"I guess if you didn't turn it on, and I'm calling BS."

I had a laptop of that era that lasted me days between charges at times, and the battery on it was old, I could easily see it going weeks with light use and a fresh battery.

It had a low power monochrome display, and was mostly solid state. The only moving disk was the 3.5" floppy, the OS was built in on ROM, it had 2mb RAM so there was plenty for ramdisk. The only thing that really hit the battery at all was the floppy, and with the ramdisk that didnt need to be hit very often.

Just because it isnt part of your experience does not mean it didnt exist.

In the case of the SpaceX flights of the Falcon 9R, it could be legitimately called engineering test data.

The drugs are often exotic molecules we've cooked up for the purpose; but hormonal birth control exploits the same hormones that would naturally show up, since those are the ones that there are receptors for and that cause the desired changes. The quantity that a dense human population will put out is something quite different; but the chemistry won't be markedly different between humans and other placental mammals.

There might be an RO system somewhere that uses gravity and an input reservoir at higher altitude than the output to supply some or all of the pressure; but I don't think that that is anything like the typical configuration. Cleaning up after a leak in zero gravity isn't going to be lots of fun; but everything else should work largely as planned.

In the case of SDI the PR might actually be worse than useless (playing mutually-assured-destruction isn't much fun to begin with; but if one or both sides come to believe the hype about a missile defense system things could really go downhill). In the case of 'iron dome', though, it might actually be helpful. Barring fairly substantial increases in rocket construction expertise, or acquisition of something particularly nasty to fill them with, the attacks it is supposed to defeat are only modestly dangerous; but extremely inflammatory.

Given how lousy the alternatives for appearing to be taking action against the rocket menace are (grovelling through every last hidy-hole in Gaza is militarily doable but a PR debacle and unlikely to turn up more than a few bits and pieces of impoverished machine tools, because low-end rockets just aren't that hard to build. Paying Hezbollah a visit might turn up somewhat more interesting stuff; but that hasn't turned out well in the past) a system that postpones or prevents somebody taking the bait and trying them might be quite helpful.

Commercial Electric is still around. They just don't make standard light bulbs anymore. They still make specialist fluorescent bulbs, but not the kind you screw into an ordinary fixture.They also make a lot of fixtures of their own, most of which seem to come with an LED bulb already installed.

If it's a "fail," it's a fail of the US Government to do something pretty much every other government does: tweak laws that have already been passed as assholes figure out ways to abuse them.

To a large extent this is designed into the system. passing laws is really hard when you have 435 independent members of the US House, who all have the ability to act independently of each-other, a US Senate with another 100 members who can screw things up, and an independent Executive branch. Since many of these people equate amending a law they opposed so that it works better, with flip-flopping and supporting said law, it's very very difficult to go back and fix controversial laws. And, since the partisan divide between the House and the rest of the government encourages BS infighting, almost everything becomes controversial very quickly.

OTOH, if in Canada nobody gives a shit about the Senate. Their Senate has no power to veto anything. The Prime Minister is, by definition, the guy who can get things through the House of Commons. If Members of the Commons decide that a) they love the PM so much they want him to have vast political power, but b) he's wrong on this relatively trivial issue and must be voted against, the Prime Minister can simply do c) and refuse to sign the re-election appears of anyone who defies him. Since all Parliamentary candidates need their party leaders signature to run for office, and the PM is (again, by definition) party leader of the most important party in the Commons, this means even the weakest Canadian Prime Minister has a level of power no US politician could ever hope to achieve.

Which means that if Steven Harper passed a law mandating energy-efficient bulbs, and ceiling fan manufacturers used a loophole to get around him, it would take about two weeks for the loophole to close.

Sure.

Which is why I do not in any way defer to their judgements, but make my own.

"To draw truths from reading for yourself."

Drawing truths from the book with the longest continuous editorial history known to man, one that warns you it has been tampered with by scribes with lying pens (Jeremiah 8:8) is not an easy thing, it is a puzzle. But our creator gave us rational minds to solve puzzles with.

I presume that the guy had a rear view mirror to look at. Then again, when you are traveling at 100+ mph through urban streets with cross traffic and parked cars, you likely aren't spending much time looking at what is going on behind you.

No, I am sorry but you are wrong. They were certainly not part of the original Bible. They were *added* to some Greek translations of the Scripture, somewhere around 100bc, but no one considered them Canonical until centuries later. We are talking the 4th century AD on the "Christian" side and perhaps a couple of centuries earlier on the Rabbinate side, but in each case it was a multi-generational project to ultimately *add* these books, to elevate the works of men to the status of scripture.

That may be a matter of opinion and perspective as well.

Those are late compositions in Greek and clearly not part of the original Hebrew Bible (properly called the Tanakh.)

The books you mention, along with the so-called New Testament books, both those declared 'canonical' by the Imperial Roman authorities and the other books that were banned instead, along with the Talmud, are all in my mind defensible and even in cases valuable, as Midrash, as Commentary, as a record of what men at the time thought on some important subjects - but NOT as scripture to be elevated to stand with the Tanakh, let alone to actually be set ON TOP of the Bible proper as so many do.

"What was the last time there was a retraction of inaccurate or harmful material from the Bible?"

It's actually a good question if refined a bit.

I would propose to you that what you see as 'inaccurate or harmful material from the Bible' is better defined as 'inaccurate or harmful interpretations of the Bible' and while retractions of those are not unheard of, they are certainly relatively rare.

I think the deeper point here is simply that the theoretical bright-line between science and religion has a worrying tendency to evaporate in practice, and simply pointing out that tel-evangelists are even worse is not much of a defense.

There's a huge difference between appreciating the scientific method and having faith in whatever the 'scientist' says - in fact they are mutually incompatible.

As best I can tell, they are whining because they preferred the imaginary world where the lawsuit against Aereo was actually over whether the filthy, disruptive, upstarts shoudl be burned to the ground and have the earth beneath them salted, rather than whether they were more like an antenna rental service or more like a cable company.

Aereo obviously didn't want to be a cable company, hence its ongoing defense; but the tone of the rhetoric against them was never "Yeah, because of a raft of tedious reasons, Aereo ought to be classified as a cable company for regulatory purposes"; but rather a bunch of fire and brimstone nonsense about the signal-stealing piratepocalypse.

It's gonna make going through airport security even more fun. Especially for those with pacemakers.

Really?

Ever tried fighting a ticket issued by another state? Or looked at the size of the Federal prison population vs. state populations? Most drug war victims are in state pens, not Federal Prison.

Or hell, look at the Fourth Amendment. You're concerned about a program that could (theoretically) be used to abuse millions of Americans. When asked to provide evidence that anyone has actualy been hurt you respond with a) abstract compalints about how bad you feel that the government knows whom you've been emailing, and b) claims that of course nobody has evidence of more then a handful of people being oppressed via NSA information because it's secret.

OTOH under Michael Bloomberg the NYPD actually oppressed the city's entire African-American male population via stop-and-frisk.

State cops kill a lot more people then federal cops, and in turn local cops kill more then state cops. Thousands of Americans' right to vote is questionable because of Voter ID laws.

So basically what's actually going on is the states are oppressing the hell out of everyone, but you don't give a shit because you prefer actually being oppressed by the states to having a Federal government which could theoretically oppress you at some point in the future.

Either increasing corporate power relative to the Feds is pro-freedom or it isn't.

If I was right and they went off on their own investigations regardless of the Fourth Amendment then it clearly isn't pro-freedom. If you;re right and they had local police help to massacre unions then it logically follows that increasing corporate power relative to the Feds is a bad thing because that would allow private corporations to massacre recalcitrant employees. Again.

They do quite well against the Feds. The whole Lois Lerner thing started as a Congressman's letter.

They have trouble with disputes with corporations because a) they don;t have a guy on-staff who instinctively understands all paperwork every corporation in the country issues, and b) very few private companies have a boss who fears Congressional hearings.

Why should anything be on that list? Because Congress said so, and in a free country governed by the US Constitution Congress gets to say things like that.

As for the Federal government's unique position, I don't think you understand how powerful states are. They actually have more legal powers then the Feds. And as I pointed out above, they use their powers a hell of a lot more.

I actually tend to agree with you that they shouldn't take people's tax refunds, but I am a bit biased because one of my jobs is getting people those refunds.