last several hundred million years, and then haven't budged an inch (metaphorically speaking) since then.

The other theories i mentioned in the first paragraph have good physical evidence to indicate that they are at least plausible. As far as i'm aware Velikovsky had no physical evidence supporting his claims. In fact the full version of his theory is something like "If, in total contradiction to all present appearances, the solar system of a few thousand years ago was an entirely chaotic system, AND we rewrite several portions of recorded history to make points in different timelines line up better, THEN we might be able to explain certain myths." I'm sorry, but Occam's Razor just does not work that way.

Just to push another free online alternative, i've been using FreeTaxUSA.com for several years. They'll file your federal taxes for free, but charge a fairly small fee to file your state as well. (I believe it was about $10 the last time i paid, but may have gone up since then.)

I used to pay that small fee, but then last year(?) CA started their free efile thing, so now i do my CA taxes for free via the CA website, and my Fed taxes for free via the FreeTaxUSA site. If more and more states start pushing the free efile thing then i expect FreeTaxUSA will have to rejigger their business model, but in the meantime it's a good thing for me.

Of course i have very simple taxes, so i can't say how either system would work for people who actually have credits and loopholes they want to use. Based on the comments i posted at the time it took me 12 minutes to do the state and 27 minutes to do the Fed. (Though it might have taken me a little longer if FreeTaxUSA hadn't saved some of my settings from last year.)