It's not Google's problem to report that somebody else made a libelous claim any more than if you tell your neighbor "Hey, that guy John Doe down the street put on the internet that you're a convicted child molester but I know that's not true", your neighbor would have a legal claim against John Doe, not against you for telling him. The fact that Google reports a search result doesn't make them responsible for the content in the USA. Things might be different in Europe though.

I'm not defending Santorum at all because I think he's pretty stupid, but the right to privacy does not exist in the Constitution. It's never mentioned. The Supreme Court has ruled that such a right is inferred by the other things in the Constitution, but strictly speaking he does have a valid point. A different Supreme Court such as the current one might well have come to the other conclusion that if it's not mentioned explicitly, it doesn't exist.

John McCain has already said that while he thinks it's a waste of time to try to repeal Obamacare that so many new members of Congress promised to do it that they have to pass such a bill, wait for the President to veto it, and then get on with the serious business at hand so the new members can claim at re-election time that they tried to repeal it, but gosh darn it, just didn't have the votes to override the veto. He said he'd rather the time be spent trying to accomplish something like removing the medical device tax (some Democrats may actually be OK with this idea) than trying to repeal the entire thing, which is never going to happen.

Government isn't going to shrink and probably no libertarian concern you have will be met. My bet is that while the role of the Tea Party has been reduced, there's still too many of those crazy ideologues around and they're going to bog down Congress over trivial matters that most other Republicans don't care about. Congress allows far too much of what I call "tyranny of the minority" to happen, especially in the Senate, and all the obstructionist tactics the Senate Republicans tried recently are now going to be thrown right back at them. Expect a lot of bluster about how unfair this is and how the Republicans will conveniently forget that they used the exact same tactics themselves in this current Congress.

I'm not as hostile towards Erica as some here, but I'm not as sympathetic either as you might think. I graduated college when Reagan was president and I've worked in IT all my professional career. I've had some jobs I liked a lot. I've had others that really sucked. My current job is pretty good and I like my employer a lot, but a few years ago things were different in the job and I was pretty unhappy. Things change in life. Some jobs start off good and get bad. Some start off bad and get good. Some are always good. Some are always bad. Erica started her career at a university in Alaska. Alaska is hardly a place with a lot of black people and university IT jobs are kind of infamous. Typically they don't pay well and they tend to attract certain types of people who aren't exactly go getters. Well, this has been my experience on the East Coast of the USA, but perhaps things are different elsewhere. Maybe in California, for example, university IT jobs are fantastic. But I've got a pretty good feeling that Erica didn't start off with a great job. That probably plays some role in her perceptions. She also worked in Windows which attracts different types of people than Unix/Linux type jobs do. That may also play a role in how things were for her.

Another thing I want to mention is that I work sometimes with other companies' IT departments to solve problems and there's a lot of variability there. Big companies usually have pretty competent IT groups. Small companies? Not always. I know that some small companies have badly overworked IT people who are doing the work of 2 or 3 people by themselves. Sometimes people in bad IT jobs won't leave for various reasons. They may fear change. They may work in an area with limited opportunities. One of my co-workers is a few years older than me and before joining our company he apparently didn't have any IT jobs that weren't horrible beyond belief. Maybe she just found a lot of bad jobs. It sounded like she was pretty happy in the job at Home Depot but got pissy over the pay and not being able to get promoted and left. If you want to work in IT and chase dollars, you can job hop and do that, but I can't promise you that the next job will be better or make you happy. You may get more money and have worse working conditions. And if you want to get promoted, you probably shouldn't go into IT at all. It's not exactly a career path to being CEO. Sounded like she was willing to trade a job that made her happy to try to get more money and she was never able to find a job she liked as much. It happens.

You won't find this in the Wikipedia article, but there are rumors in some intelligence circles that this flight was actually shot down by the Russians and Ukraine took the rap because they could play the "Duh! We so stupid! Not know what we doing! Soldiers were drunk!" card in exchange for some sort of special favor from Russia. That may not be true and it may be that Ukraine really shot it down through incompetence, but I just wanted to point out that there are some who don't buy the official explanation.

Did you talk about Hitler? I think I see a Hitler reference in that comment. Godwin's Law! Godwin's Law!

(This is meant to be a joke.)

Let me give the experience of my best friend. He's probably in upper half of what one would call the Middle Class in the USA. I work for The Man so I've always had health insurance via my job. He is a small business owner. His business employees his wife and between 1 and 3 other employees at any given time, depending on a variety of factors. He does not offer health insurance to his employees. As a small business owner, he's had to get insurance on his own for himself, his wife and one child. He is a Republican voter who almost never votes Democratic. He's not a wing nut, but he is relatively conservative politically. He originally completely opposed "Obamacare", saying the usual Republican stuff about how it was going to be the worst thing ever, destroying the country once it got implemented. He admitted to me that now that he can use the state health exchange that his insurance payments per month have dropped about $300 over what he previously paid and he thinks he has better coverage now. He no longer complains about "Obamacare" although he's still going to vote Republican.

Nooooo!!! Who would flip the hamburgers then? :-)

This. And I say this as a Christian rather than the typical rabid atheist Slashdot poster, but I have zero interest in watching those channels. Plus, OTA reception where I live is absolutely awful except for religious and Spanish channels and Fox. Oh yes - the CW, which I never watch, comes in very well too. The other major networks (CBS, NBC, ABC) either can't be viewed reliably or not at all where I live. Plenty of people actually know about OTA TV, but it's not a realistic option for everybody.

I think Netflix's streaming options are horrifically bad in general, but I seem to hold a minority opinion on that one. All I can say is that they consistently fail to have what I'm interested in watching with very few exceptions.

Since the person in question lived in Las Vegas, not Smalltown USA, I think it's pretty reasonable to assume that an ambulance was a viable option in terms of availability. Since she had to get a predatory loan to get a car, it's also reasonable to assume that she has money problems and either didn't have insurance that would cover the cost of using it or covered very little of that cost. Saying she didn't want to pay the cost of an ambulance, and for those who don't know, this can easily be $1000 in the USA, is really a different argument than suggesting that she had no other choice because ambulance service didn't exist where she lived.

Tax evasions are possible with the so called "Fair Tax" or "Sales Tax" as you call it. Rich people may find it much cheaper to buy expensive items overseas or in Canada or Mexico and ship them to the USA. That's not something that the average person can afford to do. It may also cause a black market to form where people can buy things on the sly, like electronics, where they pay cash and the sales aren't reported. I have no doubt at all that the rich people in the USA have already thought of ways to avoid this kind of sales tax that we've never considered. I've also read that in such a system businesses may pay less than individuals and in such cases the rich may simply shunt their purchases through businesses, perhaps created only to serve as a front for saving taxes on purchases. Dream on, but your idea won't work.

In a vague way, one of my hobbies is learning foreign languages. I really don't want to oversell that, but I studied 2 languages after turning 30 and while I wouldn't say I'm fluent in either (I could eventually be with a lot more practice and a real reason to use them though) this goes along with another language I studied in college and am close to fluent in. Additionally I know enough to get by of a 4th language, particularly when reading. What I found is that I could still learn another language after 30, I just had to work somewhat harder at it than when I was younger, but it was still doable. So if you are really interested in learning astronomy and physics after age 30, I think you can. The key thing is not to give up. I know of a lot of language learning failures in older (30 and above) students because they just gave up, not really because they weren't capable of learning it. It definitely gets easier to find excuses for not studying when you get older and while I did have to study a little bit more after age 30, it wasn't like three times as much or even twice as much, but it did require somewhat more work.

I was not familiar with the name coffea canephora so I looked it up. This is what I have heard in the past called coffea robusta. Maybe the name got changed to disguise what it is. A lot of people know what robusta coffee is. For those who don't know, robusta is considered an inferior species of coffee. Ever heard of coffees that say that they are 100% arabica? This is because just about everybody considers arabica to be superior to robusta. Robusta is used in blends because it is is very bitter. Robusta is more disease resistant and has higher crop yields than arabica, but I've never heard of it being used in concentrations of more than maybe 1o to 15% in blends. Usually the amount used is less than 10%. This is great, I guess, and I suppose if there were 100% robusta blends some crazy people would love it. Currently in the USA there's a big interest in making craft beers as bitter as possible. Those kind of people, who are in the minority, would probably love large robusta blends. But until they sequence and maybe talk about doing things to protect arabica from disease, this is mildly interesting and no more.

My best friend is an attorney and we've known each other for years. He has taught me a lot about how the law really works in the USA (I live in the US too by the way). Literally anything can happen in court. You may be right in that the odds may be good that he'll be able to sue and win, but it all depends on factors we can't control or predict. The judge the case gets is important. If it's a jury trial, the outcome may have more to do with the abilities of the lawyers involved than the actual merits of the case. Then if you don't like the verdict and appeal it, you go back to square one because some appellate judges tend to favor one side over the other. You get a really conservative appellate male judge in the Scalia mold and you could find that he'll basically allow the government to do anything if they feel that public safety was potentially at risk. Keep in mind too that the author may be greatly exaggerating what happened to him and what really happened may be a lot less sensational than the news report.

How do you as a consumer prove conclusively it was turned off when AT&T will say "Nuh uh. He was using it the whole time!". Then it just gets into "He said/She said" territory and I can assure you that judges hate that kind of stuff. Plus, we had another poster make the good point that even if you try to go after AT&T, they'll use their army of highly paid lawyers to argue "Change of venue" or try to show how your contract allows them to get summary dismissal. A lot of companies now have clauses that state that you agree to arbitration, which means you can't go to small claims court against them. And they can ask for the arbitration in a location as far away from you as possible so unless you're insane and willing to spend thousands of dollars to maybe win a few hundred back, it's just not worth it. I am having a hard time understanding how this is a constant problem for the original poster though unless he's trying to run a business via what is supposed to be a residential connection or he's the king of torrents. I've had AT&T for years and I've never exceeded my limits even once. Going to Uverse, as suggested in another post, is also a good idea as AT&T is known to deliberately degrade their DSL service anyway. Uverse is so much better than the old DSL service they had, I really don't think it's rational to stay with DSL if you can possibly get Uverse where you live.