He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent which will reach to himself. - Thomas Paine

Oh really? I remember back after a major patch in WoW where PvP gear was mistakenly put up for nothing, and a few bans got issued for exploiting it. Not to mention the screwed up launch of LFR, where several guilds got bans that took them out of contention for world firsts because of gear exploiting the mistake by blizzard that allowed gear trading.

To be any more obvious he'd have to slap you with a wet fish with "bad satire" written on it in permanent marker.

The US is more like Rome in the late of the late Republic at this stage.

The moon's axial tilt is far less than the earth's. Only about 1.5 degrees as opposed to about 23.5 degrees for the earth. The only difficulty is that the solar arrays would have to be almost vertical, be just finding a nice hillside for them would solve that.

Some of Heinlein's early stuff was aimed at a younger audience. Red Planet, Time for the Stars, Farmer in the Sky, Podkayne of Mars, Citizen of the Galaxy, to name a few.

You do realize that the the 3/5s clause was to reign in the political power of the slave holders, don't you? Not a judgement on the worth of slaves as human beings? The slave states were attempting to have slaves classified as people, only under the census, so that they would benefit politically by having greater representation, while the free states argued that they shouldn't be counted at all because they weren't citizens and wouldn't be the ones to benefit from that representation in the government.

You're showing your age.

Having lived in a lot of places in the world, I can assure you that Americans are no stupider than people anywhere else.

So what they're saying, is that using modern technology, they can confirm that these drawings, long known for their accuracy and detail, are, in fact, accurate and detailed. Amazing.

Knowledge and belief are orthogonal to one another. You can believe and not know (religious people), you can not believe and know (everyone with respect to anthropogenic deities that they do not believe in), you can not believe and not know (this usually involves some nebulous, poorly defined concept of 'god'), etc.

As far as claiming that affirming nonexistence of a god concept is just as invalid a position as affirming its existence, let's first define that god concept. Go with "Thor" or "Set" or "El" and I'd say that you have a much stronger case for nonexistence than existence, seeing as many falsifiable claims have been made regarding these god concepts, and these claims have been falsified.

careful that you don't burn your tongue.

Actually, Apple doesn't use AMOLED because Samsung wouldn't supply them with enough screens for the iPhone, because they were tied up in Samsung's own smart phone offerings.

Hey, it's California, which is pretty close to being single party rule. Republicans are trying anything to get a little bit of say in the government. Districts out in the central valley, like this one, are the only places they even have a chance to elect some one.

This exists, it's called the SIPRnet. You can only access it from secure workstations in secure facilities, and in theory all the network hardware is also secure, etc., etc.

AFAIK, the only recent SIPRnet compromise was Bradley Manning, and that was more of a social exploit than a technical one.