Degraded, but very much not useless. The cognitive dissonance in your post must give you a headache.

Scrip, not "script."

And the other giant elephant poop in the room that burns me up; A drone is a NEW WAY to allow surveillance on people. The attitude seems to be that "they have a RIGHT to find out everything the can" without actually letting anyone know what the burning need is. Technology is accelerating, but people don't seem to be at a greater threat of organizing, growing unions and becoming educated and empowered citizens in a Democracy.

Heck, you've got Wall Street brokers talking on PBS, and sleezy monopoly frankenfood peddlers endowing NPR, and since the Reagan era, there are no more civics classes -- so people don't know what a Congress person does anymore. Where is the threat?

Oh, you mean them bad guys you divert a Trillion dollars to chasing down rather than spend it on education or jobs -- so people here get angry and you have to spend another trillion spying on them so they don't make a mess of your perfect country that has no opportunity except for prison guards and drone operators? Yeah, well, I don't think the BAD GUY in the us are going to be doing stuff out in the open. They won't use their credit cards to buy bad guy equipment -- they'll steal it. They won't use their names to plot of facebook.

Honestly, it's all about keeping citizens from organizing and having some capability to disrupt them should they start acting like French and treat this country as if it belonged to the People, rather than stock holders.

Well shouldn't the burden be; "does not infringe constitutional rights" and not "might take away our fun of snooping on everyone"?

We have a "climategate" controversy because more money is spent to keep people ignorant than to do research today.

Different person here. This is in line with my own personal morality and absolutely correct. My life is mine to do with as I please. I am free to do whatever I want whenever I want, provided that the consequences are SOLELY confined to consenting adults (generally that would be just me).

Anything else is an evil desire to control other people, with the approval you get from your own conscience, by convincing yourself it's for their own good, so you can pat yourself on the back and feel like a good person. The typical lack of reasoning ability, wisdom or long-term thinking in most people today and the general shallow thinking of the popular culture sadly promotes and legitimizes this inability to be satisfied with one's own life while respecting that others will live theirs as they please and realizing that telling people how they should live has never worked in the first place (c.f. Prohibition) so there should not even be a debate about this.

Someone who cannot responsibly use things (usually due to either a lack of personal maturity and self-knowledge, and/or an inability to deal with one's own life that causes them to reach for drugs as a quick-fix "remedy") has a problem. There are many others who use drugs the same way you might come home from work and drink a beer and stay home. Like Bill Hicks pointed out, it sure is strange the way you never hear about responsible drug users on the news or see them portrayed on shows. That would contradict all the fear propaganda and think-of-the-children rhetoric. Pay attention and you'll notice that the major mass media outlets will generally never contradict either: each other, or anything that faciltiates control. Adult people who are expected to make their own decisions about their own lives in a responsible manner, without being told how to live, absolutely does not facilitate control. Qui bono?

Take away the government subsidies on solar purchase & installation and this problem doesn't even exist. Our government has backed an expensive and inefficient renewable energy tech - that's the only reason we're even having this conversation.

Sure, we can do that... as long as we also stop letting expensive and inefficient fossil fuel energy externalize their costs!

Or a slide! Or a fireman pole! We could make going to the airport fun again!

Machines, on the other hand, could be employed to do the same job more effectively and reliably. It doesn't even need to be particularly high-tech: a simple one-way turnstile (perhaps augmented with a video camera to sound an alarm if the turnstile is tampered with or somehow bypassed) would do a more reliable job, and as a side benefit would not need to be paid a salary.

No kidding. I've seen neighborhood swimming pools* with better security than this airport!

(* I'm not even exaggerating: the pool in question had a 6-foot-high turnstile with multiple bars to thwart jumping.)

I said that because of the implication that Africa and Australia are not "inhabitable" now, and/or that destroying the US would improve their habitability. I realize it was most likely unintentional, but I was amused so I decided to call it out anyway.

On my old 1995 Nokia, there was a Push To Talk function that used a little known option of the GSM protocol. But of course the provider disabled that function in the phone it 'offered' with the contract, since you didn't need to pay them if you used it. Is that function somewhat similar ?

>False equivalence. Although equal airtime for all views is silly, Fox intentionally distorts facts and dialog to fit their agenda. WMD's in Iraq? A certainty, well after all the other news outlets have given up on that

This is a meme that unfortunately puts you on the wrong side of the truth. WMDs were found in Iraq - their old chemical weapons stores were not all destroyed, as promised.

'On June 21, 2006 the U.S. House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence released key points from a classified report from the National Ground Intelligence Center on the recovery of a small number of degraded chemical munitions in Iraq. The report stated that "Coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent." All are thought to be pre-Gulf War munitions.

These munitions meet the technical definition of weapons of mass destruction, according to the commander of the National Ground Intelligence Center. "These are chemical weapons as defined under the Chemical Weapons Convention, and yes ... they do constitute weapons of mass destruction," Army Col. John Chu told the House Armed Services Committee. The munitions addressed in the report were produced in the 1980s, according to Army Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples. Badly corroded, they could not currently be used as originally intended, though agent remaining in the weapons would be very valuable to terrorists and insurgents, Maples said.' -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction#Chemical_Weapons_Recovered

> Eight committees investigated the allegations and published reports, finding no evidence of fraud or scientific misconduct.

Sure, there was no fraud or scientific misconduct.

However, the commission findings did confirm a lot of shitty things they were doing, such as coming up with arguably illegal tricks to avoid having to complete FOIA requests, strongarming journals that publish dissenting views in climate science, and a general lack of transparency in a field that requires data openness.

>This is effectively Google's response to OEMs (especially Samsung) putting on atrocious crapware that was ruining the Android experience for many users. e.g. "this is why OEMs can't have nice things".

You have it backwards. The Samsung bloatware is a response to Google's strong-arming vendors on their apps.

Ever wonder why Samsung installs a fucking duplicate app on your device for everything Google does? Samsung Calendar, Samsung memo, Samsung voice, Samsung Apps Store, Samsung Translator, etc?

It's so that they have leverage over Google when Google threatens to remove their apps and force a vendor to use the stone age equivalents. Having duplicate apps means that the threat carries a lot less teeth.

The only people hurt by this conflict are the customers, who have to deal with the shitty situation of two sets of competing apps on the same device.

I know all about biodiesel, Ive made my own in the past. its not viable no matter how much I wanted it to be and I wasted a ton of money trying to make it so. I still love the concept, but it still isnt a replacement

To use dino-diesel, I go to a filling station, pull up to the pump, authorize payment with my credit card, pump, and drive off again.

To use biodiesel, I go to a [different] filling station, pull up to the pump, authorize payment with my credit card, pump, and drive off again.

It seems pretty damn viable to me!