...Witness the Republican outrage over TSA's antics now that a Democrat is calling the shots and contrast it against the silence when GWB was calling the shots....

I don't think it's just Republican outrage... The TSA weren't running nudie scanners with the alternative being a junk-touching session when GWB was calling the shots. That's a brand new wrinkle that brings the privacy outrage up close and personal. I've always assumed that the government could listen into phone calls anyway (not legally, they just didn't blab about doing it), and that actual private conversations could only occur face-to-face. I'd also argue that these two kinds of privacy are of a very different quality. Privacy of one's communications is not the same as privacy of one's body.

You're making the false assumption that regulation will fix the problem. There's little guarantee or recourse for the viewer if the volume is too loud in spite of the law.

Granted, you can pay people in every TV market across the U.S. to sit and watch TV with tax-payer money to make sure of compliance. Or better, let's have the government commission the creation of software that monitors these levels for every broadcast and cable transmission everywhere, again with tax-payer dollars. We know how efficient the government is at software projects, for example that 18 million dollar web site... All of this seems drastically more wasteful than relying on the viewer to USE THE FREAKING MUTE BUTTON.

It is ridiculous that congress wasted time on this.

Newer hypotheses say that wolves domesticated themselves. The ones able to suppress their fear well enough to get close to humans benefited from getting an easier food supply. The ones that made their home near human settlements acted as an early warning system for human camps, probably earning these animals direct rewards. The trick of it was that they had to have a genetic predisposition that let the curiosity pups normally grow out of last a little into early adulthood. From there, all that really needed to happen was for the humans not to prey on the curious ones.

Definition: Observation - The act of making and recording a measurement

In the case of an electron, it is the means used to measure position or energy that necessarily precludes the ability to know both. If I remember my lay-physics right, it has to do with choosing to measure a wave or a particle. Measure one, and measurements of the other become impossible. (Someone please correct my interpretation.)

"If you had invented FaceWave, you would've invented FaceWave."

Yes. That unfairly got my hopes up that we had legislated the healing liquid from Star Wars into being. I was thinking, "Wow! That's an awesome fix bill to ObamaCare!" only to be crushed by disappointment after checking the spelling.

The reason:

Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics, and you'll get ten different answers, but there's one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us. It'll take Marilyn Monroe, and Lao-Tzu, and Einstein, and Morobuto, and Buddy Holly, and Aristophanes, and - all of this - all of this - was for nothing. Unless we go to the stars. -- Commander Jeffrey Sinclair, Babylon 5, Season 1 Episode 4

Have you learned nothing from the story of Odysseus? "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." We do that which is difficult because it is difficult, and in the practice of doing it, improve ourselves.

As leader of the Executive branch, it was Bush's job to tug on the rope and wake Congress up. The problem was, Congress didn't tug back by making appropriate laws to cover handling of terrorists. Congress still hasn't made laws that apply. So now you get this circus of trying terrorists picked up on the battlefield in U.S. criminal courts. Criminal law doesn't adequately handle either the conduct of the military or enemies of the United States. More to the point, criminal law shouldn't handle these things (chain of custody for evidence collected on the battlefield ?!?). There needs to be new law that grants or restricts authority. Military prisons and military tribunals were the closest fit under existing laws and authority.

The Bush administration played its expected role in this tension of powers as defined in the Constitution. The Legislative branch did not. Perhaps we ought to fire them for not doing their jobs.

As for 4th amendment rights, if you make phone calls to known terrorists I damn well hope our government is listening in.

So then, if Sony makes a television, only advertising sold by Sony should appear on the television? Apple is trying to make a locked-down vertical stack out of something that by its nature is an interconnection of many horizontal concerns.

I'm amused that you didn't notice my post was deliberately missing your point, Abbott.

Bzzzz... HHGTTG in book form was based off the BBC radio plays. Judging from the great success and broad appeal of HHGTTG in all its forms, perhaps movies and video games ought to go through a towel adaptation phase first.

And so dawns the age of the auto-lobotic circle-tweet.

tl;dr... busy with TwitterBook

Want to hear more about spokesboobs, though.

I don't know many proponents of the private sector that believe it is the solution for everything. The private sector is better at job creation, it's better at near-term efficiency for most ordinary endeavors. There are a very few things, however, where it is more economically feasible for government to do a thing, than it is for the private sector. For example, maintenance of a military, or building a highway system that spans a continent; these are things where government successfully drives industry. The space program, in terms of the kinds of energies (literal and figurative) needed to succeed at it, is one of those few things that government can establish better than can the private sector. That's just basic economics.

Besides, I thought liberals liked nuance, or is that out of fashion now?

Because Apple has become about being in a certain mindset.

Basically these are Disney devices.