The New America where the state is elevated and individual rights and liberties are ignored.

oh, so true.

Actually ignorant /= stupid. Ignorance is lack of knowledge. Stupidity is lack of a capacity to acquire knowledge.

Parasite? Or is there a symbiotic relationship between the two?

I don't think so. I was born and raised in NY in an immigrant family, living among other immigrants. You get used to hearing English spoken by people in Italian, Russian, Chinese, West Indian accents. In fact it becomes normal. What about someone not raised in a NYC sort of situation? A place where my NYC accent is out of place? They might have a hard time, not because they are poor communicators but because they are not attuned to the different cadence and inflection of the speaker.

The profit is coming. Companies will mine resources and manufacture items in earth orbit / elsewhere and then sell/use the items to do more mining and more exploring and more expansion. The profit will come. The excitement will come. And the investment bubble put the 1999-2000 tech bubble to shame. :-)

Another mod column could be added - for Agree Strongly .... to .... Disagree Strongly.

That might help with the situation. Hey Slashdot Admins. Give this a try for a few weeks. Easy to run such a simple A/B test on site like /.

I'm a big fan of pomodoro - actually combining kanban and pomodoro. For those not familiar with pomodoro imagine

1) setting aside a block of time to do a task (be it code or answer emails)
2) setting up a time (think kitchen timer and set it for the time necessary say 25 minutes)
3) at the designated time "Ding" - you can stop your task
4) refresh your brain with a 5 minute break (bathroom, coffee, slashdot)
5) start all over again

It's a great way to focus your brain and get specific tasks done

see kanbanflow.com for a free app.

Your conclusions are kind of funky.

The neo-con idea was to "drain the swamp" with Saddam being at the center of the swamp. (By the way I'm not a neo-con and don't support their views.)

Would it have made sense to bomb mecca? Maybe. But there would have been repercussions with that action as well.

One of the best solutions is to be energy independent and not give the Saudis any money and let the kingdom face the wrath of the wahabbi clerics without having any money to pacify them. Of course the left is against drilling for oil, fracking and is against anything that is not clean-energy. A good compromise would be to drill and focus the tax revenue derived from the drilling on improving photo-voltaic paint, tidal power, etc...

By the way this has nothing to do with capitalism - it may have something to do with corporatism but then fascism is not exactly capitalism is it? At least not the capitalism as described by its supporters - Menger, von Mises, Hayek, Samuelson. Now you may think they're mistaken - but at least address the points and views they raise and acknowledge that their conception of capitalism is not the tyranny that some make it out to be.

wish I had karma to mod you up.

Of course you're probably trolling to get mod points. ;-)

Or ... you're NSA trying to get a handle on all those subversives who agree with you.

Replied to the comment "The folks at Lockheed, Boeing, etc would be working for NASA if not for this incessant need to "privatize" everything. " The alternative is centralized government is it not? And if not - what?

Why do you fear private corporations and yet want to centralize everything in the government?

really? Who are getting the contracts? Where are your figures? Aren't you the same guy /sarc who said that the US went there to steal Iraqi oil? 10 yrs later ... where's the f..king oil?

How about a congress without limits? Where they can pass anything they want? You want less hostility? You want to reduce the chances of the US becoming a police state? Then insist on limited government. We have a framework for that - it's called the constitution.