Francis is a communist. Lashing his religion to the religion of AGW, complete with social justice wealth redistribution as the solution, comes as no surprise.

I bet right now a lot of Catholics are longing for the days of Pope John Paul II, a man who spent his life fighting the Nazis and communists.

Paul Graham's incorrect argument assumes that all countries will produce great programmers in equal proportions to their populations. He couldn't be more spectacularly wrong.

People from other countries where tribalism (Pakistan), extreme deference to authority (China), and extreme elder worship (India) are the rule, fall to the ingenuity, independence, creativity, and innovation of Americans, every, single, time. The majority of the cultural and genetic makeup of the continent for its first 500 years was that of people willing to risk their lives to come here, work hard, be independent, and make their own way. The effects of that are not easily undone. Paul Graham has fallen into the fallacy of thinking that all countries are the same, all cultures the same, all people the same, and thus their outputs should all be the same. What a dolt!

My company has an Indian subsidiary that we use to handle some of our simpler engineering issues at lower cost. And that's the point. They handle the simple issues, because even their best engineers can't be trusted with our complicated issues. We have to solve those ourselves.

So while the US may only have 5% of the world's population, it's not inconceivable that we could be producing 95% or better of the great programmers already.

If you're going to outright make things up and lie on the internet, you need to stick to topics that are harder to validate.

Here's the toxicology report from the St. Louis County Medical Examiner: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/n...

Since you're not much for fact-finding, investigation, reading, or truth, I'll sum up the relevant part: He had THC in his blood and urine because he had been smoking pot.

Here's the summary from the autopsy that Michael Brown's own family had performed on his body by an examiner of their choosing: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/n...

It states that his blood showed evidence of recent marijuana use.

Additionally, he physically had marijuana on him when he was shot: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/n...

I often wonder at the psychology of a person like you who gets so emotionally involved in something that you throw all desire for objectivity to the wind and simply make things up in order to feel better about your decision to support something.

So let me get this straight:

Delegates (ie, representatives and their entourages, servants, security, family, etc) from 200 nations will all be taking their private jets to a city located in a subtropical desert during the summer, where they'll sit around for a week in luxurious air conditioning discussing an agreement that they may decide to agree to a year later when they all travel by private jet to Paris to do it all over again.

And we're expected to take these people seriously when it comes to what they say concerning carbon emissions, global warming, and how to stop it? If they wanted to be taken seriously, they'd hold the meeting using Skype and live stream it for everyone to watch, but then they couldn't enjoy the luxury of emitting a hundred million tons of CO2 to have their discussion about how to emit less CO2.

What a bunch of clowns!

The public has a great lobbying group on this, the EFF. It's just that not enough people have decided that their rights are worth $25/year. If the ranks of the EFF swelled to level of those of the NRA, this whole conversation would be different; instead of reading an article about how the FCC is going to do whatever it wants we'd be reading an article about how the FCC is carefully evaluating the EFF's 80-page comment on network neutrality while EFF lawyers prepare their lawsuit should the rule making process fail, and in the meantime the EFF will unleash their loyal congressmen to grill the head of the FCC in some committee hearings.

It's not magic. Your voice doesn't count unless you stand and speak.

--- NRA Life Member, and EFF Titanium Member for several years now.

This intruder had a knife, though I can't find details on what kind it was (12" bowie, or 1.5" Swiss army). A hostile person with a knife, within 21 feet of you, is widely considered a lethal threat. Many police departments teach their officers that they can use lethal force against a hostile person with a knife within 21 feet. The same is taught in concealed handgun licensing classes in many states. Twenty-one feet is chosen because that's the distance an average person can travel, from a standstill, in one second.

Plane crashed INTO the White House on purpose in 1994

This guy didn't break in... Guy deemed not crazy shoots at White House, trying to kill President Clinton.

Neither did this guy, but both of them were active threats, and either one of them could have just tossed their guns over the fence before climbing it themselves.

The secret service is in a tough spot: they can't really just shoot dead every deranged person who comes over the fence, but sooner or later someone wearing a suicide vest or explosive underwear is going to come over the fence with a dead-man's switch. And we all know he doesn't need to hurt anyone or do any damage for the government and populace to overreact and start doing things much worse than terrorists could ever do.

It's a real threat.

9-in. x 5.9-in. x 5.5-in will fit an AR-15 lower receiver too. Toys for everyone!

"What moral authority," you ask? The moral authority granted by decades of Californians begging for more government at every opportunity. Now they've got it and they're realizing they don't like it.

But it's okay; instead of admit the mistake and start working to reign in the overlords they've manufactured, they'll just move to other nice states with smaller governments, functional economies, good jobs, and affordable standards of living, where they'll promptly begin to recreate the same mistakes they made in California.

It's already happening in Oregon, Washington, and especially Colorado. Austin is getting a good dose of it too, and Utah is in for a rude awakening in the next couple of years.

Funny that the Ukrainians think Zuckerberg cares. He's the worst kind of anti-freedom, in-bed-with-the-government, limousine socialist there is. Mr. Open-All-The-Borders hides behind his armed guards at his gated mansion so he wont have to be burdened with the consequences of his actions. Appealing to Zuckerberg to stop blocking their social media efforts is going to have about as much effect as appealing directly to Putin to stop invading.

And at the helm of the only NATO country that matters: Obama. NATO members with 1% and 2% of their budgets going towards defense are in for a rude awakening when they realize that the US isn't coming to their rescue. Obama doesn't have a strategy for confronting ISIS; do you think he has any plan for dealing with Russia? The only thing he knows for sure are his tee times for the next month.

This must be that flexibility he told Putin he'd have after the 2012 election. It's the flexibility to let his own foreign policy chickens come home to roost and the world go to shit while he ignores it from the golf course.

Turn the EFF into the NRA of online rights. If the EFF had 5,000,000 dues paying, donating, voting, vocal, invested members, we wouldn't be having these discussions about ISPs writing their own laws. The hardest part is already done: organizing some people who know what they're doing into what is now the EFF.

People just need to decide that their rights are worth at least $25/year.

Actions like this are how you get the other half to agree to do things to reduce CO2 emissions.

Good step: Offer to eliminate tariffs on solar panels and other things.
Bad step: Call anyone who so much as questions ANYTHING a denier.
Good step: Get behind building LOTS of modern nuclear plants. LOTS.
Bad step: Say that anyone who so much as questions ANYTHING should be arrested. https://theconversation.com/is...
Good step: Get behind building LOTS of electric cars, and the technology to increase batteries' energy density.
Bad step: Say that anyone who so much as questions ANYTHING should be killed. http://www.americanthinker.com...

Much of the political opposition that the Global Warming people get is because they believe that all of their solutions are so good that they should be mandatory. They come to you and say that you'll have to give up your money, your freedom, your independence, and your quality of life. This is all demanded at the barrel of a gun with the implication that if you don't capitulate, you'll also have to give up your life itself.

Environmentalists have made many great missteps, the two largest being not loudly denouncing those among them that call for murder of anyone who dissents, and continuously pushing plans that they know half the population will never get behind.

You want to reduce CO2 emissions? Suggest plans for it that everyone can support. Leave the death threats at home. ; )

Bell Helicopter is developing a tilt rotor aircraft for this competition: http://youtu.be/1O3Onyas984

If you take the V-22, and remove the Marine Corps' requirements for blade-fold-wing-stow and rotors small enough to launch off of a Marine helicopter ship, you free up a huge amount of design room to increase performance.

The Army doesn't want Apaches. They want a medium lift technology demonstrator that will replace their Blackhawk fleet while providing much more capability by exploring new vertical lift technologies. Then they'll run separate competitions to scale the technology up and down in size to replace their Apaches, Little Birds, and Chinooks.

Today on /. we find out who doesn't know the difference between subsidies, tax deductions, tax breaks, and taxes.

From the linked CNN article above:

So we have a bunch of tax deductions that literally every company in the country is eligible for, but when the oil industry takes them they become subsidies and are bad.

Wow.....