Wow, we're the enemy now? I thought that one of the more important functions of being a citizen was making sure that the government was accountable to us for it's actions. The guy in question, presuming that he actually was responsible, did certainly violate military regs, but he's hardly a traitor.

The concern isn't that they're weapons as such, but that they're weapons designed to be hidden on merchant vessels. In a tense situation, it would likely make all merchant ships potential threats and would likely end up with a lot of innocent civilians being killed.

Net Neutrality creates the level playing field that fosters competition. That's how jobs, and new industries, are created. A robust, dynamic net ecosystem helps all of us. The telcos just want to set themselves up to extort a portion of the profits from successful net companies ("that's a nice search engine that you have there, it'd be a shame if no one could get to it...") and control who and how you're able to interact.

I guess that might match some minimum wage manufacturing jobs, if those even exist any more, but given that most minimum wage jobs are service sector, I don't think that outsourcing is so much an issue. It's not like they'd ship my burger patty off to India to be flipped or anything; there are many jobs that are essentially inherently local.

<quote><p><i>"The minimum wage laws have little if any effect on the number of jobs or the standard of living."</i></p><p>So then why not just make the minimum wage 30$ an hour? After all, if min wage has little, if any effect on the number of jobs then it should just work right?</p><p>Heck, lets make it 100$ an hour.</p><p>1000$</p></quote>

Because that would be stupid?

Given the realistic levels of minimum wage that anyone is speaking of, employment effects are indeed minimal (It's been studied in states when there was an increase, and no notable impact on employment was noted). In terms of the standard of living, for the person going from $5->$7 an hour, it'd be a significant improvement. As most people don't make the minimum wage or close enough to be an issue, inflation from it is similarly minimal. So, the person pulling in $50k a year might notice an extra dime on their big mac, but it's not like that'd be a significant hardship.

HIghways, public health expenditures/disease eradication, public education, basic science research all seem to be investments that ultimately raise our standard of living (better transit, healthier, better educated workforce, etc...). That's not even getting into that whole "system of laws" thing, which is the foundation upon which most of the rest of it rests. Your comment sounds quite like the "the government never created a job" sort of talk, which is similarly silly.

Actually, the structural deficit longer term is indeed driven by entitlement spending, but that spending tracks overall healthcare spending in our system since Medicare buys from the same markets as everyone else (it can do so a somewhat more cheaply due to having a good bit of leverage given it's size, but ultimately that just makes it grow a bit less fast than overall healthcare spending). Thus, controlling healthcare spending and cost inflation becomes critical if we want to head off huge long term issues. That's what should ultimately be driving our healthcare debate, but alas it's not.

Anyway, 0.5% of the federal budget isn't peanuts. I think that it comes back to a lack of vision with regard to what we're trying to accomplish, so the various programs and initiatives just sort of drift on, burning money. The Apollo program was targeted and specific in what it was trying to achieve (a man on the moon) and lavishly funded as it was more to one up the USSR than achieve scientific goals. It succeeded at it's core goal, but seeing as there wasn't really a solid vision beyond that, it just petered out once we'd "been there, done that".

Well, to be fair to Jobs, it's been scientifically proven that something on an Apple product is inherently 70-80% more Awesome (or is that iAwesome?) than the same thing on a competitor's product. So, by only marking iBooks up 50%, it's still more Awesome per dollar than what you're getting on a Kindle!

What's up with the front page troll post? Worldnutdaily and Rawstory as sources? Really?

Care to detail that a bit? I have a Pre, though I'm not a palm fanboy by any means. I've had it more or less since it launched and it seems to be a pretty solid little device so far as my experience has gone. The browser is good, the GPS is handy, Wifi works, 3G data speeds seem to be fine, there are a fair number of apps available for it (and palm seems to be fine with grey-market community apps), it's easily hackable, the UI is great, though the battery life is mediocre at best (though my understanding is that this is hardly unique to the pre wrt smartphones in general). The only issue that I've had is that the little cheapy USB cover fell off, not great, but hardly a huge issue (I've certainly not smashed/shattered it, so perhaps our use cases are a bit different). So, given that, how is this a POS?

Wow, that was quick. Blame "environmentalists" for foiling plans to "release the pressure"? The fact that we don't have anywhere near the technology to impact something of this scale and depth shouldn't matter apparently. Perhaps you need to stop listening to fox"news" so much.

<quote><i>you can't use money you don't have to make more money.</i> <p>
Unless you're the Feds.</p></quote>

Actually, most business investment is done with borrowed money. That, and our financial industry is mostly based on gambling with borrowed/other people's money.