This is old news. There are forgotten caches of weapons from the Iran-Iraq War (mostly produced by the U.S.) that were left to rot out in the desert, as well as munitions that Saddam had laying around in case the Kurds got out of hand.

Anyone that ever said he didn't have *any* WMDs *ever* would simply be ignorant of the well-known facts. What was clearly a bald-faced lie was that he was currently producing nerve gas and nukes in preparation for invading his neighboring countries. "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

Show me the nukes and I will personally apologize to George Bush. Until then, no, this ain't that.

Well, first you need to get an H1B Visa...

Oh wait, you are an American citizen? Yeah.... well.... sorry, but someone with a PhD from a university in Mumbai is more likely to get the job you're applying for. And when they get that job, they'll send the majority of that money back home. But if we don't let companies like Microsoft and Facebook have all the H1Bs they want, they'll move their operations off-shore. They'll say anything to convince people that H1Bs are somehow good for the economy and create more American jobs than they cost, but the truth is U.S. software houses simply want the work done as inexpensively as possible, and you're basically advertising, with your PhD, that you're expensive and you don't even have real-world experience yet.

My advice: drop the PhD until you have several years of experience.

I think you might have your north and south mixed up. We're near the record low for Arctic ice extent, and at record highs in Antarctic ice extent. Both of which are expected as part of global warming.

Correction: *Parts* of the Antarctic ice sheet are increasing in thickness due to increased precipitation caused by warmer seas, but the overall extent of the ice sheets has decreased.

This is actually pretty simple. Put yourself in the place of the business owner. The demonstration illustrates the mood of the consumer. I as a business owner might start to see a benefit in being able to advertise that my company is "green", since I might reasonably expect that being green might improve my sales.

If you don't want to read it, go to the next article.

A) There have been political articles on Slashdot for as long as I've been a subscriber. Might as well get used to it.

B) Didn't want to read it? Then why did you?

Single payer.

"Anonymous Coward" indeed. The surveillance you're misattributing started under Bush.

I completely agree that the justice system should not be a vehicle for vengeance, but consider the most extreme crimes you can imagine. What about war criminals? What about people that are happily responsible for the torture of hundreds and the deaths of thousands, who are walking around free today? What if they could be tried and convicted of their crimes? If they were quite old, a simple life sentence would be meaningless. Would it be enough to give them the death penalty? Or would it be preferable, to those they have harmed directly or indirectly, to subjectively lock them inside their aging bodies for what would feel like decades, maybe even centuries?

Let's keep in mind that the death penalty is permanent, forever, and our justice system is fallible. Better a time dilated sentence than death, simply because we can halt the time dilation half way through if we choose to.

A more accurate example might be your mother screaming at you to slow down because you're going 90mph while the oil executive in the back seat is calling you a wimpy, pinko, commie hippy for driving so slow.

Instead of pretending that the toll bridge operator that throttles traffic and charges exhorbitant tolls from the taxis coming *and* going isn't the problem, let's instead eliminate the toll bridge operator all together and let the "free market" decide which taxis it wants to use.

Minus the bad analogy: the communications infrastructure shouldn't belong to the communications service provider, and any service provider should be allowed to operate on the infrastructure. The federal government should purchase all the cable and fiber as part of regulating commerce and tax service providers for usage of the infrastructure.

To me, communications infrastructure is like the highway system. I also don't think healthcare, emergency services, or disaster relief should be for-profit, so maybe I'm just a damned socialist?

I'm going to go ahead and reply to my own post... :)

Take the issue that makes you angriest because you're just sure our government is lying to us about it. Doesn't matter what it is. You are probably confident that politicians that vote "the wrong way" are getting paid off by some big money lobbyist representing people you despise.

Now imagine that money was no longer considered, in the words of Antonin Scalia, "impossible to separate from the speech it enables," and therefore speech itself. Imagine if one party was unable to gain unfair advantage by preventing people from voting or altering the districts so the majority lost regardless. Imagine if the only thing that mattered when it came time to get re-elected was a Congressman's record and whether he honestly represented the interests of his constituency.

Yeah, you want it too. You know you do.

The only issue that matters anymore is the restoration of the voting franchise. We need to:

    - eliminate PACs and SuperPACs
    - limit contributions to individual, human contributions only, capped to $1000 per person
    - outlaw gerrymandering and require an immediate redistricting such that, except for districts on state lines, no district has a concave border.
    - functional, tamper-proof, open source voting machines that issue paper records of the votes cast must be in sufficient supply and for a sufficient time period that everyone in the district will be able to vote
    - No ID card is required, but the person voting must be on the roll for the polling station they are assigned to and they must give a thumb print and sign their name.
    - No penalties for honest voter registration drives; heavy penalties for fraudulent practices during voter registration drives.
    - failure to provide adequate access to the voting process is grounds for heavy fines and overturning of the election results.

And don't just pass a set of laws -- pass an Amendment to the Constitution. Because the vote of the people is the most essential part of the foundation of our form of government, and it has been seriously eroded over the last few decades to the point where well-financed parties seriously believe, and rightly so, that they can sway elections and deform our laws and regulations to suit their interests alone.

When the voice of the people is restored, when we are truly once again a government of, by, and for the people rather than the top 0.001%, everything else will fall into line.

Turbo Pascal rocked. Ignoring all the "it's pascal so it must suck" idiocy being posted, Turbo Pascal changed PC programming. The only compilers besides MASM were too expensive for a college student to touch and slower than Christmas to compile, but TP was $99 and screaming fast. I got a copy and that started a 25 year career in programming, almost exclusively using Borland products and building just about everything you can imagine with them. I get it that Photoshop was first written to run on Apple, but TP was more than just a hobby compiler, and really the best choice at the time for doing any serious work on a PC.