If you want malls, freeways, and fiber, live in town.
If you want wide open spaces, live out in the country.

If you insist on having a fiber line run two miles across your neighbors' pastures to reach you, the only interested customer on your road, you can get that too. That two miles of trenching and fiber work isn't going to be cheap - I've priced it.

Remember that Glasgow is also the place where if you botch a terror act on an airport you get a kicking from some guy whose cigarette break you disturbed. Even though you're already on fire.

> your description would paint Bush as a liberal. What with his pet project to fix Iraq, bailouts for failed corporate ventures

And indeed Bush Jr's approval rating among republicans was nearly as bad as Obama's among Democrats. Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity regularly took him to task. They much preferred the elder Bush, who made a clear decision to NOT invade Iraq. I myself criticized junior on national radio, based on the argument that he was not following conservative principles.

I guess we know who was stoned out of their mind during history class. Other than me, I mean. :) Corporations you say? The colonists dumped the cargo of the East India Company. The East India Company, founded in 1600, officially ruled countries. No corporation today comes anywhere near the power of the corporations of the founding era. You might also want to look up the words "corporation" and "corporal" in the dictionary.

You might also look up "tar and feather ", a common practice at the time the republic was founded. See also "drawn amd quartered".

Here's the opening line from George Washington's announcement of the Constitution, the one that protects the rights "endowed by your creator ":
  "Whereas it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits, and humbly to implore His protection and favor ..."

The concept that the founders were liberal hippies is laughable. American liberalism, the secular movement we have today, came to America in the 1960s.

Once you have clue about American history, you can go to the hardware store and buy some hemp rope. Hemp is a fiber that os legally sold in the US. Marijuana is a drug. They are similar genetically, but not as genetically similar as Clinton and Romney are.

You defeat your own argument by bringing up lens flare. JJ Abrams says it adds immediacy by implying that the cameraman was actually there, filming it, and didn't have enough time to set up the camera to avoid it. What Abrams misses is that making it self-consciously "filmed" reduces immediacy, because it means that the audience isn't there. In Babylon 5, the lens flare was mostly restricted to outer space, not inside the station, and the effect was doubly powerful. Lens flare in space said "you are not here", and the viewer was consequently deeper immersed in the illusion of being trapped in a tin can floating in space.

It annoyed me more than it should that the one epilogue was the sailing to the west bit, and there was a modern braided synthetic rope in the rigging. Because elves are sophisticated.

Muscle-memory has a lot to answer for in typos. Quite often I end up typing "ing" for words ending -ing, eg withing, or "and" instead of -an.

The Bill of Rights is a list of things the federal government isn't allowed to do. It doesn't put any limitations on you, me or Dice. You and I can do bad things, but we can't violate the Bill of Rights because the B of R is a set of restrictions on the feds.

Therefore, ONLY big government can violate your Constitutional rights. Businesses can make you mad, they can provide'poor customer service, but only government can violate your Constitutional rights. The reason for this? Because only government can send men with guns to enforce their will upon. Comcast you can simply cancel, and get Dish or Verizon instead.

I had accidentally looked at 2013 rather than 2014. The average for 2013 was 7.5%. BLS says November 2004 was 5.4%, not 5.5% - close enough. If we're trying to compare this year to ten years ago, looking at just November only is a bit misleading, though.

For 2014:
Jan 6.6
Feb 6.7
Mar 6.7
Apr 6.3
May 6.3
Jun 6.1
Jul 6.2
Aug 6.1
Sep 5.9
Oct 5.8
Nov 5.8

That's a very interesting perspective.

I'd say that the fundamental, defining difference between conservative thinking vs progressive is that while progressives say "let's change things for the better" conservatives say "don't throw the baby out with the bath water". Conservatives think America is basically pretty good, progressives think it needs it be "fundamentally transformed", as Obama put it. Progressives say "we need to do something" (and proposal X is something, so we need to do it). Conservatives think we shouldn't lose sight of the principles that once made this the greatest country on earth.

If you belief, based on the news you see, that the place is falling apart, then indeed "we need to do something" (liberalism) is a reasonable response. If you believe life is pretty good, and slowly getting better, then you should stick with what's been working (conservatism). So I'd come to the opposite conclusion as you.

If having more women in nursing and more men in programming is a terrible, horrible thing, then we have to do something about it. If black people can never succeed, if it's unimaginable that any black person could ever be a judge, a mayor, or a senator, then we need to do something about that. On the other hand, if black people can be judges, mayors, senators, and even president of the United States, then all the liberal progressivism is unnecessary, and indeed their complaints of being "kept down by the man" are just whining, excuses. If the society isn't basically racist, then Al Sharpton is out of a job. Progressivism REQUIRES big problems. If you don't believe there are big problems everywhere you look, you have no interest in liberals' big "solutions".

Personally, I think some things could be improved. Liberals do a pretty good job at identifying the problems. However, they all-too-often fall into the trap of "we have to do something, and proposal X is something, so we have to do proposal X". Conservatives are hesitant to change things, so they don't screw things up. Perhaps the ideal would be for liberals to set the agenda of which problems we want to solve this year, then for conservatives beancounters to get out their calculators and figure out which proposed solutions have worked well elsewhere or in the past, and which ones are economically feasible. So the liberals force the conservatives to do SOMETHING, and the conservatives ensure that the SOMETHING has a reasonable chance of working, and without making us bankrupt.

And the only reason the risk is higher for longer flights is because, well, they're longer, so there's more time for something to possibly go wrong.

Every flight consists of at least three phases : take-off, cruise and landing. The large majority of airplane crashes occur in take-off and landing phases, and relatively small numbers in cruise (some while taxiing too, but they're mostly survivable - airframe damage only).

If you re-work the statistics in terms of take-off, cruise and landing, then the numerical advantage the long distance flights have in terms of deaths per passenger-kilometre decreases a lot, leaving flying rather more comparable to long-distance train travel. Both still considerably ahead of driving, even if you neglect all the starts and stops of most road journeys.

There's a reason that airlines indirectly quote the deaths per passenger-kilometre figure - it makes them look better. Deaths per passenger journey wouldn't be anything like so good. (still relatively good, but not as good.)

> The jobless? The disenfranchised? The dispossessed and everyone else who loves to lick Obama's boot?

Yes, them. Or are you COMPLETELY ignorant of history?

At what other time in history could people take two or three years off work and collect unemployment benefits? Have a look at a picture or film of a low-income or rural area from a hundred years ago. Note the large number of children sick from hunger-related disease. Then drive through a modern low-income housing project. Note all the 22 inch rims.

It's never incorrect to say "perhaps we could make things better". To say "things were better when people starved to death as opposed to today, when they might need to buy the generic-brand cheese with their EBT card" is outrageous. It just makes you look utterly ignorant.

Or were you referring to today versus ten years ago? If your idea of history is the last ten years, then you're correct. In 2004, 5% of people were unemployed. Today, it's 7.5%.

Hint hint: guns go through the air all day long by accident.

[Citation needed].

To the best of my knowledge, there's never been a problem with carrying knives, clubs and all sorts of other weapons on a plane as long as they're in hold baggage. The only time it would be an issue would be if you carried the weapon in your carry-on baggage or your pocket. And I simply do not believe that happens by accident. Anyone in any of the parts of the world where I routinely travel (not America, granted, but that's not even 5% of the world), simply would not own a gun to travel with it, accidentally or not.

Are you seriously proposing that people accidentally leave a gun in their carry on baggage, coat pocket or wherever (0.01% of passengers, if not fewer) AND the X-Ray and metal detector systems also fail to pick it up (say 5%, for relatively large chunks of metal).

Frankly, I simply do not believe you.

What gender is she?

Oh, another commentator who can't even be bothered to RTFA. What the fuck is wrong with people these decades?

Didn't anyone ASK this supposed person what they wanted?

[SIGH]- it is plainly too much effort for people to RTFA any more. The non-human person in question has clearly exhibited distress at her current conditions of incarceration and exhibition.