Yep. It has been happening at least since the early 90s. Where do you think most/all of those police-department lambourghinis and mustangs and zrocs came from? They seize people's shit, keep what they want, auction off the rest and pocket the money. You can get incredible deals at police auctions, but I refuse to ever buy anything, myself, because I find it disgusting.

The point of Silk Road was private transactions. They tried to propagandize the idea t hat it's "only for illegal drugs" to justify their actions, when what they were really angry about was simply cracking down on purportedly untraceable money. That people are going around repeating the drug thing suggests their effort worked.

Well, his estate owns half the publishing rights by virtue of including his share of the ATV joint venture with Sony. The Lennon estate and McCartney still own the songwriters rights.

...when Apple's competitors ship devices that don't have SD slots or tool-less replaceable batteries.

Funny how only low-end devices are expandable these days.

Funny how that wars with the lack of Ogg Vorbis support in the "I Don't Give A Shit" department for the vast majority of consumers.

I think liberals have forgotten the meaning and just hurl ad homs as shaming language.

Not liberals. Obamabots. Who, by the process of keeping their heads up Obama's ass through all his leaps to the right (cutting SS and drone bombing weddings), are now right-wingers themselves.

How did he allow **his** signature legislation to be gutted? **He** never offered any legislation. He mentioned some broad guidelines during the campaign and immediately upon election turned it over to

...Max Baucus, corporate whore, and his staffer (former VP of lobbying for Wellpoint) to write the legislation on the Finance Committee. Not the Health and Human Services Committee or one headed by a senator supportive of the Public Option, much less Single Payer.

Obama spent all his time negotiating with right-wing Democrats like Nelson and Lincoln, and Republicans like Grassley and Snowe. Not with Harkin or Kennedy, a long-time supporter of Single Payer. Obama also killed the public option in a deal with the for-profit hospital lobby, kept single payer off the table even as a point of negotiation, and made the same backroom deal with the same lobbyist that he attacked in the 2008 campaign. And every public statement in support of a public option was accompanied by a statement praising amendments that would gut it (like Snowe's trigger). His OFA did jack and squat to demand a PO, and finally Obama press-ganged liberals like Kucinich into passing Romneycare via reconciliation, after spending a year insisting that 60 votes were needed to pass a PO.

Obama showed all kinds of leadership on betraying his own campaign promises. You could describe pretty much his entire presidency that way.

Indicate whether you think that previous health care reform efforts failed because the previous reform-oriented administrations A) didn't try hard enough; B) had the wrong approach and were justifiable opposed; C) accepted failure entirely against their best judgment lacking sufficient political power to ram the bill through (whether good/bad for America); or D) accepted failure when entrenched ideological opposition effectively made America ungovernable (a condition which shows no sign of abating any time soon).

Indicate whether you're aware that health insurance doubled several times between 1993 and 2008. Or that even Republican voters supported a Public Option, when asked about what it would actually do (provide huge non-profit pool to force down insurance costs) instead of media fear-mongering (death panels).

Actually the crawler was bigger than either the Saturn V or the shuttle (6m lbs vs 5m gross for the Saturn V or 4.4m gross for the shuttle) =)

The only problem is that the investors getting burned by the reduction in corn ethanol production are extremely unlikely to invest in cellosic plants if they feel it's likely the government will pull the indirect and direct subsidies on a whim like they are planning to with corn ethanol. These are capital intensive efforts and if halfway into your payback period the government pulls the rug out from under you you're unlikely to invest in a similar setup.

Yeah but that's an ebook reader, not a tablet.

Compared to traditional multizone monitoring solutions with installation? Yes, it's cheap.

Meh, being able to have cheap multizone temp monitoring seems like a cool use of technology to me. Plus with Nest you can silence the alarm in the kitchen and it will silence all the rest of the smoke alarms in the house for a period of time which is cool.

law enforcement should not be able to identify you

Sure, LEO's absolutely have the ability to identify me, RLC's have zero to do with LEO's, they are private money making machines with the profits split with the municipalities. Basically they're the modern incarnation of the robber barons of the River Rhine, and when they receive too little income the companies pressure the municipalities into reducing the yellow time at the intersection which multiple studies have shown significantly reduces the safety at intersections where the cameras are installed, exactly the opposite of their stated purpose.

What if someone overheard the conversation you had at a restaurant last week?

What if you tried coming up with a relevant analogy? The person overhearing you

1) Isn't recording your conversation
2) Even if he is, it's not going in a massive cross-referenced database
3) And isn't tapping your phones and email in addition to eavesdropping
4) Doesn't have the power to arrest you or sic a trigger-happy SWAT team on your ass

IIRC, declaring martial law does require a war or insurrection.

Not just a war, but an invasion and/or insurrection. And the power to suspend habeas corpus is a power of Congress, not the President. So while the Civil War obviously qualified as an insurrection, Lincoln's suspension of HC was unconstitutional, since he did not go through Congress to do it.