You're wrong, AC, ("of course"). Apparently you don't actually know many republicans. Of the several I know, many are LEOs and would fully support this for exactly for the reasons stated in the article. If they lump their purchase under "anti-terrorism", then funding is no problem, as that still seems to be a bottomless wallet, for both wings.

Agreed. I bought an XT8 8" dobsonian from Orion about 15 years ago, best bang for the buck ever. Very inexpensive, good optics (reflector/newtonian based), simple to use. Refractor telescopes, OTOH, if they're any good, are quite expensive. The only downside to a dob is the size and weight, though you can certainly buy a smaller one. Orion (telescope.com) even has a dob made expressly for kids. Also, the basic model such as I bought didn't have a motorized/computerized or even equatorial mount, though they are available for dobs nowadays.
That could be a cause for debate: better to have a scope that can show them the wonders of the night sky automatically, or make them learn to find them on their own? I guess that depends. For an adult who intends to get a bit serious, I think they should certainly learn to locate the objects themselves; for a kid though, it's tougher call..for some, it might be better to grab and keep their interest first by letting them navigate the sky more easily (automatically, really); for other kids, they probably would love the challenge of locating objects themselves. That was a lot of the fun for me. Of course, if you get into astrophotography, then a motorized equatorial mount is pretty much mandatory.

Lastly, don't overlook or underestimate a decent pair of binoculars and a tripod, for a novice. You can see a lot more than you'd think with just a good set of binocs, and it's easier on the eyes... or eye, as the case may be.

Mexico has actually surpassed the US in obesity.. and they're on the same continent. We win! Oh, wait..

All I see is a big smoking crater..

You would have even the moderates up in arms if you did that publicly. Remember the Danish cartoonist a few years back, normally quiet muslims in Asia went apeshit, and the death threats came rolling in.
I don't know that I can agree with you on this particular item regarding censorship: I would think the extremists would love everyone to see that video, to strike fear in their hearts. They're terrorists. They want those images out there. If they can't get their message out, they aren't exactly winning.
Don't misunderstand me: they do win when other normal civil liberties are curtailed, but just this specific video, I don't think so much. Sometimes the worst thing you can do to a bully is ignore him.

I'll just mention that the headline for this summary is grossly misleading. He didn't get jail time for recording the movie with his camcorder in a theatre per se, that sounds like they caught him in the act of recording; no, he got jail time because all the things he did in the weeks and months following that, as mentioned above; sharing on p2p, outright selling hard copies; and then continuing to do so even after approached by the police with a warning. That's a special kind of arrogance.. or ignorance; they sound alike and go hand in hand.
I will say that the penalty seems incommensurately stiff to me; but this jackass put himself in that position.

Luna? The taskbar was kinda goofy, but not the windows themsevles and icons throughout the rest of the interface.I think most people just had an issue with that taskbar..

I don't know.. I still think KDE and Gnome still look a bit "Fisher Price" compared to a commercial GUI like Windows or Mac, but they've improved.
But far more important are the applications, as you mentioned. For the average user, an office suite is usually all they need; but as an admin, I find a great many of my app tools to be Windows-centric in one way or another. Even many of the java/browser based apps or tools I use that are supposed to be platform independent seem to work much better on Windows than linux, like EMC's Unisphere.
Dell pushes everything Windows. Whenever I call tech support for this or that (not just Dell), they just assume I'm running Windows, even on servers (when I'm actually running SuSE), it's kinda annoying. Then there's Active Directory, and all it's GPOs, which interacts directly with the desktops as well as servers, so it's a homogenous inclusive system that many admins would be loath to break up. I don't see Windows desktop marketshare going down for a long time.

Not arguing with the general point here, but regards gitmo specifically, that's extremely unlikely to happen. There are roughly 300 million US citizens, and currently about 155 detainees in Gitmo http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/03/18/4003331/first-view-of-the-worlds-most.html, most of whom are foreigners.

That would represent a very, very tiny percentage to the point where it's almost negligible, statistically. Things ain't quite that bad.
Yet.

That'd be kinda terrifying, actually. Especially if they grew in the wild, I don't have a General Products hull.

Tell that to the Magpies and Ravens. They're actually pretty darn smart.

Absolutely this, spot on. Where are my mod points?

But you'd really expect a state to admit to their spying? It's just as well known that covert operations are covered by deniability and secret classifications. At least where Int'l spying is concerned, anyway.

Justice is constipated.

Like I said; "Some" of it, and "most". I never claimed all or 100% of Arabic science was derived from Greece. This suggests there are other parts, technically up to 49%, theoretically speaking, that did not.
But you are correct, "Arabic" numbers are in fact Indian.