Per that picture, interest on the debt is really what is unsustainable. Entitlements grow relatively gradually and seem to be coverable with revenue restructuring. Something like 7.5% increase in absolute tax revenue or a 33% relative tax increase. Getting rid of the Bush tax cuts (for everyone) would be 10%. Removing the payroll tax cap would probably be another 5% of that. Corporate and loophole reform would probably get another 5%. Reforms to cut that rate of growth of entitlement spending (raising the retirement age, Health Care Act reform, Part D repeal, etc...) might fill in the rest.

By any means, I don't know too well, but it seems do-able if we face up to our underfunded liabilities, and, well, fund them. We'd still be paying significantly less than most of Europe even after that.

Interest on the debt meanwhile, threatens to doom us all and probably needs to be faced within the next twenty years before it does spiral out of control. How to fix the hole? That's when we start having to make the harder decisions.

Yep, someone in the press asked a question along the lines of your second reason the panelist wasn't as enthusiastic about it as you might expect. He stressed this was important for the life side because it's the strongest evidence for current liquid water but not really for colonization.

The poles already contain massive quantities of pure ice water, that would not be too difficult to get at. These leaks by comparison would be highly salted to the point of almost un-usability since pure water would boil at Mars atmospheric pressure. One of the panelist even compared it to being more like a slow-flowing gel than a traditional liquid. It isn't too much water either. They were ball parked estimated to be somewhere around 25,000 gallons annually or so per crater (Maybe a backyard swimming pool's worth.). To put it into perspective, they think each of those little trickles you see on the images was only 25 gallons or so.

Finding evidence of a significant quantity of non-polar water ice (they're currently thinking it may be in aquifer like structures several kilometers under the surface) would be huge from a colonization stand-point, however.

Source?

2009, the latest year I could easily find the statistic for, we payed $381 billion in interest. It's not 50%, it's around 10-15%.

"The also demonstrates that an old AI method, linear discriminant analysis, and demonstrates that it is as good and sometimes better than more trendy mehods such as Support Vector Machines"

I think the summary accidentally forgot the

God is by definition infinitely complex. Any finite explanation of the universe, no matter how complex, is simpler than an explanation by God. Occam's Razor, correctly stated, is that the hypothesis with the smallest new assumptions is generally the one to be desired. The hypothesis of God is the ultimate assumption since it is supra-rational. Essentially, a million finite (provable) assumptions is still less than one infinite (unprovable) assumption. Is this a problem? Not necessarily since you're already talking about the value of faith, but using Occam's Razor in your argument is dubious at best.

True, but a bit of selfish wishing can't hurt.

Diplomatic discussion on Stuxnet wasn't top secret and would show up in the WikiLeaks cables.

This is one event that we could use secret info being leaked to the public on. (At least for geeks)

Is shipping free?

We've been complaining for years about the Internet killing privacy. Now secrecy will die with it.