Earlier this year? That's been public knowledge since at least 2003. People were posting on Blogspot as early as 2004 about how they had been paid to disrupt online forums, we had several on the Alternet and Utne forums. For that matter there were FBI trolls disrupting BBS and IRC discussions back in the '90s.

Summary: You are actually free to shout "Fire" in a crowded theatre, just be prepared to go to jail for the resulting damage/injury /death.

Simple enough?

In actuality the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki did save lives in the long run. The two cities were chosen for their geographic and demographic profiles, to test the effects of terrain and building types on bomb effectiveness with a future clash with the Soviet Union in mind. What they found was that the effects of nuclear weapons were so horrible that even the lunatics in the Pentagon and Kremlin hesitate to use them. If the nukes had just been used at some remote location to demonstrate to the Japanese what we could do it's very likely that they would have been launched at some point during the 1950s and the highest life form left on the surface of the planet would be rodents.

They were harassed for violating the terms of the tax-exempt status that they had applied for. That's what the IRS is for, enforcing the tax law. If the teabaggers hadn't been so interested in hiding that their movement is entirely financed by billionaires and mega-corporations they could have applied for a different tax-exempt classification and not had any problems, just like all the other political action groups.

The IRS went after groups that were very blatantly and openly violating the rules that they are supposed to enforce. The teabaggers could have chosen any of the tax exempt classifications, they chose the one that would let them hide their donors. That classification prohibits political activity, but they were already involved in political campaigning before filling out the application. Should the IRS have just pretended to not see?

Can you say "MCSE"? I worked my ass off and destroyed my server lab half a dozen times and can honestly say that I earned my title. Then came the boot camps and the braindump sites and "paper" MCSEs became far more common than the real thing. Truly pissed me off.

My wife's friend was told by the corporate big wigs to outsource support for the (really major) feature that his group supported. He refused at first, loudly proclaiming to all and sundry that only people experienced in the development and testing of this feature could support it. He was told then that his support budget had been cut by several million dollars, effectively making outsourcing the only option possible. He had no choice, so relented and outsourced with InfoSys (as directed by the same big wigs). A year later they had to spend $30 million to bring the support back in-house and do all the in-depth training that he had said would be necessary from the beginning.

Then he got fired for being so far over budget on his support costs, while the big wig got a bonus for having saved money on support the year before.

The modern police/paranoia state is depressing to contemplate all by itself, and hideous when you think of it as applied to today's teenagers. I can think of two things that I was **caught** doing in high school that today would have meant jail time rather than detention, and I did a frack of a lot more that I wasn't caught at. Some of it I was lucky to survive, and those were some of the most valuable learning experiences.

I feel sorry for kids that will never have the opportunity to just take off and be on their own for hours/days without adult supervision because their parents grew up with "Stranger Danger" being drummed into their heads.

It's all a matter of priorities, and most of these fools feel as though theirs are the only priorities that matter. India's mission to Mars cost less than the wedding of the daughter of one of its industrialists a couple of years ago. The wealth of the Walton heirs alone could come close to funding a sustainable Lunar colony,

Don't forget to mention six inch long cockroaches that fly.

There were books by "futurists" to that effect and some science fiction stories, but reputable scientists? Hardly. If you think back, which "scientist" was it that claimed we were about to enter a new Ice Age? None, it was a reporter at Time Magazine who had (probably accidentally) learned about Milancovitch Cycles, actual climatologists (there were a few then) already knew we were getting warmer and together with astronomers put together the first climate models to explain the gross temperature ranges of Venus, Earth and Mars. Economists were the only people surprised by economic growth in India and China, and there aren't many of those who could be called "scientists" much less reputable. And even politicians as ignorant as Ronnie Raygun were under no illusion that the Cold War was a permanent state.

Are you sure that you actually remember **anything** from the 1970s?

But I wanted a car analogy . . .

Thank you, that's a very nice explanation.

More like they were trained by the CIA. How many failed attempts did they make to kill Castro?

Oh, horsepuckey. Every time the Taliban blows up an ancient statue of Buddha or a Hindu family burns a widow or an Indian tribe kills a whale it's the Left that complains. The only time the Right in the US complains is if the victim is a Christian or if it aids the sales of weapons.

Fixing it? How the frack do you "fix" a highway that had the last five miles buried by multiple meters of molten rock? Walk for half an hour from the current end of the road and you'll see a "No Parking" sign sticking up a couple inches above the solid rock. When we were there a couple of years ago there was an active lava tube a few feet below the surface just a couple hundred meters further along.