Then maybe, I dunno, explain to your parents that there's no a lot of value in sitting there while your child bashes at the laptop for 40 minutes a night. I mean, Jesus, seriously? NOTHING a two year old does is that interesting.

In one of Michael Collin's books he mentions what was referred to as the 'poor bastard' scenario for Mars exploration, in which they send up some poor bastard who does science for as long as he can until his supplies run out. As you can imagine, there was never a lot of political enthusiasm for the idea.

Type I diabetes is caused by the autoimmune destruction of the pancreatic islet cells which produce insulin. It has nothing to do with corn syrup or the FDA.

That position makes sense if you believe that other people will actually stand with you. Personally, when I observe the way people drive in traffic, or the way they leave a public restroom, it becomes very clear to me that you can't expect the average person to show the slightest consideration for his fellows unless there is some incentive for him to do so. The GPP is a clear example of that--if the other people at the checkpoint when the little girl ran away had refused to allow them to hold the parents, the screeners might have backed down. But they all considered the risk of missing their flights, or the chance of being detained or arrested, and they decided to do nothing.

My point being, if you're arguing that civil disoberdience in the solution to this problem, I'd like for you to explain what gives you confidence that other people will stand with you. I thought National Opt-Out Day was a great idea, but it probably wasn't enough to really hurt the TSA. Maybe an Occupy Airport movement, lasting days, would do the job.

I don't really see how air marshalls solve anything. Since 9/11 there have been several incidents of suspicious or dangerous behavior on planes, e.g., the shoe bomber, the underwear bomber, even that pilot who flipped out in flight a few weeks ago. In each of these situations, the offender was restrained by passengers armed with nothing more than what they'd carried on to the plane. Having a big guy with a bean bag launcher wouldn't have changed that. I would go so far as to say it would be almost impossible to carry out a 9/11-type plot on an airplane at this point--hence the focus on explosives. Bruce Schneier said it nicely: the only two things that have improved airline security since 9/11 are reinforced cockpit doors and passenger awareness. We'd be better off relaxing the current security standards to pre-9/11 levels (minus box cutters and things of that nature) and using the money saved to fund better intelligence and investigation of threats.

That's why I usually just say 'measures of central tendency.' Precision ambiguity.

Equating making a stink at an airport security checkpoint with the American Revolution is a little idiotic. The founding fathers didn't hassle individual British tax collectors and tell themselves they were fighting the good fight. They had a plan of action with a clear endgame. If you have something like that for our modern situation (for example, the National Opt-Out Day) then that's worth talking about. But suggesting people should screw themselves over with no hope of actually changing things is self-righteous and silly.

I mean, heck, you could go to your nearest airport right now and heckle the TSA goons, and yet somehow I doubt you're about to. Maybe because you don't have any desire to inconvenience yourself for no appreciable gain.

I notice you didn't quote the part of my post where I stated I think the government should force everyone to pay for a space program. Maybe because there wasn't one?

Here's an idea for the politicians out there: if parents are unable or unwilling to monitor and regulate the behavior of their children, IT IS NOT THE JOB OF GOVERNMENT TO DO IT FOR THEM. When an army of porn-addled youngsters starts rioting in the streets, then maybe we should consider drastic measures. In the meantime, please stop couching every idiotic bit of nanny state nonsense in terms of protecting the poor defenseless children.

And yet what would a private company ever get out of a Mars mission? What's the return on investment, and ultimately what is such a venture providing, and who is paying for it? I mean, nothing stops Boeing or Lockheed for building unmanned probes that could be used to investigate the solar system (maybe selling the data to scientific institutions?) but they're not doing it, and compared to a manned flight to Mars, the cost is peanuts.