I'm almost certain this was a joking reference to the man who was charged with damaging public property because his blood ruined a couple uniforms as a result of a police beating.

The Police Guild in my city has been fighting tooth and nail to prevent a police ombudsman (civilian oversight) from having ANY investigatory powers at all. The Guild can prevent it because the city is too scared to let their employment contracts lapse and dissolve the police department for long enough to enact a mandate for civilian oversight.

Talent isn't leaving NASA for SpaceX. The talent is never getting to NASA in the first place. A number of high-profile candidates courted by NASA have declined job offers in favor of positions in private space flight companies.

NASA has a much longer list of failures if you're including test rockets and launch delays.

I get tired of people failing to see the problems and instead shoehorning things into their favorite ideology.

Sadly, confirmation bias, especially where politics is involved, is not the exception. It's the norm.

News flash: Different people react differently to some things. Just because opiates left you in a fog doesn't mean they are useless for everyone. For example, I take enough opiates daily to kill a horse. I exhibit no mental side effects. If I don't tell someone I use opiates for pain control, they'd have no reason to suspect I did.

Your anecdote is a perfect example of why anecdotes are unreliable for any situation other than that of the person from whom they come. I'm the opposite of you. Opiates control my pain without mental side effects. Marijuana, on the other hand, has no effect on me. I can consume enough to get a half-dozen people high as a kite without any effect on me whatsoever. Honestly, I wish that weren't true, because opiates don't control gastrointestinal pain in me. I would be ecstatic if marijuana could control that particular pain, but it doesn't.

While ingesting a large quantity of nicotine can be fatal, the major problems caused by smoking are the result of chemicals other than nicotine. Nicotine is just the one that makes people come back for more.

Depends on the person. I take enough opiates daily to kill most people who are opiate-naive. I was foggy for about the first 3 months of using them for pain, and then the mental effects disappeared. Only those I tell have any idea that I take large quantities of opiates to treat chronic pain from surgical adhesions.

For others, the mental effects never go away. Being able to function normally on opiates depends largely on the individual.

It all has the same effect on the brain.

While most opiates generally have the same effects, different opiates have different levels of those effects. Ask anyone who has taken fentanyl and then needed to stop taking it whether it has the same effects as hydrocodone.

Different opiates are metabolized in different ways, and produce different quantities of various metabolites. Some even have different routes based on the user's health. Oxycodone, for example, has a higher k-opioid receptor response in diabetics, while in non-diabetics the antinociceptive effects are achieved through u-opioid receptors.

Additionally, the "brain effects" wear off for most long-term users when used to treat pain.

It's a mixture of FTTN, coax, and regular "DSL type" POTS copper lines. The dirty secret of Uverse, is that it is really just a mish-mash of what was already present, with them "maybe" upgrading a few things here and there. This allows them to get away with charging people more than what they would for normal DSL, and also get away with the "up to" disclaimer nonsense for their speeds.

It's part of the reasons results for Uverse can vary even more widely within a same-service area than cell phone coverage.

We were talking about you, not me.

Except in PA, where Verizon is required by the Commonwealth to roll out and offer DSL even in the most rural of areas if enough of the neighbors get together and decide they want it.

Results vary in other States/Commonwealths, of course.

And of course, we also have Comcast and Time Warner, with Comcast having their headquarters in Philadelphia.