You just described free (not as in beer) labor, not welfare. Welfare isn't a wage earned in exchange for some sort of work, its a dole handed out in exchange for nothing.

I tend to drive 11 and 5, keeps my right hand closer to the shifter.

I too have had a good experience with Dexpot on Windows 7_64. Though Skype doesn't play nice with it for some reason. Other than that no problems and works great.

Seems like a better name would be "SpaceWatch" or something. The word "Fence" implies it can block debris . When I think of tracking I typically don't think of fences.

Still, sounds like a neat project.

I had a Zune HD for a while and really liked it. When I got a smartphone it became redundant and I sold it, but it was the nicest mp3 player I ever owned. I still use the Zune software today, I think its better than WMP or iTunes by far!

I, too, am sad Microsoft is abandoning the Zune platform, it was a great product.

You say you support the right to bear arms, yet you suggest that civilians do not need military style weapons. This betrays a misunderstanding of the purpose of the second amendment. Unfortunately this is entirely too common, its probably not even your fault and I'm glad you are asking this question. I hope that I can answer it adequately.

Let's start with the text of the second amendment shall we? It is:

The amendment consists of two parts, the introduction which states the reasoning for the amendment and the actual right to be protected. "To keep and bear arms" is relatively straight forward, it means people have the right to own and carry weapons. Note that it doesn't say "The people shall have the right to keep and bear arms." That would imply the government is granting the right to the people. Rather it says "shall not be infringed," implying that the right to arms is a preexisting right that no government can legitimately take away.

That aside, typically people get hung up on the "well regulated militia" part. They argue that this means the army should have the right to arms, but not the people. The amendment clearly states that it is the people whom have the right to keep and bear arms though and the SCOTUS acknowledged this in DC vs Heller and again in Chicago vs McDonald. The second argument that is typically made is that the word "regulated" implies that the government has the right to restrict how people may exercise their second amendment right. However, there is two problems with this argument. The fist is that this statement takes place in the introduction of the amendment. The legal aspects of the second amendment can be completely understood by everything after the comma. "The right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." That's all we need, but the framers decided to include the WHY not just the WHAT.

The second problem is that "regulated" doesn't mean the same thing today as it did in 1787 when the Constitution was adopted. In that time, "well regulated" in regards to a militia or a military unit would have meant "properly disciplined." It also helps to remember the context. The revolutionaries had just fought a war against a regular army, the most powerful army in the world at the time, with "untrained civilians." They had no idea what would happen with the new government they were creating, but they knew that most often governments used their armies against the people. Ensuring that the people were able to keep and train in the use of arms was another check on the power of the government. Consider Jefferson:

Which brings us to the conclusion of the matter. The purpose of the second amendment is not to protect the rights of hunters, target shooters, or the right to self-defense. It is to protect the people from the government. Consider Madison:

So if the purpose of the second amendment is to defend the people from the government, and the government controls the military, then military arms are necessarily what the second amendment is referring to. Every person has a right to life, yes, but remember that governments have killed more of their own people in the 20th century than all wars in this century combined. Gun control almost always comes before genocide (see the Death by Gun Control chart)

All in all, any gun is dangerous, but remember that more people die in car accidents than from shootings every year. Should we ban cars? Or maybe just restrict everyone to compact cars so they can't do as much damage? Guns are tools, if someone hurts someone else with a tool they should be severely punished, but banning the tool takes the blame from bad people and places it on tools, which are neither good or bad.

I hope this at least partially answers your question and that you'll continue to search for answers on your own. Unfortunately the mainstream media has painted guns and gun owners in an incredibly dismal, and inaccurate, light. You won't find truth there. I'll give you one more resource, Penn and Teller's take on gun control (not academic I know but entertaining and gets some good points across!) and then I'll stop pontificating. Good luck and thanks for reading.

So less than half fired about 2 shots out of confusion in the heat of the moment before stopping? And these were the Ohio National Guard, which is clearly less experienced in dealing with stressful situation than the US military, not to mention probably less trained? Kent state was tragic, but it wasn't as if the Guard went in with orders to shoot civilians. They were there to "keep the peace", heard a gunshot, and reacted as if they were under attack until they realized they were not.

"What no one seemed to notice... was the ever widening gap... between the government and the people. The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway... and kept us so busy with continuous changes and 'crises' and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the 'national enemies,' without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, 'regretted,' that... one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. But the one great shocking occasion... never comes. That's the difficulty."

- Milton Mayer (1908-1986) journalist and educator, writing about the Nazi takeover of Germany from the point of view of the average citizen, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1938-45

It will never "get bad enough" for people to wake up. You can't wait for an external event to cause people to join you. You need to evangelize, you need to get out and spread your message. You need to be the one forcibly waking people up by shaking them out of their nice comfortable ignorance. Its hard work, its frustrating work, but its also the only way we'll ever "take our America back."

So everyone who opts out of TSA body scanners is no longer a law abiding citizen?

I understand the point you are trying to make, but what you fail to recognize is that often times people are arrested without breaking any laws. Or breaking a law that is being violently abused by the police in order to have a reason to arrest a person. Reporters arrested for breaking wiretapping laws while trying to film OWS protests come to mind.

Yes, this is only a tool. However, tools affect the people who use them. Look at SWAT teams. They use military tools and tactics and they end up adopting a military mindset. Ruby Ridge, Waco, the Elián González incident, they didn't go in to arrest people so that they could stand trial, they went in with military force and military objectives to neutralize an enemy.

Not that hard to pass off.

"Its raining rocks? Strange weather we're having!"

I wish I had the option of not flying, but my family is in Ohio and I moved to Texas after graduating college to take a job. I get 2 weeks of vacation a year and don't want to waste half of it driving back and forth between Ohio and Texas, so I fly. I opt out of the scanners and when they ask me why I'm very vocal about how I consider it a violation of my fourth amendment rights.

This is also one reason I'm a fan of Ron Paul. He's the only presidential candidate who's explicitly stated his desire to do away with TSA completely, at least as far as I'm aware. That, in and of itself, is worth a Paul presidency, in my opinion anyway.

I'm going to call BS on that claim. When I worked in a food store while going through college I saw people come in and buy basics with their wic food stamps and then buy energy drinks and other crap with their PA food stamp card. This wasn't a rare occurrence, it tended to happen several times every night I worked.

Perhaps that is a PA specific problem, but I doubt it. Human nature is such that if you are being given other people's money with no restrictions on how you spend it you'll make poor decisions. The wic food stamps I didn't have a problem with, they specified things like "2 jars peanut butter" or "2 loaves of bread" but those debit cards were abused like nothing else. In the case of these people, they could have used those cards to eat healthy, instead they bought energy drinks.

Meters and yards are close enough to interchange the two when doing quick estimates. That's typically what I do for stuff like this.

I'm going to bet you live in a city. Where I grew up, my next door neighbor was one mile away. The nearest Wal-Mart was an hour drive. What you are proposing would have left me and my family more or less under house arrest. Public transportation isn't always available, and driving is not so dangerous as to justify the draconian measures you are suggesting. We aren't talking about flying airplanes!

Boy Scouts of America is a private organization and as such has the right to set requirements for membership. The Scout Law explicitly states that a scout is reverent. The Scout Oath states that a scout will "do my duty to God and my country." You can see how an atheist could not recite the Scout Law or the Oath with a clear conscious. The only way atheists could participate in Scouting would be if BSA changed the Law and the Oath, but neither of those things have changed since their adoption in 1911. To change them would be to compromise the principles on which Scouting was founded.

As far as pushing Mormonism, this is the first I've ever heard of it. I am an Eagle Scout and have been very active in the Scouting community for the last 20 years or so. While Scouting makes a big deal about being reverent, they do not push any specific denomination. There are no religious requirements for advancement through the ranks. My troop was filled with a hodgepodge of Baptists, Methodists, Catholics and a few others. Scout camp chapels were all non-denominational (though a few of the larger camps had chapels by denomination) and very general.

There was no religious agenda being pushed upon any of us.

As far as the gays issue, would you want your daughter going on an overnight girlscout trip led by a male leader? Its the same issue. I know most gays are good people who wouldn't harm anyone, but don't pretend they are all saints. There is, at the very least, a perception issue and at the worst there is a legitimate safety issue for the boys in the troop.

BSA is a great organization that does a lot for boys and for this country. Every Eagle Scout has to do a service project that benefits his community. These are no small things, they typically require a few hundred man hours and get the scout's whole troop involved. They can't be done for Scouts or on Scout owned land. Every boy, to advance in the higher ranks, must hold a leadership position in the troop for at least 3 months. They learn how to work together, how to plan a camping trip, how to prepare for emergencies, basic first aid. Many boys have found their vocation through merit badges such as Environmental Science, Radio, Emergency Preparedness, Music or even Computers.

You can disagree with BSA's morals or with their admissions requirements or whatever. But please, don't demonize an organization that has done so much good and that is well within its rights to determine these policies you find disagreeable.