I believe it was Arthur Clarke who I heard speculate that we may have already encountered other sentient life and just not recognized it. If something lived so slowly that it took decades or years to form a coherent thought we would never have the patience to talk to it (even if we could figure out how). If something lived so quickly that it was here and gone in a day it wouldn't have the patience to talk to us. For some long-lived species a trip between stars that lasted a thousand years, to us essentially an impossibility, might be the equivalent of an evening parking on Lover's Lane.

One of my favorite mouse-over comments on XKCD goes to the effect of, "There is no logical economic reason to go to the stars. The universe is full of civilizations and species that lived and died on a solitary planet, discovered and recorded by the species which did the illogical thing."

The Anti-Humans-In-Space Nutters seem to have descended in force on this topic. Two centuries ago they would have been busily shouting down anyone who predicted that someday humans would travel faster than 35 miles an hour.

So the Teabaggers should be allowed to violate tax laws because Obama doesn't like them? Interesting concept. They could have registered as any of several other types of non-profit and not had any issues, instead they decided to register as one of the two classes that are NOT allowed to do political campaigning while openly doing just that. This is the exact same issue that got the Moral Majority's tax exempt status revoked at one point. They later re-registered as the correct type of non-profit and had no further issues, except that now they have to reveal their financial patrons.

It's one thing for a test to destroy a few tickytacky houses thrown up in the middle of the desert and burn some mannikins. Actually seeing the devastation is an order of magnitude different. I know from testing that the full-choke barrel on my 16 ga will create a shot pattern a foot wide at a certain distance. Actually seeing the mess it makes of a rabbit that far away is something else entirely.

Mostly because "We're being oppressed by the government!" resonates much better with their base than "We're sleazy douchebags who want to conceal our funding sources but the rules won't let us!"

I suspect that was a bad attempt at sarcasm. He says "Quoting a bad Stallone movie" as though there were some other type of Stallone movie, for example.

Earlier this year? That's been public knowledge since at least 2003. People were posting on Blogspot as early as 2004 about how they had been paid to disrupt online forums, we had several on the Alternet and Utne forums. For that matter there were FBI trolls disrupting BBS and IRC discussions back in the '90s.

Summary: You are actually free to shout "Fire" in a crowded theatre, just be prepared to go to jail for the resulting damage/injury /death.

Simple enough?

In actuality the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki did save lives in the long run. The two cities were chosen for their geographic and demographic profiles, to test the effects of terrain and building types on bomb effectiveness with a future clash with the Soviet Union in mind. What they found was that the effects of nuclear weapons were so horrible that even the lunatics in the Pentagon and Kremlin hesitate to use them. If the nukes had just been used at some remote location to demonstrate to the Japanese what we could do it's very likely that they would have been launched at some point during the 1950s and the highest life form left on the surface of the planet would be rodents.

They were harassed for violating the terms of the tax-exempt status that they had applied for. That's what the IRS is for, enforcing the tax law. If the teabaggers hadn't been so interested in hiding that their movement is entirely financed by billionaires and mega-corporations they could have applied for a different tax-exempt classification and not had any problems, just like all the other political action groups.

The IRS went after groups that were very blatantly and openly violating the rules that they are supposed to enforce. The teabaggers could have chosen any of the tax exempt classifications, they chose the one that would let them hide their donors. That classification prohibits political activity, but they were already involved in political campaigning before filling out the application. Should the IRS have just pretended to not see?

Can you say "MCSE"? I worked my ass off and destroyed my server lab half a dozen times and can honestly say that I earned my title. Then came the boot camps and the braindump sites and "paper" MCSEs became far more common than the real thing. Truly pissed me off.

My wife's friend was told by the corporate big wigs to outsource support for the (really major) feature that his group supported. He refused at first, loudly proclaiming to all and sundry that only people experienced in the development and testing of this feature could support it. He was told then that his support budget had been cut by several million dollars, effectively making outsourcing the only option possible. He had no choice, so relented and outsourced with InfoSys (as directed by the same big wigs). A year later they had to spend $30 million to bring the support back in-house and do all the in-depth training that he had said would be necessary from the beginning.

Then he got fired for being so far over budget on his support costs, while the big wig got a bonus for having saved money on support the year before.

The modern police/paranoia state is depressing to contemplate all by itself, and hideous when you think of it as applied to today's teenagers. I can think of two things that I was **caught** doing in high school that today would have meant jail time rather than detention, and I did a frack of a lot more that I wasn't caught at. Some of it I was lucky to survive, and those were some of the most valuable learning experiences.

I feel sorry for kids that will never have the opportunity to just take off and be on their own for hours/days without adult supervision because their parents grew up with "Stranger Danger" being drummed into their heads.