You realize that there is water in the streams because we dammed them, right?

"legitimate insurance plan"

It was legitimate before ObamaCare. Simply writing a law didn't change that.

AND if you're asking me, ObamaCare isn't a "legitimate insurance plan" it is a tax. If it isn't a tax, then it is unconstitutional.

I am not unarmed. I'm using the safe arms of Nerf Guns, since that seems to work with the people outraged by Cecil but don't care about things that really matter, like Hillary's Email Server.

Yeah, that's going to work out well for the Government. The government makes a shit ton off Oil and Gas, more than Oil and Gas does. And they are replacing that revenue stream with subsidies for the very thing that will eliminate revenue. Brilliant!

I remember when they raised taxes on Cigarettes to pay for people who had lung cancer. To the point where cigarette use dropped very sharply over a few years. They funded programs from the taxes, tax revenue dropped, and now they have to back fill those programs (because we never cut them ... ever) with regular taxes.

But what difference does it make, at this point? Cecil the lion is dead.

No it wasn't. IT was designed from the beginning to snooker the American people into a broken "insurance" scam designed to break the medical/insurance industry. It was designed to fail, so that Americans would jump into single payer, crap healthcare.

You can keep your plan (Lie)
It isn't a tax (Lie)
You can keep your doctor(Lie)
It will cost less(Lie)
You'll have better coverage (Lie)

And I am sure supporters will provide anecdotal evidence that some of these claims were true for them. Plenty of people lost their doctors, plans and spend more for less insurance. OH, and Obama lied about not increasing taxes on those making $250k or less. BUT who cares, Cecil the lion is dead!

Hydro is not anywhere near peak. Unless you mean "we can't build any more dams because environmental concerns".

California is waking up to the realization that All those regulations mean squat when there is a real drought, and the only thing saving the mini fish are the dams we built that they said was killing them off. Maybe now, we can build some more dams

To me, Facebook is about people I care about, GooglePlus is about things I care about. Facebook sucks for discussing my eclectic amusements. My family really doesn't care about my Ingress activities, and my Ingress friends don't want to see kitty pictures.

Or to put it another way, GooglePlus filters out all the things I don't care about, nicely.

Altimeters also show feet above sea level. Altitude above ground is a calculated value derived from altitude above sea level minus altitude of terrain. We could make a bunch of assumptions to show that it's unlikely the drone is calculating its height above terrain, but fortunately we don't have to make any:

In this case, as per the manual, the height is determined by making an altimeter reading when the drone is turned on, and height values are relative to *that* altitude. If you fly uphill, you may show a value of, say, 200ft, while only being 3 feet above the actual terrain. On the other hand, if you flew downhill, you should see a negative height value, but that doesn't mean you're underground.

I am not a theologian, but because you can't fathom it, doesn't mean it doesn't have an alternative answer.

But lets take a quick look at possibilities. Man creates fancy cancer causing agent, lets call it ... agent orange. Did God create cancer?

Or put it in another way, "God allows evil, because without a choice, there is no chance to choose"

ON the other hand, you being human and being your own god have to answer for the evil you allow to exist. Oh wait, being an atheist, you cannot even say evil exists. Everything is situational and you have plenty of excuses as to why you allow "evil" in your life. And don't lie to me saying you don't allow evil, even by your own standards, you allow it. Which makes you pretty hypocritical.

It is illogical; but these are well documented biases in human risk perception(individual and, alas, institutional): We fear risk more if we perceive ourselves as having no control over the situation(so, would rather risk a crash themselves than be at the mercy of even an expert other driver). We also fear risks imposed by other people more than those imposed by 'natural' or 'chance' causes, hence the fear of 'criminals' being greater than that of burning to death.

Amphetamine Deficiency Disorder is a very real and tragically under treated condition. Do you think those poor bastards paying black market prices for God-knows-what crap cooked up in somebody's trailer would be doing so if they could just get a nice, cheap, legal bottle of pep pills at their local pharmacy?

Unfortunately, the 'standardization' part is where this proposal seems most challenged(though, in principle it seems like a good idea). Section C-2) of the proposal form is:

"2. Has contact been made to members of the user community (for example: National Body, user groups of the script or characters, other experts, etc.)? "

The submitter answers 'No'. That's a problem. The Unicode Consortium standardizes the codepoint representation of glyphs across systems; but they have zero power(and aren't supposed to be the go-to) for designing or standardizing symbols, much less symbols that really need to be legally mandated to be useful(eg. all the 'gluten-free' as in 'we cater to fad diets' vs. 'gluten free' as in 'we maintain the same rigorous standards that a celiac disease patient's immune system does.' can be a nasty one).

As long as the 'peanut' emoji can mean anything from 'processed on equipment also used to process peanuts' to 'yup, this is the pad thai with peanut chunks on top'; it just isn't much good. If even a regional body(US, EU, one of the BRICs, somebody) or a standards entity promulgated symbols(like the well standardized and often legally binding ones used for marking hazardous goods in shipping and transport); then hell yeah, give them Unicode representations. Until then, though, this is just a proposal to add pictures of food objects, a less-than-helpful and nigh unlimited project.

"HD" is an unfortunate bullshit marketing term that should be taken out and beaten to death with the same shovel used to dig its shallow grave; but that doesn't change the fact that there are 'textures that look really atrocious on a contemporary high-ish resolution LCD; despite having looked OK in my memories of the game as played on by a CRT TV being fed a composite video signal'. And, because Capcom are just that lazy, Resident Evil 4 HD apparently has them.

The fact that "HD" carefully avoids meaning anything specific, while vaguely suggesting better sensory experiences worth paying more for, is obnoxious; but that doesn't change the fact that time has not been kind to some games; and some of the sins that phosphor dots and analog video used to smear into a warm glow just turn into a swarm of razor-sharp jagged pixels and offend your eyes mercilessly on newer hardware. Low resolution textures are one of those sins, probably among the worst(low-poly models don't look very realistic; but they don't grate on you), and one that doesn't get fixed as often because redoing a big chunk of art assets is a lot of trouble.

This doesn't seem like an intrinsically bad idea; things like the GHS hazard pictograms, DIN 4844-2, ISO 3864, TSCA marks, and similar such things seem like perfectly reasonable additions to Unicode(some of them are already there).

What seems like more of a problem is the idea that the Unicode Consortium is out there fishing for ideas. A project of that scope has more than enough backlog to work through; what possible benefit could there be in putzing around internally with ideas for stuff that hasn't been codified by any relevant user groups, standards bodies, experts, national standards, etc? If they think that they have free time for that, they probably aren't looking hard enough at the stew of natural languages and commonly used symbols out there.

The original round of unicode-ified emoji, while puerile and obnoxious, were at least a solid instance of one of the Consortium's functions: the symbols were in wide use; but saddled with a horrible mess of legacy encoding schemes and general awfulness, so the only thing to do was wade in, hand out code points, and hope that the legacy systems could be burned to the ground as soon as possible. Same reason why parts of Unicode have substantial amounts of duplication, single characters that should be represented as composites, and so on; because various legacy standards had to die.

Here, though, there is no obvious existing standard being modeled on, nor any interoperability issue being solved. If somebody wants Unicode to have a picture of absolutely everything; maybe they should go work on graphics format standards.