Republicans don't need tech or an agenda attractive to the majority to win elections, they learned a different tactic. They have a small hardcore of voters who do vote in local elections, unlike most. Add in Citizens United, and now money can outright buy an election with low turnout. That gave them control of many state legislatures, and that then allows them to push through voter ID suppression laws; along with ruthless redistricting in 2010 to pack democrat voters into a handful of very, very democratic districts, while giving republican candidates a much larger number of districts with narrow republican victories. And having entrenched their control of state legislatures, they roll back at the state level many of the civil liberty victories of the last 100 years.

You can see the same tactic with stuffing educational boards with the continuous attempts to insert religion into the science curriculum.

Getting out the vote for a Democratic presidential candidate is one thing; but the Democrats have a lot to learn about winning local elections from the Republicans and the Tea Party, or rather, from their wealthy backers.

Who needs to win an election the old fashioned way, when you can just use huge corporate slush funds to fool the gullible and fearful and declare a significant portion of your opponent's voters ineligible to vote?

I had to try a few different ones before I found ones that worked for me. To get the proper 'smoking' feeling - which to me is as addictive as the nicotine - I had to go to a beefier variable voltage battery. As long as the thread is compatible (510 or ego) you can pair pretty much any battery with any head, and the head is the more important bit to get right, though you do need variable voltage/wattage to get the best out of em. Plus you can always use an adapter if necessary.

I'm currently rocking the new joyetech C2 emode head/tank - it uses a standard 510 thread. Only really 'sputters' a little when at the very last few puffs, though like all atomizer/clearomizers I've tried, you do need to blow it out into a tissue every once in a while. No leaks yet! It's also known as the electron-S. The official emode battery is ok, but I prefer my cheap lavatube knockoff, though it is a bit big to carry around, so I use the lavatube at home and the emode goes in the car with me.

There's the small joyetech ecom that uses the same C2 atomizer, so should be good, but not tried that yet. The C2 atomizer inside the head itself lasts me about 2-3 weeks before it needs cleaning; a few cleans then it needs replacing outright (you keep the rest of the tank)

Before I switched to this one, I used the kanger T3S (ego thread) that was pretty good. The coils needed cleaning about once a week. My wife uses a chinese variant that has dual coil and very warm smoke; the K3 DCS only available from totallywicked, but it's the only head that seems to work for her. Prone to cracking though with certain liquids. She uses my old batteries, the relative thin ego-c twist. It's pretty decent, and a good step up to variable voltage, but does tend to stop working a bit too quickly for my taste; we've had to buy several replacements over the last year, so it's cheaper in the long run to get a proper variable voltage battery compartment with replaceable batteries, if you don't mind the size.

The high goes away pretty quickly as your brain adapts, though nicotine remains a mild stimulant. After that, you mainly just get the relief of feeding the addiction - you go into withdrawal pretty quickly once you're addicted. In addition, it's psychologically addictive as you get used to the relief, and associate it with the physical act of smoking. Thus quitting is very hard, even with nicotine replacement therapy, and why most who try to quit fail, repeatedly. Nicotine is supposedly as hard to quit as heroin.

Personally, I've switched to vaping from e-cigs. The same stress relief my brain associates with the physical act of smoking, a much lower dose of nicotine* (similar to caffeine in its effects) without all the tar, benzene and the many other carcinogens from combustion. Better to quit outright of course, but this is a workable half-way house for now, and much cheaper to boot.

* I've scaled down the amount of nicotine in the liquid to much lower than I started with.

'Carbon pollution' is used as a shorthand for the several carbon-based greenhouse gases (released by human activity) that are heating up our atmosphere by trapping solar radiation.

carbon dioxide of course is the main anthropogenic culprit from fossil fuels; but it also covers methane (CH4), which is a more potent greenhouse gas per mole than CO2 and comes primarily from natural gas and oil mining, and then animal based food production, and finally landfills. Carbon monoxide is also a greenhouse gas, though a weak one - it's main effect is to strip OH radicals from the upper atmosphere, which would otherwise be breaking down methane. It can also lead to the formation of ozone, another greenhouse gas.

So carbon pollution covers several gases that are causing unwanted effects in our atmosphere; as opposed to just talking about one, carbon dioxide.

Cricket, on the other hand...

I got presents for my nephews that arrived late (from a seller that only shipped in-country), so I was delayed shipping them on to where they live. Entirely my fault for not ordering earlier, and I fully warned my sister that they would likely arrive after xmas, and sent extras with my parents (they were tight on room for luggage, so could only send small presents that way). Estimated delivery window fell right around xmas.

As it turned out, they only took 4 working days to cross europe, and arrived on xmas eve. Very grateful, and thankful for the delivery guys working right up to xmas to get stuff there in time - and if it had arrived after, as I fully expected to, I certainly wouldn't have complained.

People bitching because stuff ordered xmas 23rd didn't arrive on the 24th across a country the size of the US? Blimey, talk about a sense of entitlement.

Of course the magnitude of the offence matters.

"The law does not concern itself with trifles" - usually referred to as 'de minimis' in laws. With most laws, you need to commit an offence of a significant enough seriousness to even be an offence. Once you get past that point, there is also the broad principle of proportionality, i.e. let the punishment fit the crime. Then you factor in intent, state of mind etc.

Speeding and parking illegally can lead to risk to others, so even relatively 'small' offences can have large consequences, and that's why they're taken somewhat seriously, beyond the actual consequences (which are usually, though not always, pretty much nil). Charging an electric car in a stationary parking spot? Not so much.

The correct response here was for the officer to inform the school, and then they could decide if they wanted to file a civil suit to get their 5c back. Invoking criminal theft just makes an ass of the police officer and the law.

Except the nexus 5 is likely to come in around half the price of the iPhone 5S (off contract) at $350. And quite a bit cheaper than the 5C, while blowing the latter away in performance terms.

It might only be the 2nd fastest overall, but at bang-per-buck, it's damned impressive. Personally, I'm hoping they bring back the very cheap nexus 4's; there's nothing even close to the quality/performance in that price range on android, and my wife is after a new android phone but doesn't want to spend too much.

Because it's a major article (it was near the top of the list of most-read articles on the telegraph site when I saw it yesterday) in a major serious newspaper read an awful lot by the right-wing management class in the UK. Ironically, it's also the paper read by many members of the (governing in coalition) Tory party, who are the ones who had the plan to revamp IT teaching to be more than 'this is how Microsoft Office works'.

It might be a troll article, but it IS how a lot of people think. So if you want insight into how British management think of coders, and IT guys in general, then there you are. We're a bunch of dull, weirdo tradesmen with a fungible skill. And that's why IT is being shat on from a great height in many companies, because we don't have some loudmouth 'ideas' guy, aka a suitable MBA type in their view, making us do useful stuff instead of muttering in a corner.

So if you're in IT, and you have a clueless dept head (some are good, some are crap, management has both types), then you need to basically become your own promoter and 'ideas' guy, in order to liaise with management and shape what they want (assuming they know what they want to achieve, which is not always the case) into something realistic and actually achievable, while making them think it was their idea.

Even enabling All Mail doesn't do the trick - from that tidbits article: (which has been doing the rounds quite a bit)

That is, I can read, move, delete, reply to, or otherwise operate on messages in my Inbox on the Gmail Web site, on my iPhone or iPad, or in another IMAP client, and they all sync up perfectly with each other — but even after several hours, my Inbox in the Mavericks version of Mail doesn’t reflect those changes. It seems not to matter how frequently I tell Mail to check for new messages. I also tried quitting and restarting Mail, rebuilding the Inbox, and forcing a synchronization — several times — but my Inbox stubbornly refused to reflect reality. Occasionally I’ll glance at Mail after having ignored it for hours and notice that the Inbox is closer to being up to date than it used to be, but I can’t figure out when, why, or how this happens. This is the behavior that makes me truly crazy — if I have to keep Gmail open in a Web browser to make sure I’m getting all my messages, I might as well not be running Mail at all.

My boss is a) an Apple fan, and b) a Mail fan. I've had to instruct him and a couple of other senior management not to go to Mavericks for the time being. Because we use Google Apps, and having mail notifications delayed for hours is going to be a problem. Switching to a decent email client would of course solve the problem, but he loves Mail to death, and he'd rather switch the whole company to another mail provider than give it up (seriously - he suggested it because of this). Not that having Mail cause problems is anything new; my personal favourite is the way Mail does embedded attachments, causing most other mail clients to struggle to handle his messages - usually, they end up with half an email, the attachment, and a second (and sometimes 3rd and 4th) set of attachments with the rest of the email message piecemeal. And then he complains that people can't read his bloody mail.

Showing that it's not just Gmail getting f***** up the IMAP by Maverick Mail will be quite useful to argue the real problem, as usual, is Mail.

They de-dupe disk storage, so 2 million copies of 71 emails take up no more room than the original 71. The index metafile *about* those duplicate messages, on the other hand...

Experienced IT Person: "After talking to the user, I realised they were not competent enough to operate a real computer, so replaced it with an etch-a-sketch. If they don't break that for a week, we can upgrade them to an iPad."

Very experienced IT Person: "I saved us all the trouble of dealing with future tickets from this user. In an unrelated question, who borrowed my shovel without asking?

I woke up with a hard pain in my right side. It got worse and worse, until it was clear it wasn't cramp, but something badly wrong.

I called an ambulance. I live in a rural area, so an hour away from the nearest hospital. Ambulance was there in 10 minutes. They assessed me, took me to hospital.

After blood tests, they put me on high dose antibiotics and painkillers, and onto the ward. They suspected a gallstone. A few hours later, I had an ultrasound; no sign of a gallstone, but the gallbladder was clearly inflamed and I had an infection. They decided to see if the antibiotics would tackle the infection, so I could have elective surgery more safely in a couple of weeks to remove the gallbladder.

I got worse over night, with a worsening fever. They booked me in for emergency surgery to investigate, and I was going under anaesthetic inside an hour. Turns out, my gallbladder had turned necrotic and had started to fall apart, and needed removing in a hurry - they had to switch from keyhole to open surgery, took it out on the spot.

I then spent a week in the hospital, recovering from the 6" abdominal hole from the surgery. When I was discharged, my total bill was... £0.

I was treated with huge professionalism and care, survived what could easily have been a fatal infection with rapid treatment, and I didn't spend a second worrying about what it would cost me. Ok, the food was airline quality, but I wasn't exactly hungry anyway.

The NHS is running out of money because there's more people, living longer, wanting the latest, best drugs that cost more, while funding levels are being cut in real terms by the Tory government. That's something that will have to be dealt with, but it's certainly not a reason to kill the NHS. It's one the best things about Britain, and if we have to up our contributions a few percent to pay for it, I for one am glad to do so.

it includes content such as fucking prostitutes in the back seat of a stolen vehicle and then murdering them to get your money back, ... Oh and fucking whores is a good way to make yourself healthy.

Ironically, that's one 'feature' they appear to have removed from this one. Now you have to go to the strip club and feel up a woman you're paying to graphically dance with her tits in your face, to get her to sleep with you, which is much more family friendly! Along with the graphic mass murder of ordinary civilians which is dismissed by the protagonists with jokes, the torture, the planning mass murder of cops as part of a robbery, lots of drug use, manufacture and selling, pretty much constant swearing...

It's a master example of that type of game, and fun to play, but you need a decent fully-formed reality/fantasy filter - and to be already pretty jaded about the full spectrum of the human condition. I wouldn't give it to my retired parents to play as it's not something they'd enjoy, and I think a co-worker is nuts for letting his 7 year old play it. 'I wish I could turn off the voice-overs, but he just wants to play the driving bits'. Where you run over people, who try to run away screaming, and the flying bodies and the blood...

'Ma'am, I just wanted to make you that this game is about as violent and bloody as the most graphic horror films, but here you're playing the sadistic killer who kidnaps and sells hitch-hikers to a cannibal cult, as well as graphic sex scenes with drug addicts.'

'Yes Ma'am, I can see your 10 year old son really wants to play it as he's played the previous one. Here you go.'

Myself and my wife have both switched to e-cigs full time - myself for 6 months, her a bit more reluctantly and recently. The tobacco analog flavours are pretty nasty, but then I neve actually liked the taste of tobacco anyway - it's the act of smoking and nicotine itself I'm addicted to. Now she smokes a menthol mix, and I'm a fan of fruit flavours.

I've tried to quit many, many times during a 23 year cigarette habit. Patches, gum, straight cold turkey, Allan Carr, you name it, I probably tried it. Longest time was a year before stress got me smoking again. The day I had an e-cig, I've not had a single tobacco cig since. My phlegmy cough is gone, my sense of taste is much better, I don't reek of smoke (going back and smelling an old coat that I wore while smoking just smells rank - when you smoke, you don't realise HOW stinky you are to non smokers). I also feel better.

Nicotine itself is highly addictive, but in stimulant terms isn't much different to caffeine. It's the tar, carbon monoxide, benzene and all the other carcinogens as byproducts of combustion that are really terrible for your health.

We're still on the hunt for the perfect clearomizer that gives the right combination of warmth, vapour quantity and reliability (some tanks crack very easily), but generally it's been a very easy transition for me. My wife struggled at first as the amount of vapour wasn't enough for her in comparison, but a dual-coil seems to have fixed that, and we hand-mix the liquid as we both prefer a different mix of PG to VG. I am slowly tapering my nicotine mix down (currently at 8%, which is already pretty low). I'm still hoping to quit outright at some point.

Are they 100% safe? Don't know. Most studies have shown no risk, and the worst impact has been some inflammation in those with existing breathing conditions. Given the components of the liquid are all individually safe for consumption in other products, as long as you get it from a reliable supplier that doesn't use cheap chinese contaminated liquid, it should be pretty safe. It's certainly a lot safer than the known highly dangerous tobacco cigs. I'd have no problem with goverments ensuring product purity by regulation and enforcing age restrictions - all the sellers I know insist on 18+ only, and are entirely upfront about the dangers of nicotine.

Yet European legislation is lining up to class them as medicines, and defacto ban e-cigs, as they obviously don't have a health benefit in and of themselves - only in relation to the alternative. It seems ludicrous to try and ban a product that is at worst far less dangerous than cigarettes, when cigarettes themselves don't have to clear the same proposed hurdles.