You beat me to it. It's time for adjunct administrators and more full time professors.

Limiting spending in elections inherently favors incumbents. Keep that in mind when you're talking about getting money out of politics.

It's a tiling window manager written in Common Lisp, which means I can change any of the behavior on the fly. I guess you can do the same with xmonad, but I don't know Haskell, I do know a bit of Lisp.

Unlike a lot of tiling window managers, it does user-defined "static" layouts. You start with a single frame covering the whole screen. You can split that vertically or horizontally. You can then split either of the new frames vertically or horizontally, and so on. When I used to use i3 and xmonad, I'd get annoyed when my windows kept moving around and resizing whenever I opened/closed a window. Now I have a few different virtual desktops with layouts I find useful. Browsing on one, with a big frame for the browser and some smaller ones on the sides for xterms. Programming has half the screen for emacs, the other half for an xterm or two.

It takes a second or two to start, because let's face it, modern Lisp implementations are slow to launch, but once it's running it's quite responsive. Memory footprint isn't tiny (we're running a full Common Lisp system here), but I'd wager it's still smaller than KDE, GNOME, or Unity.

One thing I really loved was that the default keybindings were good. The default keybindings in WMs like i3 often eat a bunch of bindings for other programs--I had a hell of a time using i3 and emacs at the same time, for instance. Most of the commands are prefixed with a Ctrl-T, so you'd hit "C-t c" to create a new terminal, sort of like doing an Emacs command (C-x C-s). Yes, I know you want Ctrl-T to open a new tab in your browser; to send a Ctrl-T, you just hit it twice (C-t C-t). You can also add keybindings to the running WM using a little snippet of Lisp code, and if you like it, stick that in your .stumpwm file so it works every time. I left most things default but added Alt- to switch between desktops.

Oh, look, it's a 'Take every chance to blame an enemy of the left whenever possible even though it's not remotely connected to the topic at hand' post. I thought these were confined to fark.com; it appears I was mistaken, and it also appears there are moderators on board. Perhaps your very own sock puppet moderators.

Mod parent up. Reposting to get past AC filter.

There's an Anime series (a remake of Neon Genesis Envangelion) I would have purchased by now, except it's coded in a different region. That means I have to want to watch it enough to not only pay for the discs, but a region-free player as well. So I haven't purchased anything, when they could have had my money already for the discs.

I never said anything about life in prison or a death sentence bringing restoration to the victim's family. I'm concerned with getting dangerous, extremely violent people away from the living permanently. A dog gets rabies. Am I mad at the dog for getting rabies? No. Does it matter how he got rabies? Only insofar as we can eliminate the source; for the fate of the dog, it doesn't matter one wit. The dog is put down because it is simply too dangerous to be allowed around the living anymore. So it is with death row inmates. As for what 'civilized countries do', kindly provide some stories of comparable murderers who were successfully re-introduced to society.

He'd still be there to torment his prison guards and fellow inmates. The decline of the death penalty matches up nicely with the rise in supermax prisons.

Everyone who brings up your line of logic imagines that the most base, vicious members of society will sit in prison for the rest of their days reading books and reflecting on their life's choices. It isn't so.

Take a good look at how these life sentence crooks entertain themselves when they have nothing to look forward to but decades of confinement. Then decide if you still think lifetime imprisonment is irrelevant to the living, and to lesser criminals.

You say it like that would be easy. It wouldn't. Nuclear power plants have significant numbers of armed guards who run drills against adversary teams trying to do just that sort of thing; a factor that's very important, but omitted due to the nature of my previous point.

I'd also like to point out there is a short supply of suicide attackers who have any sort of real capacity to run a mission. 9/11 was the last time anyone with more than five brain cells willingly died in an attack. There's been the occasional unwilling but reasonably intelligent suicide bomber, but a guy like that ain't doing much besides driving a car up to a target.

If you have proof to the contrary, I'd like to see it.

You die. Seriously, the stuff that's radioactive enough to make a dirty bomb is radioactive enough to kill you before you get offsite. New fuel (less than 5% enriched uranium) is not particularly radioactive. It's perfectly safe to stand next to it; to inspect it before you put it in the nuclear reactor. On the other hand, spent fuel is incredibly radioactive, and when it's being handled it's kept under 30' of water so it doesn't kill everyone in the building.

Now, let's assume you had access to the fuel long enough to get it out of the pool. You would receive a lethal dose of radiation in 36 seconds; enough to kill you within a month. Even if death doesn't come for weeks, you would be rapidly debilitated- which of course would leave you immobile next to something giving off massive amounts of radiation, so I imagine you'd be dead-dead within a half hour. Probably much less.

Now, there is spent fuel that's had several years to decay sitting in dry storage on most nuclear sites, but they're kept in casks and bunkers which are so robust, you're not going to be able to steal or breach them in less time than it takes for three states worth of Law Enforcement and FBI to come crashing down on your party.

That fuel in dry storage would still kill you, but it would take longer.

If all the money spent on software licence had instead been spent on developing software, the government would have produced the necessary software ten times over and been able to distribute for free instead of still paying to this day.

I don't contest the logic of this statement in and of itself, but I do wonder were this kind of thinking ends. The Government has it's own critical tasks to perform, and officials should focus their efforts on, well, governing what they're supposed to look after. Should the government build it's own office chairs? It's own cars? How about servers? Handguns?

Those 'other reasons' are pretty simple: Liberal and wealthy societies become complacent due to the ease of their lives, and that makes them neglect the principles and practices that made them powerful and wealthy to begin with.

The default human condition is poverty, misery and violence. Escaping that is rare, and it takes a special society to make wealth, power and security seem normal. Once wealth, power and security are seen as birthrights and not hard-won prizes, the parts of a society that make it special are neglected (because, hey, they're 'mean' and 'hard work'), and rot sets in.

Don't forget that OPEC countries have been found financing anti-Keystone XL 'environmental' groups as a means to keep competition out of their oil markets and keep prices up. Then there's the railway owners, who would lose out if a pipeline was built. Much of the inland oil development is shipped by BSNF, a Berkshire-Hathaway company. Buffet is an Obama supporter who has publicly supported Keystone XL, but who knows what deals are going on behind closed doors? (my apologies if this is a repeat post, the last one didn't seem to take.)

There's more though. Arab oil-producing companies have been found backing environmental groups, to fight the introduction of new supply into their markets, which would depress prices. Then there's the owners of the railroads, who would lose out if the pipe network was expanded. If I remember correctly, BSNF railway ships much of the recent inland oil development, and it's owned by Warren Buffet, a notable supporter of Obama. Buffet (again IIRC) has come out in support of the Keystone XL pipeline, but who knows what deals are going on behind closed doors?.

How can a list of "the seven major tech hubs" not include Seattle, which is home to some of the biggest tech companies in the world, but include cities like Atlanta? That is a strangely biased list so I wonder what the criteria was for "tech hub".