"I'll worry about Clarkson being violent when I find out what was said, and not until."
If the producer was verbally assaulting him then Clarkson could get him canned in a minute.
Time to move past school and into the adult world.

No. I question the ethics of paying people to beat each other for my entertainment.

Now you're just being coy. Do you really think that it has ever been a feature of the Freedom of Information Act to require the archivists at the FAA to scour, say, the records kept by Justice, or Agriculture or Commerce etc when someone submits a FOIA request to the FAA for all correspondence involving a given FAA official on a given topic? Of course not. It's understood that the FAA is the keeper of all of the FAA staff's correspondence. If that agency's director was running all of his official mail through a private domain on a server kept in his house, and corresponded with, say, a Senator or someone at Justice, the FAA's own mail archives would have no record of that because said message never traversed the FAA's systems and the archiving mechanisms they have in place. A FOIA request to the FAA's records office for that official's correspondence with said Senator would - just like the FOIA requests for some of Clinton's mail - come up dry. Why? Because a FOIA request to the FAA doesn't cause the FAA's archivists to ask every other agency in the government to also scour the archives of all of those agencies.

We have no record of Clinton's correspondence with anyone in any other agency or branch of the government because the FOIA requests to State can't come up with them. Because those messages didn't traverse State's systems. Her claim that she was relying on her correspondence with other people at State to serve as a record of her official mail deliberately avoids the topic of how her personal server was allowing State to keep records of correspondence that didn't involve State's mail servers or archives. The only possible record of such external communication was going to be found through bottomless research against mail servers all around the government and the world, or through access to her own server - which she says she's wiped clean and will not allow anyone to see. We also get her own personal decisions on which fraction of her email she decided to print to hardcopy, rather than simply passing along in their entirety. And this she did only when pressed to do so, long after she left office. That is in direct violation of the Federal Records Act generally, as well as the 2009 NARA. That it's also in contradiction to her own signed policy just helps to illustrate how phony she's being on the subject.

But using that system would have been a good faith effort to comply with the FRA and NARA. Rather than make that good faith effort, she deliberately acted to keep her records from going anywhere near State's servers, didn't provide ANY of the records during her tenure, and didn't provide any when she left.

Yeah, an assistant DID. A personally paid aid, working for the family foundation. Someone who's not cleared for sensitive/classified information, and whose paycheck is funded in part by the millions of dollars Clinton collected from foreign donors to her family enterprise while on tour as the country's top diplomat. Regardless, she's the one telling the press that she decided when a message wasn't to be kept for being irrelevant from the State archivist's perspective. I'm sure the career archivists appreciate being told what to think and cut out of that process - not for the incidental use of a staffer's private mail, but for ALL of the top official's communications.

I didn't say that. But because it is the slower method with more work involved, it reflects a deliberate choice to produce the required documents in a way that maximizes the delay in allowing FOIA requesters to see the results and minimizes the contextual information that can be gleaned from the stripped-down information. That was a deliberate choice made by her. She chose to have her staff do more work, and to make far more work for the many third parties requiring the records. Just icing on the cake, to go with not having provided the records on the fly, during her tenure and at departure, as required by the FRA and NARA.

Because if you admitted that the odds of her having corresponded, even once, with another agency or external party in the course of doing her job were 100%, then you have to explain why you think that the complete absence of any of that in the FOIA requests doesn't impact your narrative about how she must have been BCC'ing all along to remain compliant. State has her correspondence with internal staff, but nothing external. She generated and received tens of thousands of emails, and you think that by sheer coincidence, flaky archiving at State accidentally lost ALL of the external stuff she faithfully CC'd, while happening to retain the stuff she sent internally? You can't actually believe that happened, which means you're spinning.

As were "sales" and "tax", since what you were talking about is a duty that would be applied at customs when you return. All three words were the wrong thing to use.

In the last posting, before I ripped the idea of a global sales tax to shreds. So don't get upset that I was talking about a global sales tax before you admitted it was a mistake to say that.

Wrong. They would still need to audit individuals to make sure they've paid the sales tax on things that they buy. Then they would ALSO have a new responsibility to go digging in corporate records to verify sales tax collections. Implying that the IRS would become a friend of man because their job would be different is just loony. They'll still be a large, powerful tool available to the ruling party.

Since this is now context-less, I'll return some. This statement is about the "simplicity" of the new system where people would be asked the question "do you meet the requirements for the sales tax rebate?" in order for the IRS to know who to send the free money to.

What truth? D'oh. Do they really qualify as "poor enough" to get the sales tax rebate? Does that person who answered "yes" really even exist, or did they die two years ago? Why assets and income? To know if they are poor enough to qualify. You're making $200k a year and own a mansion and a yacht, what makes you think you'll qualify for the rebate?

Most of the time current tax rebates and credits are dependent upon income. In fact, I don't know of any significant one that isn't. Maybe the clunkers clunker wasn't, but earned income credit is. Handing out checks for sales tax rebates will almost certainly have the same kind of income test. You don't think any rational politician will let the poor people know that he's voting to hand out free money to rich people, do you?

Current loopholes are easy to hide since they are often complicated and hidden side effects of other legislation. They appear on tax forms that the common person never sees. "Enter the greater of 33.4% of the value on line 45 of form X7Y/4 or 0:". Huh? But when the single page form consists in large part of the question: "do you qualify for the sales tax rebate?", and the instructions on the same sheet of paper say "you do if you are alive and a resident of the US", it will be hard to hide the fact that the 1% is benefiting from the free money intended to help the poor people.

You don't think an audit checks your income? And I was accused of being naive because I didn't agree that it was an anal probe process.

Apple only counts for money made.
What a load of garbage.
I love OS/X but the latest round of Apple hardware shows what happens when the "designers" run the show.
New Mac Pro... Stuck with Ivy Bridge CPUs when Haswell-e CPUs are out. GPUs are good but not near the best you can get plus no Nividia option for Cuda.
Mac Book line. You can not upgrade the ram and can not upgrade the SSDs. Prices for SSDs are going down but if you need more you have to buy a new notebook.
Apple is making money hand over fist but RIM and Nokia made a lot of money after the iPhone came out as well.
As much as I love OS/X and my MacBook Pro it is PCs that still do most of the real work. Servers run Linux, BSD, or Windows and not OS/X for the most part.
Desktops are running Windows for the most part.

What? Clinton herself signed a memo to her staff reminding them that they had to use state.gov mailboxes for their official correspondence. The woman you're trying to let off the hook certainly supported the common practice of each department (which have to handle their own FOIA requests) maintaining their own records. Do you really think that when someone at, say, the FAA gets a FOIA request, that it's the intention or the practice for their own records people to then contact hundreds of other agencies and departments to scour THEIR records for FAA-related correspondence? I guess you might think that if it allows you to ignore the hypocrisy of Clinton's own words.

What are you talking about? You're essentially saying that absolutely no career archivists and investigators can be trusted to know if they've looked through stored email records, but we can trust Hillary Clinton to be 100% upright when she tells us that we have to trust her when she says that the tens of thousands of records she destroyed were without relevance to the multiple inquiries that she's stonewalled for the past few years. You operate on a really bad case of mixed premises.

Who's speculating? She's the one who says she destroyed the records without allowing State archivists to do what they're required to do with all of the staff under her (review mixed private/official communications to make judgement calls about what's a public record). She's the one who deliberately transformed convenient, searchable electronic records with context-providing header info into clumsy, labor-requiring hardcopies ... and only after they were demanded of her long after leaving office. Her own description of her actions shows that she didn't provide State with any magical CCs of her communications with external third parties or other agencies, but YOU'RE the one saying not to worry, she probably CC'd somebody, somewhere, somehow, in order to be in compliance with the 2009 NARA requirement. Since you're so tired of speculating, how about being specific on why you think the thing that she's carefully avoided saying she did was none the less actually done, even though it left no trace whatsoever for multiple investigators to find at State? Please, be specific.

That's the point. There ARE NONE. The only way your lame, blithe dismissal of that can be anything other than shameless spin is if you are asserting that she never exchanged a single piece of official email with anyone in another agency, branch of government, or third party/nation. How about answering one single question: do you really think that's true, that she neither sent nor received a single email from anyone in the Senate, at the CIA, at DoJ, in Germany/Japan/UK/Arkansas/NY, or with any long-time fixer like Blumenthal during her entire tenure? Not a single email? Yes or no.

If you say no, then please just stop the hand-waving "she did nothing wrong" nonsense, since it's BS. If you say yes, then please just stop everything, including voting, because you're either toxically naive or being completely disingenuous.

So, yes or no? One single email with any one single contact outside of subordinates at State?

http://blogs.scientificamerica...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...

  I don't know if that is GP's objections but they are pretty good reasons to think radio isotopes are a threat to the environment and ultimately, humanity.

Not if dealt with correctly.
The spent fuel can be recycled. The short lived radio isotopes do not need to be stored very long. The medium waste goes back to fuel. The low level is close to background.

"Newer" reactor designs like the LFTR and I use new only in the sense that the prototype was built and tested about 40 years ago but not put into production. Produce a lot less waste and are walk away safe.

"And speaking of vilification, that is what happened to the peer reviewed science [stormsmith.nl] regarding the energetic return of the nuclear industry"
Um... What journal was that published? Who reviewed that? All I see is a website that seems to be dedicated to anti-nuclear. Some of the reports listed at the end are in journals.

It's hard to talk about a wandering target. First it's a global sales tax, then it's not.

A sales tax doesn't depend on what you carry into the country, it's on what you BUY. If it is a tax on what you bring in, it's a DUTY, not a sales tax. So excuse me if I'm talking about the global sales tax you proposed while you change the system into something different.

Yeah, my mistake. I assume people say what they mean and don't try to second guess them.

Your global sales tax that really isn't. The idea that a global sales tax would get rid of the IRS because it would replace the income tax.

Your idea was that it would be as simple as asking people "do you qualify?" That's the entire "tax return" to qualify for the free money rebate. That's not an audit. Well, if you want to know if they tell the truth, you will have to examine their assets and income to see. That's no different than today's audits. And it requires a government agency to do it. Whether that's called the IRS or not, it does a similar job and has the same potential abuses.

Are you really so stupid that you don't know the difference between voluntary debt and government taxation? Do you see how wonderfully productive it is to call people stupid when they don't agree with you?

I don't have a mortgage. I'm a "normal people". Under your new taxation system I'd have to find a spare $10,000 a year to hand over to the government if I want to keep my house. Every year. For the rest of my life. Even after I retire and my income drops to zero.

I don't know what "that" you are trying to deny saying. You want a tax on ownership, which means the same property gets taxed year after year after year -- until you can no longer afford to pay the tax and you have to sell it. And your attitude toward those who find themselves unable to pay is just pathetic. Don't buy it if you can't afford the taxes. Phhht.

So after I point out the absolutely absurd result of your proposed tax on ownership you come up with two minor exemptions. Very handy. But you still tax savings that has already been taxed. Not everyone qualified for an IRA, and thus not everyone has retirement money in the bank that was pre-tax. So you'd like to dip into my bank account at 5% per year because I managed to save money while I worked, and you'll keep dipping after I retire and need the money to live on. My main retirement is also not an IRA, so that goes into someone else's pocket, too. Thanks. I worked hard all my life, saved my money, and you want to tax me repetitively on it until I'm living in poverty. You're such a sweetheart.

I'm sorry I bothered asking you what amount you thought it was going to be. It doesn't really matter if it is 5% or 10%, it screws every person who tries to save for retirement or provide for his family. More property taxes will not make it easier to own a house, it will make it harder. It will decimate family farms and turn marginally profitable operations into losses. But if they can't pay the tax they don't deserve to own whatever it is.

Uhh, if we apply a federal property tax rate of 2% to only those who have $1 million, we can lower the tax rate to 30%? I'm sorry, to whom does that 30% tax rate apply when you've said it would be 2%? Or were you lying when you said this new property tax would replace existing federal taxes?

And you aren't civil enough to be worth having it with. If only we were all as smart as gurps we'd agree with it. Sure. Nobody knows better.

Someone (I think on reddit) pointed out that using the code name Spartan fits the "Halo" theme they've started with the "Cortana" search assistant.

Failing to stop your multi-thousand-pound vehicle as you drive at a military checkpoint is telegraphing violent intent. At least, that's how the guards have to treat it. Driving a suicide car bomb at/through checkpoints is a well established tactic, and has produced a no-compromises protocol in response. When you give off all the signs of violent intent, there's really no way to just let them carry on and decide later if they were a threat. It's not video game with a retry button the guards can push after they've been blown to pieces.

No, you're getting your media memes all wrong. If they were brown, it would have been, by default and without any need for further analysis, another case of police brutality blah blah blah. Please get your coverage spin in sync with contemporary standards. There are people who make a living off of faux racial outrage, and if you don't help their hype, they're going to have to find other work.

A poor choice of things to compare.

"It needs to be fixed" can read like "It needs to be changed from its current state to a new state, in which is has been fixed." What it needs is something that, once done, will put the act of fixing it in the past tense. "It needs some fixing, so that it will then be fixed." If you're going with the shorter "It needs to be fixed," the "to be" needs to be there if you're going to used that future-sense changed state of "fixed." Or, one should just use: "It needs fixing," where "fixing," a gerund, acts like any other noun that would serve as the object of the sentence.

"It seems fixed," on the other hand, is a completely different construction. There is no assertion of the need for an action (like needing TO BE fixed). It's an observation about its current state (it's in the state of already having been fixed). The "seems" casts mild doubt on the quality of the assertion, but that's just modifying the word "fixed" in this case, which is acting as an adjective (the thing is fast, the thing is light weight, the thing is expensive, the thing is fixed). Think of saying, "It looks blue." Normal usage is rarely, "It looks to be blue," any more than it is, "It seems to be fixed." You could replace "seems" with "feels," knowing that you'd also be far more likely to say, "It's no longer wobbly. It feels fixed," than you would "It feels to be fixed."

No, it seems I'm not.

No, an inquiring mind would have thought it through before trotting that one out.

Hmmm. That's not what I replied to. This is: "So the Top 1% needs to give the bottom 99% all their money."

Do you have some definition of "all" that equates to "a bit more tax"? I don't. And I'm not the one who suggested it, so why you're flipping off on me is a mystery. Makes you look like a moron, I'd say.