If I were a teacher I wouldn't want all of my students (past and present) to be friended on my personal FB page anyway. Even if it were segregated into groups (fb) or circles (G+), it would just be a lot easier to manage posting information and fielding questions, messages, and such if a page were made for the classroom that was organized by the teacher. I wouldn't see it as a function of things being appropriate conduct or not, just a sane separation between work and personal communication.

Would saying +1 to this be too meta?

When you're stuck in debt and in a low wage dead end job, would you enact full blown austerity measures on yourself, sell your house, your car, get rid of anything that costs money and live in a box? So you could pay pennies on your interest from your 7-11 job? No. You go take out a student loan, you increase your current debt, get a degree, and get a job where your revenues are to a healthy enough point to where your long term debt isn't a problem anymore.

You can't cut your way out of a depressed or recessed economy. The national debt, while a problem, is not the biggest problem we need to worry about right now, the thing we have to focus on is jobs. We need to invest in economic stimulation, social safety nets, and overall job creation. If we focus on that and start actually recovering revenues then the debt problem won't be this insurmountable thing. The debt is a long term problem. The slow economy is an immediate problem, and if we use spending to bring it back to health it won't matter in the long term whether it adds to the overall debt or not. BTW, no one is getting "taxed the fuck out of", taxes are as low as they've been in decades. One of the largest contributors to our current debt was the Bush era tax cuts, which did practically nothing to stimulate the economy nor grow jobs, and the republican's staunch opposition to letting them expire was one of the things that made them most transparent. They don't actually care about reducing the deficit, they just want to defund the government and make sure all the rich people get richer.

Right now just about every major technology corporation in Silicon Valley have amassed large sums of software patents (most of which should never have been awarded or given credence in the first place) for the express purpose of either frivolous use in lawsuits, or the threat bringing suit.

Granted there are not many easy solutions to this gross misuse of the original intent of patent law, but the answer of "don't buy a smartphone" isn't really going to help much. It's a systemic problem widespread in the industry, and I'm doubtful it will go away without serious patent reform.

At the very least a user is a client of the service, however from Facebook's POV they may as well be a customer. Every head that logs in to their site produces ad revenue, fairly efficiently targeted ad revenue if the person has bothered to enter in any amount of "likes" for various interests. Facebook's purchased currency, "points", is gravy by comparison.

I don't believe anyone is arguing that id can't innovate technology-wise, the Doom3 engine was pretty advanced for its time and all of its normal-mapped goodness was pretty well received as far as "good graphics" metrics went. But the actual Doom 3 game, good luck seeing all those pretty graphics when over half the game is played in practically no light whatsoever (at least before you get to the hell levels).

Which isn't even all that bad a trait but for the fact that the actual creative design of the game boiled down to a one-trick pony. Wander around in the darkness -> Pick up an item -> Monster jumps out of the closet. It works for the first few times, and then it's just boring and predictable. For a sequel to one of the most notorious action shooter games of all time, there's a whole lot of wandering around not shooting anything save for the times you happen across an enemy or two. It frankly didn't feel like a Doom game at all, it's like they wanted to be System Shock 2 but couldn't figure out the formula.

Ironically, an earlier released game Painkiller turned out to be a better Doom sequel than Doom 3, not to mention it also stacked up pretty well to D3's fairly well.

The action of tucking the treads underneath is impressive and a pretty sweet engineering. I just wish the headpiece was more than an afterthought, though. It looks very unfinished.

While the feature does exist, it takes a good bit of time to set up and organize (especially for people with 200+ contacts) and on top of that it's cumbersome to use. Google+'s Circles feature, as I understand it, is introduced with the addition of every contact, and in every post you make it's made very clear with what groups you are communicating information to.

The part about looking for nervous responses isn't a bad idea, but the rest is fundamentally racial profiling, and won't do much to prevent actions of local citizens that have been radicalized, another of Al Qaeda's recent focuses.

I agree with your points here, but would like to add that, concerning geothermal, the only thing restricting wide-scale geothermal power production is the current limitations of drilling deep wells. Once it's practical to drill deep enough to get substantial heat (and you can drill anywhere to do this) it becomes a simple matter of pouring in salt water and capturing the steam for energy production. There has been at least one MIT study suggesting these renewable power plants could serve our energy needs for the next few thousand years.