Good idea. Instead of letting a laser make it impossible to see out the windows from glare, we'll make it so a laser makes it impossible to see out the window because it makes it opaque. ;)

"Come on, who do you think is at fault here - the young teenager taking the easy money being offered? Or the multinational corporation with packages designed to temp said teenager, and profit massively out of the situation?"

How is it you missed the other party in your search for fault? The federal government that guarantees all the loans? If the government guarantees that the banks will get their money, doesn't it make sense for the banks to take advantage of that?

Where are you banking, because I want to bank there!

Or when you say "a return", are you referring to an amount less than inflation, so they're giving you more dollars back, but less purchasing power, for letting them use it in the meantime? In that case, I already have one of those.

The problem, of course, is that "newsworthy" == "whatever train wreck gets us the most viewers for our advertisers". When it comes to actual useful information, facts, context and statistics, you may as well forget the news media.

You're comparing apples to oranges, or rather, raw material to finished, useful goods. A kilogram chunk of rocky metal in space is worth a lot less than a kilogram of food, or equipment. At least until there's the capacity to manufacture any needed item in space, and getting that infrastructure in place is going to cost a lot too.

On average. In reality, some people exercising 7 hours a week will live much longer than that, and some much shorter.

Maybe he wants USPS privatized, too. But probably not.

The point he was making is that a lot of wildfires will cause a spike in the CO2 levels in the air. Most of the carbon in those trees has been sitting in wood form for years, and it will take years for new trees to grow enough to re-sequester that carbon.

The Bush administration would probably have had its lawyers write papers determining that managing XP installations is not, in fact, torture, and have the enemy combatants at Gitmo doing sysadmin work until they broke down and revealed their terrorist plans.

The return address is not required in many cases, so regular mail can certainly hide who you are communicating with. Or the return address can be easily spoofed.

And if you drop the letter in a big blue mailbox or at a post office, there's no way to track the origin of the letter.

How about privileges, for a less dirty-sounding word? Rights granted by God, privileges granted by government.

I'm assuming your perl script uses a logged in google session if that's what you do in your browser. Is your perl script using the same user agent as your web browser? Do you allow javascript to run on google.com in your browser? Does your script run all the time, periodically (but randomized intervals), while you're awake, or does it run around the times you generally are searching for real? That's just a few ways that Google could determine which searches are really you and which are a script.

Is there a way to set it up to BCC another account automatically? Seems like this would be an easy step to forget when you're sending an email.

If you can keep one or more of today's computer in a runnable state for billions of years, I'll concede that you're right. My bet, however, is that every single one of today's computers will be little more than dust in "a few billion years", effectively making the problems "unsolvable with conventional computers" because they simply can't last that long.

Sure, 161 sounds like a pretty big number, but you have to consider how substantial the amendment is compared to the rest of the bill. If Nancy Pelosi accepts my amendment that would raise HSA limits a couple hundred dollars, should I say "wow, thanks Nancy, this bill totally gets my vote regardless of what else is in it?"