"I don't even own a gun, but I sleep a lot better at night knowing that the men in black uniforms aren't the only people who have them."

Agreed. I do actually own a gun, but it is an impractical gun, locked in a box, in an inaccessible place, with no bullets. Even though I'm not a 'gun person' myself, I think the presence of 'gun nuts' makes the country better in many ways. It takes all sorts.

Mmm hmm. If you have tools of death, then your threats of killing have increased plausibility.

I refuse to accept that you are too daft to understand that. I am left to assume that you are simply pro-gun, like I am, but that for you it somehow causes you to ignore perfectly reasonable context like this.

If you are pro-drugs, like I am, it would nevertheless be foolish of you to object when a news article reads "James Q Public was arrested in his home yesterday after a police raid turned up three pounds of marijuana and over $15,000 in cash." It would be stupid of you to say "I love how the article points out that there was cash in the house, implying that somehow ordinary American citizens don't have cash."

Let me rephrase that.

"I know what is Constitutional, and if the Supreme Court disagrees with me, then they are wrong. Whatever I think is right and everyone should agree with me."

Yeah, dude, we all feel that way. We could fight about it, or we could appoint some people to sit on a panel and decide which blowhard is right and which blowhard is wrong. And in fact we did appoint those people, and we call that panel "The Supreme Court".

If you want to, you can do the incredibly difficult work of learning and working hard to get yourself onto that panel. Or, on the other hand, you can be a blowhard on the internet.

The death penalty definitely does not save the taxpayer any money. It is very expensive to execute a person, much MUCH more expensive than allowing them to live in prison for the rest of their natural life.

The whole point is that executions are worth the cost.

Yes they do. Civilized people have the death penalty. Only uncivilized people don't have the death penalty.

The sentence you quote sounds like marketing speak to me. I wouldn't base implementation assumptions on it. It might work that way, or that might be the way that the Media Director decided to describe it.

The difference is a quarter-million miles. Science is more precise than that when it is able to be.

Almost every programming job I see posted requests a CS degree. So you only need a CS degree if you want a programming job. Or, if you are a super-elite hacker god, you can probably get by without one.

It is sort of a joke, sort of not. I know he isn't CEO anymore but I always assumed he still had a large, probably majority stake in Bain. Is that not the case?

Oh okay. Well nobody says that so I guess we can agree there are no fanatics.

I can explain what happened.

I work for Weather Central in Madison, Wisconsin. In December we were purchased by the famously rich Rothschilds of Europe and they brought in a charismatic new superstar CEO. Seven months later, they cashed out to the tune of +$15 million, selling to our historical nemesis and competitor, Weather Services International.

WSI is owned by The Weather Channel Companies, which is an umbrella company for The Weather Channel (duh) as well as Weather Underground, which they recently bought. (TWCC is owned by NBC Universal, which is owned by Bain Capital and Blackstone Group. That means I now work for Mitt Romney.)

This consolidation is complete. Over 90% of the worldwide weather services business is now owned by TWCC, which used that considerable power to negotiate a contract with Google. The contract stipulates that TWCC (and their sub-companies) will provide data to Google, and in turn Google would eliminate its weather API, because TWCC has its own weather APIs (more than one of them now, in fact). The API at my company is cleverly named DataCloud: http://datacloud.wxc.com/?vs=0.9.

This consolidation is definitely good for TWCC, which will never again have to worry about competing in the marketplace. The monopoly will last until a disruptive technology displaces it in a couple decades, if it's anything like other stale monopolies. Unfortunately, it is definitely bad for the other 7.01 billion people on the planet, who now only have one source for weather data.

"Morman" would be an awesome superhero secret identity for Mitt Romney.

maybe you meant 'farce'?

I think Bush definitely could have gone to war without Congress. He would have suffered a bit of criticism, but he could have done it. Remember, technically he never went to war, he just deployed troops; we haven't declared war on anybody since WWII. Both of the two Bushes each tried to go to war without Congress, then Congress complained, so they took a side-trip to Congress on the way to war. That was perfunctory of them, but nobody would have stopped them if they hadn't done so. Don't you think?

I think Obama could have fought harder to close Gitmo, but it was a boondoggle. He was suddenly faced with the difficult reality of what the fuck to do with a handfull of really pissed off terrorists. You can't kill them, you can't release them, you can't try them, and nobody is willing to take them. The one option is that he could have opened a new facility, also outside of the US, and put them there. That would have been a purely symbolic move, a total waste of time and money -- but I think he should have done exactly that.

"As a matter of fact, to beat Apple, it has to work really well on Apple devices."

Seriously. Microsoft should concentrate on the "work really well" part, and then after that work on the "Apple devices" part.