I took my son on a motorcycle trip through North Cascades National Park this summer and it was fantastic.

Your .sig is less persuasive in the context of your post; it sounds like you are practically on tin cans connected by string up there!

My kids have practically no concept of TV, not because they're too good for it, but because it has been replaced by youtube.

The point of pumping the water back uphill is so you can re-generate power from the same water over and over.

The Hoover dam seems like an ideal candidate for pumped-storage hydro, turning it into the world's largest "battery" for renewable energy.

Huh, it appears the Firefox version does offer that, whereas the Chrome version does not. I am on Mac. The version number of FlashBlock is 1.5.17, vs. 0.9.34 on Chrome - even after I go into chrome under chrome://extensions/ then check "developer mode" and "update extensions now."

The Shiite militias and ISIS both include plenty of Iraqis and fight to the death/suicide against superior forces (ourselves for example) all the time. I think they run from their government posts because they identify more along religious / ethnic lines rather than with the unified Iraqi state. We tried to institute secular government but now it is backsliding into Shiite (al-Maliki), Sunni (Isis etc), and Kurdish.

I don't think "overrun" really covers the situation in this case. The basic problem is we are are fighting on both sides of the war. We're not just giving out weapons to our allies, we're handing them out to make allies. A few months ago the big push was to give weapons to anti-Syrian fighters. Some of those are more western-friendly (or act that way to our face), some are not, including ISIS. The reason parts of Iraq were so easily overrun was because the Iraqi soldiers in question had divided loyalties, at best.

Why isn't flashblock doing it for me? I have used it for a long time, but lately some sites including slate.com still seem to be able to auto-play videos on me? Anybody else have this problem?

I think Tesla is accomplishing something amazing and revolutionary. At the same time, the selection of a site for this factory has been WAY over-reported (at least here in NM, which was on the list), and watching the states trip over each other to "give away the store" in luring Tesla is just sad, and especially unfair to regular companies who don't have this kind of pull and will never get such sweetheart deals.

I personally want the equipment geared better for interactive gaming

What is wrong with this for interactive gaming? The list of what they did makes it look very well suited for gaming:

• Enabling real time scheduled multithreaded application processes at guaranteed clock rates
• Context prioritized GPU rendering, enabling asynchronous time warp
• Facilitating completely unbuffered display surfaces for minimal latency
• Supporting low-persistence display mode for improved comfort, visual stability, and reduced motion blur / judder
• variations of the Oculus Tracker and firmware built into the headset for extremely accurate, ultra low-latency 3DOF tracking.
• sub-20 millisecond motion-to-photons latency, roughly equivalent to the most highly optimized experiences on DK2.

A 1440p AMOLED display and cutting-edge GPU are the ideal building blocks for a self-contained VR headset, and using your cellphone to power it should make it much cheaper than any comparable alternative.

My main concern, on the other hand, would be the weight of the phone hanging out at the front like that.

Michael Phelps: 12,000-calorie diet just a myth

.

Olympic gold medalist Michael Phelps says a story about him consuming 12,000 calories a day while training for the Beijing Olympics just isn't true.

"I never ate that much," Phelps said. "It's all a myth. I've never eaten that many calories."

Seacrest replied: "Good because I was starting to loathe you, that you could really eat all this."

Said Phelps: "I wish. It's too much though. It's pretty much impossible."

The truth is, they just don't care because they'll be dead before it gets bad.

Here is your answer, the A20 is freakishly slow compared to anything Intel would put their name on.

Granted, you can build a tablet to do specific tasks (like decoding video codecs) around a really slow processor and some special-purpose DSPs. But perhaps the companies in that business aren't making enough profit to interest Intel.

But you didn't respond to my suggestion that the video be retrievable only by court order. Don't you think that would mitigate a lot of the issues you mentioned?

the Federal government's control reaches into the crooks and nannies it was never supposed to reach

"Supposed" by whom? Some long-dead people?

I do think there is some misalignment between laws as written vs. current practice. But you should realize that bringing them together would most certainly result in more changes to the law, than to how they are practiced. For example, Social Security may or may not be particularly Constitutional, but it will get written into the Constitution long before it will be repealed. Most people want it.