I'm not taking much stock in the overwhelming rise of the majority rule of morning people here

The original comment, that noone is a morning person, was the sort of comment that will only produce responses that contradict it - why would someone bother with "yeah, I can't get things going before noon either"?

So, no, the responses saying, in effect, "I am a morning person you ignorant clod" should not be read as saying anything other than "yeah, there are some people who are morning people. Maybe not many, but some."

For what it's worth, I don't use an alarm to get up. 4:30 to 5:00 is just when I wake up naturally.

Once upon a time, many years ago, I drank a lot of coffee and sodas. I had a hard time waking up, and my ideal was to sleep till 11 or so.

I stopped with the caffeine, and after all the side-effects worked their way through my system, I found that I woke up like switching on a light switch - from fully asleep to fully awake in a second or two....

Who the hell do you know is a morning person?

Well, me, for one. Get up between 4:30 and 5:00 AM every morning, walk several miles before breakfast.

Note that there are 21 States more than twice the size of Scotland, of which eight are more than three times the size of Scotland, of which one each are four times, five times, seven times, and twenty times as big as Scotland.

And, on an unrelated note, for you Texans out there, remember that if Alaska were split into two States, Texas would then be the THIRD largest State....

I love lying to survey takers. If someone wants to waste my time asking me stupid questions, I'll waste his with stupid answers.

Ditto.

After all, what's the point of a poll other than to amuse yourself at the expense of the pollster?

You might have a point with food supplies and resources, if we were not constantly being accused of wasting so much food feeding an nation of obese gluttons.

Assuming, just for the sake of argument, that every single American were living on 5000 calories per day. They aren't, but let's assume an extreme case.

Let's further assume that every single American could manage nicely on 1200 calories per day. They can't, but let's be extreme again.

In that case (large overestimate of food used, similarly extreme underestimate of food needed), we'd be able to feed approximately 1B more people on the food we "waste".

Which is 25% of the expected growth....

Take the greed of the 1% down a few notches

Note that the income of the 1%, if distributed evenly among the 99% would represent only about a 14% pay raise across the board. The wealth of the 1% would nearly double the wealth of the average American, if uniformly distributed.

If Kip Thorne can win a year's worth of Playboys for his bet that Cygnus X1 was a Black Hole, when current theory from Professor Hawking says Black Holes don't really exist, then can Professor Thorne please give me a year's subscription to the porno of my choice due to the non-existent bet that this wasn't such a star?

So, any serious multinational can have the stock distributed enough to get past your first law....

As to your second, at least in the USA, you're going to be blocked by the First Amendment to some extent. After all, "lobbying" is done by people no matter where the money comes from. As is "political activity".

IN other words, you need to think the problem through a little more carefully...

By the by, are you aware that if Google (for example) were paying ZERO taxes in the USA now, and the laws were changed so that they were taxed at 50% on worldwide revenues, their tax obligation would pay to run the Federal government for a bit less than 16 hours.

Do note that Google is paying some taxes in the USA, and corporate tax rates are rather under 50%. Which means the actual benefit from taxing Google's worldwide income would not be nearly so significant as you might think....

"If you can't save everybody, save who you can" seems like a reasonable addition to the program.

The problem isn't that you can't save everyone.

The problem is that you can save either of two people (hypothetical people, in this case). So, how do you code things to choose between the two, when you can do either, but not both?

Let me guess - a PRN?

Interesting...

Note that the President that got us into WW1 was a Democrat (Wilson).

As was the one that got us into WW2 (Roosevelt).

Then there's the Korean War (Truman).

And the Vietnam War (Kennedy/Johnson).

Carter was the only Democrat President of the 20th Century who didn't get us involved in a war.

And, as of last week, there are no Democrat Presidents this century that haven't gotten us involved in a war (or does anyone really think that this ISIS affair is really going to be a quick bombing campaign?).

So, is this something which actually exists and is being tested? Or is this vapor ware?

A little of both.

Boeing doesn't do development work without a contract. So, when they got a contract to start development of their capsule, they started.

And then they stopped working on it as soon as the contract ran out. They're waiting on a new contract to resume work.

The only way their thing is going to be flying within a year is if you define flying as "unmanned test launch" (note that Dragon has been doing "unmanned test launches to the ISS for a while now in the form of its CRS flights. Another of which is due this week, as I recall.).

It's quite possible they'll have a usable capsule in three years. It's not the way to bet, but it's possible....

This is clear evidence of corruption, because the government is selecting the lowest bidders instead of the most popular companies.

Lowest bidder??

Last time I looked, Boeing was the highest bidder of the various bidders.

Also the one farthest behind in the design process, since Boeing doesn't do development work until they have a contract signed, while SpaceX has been working on Dragon on its own dime.

It's similar to the filter that gets applied to modern music: it always seems to appear that things were better in the past because you forget the bad songs and only remember the good ones.

Just so.

It's why I listen to oldies stations when I'm driving.

90% if everything is crap. But for oldies, the 90% filter has already removed most of the crap before it has a chance of being repeated.

So the oldies stations playlist is taken from the "non-crap" survivors of the era in question. Unlike stations playing modern music, where the crap filters haven't yet engaged effectively.

So I guess your eyes glossed over before you got the part where I talked about how someone is still maintaining current releases of Firefox to run on the original iMac (from the 20th century)?