reasonably lucrative work

I could understand Fiorina just wanting the attention - but dear God, I hope she doesn't need the money. That $20 million severance package would last most ordinary people a lifetime.

I think her target market is Republicans who want a viable female challenger to Hilary. Realistically, she's setting herself up for Sec. of Commerce, or maybe, if she's extremely lucky and does moderately well in the primaries, VP. I am no fan of hers for all of the obvious reasons, but she is a rocket scientist compared to Bachmann and Palin.

Then why is it exclusively conservatives who use the incorrect term?

I also mulled laying off gambling before I went broke.

Therefore I am, morally speaking, thin and rich.

Which makes sense. Sea level rise in the last 50 years has amounted to about 4 inches, probably not enough to make drains run backwards.

The way sea level rise will make itself known isn't through changes in day to day phenomena, but in exceptional phenomena like storm surge flooding. This is a place where inches may well matter. People plan around concepts like a "ten year flood" or a "hundred year flood", and this creates a sharp line on the map where there is no sharp line in reality. Depending where on the domain of the bell curve their chosen planning horizon is, a few inches could turn a ten year flood into a five year flood, which has immense practical implications.

When people way that there is nothing intrinsically worse about a globe that's four degrees hotter they're right. But *change* that undermines human plans represents a big challenge. Change also represents a big challenge to species populations that can't relocate on the timescale of change.

She can't hear reality over the roar of the hundred million dollars she was paid for halving the shareholder value of HP. Clearly she isn't deluded; she just lives in an alternate reality from the rest of us.

Not precisely correct from an anatomical standpoint. The rocks in question are superior to the c1 vertebra.

Then why isn't it already used for mass murder? It's apparently widely legal.

Having fun isn't necessarily stupid. Having fun with flamboyantly dangerous things isn't necessarily stupid. It's endangering unwilling bystanders that's stupid.

Some people like to build and shoot powerful crossbows, or even replicas of medieval siege weapons. These are extremely dangerous and useless things. The dangerous power of a trebuchet to throw an upright piano 150 yards is part of the charm.

But a trebuchet is something that takes certain amount of thought and sacrifice to obtain and use. This flamethrower thing is more like a powerful handgun. There's been a recent fad for ridiculously overpowered handguns, which pack superfluously fatal power into a convenient, affordable form factor. The recent brouhaha over "armor piercing" ammunition was a side effect of a manufacturer selling a cut-down semi-automatic carbine as a "handgun", even though if you look at videos of people using them they're obviously terrible as handguns. This raised the question of whether 5.56 NATO ammunition should be regulated as "handgun ammunition", and in the end I think the decision not to was reasonablee. These aren't cop-killing or military handguns. They're extremely dangerous toys designed to get your rocks off.

There are some who'd say that because these guns are dangerous and impractical they should be banned. But I don't agree. "Impractical" isn't the same as "useless" because getting your rocks off is a legitimate use for a thing. I think people should be able to enjoy their ridiculous firearms as long as they do it at some kind of appropriate range. I also think there's a real danger though from stupid people who will go plinking in the woods with the things like they were BB guns.

That's really the only problem I have with this flamethrower, whether it's gold, chrome, or gunmetal gray. Any idiot can buy one, but it'd take someone reasonably intelligent and determined to find a place where it can be used safely. I'm not against people buying them, but I am for coming down hard on people who use them where they're a danger or public nuisance.

Well, in the end you have to ask "did he get away with it?". Or, given that he turned himself in later, "did he have some purpose in escaping that he fulfilled?"

Intelligence is a multi-dimensional phenomenon. It includes things like thinking through unintended consequences before acting that quite clever people are sometimes bad at.

Absent interference in the market by governments and/or corporations, price is determined by supply and demand, not capability. I can't think of any rational reason for anybody to interfere with the market for PDP8s, so I'm going to assume it's a free market. Although economic theory with its neat little graphs might give one the impression that it's some kind of science, the actual shape of the supply and demand graphs (and thus the equilibrium price) are determined by emotional "ugly bags of mostly water".

Scrolled down for this. I would add, "time and testing" and "testing" usually involves wide distribution. Yes, JPEG, PNG and Open Source compression libraries have had bugs, sometimes very serious ones. I still consider it some of the best code out there. I don't think being able to read the code matters. That's a red herring, unless you need to work on it. If everybody needs to work on it, it's too unfinished to be particularly good code. The only thing I've read in some of these libraries is the headers, and mostly the comments in there. It was literally self-documenting in comments the last time I looked at it. That's some good code.

That's a pretty broad exclusion to be enforceable.

Yeah Shorten is proving to be somewhat of a ... loyal... opposition. Its a messed up situation and shorten is going to get punished in the polls for this. He's already taken a big hit to his polling.

"Women and children, first". Do men and elderly have lives that are worth far less on the high-seas?

It's not a matter of what lives are subjectively or objectively worth. Their subjective value is varied and demonstrable -- I'm sorry, but my child's life means more to *ME* than that of some stranger. Their objective value differences are likewise demonstrable -- there's an entire industry based on it. Look up "actuary".

When someone who dies due to an accident, illness or by action and they have lived a full life, how can you not see the additional tragedy of lost potential on the exact same type of death of a child?