In many species, including chimpanzees, when a male takes over leadership, it is common for him to kill infants because they are not his.

What is irrational about killing someone else's unborn baby, and the traitorous mother bearing it, and leaving your own 4 year old child alive? It may be insane, it's certainly not very nice, but I don't see anything irrational about it, if the stabber is thinking only of propagating his own seed.

Just because behavior violates every norm of civilization doesn't make it irrational.

If someone is insane and thinks everyone is spying on him, it may be entirely rational to kill a bunch of them.

If someone thinks a comet is an alien spaceship come to take away true believers, it may be entirely rational to kill oneself as an act of volunteering to travel with the aliens.

There is a rational possibility: the stabber was not the father of the unborn child.

You must have a different definition of engineer than any I am used to. Perhaps you think "engineer" is appropriate shorthand for "software engineer"?

Engineer as a standalone job description involves mathematics every semester of college and you better have had it in high school before that. How you could get to graduate school, as an engineer, without having studied any mathematics, is beyond me.

You have a problem with verb tenses?

No, as an example of someone who only heard what he wanted to hear, and possibly died as a result of it.

You single out the "super conservatives" as the radicals?

There are so many nutjobs to choose from. I guess we can tell where you come from.

No mainstream politician has any interest in reducing the national debt. Reagan was the first president to raise the national debt after WW II, close to tripled it. Clinton actually started it down the road to lessening it, then Bush II also came close to tripling it, although Obama's own contribution could also be said to nearly triple it, but Bush II and Obama are so intertwined in the debt department that it's hard to tell how to divvy that up.

Of course neither party is even willing to admit that we are spending too much. The Republican plan, if you can call it that, was to balance the budget in 2061 or so; Obama hasn't even submitted a budget for three years, and his talking points grudgingly accept the possibility of maybe trimming growth by $1T over ten years, when that isn't even the full deficit from a single year's budget. Cheney must have been speaking for both parties when he said deficits don't matter.

Then the left refuses to accept the science of GMOs and refuses to admit there's any uncertainty in the degree of global warming, let alone how much man causes, while the right plugs their ears when anyone mentions evolution or any human contribution to global warming. Both have tons of nuts (Obama and Rubio being the latest) who won't even cop to the simple scientific fact that the earth is 4.5B years old.

Republican platform was to actually increase military spending, while Democrats merely howled that any decrease would be a disaster. We could cut the military budget in half and still be spending as much as 10 years ago in inflation adjusted dollars.

Civil rights? Oh yeah, they've heard of them. Both parties are racing to be the most Orwellian government in our history. Obama thinks it's just great that he can pick people to kill with drones, without any judicial inquiry, even if the targets are American citizens in countries where we are not at war. Yet they had so little foresight that eben wile being scared of Romney winning, they never considered how he would have handled the secret kill authority.

And you pick "super conservatives" out of all that as the radicals? It's the moderates in charge who are doing what was unthinkable just a few years ago.

One of the problems I see with the Republican proposal is that it has a sliding scale for renewal too, but it is based on revenue from the work. That requires an intrusive bureaucracy to verify the income figures, and Hollywood is notorious for cooking the books; supposedly Titanic and a few other block busters have never generated a net profit. One of the rules for any contract with Hollywood is to always get a percentage of the gross, never the net, because they set up shell companies and structure expenses such that nothing makes a profit.

So you've got the right track there. But I's set the first 4-year renewal much higher. If something is only worth $100 after four years, it isn't worth much at all.

I like that idea! Hand out 640K years of copyright, total. As time goes by and years expire and are returned to the 640K year pool, auction them off to the highest bidder.

By George, I LIKE this idea!

You sound like you think Democrats are better.

News flash: politicians, like broken clocks, are right once in a while. Broken clocks have the advantage of being otherwise useless, while politicians actively get in the way.

Here, take a look.

Other nonsense patents include a kids' swing. It happens all the time. That's a broken system.

Let's go back to manual labor for everything. Power drills? Nail guns? Air wrenches? Bah! As for tractors, trucks, backhoes and bulldozers, double Bah!

Call me an ostrich with my head in the sand -- I have no intention of reading any article which leads to such a summary. Is there something about agriculture which doesn't require smarts? If nothing else, they need better ways of beating off the raiders who don't farm, and ways to hide their crop from tax collectors, and ways to find the hidden crops.

What about the notion that writing and arithmetic began as ways to keep track of crops and taxes? Maybe only dummies can do that.

I think it's more likely that some people have lost the ability to think rationally, they think since they are smarter it must be even worse for peasants, and they found a silly journal to publish their efforts.

Of course, maybe I'm such a peasant, and being dumber than they are, I just can't see it, so I post on slashdot instead.

This by itself is slightly interesting. What would be more interesting is comparing it to other politically incorrect keywords, such as socialist, dictator, warmonger.

They convert all passwords to lower or upper case before securing.

Do you complain equally that utility workers get paid double and triple overtime for their efforts to restore supplies during and after disasters?

Why then do you complain about truckers and other workers getting extra pay for bringing in supplies, and the store passing along that cost?

Or are you so naive that you think those utility workers are working straight time, or donating their time?

Is greed ok when it's union, but not otherwise?

Is greed by the truckers ok, but the store is supposed to absorb that cost?