If the society I am part of is brought undue harm because of my actions, I fully expect that society to hang me out to dry. Freedom does not mean irresponsibility. What we see here in Texas is petty religious bickering which ended in two deaths and at least one other injury. For these people to be representing two religions that claim to value life, that seems like a pretty shitty way to conduct yourself.

Members of BOTH religions should be denouncing what happened there.

Layoffs don't get rid of low talent, they get rid of excess workers regardless of talent and skill. If you want to get rid of low talent, you fire them, or "manage them out"

It is called a train, not a huge bus. 300 people is about 6 busses.

Buses. Yes, I know it's stupid, but that's how the English language determined that the plural of "bus" is spelled.

I was about to ask how many seats you have in your butt.

You only really need one.

The southwest has tons of potential for producing solar energy, let's not shut down development there yet.

So maybe we should develop solar plants there and not almond farms. Just sayin'

My thought is: More than half of Washington is desert (or semi-desert) and they want to pipe water from that state to another state to water a different desert...? How ridiculous. Although, I was pretty sure he was going to suggest diverting from the great lakes and nearby rivers, so at least we aren't going THERE again.

Quick read if you think all of WA is as rainy as the coast: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...

Good point -- I was about to ask the GP where he planned to store the 20 character random passphrase that was also safe from fire or other disasters...

I don't know how much I'd classify myself an environmentalist, but I do care about what's happening and think we should do something. I'm all for building new reactors to replace & reduce fossil fuel consumption. Put a candidate on my ballot who actually wants to do it (and who doesn't want batshit crazy social policies).

I don't know anyone who only wastes 1.5% of their money

I don't disagree with your post, but it always strikes me as funny when people compare federal government budgets for the largest economy in the world with their personal finances. It's NOT the same, no matter how much the presidential candidates like to pretend it is. No individual's revenue comes from within itself like a government's does. No individual has their own internal "economy" to mind.

FYI The article is dated Tuesday 31 March 2015 03.40 EDT

Just curious, couldn't they make it out of bulletproof glass? Then the aesthetics would be great because it's clear and yet the glass is slippery so there's nothing to grab hold of in order to climb over.

I have not clue how this relates to their business model, but more power to them anyway. I hope society learns a lot from experiments like this -- will its solar panels really supply enough power? At 60k feet they can cover a humungous land area, which potentially means millions of customers. I can't imagine the power consumption of laser communication between this unit and all of the potential customers. Can this really cover an area that big or is it just flying that high to stay out of flight levels of commercial aircraft?

So many questions that this experiment might be able to answer.

I think her best chance at the nomination was in the 2008 election, and she failed to secure it. If she runs again, there are lots of other options who would be much better both politically and from a competency standpoint.

Agreed, and both sides use that same childish argument ALL THE TIME. Sometimes I think we should put them all over our knees and spank them like the misbehaving children they are.

But no, we still re-elect most of our incumbents every 2, 4 and 6 years in both parties because we aren't really interested in change, we just want to act like we are.

Ok, I'm not big on all the hubub around these emails either -- but we need to be the change we want to see in the world. If Democrats like Hillary want our political discourse to be better then they need to set the standard, not act like children and point the finger back across the aisle. If all we're going to do is wait and see which party will do the right thing first, then they will NEVER do the right thing. We, as a governed populace, should be looking for a government that does the right thing even when it means admitting they had previously done the wrong thing.