'Shit' didn't just happen. A pending attack or assassination was a big concern for Ambassador Stevens months beforehand, and his requests for more security went nowhere.

Requests for all sorts of things are denied by superiors all the time for all sorts of reasons. Some reasons are good, some reasons are bad, and some reasons are even criminal, but you haven't established which one it was. I would suggest you present the substance of this supposed request, and show how a reasonable boss should've granted it. Just because the "big concern" turned out right in hindsight isn't actually enough.

there's some concern that Obama failed miserably when Hillary Clinton's legendary '3 am phone call' came.

That's rather vague. What did he do, and what was he supposed to do, when?

Note that I'm not defending the Obama administration's actions in any way. I'm just pointing out that I don't actually know what you're accusing them of.

Insurance only makes sense if the premium is much much lower than the catastrophic event you're protecting against. For example, Google shows me an ad for life insurance: "Get $500,000 of Coverage For Only $21/Month". That makes sense, because the $500,000 protects your family against financial ruin, and you can afford the $21. A Mars colony protects against human extinction, which I would expect most people care about a great deal less than their families. Hell, at least one major religion embraces apocalypse, so their believers would presumably not be too worried about it.

So bring a book or magazine. Or chat with your seatmate. Or take a nap. It takes about half an hour for the plane to reach cruising altitude. You'll survive.

If there ere any scientific prove these foods may be dangerous, they would be prohibited by governments.

According to Wikipedia, "Asbestos became increasingly popular among manufacturers and builders in the late 19th century because of its sound absorption, average tensile strength, its resistance to fire, heat, electrical and chemical damage, and affordability. [...] The first documented death related to asbestos was in 1906. In the early 1900s researchers began to notice a large number of early deaths and lung problems in asbestos mining towns. The first diagnosis of asbestosis was made in the UK in 1924. By the 1930s, the UK regulated ventilation and made asbestosis an excusable work-related disease, followed by the U.S about ten years later. The term mesothelioma was first used in medical literature in 1931; its association with asbestos was first noted sometime in the 1940s."

The point is not to say that GM foods are dangerous. The point is that some ill effects can take time to show up, still more time to link to the source conclusively, and then still more time for governments to take action. The harmful effects of tobacco have been well-known for decades, yet it's still quite legal, so I'm not sure where you get your faith in governments.

It's not that complicated. Your personal sharp brake count can be compared to the average count of all drivers in the area. Random events happen to everybody, but if it somehow happens to you a lot more, then either you are extraordinarily unlucky, or you're a bad driver. Either way the insurance company would want you to pay more, assuming they can correlate this behavior with actual accident rates.

Prolonging the inevitable doesn't make it any less inevitable.

That's not actually true. Even just breaking even means that you don't have to lay off employees with important skills and knowledge, and watch them go work for competitors. It means buying yourself some time for R&D to catch up. It means time for a competitor or two to make a mistake. People forget how many years Apple struggled with "inevitable" bankruptcy, that as recently as 2003 you could've had a share of AAPL for $7.

It's not as if Obama has strayed at all from his predecessor's policies on war, executive supremacy, and foreign policy.

Obama got the Arab League* to endorse the no-fly zone over Libya, and got the Europeans flying many of the missions, for a final cost of about $2 billion and no known American lives. Does that sound even remotely like either of Bush's wars?

* Which, mind you, is not only Arab and Muslim like Libya, but also mostly dealing with internal dissent themselves, and are obviously wary of Western intervention themselves. How eager do you suppose they were to throw Libya under the bus?

A no-name company with a skeevy CEO, a custom OS instead of Android or something more well-supported? Maybe at $100, or possibly even $200.

I fear your expectations for a $100 tablet may be a bit high.

I really don't see how my reader could be significantly improved.

In no particular order:

1. The background color of e-ink is not ideal, and should be able to display something resembling white, if not actually a user-selectable color.
2. The resolution of e-ink can be improved, at least to 300 dpi or so.
3. While the flashing refresh is bearable, it's obviously not ideal.
4. Depending on what you're reading, rich color.

Yes, because the bleeding hearts couldn't stand seeing it locally, so they got rid of polluters, sweatshops, abusive management. IF we could export those guys to China, they would clean up China, which is pretty much a hellhole. Better than it was 10 years ago, but still a hellhole..

If that's the kind of country you want to live in, seems to me it'd be more efficient to move you to China than to send the "bleeding hearts" to transform China.

Can't we just face the reality that some races are actually better are certain things than others due to millions of years of evolution?

You misunderstand the reported problem entirely.

Even if we assume your assertion is correct, the average still means nothing in this context. Even if 2% of white people have IQ of 130 but only 1% of black people do (numbers entirely made up for illustration purposes), we would expect the 1% to be approximately as successful as the 2%. If they aren't, then we might reasonably want to understand why.

The tallest woman was 2.48m tall. Would you expect her to be shorter than a 2.48m-tall man, just because women are shorter than men on average?

Manned exploration may be really expensive, but if we can do it right I think it would be far far more efficient than robotic probes.

What about robotic probes that cost half or even about as much as manned exploration? The choice isn't just between tiny rovers and astronauts.

You mean the Xerox that "was allowed to buy pre-IPO stock from Apple, in exchange for engineer visits and an understanding that Apple would create a GUI product", according to Wikipedia?

Make no mistake if they didn't have to - they wouldn't have.

WebKit was created in 2002 with IIRC about 400,000 lines of KHTML code. While this is a good chunk of code, let's not kid ourselves that this represents something Apple couldn't have written from scratch to keep closed. Still, Apple presumably saved some development effort, and the resulting code is enjoyed by many - including Nokia and later Android. How biased do you have to be to turn a win-win-win story for open source software into a snide comment?

Blame the broken system rather than the companies who take advantage of what they're given.

Well, these are powerful companies that either helped draft those laws, or are not doing much to fix it...