And this doesn't even get into the mysterious ability of senior NSA officials in the Obama administration to lie to Congress with no consequences whatsoever.

Lie about playing baseball on steroids, and you're in a world of shit. Lie about grave Constitutional matters, and you're in good company.

I still don't see the problem at hand. Is it so inconvenient to carry a few different credit cards that it's worth inventing some Rube Goldberg contraption to copy them onto one device?

Would you do it if they were reading comic books about war?

If the US DoD were spending enormous amounts of money developing those comic books with the express purpose of making war look as glamorous and consequence-free as possible, then yes, I would still let my kids read them, because I disagree with intellectual censorship in any form, at any age. But you can bet I'd talk with them about what they were reading, who wrote it, and why they might have written it.

It's a grayer area than that. Blasting Nazis on Mars or whatever was one thing, but the US Department of Defense now throws millions of dollars at game developers, tasking them with making war look like just another extreme sport.

IMHO (and in the opinion of most credible researchers) even these games are not directly psychologically damaging to young people. But I don't like the message they are engineered to send. It sounds like this father has found a great way to give his kids an inside look at the game they're really being trained to play.

That's pre-9/11 talk, citizen. Now pick up that can!

Everyone else is getting contracts which require them to sign away their works forever, sign away any future works in the same genre, sign away all electronic rights, etc... for a $5K advance on a one or two book contract.

Exactly. Somehow, those predatory publisher contracts never come up in these threads about how evil Amazon is.

And the barrel riding was supposed to be a leisurely ride down the river

Yeeeeah, we'll get right on that. Everyone from the studio execs to the Oscar committee will positively leap with glee when we release our new $200,000,000 holiday-season spectacular, THE HOBBIT, PART II: A LEISURELY RIDE DOWN THE RIVER.

Pro tip: Don't quit your day job to move to Hollywood.

"Why are scientists continuing to take chances with uranium?"
"Why are scientists continuing to take chances with high voltage?"
"Why are scientists continuing to take chances with dimethyl mercury?"

Because science.

Also, there's no reason to obsess over the presence of a few virus particles in a jar on a shelf somewhere, if we have the source code in the form of its gene sequence. In that case we'll be able to resynthesize the virus at our leisure, at some point in the not-too-distant future.

And if we don't already have the gene sequence in hand, well, that's a problem in itself.

Not too familiar with Einstein's career and the massive amount of "consensus"-based opposition he had to deal with, I take it.

When you own the CIA, you're a little bit more responsible than the people in Congress who don't know anything about the supposed "threat" but what they're told.

Not everything has to be a Federal matter.

Probably so. Mahatma Gandhi advocated fighting the Nazis with a one-two knockout punch of surrender and mass suicide. Mother Theresa was a galactic douche with PR talents that you might expect from the love child of Oprah Winfrey and Gandalf. And FDR, well, about the best you can say about FDR is that he made World War II look like a lucky break for the US economy.

Woz? Um, well, I heard he was caught doing 115 MPH in a Prius. That's about the only bad thing anyone has ever said about him. Personally, I would have given him a trophy rather than a ticket, but that's probably why I'm not a cop.

Is that the sequel to "Stephen Wolfram Is a Big Fat Idiot"?

It will work by making the wearer look like a schizophrenic who's off his meds. Here's the patent drawing: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/47/Dt2wrr.jpg

"Murder."