and God actually said 'Thou shalt not kill'.

The correct interpretation is 'Thou shalt not murder'. A very significant difference. Besides, the Bible is full of tales of God telling people to kill someone, wipe out entire villages, towns and cities so obviously killing someone who has wronged society is not against Biblical doctrine (for whatever that is worth).

Because of people like this. Or the person (or people) who thought it would be fun to put cats in a bag and beat them to death, or the guy who raped and killed an 11-month old.

For these reasons, and a whole host of others, these people have decided the basic rules of society do not apply to them. As a result they need to be removed. Keeping them alive does nothing except waste taxpayer money on people who will never be productive members of society.

That is why we have the death penalty.

15/5 is shit. The speed should have been doubled years ago and the price should be substantially lower. For 15/5 Verizon wants to charge me $75/month and I'm hardly in the boondocks. For that speed the price should be $45.

My points still stand. We have slow speeds and high prices in this country as a direct result of no competition.

anyone remember in the pilot of the Battlestar Galactica remake . . . designed it that way on purpose to prevent hacking?

I do and I grinned when I heard those lines. Like so many of us on here, I work in the IT field (mainly solving problems created by others), and want to continually smack people upside the head when I hear them talking about wanting to add devices at random to the network or all the things they do on their smart phones.

The amount of people, in IT especially, who think networking everything is the be all and end all is staggering simply because these people, do not think the process through to realize the HUGE security issues they are opening themselves up to. These are the same people who think pushing the envelope of technology is a good thing until it bites them in the ass and they come running to my area to fix what it is they broke.

In a way, I get a sense of schadenfreude when I hear about people who have their phones lost/stolen with all their information on it, or who install the latest and greatest piece of software and find themselves wide open to attack.

Like most things, there is a reason not being at the forefront of technology is a good thing. You let others make the mistake and get exploited so you know how to be safe. In the case of Galactica, not being networked and not having the latest and greatest was its strongest defense.

Note that one key element of cost of any service is population density, not population.

So what's the excuse for high prices and slow speeds in places such as New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Atlanta, etc? Those would certainly qualify as population dense.

The fact of the matter is the FCC, just like Congress and local governments, has been bribed to allow near monopolies to exist rather than enforcing existing laws regarding competition. As a result the U.S. continues to fall further and further behind the rest of the industrialized world in broadband penetration, speed and obviously, price.

Currently we are ranked lower than places in the former Soviet Union for both speed and price, and well behind places such as Taiwan and Hong Kong. You can keep using the excuse of population density and large land area, but the reality of the situation is we have only 3 (maybe 4) providers in this country who have tacitly agreed not to compete with each other, the end result being what we have now: low speeds for high prices.

Link one for reference

Link two for reference

Link three for reference

Note that all of the above links are from November-December of 2013, less than six months ago so the information is up to date.

I've no idea what sort of creds the writers have

Considering Mayim Bialik is an actual neuroscientist and several of the consultants for the show are physicists, the creds of the writers are very well established.

Don't forget Danica McKellar who showed up for an episode, with her degree in mathematics (sum cum laude). Stephen Hawking, Brian Greene and Neil Degrasse Tyson have also appeared with Hawking lending his electronic voice to a handful of episodes as well.

The fact of the matter is the show is written to both poke fun at the foibles of the nerd/geek crowd as well as provide a light-hearted commentary of some of the people, similar to yourself no doubt, and how they perceive things. Yes, much of it is formulaic but the zingers are worth ignoring the obvious plot holes (the most common of which is how Penny can survive on a waitress salary).

It's a show. Stop being a nerd and trying to dissect everything as if it's supposed to have some grand, overarching meaning to anything.

So then you're agreeing if I leave my door unlocked at night and someone comes in and steals something, it's my fault because the asshat thought it was okay to steal?

Shall we take that twisted logic to the next phase and say if you get shot it's partly your fault because you weren't wearing a bullet-resistant vest? After all, you knowingly wore something which wasn't secure (your shirt/jacket) so obviously it's partly your fault for getting shot.

If some crackers screw you over, that may be on them, but it's still partly your fault.

So like when a woman is drunk and she gets raped, it's her fault. Gotcha.

Essentially what you're saying is asshats like Anonymous don't have to take personal responsibility for their actions because their victims were asking for it.

Raj and Howard in front of a 3d printer:

Raj: Ooh. I, I think it's done.

(Opens door to printer)

Raj: It worked! We printed a whistle.

Howard: Amazing. You realize these things go for 25 cents a pop at a party store.

Raj: And we made it in only three hours!

The difference is we have a choice when the weather gets too hot and humid or too cold as to whether we want to be out or not. The horses don't. They are at the whim of their owners.

While there is a group of NYC officers whose job it is to check on the horses when the weather gets hot, and have the power to order the owners to take the horses to the stables, that is still different than humans being able to walk into an air conditioned building whenever they fell like it.

My guy? Who said Obama is my guy? I am only pointing out that people who are up in arms about what he is doing were, for the most part, completely silent when Bush did it.

Pick anything you like: executive privilege, spying on U.S. citizens, signing statements, the list goes on. Everything that he is doing, and the right is complaining about, are the exact same things Bush was doing and the right kept gloating about how well he was doing.

We cannot have it both ways. If you're going to complain about how one person is doing something, you have to do it about the other. If you're not going to complain when your guy does it, you can't complain when someone else's guy does it.

History dictates that Obama will declare "executive privilege" or some other nonsense

So he'll be like George Bush? After all, the previous administration used every trick in the book to prevent the public from knowing what the White House was doing such as claiming he needed "unbiased" information which is why he refused to turn over the visitor logs when meeting with oil executives on U.S. energy policy, or claimed that by not opening emails they weren't "read" and so the contents didn't have to be turned over to investigators, the public or even backed up for historical purposes.

And let's not forget Bush (and Vice-President Cheney) avoided every single Congressional request to testify on the failings of his administration to prevent the 9/11 attacks, including refusing to hand over every document requested by the 9/11 Commission except for one page, heavily redacted, which had the title, 'Bin Laden Determined to Attack the U.S.".

So if you're saying Obama will declare "executive privilege" or some other nonsense, we can safely assume he is following the example of his predecessor

I want a drone that I can call in when the person at the head of the line sits through an entire red light without making a right turn when it is safe to do so, thus holding everyone up and costing us money by idling. The drone has to be able to lift the heaviest, non-commercial vehicles.

Conversely, I want a drone armed with Hellfire missiles to take out the asshats who drive during inclement weather without their headlights on, weave in and out of traffic just to get one car ahead and the ones who blatantly run red lights when the opposing traffic has the green light.

Oh, and the same goes for bicyclists who believe the rules of the road don't apply to them (i.e. running red lights, driving against traffic and cutting in front of people).

So you're saying you can never take pictures of trees (which are vertical, not horizontal) because modern, digital technology is incapable of doing what analog technology had done for over 100 years.

Just another example of the failings of the digital age.

TI-36 solar version. Came with the vinyl flip case which still has part of its spine holding on like grim death.

Bought it just out of high school (back in the day) and recently used it for my stats class (about 2 years ago).

I still take it with me every time I go grocery shopping to keep track of how much I'm spending.