This is either the worst joke, or the best troll, I've read all day. Can't tell which.

Stereotypes do not arise in a vacuum; I think our culture takes managers and their skills just about as seriously as those managers have given the culture reason too.

"Are government bodies not entitled to charge a nominal fee for services rendered?"

No.
Especially in this instance, as the service wasn't rendered. If you pay for Document X, the money doesn't go to the people who did whatever work went into that document, it goes to the reproduction office. All he's really done is take out the middle man. There's also that whole taxation thing...

The fact that you even wonder if it would be the same if it was "common" strikes a blow to your assessment that it actually sounded different. I'm sure good ones sound better than cheep ones, but all you convinced me of was that elitism has a note all its own.

And this is different than any other administration how, exactly?
(Not that everyone else doing it makes it OK now, just that the US government has sucked exactly like this for at least several decades, and probably longer.)

To my eye, this would be akin to the distinction between "assault," and "aggravated assault with a deadly weapon." Granted, both of my examples are violent, but I was trying to show a place where the law does in fact draw such fine distinctions. As opposed to rape, which is sort of the only word the law recognizes in terms of nonconsentual sex acts, with no grades of offense, at least as far as I know. Shoot, even flat-out killing someone has grades of offense, from accidental manslaughter through premeditated murder. Not that a rape is ever really accidental, but it would be interesting if it wasn't a binary legal switch.

Never mind all the crap that will get you on the sex offender list all by yourself without ever touching another soul, like getting caught pissing in an alley way.

No, it wasn't intended to predict anything in a scientifically rigorous manner, like predicting planetary orbits or something, so maybe a bad choice of words. Definitely more of a talking point.

That said, the equation was presented by Carl Sagan to some senator in a reverse manner, saying that if they knew N, they could predict L, which played nicely into the senator's anit-nuclear weapons view and thus secured funding for SETI. So its got that going for it, which is nice.

You're thinking of the Drake equation:

N = R* x Fp x Ne x Fl x Fe x Fi x Fc x L

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation

Without giving a lengthy description, at the beginning of the project that would grow into SETI, they asked more or less the same questions and decided that it really came down to, "What are the odds that after a given species invents radio, they invent nukes and destroy themselves?" The equation is intended to predict the number of advanced civilizations in the galaxy at any given time, based on a bunch of "educated guess," variables, like the number of planets that can support life, the number that actually do, the number of those that become intelligent, etc.

Which protoculture? The one that gets you high and drives your space fortress, or the one that brings sex back to your civilization?

Ugly? ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND? That thing looked AWESOME!
  (yes, I'm yelling. We're talking about the closest thing to a space fighter ever built)

Providing for his kids is all well and good. But I think most folks would agree that by the time the author's children are adults they should fend for themselves. And in this case, we're talking about the man's grandkids.

I dunno, was the slave good at casting fake rubber feet?

I think I speak for, well, a whole lot of people when I say, "Fuck 'em."

Everyone brings up that scene as if Vaikman was messing up his experiment just to flirt with the chick, but that ignores his true brilliance. Sure, he fudges the test for her -- she clearly is not psychic, she's just there as a control, so it really doesn't matter if she ever gets shocked or not. It isn't like he's testing electrocution of normal folks. But as for the guy, how is seemingly shocked for giving the right answers -- that's the whole experiment. Vaikman even says so: "I'm studying the effects of negative reinforcement on ESP ability." In other words, will you keep being psychic even if you get electrocuted for it.

As someone who was prescribed Percocet after reconstructive surgery (my arm is full of plates and pins) the effect they might have on my liver was the furthest thing from my mind. Even had I known of this risk, I'd have not been at all hesitant about the drug.

Its also pretty hard to read that list and not assume the FDA is banning some of the more commonly abused pharmacuticals. Because, ya know, prohibition is totally what people want from their government.

I've been watching TOS reruns since I was a kid, I've seen everything from Wrath of Khan forward in the theater, and I've tried to watch all the TV shows -- even when they were bad. It's when they were morbidly shitty (Voyager, I'm looking at you) that I had to bail out. So...

Many of us bored fans were bored senseless with how Rick Berman and been trolling in circles with the Star Trek canon in the last several outings.

I had gotten to the point of not caring if this movie was any good or not, because the entire franchise had gotten so moldy and booring but now, having seen the movie, I believe that he dumped everything shitty. Everything I used to like in Star Trek is still there, just without the baggage.

Also, might not need to assume that the entire canon is gone. The details of it are no longer set in stone, so things might play out differently, but the same events can still take place. As a for instance, I'd LOVE to see Carol Marcus in the next one...