Guns are dangerous because of the cultural media message. The message that the media presents people is, 'If you own a gun, you are powerful and safe.', Which causes people to purchase them for the same reason a lot of people smoked 50 years ago. Think about how cigarettes used to be portrayed in the movies and consider how guns are portrayed in the movies. Sexy, confident and charismatic movie stars were lighting up every other scene, so of course half the population was smoking. With essentially the same marketing, why wouldn't gun ownership in America be ubiquitous? Everyone likes to feel safe and powerful. The fact that a gun makes you neither safe or powerful is moot.

Guns are particularly dangerous to sell with this message because weak minded individuals who buy into the image can hurt others with a gun quite easily, since a gun is a tool designed to wound or kill its target, where as a cigarette is largely self-damaging. I suspect that guns wouldn't be nearly the problem they are if you removed the media message.

Just speculation but, when you propel something to mach 7, friction becomes a real issue. The SR-71 had a titanium body if I recall correctly, to help deal with temperatures it encountered at Mach 3. It is quite possible that the projectile is very hot and is igniting materials that have lower ignition temperatures.

Genetic distance is an interesting concept, since there isn't a single axis of genetic diversity, but many. I would imagine that you could probably graph a genome as an N-dimesional hyper point, where N is the number of distinct genetic characteristics. The math of higher dimensional space isn't that complex, but it's interpretation can get weird, because what is 'genetically far enough' apart? Also, the space may not be smooth and continuous, so how do you know that you have an 'adequate' coverage? While it seems counter intuitive, it might be best to just pick N random people from the gene pool, where N is large enough to be mathematically representative of the larger population.

Nobody ever discovered new lands by sitting at home and playing it safe. Every time a boat went out to sea in the Ancient world, there was a risk of death from numerous sources but that didn't stop them. The shipped out as fast boats were built.

NASA: grow some balls, you gutless bastards. People are going to die in space. Its going to happen and there is no way around that. Now get off you asses and put some people on Mars. Every person who goes on that trip knows that it is going to be a one way journey and the only person fretting over it is you.

I have wondered how far the Cartels will push the government before they just decide to cut the military loose with a death list that includes anyone even remotely involved with the Cartels. At some point the society as a whole is going to get scared/angry and demand a harsh crackdown. When tanks start rolling your million dollar estates, all the AK-47s in the world aren't going to save you.

In any event, it is likely to get worse before it gets better.

This is the new meme of the week. My turn:

"Working for Microsoft is like being raped by a drunken billy-goat while falling down a three hundred foot high pile of chocolate chips."

...So it went for 400 million? ZING! Honestly, who would want to hold FB stock? I'd only take it as part of a deal if I could dump it the next day wall street was open for trading.

Also, what possible IP could Facebook want from Oculus that would be worth that much to them?

I posted in a prior article that I think this is Facebook making a play for the future Google glass market. Portable computing is the big thing now (iPad,etc), and Glass is the next market. Oculus is very similar in nature to Google glass, so if you want to get into the market without playing too much catch up, you dump 2 billion in buying up someone with knowledge and patents in the field.

2 billion seems like a lot of money to sink into a gaming headset....Think more about where you could go from where the product is now, and think that other companies are doing that is similar.

*COUGH**COUGH* GOOGLE GLASS

Facebook wants to compete with Google. They think Glass is the next iPad, and are trying to get in the game.

If you look at history, most 'empires' lasted about 200 to 400 years before they imploded, became irrelevant, or were burned to ashes by the neighboring states. The US is a bit over 200 years old, so we are probably shortly due a revolution or invasion, statistically speaking.

The sad thing is, is when it happens, the mouth breathing anti-government radicals will insist that 'they knew it was bound to happen, because gay black heathens have taken over the gubbermint, and baby Jeebuz wanted to see them burn.'

(Of course they are technically right, because Baby Jeebuz was a 8 foot long monitor lizard with pyrokinesis.)

Unless the L.A. PD is going to try and make the case that everyone in L.A. is suspicious....

....And they would be right. ZING!

Just because botnets aren't efficient doesn't mean they aren't worth running. Stolen CPU time is free, so some profit is still free profit. I mean, if logic and reason governed criminal activity, 95% of it wouldn't even exist.

"At a huge cost to Americans". Does inflation 'cost' anything? It erodes the value of money, but it also erodes the value of debt. 23% Inflation is lousy if you have a lot of money saved up, but it is great if you just took on a huge fixed rate loan. While inflation could create short term money flow chaos, it doesn't really affect the intrinsic value of production. I would say that the problem would be a predictable system changing faster than people are used to.

Russia or China couldn't create that much chaos by cashing in all at once. Likely there would be a slight dip in the value of the dollar, and then everyone else in the world would swoop in an buy it all up at a bargain price to make a killing after the dollar stabilized.

Aside: good to know that the US doesn't have a monopoly on blowhard nationalist idiots like Limbaugh.

Polygraphs do not test for nervousness. They measure baseline physiological stats and monitor for changes. Anything conclusions you draw from that data is pure conjecture. What would it mean if respiration slowed 3%, perspiration increased 2% and blood pressure held steady? Are they nervous? Starting to relax, but feeling warm? Starting to tense up? Having a mild attack of angina?

I mock your claims further:

I can burn chicken bones to detect lies. To claim that the ash patterns could never detect a lie is just flat out wrong.

Sure. That means they are imperfect. It does NOT mean their results have "no connection" to lying. Burned chicken bones are not perfect. Their accuracy is far below the "reasonable doubt" threshold needed for evidence in court. But to extrapolate from that and claim that they don't work at all is nonsense. They are "good enough" for preliminary screening.

Hey, flipping coins will get you 50% accuracy, so a polygraph is at least that good, right? Can you at least find a study that that proves that?

+1 snarky. Zing!