Not to argue your point but just to clarify. Radiation is one of the ways that coal plants do kill people. Burning coal releases radioactive isotopes directly into the atmosphere. Assuming of course that a containment and scribing system capable of removing it has not been installed. Even in that case you are left with the coal ash, which in and of it's self is radioactive. http://www.scientificamerican....

This strikes me as the same kind of compromise constantly suggested by gun regulation groups. You quietly compromise away one right after another for 100 years with absolutely no give from the opposition. Maybe you truly believed compromise was in everyone's best interest. Then when you say enough your the bad guy for refusing to compromise!

I put together an atom based (Jetway Board) PFSense firewall with four 1gig ports and wifi for under $400. It's fan less cpu and low power usage makes it an ideal replacement for the e2000 I had before. In addition to the firewall it's running snort updated daily. If power is your only concern it may not make sense to upgrade your hardware but if you want something quieter and not much larger than a consumer router then you should look into them. Don't let the realtek NICS on the cheaper boards scare you PFSense 2.1 can handle them just fine and I have yet to find any performance issues.

It's a nice straw-man but my point wasn't about the nature of driving as a privilege in modern America but the pervasive attitude that pushes such legislation. We see it all over the place from trying to regulate nicotine vaporizers under the same exact laws as cigarettes to il thought out attempts at various gun bans. From drug laws to NYC's recent dive into soda sizes. It all comes from a sense that people shouldn't be trusted to make there own decisions. That "they" know better than you. More and more this idea is taking root in America and that is a far more dangerous thing than somebody having a more convenient display for there vehicle controls and GPS. My problem is with the reasoning behind the legislation not with the fact it may exist. If after appropriate study we find that they present such a significant threat to public safety we must control there use then so be it but preemptively banning things because "it feels like we should do something" is simply a sign of poorly developed reasoning skills.

That is exactly the opposite of the "right question"! In a free country the government must always defend any limitation of personal freedom. You should never have to justify it's free exercise. Anything else is not a freedom it's a privilege. If Glass, HUD's and similar emerging tech are dangerous or dangerous in certain use profiles it is the duty of the Government to prove so with scientific fact and not emotional hyperbole before enacting laws limiting your freedom. Beyond that it very well may be that GPS usage in a Glass type device is safer than a dash or window mounted GPS. It may also be that speed, gas, rpm and other vital info can be more safely delivered in that format. These sort of reactionary knee jerk laws only server to stifle innovation and the adoption of tech that could solve real, practical problems.

I agree with most of what you said. I also agree with requiring English as a core language, however not for exclusionary reasons. The US is a melting pot of cultures who come to our shores for a variety of different reasons. A core common language is an important glue in tying all of those cultures into a cohesive and some what unified society. Split language nations have shown time and time again a tendency toward eventual civil war because the different parts of the nation do not consider themselves one. I'm not saying people should be made to suffer unduly but a little social pressure to encourage English adoptions among new immigrants is a good thing.

For an interesting alternative look at hereditary positions read "The Philosopher In Arms". The nation at the heart of the book believes that to be a good leader one must be raised to it. Taught the responsibility and weight of it from birth. Every member of the family is raised to the position and it typically falls to the child (male or female) of the current leader. To server how ever they still must face a national election every few years and could be removed by either an election or act of congress. The Yeoli's take fear of a dictator to near paranoid levels. They force there leader to be drowned to near death every 3 years to prove he is willing to die for his people and the sitting Demarch can own no personal wealth. The Demarch and his family live in a home maintained by the nation. The position of national political leader and national military leader can either fall to one person or two depending on the leaning of the semanakraseye in question. The stories are well worth reading.

During the cold war left/right politics was largely replaced by the us/them capitalist/communist simplified politics of the time. Even today most people in the us have no idea what left/right real means. Modern US politics is largely a continuation of the cold war without Russia. The Democrat party is more or less a moderately socialist right leaning party while the Republican party is a heavily corporatist right leaning party. The citizens involved early on in the Tea Party could have been considered far more left wing than the Democrats. They acted mainly on a belief in less government control over our day to day lives. The Tea Party as it exist today is just a way for Republicans to capitalize on that sentiment and farther marginalize other third parties. There are left wing groups of varying degrees. The Libertarian party is center left socially with an unfortunately strong affinity for "Free Market". The Green party is probably is probably as left as a major third party in the US gets but their environmental policies often border on the extreme. The irony is the founding fathers of our country would likely be considered left wing radical terrorist by today's standards.

As I stated in another post Google has a vested economic interest in restoring public faith to their cloud offerings. To do this they would need to eliminate any access they may have to the unencrypted data. In a perfect world Google would take something like gpgp and add there own key server and integration and automation with Google's services. This would likely be limited to chat and email given that A.)Google makes a lot of money off of adsense and B.) It would be difficult to implement an interactive web site for which the content was unreadable by the servers producing it.

I think you assume too much. First the companies implemented in this mess stand to lose a lot of costumers, yes domestically, but more so overseas. If for no other reason than basic economics Google has a vested interest in restoring public faith. As shown by the current state of affairs the only way they can achieve this is to eliminate there own access to the data. So yes from Google's perspective it would make perfect sense to implement a strong end to end encryption process that was client side and had no access from Google's servers. Now how that would play into adsense and that sort of thing I don't know. Of course you always have the possibility of NSA interference in the basic encryption methods to render them less impenetrable but in the end I don't know how we can either prevent or detect such tampering under the gag orders these companies are forced to live with.

For people in the US they are two very different questions. Domestic spying in this regard is a violation of the citizenries constitutional rights. Foreign intelligence is a separate legal issue though with obviously connected mechanics. Most people int the US would feel it is wrong to spy on the citizens of an allied nation but this is a matter of priorities. Foreign policy can never be fixed so long as internal policy is so uncontrolled. In this case it is likely either the NSA will be scaled back resulting in less capacity for intelligence gathering in general or we will lose any pretext of being a free and functional democratic republic.

It seems they have forgotten that evolution doesn't favor anything instead specific traits are favored in environments in which they are useful. In human behavior selfishness is partially a byproduct of the survival instinct. In times of plenty it's easy for most of us to push aside our survival instincts and work together to form larger more cooperative communities. It is to our benefit that such communities prosper so that we may live in greater security within the buffer they provide. The more scarce resources become the more pressing our survival instincts are and the more large communities begin to crumble. When you get to the family unit the biological drive to procreate and insure the offspring's survival will moderate the survival instincts allowing parents and other close relatives to sacrifice there own survival. No one, know matter how selfless is going to watch their loved ones starve so everyone can have an equal share of the communities resources. Which brings me back to my primary point. All human behavior is at is base inherently, though not always consciously selfish.

That's a touchy question and in a grey area because as I understand the law I could own and build the mechanics and electronics of a suite case nuke legally but I could not own or attempt to obtain a sufficient quantity of fissionable material to detonate it and would require a license to own explosives of sufficient quality and yield. Of course those laws have as much to do with environmental and public health concerns as the actual military use of the material itself. I could if I wished and had sufficient funding build an ICBM in my garage. I could not launch it without government approval. I could own a Jet fighter (assuming someone would sell it to me) and if sufficiently licensed even fly it. There are companies that specialize in putting you through mock dog fights with lasers now. I could not currently own most of the weapons for it seeing as they are fully automatic and covered under the NFA of 1934. Questions of nukes aside I consider the NFA highly and unquestionably unconstitutional.

You are conflating cause and effect. Yes you can be held accountable for getting people injured by yelling fire in a crowded room just as you can be arrested for murder. The government does not have the right to make you wear a gag before you enter the room just encase you get the urge to do so. This is one of the most common mistake made by middle ground gun law sympathizers. You can under the constitution make it illegal for me to shoot you with out due cause (Yell fire!) but you can not deny me the right to be armed (gag me before I enter the room).

f you had ever actually read the case law instead of quoting some talking point you would know the following. Since the first case to touch on the subject in 1886 the Supreme Court has never questioned the individual right. But please carry on.

1. Presser v. Illinois, 116 U.S. 252 Year 1886 - Supports individual right.

"We think it clear that there are no sections under consideration, which only forbid bodies of men to associate together as military organizations, or to drill or parade with arms in cities and towns unless authorized by law, do not infringe the right of the people to keep and bear arms."

2. United States v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174 Year 1939 - Supports individual right. In the absence of evidence since miller was dead and his lawyer a no show the court could not overturn the ruling. Also of interest they used military applicability as a test for 2nd amendment protection meaning ar-15's and ak-47's would be a protected weapon.

"In the absence of any evidence tending to show that possession or use of a 'shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length' at this time has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument. Certainly it is not within judicial notice that this weapon is any part of the ordinary military equipment or that its use could contribute to the common defense... The signification attributed to the term Militia appears from the debates in the Convention, the history and legislation of Colonies and States, and the writings of approved commentators. These show plainly enough that the Militia comprised all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense. 'A body of citizens enrolled for military discipline.' And further, that ordinarily when called for service these men were expected to appear bearing arms supplied by themselves and of the kind in common use at the time."'