if you make a threat, people aren't going to ignore that

this is not an overreaction or a big brother issue

you can never expect to make a statement which is clearly a threat and people are just going to ignore it

yup, well said

many of us also remember our youth fondly. when the teenage years are the most psychologically painful periods of a human life

we all have it. we forget the bad, and remember the good. it's also why people think things should be "like the good old days," to mythologize the past and always think things are getting worse. the truth of course that the past was more violent, poorer, and unhappier

it's a fundamental human conceit. historical myopia

you want to take away the government?

you want to magically remove corruptibility from the human race?

you don't want to go after the slimy assholes doing the corrupting?

you're a moron, really. not a baseless insult, an objective evaluation of your thinking. you want to ignore corruptors and focus only on the corrupted. fucking stupid

yes, absolutely, political corruption is a crime with a corruptor and a corrupted

why do you want to focus all blame on only one side of a deal that is the fault of two sides?

why do you focus zero blame on the guy who is paying for and often initiating the corruption? you think it's only innocent corporations being reached out to by sleazy politicians? seriously?

I agree. Duh, the program is obviously not perfect and screws up sometimes. But I'm amazed by how good it actually is. Even being able to just ballpark it some of the time would be impressive, but the fact that it gets pretty reasonably close most of the time, I find that incredibly impressive.

Someone on my Facebook feed was complaining about how in a washed-out picture of three children the picture guessed only two of them right, but saw one (a young boy) as an adult woman. My response was to crop out just the washed out face, take it out of context, and point out, if you saw this face, not understanding anything about the context, could you guess it? I certainly couldn't have. But that's exactly what the software has to do.

I took a number of pictures of myself in different angles, making different faces, etc, and its range on age guesses was only 3 years. My brother-in-law managed to get a 20-year difference in guesses by making faces, but I couldn't manage it, and neither could most people I know who tried. Again, computationally, it's very impressive.

Yeah, it bites all of us (I can't write a thorn here). They only care about Americans so after countless redesigns there's still no proper unicode support.

Speak for yourself. My lander was near the epicenter and I lost five crew :( I was aiming for Diablo Canyon to pick up some radioactives but I had to return to orbit to recrew.

And how exactly do you know what her DNA is? There are XX men and XY women.

And seriously, of all of the stupid measures of who someone is, DNA has to take the cake. "Okay, okay, this Stephen Hawking guy seems to be smart, but that doesn't matter, what does his DNA say? Does his DNA say he's smart? If not then I don't care what he has to say."

"someone bribed the bank guard and robbed the bank"

"so fire the guard, problem solved"

"what about the robbers?"

"uhhh...."

So, there was no billing error here. The guy actually had his modem making long-distance calls for inordinate amounts of time. Doesn't seem like an AT&T error. Though it definitely sucks for the old man/woman!

No billing error? The entire billing system sucks balls at the largest possible frame.

There should be a legislative directive that all such usage-based billing plans provide an option for the end user to set hard spending caps, which are automatically enforced by the service provider.

Show me a corporation that doesn't—at least attempt—to enact hard spending caps enforced by automatic systems wherever and whenever possible. Heads roll in the gutters when a corporation loses $100 million because some trading desk manages to go rogue with respect to set trading limits. (By the Finnish system of traffic fines, a $100 million loss for AT&T is about on par with some old geezer tabbed for $25,000.)

End users are, of course, purposefully disadvantaged to have to police their own usage by manual vigilance, because everyone knows this is a lucrative fail mode for AT&T's revenue piracy service.

That this whole thing sucks balls right down to the bag root is the least possible diagnosis.

i see it as a similar conceit to anti-vaxxers

anyone who grew up when it was common for children to die at a young age due to common diseases would vaccinate wholeheartedly. but, distant those horrors, the effort necessary to maintain the status quo of healthy children becomes all you see: vaccinations, sticking needles in children, strange concotions i don't understand...

likewise, you have these similar fools who see the benefits of a regulated marketplace, but only see the onerous regulations, and not the horrors of what an unregulated marketplace is really like. so they react to the regulations as if they are the actual evil, just like anti-vaxxers

anyone who survived (broke) one of the many banking panics of the 1800s would claim the FDIC the greatest godsend. but, now that we don't have runs on banks, we just have this "evil" "world domination" "freedom destroying" scheme called the FDIC: morons think the FDIC is the actual evil

it's a conceit of lack of experience, lack of education, no awareness of history, prideful ignorance

so the rich and corporations do not use their money to change the laws to get even more money, for no extra effort?

you're ignorant and delusional

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

I don't think NASA needs to make the fictional heroes; I think every piece of sci-fi that comes out helps inspire the next generation. I guarantee you that there's tons kids and young teens who saw, say, Gravity and think that's what it is to work at NASA and have set that as their aspiration. "Astronaut" is usually in the top 10 of what kids want to be when they grow up.

More than anything else, I see the main point of having astronauts is just to inspire kids. Just knowing that there's people going up there is enough - they don't need ot be doing big stunts that cost hundreds of billions of dollars to put a footprint on a distant body; they simply need to be twirling around in zero G in LEO.

How many current astronauts can you name?
How many current astronauts can anyone here name off the top of their head?

The time of astronauts as heroes has passed. Far, far more people today do care about MESSENGER and New Horizons than they do about what astronauts are doing in space. They get more coverage in the popular press too. MESSENGER hasn't been a big public eye-catcher (except briefly when it crashed) but there was lots of attention about Rosetta, MERs, MSL, Cassini periodically (for example, the geysers of Enceladus, the Huygens landing, etc), and you better believe New Horizons is going to get a lot of coverage when it does its Pluto flyby (the public has a lot of interest in Pluto, more than in a long time due to the "demotion" controversy)

Yes, the percentage of Americans who read about these sort of things when they come up in the news (let alone follow them in depth) is probably in the 10-20% range. But so? How many specific sub-programs in the Social Security Administration or Internal Revenue Service can you name? NASA still captures the public imagination in a way that no other part of the federal government does. It doesn't take a moon landing to do that.

I'm sitting right next to a dinosaur now and scratching its head.

There wasn't an extinction of the dinosaurs. There was an extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs.