HK-47, opining on torture
"Droids tend to blend into the background, like a bench or a card table. Mockery: Droid, fetch this. Droid, translate that. Droid, clean out the trash compactor. Part of the love of my function comes when the ‘furnishings’ pull out tibanna-powered rifles and point them at the owners' heads."

You sound like someone who's old. Or irrelevant. Were you one of those people protesting in front of air force bases in the 70's? Sure, a nuclear-armed Iran is a convenient boogeyman to wave around to scare the US public. Who's doing that? John McCain mostly. Let's apply our criteria to him. Old? Yup. He's practically yelling at the rest of Congress to get off his lawn. And irrelevant? Yep, pretty much. No one cares what John McCain thinks, except maybe some old people in Florida and Arizona and some irrelevant people at Fox News.

Nuclear weapons were a convenient boogeyman to wave around when you were a hippie in the 70's. "Oh, they're going to blow the world up unless we pour this goat's blood on the gate of the air force base!" Discounting the fact that making a nuclear bomb is really hard (Iran and North Korea have been trying for as long as I've been alive, despite the fact that the general concepts are simple enough for a teenager to grasp,) and making something to deliver it is also really hard. By the time you get done doing all that stuff, you may as well have just leveled a city with conventional weapons. We did a lot more to Japan with conventional weapons than we did with nuclear ones in WWII, by the way. But after all that, some very interesting politics come into play, which is why India and Pakistan haven't nuked each other. And you know, the longer a nuclear device sits, the less likely it is that it's going to work. Your nice pure plutonium core starts getting crapped up with hydrogen bubbles. And those things are already very finicky as Iran and North Korea are finding out.

So yeah, on a scale of things that are likely to kill you, nuclear war is simply not one of them. You're significantly more likely to be shot by a disgruntled co-worker or a road-raging jackass in a giant penis truck. His truck is very very big, his penis is very very small and he's angry! In fact if you asked 1000 random people if they worry more about dying in a nuclear war or to zombies, I'd be willing to bet most of them would say zombies. Which are fictional.

It's like an anti-social network! If you had some data you wanted to make sure no one would ever see, you could post it to Google+!

I saw some (i'm assuming) teenager post some angsty thing on a social page the other day and it occurred to me that we built this huge network that lets you reach out and speak to basically any other human being on the planet and people seem lonelier than ever. Odd, how that works...

Pretty much. No one cares about nuclear weapons since the cold war ended. Well, no one but old, irrelevant people.

wherein we find out that Monsanto has known it all along.

Probably they were hoping no one would find out until they' ready to market GMO humans that are resistant to it.

The USA should already have started a massive water engineering project on the scale of the interstate highway system. We need to be able to reclaim much more water for regions that get too much in quick bursts and move it around the country as need arises. Clean drinking water is already starting to become one of our top concerns, and it's only going to get worse. We should be planning for it now and investing in our future, but no one is even talking about it.

I Misinterpreted The Rules

Maybe we do have something in common with India, after all!

Here is what is also true: greenpeace and other "green" organizations have been found to be taking millions of dollars in money from Russian oil interests, through shell corporations

Hey, you left out your link to a reliable source for this claim.

According to the GAO, $106 billion was spent by US government on climate research by 2010.

A total over an unstated number of years is meaningless. According to Forbes -- hardly a lefty source, and this is a denialist article -- the U.S. Government spent $32.5 billion on climate studies over 20 years between 1989 and 2009. That's $1.6 billion a year. About $5 per American per year. Accoridng to the GAO (notice the hyperlink, please starting using them, thanks) federal climate change acivities in 2010 were $8.8 billion, but that includes "technology to reduce emissions, science to better understand climate change, international assistance for developing countries, and wildlife adaptation to respond to actual or expected changes" -- so climate research is only a small part of that. Figure a quarter to a third of it is climate research. So we're looking at something on the order of $2 or $3 billion a year spent by the federal government on climate change research.

For comparison, the Iraq war was is estimated to have cost $1,100 billion in total.

Exxon Mobills's profits -- not revenues, profits -- last year were $32.5 billion. And that's just one company.

The Army's R&D budget -- not the whole military, just the Army -- is around $21 - 32 billion.Climate research funding is chump change. I kind of liked this line of bullshit better when it was "those scientists telling us smoking causes cancer are just riding the research gravy train!" At least it was a fresh and audacious sort of intellectual dishonesty then. Now it's just pathetic.

No warming for nearly twenty years.

How do people still believe "no warming" bullshit? There is no pause. Please stop speading misinformation. Thank you.

Mental floss

You mean soon the computer will be a match for me in chess AND kickboxing?!

We could put it back. It'd be easier to build a store and forward network now than it was back in the day. Hell, you can still put your hands on uucp.

Just as I was planning to move to France and buy a house with a roof made entirely of stinky cheese! Guess I'm going to have to rethink my plans!

I usually buy a fairly high end system and use it for years and years before buying a new one, and the hardware still lasts with very few problems until I'm ready to buy a new one.

I did have two video cards cook themselves to death in a MacPro desktop a few years ago. There was a lot of chatter about that particular problem happening with that machine on the forums, but I don't believe Apple ever admitted anything.

My room mate had an awesome problem with one hard drive. Some part of the write hardware had failed on it, so you couldn't write to the disk, but it would still cache writes and report them back so it looked like you had. So you could format it and start adding files and then when you rebooted it, it would have its old files from before you formatted it. Figuring out what was going on there took a while, and a boot to a Linux live CD to attempt to dd over the device with nothing else in the way.

I kind of like the low turn-out. Increases the value of my vote. As an independent voter in a swing state, all the candidates are trying to get me to vote for them. The keep knocking on my door, asking me if I want my lawn mowed or my car washed for free. They love it when I play hard to get, and pretend to be interested when I ask them about freeing Hat Mccoulough, who was improsioend for murdering 23 babies. They nod understandingly when I explain how it was entirely in self defense. Then I go to the polls and vote for that one guy who didn't have the budget to make it 'round to our state.

So you see, I'm totally against this.