If we want to get all pop-statistical about it, half of them had two-digit IQ's.

Sure there's a selection bias since juries are pulled from the voter rolls and those people tend to be... oh fuck it I'm surrounded by assholes.

Thoughtcrime doubleplusungood

Former Navy sailor and a former #1 nozzleman here. You can't possibly have enough robots to fight fires in all the places a fire could be unless you make the ship a giant firefighting robot. As cool as that sounds, it kind of detracts from the actual mission, which is to fight and win wars at sea. The ship's crew are ultimately much better equipped to defeat fires than some automaton because they have native human intelligence and can use spur of the moment logic to reassess a situation. A robot might see a hotspot in a puddle of burning fuel oil and concentrate on it, where a human would say "that'll put itself out and I need to concentrate on this jet of flame erupting from the gas turbine engine." Someday, maybe, robots will be able to assess a main space casualty the way a human could, but until that day comes the Navy should continue to rely on the very good judgement of its human firefighting teams. The US Navy trains every single sailor to be a firefighter, the way the Marines and Army train everyone to be a rifleman. Damage control is a religion among the seagoing set. It will be a very long time before a robot can replace a motivated sailor as the best means to save the ship. There are too many variables to leave it to code.

I worked in a Kodak paper mill at Kodak Park in Rochester, NY at the most recent turn of the century. I. WORKED. AT. A. PAPER. MILL. AT. KODAK. Might as well say I was one of the last people in the buggy whip factory.

We were developing a new kind of long lasting paper then. Welp, here's to all you other saps at Building 50 at Kodak Park. I quit in 2000 because I knew that shit was going nowhere. The video of our building getting dynamited is on YouTube. It was still a very cool place to work. They had cigarette lighters mounted in the walls of the break rooms. Cancer was so easy! You didn't even need to disturb the asbestos!

In all seriousness, there were few employers in the United States who treated their employees as well as Kodak did. That's why Kodak is pretty much no longer around, that and the fact that the state was a life-sucking vampire that used windfalls from upstate industry to fund its social programs. Look at all the other industrial giants from a bygone era who grew to greatness in upstate NY - IBM, Xerox, Bethlehem Steel, Union Carbide, General Electric, Carrier... it's like if a state could say "don't do this", they'd just put New York up as an example and not say anything else. Now, the areas that claim the most dependency on our state can claim they pay the most in taxes to balance the equation. So Goldman Sachs elites pay pennies on the dollar compared to what the old, solid industries upstate once paid, and we scrape by with a smoke-and-mirrors balanced budget. Meanwhile upstate gets depopulated as their children move south for low paying jobs. Yay, New York. We got fucked by a combination of our industries failing to adapt and our in-state brethren selling us down the river.

You're failing to account for a crucial divisor: the number of Slashdot members who have had sex with another person (q).

So:

E = ((MC^2 * (1 + (($M - $P + $D) * $D) / L ) + ( Ic/Ir )) ^ dem)/q

The mean, median and mode are all zero. Some of us are outliers in the data, but we must press on. Using this totally scientifically modified formula, my calculations indicate the world will end on December 21, 2012, due to shoddy coding.

Just reverse the tachyon field on your deflector array, and then inject a stream of polarons into the positronic matrix.

Jeez, do I have to do everything around here?

Right, there certainly is. The difference is, Obama can set executive policy, you know - the rubber meets the road stuff, without having any one else's say-so. He also has the bully pulpit and the almighty veto. He hasn't done anything that would safeguard our civil rights. In fact, he's worse on civil rights than his predecessor was. Dubya never assassinated an American citizen. Dubya never signed a bill that allowed for indefinite detention of American citizens by the military without any sort of due process. He probably would have, but the Democrats would have screamed bloody murder. My ears ache from the silence now.

Compare Candidate Obama c.2007 to President Obama c.2012, it's like some crazy brain-switch has occurred.The one who would end the wars, open up the government, and finally bring truth to the American people has been exposed as nothing but another cheap peddler of lies and also lies. So what are we to do? Vote for the opposing party's liar? As if Romney or Santorum would do any different? Meet the new boss, et cetera. If Ron Paul won, well, that would be something, but quite honestly we all know that that particular outcome wouldn't be allowed since it would end the whole military-industrial complex stranglehold on the executive and legislative branches.

So in summation, dear Anonymous Coward, let me encourage you to educate yourself on what really happens in Washington, and how little changes from administration to administration, and from Congressional session to Congressional session. The same vested interests buy off the small men and sociopaths that are put up for us to select, and we are told that if we don't vote for them we're wasting our vote. And we believe them, mostly because we're too self-involved with making sure we've a roof over our heads and food to eat. Oh and all the shiny things on TV, American Idol or whatever.

We have the government we deserve, until the point when we as a nation decide that we don't. It's a shit sandwich I wish more people could taste.

Yeah the joke is that there are no jokes. There's really not much to laugh about.

If only people knew what the Federal Reserve was, what it did, and how it affected their everyday life without any oversight from their elected representatives. Around a fifth of Americans are already aware, and that number is growing. They aren't devoted to Republicans or Democrats. They are simply aware. These people may disagree on how to solve the problem but the key thing is, they see there is a huge problem. Things are going to get fixed, eventually.

Whether you frame it around Ron Paul or not, a lot of people can see that our problems seem to be stemming from the central bank, and that before we can even begin to fix the problem we need to know EXACTLY what they've been up to. This has been a big problem for a long time. Our representatives have had very little power to compel the Fed to open its books up. Thanks to folks like Dennis Kucinich, Bernie Sanders, Ron Paul, and others, we've gotten a very ugly glimpse. We need to see the whole picture, though. Americans need to know why their currency is being inflated. (And before anyone says 'uh inflation isn't happening' let's just remember that we've moved the goalposts on that metric just as we have our cost of living and unemployment. Lies, damned lies and statistics.)

You might want to look into Ron Paul. He's been pretty much screaming at the top of his lungs about this since, oh, when did the PATRIOT Act pass, again?

Step outside your comfort zone and assess for yourself what really matters, when all the demagoguery and manipulation falls away. Think about what America means to you and what would cause it to cease to exist? Would cutting out the Department of Education cause our republic to fail? Or, would it be because the Federal Government unconstitutionally stripped us of our natural rights? We're at a crossroads here. Odds are the American people will chose the road of less freedom for more "safety". We can choose to be free or we can choose to be serfs to the fascist combination of all-powerful government funded by multinational banks.

There is an often quoted axiom about the definition of insanity being to do the same thing repeatedly and to expect different results. Every four years, the American voters lend credence to this facile axiom. Just once, wouldn't it be nice to break the back of the powers-that-be, to upend the money changers' tables, to demonstrate that this is not a nation governed by the few, to show we the people still hold sway? I had hope when President Obama took office. I still have hope, but I will never place it in him again. We need someone who is going to kick the Beltway right in the balls.

Seconding the interview request for Seth Shostak. He's an incredibly bright, level-headed skeptic who looks up at those same stars we all do and thinks big thoughts.

Also, I enjoy that podcast a great deal. Any podcast that gets Leonard Susskind as a guest (he's in the latest episode) is pretty cool in my opinion.

Yeah, well, that's like, his opinion, man.

Also, I'd characterize your argument here as a fallacious appeal to authority.