And if you want to make it exceptionally strong, you combine those techniques. "correct horse battery staple" is strong, "correcT horXe batt6ery st&ple" is heat death of universe-strong and actually not much harder to learn.

At the cost of travelling around with the keys to the kingdom. Imagine you're on vacation and you want to pop into an internet cafe and log into /. because abstinence. Except it has a keylogger/trojan that'll steal your key file and your master password. Now you've compromised your email, online bank, ebay, paypal, steam and all the other passwords that might really matter. Personally I tend to keep three:

1) My mail, because it gets all the password resets.
2) My bank, but it's using two-factor anyway.
3) My "assorted junk" password where I might lose my forum account or whatever that doesn't *really* matter.

I really try not to use the first two on an untrusted device unless I really have to, because afterwards I need to change it. In fact if I know I will need to use it I'll change it on a trusted device up front and restore it later, good memorized passwords are a pain to relearn.

Are you secretly planning to use it as a Dunning-Kruger meter and avoid all that self-rate as 10 out of 10? Because if you think you'll get anything else useful out of it, I want some of what you're smoking...

We don't need government help to prosper.

Said the guy, on the internet.

The problem is that unifying VAT and classifications basically regulating half a tax system without regulating the other half. You can tax income and you can tax consumption and there's pros and cons to both. If we're forced to lower our VAT, the other taxes would probably increase to compensate or the other way around. In addition many of the VAT brackets are made for a specific purpose because the goods are either particularly good or bad for society, like taxing books less (knowledge is good) and tobacco more (very bad for public health).

For example, around here we have about half VAT on food. If we can't keep that exception, prices would rise 10%+ on the spot. So would our taxes, in practice we'd probably funnel that money into agricultural subsidies instead which would make our food cheaper, thus creating an even more heavily protected, subsidized agriculture. And the things we want to punish, just add other taxes instead of VAT, unless the EU wants to regulate all consumption tax. That would be a tough sell, I think.

What products and services end up in what VAT bracket is sometimes controversial, for example here in Norway at the moment there's 0% VAT on buying a physical newspaper and 25% VAT on a digital newspaper, because it doesn't meet the criteria for an exemption. Also eating at a restaurant and takeaway ended up in different brackets, so if you take your burger outside and eat it on the sidewalk it's cheaper than sitting down at McDonald's. We have an exception for culture, they were probably thinking more like theater, opera, concerts but exotic dancers won at court as an "artistic performance".

Not saying it can't happen, but if it does it's a big step on the way towards a "United States of Europe".

The public is moving inexorably toward acceptance of gay marriage.

Check the historical data:

http://www.gallup.com/poll/117...

I don't honestly see Jeb as having that much a chance, at least not if it were done today.

He's winning the money primary, which is the only one that really matters.

I also think there are a lot of folks in the US that just do not want another dynasty name in there, no more Clintons or Bushes.

Well, there's the problem, isn't it? It just doesn't matter that folks in the US think when it comes to US elections. The decisions are always made for us long before election day.

Funny, that never seems ot work when the elementary school teacher also dances at the local strip club. Then it's never about non-discrimination based on job performance and all about your employer's right to not associate with you anymore. Let's face it, you've picked some attributes that have hardly anything to do with your job performance like race, religion, sex etc. and "blessed" them while other equally irrelevant attributes can get you fired on the spot.

I'm not sure why you need to put "forced" in quotes. If you're a white supremacist running a self-owned bakery and wouldn't serve a black customer voluntarily, then clearly it's involuntary aka forced. As forced as the health and safety regulations and paying your employees minimum wage I guess, but it's something the government tells you that you must do. Now I know certain libertarians try to make great leaps of logic to act like they're different, but fundamentally they're not. If you want to throw out all government regulation, you also throw out what keeps the baker from refusing to serve the black guy.

Your argument sounds roughly like the one I heard was common after WWI, after millions dying in static trench wars they thought barbed wire and machine guns would basically end war since any attacker would be sending their troops into a massive suicidal bullet rain. At the time it was probably true, remember the car was in its very infancy. Except over the next 20 years the Germans created Panzers and Blitzkrieg tactics outmaneuvering and overrunning France in six weeks.

So maybe in the 1950s or 1980s you could send ICBMs and have them reach their destination, but they're always working on laser weapons, missile-destroying missiles like the Patriot missile and a host of other highly classified projects. In case you missed the memo NATO has been working on a ballistic missile shield, allegedly against rogue nations like Iran and North Korea but Russia is also not amused. There might come a time where the "mutually" part of "assured destruction" is no longer valid, it's not like we invented nukes and war is now over, forever. Then you're being extremely naive.

You won't know if it's first until it's observed.... and it's not :(

Considering the Democrats who controlled both parties failed to do anything but renew it, the Republicans may be our best shot - particularly while they don't control the executive branch.

With Jeb Bush about to become the nominated leader of the party? Good luck with that.

When it comes to stuff like homeland security and defense appropriations, the parties don't matter. It's neo-cons all the way down.

Did you know that Jeb Bush has asked Howard Baker to become his senior advisor?

It's gonna take a much bigger shift in government than just a one party or the other taking over to get rid of the Patriot Act.

This may come as a shock to you, but most large companies have a big R&D division that follow the scientific method while rarely or never publishing their work. Intel knows a lot about making CPUs. Boeing knows a lot about making planes. Ford knows a lot about making cars. They're going to use that to make money, not to blab away the details to their competitors. Sure, Intel's processors are based on physics... but good look making a 14nm processor from their PR slides.

Under the right conditions snow will stick to the signs looking like these signs even though it's otherwise clear. It doesn't happen often, but when it does I think the self-driving car is pretty much screwed. Humans seem to get by on a combination of routine and heuristics.

That they need to eat 10,000 calories a day to sustain them doesn't mean they could eat 2000 kcal and net a -8000 loss. The most strenuous one day event I've done burns 5-6000 kcal, anything less than 3-4000 kcal in and you're likely to run into a proverbial brick wall. It's common to try overdoing it on exercise while cutting the intake and the result is a body with no power at all, that engine needs fuel to work and pure body fat won't do.

But over to the obese people, when I started out I could do maybe 350-400 kcal/hour and I'd probably not last the full hour. And the body feels like total shit afterwards, it's real easy to end up with excessive strain due to weight on muscles and joints that aren't used to it. It's almost like a U-curve, if you're fat and don't strain your body you're pretty comfy. If you're healthy and exercise you're comfy. But in the middle is a rather ugly place. So you come home, feel bloody miserable but hey you exercised and did good so you can give yourself a little bonus right? Turns out the kind of bonus you need on your high-sugar, high-fat diet pretty much negates any calorie benefit.

If you don't start with your intake you'll never get anywhere. Exercise is a nice accelerator, but it's really, really hard to counteract a +500 kcal intake with exercise. And that's not particularly much soda, snacks, sweets and junk food.