We live in a delusional bubble and sooner or later that bubble will burst. We were very good but to stay the best takes effort and money. Both of which we traded for political demigods and cheap trinket and oil from authoritarian regimes around the world to live our obese Wal-Mart fueled lives.

We want to be the best, but where will the brain and money that are needed for such endeavor come from? Certainly not from the flag lapel wearing politicians that caters to the money worshiping financial and legal sectors while neglecting the egalitarian nature of a strong domestic manufacturing base.

So, no being first in the world doesnt' matter to us anymore, as long if we think we're number one that's what counts.

That's very adolescent of of you to dismiss someone else's idea as adolescent rant while offering nothing of substance except support for status quo. Our system is broken. In addition to our military industrial complex, we also have a prison industrial complex, public sector union mafia, and the new kid on the block, private school public student loan pyramid scheme.

I heard Lawrence Lessig's keynote at SCALE 12X and he sounded like a pragmatic guy. During the typical after talk Q&A session when idealogical can lean a bit to the extremes, politely he kept to his believes and reminded everyone that our system is corrupt, not necessarily the politicians and that we've came a long way since the days where congressmen have safes in their capital office for the random bags of money that just appears.

I am fairly cynical of our entire political process, however I have donated to the Mayday's first round of funding and now I am contemplating selling some of my treasured 2A relics to help fund the second round. As much as I cling to my 2A relics, it's an illusion of power that keep us fat and lazy, sitting comfortably in our homes looking for that next purchase. At least Lessig is doing something to reform our corrupt and inept political system, that far more than anything accomplished with 2A relics in modern time.

I don't know if he will be successful or not, but at least he has a history of advancing our civl liberty causes and MAYDAY, despite the long odds, is one of the better ideas available today.

Guns make you fat and lazy. Just look at the NRA. Decades of advocating the protection of 2A as a mean to protect our collective freedom, yet we have two administration worth of torture, rendition, mass surveillance, and drone strikes, while the NRA grew old and fat. Still yelling the same old crap while our guns rust away in the safe.

Anyway, I donated my half case worth the 62gr .223. If this works, I'm selling my AR/HK/Sigs. If it takes money to buy our freedom back, rather than with guns, so be it!

I hear Lessig's keynote during SCALE 12X. More importantly, I heard his answer during the pubic Q&A. He seems like a pragmatic, hard working guys who lives in the real world.

Dumping $2.6 million worth of editable food when there are people starving is shocking to most of us. Yet, this is a reflection of our current law suit happy society.

Most of us has very little to loose and most food banks has very little to loose so our local food bank gladly take in our donated food items and we happily go on with our lives do what we can for people who are starving, one canned food at a time. Also, I've volunteered at the local food banks and base on what I've seen, Costco peanut butter is probably an upgrade to the various expired high fructose laden supermarket rejects.

Life is very different for our newly anointed fellow big corporate beings. In their billion dollar world, with their million dollar lawyers, somewhere, somehow, the meaning of starving people became irrelevant. After all, corporations do not understand the physical pain of starvation.

You too? I thought I'm the only idiot in the room. . . .

Lenovo again? First you took my Thinkpad now my Moto X.

I guess the "Don't be Evil" Google is long dead. The principled stand of exiting from the Chinese market, followed by assembling the Moto X in the US, then selling Motorola to Lenovo? ? ? WTF, Google.

Yes, US is guilty of everything you listed. We can talk about all the past and present failed US policies. We can openly criticize the policies. For those of us who live in the US, we can even openly organize to remove the politicians in questions. That is the difference between democratic nations and authoritarian countries.

Like the old saying, "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance." US has certainly slipped but it is still far ahead of China is terms of basic civil rights for all.

Um, Veganism is about minimizing cruelty and suffering. Vegetarianism is just a form of diet. I know plenty of vegetarian with leather handbags and leather upholstered car interiors.

I do eat meat but I am a bit uncomfortable with the whole classifying living things into how complex they are according to human definitions. It goes without saying, life is essential to every living being regardless of their CNS complexity. Just because something doesn't feel what humans perceive to "pain" does not mean that they do not feel "pain." Everyday we learn something new about our environment and our fellow Earth cohabitants. The old thinking that crustaceans do not feel pain is being dispelled by new research data.

I usually store my nexus 7 into the thigh pockets of my cargo pants. It's fairly secure, especially in pockets large enough to button up. Fairly inexpensive and unobtrusive. The weight of the nexus 7 is held very close to the body so I really don't feel the extra mass, unlike putting it in a oversize jacket pocket.

Snowden was a hero for exposing domestic spying of American by NSA. However, by disclosing US spying on foreign governments, Snowden has crossed the line.

Disclosing anything related to foreign affairs short of atrocities that involve the lost of innocent lives is treasonous. By claiming US hacking of foreign networks and now the disclosure on UK spying, Snowden is hurting his own credibility as a whistleblower which will damage the current push to hold NSA accountable for domestic spying.

Whatever fault and atrocity US may have committed, anyone in the world is free to criticize and any US resident is free to discuss and lobby for change. The same cannot be said for China and that is fundamental difference between China and the rest of the free world.

I disagree strong with the Patriot Act, the use of torture and the Iraq War, but even I know that those actions pale in comparison to the tens of millions if not hundred of millions of Chinese that perished in the last 50 years due to the ineptness of an authoritarian regime.

While China certainly has achieve spectacular economic growth in the last 50 years, but I would argue that the US civil rights movement that continues today has far more importance than avoiding starvation.

I am kind of the IT person in a small company with about 20 users and I switched everyone over to OpenOffice 4 or 5 years ago and we have never looked back. OO has certainly came a long way since we started using it. There's a few access programs we use to run reports that I haven't been able to convert to postgresql, but I only need on copy of MS office running on the W2K server and that pretty much solved our report generation.

With the money we saved from using open office and the various linux email/web/sql servers, I managed to upgrade everyone to dual 20" screen desktops. The hylafax fax server I installed almost 10 years ago is still running today. Nothing MS made ever lasted that long, because like it or not you're forced to upgrade every few years.

BTW, I stay away from any external web based application because we simply do not have enough bandwidth to handle the traffic volume. As much as I like gmail, it's a lot faster to send a 3mb email attachment to an email server on the dmz. We're still limited by the T1 bandwidth, but at least I am free to do other tasks instead of waiting for the attachment to upload.