The oath for Federal Officials:

"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.

That makes things pretty clear.

Either communications (phone, email, twitter, etc.) are private and protected by the Constitution...or they are not. It cannot be both ways. If they are protected by the constitution...and the government, through its agency, the NSA, refuses to uphold the constitution, then a constitutional crisis is upon us...and the way forward on that is bleak since the constitution has been the basis for the existence of the United States for the last 2+ centuries. Here, we have the government essentially saying that their needs entitle it to disregard the constitution that they are sworn to uphold. Probably the only way to really resolve this is to arrest and bring the responsible officials into court on charges of treason...and it's not clear who or what would do the arresting and prosecution.

Western Washington has millions of people living in slide zones, living on old slide deposits, living in front of future slides. It's easy to point to one active slide area and say 'damn fools shouldn't have lived there' but the reality is that we live in the shadow of glaciers from the recent past that resulted in widespread deposits of soupy soil. Western Washington is also a high-hazard area for huge earthquakes, as are many parts of California. Do people expect everyone to move? Or what about Oklahoma or Kansas in the path of tornadoes? Or Minnesotans subject to stinging blizzards and arctic chill? Or...? You get the idea. You try and identify the hazards, mitigate them, and warn of them. In the case of the Oso landslide, there never should have been clearcut logging above the slide-prone area, there should have been monitoring of the water levels, and there should have been drainage mitigations installed years ago...as there have been in many other similar areas including just up the road from Oso. So...don't tell people to move until you're prepared to tell Californians or Oklahomans or English or Japanese or whoever to move.

Might there be emergency water supplies on the rafts? Perhaps they have small solar-powered desalinators on the raft as emergency equipment (many do)? Perhaps it rained and the passengers collected rainwater?

The calculations show the southern flight path and consequently a water landing. But...how can they be so certain that no one survived? Isn't it possible that the airplane made a controlled glide into a non-powered water landing and that the life rafts deployed and allowed some of the passengers to survive? That has happened before. Admittedly this is very unlikely but can anyone at this point say it is impossible as the Malaysian government is doing?

"...pointing to a future stalked by floods, drought, conflict and economic damage if carbon emissions go untamed."

assuming for argument's sake that warming is occurring, why would/should the impacts be all bad? A warming climate should make vast areas of the planet more habitable, reduce heating and shelter requirements, increase areas for agriculture and allow increased yields, etc. Why wouldn't there also be some benefits?

"Scientists and government representatives will meet in Yokohama, Japan, from tomorrow to hammer out a 29-page summary.

Is this meeting 'science' or 'government?' It cannot be both.

"The work comes six months after the first volume in the long-awaited Fifth Assessment Report declared scientists were more certain than ever that humans caused global warming."

The alleged scientists have allegedly been 'more certain than ever' for at least 10 years. In fact, anyone who doubts is usually referred to as a 'denier.' Are a greater percentage of the 'scientists' in agreement or are those in agreement merely firmer in their allegedly scientific convictions?

"Seas will creep up by 26cm-82cm by 2100."

The global absolute sea level has increased by 24 cm since 1870 and disaster has not yet struck. Land use changes, buildings and cities move over time. The sea level has dropped significantly at times over the last 20 centuries and has been much higher at times during that period. For example, the ancient ports of Rome and Ephesus (two of the 5 largest Roman cities 20 centuries ago) are now high and dry. Why would we think that sea level should be a constant? The current rate of increase has been essentially constant over the last 13 decades. An increase of 26 cm in the next 9 decades is not much of a change from the present rate.

First off, no one has ever cloned an actual living elephant. Horses have been cloned by implanting a cell nucleus from a living cell in a host egg cell and then implanting that in a surrogate mother. That process results in about 1 viable embryo for every 1,000 attempts so it is hardly a sure thing. In TFA however, they are talking about taking a nucleus from a 43,000-year-old frozen cell and implanting that in an egg cell of another species and then implanting the hoped for embryo into a living elephant. There are not that many elephants to try this on worldwide, most of those are in zoos, and even normal reproduction of these elephants is problematic with the population plummeting due to a lack of fertility. The bottom line is, don't expect to see the wooly mammoth at your local petting zoo anytime soon.

The guy is just not tech-oriented. He was not excited about cool stuff that tech can do to make lives better. No, he was excited about making money...and that's the problem with Microsoft today. One gets the impression that 'making money...and lots of it' is the main focus of all of the top execs. Tech is different. It has to excite...to be cool...to stir passion...to truly change people's lives for the better...and the money will follow. Jobs was that way. Google is that way. Microsoft still makes all of their money selling Windows. When Windows was new, it was bringing a gui user interface to millions of computers that did not have that...as was Apple with their Mac. That was a transforming thing. Now, though, gui is expected. Everything has that. It's not new. People still buy and use Windows, though, because 'Windows' is a standard that gives people a familiar, comfortable experience...except that now it no longer does. So, Microsoft has trashed their own ersatz 'standard,' tossed the compatibility 'chair' out of the window, and embraced a lot of me-too mobile stuff that everyone else is already doing longer and better. Those are the actions of execs who are trying to milk more money out of their captive cows and don't give a second thought about actually doing something that transforms peoples lives for the better.

Those 'conservatives' at the meeting were really agitating for Apple to make decisions based on their short-term ROI rather than their long-term ROI. Short-term decisions are necessary but a healthy company rarely does them. For example, many companies, including Apple, spend a lot of money on research. Research costs a lot of money, has an uncertain return on the expenditure, and a lot of time passes before that return is ever realized. From a short-term perspective, companies should never spend money on research but should instead just pass all of the money on to their shareholders. Yet, if companies operated in that way, they would go out of business fairly quickly. So...that is the beauty of the free enterprise system. It leaves companies free to operate in what they see as their overall best long-term interests and often, those are as Apple's Tim Cook presented them rather than as the 'conservative' shareholders wanted. When shareholders gain too much influence over the daily operations and decisions of the company, it usually leads to the company's demise as shareholders seek to transfer cash assets to their pockets and leave the company limping along and struggling to continue. However, that just means that the company's competitors pick up the business that the wounded company can no longer compete for. Ultimately, it's a self-correcting system, as long as there is a competitive marketplace with no one company grown so large as to monopolize all of the business.

The landline telephones in the old USSR didn't hang up when the user put the handset back in the cradle and so people routinely put a pillow over them.

Okay, I'll burn what's left of my karma and point out the reason why we can't get along...because Microsoft HAS NOT CHANGED. They are still the price-gouging, competition stifling, astro-turfing, anti open standards, monopolizing enterprise that they have always been. What HAS changed is the rise of Mac OS X, iPad, Google Chrome, etc. that have created some real alternatives to Microsoft.

From their point of view, people are nothing but cogs in their machinery of state to be used and abused as necessary to keep the machinery turning. A person has no more value to them than a horse or a cow...maybe even less. Moreover, this is not new. The North Koreans were doing the same thing to pows during the Korean War, many of who never returned. They invented 'brainwashing' which was basically continuous torture until the target was mentally broken. They are still holding the USS Pueblo that they illegally seized from the US Navy in 1968. The captain of the Pueblo provided graphic descriptions of the torture he witnessed while held in captivity. President Bush termed them part of the 'Axis of Evil.' They recently threatened us with thermonuclear devastation and have repeatedly launched missiles over international waters. The UN is still technically at war with the North Koreans. The latest UN report on atrocities is just another in a mountain of paper describing how wicked people do wicked things.

Slashdot has been plowing ahead with their 'beta' site despite the obvious elimination of functionality for reading and responding to comments and the predictable complaints from /* members. The comments and discussion are, after all, the ONLY reason for slashdot to even exist. They say they are 'listening' but they obviously are choosing not to 'hear' and so we have to think that that is intentional. Maybe we should consider that the problem with the 'classic' (gotta love how that word characterizes everything) site is NOT that it has an unattractive appearance, uses too many resources, doesn't display enough ads, or is too difficult to support going forward but that it does the discussions too well. You provide a forum for intelligent people to share thoughts and ideas and...guess what...intelligent people share thoughts and ideas...and for some people (governments, scientologists, corporate pr departments, etc.) that is a problem. There are very, very, few sites that offer the ability to comment and share interactive comments with others in a construction and information fashion...and slashdot is one. We should consider that the 'beta' site is just another way of snuffing out one of the last few flickering lights of informative discussion on the internet.

People need more substance in their social interaction than what is provided to them by using facebook. Eventually many facebook users will do what this user did and close their facebook account in favor of real conversations and face-to-face meetings.

"Hitler's armies famously used the slogan "Gott mit uns" ("God with us") on their uniforms, and had a cozy relationship with the Vatican."

Hitler brutally suppressed Catholics in Germany during the years of his 'third reich.' Moreover, the Nazis sent thousands of Catholic priests to the concentration camps in Poland. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_victims http://www.catholic.com/magazine/articles/catholic-martyrs-of-the-holocaust