And if someone accidentally forgets to check in their weapons then they can be politely reminded that they need to do so and have their bags sent to check-in instead of having their property confiscated.

So basically no different than all the ships coming from China carrying all the stuff you buy... and by "let us deal with it" you mean deal with it the same way we are dealing with it now... which is to say not dealing with it and just letting it wash up on beaches and sit in the middle of the ocean until it finally sinks.

One ton of AC is equivalent to what one ton of ice melting would provide over a day.

You should be happy since NASA has paid for about 1/2 of SpaceX expenses so far. In fact NASA doesn't build much. The last A is for administration which is what it mostly does. Private contractors do the vast majority of the work. NASA just sets the goals and monitors the contracts. Some work is kept in house but most of that is so that there are people smart enough to manage the contracts.

English picks up foreign words; why can't German pick up foreign words?

I can understand attacking a plant in the US, but Europeans sell anything to anyone with the cash (and then bitch at us for being hypocrites).

Russians, maybe, since Merkel wanted to stay tough on sanctions?

Who's to blame when your unlocked car is parked on the street and get's stolen? Both the thief and the foolish owner.

One word: telephone.
Two words: water cooler.
Four words: lunch at the deli.

If that's not possible, then learn to criticize without getting personal. It is doable!

Two more words: reasonableness test.

Right. Playing with your gun teaches the ability to resist road rage. Are you even listening to yourself?

Try it. Then sound off. B-)

Do "regular" North Koreans even have DVD players?

Costs would increase, but so would employment of less skilled but competent workers.

Nobody except all of the Sony employees who weren't!!!!

Of course, there's always keep your personal shit off the company servers!!! And keep what you do write in company documents at a professional tone.

That would sure have mitigated a whole lot of personal pain by these supposedly blameless Sony employees.

I don't believe people are attacking climate science primarily based on their own preconceived beliefs. At this point most of the "debate" is about politics, economics and self interest. And very few people on either side seem truly motivated by what will happen 200, 100 or even 50 years from now.

If carbon emissions are an overriding concern, then we could relatively easily replace most of our carbon emissions with a large concerted nuclear power build-out in the next twenty years. One which would give us hundreds of years of power supply without carbon emissions just based on Uranium alone. We know nuclear power is relatively safe and a workable solution compared with the more speculative technologies or draconian economic and population contractions that have been talked about.

Or we could just wait and see what comes down the pipeline in terms of new more efficient and more workable energy production technologies, which seems to be really what we are doing de facto.

Either way spinning our wheels in this "debate" seems like a deliberate distraction that all sides are using to distract from the fact that we don't seem close to an agreeable solution to the problem.

As you can see, the moderation converged on a more proper +5 Insightful

  I've read the post carefully and it doesn't qualify as Flamebait IMHO. It states a controversial political opinion and thus invites a discussion, which may lead to flamage, but does not itself lead with a flame.

So this looks like someone who doesn't like the position trying to suppress it, by hitting it with the most plausible -1, in the hope that one more like-minded person will have mod points and get it suppressed before very many people see it. That works for "politically incorrect" subjects (such as criticisms of the "heat death of the Earth, everybody panic and suppress technology" interpretation of climate data), where a crowd of like-minded free speech haters are ready to suppress opposing opinions. But pro-pot doesn't appear to attract that much system-gaming opposition.

Right now it only takes two downmods to hide a non-anonymous itme. It seems to me that we have enough people willing to moderate that it's time to scale up the mod system, so a small astroturf operation can't shut down debate. Say: double it: Mods get 10 points, -2 hides, non-anynomous starts at +2, high-karma at +4, doulble everybody's current karma and readjust the cutpoints for bonuses, caps, and the like. That would mean it would take two moderators to suppress a anonymous post and four for authors willing to risk reputation. (It would also mean more work for those who are willing to moderate - but they might be more willing to spend a point if they had more to spend.)