It's a great sentiment, but money is just the intermediary to the real political capital, which is speech. In our capitalist society, the latter can be bought to a degree -- radio, newspaper, and television adds, movies, books, endorsements, flyers, lobbyists, think tanks, push pollers, etc. -- which is how money becomes a problem. But these things still all exist if you say "candidates can only use government provided funds." So what do you do if, say, the cable networks all lean one particular way? Do they just get to de facto choose who gets to president? What if one person sees it as worthwhile to purchase all of them?

For that matter, what do you do about the funding of third party political commentary in general? It's just as easy to buy an ad or promote a movie or event saying "Candidate X is a great guy" as it is to hand him the money so they can do it themselves. IMHO it's less accountable because you don't see the purchaser on the published list of donors, and if the message is dirty or incorrect a third party probably doesn't care while a candidate saying such things can lose significant backing and reputation.

Maybe you say, "No one in America is allowed to publicly say or do anything construed as supporting a candidate without giving equal time to the other candidate." Okay, what about financing which supports issues said candidate is backing, never mentioning him but clearly propping up his campaign platform? Are we going to ban all advocacy of any kind?

The nature of speech is to be too broad and adaptable to be regulated without inadvertently regulating it in its desired forms, and the point of the 1st amendment is that the benefits of its free exercise are too valuable to set aside. I tend to agree with that, personally -- I think we gain more from unrestricted speech than we lose from malevolent entities trying to use it to their advantage.

Thankfully, while it's easy to speculate better ones, the present system is actually not all that bad. Yes, it confers *some* advantage to be able to spend 60 million when your opponent spends only 30 million. But the return diminishes rapidly. It's a huge difference being able to convey your message to a voter vs. not being able to. But compared to that it's only a little bit better to convey the same message twice, etc. In general, it's possible for candidates to get their say in even in demographics where the other candidate enjoys home turf advantage. And as much as we like to bemoan the "uninformed voter," the overall effect is to inform voters. The system is definitely inequitable, but not horribly so compared to other systems, and I think with little susceptibility to extensive influence by individual players.

I'm all for precision in language, but in day-to-day speech a 'formation' is just something that is formed, and the grand canyon is indeed a formation even if it is not a 'geologic formation' proper. It's a bit like if mechanics decided to formally call washers 'round things' and then got particularly upset when a ball bearing was casually referrered to as a 'round thing' as well.

Food which provides all nutrients homogeneously is apparently used as punishment in prisons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...

However, while it doesn't exactly sound enticing to me, I could actually see eating Soylent. I love to cook, but I've had a pretty demanding academic curriculum which not only makes cooking difficult, but sometimes it's hard even to remember to eat anything besides snacks. The days and work just kind of blend together. Also, I've taken up bodybuilding, and the recommended diet winds up being difficult and fairly monotonous anyway. I wind up eating an awful lot of chicken breast with some kind of vegetable side.

If I could just munch on some soylent during the week and treat myself to a full and delicious meal on the weekend, that would not be a bad arrangement.

Please raise your hand if you are planning on using a large controlled explosion to propel yourself into the oxygenless, -270 Celsius medium of space, return by crashing back down hundreds of miles, and your plan to do so is rooted in the belief that this is all fantastically safe and unlikely to result in your death.

I think the government space program has had an overall fatality rate of something not quite 10%. It's reasonable considering just what they've been doing, but even if commercial space flight is 10 X more safe than the program NASA developed, that's still going to be some guaranteed casualties for any widely implemented program. It's certainly nothing you would tolerate coming from an air liner. Anyone going up is going to have to be acknowledging the not-utterly-unlikely possibility of their death

That said, some oversight isn't bad -- as long it's reasonable and not based on the stupid and unquantifiable "We have the prevent the next Titanic" metric -- but what the government should *really* be offering is direct assistance. The program is still small enough that it's entirely reasonable to help out all the viable startups, and nothing is going to promote success and safety so much as direct cooperation with experienced persons at NASA.

Yes, well, I'm very concerned about this. With the NSA cat and mouse game, at least there was a chance of the mouse winning. More importantly, the mouse could win without being sent to the chopping block, because the cat didn't want anyone to know it was even playing.

Now what it sounds like to me is that we are going to publically require ISPs etc. to engage in long term storage of all of our activities so it can be accessed at request. I'm sure the logging requirements and the period the data is stored will only get longer with time. And agencies other than the NSA will want and receive access. And it will become illegal to do anything which bypasses this now-sanctioned spying.

I prefer the secret quasi-legal spying where the NSA couldn't really use the data in most ordinary cases for fear of revealing what they were doing to making the spying an acceptable part of our government and culture.

Isn't it usually the terrorists who make this argument?

"How did they know it was me!?" -- time traveling Hitler, participating in any online debate

According to the paper, studies were conducted in an open field and there was reportedly no bias based on whether data was recorded e.g., in the morning or in the afternoon. Due to the local weather conditions most of the time the skies were cloudy. When there chanced to be magnetic storms during the day then the dogs' North-South preference disappeared. They did a fairly good of controlling for other factors. The alignment of the magnetic field gave the best correlation.

Hence why it hasn't been mentioned --- the people with all the answers have no reason to Ask Slashdot.

So you're telling me there's an exception built into the law for the case in which all employees do have the same belief, right?

Woah, woah, woah, because I won't chip in on some contingency pool in case you want to pay for X, I am barring you access to X?

Look, the only issue here is whose name goes on the bill of purchase. If instead of having the employer buy the insurance you had the employee use the same money from their compensation to buy their own insurance there would be no issue at all. In fact, that is how it works now, with the one difference we've decided that people can't be trusted to buy insurance under their own motivation so the government needs to mandate it. There's any of a hundred different options to do this in such a way that no one except the employee has to sign off on what they buy. If the only resolution you can think of to this dispute is, "force the religious organization to do it whether they like it or not" when the only difference between some of these options is a symbolic one, then it's obvious whom is trying to oppress the beliefs of whom.

Now allowing coverage exceptions is going to mean health insurance will be capriciously allocated as a form of ransom? I think your dystopian view is going a little a far, especially since up until now being able to decide the nature of the offered policy has been the status quo, and I haven't heard of anything like this happening.

Yes, they are. No one wants to review all of your credit card purchases and verify you haven't bought anything untoward. All these organizations want is that when they pay their own accounts there is nothing which discusses, e.g., abortion.

Just let the religious organizations buy a cheaper plan and have them rebate the difference to their employees. If you give me $20 bucks I can buy my own condoms. I'm not exactly sure why a cheap regular purchase is something you would buy 'insurance' for anyway.

These are people whose social network consists of persons they see just about every day of their life, i.e., their classmates and family. It's not surprising they don't find facebook useful. What is surprising is that they find any other online social network particularly useful. I imagine twitter has more to do with keeping up with celebrities/bands and snapchat/whatsapp is really not a social network so much as it is an improved texting interface which probably works well for intercommunication between small high school cliques.

The reason they use facebook to keep in touch with older relatives is because older relatives are the only people they have developed significant relationships with who are not immediately accessible. When these same students go out-of-state to various colleges, Facebook is going to be a much better way to keep track of each others lives, interact casually with new people (i.e. facebook can be very passive, it doesn't require as much direct activity as a chat program, can just go ahead and friend that guy/girl you maybe like), and keep track of clubs and related events.

But I have seen some die off in facebook popularity. People still check it but they don't post nearly as much. I personally blame privacy issues and the 'like' feature. The latter because it's makes it a popularity contest. Some people are secure enough to not care, others are going to be put off when certain friends post and get 100 likes and they get 2, or even if they do get enough likes stress about keeping it up, or whatever. Best just not to post and avoid the stress of whether your post will be well-received by the community. Any contest is ultimately only going to be participated in by people who do well at the contest, assuming there is any choice in participating.

I would think a properly functioning NSA would indeed be interested in promulgating more secure standards to American companies as part of preventing corporate espionage and preventing foreign companies from stealing trade secrets, besides generally protecting America's technological infrastructure from attack.

RSA seems to indicate that was their belief:

It's a bit like the government has told you to add a new safety device to the cars you manufacture (not just the government ones). That would seem pretty reasonable to go along with. You wouldn't really expect that the safety devices were actually remote activated bombs.

The value of a dollar can and does fluctuate wildly (consult any market crash) and certainly alters slowly over time. What makes it "stable" is the heavy inertia it enjoys from being tied to so many aspects of a large economy, particularly goods whose value are themselves stable. This makes it stable on average, but your analogy wouldn't work if instead of going into a store and buying an apple you went to the stock market, and it doesn't work if a major part of what the dollar is exchanged for comes under duress, such as the real estate market or the American government.

Bitcoin is fluctuating in value right now precisely because people are betting on its future usefulness as a currency. It's sort of like you are buying stock in the Bitcoin Digital Currency company, but the currency itself is being immediately exchanged for the stock. How is it supposed to have a stable value when the only thing it's good for is making bets on an uncertain future? If I had 10 bit coins right now, I really wouldn't know what to do with them, except for look up what they are selling for and get some dollars in trade.

But the simple progression of the future is going to make its more intrinsic value obvious, and once it's tied to companies like Overstock, the value will start to derive increasingly from the goods you can buy with it.

Hasn't bitcoin been specifically designed to have an investor-centric mining phase before plateauing?

It's not meant to be a 'phrase' in this context, it's part of a parable, an argument structured in a story, and you have to understand the story. The law on the books at the time was that adultery was punished by stoning, and so "fair and by the law" judgment being put into effect would mean the adulterous woman would be pommeled with rocks until she died.

Jesus was not concerned that the wrong sort of person was going to be doing the stoning. His concern was that the woman was being stoned at all. So he reminded her accusers that they were in equal standing with the woman as far as being guilty (in God's sight, if not that of the local officials), and coincidentally made it very difficult for them to carry out their task. (If they threw a stone and the others took it as a serious claim of sinlessness, that person could be in for some unpleasant repercussions themselves.)

What you are meant to take away from it is insight into Christ's character -- forgiveness, providing redemption, showing compassion -- and the associated moral philosophy. The idea that everyone does wrong, that no one can boast about being better than others, that everyone needs God's forgiveness, and as recipients of that forgiveness it is hypocritical if we don't show that same mercy to others.

When someone says, "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone," they are typically inviting a bit of similar reflection.

Jeff Bezos circling above in an Apache attack helicopter.