Indeed. Humans are returning to the Moon.

That is not a skill set most IT departments have.

Many IT departments don't even have enough skill overage to deal with one guy being sick, much less have excess expert capacity.

Back in the 90's I watched a big medical center show the door to the guy who maintained the disaster recovery plan. He was "a cost center and never produced anything that anybody used."

That's about the timeframe when professional IT ended in the general population. Or maybe it's just when the general population got an IT staff.

If you're self-employed, have investment income, or asset depreciation, you probably already do your taxes with a real CPA. If you aren't, you probably should.

This is bad advice for typical small businesses. I once paid a CPA $1200 only to find that he missed all sorts of deductions that Turbotax found.

Hire a pro when it goes beyond the scope of what a computer program can do and hire a computer program when exhaustive rote is called for.

Here in Colorado diesel is still at 3/ gal.

Sigh. 3.80 on Cape Cod. Apparently just because they can.

It's not a given that low voter turnout is a problem. We don't need more low-information voters (89% agree that DHMO should be banned) and we don't need to coerce those who do not vote to signal their non-consent to the system.

Blockchain technology could make voting more reliable, but that's a separate issue - don't confuse the two.

We have proto-law in the form of the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech". So long as that provision is not amended via Constitutional process, do you see any wiggle room there? Hemming and hawing doesn't count.

As it stands, any Federal law whatsoever abridging freedom of speech in any manner is null and void on the face of it. But this in no way restricts the laws of individual states.

He's on the money, though, isn't he? Doesn't change the message.

and damn well the protection of free speech should mean that you can say anything you want without legal consequences

No it doesn't. If I publically incite/encourage harm against a group of people and they come to harm then I should face the consequences even if all I did was talk. If I was the cause of the harm then I'm responsible. You're free to say what you want but you're also responsible for what you say.

That has validity, so long as one understands that the crime of incitement is a very slippery slope. Objectively there is a huge fundamental difference between saying "jews are all evil bastards and all jews should be killed", and "faggots are disgusting" or "muslims are intolerant and dangerous". Anyone with a working sense of logic should agree that the first steps over the line and needs SOME sanction (exactly what sanction is saved for another discussion), and the others are nothing more than the expression of the right NOT TO LIKE.

There can be no guarantee that everybody likes everybody and everything, or even that nobody is allowed to express dislike or fear or disgust. Yet many such expressions have come to be regarded as "hate speech" against protected minorities, and prosecuted or suppressed as such by the force of the law.

Of course the goal of suppressing hate cannot be thus achieved at all. The only achievement is an atmosphere of repression.

Seriously? Do you think everybody in the world should be subject to the laws of all 196 countries in the world? The only way the US could get its claws on a foreign national residing in his own native country would be rendition or kidnapping. I doubt Canada would extradite a Canadian citizen to the US. The response would probably be something like "are you fucking kidding me?". If it was a case of country A requesting the extradition from country B of a citizen of country A, or in extraordinary circumstances even country C, visiting country B, it would be somewhat less unlikely.

And Pu-239 has a half life of 24,100 years.

Whether or not you see a blue screen with a lot of text on it is beside the point. Every OS can potentially panic. Even if it's configured to paper over the problem by doing it quietly and rebooting, the system has gone tits up.

Rolls eyes helplessly at the depth of ignorance.

Yes, it is a very true observation that both the bible and the koran are full of vengefulness. But there is a distinction you fail to note. Christ and the new testament form a tremendous moderating influence. That is not the case with the koran. Mohammed was an evil vengeful bastard, and the koran is full of vengefulness from one end to the other. Relativism doesn't fly here.

Being against violent religious zealotry is not racism. I believe on reflection you would rather agree with that than be a fool. Religion is not race[*]. The most you can go for is labeling it xenophobia, but as we see below, there is excellent genuine foundation for being highly suspicious of whether huge numbers of Muslims are civilized at all.

And I see you have absolutely nothing to say about the substance of GP's post, which is that a study found that majorities of Muslims who favor sharia law also favor murdering "apostates" who "abandon Islam", in Malaysia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan, and "Palestine". I'll make it easy for you. Just turn to page 55 in the highly detailed 2013 Pew study.

Sure, one has to be careful that their brush does not colour too universally. For example (page 46), only 17% of Muslim Turks who favor sharia believe apostates should be murdered, and only 12% of Turks favor making sharia the law of the land (as opposed, for example, to 91% of Iraqis and a whopping 99% of Afghanis.

[*] In fact, there is anthropologically only one human "race" in existence in the modern world.