While I can see the advantage for Soldiers -- we have already made war TOO EASY.

Do you know about all the wars or "hostile engagements" the US is already in? We hear about Iraq and Afghanistan because of a lot of troops -- especially people coming home injured. But most Americans don't know we have a lot of drones in Yemen -- and have for a few years now.

The only thing that really stops wars right now is soldiers. Not the Airforce who get to fly over and drop bombs -- no, it's the men and women been the ground who suffer.

That's why people who want LESS wars are for a draft or shared sacrifice. Without sacrifice of some kind, asymmetrical warfare (where one side is a lot more powerful than the other) can go on forever. The military industry and the multinationals benefit -- and we get shocked and surprised by people who hate us for our freedoms. As if drones were less of a terrorist weapon than homemade bombs. ALL weapons cause fear.

I seem to remember reading that in the Android support manual.

I too think it's insane to link a "real" account to a forum for exchanging my "opinion."

If Slashdot only allowed FaceBook logins, I'd either censor my opinions and keep it professional (which MIGHT be good for the quality and decorum of discussion) or I'd not use Slashdot.

When FaceBook logins were required for Huffingtonpost.com and Digg.com -- I quickly left. It's one thing to voice a political opinion -- it's another thing to become permanently unemployable.

More and more, I believe, companies will use social media to do background checks, and if your Facebook doesn't look like a Sears & Roebuck catalog and your political opinions aren't supporting Bernie Sanders -- you are in luck!

I also figure that you will soon have an "employment score" just like you have a credit score. Free speech doesn't mean much without employment.

I really think you are onto something with that combination Refrigerator + Toaster idea. There's heat being pushed out and wasted already, and that could be concentrated and used to brown bread, or at least warm some water.

Samsung makes appliances like these, and should really jump on the Chimera appliance bandwagon. Curved screens, Toaster + Phones, Toasters + WiFi. The marketing is easy; "We only sell hot stuff."

So lesson learned; from now on I'm going to use an alias for my pets. ... Kidding aside, Google+ might be attached to doing real business, and then suddenly you might comment on a pet shaming video saying; "That is completely gay." Which can haunt you, and your gay cat forever.

I wonder if we are still going to war. We do a few 'surgical' drone strike that take out one or 2 guys and leave the rest of the family alive (and angry). But it used to be that you'd burn to the ground entire cities, where the few survivors would be only too relieved to see you coming and not shoot them afterwards. I wonder if we are going towards a state of perpetual low level warfare. At least when you wipe out an entire country you have a generation or two of peace afterwards. I think we are improving but I'm not so certain. Remember, a massive amount of violence solved the nazi problem.

Hell, I might even just write in Elizabeth Warren.

Bernie Sanders is just as good, and actually running.

But corporations are not people.

See my post, above, pointing out that corporations are groups of people, with all the rights guaranteed to people, who don't lose those rights just because they're acting together for a common purpose.

The legal system DOES, in some situations, treat corporations as pseudo-people. But that's just a convenient way to interact with the corporation's members/stockholders/what-have-you when they're acting together to advance the common purpose that the corporation was chartered to handle.

fuck off you right-wing scum.

In the immortal words of Red Skelton and Mel Blank: "He don't know me very well, do he?"

corporations aren't people.

Au contraire: Though they DO exhibit most of the characteristics of independent lifeforms, corporations are GROUPS of people, working together for a defined purpose. This is true whether they're businesses, schools, labor unions, churches, political parties, special-interest group, or whatever.

I assume we're agreed that people working together as a corporation shouldn't have any extra rights beyond the pooled rights of the individual members. But should these people LOSE any of their rights, just because they're working together?

Should spokesmen for a corporation with ten thousand stockholders, when speaking on issues related to the corporation's purpose, interaction with laws, and its stockholders' interests, have any less access to the ear of a legislator than the ten thousand stockholders themselves? A corporate lobbyist is just a representative of those ten thousand people when they're acting on this particular common interest.

The legal system treats corporations as pseudo-people because it's a convenient way to interact with the people making up the corporation when they're acting as a group.

[Rant deleted.]

Ad homenim. I win. B-)

I wish I could be shocked at this behavior but this is standard operating procedure in America. The government has long been owned by the corporations, stuff like this just removes all doubt.

In the executive branch this has also changed - and not for the better - recently.

One of the biggest political machines in the US is that of Chicago. Chicago is utterly corrupt. But it's also the "City that Works" (according to one of its slogans), because ANYBODY can bribe the relevant officials, for sums that are within reach. The result is not pretty (and never has been). But it is thoroughly entrenched. How it operates is well known throughout the region.

Obama is a typical Chicago machine politician, as are his associates. Those of us familiar with Chicago's politics warned that, should he be elected, the likely result would be the Federal Government's executive branch would be run like Chicago's political machine.

And that's exactly what has happened. The Congress, with its slow turnover, is still largely in the pocket of the same corporate interests as before - but the Executive Branch changes more rapidly and is currently being run on Chicago's political-machine model, top to bottom. (It's usually largely in the hands of organized crime, and has been since the Nixon-Kennedy election - which was substantially a battle between two Mafia "families".)

If you wonder at the odd foreign policies (or lack thereof) of the current regime and their blatant extra-legal use of government agencies to suppress political enemies and promote the interests of arbitrary groups with no obvious ideological connection between them, try thinking of it as a corrupt big-city political machine and see if it makes more sense.

Passing laws which make lobbying a criminal offence would seem to be a good start ...

It would also be unconstitutional.

The Right to Petition IS the right of lobbying, and is constitutionally protected. (That's why anti-lobbying laws keep getting struck down when challenged.)

In the US it's part of the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law ... abridging ... the right of the people ... to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." You'll also find it in Article 44 of the EU's Charter of Human Rights, Germany's 1949 Fundamental Law, England's Bill of Rights of 1689, Petition of Right of 1628, and Magna Carta (1215).

It's a fundamental part of Western Law: ANYBODY gets to ask their legislature to adjust the law to make it better for them (if they can get the legislators' attention) and not be penalized for doing so.

It's also a REALLY BAD IDEA to try to interfere with this fundamental right (and also with the fundamental right to support the political candidates of one's choice). The big money / big power people can always find ways to influence and finance the politicians of their choice. The only thing such laws do is make it harder on the "big mass of little guys". So they institutionalize elite-class favoritism and corruption, rather than retard it.

If you want to attack corruption the place to do it is the selection of the officials: Elections, and exposure of malfeasance to the electorate.

My attitude on the whole H1B visa thing is that you need to require that they pay them... lets say 20 percent more than the going rate for domestic labor of the same kind.

In particular, employers of H1Bs are not required to contribute to SOME of the social programs they aren't eleigble for. Part of any H1B reform should be a requirement that they pay them at LEAST as much more as the difference in government fees saves them. Otherwise there is a strong financial incentive to use H1Bs in preference to citizens.

(An additional complication is that the employers often put the H1Bs to work on things above their official job title and its resulting pay scale.)

N-acetyl carnosine drops have been used with good success for a while. Bought them for my grandmother in law. Over the course of a couple of years it halted and mostly reversed her developing cataracts. Can get them from multiple sources.

Good information - especially while we're waiting for this stuff to become available.

I note, though, that:
  - This newly-identified material substantially clears cataracts in six days while N-acetyl carnosine takes four months for significant improvement to show.
  - This newly-identintified material appears to be what the eye normally uses in a specific mechanism to prevent/repair cataracts, while N-acetyl carnosine appears to have more generic antioxidant and chelation properties. (It's a modification of carnosine to a form which can penetrate the tissues of the eye and is converted back to carnosine within them. Carnosine is great for retarding several ageing mechanisms but it looks more like a generic helper than a specific repair-mechanism component or trigger for cataracts.)
  - The discovery of this new stuff occurred by identifying what was missing in people with a genetic early-cataract problem. If this is necessary for cataract prevention/repair and its production declines (but doesn't fully stop) with age, N-acetyl carnosine might not work for people who don't make it at all.

So though N-acetyl carnosine looks good, this looks great and specific. (And I don't see any reason to stop the former even if taking the latter. Unless some specific interaction issue shows up I'd expect them to work well together.)