Never work overtime for longer than a week.

Why? Because your brain gets tired. You make more mistakes. Mistakes slow you down enough that, after more than a week of overtime, net productivity goes down. (This isn't an assembly line, it's brain work.)

If your boss can't wrap his brain around that, start looking.

The birds got confused by the discrepancy between runway numbers and magnetic north, couldn't figure out where to land, ran out of fuel, and crashed?

You think that an "executive agreement" both:
- has legal force, and
- is exempt from the first amendment?

Tell me your kidding.

More to the point, tell me that the Supreme Court does not agree with you...

Hardware modding may be required. Remove ceiling or wall before use. If you try it, on your own head be it - I do not guarantee your safety.

Look, we already went through the era of patenting obvious, well-known process X "with a computer". Then we went through patenting X "on the internet". We look back on that now, and we say, "Duh, putting it on a computer or on the internet didn't make it novel."

Is putting it on a GPU any better? No.

We'll never have flying cars (other than airplanes/helicopters) in regular use until we either have limitless, free entergy, or we have working anti-gravity. The energy cost is just too high otherwise.

Well, gays (engineer or no, doesn't matter) aren't going to be welcomed into an extremist Muslim organization.

Different 4th Amendment issue: Surveilance of your house from the street. If I understand correctly, the cops can look all they want, but they can't use any technology that "looks through walls" (infrared, etc.) without a warrant.

So, by analogy (always a dangerous way to reason), TSA should be able to look with their eyes, but not with anything that looks under people's clothes. To do otherwise is to violate the 4th Amendment.

And, they can't weasel out of it with "it doesn't apply to us", because TSA is a federal agency.

That's not "ruining it for everyone". That's "ruining it for a few people who were already relying on a subsidy to engage in a marginal activity". That doesn't exactly overwhelm me with the need for concern.

Now, you could easily give examples of people who were subsistence farmers, who didn't have a subsidy, and if their activity goes from "marginal" to "no way", well...

Which will be what? Imprisonment? Well, that's too bad. Don't break into our computers, and you won't have that problem.

Guantanamo? That's a different matter.

Or is the allegation that US prisons are, in and of themselves, cruel and unusual punishment?

I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say that "almost everything Jesus said was a general rule". Let's take a closer look at this particular conversation.

A rich guy comes to Jesus and asks what he has to do to inherit eternal life. Jesus walks him through the Ten Commandments. More specifically, the Ten Commandments has two parts: commandments 1-4, which deal with our relationship with God, and commandments 5-10, which deal with our relationships with people. Jesus dealt exclusively with the second section, but omitted commandment 10 (thou shalt not covet).

The rich guy said that he had done all that.

Then Jesus hit the guy with where his problem really was - his money. (This is tightly related to the covetousness that Jesus didn't mention in his first pass.) Jesus is saying, "This is your problem, you can't hold on to your money and still follow God." But that's because the money is what this guy is holding on to. If Jesus were talking to somebody else, he would go after what they were holding on to - maybe sex or pride of position.

See, you're either holding on to God, or to something else. If you're holding on to something else, that's what Jesus would go after - whatever it is for you. So it's not that having money is a problem, it's that holding on to the money (as the thing you put ahead of God) is a problem. Now, I will grant you that that problem is somewhat highly correlated with having lots of money, but not entirely so. (Poor people dream about the money they don't have instead of holding on to the money that they do have.)

Then, after the rich guy leaves, Jesus said that it's essentially impossible for the rich to get into heaven. Now, what made this such a bombshell is that the culture said that being rich was a sign of God's favor - so being rich meant that you were much more likely to get into heaven, right? But Jesus' point isn't that the rich have to give up their money to get into heaven, it's that you can't get into heaven any way but through him. So it's hard for EVERYBODY, not just for the rich. And, true, it may be especially hard for the rich, because it's really easy for them to grab onto something other than Jesus (money), and that means that they miss the only way.

But saying "Jesus clearly says in that passage that the only way for rich people to enter heaven is to drop their earthly possessions into the hands of the poor. All of it. For all of them. The passage can not be understood differently" is a bit much. No, Jesus didn't say that.

I refer you to Acts 5, where there were people selling their property and giving to those in need. And Ananias and Sapphira tried to fake it. Peter says, "When it was yours, did it not remain your own? And after you sold it, wasn't the money under your control?" The issue wasn't that they weren't giving it all, the issue was that they were trying to pretend that they had done more than they had. That means that Peter didn't understand Jesus the way you did. No offense, but my money's on Peter to be right.

But Jesus never said that the community owns everything, or anything close to that. He said, "YOU [the rich guy he was talking to at the moment] go and sell everything you have and give to the poor".

He didn't say "bring down the capitalist system", or "confiscate everything from those who own it, because property is theft, or because the community owns everything". He said, "You who owns this stuff, you voluntarily give it away, not because I'm changing the social order, but because I'm changing YOU".

That last paraphrase gets to the heart of the matter. Jesus was about changing people's hearts, not about changing the social order. The change in their hearts was supposed to change their behavior, including their behavior toward money. And that change was supposed to influence society. But the influence on society is a third-order effect. Jesus talks about money (the second-order effect) to expose the heart issue, which is what he's really after.

So, no, Jesus is NOT a socialist. I'll give you this, though - he's not a capitalist either.

"Jesus was a socialist"? Um, no.

Theoretically, Jesus was a theocrat - God rules. But practically, he told those living under occupation by a foreign empire (Rome) to pay their taxes, and that there was no disloyalty to God in doing so.

People say that Jesus was a socialist because he said things like "give to those who ask of you". But this is not at all what people call socialism. He didn't say "set up a government structure to take taxes from people and give to those who have need". Instead, he said "you who follow me, you give to the needs of others. Do this, not because the government makes you, but because of what God has done for you."