That being said, it's remarkable they're still in business.

Aye, but I'm thankful they are. I think it's because general trust in them is so deep that they keep a steady readership. They also lock most of their stuff online behind a paywall (especially auto reviews, which I'm sure gets them most of their attention; after all, if you're looking to buy an $XXK car, dropping $5-10 for a short subscription to their site makes sense.)

It also wouldn't surprise me if they were extremely zealous in keeping sites from reposting their material, though I've not actually heard of actions on their part.

Or they can what Consumer Reports does: Buy the models themselves. I didn't see mention of it while skimming TFA, but many review sites/publications use samples/loaners from companies, making this kind of bait-and-switch easy.

Sure, this means they might not get the review out before it's released, but that also makes this kind of thing far harder to do. (They could still release a first batch of high-quality items, and then successive batches use lower-quality parts, but that still costs more money and will mean less people swindled.)

You're making a big assumption, in that our metaphorical bread winner has a car. This isn't always the case, and in poor areas the lack of a car not only makes getting a job harder, but it also makes getting proper food harder due to the lack of local markets. And, even if that person somehow had unlimited funds for food, they are still at a disadvantage because they can't buy in bulk, being limited to whatever they can carry in that trip.

Sprawling suburbs have the same problem, but we don't notice it because we're used to driving multiple miles, sometimes out of our way, to go grocery shopping. This is thanks to many of our zoning laws, because having a small shopping center in the middle of suburban areas is somehow a travesty to many people (NIMBYs?)

Because most grocers don't like losing shedloads of money due to food-stamp/EBT fraud, shoplifting, robberies, etc.

It's not just due to those, but the added cost of getting food (especially fresh food) into dense cities, and that's just on the financial side. You can't regularly drive huge 18 wheelers down the streets of an urban population, to my knowledge. Food deserts are a relatively new problem.

You decide who is on the ballot.

Actually, no. Not for the two sides of the Establishment Party, anyway.

First, in 2011, 196 people provided almost 80% of the funding to all Super PACs. The one with the most funding is also often the winner, though thankfully we have a recent case to show there are outliers.

Second, I read an article last year (or the year before) that tried to work out how many people it actually takes to get someone on the ballot. I wish I could find it now, it was incredibly insightful. (My first born to the man or woman who can find it in my stead.) It talked about the primaries, the selection of convention delegates, how people are chosen to run, etc., some of which is controlled by state laws (like having to register as a party to partake in that party's primary.) I believe the final number was something like a few tens of thousands people decide who gets on the ballot in the major parties, leaving the millions of people who staunchly tow their respective parties to have "only" one option (because, what, vote for third party? You're mad, that's just throwing your vote away!)

The problems in our national politics are far deeper than people voting only with regard to "their" party, though if we could at least get them to acknowledge third parties that would be a major advancement.

Oh, come now. Given our political climate, I'm sure any despot that the oligarchy put on the ballot (for either party) would be just as happy to allow or order such acts.

It's not that you give President Obama too much blame, it's that you give him too much credit.

I'm not a paid shill.

Then you are naive, at best. Even if he came back to the states today, there is no possible way for him to get a fair trial. It would be a huge miracle for such a trial to even be public, given our government.

Consider that it took one person eight years to get taken off the no-fly list after being put on for what is reportedly a government mistake. Part of the reason (if not the entire reason) for that was the continued insistence by the Justice Department that they couldn't reveal why she was on the list, even just to her own attorneys, because it was a state secret:

Holder and Clapper argue that U.S. national security could be seriously or significantly harmed if Ibrahim or her lawyers are provided with classified information about whether she was the subject of an intelligence or terrorism investigation or about the standards for inclusion in a database called the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE) could harm national security.

This is how our government reacts for a single individual who has been unable to use air travel because of the mistake of a lone public worker.

While he did technically break many laws, it was justifiable because of the sincere good it did in revealing just how unconstitutional our government acts, which is the first step necessary to making it stop. In order to prove that it was justified, he would have to present evidence of the wrong-doing of the government. Do you honestly believe he wouldn't be completely stonewalled and railroaded by the Justice Department, Congress, and whoever was the President? Even if the documents are now in the public eye, they can still be withheld from trial; nevermind the mountain he would have to claim to extricate extra documentation from the NSA proving how much shit they do.

The only way for Snowden to come back with any hint of safety is a Presidential Pardon; I'll know our nation has finally grown up and stopped being scared of the invisible monster under its bed once that happens, if it ever does.

In 120 years people will laugh at the primitives from the early 2000's who reacted with shock and horror to Google glass.

Yes, and in 120 years there will be a similar uproar over FutureBrainWave's BrainReader, wearable tech which can roughly read the thoughts of people in a specific vicinity and upload them to the Stratosphere (the replacement of the Cloud).

The tinfoil in me says that these "stingrays" don't exist at all; instead, whenever law enforcement gets info from their NSA buddies concerning cell phone use/location, these mysterious "stingray" devices are stated as the way the defendant was found. The documents the ALCU would have obtained probably showed the devices (if there are even any physical objects) to be 100% useless at best, leading to further digging, and the eventual revelation of unconstitutional searches that these "devices" lead to.

Maybe it's just the cynic in me speaking, but what if the whole thing is a false flag? "Well, if $100M can't fix public education, perhaps we should [[raise|remove] the H1B cap | make it easier to start private schools and give them all the money | some other bullshit]."

In addition, according to the MSN article:

In 2010, Mayor Booker found a loophole in getting money to help fund Newark's educational reform. It came in the form of philanthropic donations, which, unlike government funding, required no public review of priorities or spending. Gov. Christie approved the plan, and Booker's job was to find the donors.
[...]
The reform ended up looking like this: taking low-performing public schools and closing them, turning them into charter schools and "themed" high schools. But there was no easy way to expand charters without destabilizing traditional public schools.

In the months following the gift announcement, Booker and Christie still had no superstar superintendent and no reform plan.

(Emphasis mine.) This only happened due to a "loophole" in the law, which tells me that there were no good intentions when it went into place. It was probably just as much a bribe--sorry, lobbying effort--to friends and family of Christie, Booker, or both, as it was a school reform effort. And, unfortunately, even if it was totally legit, it wouldn't have worked thanks to an issue mentioned in the article:

Booker appointed Cami Anderson for the job. She implemented ways to help students and improve schools (all which The New Yorker detailed), but there were roadblocks along the way, like how the students brought the issues going on in their homes with them to the classroom.

You could have the best classrooms, the best tech, the best teachers, and no nagging administration; but if the students aren't getting meals outside of school, if they have to walk to/from school worried about being accosted by gangs or thugs, if their parents aren't around (be it from abandonment or working multiple jobs) and able to be involved in both making sure the student studies and within the school, then scores and the graduation rate will likely improve at a rate that would be considered a rounding error.

If that money had gone to improve the community (primarily through offering local, well-paying jobs to the parents, secondarily through safety concerns) then I believe it would have done far, far more to improve student education then any effort they undertook.

people might wake up and PROTEST

Hahaha, excellent joke! Caught me completely by surprise. Are you a comedian, per chance?

2. laugh track (these annoy the living crap out of me...."hahahahahha"....)

I actually appreciate these. If I'm looking at new shows and one has laughing overdubbed (be it a live audience or laughtrack), it lets me know the show is worthless and saves me a bunch of time. If a show thinks it need to prompt me to laugh, it certainly has horrible writing.

All the comedies I've enjoyed in the past decade have been without such a track. Arrested Development, The Office, Parks & Rec, Community, none of these have laugh tracks as a regular thing (some may have done an ep or two with them as a rip on such comedies); they all tend to have deeper stories than laughtrack fodder, too. I think the last show I really enjoyed that had a track/audience was Frasier.

Just because I see so many friends/family rave about it, I figure one day I should watch at least one episode of TBBT, but the fact that none of those people are someone I'd consider "geeky" in the least does not give me any optimism about such a viewing.

Something else I've wondered about is why, if we believe these people are the worst of the worst, we don't use them as case studies in psychoanalysis/physiology. Sure, few might be willing to participate (any number of offered privileges could be used as incentive, though), and even if they do it wouldn't be an ideal situation (if the examiner/pshrink could even be in the same room, they'd be surrounded by guards and/or council, likely), but they could so provide valuable insight into human development that might allow us to recognize these kind of people at an earlier stage and get them proper help.

Could well be that the people our society are so interested in killing are worth more to us alive than dead.

I think a part of this is that, as we grow up, we think back to the things we loved and give them a deeper look. We find a number of lesser questions and plotholes and try to answer those questions or fill those holes, both within our own minds and in discussions with fellow fans. Over time pockets of the fandom (or even just a lone super-fan) come to a rough consensus on this or that, and it becomes "headcanon". So when we go back to watch the movies, the headcanon comes with us and our glasses stay tinted. But kids, or even people new to the property, have no such glasses or headcanon, and so the more action/CGI-heavy films make it easier to keep them entertained.

The problem is the people that vote because of the last commercial they saw. There are a lot of uninformed, stupid, lazy people who think it is a good idea that they vote anyway.

I don't disagree about people being stupid and uniformed. But the more money you have, the more frequent your ads can be, the more likely they become the "last commercial". So if people vote by that standard (and I'd argue that you're giving them too much credit; many just look for that R or D and call it a day) then "Big X" still controls how they vote through their financial support.

I don't know about recycling--if there really are that many cartridges, you could make some chic video game partitions or something out of them, assuming the only thing physically wrong with them is having some dirt/dust.