I think you're overthinking matters.

Of course, there's no way to be sure why people in the bible belt tend to be religious, but living here most of my life has given me some clues.

We've got 3.5 million people in Oklahoma. Half of those live in Oklahoma City and Tulsa. The other half lives in smaller towns or rural areas.

The type of people who were able to survive and thrive here in the early days are the type of people that tend towards religion; hard-working, self-reliant, conservative types. Church was often the only social contact they had in a typical week. Education beyond the very basics wasn't readily available and generally deemed unnecessary. Hospitals were few and far between. Law enforcement was negligible - you protected your property and family yourself. Flooding, tornadoes, drought, violence, crime, and sickness would take loved ones and destroy the efforts of labor, sometimes taking entire towns. Then add the dust bowl and the depopulation of the western part of the state. If the only place to turn for help is God, then that's where people will turn.

Our current leaders are only a generation or two behind those events. We have access to good education and hospitals, and the towns are larger now, but attitudes change over generations. Give us time.

Kansas is a bit older, but its history just means that people were in the position that early Oklahomans were in for longer. Kansas didn't really begin to modernize until around the same time as Oklahoma. I suspect the same applies to much of Texas and Nebraska, although Texas has some older, larger cities where religion isn't necessarily the norm.

As far as Pat's comments (or Falwell's concerning Katrina), that's just the same old bullshit warmed over and re-served that religious leaders have been spouting forever. The oldest example of that I can think of is the obvious one - Sodom (there is archaeological evidence that it was a real city). It's unlikely to attract any followers, but it works on the believers. I doubt any of the mouthpieces will use the "mysterious ways" line - they'll just get people to pray for our poor, damp and bedraggled selves and play it off like it's a bigger deal than it is (while there is some major damage and loss of life, the vast majority of us are fine and we have systems in place to deal with it. Like I said before, this isn't exactly a rare occurrence.).

And those guys that paint messages on their fenceline? Yeah, I dunno about them. You see that more in Kansas than Oklahoma. My personal theory is that it's because the evangelical churches have flourished here, with their doctrine on "spreading the word." You know the old saying - the loudest aren't necessarily the majority.

Exactly.

I personally don't think using it to "organize" your talk is very effective, but it's great for props. How much CPU time is used in a particular part of your code? Put up a graph showing it. It gets everyone on the same page and lets them discuss it. Throw up a diagram and use a pointer to direct attention to how the different areas interact. Discussing a method of rendering surface normals in a 3D model? Put up images that compare the results side by side. I've seen it used very effectively.

If you just put up slides that show your main points, you're wasting everyone's time and attention. Take a class on giving speeches, learn how to do it right, and stop distracting your audience. The only person that needs to see your outline is you.

When I was in the Air Force, I regularly received Powerpoint attachments in my email to tell me things like "Softball game against Services Squadron on Tuesday at 5pm!" with tons of clipart and whatnot. They were always from officers. They must have a Powerpoint course at the Air Force Academy. I decided that while Powerpoint was a useful tool, officers should be banned from using it.

Oklahoma gets flooded every decade or so. Some parts even more often (the next town over floods almost every time it rains... it's a poor town so people can't afford to move).

It's because of a mixture of terrain and weather patterns. Large parts of the state are fairly flat with wide, shallow river basins. The Arkansas river near here is very wide and usually only a couple feet deep - you can walk across it and not get your shirt wet. People take their 4x4s out on it and drive between the sand bars. Canoeing on it involves getting out and dragging your canoe every half a mile or so. So when we get a lot of rain, which happens every few years, the water has nowhere to go.

It's no different than tornadoes or drought. You live here, you get used to it. Unless you live in Moore, which is rapidly becoming a running gag around here.

You can blame God for it if you like (or Obama, he gets blamed for everything around here), but that's like blaming God for earthquakes in Tokyo and California, or hurricanes in the Caribbean. The "ways" aren't exactly mysterious. You live in the great plains, you're going to get floods and tornadoes.

Space weapons aren't illegal. You just can't have orbital weapon platforms for weapons of mass destruction (think nukes).

It's perfectly legal for any country to send up a satellite that could attack other satellites or space stations. It's even fine to put one up there that uses conventional warheads or kinetic weapons against targets on earth.

It's also perfectly legal to put up weapon platforms that are capable of launching nukes from space - it's just not legal to arm them with actual warheads.

The reason we don't do much of any of that is because a) we have no reason to attack anyone in space (yet), b) we can shoot down satellites from earth just fine, and c) we can attack other places on earth more efficiently and with less cost without orbital platforms.

Unless you're testing the aerodynamics and other flight capabilities of a reusable robotic lander.

But yeah, that's probably not it. That wouldn't be classified.

My guess? They're testing some kind of new spy tech.

I don't have any sympathy for the Confederacy. My state wasn't around then, and Indian Territory (which fought for the south) wasn't actually the precursor to Oklahoma (it just took up the same land). That said, there is a very sound basis for the requirement for slavery.

Slavery being a state-by-state option doesn't work. A person has rights, even non-citizens, that slaves do not. The US Constitution (and both federal and state laws) had to bend over backwards to make a viable legal framework for this.

That's because the status of a person isn't a state issue. It's a federal one. The federal government determines if you're a citizen, a resident legal or illegal alien, or a nonresident foreign national. Crossing state lines does not change your status.

By requiring slavery, the status of "slave" became equal in all states.

There's also the notion that since slaves were property, a slaveowner would be able to take his property with him anywhere in the country.

The general framework of the constitution would have worked well for the Confederacy, although I'd be surprised if (had they won) they wouldn't have made amendments shortly after the war. They were a bit pressed for time when they adopted it. State rights would probably have been a key issue.

Also, from a practical standpoint, given how much trouble slavery had caused for the US government, the CS probably wanted to avoid unnecessary infighting. And there's the point that no state was actually required to sign on with the Confederacy - if Georgia, for instance, wanted to be its own country, it was certainly free to do so.

1) Your idea of a republic doesn't resemble any actual government in the world. Idealism is nice, I suppose, but that's just not the way things work. Also, I've met quite a few libertarians who believe (as did pre-civil war Democrats) that the government shouldn't be responsible for public infrastructure, such as roads. The free market - that magic bullet that fixes everything - will take care of it.

2) I was not arguing that the government would force addicts to seek treatment, only that libertarians would offer no assistance in doing so. And from what I've seen, many libertarians fully believe that no, they should not help addicts.

3) You saying this doesn't happen? Also,

4) The idea that those with money shouldn't be responsible for those without money (at least insofar as taxation is concerned) is one of the core principles of libertarianism. Anything else would be wealth redistribution. To quote one libertarian I know personally, "that's what churches are for."

Just as an aside, I do generally agree with the libertarian ideas on social issues. Too bad the rest of the Republican party doesn't.

It's a complicated issue, but a lot of it boils down to what level of government is doing it.

In the case of municipal ISPs, it's a local government. Local governments provide all kinds of services to the public as a matter of course. Around here, they provide electricity, water, a library, police, fire, trash collection, sewer, landfill, permitting, zoning, street maintenance, free WIFI (which sucks), and all kinds of other things.

The federal government can't provide most of those things, by law. States can, depending on their constitutions, and local governments can depending on state laws and their own charters. This is basically what the "states' rights" debate is all about. It's been going on since this country was founded, and will likely continue until the Canadians finish their war machines, stop acting so polite to everyone, and take over the world (at which point we'll get decent health care and maple syrup).

Health care is contentious because most proposals for an actual decent healthcare system involve taking our current federal health care system (medicare) and extending it to everyone (it currently only covers people of retirement age). Medicare is considered "socialist" by a lot of groups on the right, but since it benefits the elderly, and the elderly vote, it won't be going away. Extending it out would mean more power in the hands of the federal government (a big no-no for the libertarians) and higher taxes (a big no-no for Republicans in general). Plus it would shake up the medical industry, which pulls in money hands-over-fist with the current system and doesn't want to see it change (and can afford lobbyists).

You have to understand that most people here don't actually understand what "socialist" means. The older generation grew up with cold-war era anti-communist propaganda, so "socialism" has bad connotations among a lot of the population. The right and their media mouthpieces use the word all the time in manners that Europeans (who actually do understand what socialism is) would find baffling. It's the nature of politics.

Religion is the traditional opiate of the masses, and has better lobbyists.

That's not how libertarians work.

It's more like:

1) Abolish laws that make drugs illegal, thus saving money on prisons and law enforcement, and lower taxes accordingly
2) Let addicted people pay for their own treatment, "entitlement" and whatnot
3) Wealthy Americans install better security or live in gated communities, paid for by the savings in taxes
4) Who cares about everyone else? If they were important, they'd have money.

What we're seeing here is akin to evolution.

If you've been around for a while, you've seen how ads have gotten consistently worse since the beginning. Adblocking is a normal response.

Remember, spam is a type of advertisement. You don't see very many people advocating it. Telemarketing is another. Hardly anyone cries about the do not call list.

Google's approach (tracking aside) is the right one. Their ads generally don't bother people. Contrast that with the last few years of video ads (with sound!) or the "darken the page and load some stupid thing in the middle" thing that's getting so popular.

Advertisers have to deal with the fact that being annoying is going to lose them customers. This is a good thing. Without people adblocking to keep them in check, the internet would be unusable.

You may find this interesting reading.

In old versions of UNIX (not open source, but only because there was no such distinction at the time - the source was very much available) the compiler would add code to any program you tried to compile named 'login'. You could look at the source for the login program all you want and never see the backdoor. You also would have a hard time finding the code in the C compiler.

And this was just something Ken Thompson did to prove that he could. Imagine what the NSA would be capable of.

I don't need to convert thousandths of an inch to anything because I'm effectively not measuring the same things with them.

For instance, I would measure a table leg in inches, but never need to convert that to thousandths. I might measure the amount I need to trim off a tenon to fit into a mortise in thousandths (I generally don't - I hit it with a plane or chisel a few times and test the fit again - but that's down to style) - but again, I don't need to convert that anywhere.

That's kind of the point - metric units are a "one size fits all" solution. For a woodworker, it makes sense to have units around the size of feet and inches. For a farmer, yards, acres, etc. make a lot more sense. You use the units that most closely match the areas you need. I could certainly do all my woodworking using fractions of a yard, or a farmer could measure his field in square feet, but it'd be silly when there are much more appropriate units available.

I'm certainly not suggesting that it's impossible to do common tasks in the metric system. What I am suggesting is that they're not using units tailored for the purpose they are being applied to.

What's funny (only marginally, but still) is what I've stated above; they're using units that are inappropriate for their purpose. Measuring lake volume in acre-feet makes a lot of sense for the people that use that unit; using cubic meters seems downright silly. It's like seeing someone climb mountains in ballet slippers.

Why?

Since when is Google primarily a power utility?

What Google products (other than datacenters, which it builds where power is already available) would benefit from gen IV reactors? Hint: you're never going to get a phone with a thorium reactor built into it.

I'm certainly not against development of smaller reactors - lead-cooled fast reactors have a lot of promise for powering remote areas, for instance - but why would it make sense for Google to invest in them rather than technology that directly impacts its business?

Bonaparte built batteries for better battles!

I'm going to go lie down now, that was bad.