Well and easy fix would just be to privatize it again. The accountability will be restored.

Actually, "privatizing" the TSA wouldn't do anything to fix it, because it would still be an enormous private corporation - one funded entirely by the government AND expected to turn a hefty profit. If anything, the abuses and invasive behaviors would grow worse, as the corporation spent scads of money on propaganda and lobbyists with the goal of terrifying taxpayers and Congress into forking over even more money for their abusive security theater. Ultimately all it would accomplish - apart from accelerating our descent into fascism - is to further pad the corporate executives' pockets.

Now, if you simply handed security back over to the individual airports - public, private or whatever - that might help to re-establish at least some accountability, simply because those organizations are much smaller and locally controlled.

As long as laws exist which continue to strip passengers of their constitutional rights though, you're going to continue to see abuses regardless of how you operate your security theater - public/private/Federal/local/whatever. In fact the abuses might even get worse in select locales - just think of how corrupt some local governments are, or how crooked some local businessmen are (especially in locations where the local government is weak).

I think when I find a pocket watch on the ground, it is less complex for me to believe that it was intelligently designed than to believe that it came about through a mathematical (not necessarily random) process

Well, maybe, but a watchmaker implies a mother and a father. Watchmakers don't just spring into existence. So proposing that some watchmaker was required then begs the question, "Who made the watchmaker?"

This is yet another example of how religion does nothing to answer any of the big questions. It's just mental masturbation that ultimately serves to enrich and empower the con artists running the churches, an intellectual shell game.
 

I just had my machine get totally infected last month by some Java-spread garbage. MSSE was useless. I tried several programs, and Avast did by far the best job at detecting and removing the infection. It's my new AV of choice.

I also switched to Chrome and set it so that I have to click to run any Java or Flash crap. Hopefully that'll help prevent drive-by attacks in the future that exploit the gaping security holes in Java and Flash.

>On the other hand, Spirit took three years to move as far as I walked yesterday morning.

On the other hand, Spirit and Opportunity cost $820 million to build, launch and operate for the duration of their initial 90 day mission. The extended mission has cost ~$125 million in the subsequent 8 years. The rovers are 5 feet high, 7.5 feet wide and 5 feet long and weigh 400 pounds.

It would likely cost about a trillion dollars to get a single human to Mars on a one-way suicide voyage with supplies to last maybe two years, at best.

Like I said earlier, that same money could send numerous tank-sized rovers to Mars equipped with sensors, labs, the works. All stuff we couldn't hope to afford to send along with a human on a suicide mission, equipped with a shovel.

Oh, I wish I had mod points. This about nails it.

Robots can gather a lot more science than humans. They can run off solar or nuclear power, they don't need air or water or tons of radiation shielding, and they don't need to sleep. You can get them to Mars for a tiny fraction of what it would cost to send humans, and they can stay there indefinitely without resupply.

We've been sending rovers to Mars that are skateboard sized. If you look at how much mass we'd have to launch into orbit and then boost to Mars just to send one human on a one-way suicide trip, it would be cheaper to send several tank-sized robots with their own onboard nuclear power plants. A robot that size would be bristling with sensors and packed with onboard labs - all the stuff you couldn't afford to send along with a human explorer.

Sending humans into space is just stupid given the cost of getting into space. When somebody builds a successful space elevator or space fountain that could very well change, but for now it's just a stupendous waste of money. We'd get a lot more science with robots, for a lot less money.

>I've never actually been to Antarctica, but I do know it snows a LOT there in the winter

Uh, wrong. Antarctica is actually pretty dry. The whole continent is technically a desert, averaging 166mm (6.5") of precipitation a year.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Antarctica

>I just bought a 30 pack of 40 watt Incadescent bulbs for better lighting and environmental efficiency - No Mercury.

Unless coal is used to generate some - or worse most - of the electricity where you live, in which case powering those incandescent bulbs will release far more mercury into the environment than an equivalent number of CFLs would.

Worse, the mercury that comes from burning coal isn't elemental mercury, as you'd find in a CFL. Which means it's far more easily absorbed by living things like us.

Sauropods lived outside of swamps, too.

Junk complaint.

Climate was warmer and wetter then too, at least in many places. Presumably that would support more, faster-growing vegetation.

Exactly! MS has spent north of $30 *BILLION* developing the Xbox and Xbox 360. They haven't come anywhere close to breakeven on that investment. They'd have made more money if they'd invested $1 in Apple stock in 2000.

I doubt they'll ever turn a profit off their videogame business. A next-gen Xbox to replace the 360 will need to be developed and produced sometime in the next 3 years or so if they want to remain in the industry, and that'll cost billions. In other words, they'll need to dig a deeper hole in an attempt to get out of the hole they're already standing in.

I wish them luck...

>They haven't been eating bugs and grass for a long time. (Actually I'm pretty certain
>birds don't eat grass at all, so you might want to brush up on your livestock knowledge).

Chickens most certainly eat grass. My grandmother used to raise a few. They eat a lot of stuff. They seemed to love bugs the most. They'll eat seeds and grains too, but there's no way that's the bulk of their diet in the wild.

We evolved to eat free range meat. Agriculture to produce farmed grains for livestock is a VERY recent invention in evolutionary terms.

>Except we didn't evolve to eat animals every day in large amounts.

Oh really? So what were we eating for the million or so years the human race evolved prior to the invention of agriculture?

Of course we ate meat. It was the only thing an animal our size with a digestive system like ours could eat. Any study of primitive, hunter-gatherer societies will show that meat, eggs, fish and insects are the primary component of the diet in pre-agricultural cultures. Nuts, seasonal fruits, a few starchy tubers and select vegetables typically make up the remainder of the diet.

There are plenty of traditional societies where meat is the overwhelming component of the diet (Eskimos, for example). Invariably these people were incredibly healthy prior to the introduction of the modern western diet, with its abundance of cheap carbohydrates and processed oils. Which are garbage that humans aren't designed to eat.

>Then you die like the doctor who came-up with this "eat lots of fat" diet.

If you're referring to Atkins, he died after slipping on the ice, falling, hitting his head and going into a coma. Diet had nothing to do with that (unless he was drunk at the time!).

I dropped carbs pretty much completely out of my diet a year ago, and started eating meat with every meal after having been a vegetarian for over 20 years. I've dropped from about 215 to 165lbs, and my cholesterol has dropped from over 250 to 200. My "bad" cholesterol has plummeted, and my "good" cholesterol has skyrocketed. My triglycerides are way down. So's my blood pressure. So all of my markers correlated with heart disease have improved, dramatically. And I sleep better and have more energy.

Atkins was right. I just gotta be more careful than he was when I step on icy sidewalks!

~500 million years ago was around the time of the Cambrian explosion here on earth, after a big snowball event. Wonder if there's any evidence for increased impacts around that time...

It's been proposed that Triton is a captured satellite as well, I believe. Maybe something Neptune picked up as it migrated outward.

Wonder what the ratio of captures to collides to ejects is when these bodies encounter each other during solar system formation. Would be interesting if you could also determine how much big stuff either slammed into the gas giants or was ejected from the solar system (or spun into the sun).

Hmmm. Wonder if some of the big stuff buzzing around in the Oort Cloud was ejected by the gas giants? Could some terrestrial world be lurking out there, chucked into a wide, distant orbit 4 billion years ago?