Part of this problem is unrealistically slow speed limits. In the NYC area all highways have a maximum speed limit of 50, including the interstates. So you have the "local" speeders and the out of towners who are used to the faster speeds all travelling happily at speed, and then some douche is going the speed limit in lane 3 of a 4 lane road, causing people to split around him like Moses parting the sea and re-enter that lane. Countless unnecessary merges.

Seriously, if there was ever a time the slashdot effect was needed, it's now.

Apathy towards the workings of our government are what allowed the Patriot Act to last this long, I hope that same apathy can be counted on to keep the "whatever to keep us safe!" crowd from fighting its repeal.

Rental payments on a primary residence should be income tax exempt. Moving ~$12k a year from post-tax money to pre-tax money would be a huge boon for the middle class.

Yes!! They need to make it so that IP addresses in the address bar default to http:/// the same as if it was something.com....

The RootKit fiasco was their media division, not the division that handles laptops. They were caught and punished and ceased the activity.

The Coca Cola corporation in Columbia murdered a few union leaders, and essentially got away with it. Does your place of employment have Coke vending machines? After all, if one part of a company does something bad the entire company is bad, right?

The defense force is currently defending South Korea and Japan, with the permission of those countries. I'm with you in spirit, but you should include allowing them to defend countries which ask for the help. Also since Japan isn't allowed an army (an arrangement both Japanese citizens and most of South East Asia seems to be happy with), it would be a special level of messed up to pull out of there, not to mention in violation of a treaty.

I came here to mention exactly this. Getting the initial blocklist was somewhat of a challenge, the connection kept timing out.

My purpose was not for children so much as restricting the free wifi I provided to guests and neighbors. To "encourage" the use of the dansguardian proxy I used a wireless router that did not have a connection to the internet, and the dansguardian box was a client on both that network and the real network. Worked well enough.

Incorrect, in most states you are allowed to provide alcohol to your own minors (though many restrict it to private property only).

Eh, presuming you have some form of text editor (or for that matter, cat), the mount command, and the RedHat ISO, you can trivially reconfigure yum to use the DVD image. No subscription required. Just make a file in /etc/repos.d/ that looks like:
[somename]
name=some name
baseurl=file:///path/to/mounted/dvd
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1 #(or 0 if you're too lazy to import the redhat GPG key)

We do something like this on our servers that are not allowed to connect to the internet, we sync the official redhat repo to one box and the others get their updates from it.

CNG cars can be refueled in private garages without going out... though I'm pretty sure the apparatus for that is far more expensive than a standard wall socket.

citation.

It was 7 winners, the 8th had abstained...

How about lottery pools. A few years ago a group of 6 or so IT staff (all on the same team) won the mega millions, ~$200 million. What happened to the seventh guy who didn't put his cash in with the rest of the group? After a few weeks of staring at 6 empty chairs knowing why those chairs were empty, he quit and took a mall job. I'd hate to have been the manager of that team...

Absolutely. Doesn't mean they can't increase beyond your ability to pay them. I was looking at house (short sale) which the bank had cut the price to 40k below market value, purely because the tax bill was 10k/yr (on a 1 acre plot). And there wasn't even public transit or a school nearby (or for that matter, a sidewalk). 1/2 a mile down the road the taxes are less than half that, just the wrong side of a town line.

Now let's look at apartments: an apartment dweller would theoretically have to worry about the same property tax increase. However, the burden is split among all the tenants in the building. And if the rent is still increased beyond the ability to pay, well it's a heck of a lot easier to move to another complex 1/2 mile away than to sell a house and buy another now isn't it...

These 'social issues' are working themselves out at the state level. Some states have legalized weed, many recognize gay marriage, and there's enough variety of pro/anti-gun and pro/anti choice balance to satisfy anyone except hard liners in each camp. There's more important shit out there to be worrying about on the national level: healthcare, immigration, our crumbling infrastructure, and our global reputation getting flushed down the crapper.

However what the states cannot do is anything about an overbearing federal government. The only way to rein in the NSA, TSA, and other TLA's is on the federal level. So if there is a candidate ignoring the things that are already being handled by the states and only focusing on the things the feds are actually supposed to be meddling with (and getting the feds to stop meddling with things they shouldn't have meddled with in the first place).