Bigotry.

How many Muslims do you know? How many are there in the world? What miniscule fraction write screeds and take up arms?

Catholicism has the bloody destruction and enslavement of the Americas on it's conquistador hands. Islam - past and present - has nothing to shade that, by way of comparison.

It is interesting to note that Ghengiz Khan was a worshiper of nature-spirit, but almost half his armies were Buddhist - His first wife was oriental Orthodox, as were a substantial minority contingent of the Mongol horde and leadership. Papal emissaries were entertained by the Khan and later his grandson Guyuk was in correspondence with the pontiff.

The "muslims" that you see and read about with violent conversion and conquest? They are created, inflated and supplied by the various trans-national agencies and alliances in Global para-politics.

Snide.

But do background on Foley and Berg. Seriously.

It ain't about foreign wars.

It's about locking up unrest at home. Those evil, ISIS guys we gave weapons? They could be your neighbors! They are able to operate anywhere, anytime! They have Mexican drug-cartels (boogey-man II) in their pocket!

It's all about degrees of disaster. If there's a real disaster, I wouldn't give a rodent's behind about my electronics and I too would be happy with my emergency stash of food and water. But even so I have taken some precautions... My router, server, NAS etc sit in the basement, but they are mounted as high as possible in case there's a flood, and there's a flood detector as well. No use against a real flood (we live below sea level), but if the water mains bursts or if a minor dike breaks, my stuff will be reasonably safe and I will be notified in time to move it if the flooding continues. The same level of protection that people arrange in hurricane areas, I suppose, like having sheets of wood handy to board up the windows with. Not sure how you'd protect your things against a minor earthquake, though. Not mounting them in a wobbly cabinet is probably a good start.

They are doing both the space program and doing something about living conditions. The problem is that fixing poverty is hard, and like the problem of travelling to the moon or Mars, you don't solve it merely by allocating a budget, that's only the start. If fixing poverty was easy, a lot of other countries wouldn't have any. Hell, perhaps the USA wouldn't have any. And fixing their poor living conditions probably costs a multiple of what it costs to run their space program. According to their 2013 budget, the Rural Development Ministry alone receives over 16 times the ISRA budget. My point is that I think it would be a big mistake to shift the +- 1 billion $ space budget to further rural development.

India is doing well economically and I think they have the right idea: they promote high tech industry and have a couple of high profile projects like these. This makes them more independent, builds their economy, and instills national pride. The wrong way to do it is to take things one at a time: first get plumbing and sanitation in place, and only then work on getting a meal into every child's belly, and only then provide basic education, and only then introduce mechanised farming, and only then work on a national road network and electrical system, and so on. India's space program is money well (and frugally) spent.

I play most games on my PC as well, but sometimes it is just nice to boot up a quick game on the console and have at it with some friends. My main niggles about the PS3, compared to the older consoles:
1) The old games were very much about head-to-head action, but many PS3 games have poor support for multiple players on one console, and instead focus on networked play
2) The updates. The god-damned updates. The PS3 is switched on only every now and then for a few quick games, only to find that both console and game require a patch, which sometimes takes over an hour to download and install. Fail. The whole point of a console is that it's instant-on.

You have an essentially correct perception here, embedded in the psychological noise that accompanies these perceptions.
It is difficult to maintain a "rational and sane" perspective regarding these experiences - and encountering actual Reality? Reality is accessible only from a state of being that is "crazy" to the rational.

"Quis Troglodytarum troglodytae?"

Contrary to anti-EU people*, it's not completely pointless. Regulations like these are not just for controlling the wattage of vacuums, the curvature of banana's, or the number of times a paperclip can bend before it breaks. Thanks to regulations like these, certification for products in the EU has become a whole lot easier; no more need to have it done in each country separately. The problem is that the EU has a lot of bored politicians eager to make their mark, and they *love* to slip politically motivated items into these bills. Some are relatively harmless like the limit on vacuum cleaner power, some are a bit more evil and designed to give certain countries an edge over others (look at EU farm policy), and some are just stupid, like fixing the maximum weight a worker is allowed to lift at 23.5kg, when most bulk goods like cement come in standard 25kg bags (the limit was taken from a US study, and converting the nice round weight given in pounds to kg, they arrived at the 23.5 figure)

*) I'm all for the idea behind the EU, but very much against the intransparent, bureaucratic and unaccountable mess they turned it into. The EU needs a severely limited mandate as well as better democratic controls.

Haggis is fucking brilliant. Meat is the only real food, and Haggis is king of the sausages.

Not superior, just cheaper. The guy is right when he states that, in tech, "The difference between someone who's truly great and just sort of okay is really huge". It stands to reason that you'd pay a hell of a lot more to the truly great compared to the good, and that the good still earn quite a bit more than the sort of ok. Funny how that never seemed to happen, though, except in a few companies I've seen (where you also had management reeling in horror at the fact that some techies made more than them). I bet there's plenty of talent to go around in the US, but top performers command top pay or they'll up and leave. Foreign workers are a cheaper and less mobile work force.

Wae Don' needa nae Nukies! Wae gots... HAGGIS!