RIPD is Bleach with a Western perspective. I dunno at the specifics, but that's exactly what the marketing made it out to be. The difference between why Bleach has hooked millions of kids and teenagers worldwide and RIPD is failing is twofold:

1) Bleach has teenagers as the main characters. The Star Trek reboot understands this. If you want to capture the core summer blockbuster audience, it helps to cater and relate to the core audience. Ryan Reynolds does not count. Jeff Bridges sure as hell doesn't count.
2) With Bleach, the cops / Soul Reapers have crazy unique powers like the X-Men. Incidentally, the X-Men movies have done well at the box office, even the crappy Last Stand. The power reveals are half the damn fun. In the trailers for RIPD, Jeff Bridges and Ryan Reynolds get to shoot stuff with guns. Woot.

Yes, but it's not entirely clear that "monitoring makes that impossible". For example, as long as the government doesn't interfere with a political rally, can you really show harm to 1st Amendment rights by the mere fact that the government databased everyone who attended? It would seem that a 4th Amendment challenge would be much more clearcut.

To further extend the analogy, I'm in favor of responsible gun control that doesn't infringe on 2nd Amendment rights - including comprehensive databases on gun ownership for criminal tracing and background checks. Unless you really believe the nutball theory that evil UN men in black will use those databases to swoop in and start confiscating guns indiscriminately then it's pretty implausible that holding gun sellers and owners accountable would violate anyone's rights.

Yeah, no kidding!! Oh, wait. Zimmerman's Hispanic. Maybe you should read up on the actual facts of the case, not what NBC is trying to sell you.

There is only one reason recognized by the law to use deadly force: if you are in fear of immediate death or serious bodily harm to you or others. Not in the next minute. Not in the next hour. Now. In most situations, firing a warning shot means you have time to verbally warn an attacker, or otherwise try to reason with them to desist without pulling the trigger. And that is how it should be. In some states, you are allowed to brandish your weapon in "self-defense" with the express purpose of terminating an escalating confrontation, where you are not in immediate fear for your life but are being interfered with. Not sure it is universal, but I would bet it wouldn't be so. See my above post in response to someone else where NYC police shot 9 bystanders in addition to a criminal. And they weren't firing "warning shots", which intentionally are being shot somewhere else that you're not aiming at.

It makes perfect sense to anyone who is grounded in the reality of physics. Every time you shoot a high velocity dense metal bullet, it goes somewhere. There was a recent shooting in New York City (revenge for some slight, google it) out in broad daylight. The cops who responded to the scene weren't even attempting "warning shots" and they still managed to hit multiple bystanders unintentionally, actually shooting more people than the real criminal.

Of course, if you're an anti-firearm liberal living in fantasyland, then yes... I suppose warning shots makes perfect sense, since confrontations are essentially Aaron Sorkin scripts to teach us life lessons, not unpredictable chaos.

I always want to throw up when I see sentiments like this. Egyptians ONLY voluntarily elected an Islamist party the last time because (insert crappy dichotomy) the OTHER choice was to elect a stooge of the outgoing dictatorship that they just spent blood, sweat, and tears to oust.

Go figure, Wolf #2 turns out to be just as bad as Wolf #1, and Egyptians turn out in the millions in the street again to protest Morsi. Now, that's not to say a sizeable minority of Egypt would like their freedoms to be bent over under Sharia rule, but there's also a sizeable minority in the US that would base the government on Old Testament law given the chance.

Even heroes do really shitty things from time to time.

Did Abraham Lincoln violate the Constitution, and should he have been called to account for it?

Yes, and maybe. Sometimes the spirit of the law is fulfilled in different ways than by following the letter of the law, but in the case of Lincoln, it isn't clear that it was necessary.

Oh, and FDR, who probably saved the world from the Nazis by supplying the Soviets and Britain against popular opinion in the US (before Pearl Harbor), his government opened concentration camps for Japanese Americans. Being a hero doesn't mean everything you do is heroic.

And if a large majority of Syrian citizens are against further arming Assad's regime? Whose problem does it become? If they ask or beg for the UN to impose a no-fly zone to counteract the Assad regime's airstrikes, whose problem does it become, these new(er) anti-aircraft missiles?

Was Rwanda and its internal affairs just a problem for Rwanda and Uganda? Was the breakup of Yugoslavia merely a problem for the Serbs, Croats and Muslims to duke it out?

Just curious at how far regimes can descend, before action is taken. Is it a utilitarian argument, where the balance of lives saved must outweigh the lives lost in escalating the rebellion or outright toppling the regime? Is it an argument for means justifying the ends, that there's a tipping point where offensive military action or aid is justified (Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey already think so)? Does it change the equation if not stopping the Syrian conflict will inevitably draw Lebanon, Israel and probably Iran, Turkey and the United States into a wider and messier conflict? Would it change the equation if Assad had 10,000 artillery pieces aimed at Istanbul?

The point of all these questions is foreign policy is difficult and nuanced. No two situations are alike, and although we'd like it to play out like a domestic law enforcement problem, it never does and it necessarily can't be. Leaders and nations following simple rules to a fault, such as "Unless you live in Russia or Syria, it's not, and shouldn't be, your problem" tend to make a fucked up mess of things, either through gross inaction or not-well thought out action, like George W. Bush.

Hey thanks, moron, for stalking me and my slashdot account information. If you didn't notice, my UID is slightly older than your ignorant ass, so you're about a decade too late with the premed cracks. And again, you're fucking retarded, because while the laws don't prevent people necessarily from making a weapon or two at home with materials and tooling that they can purchase, it does give legal pretext to 1) arrest these idiots (like you, I presume) who make these completely unjustifiable weapons without going through the due process of obtaining the proper credentials and 2) monitor the purchases of material (fertilizer, anyone?) to make these weapons and 3) prevent any scalability of businesses who peddle services in obtaining these weapons. You can't outlaw education and skills, but you can tell people, politely, to not turn their skills to violent purposes. And it shouldn't take a bomb going off to take away the said bomb in the first place...which in your fantasy world apparently everyone should be able to stockpile whatever weapons they want.

So, please, do the world a favor and blow yourself up with your favorite hobby. The gene pool thanks you in advance.

Are you fucking retarded? Do you own a 20 mm minigun? How about a room full of pressure cooker improvised explosives? Maybe a fertilizer bomb? There are clearly things that do not belong in the possession of the general public (other than properly licensed and checked entities) and it doesn't need to progress to pulling or pushing the trigger before saying "oops, he shouldn't have possession of that item!".

It doesn't need to proven that Manning personally handed a copy of the release to an al Qaeda agent to make him guilty. This charge should absolutely stick. Let's say John Doe is a disgruntled Armed Forces intel agent working in Afghanistan. He's sick of his job, and takes a huge stack of classified targeting mission profiles and drone photos and scatters them in the air in Kabul's marketplace out of protest. Agents of the Taliban or al Qaeda collect the papers and peruse it. Regardless of the timeliness or utility of the info, he's (unwittingly and stupidly) gone against explicit orders and policy and aided and abetted the enemy efforts. Trying to draw a ridiculous line of causality for "proof" between release and someone getting killed is not needed at that point.

Quit idolizing Manning. Just because Manning exposed some of the seedy underpinnings of international diplomacy doesn't make him a hero. No, there were no explicit war crimes that weren't already being exposed by the MSM (Abu Ghraib being the best example). I've read through the wiki leaks releases, and there is little to nothing within them that couldn't be found in the MSM or inferred through a basic knowledge of international affairs. He's a Kevin Mitnick of this decade.

$168,000 for a married couple would be lower-end upper middle class (or comfortable middle class for a higher living-cost area like a metropolis). Think about it. That's two lower-end salaries for a pair of educated professionals. You're not buying mansions at $168,000 a year; nor are you jet setting to Club Med on a whim.

Just because the current meme equates middle class with "just above drowning in debt and living paycheck to paycheck" does not make it true.

The Wealthy, the true upper class, have no need to work. Their income (for the most part) comes from interest and capital gains. They'd be using a different tax calculator anyways.

Iran should feel free to. The US economy wouldnt even blink. In fact, Iran needs the US and other advanced manufacturing economies for the high strength materials needed for its missile and nuclear material enrichment programs.

And that was for Mario, as well as my and my kids' anticipation for the next Zelda, Mario Kart, Smash Bros, Mario Party, and Metroid. We'll probably get a PS4 too, but the decision to buy a Wii U was a no-brainer. Those games are coming, and yes, they'll be worth a new console.

Yes, this surgery is creepy and dangerous.

However, when you veer off into talking about addiction in general, you start conflating two very different phenomena: dependency and addiction. Dependency is the fact that if you stop using the substance in question, you will experience adverse effects. Stop drinking caffeine after you've become dependent, and you'll experience headaches. Etc. Addiction is a primary neurological disorder stemming from the way the reward/pleasure centers of the brain are wired. Addiction is not necessarily tied to a specific substance; more than likely, if an addict experiments around, there are multiple behaviors and/or substances that can fill their craving just fine.

There's a very simple litmus test that can tell you when a person needs to stop. Substance abuse is separated from mere dependency by the continued use of said substance despite clear harm or impairment from its use. A cigarette smoker that is tied to an oxygen tank because of COPD. A cocaine abuser that has cardiomyopathy and heart failure. An drinker that continues to drink despite brain damage and liver failure. These are more extreme but easy to think of cases of abuse in which they should have stopped a long time ago or gotten treatment.