In a vacuum, yes this is true, a powerful government can take everything from you. Keep in mind, though, that the alternative is to allow powerful individuals to control everything instead; in that case, a state which humanity has languished in for thousands of years, those powerful individuals will take everything from you.

The large middle class that we've seen rise in America and other modern countries has only come into existence thanks to the tireless work of powerful governments holding back the power of the very wealthy. It's no surprise that, now that those very wealthy have managed to subvert the government, we are seeing the middle class shrink, battered by high costs imposed by the rent-seeking rich.

So, Google is deciding to fix its past mistakes with not implementing multi-window, and now they're actually looking forward and supporting features that aren't in any existing phones. Great!

Maybe we'll see decent keyboard/mouse support next, given that there are already netbooks out there running Android.

Oh, Internet...

It doesn't matter who wins the Circuit; this is going to the Supreme Court for sure, and given how partisan this issue is it's really only Roberts and Kennedy who have a decision to make there.

Excellent, now we get to observe a bunch of 60+ year old men, most of whom have likely never so much as checked their email without an intern or a grandkid watching over their shoulder, try to judge the value of the Internet to American society.

Every dollar spent on space exploration has come back to us tenfold. No other investment in history can make such a boast. Most of your "better ideas" have in fact proven to be losers over time, especially direct economic aid to poorer nations. You talk about setting aside emotional commitments and embracing rationality. Practice what you preach, shut up and multiply.

Hopeless or not, we have to do it. Right now all of humanity is in a single interconnected biosphere, that is one rich crazy dickhead away from becoming uninhabitable. How many people are out there right now claiming that we can do anything we want to the Earth and humanity can never become extinct, because God? We need to get sustainable populations off of this planet and somewhere they can survive for when the inevitable happens and one of those mouth-breathing morons hits the wrong button somewhere and releases super-Ebola into the atmosphere or something.

Not all Republicans are ignorant jackasses. Some just don't care about anything other than lowering their own taxes at any cost. Some have bought into the delusion of upward mobility that this country still peddles, despite all the mounting evidence that the difference between rungs in the social ladder are greater than any time in the past 100 years. And some are actually very nice people, but continue voting for Republicans for reasons of social inertia or the sunk cost fallacy, effectively rendering them ineffectual sockpuppets for the ignorant jackasses.

Democrats are slightly, slightly better, but really until someone succeeds in removing the massive amounts of outside money necessary to run for national elected office you'll never see anyone in the House or Senate who actually represents the people who supposedly elected them into office.

Nobody lives in the California Desert. Well, okay, we do have a decent retirement community out in Palm Springs, but the parts that most people settled on were temperate grasslands, forests, and wetlands (the Central Valley was an inland sea for much of the year before we dammed it all up).

The real problems are:

1) Irresponsible farming by agribusinesses. This one here is the biggie, but is really hard to control because the biggest agribusinesses have so much political clout, both here and in Washington.

2) 150 years of politics. For well over a century, the saying has gone, "Liquor is for drinking; water is for fighting." There are a byzantine set of local, regional, statewide, interstate, and international laws governing how water is used everywhere in the state, most of it based on environmental studies decades or centuries out of date, and none of it changes quickly.

3) Wetland destruction. For a long, long time nobody understood the value of wetlands in water table control, flood prevention, and ecosystem management, and so much of it was filled in and paved over in the last 100 years. This has proven to be a huge mistake, one that will take decades and billions of dollars to fix, and isn't helped by ignorant jackasses who insist that environmental concerns don't exist, that scientists are hucksters, and that God will provide everything we could ever want, forever.

4) Climate change. The theory is nearly 200 years old; the lab-scale proof is over 150 years old; definitive proof it's happening out in the environment is over 50 years old. It's happening, right now, and given politics and the endless prattle of ignorant jackasses it doesn't look like it's going to be slowing down any time soon.

Did you notice what's not on that list? Cities. All of the urban and suburban development in California accounts for less than 10% of the state's annual water usage (the vast, vast majority is used for agriculture), and the number is dropping every year, as more efficiency and water recycling programs come online.

Those wetlands you're disparaging are flood control systems. Those wetlands keep the rain from flowing straight out into the ocean; part of the reason we're in this mess now is that we've spent the last 100 years plowing them into the ground and pouring concrete over them (see: LA river).

And thus does Intel make the same mistake that hundreds of companies around the world have made before it: putting intellectual property in physical reach of the Chinese government. Fast forward five years and I'm almost certain we'll see Foxconn or some other Chinese company with ties to the Chinese government have a series of "research breakthroughs" that mysteriously parallel the exact technologies that Intel brought to its own plant, which is once again down for "inspection".

It's not like this sort of thing hasn't happened already.

Start telling Congress how Europe and China can predict hurricanes better than we can, thanks to their supercomputers. Nothing like a good "The furners are beating us!" rallying cry to squeeze money from the right (hell, the left too).

That's why you go multi-monitor. I have a horizontal (cheap LED-LCD) screen for videos and entertainment, and a vertical screen (more expensive IPS) for getting real work done.

That's not what global warming does. Global warming heats the oceans first, screwing up weather patterns all over the world. Global warming means more hurricanes, heat waves, tornadoes, and ruined crops.

And you were doing so well until the end, too.

The science tells us that ebola doesn't spread until the patient starts showing symptoms. Once you start going beyond the science to indulge in paranoid fantasies you're leaving the realm of behavior that should be expected of reasonable adults.

Quarantining people for no reason is exactly equivalent to locking someone up for up to three weeks for no reason at all, and what's worse is that you're doing it to people who are selflessly risking their lives to help total strangers in a country they would never go to otherwise. These are heroes, and should be given a hero's welcome, not told to lock themselves in a room for three weeks and think about what they've done for a world that neither cares about nor fully understands what they've done.