Like I said, "woosh" :)

I had much more fun fixing the sentence while preserving the "biggest" error. I only posted to have fun with that. I have no complaint with your point or your mild mistake. Just having a little fun with what correcting it could look like.

Umm, woosh?

I hate to be a grammar Nazi, but...

There, FTFY.

Such equanimity, to smile and respond graciously to a hideous ass-freshly-pulled-talking-head!

Agreed. To fix Feinstein's quote: "He’s done this enormous service to our country, and I think the answer is no clemency."

I understand why he can't be offered clemency by the overseers of the system he has revealed. But the state is insular, the security apparatus more so. To suggest that whistleblowing within the ranks would have produced the sort of system review that's been going on is intentionally naive on her part.

Snowden did what any honest president with a backbone could have (legally) done upon learning about the overreach of the US security apparatus. Reveal the key abuses, start a public dialog about how the abuses came to be, and initiate reforms to correct the abuses. It's hard to remember, but this is the course of action you would have expected from Obama's pre-election rhetoric. He was for transparency and reigning in the constitutional abuse brought on by the war on terror.

The difference between a president and an underling doing it is that the underling is not authorized, and therefore by definition is revealing state secrets, and his mechanism is solely public pressure. Snowden has accomplished the first two objectives (reveal and start a public dialog). It's up to us to push the third.

And by iMail I assume you mean the program called "Mail" that ships with Mac OS X?

My dad used to joke about studies done in the 1970s about the viability of capturing methane from cows. I guess those cows showed him...?

Hey Esther -- Bundling and Price Discrimination. Read up on it, and watch all your questions about such fees melt away.

Now let's talk about what "Congress" means. Oh, it's a decision-making body, in which, generally speaking, "it's" decisions are those reached by the majority of voting members.

And how would a majority of the members vote if the clean CR came to the floor, now or before the shutdown? And there you have your problem. The phrase "power of the purse" is not meant to solely apply to John Boehner.

Are we really going to pretend that we want a government where existing laws are subject to a super-minority approval in piecemeal fashion every year?

The Senate caving to accept a process of selectively funding EXISTING LAWS through the strainer of super-minority disapproval is not a precedent either party will enjoy in the long run.

For the record, I worry that the ACA does nothing to curb costs in healthcare (in fact, its primary feature is to make demand for healthcare less elastic by requiring its consumption -- this puts providers in a position to raise rates without market consequence of less quantity demanded). That said, it's a law, and the process through which we change it should not be the hostage-taking of all other government functions through procedural loopholes.

At it's foundation, when a majority speaks in a democracy the government should move with the majority (with minority rights protected. and no, black-balling something you don't like isn't a minority right.)

It's a conspiracy. He's conducting a false flag attack on the shutdown. Any and all evidence will only confirm this fact.

I'm pretty sure it's science that ruins lots of comments on web pages.

If Slashdot would take less than 30 seconds to load up on my iPad 3 that would be just great. This new design, unfortunately, looks more like the mobile version -- and it seems to load slower on my desktop browser.

Hey Slashdot, don't copy crap and paste over good stuff! Or to borrow a headline style from Slate magazine: "You're Doing it Wrong: Web Design"

Yes, but one hopes that debate carries some sort of rhetorical value. When the debate takes the form of "I believe in X and here are blatant falsehoods to support my view and you can't talk me out of claiming they are true," I can understand why Popular Science doesn't want to associate its brand with that.

I'd say that Popular Science isn't trying to silence dissent as much as it is trying to not be party to this type of discussion, which is an affront to the scientific method. It is too bad that the quoted rationale centers around "established facts in science" rather than not wanting to legitimize non-scientific discussion of the sort that crops up in their comments section.

Mod parent up... +1 irony.