Agreed. And if they do send people those people will almost certainly starve or suffocate.

Biosphere 2 is our best attempt at creating a self-supporting closed environmental system. At 3.14 acres stocked with complex (and sensitive) vegetation, air and water supplies and support machinery weighing an untold amount of gigatons costing $200-300 million with relatively cheap Earth-based construction techniques and labor - not to mention Earth solar insulation for power and vegetation growth unlike what will be available at Mars, it couldn't produce enough food or oxygen for a mere 7-8 people.

There is no way at anything near current or foreseen launch prices that anything like that could be duplicated on Mars, let alone exceeded.

Unless the states want to make laws regulating companies like require labeling or such in which case the Supreme Court has to step in and quash the state regulation.

I think doing this would be a good idea. My water company splits its charges this way. Not sure why the government approvals would take so much more work.

"Contrary to popular belief, and many a breathless article, the government does not, in fact, book a profit on student loans. As New America's Jason Delisle has explained, that's because the Congressional Budget Office is required by law to use a bizarre and faulty method for determining the cost of government loans."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/20/no-the-federal-government-does-not-profit-off-student-loans/

At the time, Solyndra's CIGS thin film technology was a smart idea with standard solar panel polysilicon running at $400 per kilogram and China cutting global access to their supplies of rare earth elements. Had those conditions continued, the company would have been very profitable. Hindsight may be 20/20, but nobody in those days was predicting polysilicon dropping to under $30/kg, China relaxing its rare earth access and subsidizing its own solar exports to dump under cost of production. Certainly Solyndra attracted its share of private financing as well as the US Government's.

The specific words used are that the data is not transferred to any of Apple's servers or backed up to iCloud. They do not say it is not transferred to any non-Apple servers or backed up to any non-iCloud backup systems.

It's a possibility, but even if not I'm pretty sure you will need a subscription to XBox Live.

I wasn't being bitchy. Just pointing out an equivalent logic that just about everyone supporting the originally proposed logic would reject venomously. Sorry you read it that way.

I didn't want to muddle my original post, but there is another argument on equality grounds against your originally proposed argument (whether or not you agree with it):

It is sexist - not equal treatment of men and women. You are disallowing women from doing something men can and vice-versa.

For the record, I agree with the rest of your argument. Church and State should remain separate whenever possible.

As a board member of the National Organization of Marriage, Card has organized many boycotts of businesses that he say as being pro-gay. So maybe you don't want to support him for this idea.

You can drop the "people like" in "people like Card". Card himself is a board member of the National Organization for Marriage - an organization that has organized many boycotts of pro-gay businesses.

Card asking people not to boycott him for being anti-gay is hypocritical in the extreme.

You must send it back all the time then since "chicken" at these restaurants includes both sexes.

Well, in that case, let's change the law to only allow people to marry a member of the same sex. People using the reasoning you suggest should have no problem whatsoever with this since it is logically identically "Equal Treatment".

I agree on this. Why have low penalties on young smokers and really high ones on older ones? To not give them any reason to quit when young and get really hooked and then throw in the high penalties?

Do what insurance is supposed to do - spread the risk and costs for the behavior so people who choose to do it when they are young are already helping to pay for the costs of their behavior when they get older. The costs they incur when they get old aren't solely cause by the smoking done when they are old.

Are you kidding?? Japan has spent over 20 years dealing with deflationary pressure, not inflationary pressure.

Let me know when somebody actually runs a commercial thorium or breeder reactor.

The much hyped Indian "thorium reactors" are actually going to be run as conventional light water reactors for the foreseeable future.

Most breeder reactors have been for experimental research, not actual commercial production. France shut theirs down.