that don't want to pay taxes that fund education. What the hell did they expect?

Until you start wondering if someone on a plane you're sitting in might have ebola. The disease isn't the problem, the fear is the problem. Fear spreads faster than the flu.

You don't understand. While ebola might be a poor weapon compared to something like smallpox in terms of its ability to kill large numbers of people, it is readily available (just a plane ride or two away) and produces HUGE amounts of fear. Fear is the goal of terrorism, and fear is what is expensive. All those people blowing themselves up don't usually manage to kill more than a few others in their immediate vicinity but that's OK because killing a lot of people isn't necessary to instill fear. People never know when someone is going to try to do it near them, so they stay away from markets, cafes, etc. that are easy targets. Airlines can't sell tickets when people are afraid they'll catch ebola on a flight. If people aren't traveling, all the associated businesses suffer. Everything shuts down.

Remember 911? What did the response cost? Trillions of dollars wasted on pointless wars, lost business, creation and operation of the TSA, universal government surveillance of US citizens, etc. And what did it cost the terrorists? A few hundred thousand to have a few guys trained to fly jets.

The day a news story breaks about government agents arresting a terror suspect at a border and finding that they recently traveled to west Africa is the day everything stops working for months.

You are apparently not familiar with 3D printing. The effort required to get a good print for most of these machines is far greater than the effort to make a gun by other means.

I'm just a casual observer of the news. The leaders of those groups are working 24/7 to come up with ideas to create fear, trouble, and expense. Do you believe they didn't think of this before I did?

Um, you're aware that suicidal jihaddists regularly blow themselves up, right? They spray themselves on everyone around them.

Fear of ebola is nearly as expensive as fighting actual ebola. Look what happened to airline stocks when it was announced that one of the nurses with ebola flew with a fever.

Disaster? With a single shot plastic toy that is liable to blow up on you when you pull the trigger? Do you watch the news? Have you seen the ridiculous measures being taken at crazy expense to ineffectively deal with a few cases of ebola in the US? If ISIS or Al Queda or any other nutty group wants to do damage, printing poorly functioning plastic guns is not the way to do it. The way to do it is to send a bunch of suicidal jihaddists to west Africa to get exposed to ebola. They will have about 2-3 weeks to travel to other places, such as airports, sports events, etc., where large crowds of people gather. Can you imagine the financial impact? No 3D printers, no bullets needed. Just a few airline tickets and maybe some phony passports.

Cody Wilson is nothing but a master manipulator of the media. His 3D printed gun is crap. You can make a better gun with a piece of wood, a drill, and a rock. The media is stupid to give the guy all the attention they do for making a piece of plastic junk. You have nothing to fear from 3D printed plastic guns, even in the hands of ISIS.

people. As a dentist I often treat people who drink soda even though their teeth are turning black with decay. If people are able to ignore such an obvious sign of a problem, "shorter telomeres" isn't going to mean anything to them.

The battle against ignorance has to be fought with 2x4s, not more information.

says Natasha Frost. "People don't care so much about crime, and it's less of a political focus."

People still care about crime. I think what has changed is the definition of crime and the idea that punishment should match the crime. People have figured out that it costs a lot more to keep people locked up than to prevent the crime or "rehabilitate" the criminal.

What's next, universal health care?

I'll be surprised if the "conservatives" don't start using the "criminals are being let out of the prisons" argument to try to scare people for the upcoming elections in November and 2016. OTOH, maybe the gun nutz among them will claim crime has dropped because more people are walking around with guns.

The "free market solves all problems" capitalists will have to figure out a use for all that empty jail space- I know, they can convert it to "affordable housing" for illegal immigrants and solve two problems at once!

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/m...

into one division that writes the viruses and another that writes the antivirus.

Do any of the servers you connect to actually provide 1 Gbps if you try to DL a file?

I have 15Mbps via TWC and rarely max it out unless the server I am DLing from is geographically close to me.

In addition to a couple popular-among-single-issue-voters hot isses like gay marriage and medical weed, they also have a terrible property tax system that screws the public schools and a legislature that controls only about 15% of the budget because the easily manipulated voters have commited the other 85% of tax revenues to specific projects by voting for things they no almost nothing about.

Representative government is better than mob rule, but with decisions like "citizens united" essentially selling all our elections to the highest bidder, it's only just a little better.

1) Thank God they don't pay attention to most public comments. Can you imagine the magnitude of the disaster that would result from a California style of mob-rule in Washington? We definitely DON'T need THAT.

2) They pay far too much attention to their corporate sponsors instead of doing what they are paid to do- use their brains and think about how to give us the best possible services. It's no surprise that the Republicans have a major hand in screwing us all, after all, their platform includes denial of science.

More specifically, we eat things that aren't main characters in Disney movies.