This has been going on 40 years, there's no reason to think common sense broke out now just because we wanted it to. Hopefully the same people who flooded the FCC site months ago are going to be ready to keep doing this until we can get some concession sufficient enough to weaken the monopolies.

Classic all-time backfires; much of the time, even trying to prove that it's okay to pollute is going to show the opposite, because duh.

The money is in agreeing with you. Big Oil and the like are happy to pay scientists for studies which say that they can continue raping our ma.

I also mulled laying off gambling before I went broke.

Therefore I am, morally speaking, thin and rich.

Which makes sense. Sea level rise in the last 50 years has amounted to about 4 inches, probably not enough to make drains run backwards.

The way sea level rise will make itself known isn't through changes in day to day phenomena, but in exceptional phenomena like storm surge flooding. This is a place where inches may well matter. People plan around concepts like a "ten year flood" or a "hundred year flood", and this creates a sharp line on the map where there is no sharp line in reality. Depending where on the domain of the bell curve their chosen planning horizon is, a few inches could turn a ten year flood into a five year flood, which has immense practical implications.

When people way that there is nothing intrinsically worse about a globe that's four degrees hotter they're right. But *change* that undermines human plans represents a big challenge. Change also represents a big challenge to species populations that can't relocate on the timescale of change.

Go to Mars. *Stay there*. Don't return the Presbyterian astronauts back home to Ohio. Keep lobbing supplies at the colonists until they can sustain themselves. Why on earth do we keep trying to re-enact the Apollo fiasco? Colonize, or don't go. Plenty of older folk such as myself who would be glad of a few years of low G before we die while we build up the place for later arrivals. Dying there? The horror! Um, of course you'd die if you stay on Earth anyway. Dying on Mars would be more scenic, and your knees wouldn't hurt when you stand up.

Of course, Mars won't pay for itself as far as Earth is concerned, the way orbiting terraria and factories would. Less room, less opportunity, and yet another gravity trap on any planet. Mars is a place to colonize. It can't produce wealth for the old country. And colonies don't care about the old world much, so we're building a suburb that will home-rule faster than a town next door to a impoverished city.

Well, limited vision, but at least we'd have two baskets to put our eggs in.

I thought I'd never see you write those words. You are completely correct, of course..

The reason for the crushing of liberty is the cash cow. Profit first, politics later.

She can't hear reality over the roar of the hundred million dollars she was paid for halving the shareholder value of HP. Clearly she isn't deluded; she just lives in an alternate reality from the rest of us.

China has their checkbook ready!

Not precisely correct from an anatomical standpoint. The rocks in question are superior to the c1 vertebra.

One thing that marks the onset of presbyopia is that your vision increasingly sucks as low/dim light conditions. If this stuff is without side effects, then this would make a neat (at least temporary) cure for early presbyopia, not requiring bright(est) lights for reading, soldering, etc.

In one of the stores which is closing, there as a Best Buy and a Future Shop right across the street. So you shop at one and then go across a crosswalk to the other one.

They've always had mostly the same stock, and at mostly the same price.

I'm told the difference was Future Shop had commissioned (and therefore more annoying) salesman, while Best Buy wasn't on commission. I often found hard to get items were more likely to be stocked at Future Shop instead of Best Buy.

Many of us have always thought it quite stupid that the same chain always had two stores in many places, since nobody thought of them as competing.