Yeah, all that on top of no booze.

failing to take advantage of the brief period of Democratic control of Congress by getting his health care plan passed (and instead trying to play fair with the GOP, a party which makes no bones about its policy of doing everything it can to harm the country when the other party holds the White House in order to make the President look bad)

Actually, "Obamacare" was more ambitious than the administration wanted -- they were cognizant of what happened to Clinton when he tried this. It was Nancy Pelosi who pushed for what Republicans call "Obamacare", which ironically was based on Romney's Massachusetts system, which in turn was based on Bob Dole's Republican counter-proposal to Clinton's plan.

It's not that Obama would be against a more radical single payer in principle, it's that he'd have been satisfied to fix enough specific problems (like pre-existing conditions and the "doughnut hole") without getting too politically exposed. I

Well, the rule of law as it has been settled over the last couple of centuries doesn't consider suspicion a burden to the target. That's because when the Bill of Rights was framed the cost and difficulty of surveillance was so high it was assumed not to be a serious threat to liberty. And that's where the current understanding of the US Constitution's limitations on police remains to this day. The law hasn't adjusted to the fact that it's now possible to *mechanize* suspicion and surveillance through cameras, software, networks and databases.

In fact this problem predates technological advances. The emergence of a government with powerful, permanently constituted security agencies is something the founders never dreamed of. That is the problem with "original intent"; in many situations what the founders might have intended is a matter of speculation. For example we now accept that 4th Amendment protections protect people in public places (Katz v. United States, 1967) but for a long time the limitation to a person's home, self, and papers was taken literally (Olmstead v. United States, 1928).

It is certainly not true that three letter agencies can do whatever they want, wherever they want; but the limitations the Constitution specifically puts on them do not cover their current capability to infringe on individual liberties, and the courts thus far have declined to check them under the Ninth Amendment or through extensions of other amendments..

Ever hear of NIMBY? It's easy to be against all regulations that protect other people's property.

Wanting protections for your own backyard makes you a concerned citizen. Wanting protections for everyone's back yard makes you an environmentalist -- and apparently a socialist.

Anyhow, the concerns raised by the group are reasonable, but raising a reasonable concern should not amount to veto power. The sensible way to respond to a reasonable concern is to commission an environmental impact assessment, give the public a little time to critique the study, then make a decision one way or the other. Either way there will be people who aren't satisfied, but there's no point in even talking to people who will only be satisfied unless they get their own way.

The long coexistence of wildlife and launch operations at the Kennedy Space Center is promising, but not conclusive. You can't generalize or reason from first principles one way or the other in cases like this. You have to work from location-specific data. While it is hard to put a precise cost on an environmental impact assessment, the cost of determining whether there's a reasonable concern here isn't likely to be a significant financial burden to a project like this.

That's true, but it's also true that we older folks don't have the memory for arbitrary strings of data that we used to. So our choice is to use the same password for everything, use weak, easy to remember passwords, or use some kind of memory aid. I've opted for the last. I use KeepPassX religiously and generate unique, strong passwords for every site I use. I only have to remember one, moderately strong password which never gets transmitted over the wire.

In fact a few people like me probably skew the results if you're going by averages. According to TFA the average user chosen password has less than ten bits of entropy. My low-sensitivity site passwords have about 40-50 bits of entropy but my banking and ecommerce passwords have over 80. Remembering a half-dozen 80 bit passwords including mixed case, numbers and symbols would be a challenge for anyone, but it's a cinch if you don't even try.

Another trick I've recommended for people to use for sensitive data is to write down a several strong prefixes, carry them in your wallet, and concatenate them with weak but easy to remember password.

Well, I think that individuals who are honest and care about their work can contain their personal biases by conscientiously following lines of inquiry that lead in directions they'd rather not take. If that were not possible, it would be impossible to be honest with yourself about your own behavior. But like being honest with yourself, it's a lot easier to convince yourself you're being impartial than to actually do it.

I see a number of good reasons for bringing in outsiders, but the most compelling one is credibility. If an inside investigator clears a colleague or wrongdoing, people will suspect a cover-up. If he concludes that a colleague bears individual responsibility, *that* can be seen as a cover-up too: they might be throwing someone under the bus to protect the organization.

That last scenario actually happened in the US Navy investigation of the 1989 investigation of an explosion that killed 47 men in the gun turret of the USS Iowa. The bodies were removed without documenting their location or condition, the equipment in the turret removed and thrown overboard, and the interior repainted. All this was done with the knowledge of the admiral running the investigation. Witness testimony was coerced and in some cases altered, and the technical lead in the investigation was the officer who had overseen the packing of the powder bags that exploded. The only reason we know all this was the attempt at scapegoating was so transparent.

One man's genius is another man's sociopath.

Think how much more true that is now that Carlin has died.

Well perhaps it is not the answer to the question "Did creation come from nothing" that is silly; perhaps it is the question itself.

There are certainly other questions we could ask that clearly presuppose ordering events in impossible ways. What's colder than absolute zero? What's north of the North Pole? What has a higher elevation than directly overhead? What happens when you shrink a balloon to less than zero volume?

Asking whether creation came from nothing presupposes our notion of time and space can be extended before the Big Bang. It assumes that time is a fixed, universal measurement framework in which events can be unambiguously placed. But we already know that time is not like that. Special relativity has been pretty well corroborated by now. If time isn't a universal dimension but a set of paths along which events occur, it is no more repugnant to reason for those paths to lead back to a point than it is for them to go back endlessly.

This problem of trying to extend our understanding back before the beginning of the universe is not resolved by assuming a pre-existing God. Did anything happen before "the moment of creation"? If so, then the moment of creation is just an arbitrary point in time. So what was God up to in the eternity before that? If there is no beginning to time, there is no reason for God to perform the act of creation when he did. He had an eternity to work his way up to it. Possibly He has done this an infinite number of times, in which case time is as Eastern religions often conceive it: circular. Note that this conception of God doing things in an eternity before creation is no longer really transcendent. God may not be part of creation, but he is part of "existence" and does things because conditions in existence him cause him to, just like you or I put on a coat when it's cold. This version of God is not so different than you or I, just longer lived and more complex.

On the other hand, let's suppose God has the transcendent role religion assigns him, that he is indeed the First Cause. That means things didn't happen before the moment of creation. That brings us back to the same situation we have with the Big Bang. Does it make sense to talk about time in which events don't occur? Event he ticking of a clock is an event; a beat of the pulse; the vibration of an atom.

Perhaps it would be best to think of the beginning of the universe not as a limit to the Universe per se, but a limit to any kind of extrapolation from experience. The laws of physics as we know them came into being in first 10^-12 seconds. As we go back further to the Planck Epoch before 10^-43, intuition begins to break down. And as we push further back in that 10^-43 seconds, there will come a point earlier than which we can't even extend our deductive frameworks. Let's say the earliest event we can discern by deduction occurs at 10^-X. In the time between 0 and 10^-X our understanding completely breaks down. That tiny sliver of time is for all purposes an eternity, since we can't put any definite limit on events that occur in it.

I have often wondered whether intelligent life (obviously not as we know it) might have existed in the epoch of the Universe, only living on a vastly faster time scale. To that life our epoch of the Universe would look like the future heat death of the Universe does to us.

If by "dumb" you mean "below median intelligence", that's approximately correct.