The cameras like that already exist - all that's needed is adding an accelerometer to one to detect the shot being fired.

If you think you need super human skill to text and drive then you need to give up your license.

The fact is that 99.99% of what we use PC's for can be done on Linux, in fact 99% of the server room can run on Linux with out effort. It's time for Microsoft to admit we don't need them.

There is no such thing as distracted driving! There are bad drivers, incompetent drivers, morons, assholes and people who should never of been given a license in first place but there is nothing called distracted driving. Just because you can't use your cellphone and drive doesn't I can't, I could have 20 naked women all grinding me and still drive a prefect straight line well taking in everything in my environment, which doesn't mean that if another person, in the same situation, crashes it's distracted driving. Just as video games don't cause violence, Atheism doesn't cause a loss of morals, cell phones don't make you a bad driver, you either are a bad driver or you're not.

All this talk about how to handle cell phones in the car is just silly, don't do anything! It's not up to the car or police to control phone use in car, it's up to the driver to realize that they have no control of a car well texting or calling. Yes people have died as a result of someone using a cell phone well driving, but in reality they died because the person behind the wheel was given a license when in fact they shouldn't of been. A cell phone has never caused an accident, only a driver can cause an accident, can we start calling out piss poor driving and stop trying make excuses. Bad driving is the problem, don't make your cellphone take the fall for the fact you can't drive.

Atheism means that you believe it's more probable for the universe then create itself then it is for a pedophile, misogynistic, sadomasochist, asshole, to create the universe 6000 years ago and you exist now thanks to incest, murder, killing, abuse and rape. If you want to believe in the literal bible then please go ahead, but you don't look intelligent, rational, mature or even like an adult. The same goes for Islam, Judaism and any other religion which claims to have the answers.

(b) it's an easy mental barrier between people venting at you, and, well, you (because they're not yelling at me, they're yelling at "Antonio".)

When your introductory training includes psychological coping mechanisms, rethink your decision to be there. :-)

Of course not. But you give the right answer immediately.

Exactly. Embargo is a convenient scapegoat - it lets the government to explain away harsh life and crackdowns by an ongoing conflict, "us vs them", "everything for the victory". Remove it, and it makes that much harder for them to maintain that. Long term, it will accelerate the inevitable collapse of the dictatorship and the transition to something saner. If Castros are smart, they will do what Chinese and Vietnamese elites did, and head the transition rather than trying to resist it, so as to reap the maximum benefits. If not, there will be another revolution.

Either way, all that embargo does is delay that process. So it hurts the people of Cuba, not its government.

The embargo started before the Cuban missile crisis (in fact, many historians believe that it was the extreme hostility of US towards Cuba after the revolution that pushed the latter towards Soviets). In any case, the notion that if the embargo is lifted, Cuba would rebuild the missile bases, just defies any common sense. It was not their bases to begin with, and if someone else would want to rebuild them today, the embargo makes it easier not harder (because it takes that much less to pay to Cuba for them).

If you seriously consider the Black Book of Communism to be the "best estimates for communist regimes killing people", you're either deluded or retarded. Heck, even if you take the book at its face value, even then it counts "victims of communism" - and by this they mean anyone who has died due to e.g. starvation during a famine, regardless of whether said famine was artificially induced or not (and Soviet Russia had plenty natural ones in the aftermath of its Civil War). For the actual killing estimates, they tend to take the highest figures from the sources that are basically pure guesswork, like Solzhenitsyn's books.

The embargo is by US on Cuba. If US truly wanted to lift it, it could just do that. The fact that it is not lifted because "Cuba does something" means that US doesn't really want to lift it, either.

Which is stupid, because Cuba is as communist as it is only because of that embargo. Hell, look at Vietnam: a country that US actually went to wage war in, with numerous civilian casualties, and now? They're rapidly catching up with China on that whole capitalism business, and you can actually talk to a Vietnamese guy on the Internet and ask him what he thinks (and tell him what you think).

More like 11th century, actually.

I mean, this is Europe we're talking about here. If two states had a common border, you can be pretty sure they had at least one war per century, and often more than that. In case of Russia(/Ukraine/Belarus) and Poland, the only reason why it doesn't go back earlier is because Rus was a proto-state before then, and it wasn't until the end of 10th century that it was fully formed.

I was born there as well, and my parents were not communist activists.

True, but this was mostly in the 80s (and mid-to-late 70s in some regions). Basically, the beginning of the end. Which brings us to...

At the time where there were long lines for toilet paper, that was quite unlikely. Killing on the streets was certainly not the thing, and even political dissidents were usually found insane, so that they could be put into asylums rather than imprisoned (that's when they invented "sluggish schizophrenia") - better from the PR perspective.

Certainly, for an average Soviet citizen to be killed or imprisoned by authorities in the 70s on, would be extremely unlikely.

That part is either bullshit or meaningless (or both). For someone like a teacher, say, the monthly salary was typically between 100 and 200 rubles during that time. Factory workers actually earned more (cuz "proletariat"). I can't think of anyone in full-time job earning less than a 100, in any case. University students got 50 rubles per month.

Now, the official exchange rate was 1 USD = 0.8-0.5 RUB, but that was bullshit in any case, because you couldn't freely exchange them. So the only way to meaningfully compare is in terms of purchasing power. Now, for example, price in rubles for some common foods:

box of 50 matches - 0.01 rub aka 1 kopeika (they used it for change when they ran out of coins)
loaf of wheat bread (400 g) - 0.26 rub
loaf of dark rye bread (700 g) - 0.16 rub
1 liter bottle of milk - 0.46 rub
1 kg of sugar - 0.78 rub
1 kg of cheese - 2.20 rub
1 kg of butter - 3.40 rub
100 g of chocolate - 0.80 rub
ice cream in a waffle cone - 0.20 rub

Some other random stuff:

bus ticket (valid for that one bus for any distance) - 0.05 rub
tram ticket - 0.03 rub
evening movie ticket - 0.25 rub
soap - 0.14 rub
camera - 15 rub
ushanka - 14 rub
vinyl record - 1-3 rub
1 liter of gas - 0.10 rub

Expensive stuff:

motorcycle - 1000-1500 rub
car - 3500-10000 rub

Free stuff:
housing
medicine
education

So it's still not a straightforward comparison. If you take food - say, milk; US average is $3.74/gallon, so almost $1/liter. If you go by the prices in rubles above, it would make the average Soviet salary of 150 rub equivalent to $300. OTOH, in US, most people spend most of their income on rent or mortgage, while Soviet citizens spent most of it on food, clothing etc. Average monthly gross rent in US is ~900$; adding that, you'd end up with $1200 per person, or $2400 per household (since both would typically work and bring roughly the same wage). This is pretty close to the average median income of an African-American household in US today. So, basically, pretty damn poor, but not third world shithole poor.

OTOH, car was a real luxury.

It is, in a way. As harmful and unjust and just plain stupid as it obviously is, it's something nice for Russia to point it and say, "see, these guys are up to no good, too" - which is very efficient for propaganda purposes.

Actually, that's not quite right. RT will make false stories where they can get away with them (e.g. Ukraine). But when they make one about US and Europe, it almost always has some kernel of truth in it... just distorted and embellished to fit their agenda. Nevertheless, if they tell there is a problem, it's a good habit to try to find the original source - oftentimes you will in fact discover some real issue there, that you'd do well to know about (and that mainstream US media, say, won't comment on loudly until much later).

If by "the ideals expressed by the Founders" you mean "natural rights are this thing that all white males have", then yeah.