I'm curious what the call rate is at centers like that - what gets portrayed in the media is either a room with 20-40 people constantly taking calls all day long, or a closet with 2 people in it, who get a couple calls a day. The closest one I've actually been in was a backup fire dispatch center that was about to be decommissioned (it was really old) in favor of its replacement, and it had room for 3-4 (uncomfortably). How many calls per hour would you estimate your center receives, and how big is the area it serves, population-wise?

Was that their "business" line or their "emergency" line? I've tried calling my local PD for non-life-threatening stuff I've witnessed before, and the non-emergency number appears to keep even less helpful hours than banks. Since police departments aren't normally geared for the customer-service mindset, they don't tend to set up their interfaces in a manner that makes sense to the callers in the same way it was intended by the receivers. And no one really expects to call and find the police department closed if there isn't a gun or knife threatening your life.

> automated plane systems which could save thousands of lives per year because it might crash once or twice.

I haven't heard of a plane that has crashed twice, usually once will do the job.

It's a weak god indeed that is needs to be protected by semi-illiterates armed with hatchets and cleavers from a guy asking questions and having discussions. Each act like this done in this "god's" name further convinces me there is no possible way it is worthy of worship, or that it exists at all.

You're confusing laws and theories. Laws describe what things do, with no concern for how that is accomplished. For example, Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation: F = G(m1*m2/r^2)

This accurately describes what the gravitational force is between two masses, but you're not going to see anything about gravity waves or gravitons or gravity elves in there - there's no "how". For this to be overturned, you'd have to contradict all of mankind's collected observational data on the subject, where everything we've ever observed has turned out to be affected by gravity according to that formula.

Theories are our attempts to explain the "how" - and are subject to correction, reinterpretation, and refinement constantly.

Out of ideas, or to protect themselves from ISPs that seem intent on using bandwidth as an excuse to throttle connections to their sites and extort money from them? If they become peers to the ISPs (becoming ISPs themselves), then the arguments that comcast/verizon/AT&T use against content providers like Netflix will fall apart and they'll have to go back to hatching new evil schemes.

Actually, closer to 100% of water is recycled. Possible exceptions being that underground lake they found in Antarctica (Lake Vostok) that has been sitting there for the past 15-25 million years, and a few places like it.

Still doesn't mean that it's not recycled dinosaur toilet water. There's been a few nights I thought I recycled all the fresh water myself, or that's what my kidneys (and their damned stones) were telling me.

That's a mistranslation - the original text says "burn in Burbank", and was more of a figurative thing because it was summer at the time.

It'd be somewhere (lower) on the scale of what it took to obtain all that info in the first place. And we're the ones paying for that to begin with.

If you want to monitor my communications, get a warrant. Otherwise, they're violating the 4th amendment. If they are going to argue that we should have nothing to hide if we are not doing anything wrong, I must ask why the government keeps secrets from its citizens - after all, we are also the "good guys". Any reason they have for not trusting citizens with access to their "secrets" would stand as a good reason why citizens would not trust these agencies with ours.

So, an early version of Mudd's Women, where there's only 72 instead of 500?

Tell that to the folks that used to work for Kay Bee toys. http://www.politifact.com/trut... While he had left by the time Bain did their damage there, they were using the system that he had set up: Run up a large debt to purchase a company, assign the debt to that company, sell off much of its assets, and watch it burn.

By firing air traffic controllers and public mental health workers.

Considering he pointed out the distinction between communism and socialism, and provided examples the the continuing success and happiness of people that are using that system; then you get right back on the train of calling one by the other's name and giving it the blame for what that other did - that's some industrial-grade stupid there, son.

Can you really expect anyone to take you seriously when you use the word "anointed"? It gets trotted out every election cycle and it tells me to to ignore the person using it - because if the only serious critique you can come up with is that the candidate or office holder is popular among their supporters, you're likely into your third jug of kook-aid for the opposition. (yeah, I saw that typo and decided to keep it - it fits the concept well)