Unfortunately, that's not how discussions are conducted in practice. Everyone always thinks that they argue rationally and factual, and it's always the morans that disagree with you that are _ing blind idiotic sheeple for not seeing the obvious truth of your position. Just look at the pro/con climate change discussions here here on /., the heated US Rep/Dem discussions, or even the iOS/Android pie fights.

Add to that an entire industry that manufactures plausible rationalisations and helpful facts, and you have all the ingredients for large-scale underbelly-based public discussion that is easily manipulated.

You are absolutely right. Given that Solyndra is the only failure that the Obama critics can ever come up with, and given that a subsidy program for renewable energy obviously has high risks (but also high gains), Obama has a very impressive track record in this area. Better that he spends that public money on something that benefits not only the USA but the entire world, rather than, say, the NSA. (Or a Slashdot BETA.)

Ah yes, the But teach!?! Everyone is doing it! defence. That is always so convincing.

If the welfare is handouts that are entirely at the whim of the rich, then yes, you create a pathologically dependent lower class. However, a reliable safety net allows people to take more risks because they know they can fall back on that safety net. That allows those people to create jobs.

Why do you think they are not trying 'to produce something' at the moment? Being poor is for most people not a choice, but something they are working very hard to escape from.

Hunger is a serious problem far before people start to die of it. It makes people less healthy (and hence productive), it makes children do less well in school, and it also encourages criminal behaviour to get some food on the table. There were very good reasons to introduce food stamps in the US (even apart from the subsidy to farmers, I mean), and they are exactly the kind of investment that even the most psychopathic should approve of for entirely selfish reasons.

Where is that utopia you are dreaming of? It is certainly not the US. Possibly some of the scandinavian countries that have a reasonable balance between socialist and capitalist ideas.

Which is exactly why it is so shortsighted to cut on welfare programs and generally treat the poor as the enemy, as is the trend in the US and many european countries nowadays. When the poor start to starve, they will not die quietly, they will get violent. Keeping the masses reasonably well off is a good investment, even for the most psychopathic rich.

Supervision of a powerful instrument of state such as the NSA is not only the task of some senate or congress committee or even the entire senate/congress, it is a task of the public. Yes, some parts of the NSA work must remain secret, and for those parts supervision by a smaller group of people is appropriate, but those parts should be as small as possible. I think it is very hard to argue that Clapper lied about something that should be in that small set of necessary secrets.

Therefore, the congressman was doing his duty: he tried to force Clapper to inform the public, so that it could properly supervise the NSA. Clapper chose to lie instead.

That may be what NSA employees think, but the public disagrees. And rightly so, leaving all NSA practices so poorly supervised is very dangerous.

That's illogical. Clapper said something he knew was not true. That's a lie. You may think that the question was inappropriate, and the lie justified, but it was a lie.

And even if the question were inappropriate, it would not automatically justify a lie to answer it.

Hmm, I know a certain tribe that shoots rockets from drones on wedding parties and other innocents with disgusting regularity. And then there is a tribe that keeps another tribe in a concentration camp and kills random groups of inmates when one of the inmates attacks them.

Both of these tribes are most certainly not Muslims, and they have a much better propaganda apparatus.

Which is why we have much smaller and fuel-efficient cars here.

Exactly! For me the cable was the problem as well. The Nexus 7 2012 I mentioned comes with a wallsocket-to-usb charger, and a special USB cable. I managed to mislay that cable, and with most ordinary cables I had very long or even negative charging rates, even with the original charger. As far as I can tell the trick is to find a cable with low wire resistance, either because it is short, or because it has thick wires.

In any case, I think the whole discussion illustrates that some kind of measurement instrument to determine charging time or current is indeed helpful.

One example: my Nexus 7 draws so much power, even when sleeping, that it is possible to connect it to a weakly charging USB port, come back a few hours later, and it has a lower charge level. I'm sure the same is true for other tablets, and possibly even some phones.

Whereas European politics is thoroughly corrupt because party power talks in European politics. I'll take money politics over party politics any day.

So the US doesn't have party politics? Really? Seriously?