It's along the lines of not betting in sports matches in favor of a team that you're a passionate fan of. You're not likely to bet in a fashion that's reasonable and well thought-out; your love of your team won't let you objectively rate their weaknesses and you stand a worse chance of losing the bet.

The worst for this are new managers that are young and think they know everything. We had to deal with this, the guy who took pride in not learning how/why for the exsting infrastructure has left us with a mess that'll probably take a couple of years to sort out.

If the company drunks run the company, then it's their opinion that matters. As bad a person as Stalin was, his quote, "to the strong, it is the weak who are wrong," applies.

Yeah, it doesn't sound like the statements met the criteria for general "terroristic threats", but wasn't targeted enough to apply as direct intimidation either.

No, the enemy of my enemy on this particular subject has something in common with me right now. The enemy right now might be my friend against my "friend" on another subject. Don't be a dick to any of them unless you want them to go out of their way to be your enemy as often as possible.

And go out drinking with them. It's stupid but patronage, not merit, runs the workplace. Don't get so chummy that you can't bring yourself to throw them under the bus if you actually need to.

The lessons from Machiavelli's The Prince ring true. You can cooperate, you can be confrontational. If you are confrontational you have to expect others to be confrontational back to you in the future, so the benefit in being confrontational better outweigh the negatives that one can reasonably foresee down the road. The people above you have gotten to where they are by stepping on others; you will be stepped on and if you want to succeed beyond simply being the best worker, you will step on others too.

I interpreted the summary's description to mean that the law as-written seems to imply, "preponderance of the evidence," which is how civil law findings can be determined, as opposed to require a significantly higher burden of proof in the form of, "beyond a reasonable doubt," that criminal proceedings require. The defendant wasn't quoting those on a terrorist list or writing his own content, he was quoting or paraphrasing a work that is considered art, without there being any specific or credible intent to actually cause bodily harm to those whom his rants were directed toward.

I expect that had there been a credible threat (ie, action of his that demonstrated planning or intent to cause harm), or had the words been either been his own original words or had been quoted from a source considered to be sometihng other than artistic expression there would have been less doubt about his intentions.

Maybe they all came to Phoenix ComiCon last week and this weekend and were too busy staring at attractive women in their costumes to care about what happens in the digital world...

You bastard!

Aaargh! you made me do it too!

You will never see laws forcing stronger emissions on noncommercial vehicles pass in this country, or if one did, people would simply skirt it through various exemptions for classic car insurance and out-of-emissions-area registrations. I've known people to register cars at rural family members' homes that weren't in the metro areas that need to be tested. Besides, the number of garaged classic cars that need to be tested is quite small compared to the cars between five and twenty years old that have enough volume on the road to where they matter.

I actually think that once a car is 20 or 25 years old, so long as there aren't obvious holes in the tailpipe that let emissions out without passing through the machine, a visual shouldn't matter anymore. My car from the seventies still has a lot of emissions controls on it that just don't function anymore due to age and mileage, but still have to be on there to pass the test. I've seen people actively disable components (blockout plate between the EGR valve and the intake, or a crimped-off smog pump air injection tube) and it still passes. If these cars can pass without these cobbled-on controls, then maybe it's time to let them pass if the actual output is clean, regardless of how that's achieved.

The expensive luxury cars prove that there's something of a market, and the relative scarcity drives up demand relative to supply. On top of that since they're having to deal with direct-sale bans in many states, until that's overcome by rich people with connections that want their cars, there's no easy path to mid-market cars. Once the institutional issues are largely overcome then it'll be a lot easier to do direct sales to the average car buyer.

On top of that, they're driving an interest in the other car makers to themselves give electrics a-go again.

And it's not hard to get a gross-polluter to pass if it's carbureted, turn the screws in so that it only barely idles, then run a bottle of 91% isopropyl alcohol in about five gallons of fuel; the alcohol burns cleaner and hotter, which helps the gasoline burn more thoroughly. Once it's passed, run regular fuel again and readjust the carburetor for power and you're good for the next year or two depending on model year.

Power plants can have both scheduled and surprise inspections to look at emissions equipment and pollution, and there are a lot less of those to inspect than there are cars.

Regardless of how it came to be a part of Buddhist teaching, it still offers a contradiction to be pointed out and further helps to demonstrate how religions are social-evolutionary processes. Which is why fights between religions or subsets of religions are so damn funny at times.

That's what happens when you try to surf the web on a Motorola StarTAC...

It also helps to make it easier to change our energy infrastructure. When fossil-fuel-powered cars first debuted there were no gas stations. There were at-best stables where horses and mules could be groomed and fed and where wagons could be mended if necessary. Gas stations had to be built as the demand for gasoline and other fossil fuels for automobiles grew.

To an extent that's where we are now for electric vehicles, especially those that wish to travel outside of their home range. Homes themselves need charging stations with heavier gauge wiring to most effectively charge the cars, and we need service points with chargers to recharge the cars on roadtrips. That means there needs to be enough electric cars on the road, using similar enough technology, to justify the cost to install the charging stations both at home and in public. This is a snowballing effect, the more places to charge, the more that electric cars become viable to the average car buyer, and the more electric cars on the road, the more people and businesses willing to make the investment for electric car infrastructure.

In the end, we shift the primary source of automotive pollution from the end-car to power generation, aka, power plants. Sure, there are still fossil-fuel power plants that pollute, but it's a lot easier to regulate hundreds or even thousands of power plants than it is to regulate hundreds of millions of cars, and unlike cars, power plants have found themselves subject to end-of-life if they do not meet increasingly strong emissions standards, while cars only have to meet the standards in-effect when they were manufactured, some as far back as 1967. Suddenly the car owner no longer as to go wait in line for a Department of Environmental Quality sniffer test or has to worry about the financial cost to simply make the vehicle clean enough to pass such a test.