Instead of a lottery or affirmative action -- why don't we let everyone have higher education who wants it.

This country progressed with the GI bill and letting a lot of people who wouldn't otherwise afford college go. And we could do the same for trade schools. You only have to pay for education if you leave the country.

It's the reverse of the "H1-B Visa" where businesses don't pay for education in the USA and import people who got educations paid for by their countries.

Scalia dissented from an opinion where a right to innocence is removed? That's a surprise.

I can only assume that Thomas and Scalia take turns being "the bad guy" so it doesn't always look like a slam dunk that they'll vote with fascism each and every time.

What would shock me is real thought and concern for citizens from the likes of Scalia and Thomas.

Many police officers are quite certain of their ability to determine guilt or innocence; usually in direct relation to how much the person in front of them is pissing them off.

If it takes an "anonymous call" to make sure they get the bad guy they are 100% certain is bad -- then it's going to happen. There's already a drop bag and a drop gun for mistakes. Now there's going to be the burner phone.

Is America falling apart because we don't have enough poor people in prison or enough bankers in prison?

No a lawyer, but I thought "probable cause" was that the original CAUSE for the police stop and search has to be legit. If you can't arrest the driver for "forcing someone off the road" then anything found after that wasn't supported by the search.

Or maybe I'm living in a fantasy world. I'm just not too enthused to live in a country where the "right to imprison" supersedes the right to liberty. Pot shouldn't be against the law -- but it is, because of stupidity and it means we have to buy a lot of anti depressants to compensate.

But really, society isn't breaking down because we don't have enough people in prison. A person should be a real menace to society in order to justify the government taking away their liberty. Prison is a sick, sad place. And I don't want to make this an easy process for the state.

Hey, you know what they say: if something's worth doing, it's worth overdoing!

(Also, in retrospect, the tongue-in-cheek didn't translate to text as successfully as the sarcasm.)

Um, anywhere? Hydroelectric plants, windmills (even low-tech Dutch-stereotype ones, if necessary), steam-turbine generators fueled with anything flammable (wood, trash, soybean oil, whale oil, dead bodies -- anything!)... oh yeah, or you could even just do solar thermal and skip the PV entirely.

She should be barred for life...for at least 5 years.

What?

That is sad...we should never be at that point.

We started at that point. This country was founded by people who would nowadays be libeled* as "terrorists," remember?

Maybe it's about time for the "tree of liberty" to be refreshed.

(*not a typo)

Well excuse me! I merely read the fucking summary and somehow thought just because it said that "the ultimate goal is to replace KDE as the default desktop of PC-BSD" and that "Lumina aims to be lightweight, stable, fast-running, and FreeDesktop.org/XDG compliant," that meant the point was to make something better for the public, not merely to "have fun" or "learn" something.

Clearly, your reading comprehension skills are so far beyond mine that you were able to determine the "real" ultimate goal of the project despite the summary explicitly saying something completely different. I'm so goddamn sorry I deigned to participate in the conversation, when my ideas so pale in comparison to your obvious brilliance!

Including your "neighbors" two states away that hate everything about your ideology?

Okay, but when you've torn everything down and started over from scratch twenty-plus times already, maybe that stops being the right development methodology?

... calculate the probability of a single event (asteroid arrival) in a period of 50 years that strikes a population-dense area.

Not a single event. One or more.

(By the way: I was just explaining how the poster's formula worked, not vouching for its correctness for the problem. Nevertheless, it strikes me as a reasonable quick approximation, given the uncertainty of the single 13-year n=26 sample of meteor arrivals.)

Obama is a legit President, not like Nixon, Ford, Regan, Bush I & II and Clinton...Obama isn't perfect but he's not illuminati.

You've got to be kidding me. Doing exactly the opposite of pretty much everything he promised during his campaign (close Guantanamo, not kowtow to lobbyists, improve environmental regulations, etc.) is hardly "legit!"

Obama stretches decisions bad for the Oligarchary out over time...he doesn't fire Sebelius when all the media heat is on it happens after...the Keystone XL pipeline is another example...

Sebelius fucked up, and her fuck-ups damaged Obama's agenda. Failing to replace her immediately accomplished nothing except giving Republicans an extra talking point and revealing how much Obama sucks as a manager.

"Left" means social authoritarianism. "Right" means corporate authoritarianism. Those of us who care in the slightest about freedom are fucked either way.

The FCC wanted to do B without C, so they claimed "ISPs are not common carriers, so we don't have to do C. ISPs are common carriers, so we're going to do B". That's ridiculous, you can't say they ARE common carriers and NOT common carriers at the same time. Therefore, the FCC can't make up net neutrality laws.

The FCC should just fucking go ahead and do C (i.e., make ISPs common carriers)!