Many credit unions support shared branching which lets allows you to cash checks, make deposits, etc at other credit union in the same network. I've lived in a city that has no branches of my actual credit union for 5 years now and honestly it doesn't bother me that much (although I will probably get a new account at one of the local credit unions soon).

I realize he put it in a rather asinine way, but I too was shocked to hear that they called firewire obsolete. The line between pro and amateur continues to blur as technology gets cheaper and easier to use. Sweetwater Music has three pages of firewire audio interfaces, for example.

I realize this isn't quite what you're looking for, but bandcamp offers music in in basically any format imaginable, including FLAC. It's mostly smaller artists, but there are a few big names (like Amanda Palmer, for example).

It's still an option, but most pretty much every employer offers you the option of having the money directly deposited. I myself haven't received an actual paper check in years. Still, many lower wage workers still receive paper checks and take them to those god awful check cashing places *shudder*

He also complains about how he doesn't like the fact that currency isn't backed by precious metals and has a whole video devoted to how the grades given by Pima Community College are "unconstitutional". I realize the extreme paranoia he exhibits could come from the fringes of either political wing, but those two things seem like memes he picked up from Tea Party folks.

Mod parent up. You don't get to put words in the mouths of your ideological opponents

The WHO appears to disagree:

A large increase in the incidence of thyroid cancer has occurred among people who were young children and adolescents at the time of the accident and lived in the most contaminated areas of Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine. This was due to the high levels of radioactive iodine released from the Chernobyl reactor in the early days after the accident....In Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine nearly 5 000 cases of thyroid cancer have now been diagnosed to date among children who were aged up to 18 years at the time of the accident.

source

I'm sick of people on both sides of this debate exaggerating. No, it didn't mean "instant radioactive death for ten thousand years", but pretending like it was a minor mix up and no one got hurt is simply silly and irresponsible.

No. The preamble is all very interesting, but if it's not listed as one of the powers of Congress, the President, or the Supremes, then they can't do it Constitutionally.

Fine. Article I, Section 8, Clause 1:

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;

I realize we could have a debate all day about what exactly those powers are (lots of very smart people have done just that and nonetheless disagreed), but it doesn't help anyone to pretend that this kind of power had no constitutional basis at all or that state legislatures are somehow automatically more competent than their federal counterparts.

The Feds are, however, responsible for "[promoting] the general Welfare" (right after providing for the common defense in the preamble) and have the power to "regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes" (Article I, Section 8, Clause 3), which sounds to me like they do in fact have the responsibility and power to redistribute wealth/take care of the poor.

And this is exactly why she isn't electable. Palin might be able to muster the resources to pull off a Christine O'Donnell-esque upset in the primaries, but it will only lead to a Christine O'Donnell-esque embarrassment in the general election because you can bet that the majority of people who didn't vote for her the primary sure as hell aren't going to vote for her in the general election either. Some might vote instead for Obama, some might vote for a third party candidate, and some might just not vote at all, but pretty much no one is going to vote for her. Winning the presidential election generally means being able to win over the people who didn't vote for you in the primary and attracting support from independent voters. As far as I can tell, Palin isn't able to do either. She exerts a huge influence on a sizable group of people, but she's managed to piss off a much larger group of people on both the left (me) and the right (parent).

Ridiculous copyright length. This means you have to pay again and again for stuff that's become part of culture, i.e. as I mentioned in a previous posting quite a while back, in my view the media companies get to have a stranglehold on your memories, on nostalgia. Stuff may not be great but may be nostalgic. Why should I have to pay (again!) to watch/use it? Why should people get to be rewarded for something that may not be good, but only be enjoyable for a reason not having anything to do with its 'real' value?

I agree that the copyright length has become ridiculous in a lot of countries (especially the US), but last time I checked, the Pirate Bay hosts torrents regardless of how old the content is. For example, I used to watch a Halloween special called Mr. Boogedy every year from a tape my parents had made from the Disney channel. It became a cherished tradition for my family. Eventually the tape wore out and I was unable to find a copy for sale, so I found it on online. The costs of producing DVDs of the program probably would mean that it wouldn't make much profit for Disney, but they also didn't want to release it into the public domain. My view of TPB would be way different if that's what most of the traffic there was about.

Instead, a lot of it is people who want movies that just came out on DVD (or may even still be in theaters), music that was just released, the newest version of a particular piece of software, etc, which explains why "Scott Pilgrim vs The World" (which came out on DVD earlier this month) currently has 9305 seeds on pirate bay, but the best "Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer" torrent only has 199 seeds.

Copyright does need some major reform, but people who make money selling adspace on a site that makes it real easy (yes, yes, I know the actual files aren't hosted there) for people to download new music and movies for free are poor spokespeople for such a movement. Don't forget that the people who make money off of torrent trackers are middlemen who don't justly compensate the content creators, kinda like the record companies and movie studios that they're so eager to critcize.

Gaaah! Where are mod points when I need them!? Parent is absolutely right. I would be furious if I were one of the students who hadn't cheated. Think some of the students cheated? Fine, go pursue them and take the appropriate action, but don't do this bullshit where you "challenge" the students to stick by their work. The only people with something to lose in this situation are the honest students who might be falsely identified as cheaters and who will have to take the midterm AGAIN (and possibly get a lower grade because of it). The cheaters themselves are in a completely no pressure, win-win situation. If I were in the class and had not cheated, I would be sorely tempted to confess out of fear. And seriously? A test bank from a publisher for a senior-level class? What kind of bullshit is this? IMO the professor deserves some disciplinary action for conducting his course in a manner that makes cheating incredibly easy and also for punishing all of his students who didn't cheat.

I fail to see how this is any different than Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln, which Disney brought to the World's Fair in 1964. I suppose you have the added element of a human actor working alongside the animatronic, but I didn't see anything interesting. Mostly I just found the thing creepy...

Mod parent up. A post from cayenne8 somewhere above extolled the values of "[learning] how [women] think" by listening to the PUA-types. After many years of being frustrated, I tried this approach. I read "The Game", started dressing a certain way, used the tips from the book and all in all tried to "alpha" myself up. To a certain extent it worked. I was actually able to talk to girls at bars and parties and get them to laugh at my jokes and succeed at getting some numbers and some casual making out only an hour or two after meeting them, but I noticed that as soon as I let the "character" I was playing slip, they would quickly become uninterested. At first this frustrated me a lot, but then I realized that this was perfectly natural since what I was doing was deceiving them. The way I was acting and presenting myself wasn't me trying to put my best foot forward (which we all do and is actually a good thing), it was me trying to convince these women that I was a completely different kind of guy. Fast forward a few months to a blind date I went on. I try my usual spiel and it seems to hold her attention, but she doesn't seem very sure of me. Then the facade slips, but this time the girl actually likes me better when I'm just being my usual, nerdy self. Fast forward to now and I have a loving, year-long relationship that isn't going anywhere because it's based on the fact that we actually, you know, like each other and have shared interests rather than her liking some persona I'm trying to adopt.

BenEnglishAtHome's story about his friend's wife might well be a similar phenomena. Just like I was pretending to be a boisterous, loud, type a, alpha male, his friend's wife could have been pretending to have a much bigger sexual appetite than she really did because she thought that all women needed to do that to attract men and when the facade came off, no one was happy. I guess what I'm trying to say is, it's a good idea to dress nicely, be interesting and generally try to be the most attractive person you can be, but that trying to play psychological tricks on women (which is, after all, what the PUAs are pretty much advocating) might work for shot term liaisons, but it will never be the foundation of a good relationship and you may find out that she's putting on just as much of a show as you are.

Please don't make light of measles. It is deeply insensitive. You might try being positive instead. Give people the cure, and enjoy your instant celebrity. But beating up on people who have the answers, for no other reason than you can't accept that your child was born the way they were, is just plain evil. The people of India didn't ask for 125,565 of their people to die last year, but it happened and they're coping with that. Why on earth would you choose to make it harder than it already is by spreading junk science and FUD about the vaccine? Your passions could be towards assisting the people DYING EVERY FUCKING DAY FROM A COMPLETELY PREVENTABLE DISEASE, but instead you spend it on indulging your paranoia. And that's just sad.