Yes, but I don't remember Westboro Babtist Church protesting any mob or cartel bosses funerals. Russia won't play the games that NK is used to playing with the US.

I don't know about spoilt, but in the US, pretty much everything including cities are built with the expectation that you will have a car. A few larger coastal cities have some form of public transit that make it possible to live without one, but Still not anything like what I've seen in Europe. In the Great Plains states (Texas and everything north of it), things are spread out with miles between your house, work, stores, etc. A 20-30 miles commute to work is not unusual. In the college towns I lived in, there were lots of housing near the schools, but the nearest grocery stores were over two miles away. The only jobs nearby were the few retail jobs which were usually in short supply with so many willing to work them. There are no paths or lanes for bicycles.

If it's like my alma matter, a semester of school is essentially free. Once you get accepted and sign up for classes, you weren't required to pay till you wanted to register for the next semester, graduate, or get your transcript. There were plenty of people who were in school and going to classes because they didn't have to pay the money up front, but were having a hard time making ends meet during the semester.

That is just one of the reasons I got the fuck out of OK. My funny story about Tulsa's transit system. When in high school, I lived in a small town near Tulsa and decided to go to the local sci-fi convention. I was able to get a ride to the airport, figuring that I could get a bus to as near to the convention as possible and then walk the rest. I was already assuming I'd be walking a few miles. I went up to the booth that said "bus schedules" at the airport. It was out of bus schedules. I asked the old lady that worked the counter if there were any others and explained what I was trying to do. She searched the booth, made calls, tried to find out the bus schedules for me. Eventually, she just told the person in the next booth she was taking a break and drove me to the con in her own car because she couldn't even figure out what buses I might be able to take and she ran the Tulsa information booth that was supposed to have the bus schedules. Luckily, at the con I discovered there was a shuttle back to the airport for the return journey.

You are correct. It usually is the cheap parts that break. That is usually designed in because better to have a cheap part break when something goes wrong rather than an expensive one. Then you'd have 100x+ the part cost and 100x+ the labor cost to fix the item.

"A live body and a dead body contain the same number of particles. Structurally there's no discernible difference."

But energy, while conserved across all reference frames, is measured locally like time. It should be possible to create a near infinite amount of momentum by also creating a near infinite amount of momentum along an opposite vector, thus energy is conserved although there may be regions of high energy. Take a future drive that manages to take create matter and anti-matter pairs with opposite momentums in the direction decided upon by the drive. Allowing one to impart the ship and transfer it's momentum to the ship, while the other is expelled as exhaust. The ship gains momentum while net energy is conserved. Alternate the type of matter impacting the ship, and the exhaust recombined behind the ship into gamma rays and the ship gains energy for operation without gaining mass. Such a system should also be ok with thermodynamics, although there will probably be an efficiency issue requiring energy to be put into the process that will be converted to heat. You just need the momentum the ship gains to be greater than the momentum that could be created by that lost energy alone to be workable.

Basically, he's saying all your atmosphere will eventually end up as ice on the dark, cold side.

Personally, I am not sold that digital versions will stand up to the test of time. Printer versions pretty much only go out with decay or change of language which happen very slowly. Digital has it's own decay issues but proper back up will probably make it better than print, but I am uncertain that word docs, pdfs, or even text files will be compatible with future versions of similar readers a few decades from now. Will Adobe Acrobat 45 be able to update and open something made with Adobe Acrobat 4 accurately and reliably? Then there are revision issues. I can usually be certain that nobody has reprinted an old book with changes and if they have, there will be proper notation of this on the copyright page. Not so sure, I can tell how old a digital document is or that it hasn't been changed.

They obviously went to different schools than my friends in college. The ones from Philadelphia were explaining all the work they would go through to sneak their guns past the police guarding the school, and the one from NYC just laughed and asked why they didn't pay off the cop like they did. This all would have been in the 80's.

It was about the South running off with all the toys and money the North had bought for them (including the indepenence of Texas due to the Mexican-American War) and thinking they could just walk off with them.

The benefit of SFO is that there are things to do and you can probably walk or take the bus there unlike LA or Denver. From what I've heard, there are plenty of jobs in Denver and similar fly over states because the people capable of working those jobs don't want to live there. I've seen many friends try and decide if they want to live like a king in Ohio, or struggle with more money in SF, and they choose SF. The times I have seen them go to the less populated states has almost always been to raise kids in a place where there was passable schools and less trouble for them to get into. Of course, most of my friend and I grew up in those BFE states, and we're still bitter and biased.

Yep, but in the States, people like my Republican father find it a bit too liberal for his tastes. He still reads it because it has good information, but he can't see how they could endorse Obama in the last election (which they did), but there are other issues besides economics going on there. Of course, Obama is considered a solid conservative to most outside the US apparently.

According to U. S. Grant, in his memoirs, it was over money. The US had just fought a war to help Texas gain indpendence, mostly funded by the north in both money and soldiers. The South was mostly economically depressed and the US had a great deal of possessions there, such as Fort Sumter, as well as money they had put into the South. There was simply no way the North would be willing to let them take all the toys and walk away with them. Slavery was certainly a wedge issue, and the reason Grant gave for the South being impoverished (You can't keep a third of your population so uneducated and unskilled that they can't even act as factory workers, and expect to do any better.). It was certainly one of the requirements for ending the war as at the Siege of Richmond when the South stalled by asking terms, Lincoln's offer was come back to the Union as if nothing had happened and abolish slavery and they would be allowed to write any other terms they wanted. Still, he stated in his memoirs that had the South sought independence without the economic entanglement, they would have been allowed to leave.

God tried to show his birth certificate, but scientists refused to look at it because it wasn't the long form.