He stopped using Flight Sim... ;-)

Maybe a clear distinction of wants vs. needs? Take the Star Trek example: Energy and Food and Housing seem to be pretty much "free". You need to live? You can sit on your ass all day and live all you want. Transportation is also free so you can travel and see stuff and live and also do no "work".

BUT If you want to do anything more interesting then either you're signing up for Star Fleet (military) or you're doing something more interesting "of value" that affords you the resources to do that.

It's a radical shift in how the world works but I think it is a feasible destination even if the journey isn't realistically possible given the current state of human nature. I would like to get past the point that my *survival is dependent on performing some task for some other person for currency.

It's about 0.37% of Lake Superior...

Anyway... according to the news and Google they've received about 10Trillion gallons of rain in the past 10 days SO guess problem solved ;-)

Nope. It's gotta be aliens farting... There is NO other acceptable answer.

Yes. Until the police face "real" consequences for violating our rights and the rules (theirs and ours) then what justification do they have for not continuing to act as they please?

I live in Minneapolis where several settlements amounting to Millions of dollars of taxpayer money have gone to people our police force have inappropriately dealt with. We've had gang and drug task forces basically running a racket stealing goods from law abiding citizens for their own use. "We no knock raided your home because some junkie said you were dealing. Sorry you're innocent and we destroyed or confiscated all of your stuff but also sorry you can't do anything about it!"

We're rolling out a pilot lapel camera program that will hopefully spread to the rest of the force but honestly it's hard for me to believe our prosecutors will actually do anything meaningful *criminally with the additional evidence. Protect their own has gotten comical in its abuse.

I feel the same way about this as "Support The Troops".

"Support The Troops" BUT not the ones who are raping their fellow soldiers and committing atrocities in service.

"Support The Police" Their jobs are hard too BUT have zero tolerance for those who abuse their power and cause harm to the people they are charged with protecting.

Those with power should be held to the highest standards.

Meat Tosser!!!

No. That will inspire them to create an amendment and make the Keurig Coffee Tax part of the Constitution.

If normal users could watch multiple pr0n side-by-side they totally would.

Excuse me... "one the the biggest failures of the Obama administration"

Failure to prosecute his predecessor you mean? Obama is the executive who signed the executive order calling for a cease of such methods so... I'm all for blaming Obama for everything as you pubs can't help but do constantly but give it a rest, please. It's laughable.

DRTFA and BRTFS but I can give you an few lil tidbits about this:

1) Everything connected to the internet is connected to a router somewhere along the line... that's not interesting.
2) There are a lot of ways to connect to the internet that have absolutely nothing to do with WiFi or 3G.
3) Right now a Bluetooth device can connect to another device. That device may provide a variety of services for said Bluetooth device including providing network connectivity BUT that device isn't really connected to the Internet itself. The new spec provides this device to be connected "more directly" to the net as in it will have its own IP address. The router that it is connecting to supporting the BT4.2 protocol is really no different from the WiFi access point your WiFi equipped device is talking to. Just need to add to the alphabet soup: a,b,g,n,bt

I have a 1 W Laser (kinda super). Not *nearly powerful enough to vaporize leaves although I have lit a few cigarettes for people with it :-)

As for SWAT they leave me alone so long as I don't point aircraft with it...

Ignoring the problems with the flat number ignoring cost of living mentioned by my fellow commenters...

Since this particular number would not help me I want to mention the problem that I would like to have fixed: Excessive / required overtime. As a salaried employee I never really expected to get overtime based on my field / earnings and I really have no problem working variable hours and always getting the same paycheck so long as those hours balance out to something somewhat fair.

My previous job blew that "fair" ratio way out of the water. Specifically this would occur when we were on-site. Those trips almost always required more than 40 hours in a week because we were spending long hours troubleshooting the whole reason we had to be on-site in the first place. 50-60 hours weeks were pretty typical. I had a sequence of trips where that blew up to 100 hours / wk. At some point I forced the company to compensate me for some of that but on their side, aside from me sticking to my guns and having a sympathetic Senior VP in my corner, they have no incentive to keep me anywhere close to my actual paid hours. In fact it is in their best interest that you work > 40 every week so they get more bang for their buck. Making the bold statement "I only the 40 hours you pay me for" is great in a perfect world but when the job doesn't get done or done right on time then that's of small consolation. Having to pay (even regular pay) for any hours over 40 gives the company an incentive to hire enough staff or otherwise keep your workload manageable in a normal week.

Honestly I don't care if I get time and a half... sure it'd be great but I make plenty per hour I just want to get paid for ALL of those hours. THAT is a big reason why I work as a consultant now. I work exactly 0 hours I don't get paid for and that makes me happy. If a project doesn't have a budget for overtime then I go home after 40 and get to enjoy my life outside of work. The project I'm on just decided they wanted to fix some schedule issues and approved overtime so I'm now working more than 40 hours a week and getting paid for them all. I like it.

Exercise for the reader: Try sweeping the leaves off of your driveway or sidewalk when they are wet and stuck to the pavement. Now imaging accomplishing that in a single high-speed sweep.

IANATE but I believe many trains already have such a brush but even if they don't they are not effective.

Freaking laser beams have a bunch of other issues but are WAY cooler ;-)

It's a PR division pure and simple. Good Cop Bad Cop as literal as it gets.

"FBI did something 'bad' so we gave them a spanking... of course they like spankings so we gave them a bunch more and OOOH BOY that was fun! Then we went out and got wasted. Good times."

As with anything worthwhile in life this requires willpower. I'm surprised it took you all the way to grad school to have trouble plowing through boring text books. The truth of the matter is no matter how far we've advanced we aren't really any better at shoving knowledge into your brain. The real change that has happened in the Google universe is that the philosophy of "Why memorize it when I can Google it?" has taken over. Unless you have some form of ADHD (honestly severely over-diagnosed but does exist) then the ability to sit down and read something long that is not interesting falls to pure willpower. I didn't want to do homework either but if I didn't my grades suffered. "Consequences" All of these distractions that are more "interesting" to you can wait. Don't blame technology for giving you more distractions to choose from.