I was expecting this to be about slashdot.

I'm in the Northeast and this *&%!@ snowstorm is keeping me from viewing the stars.

PGP/GPG is much easier to use these days than it was in the 90's. Plugins exist for many mail clients that do the heavy lifting in the background.

Friends and family are surely tired of my tinfoil hat, they just do not seem to care about their privacy. Many say the "I have nothing to hide" line.

Many people in your group go around denying the reality of addiction, saying it is just a choice, as easy as choosing soup over salad for lunch

It is a choice. No one is born needing to shoot heroin or smoke a cigarette since they've never experienced. They make the conscious choice to do so despite the overwhelming evidence of what happens when you use both.. At that point one could argue it becomes an addiction, but no one is born being addicted (assuming their mother didn't make the choice for them).

That explains why there is so much lens flare in his movies. He's trying to recreate what he sees every day.

Slower photons in fiber optics means a slower, more relaxed pace for my web browsing.

Except in Microsoft's recent pattern, FINDING those items is much more difficult and less intuitive. What was once a single-click to see all your options from 'View' (for instance), is now a "click and hope" funfest as you meander from ribbon to ribbon trying to come across what you're looking for.

The layouts are not intuitive, they have moved items from where they used to be, have buried items in sub-entries and it takes longer to accomplish what you want.

By any measure, that is not an upgrade no matter how many people wish it to be so.

In general, the real silliness of drug tests is when they are used by things like fast food restaurants

Right, because I want to be the customer who has their food spiked by someone who was high or under the influence because they thought it would be funny. Imagine them sprinkling crack or LSD on food and someone has a reaction or leaves in their car and has an accident. That's totally hilarious.

or worse when they are used as a condition of welfare

If you have money to buy drugs you have money to buy food or pay your bills. Or have we abandoned personal responsibility?

then "the more you pay the more you get" should be true as well

That's the specious logic corporations use to justify the exorbitant salaries of their CEOs despite numerous studies showing the person at the top has little to no impact on the performance of the company.

Then again, when corporations say they can't their workers more they are by default stating they don't want the best workers because they're not willing to pay the folks on the front line what they're worth.

Some reference material:

• Report 1
• Report 2
• Report 3

What's the point of an engine that runs correctly in a car that looks good if everything else is shit?

My second thought was, if their budget is cut all they have to do is reduce the scope of their mission.

They can't. The scope of their mission is defined by Congress. They are tasked with carrying out what Congress says. They can't unilaterally say, "We're not going to do what we're told to do."

That said, if they wanted to reduce their mission scope they could always ignore trying to collect money from people who didn't hand over their money to private companies since this has nothing to do with the collection of taxes.

and they charge their customers a small transaction fee in the form of an exchange rate difference.

So you lose money each time you use it? That sucks.

I don't have that problem when I use real money. If something costs $10, I give the person a $20 bill and get $10 back. By your logic I might $9.95 back.

What a horrible deal for the person using this crap currency.

how does empty space have energy?

That was my question as well until I read Brian Greene's explanation in his book, The Fabric of the Cosmos.

In short, the Higgs Field. Long answer, think of what we call space as a fabric (hence the title of his book). The Higgs Field is the fabric upon which everything else "sits". Even if there are no particles in a given unit of space, it is not empty because the Higgs Field is still there.

Start on page 254 of his book and work your way through as he describes the field and how it (supposedly) permeates everything.

... the oldest goatse in history.

Excellent! It took me straight to The Black Hole game. Thanks!