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They're the only ones I know of that have pledged to spend almost a billion dollars to influence the next election.

So public disclosure of the terms is "likely to lead this to go immediately into the public debate on an ill-informed basis", and yet aren't secret terms and meetings guaranteed to result in ill-informed debate? If the agreement were truly in the public interest, then it sounds like Groser is saying is that the public is too stupid to be persuaded to support the agreement via educational campaigns. The reality is that these agreements are trying to achieve aims that are in the interests of corporations and other mega-donors, not further the interest of the people, and that's what they don't want known.

I'd be fine if we got rid of DST but kept everyone 'sprung forward' an hour. I'm a night owl so any daylight earlier than 8:00 am is wasted on me.

Unfortunately, what you don't own is Congress.

Let's wait for this discussion until a computer has something interesting to say.

if I won the powerball tomorrow, I doubt I'd even go back in to collect the few personal things I keep at my desk.

Maybe you need to look into getting a different job.

I was thinking about this type of response, commonly given when someone says they don't love their job, when I was reading another article where 'college grads with degree in X can't find work'. There the common advice was "maybe you should have gotten a degree in something more practical."

"Why bother? They'll be correct again in a few months."

once they have 18 months they'll say it's not long enough and they need 36 months. Rinse and repeat until logs are retained for the lifetime of the customer plus 70 years.

I'd prefer it not hang and use 99% of the CPU when I close it.

BP, to its credit, has accepted responsibility even though its almost certainly not to blame.

Just like the companies whose foreign factories run sweatshops and use child labor aren't to blame? If it's BP's well, they have a responsibility to ensure the other companies they hire operate in a responsible fashion, even it it entails having a full time BP employee stay on the rig to inspect and monitor what's going on.

Buy one for all your friends!

Since when is gun registration violating innocent until proven guilty?
Is it the same way as driver and vehicle licensing violates it?
That is... not at all?

Driving is a privilege that can be revoked, registration to allow the authorities to verify that you're still worthy of the privilege makes sense. Gun ownership is a right. The only benefit of registration is so that police can identify suspects if a particular type of weapon is used in a crime. There's your presumption of guilt.

why turn off the microphone just because you aren't making a call? Just continuously record everything in the vicinity

They'd never do that, because then they'd have to upgrade their networks... ;)

Ok. This new "law" would simply create a new black market for thieves. Increasing their profit streams. Now instead of a walmart tracphone. you buy a "clean" prepaid phone from vito that is registered to a 14 year old cheerleader in the hamptons. Honestly, are out lawmakers simply a bunch of retarded old idiots? Did they not think of this?

Whether it's a smart thing to do or not has nothing to do with it. They just want a 10 second soundbyte to look 'tough on crime' during the next election, or for opponents to say incumbents are 'soft on crime' if the incumbent is intelligent enough to vote against it.

We look at beastiality taboos as protecting animals... some of whom we will wind up killing and eating. This doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

It makes perfect sense to me - I want to be sure that someone guy's hot dog hasn't been in my hot dog.