I'm with you. If the ads had been less intrusive, less annoying and less manipulative earlier in my life I might not mind them so much. But as is I think I've been ruined for life on advertising. Now I have not the slightest compunction about blocking them and avoiding them and screwing the advertisers if at all possible.

What really bothers me is the way they're starting to substitute for culture. In school and now at work people discuss their favorite advertisements as must as their favorite music, books or movies. The advertisements take snippets of dialogue, memes, actions and such and present them in a way that strips them of any relevance or meaning. It's adding noise to the common discourse, and that more than anything else about them pisses me off. The larger the population gets that harder it gets for people to keep up with each other. Advertising just acts as white noise or active misinformation that makes society less functional.

tl;dr: fuck ads

The only Republicans who believe that are the same ones who find peekaboo fascinating and confounding. If that includes any in office, and there may be a few I'll admit, then we've slipped more than even I thought. I doubt that's the case though. It would be strange, even for them, to be hung up on something that was banned 25 years ago. Out of curiosity, where did you get that notion?

So where's the case against the people who hacked the CRU climate researchers' email? The ones who leaked their email to attempt to make major legislation go their way?

There was a recent article in the New York Times that said one of the first things to go with dementia and Alzheimer's is in fact the ability to manage money: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/health/healthspecial/31finances.html

Most people cap their ratios at 2 or 3 anyhow, if not just leech, so it's the same thing. Why does everyone have such a hard time with this concept?

TARP itself was never the problem. It's the fact that we passed TARP without jailing the bankers and splitting up the banks that was the real problem. That was our one chance to really reform the system and they let it pass like a wet fart. Everyone crowing about how much it would cost us was missing the point - that without reform it'll happen again in about 15 years.

That's a foolish thing to say. They really can't do anything. It makes about as much sense as saying "When Archimedes pulls his head out and gets the right teams together, he can do anything." It's just not true. There are limitations, physical and practical, that NASA can never overcome. Could Archimedes have built a really tall ladder? Sure. Could he have built a space elevator? No. Not with all the money in the world and 500 years. He would have long since bankrupted Sicily and probably been conquered sooner than he was had he tried. At best they might have learned the limits of wood construction.

We would be far better off researching the things that we need to know for space exploration directly rather than spending the money to keep guys living in cans 100 miles overhead. We can research materials, propulsion, computers, vacuums etc. on Earth or with robotic probes. We don't need a manned space program to drive this research - if we can muster the will to put people in space we can muster the will to research these topics.

So by all means lets increase NASA's budget, but I have yet to hear a convincing argument that a manned program is worth more on a dollar-to-dollar basis with an unmanned program, or even close in terms of science output.

Considering that they carry most of the same genetic material I'm surprised you make that claim. Unless you think genetics has nothing to do with personality I think it's safe to say there is a worse than neutral chance that their next baby will be difficult.

And where does the employee of the company who is buying the ads come in? He doesn't have a say in how the political ad money is spent. It's the executives who decide that. It's fundamentally different from the case of people voluntarily joining together for the express purpose of furthering a political goal. There are sure to be employees who disagree with the donations, but can't speak up for fear of losing their jobs. How's that for trampling rights?

Windows 7's naming of directories as "libraries" is inexcusable. It was a well-defined term!

Citizens have the right to record any public police action in the US, whether people are aware of it or not. I'm not sure what the law is in Canada.

Of course to be fair I think even many of those scientists do produce good research, with their results either buried or cherrypicked depending on whether or not it's favorable to their corporate sponsors. Granted you'd think that anyone who stays in such an environment has to be somewhat complicit, I'm just saying they're maybe not as corrupt as you might think.

Don't be so obtuse about the energy problem - you sound like an ass.

You must be suffocating in your own smug, you poor thing. If you're so sure we can adapt and change, why not do it now before the shit hits the fan? The longer we wait the higher the chance of a Malthusian collapse. It's idiotic not to implement those sustainable solutions now, and yet you seem happy to put it off. Please, explicate your rationalizations for us!

Well said! Someone mod this guy up.