"On the Iraq war: Democrats were opposed 126-82, Republicans in favor 215-6. If Democrats had controlled congress, it would never have happened."

Funny how vocally and vociferously "opposed" the Democrats were when they were running for re-election. Funny how after they won their elections, you barely heard a peep from the Democrats on how "opposed" to the wars they are.

And in practice, after gaining a majority in both houses in Congress and winning the White House the Democrats decided to end the Iraq war a mere 3 years later, not to mention continuing the pointless war in Afghanistan, the longest war in US history, even after getting Bin Laden over in Pakistan.

The only thing the Democrats are really opposed to, is losing an election.

Has anyone considered the possibility that this price is reflective of the current commodity values for gold and silver right now?

What specifically wouldn't scale? Many of the strategies and defenses I saw and have read about that are used at Ben Gurion could be applied here just fine.

For what it's worth, I'm fully Caucasian, as white as it gets, and I was stopped outside before entering on my return flight, and interviewed for a good 15-20 minutes. I had some time to kill, so I checked my luggage at the airport storage, then caught a cab and explored Tel Aviv for a few hours. On my return, the taxi dropped me off, and all I had with me was my camera. The outer perimeter security guy thought that it was unusual I didn't have any luggage, so he had me explain my story several times.

Close... if they are for someone else, other than me or my family, they are evil. If they are for me, better not take them away!

Efficiency is generally measured by administrative costs vs program costs, and can be found on Charity Navigator. But I would say pick a cause that really matters to you, then take the time to do your research into what the best solutions are out there, and then pick the charity that focuses on those solutions.

For me, I am passionate about poverty relief. Specifically, clean water and feeding starving human beings. I like Thirst Relief International for clean water. And for feeding starving people, I did some research and found one of the biggest problems was that for many years programs used a dry-milk based food that required mixing with water, which going back to the need for clean water, is hard to come by in these parts of the world.

Turns out there was a breakthrough in France, that eliminated the need for this. The new treatment called Plumpy Nut, is a peanut butter based RUTF (Ready to Use Therapeutic Food) for children who are suffering from Severe Acute Malnutrition, that literally saves kids who are on the brink of death. There is a powerful video that rocked my world reported by Anderson Cooper for 60 minutes.
Story:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/10/19/60minutes/main3386661.shtml
Video:
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4201082n

In addition to other poverty relief charities like Feeding America, my local food bank, and Heifer International, I give now to charities that specifically distribute peanut-butter based RUTFs. These include:

UNICEF (Niger)
You can buy the PB RUTFs specifically:
https://secure.unicefusa.org/site/Ecommerce/1369610601?VIEW_PRODUCT=true&product_id=2320&store_id=4221

Project Peanut Butter (Malawi, Sierra Leone)
http://www.projectpeanutbutter.org/

Meds and Food for Kids (Haiti)
http://www.mfkhaiti.org/

What you've effectively done (in programming language) is:

Problem solve.

Take a large complex problem, and break it down into smaller solvable problems.

Two words.

El Al.

I thought they created the 16th amendment (income tax) to replace the loss in revenue preemptively ahead of the 18th Amendment (alcohol prohibition). At the time, 1/5 of the federal budget was paid for by taxes on alcohol. They knew at the time there was no way they could ever get the 18th passed, without some way to make up for the loss in revenue.

Is it safe to assume that if you're an EU company, the majority of your end users/clients/customers are in the EU? Wouldn't you want to host your data in the closest cloud geographically to reduce latency anyway? Perhaps the issue only comes into play when you're considering multiple geographic CDN's around the world, and one of these regions is the US.

People can pontificate about the efficiency of trains, but the reality is people love their cars. Particularly Americans, especially in California. We love them because we wanna go where we want to go, when we want to go there. And we don't want to wait on other people. Moreover, carpooling and their allocated carpool lanes are a waste because most people are going to different locations.

So how do we square this reality with some kind of innovation that solves the problem of congestion and improve efficiency?

If I were president or governor, I would re-purpose the carpool lanes for autonomous vehicles to something seen in the highway exchange system in the film Minority Report. Essentially, when you arrive at a highway onramp your car switches into autonomous mode and you are whisked into the designated lane with perfect precision. The lane would be packed tightly and at a constant rate of speed. Some further problem solving would be required to make it all work, but overall this would balance the reality of people who will always love their cars, and provide a more efficient transportation network. Over time I would designate more highway lanes for autonomous traffic.

Seconded. Hayden Planetarium has the best planetarium show I've ever seen so far. Natural History was cool too, I liked the big Redwood tree cross section.

"The government made the right call there."

The government made the right call, because our out of control nanny state shouldn't be trying to restrict or remove pizza from school lunches. When I was a kid in school, pizza day was a good day.

When I was in South Africa, if you order from KFC, they give you little mini loaves of bread, instead of biscuits. Thought that was funny. Like they said in Pulp Fiction, it's the little differences.

Hybrids are 10% *heavier* on average? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. Isn't the whole purpose of a hybrid to get better gas mileage? Shouldn't one of the first design criteria for a hybrid be a decrease in weight, to increase fuel economy?

Financial incentives are important, but we need more than a higher number of engineering graduates. We need a legion of enthusiastic experts who live and breathe it. Who love it to the point they're almost willing to do it for free. We need something to truly inspire them. Something to challenge them to change our world as we know it.

There was a time when a President stood and said, in this decade we will put a man on the moon. This ushered in an unprecedented leap forward in technology, and at the heart of it were a wave of engineers who were given a concrete goal they could achieve.

It's time for a new mission. The next leap forward.