Uh, Dune was copyrighted in 1965 so I'm fairly certain Paul Atreides was also not modelled on some politician from the 1980's either.

For me, Heretics was a struggle and Chapterhouse was unreadable until after I read the House books. It was in the House books that some of the technology that seemed to come out of nowhere in Chapterhouse was introduced and then it fit in. They weren't as well written as the original books, but the House series did do a nice job of filling in much of the backstory.

I suppose you are referring to the Rocky Mountain region of the US where it has always been illegal to divert the rains from the rivers to an extent that you are withholding more than the allotment accompanying the title to your land. Small-scale wars were fought over this. Read history, it really does have more to it than "white people were mean to non-whites" and "men were mean to women."

Well, 100+% still counts as significant in my book.

$1 a month simply does not add up to $500 over the course of 6 months, at least no according to the calculator built into Windows 7. Maybe the calculators built into Linus are more accurate, I don't know.

I think the point is that until they meet the needs of the 85% you mention, they won't sell (which seems to be the case).

And using any of them not connected to your house may be considered theft.

Whatever, I'll pay $6k - $12k more for my next truck than "the market" would suggest because of those "subsidies" you mention. I need a truck to pull certain things that are heavy and it is simply is not feasible to do that and achieve 40 MPG so my truck price will include a penalty to the government for not meeting that standard. Exactly where is this subsidy you mention? I don't think that word means what you think it means.

Yes, as long as you never leave "home". As you said, you can do this without altering your lifestyle because you have the typical Bay area attitude and cannot imagine that life exists on the other side of those mountains to the East.

Oh yeah, nothing like going from the upper midwest to the South or the Rockies taking over 30 hours instead of ~20.

Except for situations where the "commuter" car is for a sales job that routinely puts 40k - 50k miles a year on the car (travelling 3 or 4 days a week on average) and the other is for pulling campers and boats in addition to other "household" duties. I can give other real situations as well but just one real example should be enough to start imaginations working to realize that not everybody lives in a major city and drives 30 miles to "the office" and then home again.

Why the hell are college students considered novice drivers? They should have at least two years of driving under their belts and that means "not novice". Do you live in one of those backwards places that thinks pushing the driving age to 18 instead of 16 actually solves problems?

Well, you do realize the ultimate goal of the left IS to have us give up this irrational lifestyle of visiting family and vacationing and such.

You really think that is that far-fetched when we have actual proof that guys are being expelled from colleges even after the so-called "victim" is on tape admitting that they are only upset because she thought the one night stand was the beginning of a relationship and he thought it was a one night stand. Rape after the fact is very real so I don't see why this scenario would be any different.

Forgiveness and forgetting are the same when speaking of the Lord but not of humans. Forgiveness does not mean that we don't expect punishment nor does forgiveness require that we forget that our neighbor repeated molested our oldest daughter and let him babysit her younger sister; it means that we sincerely hope he can overcome his issues and make himself right with the Lord.