Correct, sir. This is a fully bipartisan, multi-Administration travesty of law and government. And it has been building since early in the Cold War, see United States v. Reynolds which created the "state secrets privilege" by a court ruling in 1952. It is very telling that the "facts" presented to the court in secret were, in fact, lies (learned on 48 years after the fact). In secret the government can lie to heart's content without worrying about its dishonesty being questioned or revealed.

It is form of a specialized axe, known as a maul. Still an axe, but only good for splitting short logs. Still, if you are busting wood for heating you would do well to have the right tool for the job.

Allow me: "Who-o-o-o-sh".

Whew! Its a good thing they never claimed they were doing any such thing.

"physics at the one-millimeter rock grain scale" does not mean that they were using a model grid of that same scale.

To show that the assumption that it must, or even should, is incorrect consider any engineering model that involves the effects of static friction.

The phenomena that cause static friction exist on the molecular and atomic level, and theoretical predictions of friction under arbitrary conditions need to be analyzed and calculated at that scale.

But once you have determined what the coefficient is under a given set of conditions, you only need to use the single number in a macro scale model.

That is what they did here. If you read TFA you will see that their macro model used coefficients calculated using the detailed physics.

I would take the "Globalfirepower" rankings a tad more seriously if they revealed the model they used to combine and weight all those factors, and if they weren't a "link farm" site that lists itself as being "for entertainment only" and the people running it weren't completely anonymous. There is no reason to attach any credibility to the ranking scores they offer.

When Obama became President, no one in the CIA was tracking down bin Laden in Pakistan. In 2005 George W. Bush shut down the CIA unit tasked with tracking bin Laden (code named Alec Station and established in 1996 by Bill Clinton). "C.I.A. Closes Unit Focused on Capture of bin Laden".

It took an executive action by Obama to recreate an intelligence unit to pick up the hunt, and then a tough call to send the SEAL team in when the intelligence about bin Laden's presence was still uncertain. A weaker man would have temporized about the uncertainty and done nothing (GW Bush and Tora Bora?).

BTW - the right's adulation of GW Bush as a hero, strutting in front of his "Mission Accomplished" banner, when he had never fired a shot in the invasion, while pretending Obama had nothing to do with the termination of bin Laden "because he wasn't on Seal Team Six" is a double standard so glaring that it makes one stand dumb-founded at the intellectual dishonesty involved. Yeah, and Reagan defeated the Soviet Union single-handedly. Right.

In addition, doesn't anyone bother to look up just how much of the U.S. "balls" China is holding? China holds just 6% of the U.S. Federal debt! ($1.1 trillion out of $17.6 trillion).

Ooh! Sc-a-r-r-y!

A graceless concession after a showed up the foolishness of your post, and more than a bit of a non sequitur, but I accept it anyway. Have fun waving whatever it is you are waving now.

Water cooled lights. End of problem.

So you are advocating that anyone showing up at an ER with the strong smell of alcohol on their breath, and no obvious injury, should be kicked out on the curb to die. Correct?

(This is 3.5% of all ER admissions, and outnumbers all illegal drug admissions combined).

A bit broader than "Western Europe" - you are a couple of decades out of date at least. It would be more like "the entire rest of the advanced industrialized world" since much of Eastern Europe is now included, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, and a fair part of South America as well (I'm sure you have flown on Brazil-made airliners, they are very good).

I guess that is a bit elitist.

I find it very interesting that the American right is finding it necessary to point to the worst nations in the world (Middle East police states, African kleptocracies) to prove U.S. virtues.

I think that is very telling.

I came, I saw, I hated Unity. I still do, pretty much.

But it you install Classic Menu or CairoDock then you have access to the old way menus for finding your installed apps, and you can ignore Unity entirely (but I occasionally hit the Unity sidebar for some minor convenience from time to time).

Some lessons I have learned for working with Ubuntu if, like most people, you just want a desktop environment that lets you do your work efficiently, employing established knowledge and skills and not have to muck about with solving problems created by the distribution and its UI:

• Only ever install the LTS version, otherwise you find yourself dealing with Shuttleworth's "experiments" and support gets terminated in 18 months,
• Only ever select the default UI (Unity in this case). I tried every alternative to Unity first, but every one had some basic feature that was seriously broken and could not be fixed in a reasonable amount of effort. Guess only the primary UI gets sent to QA.

I will be trying the new LTS after it has been out a little while.

Heck! With 20% annual growth you can hit a million in 14 years, and with 30% annual growth you can hit a million in 11 years!

Just ask Bernie Madoff!

The real long term return on stocks is 6% or so. You only get 10% if you carefully draw the period to cover two bubbles and avoid the post-bubble malaise, collapse and ensuing low-grade depression. That's called "cheating with statistics".

And even stock market optimists (like Jeremy Siegel) feel that returns over the next few decades will be around 5%, as the long hang-over of the Bush crash persists, and the relative decline of consumer purchasing power continues.

With a more realistic return of 5%, the time to accumulate a million is 30 years.

Look for it as the eclipse starts, it will be a full moon high overhead. You can't miss it (assuming that you can see the sky at all).

At the height of eclipse the moon turns dark reddish because the only thing illuminating it are all the world's sunsets and sunrises at once!

After the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the Philippines in mid 1991 pushing more particulates and sulfur into the stratosphere than any eruption since Krakatoa, the following lunar eclipse on 9 December 1992 was so dark the moon completely disappeared, except for observers in truly dark sky sites.

The El Chichón eruption in 1982 also led to a very dark lunar eclipses in July and December of that year (but not as dark as the Pinatubo eclipse).

It shouldn't be a dark eclipse tonight, since there have been no major recent eruptions - but these things are hard to predict.

There are a huge number of electrical generators in existence - almost every vehicle on the planet has one for example. Anything that can run a motor can produce electricity. Electricity would be precious perhaps, but absent? Hardly.