No it isn't. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_v._Texas

This is the reality of business. People make mistakes, and when the stakes are high the mistakes are expensive. Anyone whose career trajectory includes positions of great responsibility WILL eventually make mistakes in this general price range. It doesn't mean they're bad at their jobs or should be fired, it's just a cost of achieving big things. I've only made about a $20,000 mistake, but I was fresh out of college so my damage potential was limited.

I certainly agree with your general point, but you actually can throw together a gas turbine in your garage in a weekend. I've done it. Start with the biggest diesel engine turbocharger you can find, build a combustion chamber, and then hack together all the other little bits needed to make it run. Of course, the design of the combustion chamber and the hacking together of all the support systems is quite a project! But it is totally achievable in a garage, and takes no more than a weekend if you have all the parts and a good design in advance. The result is a functional and very noisy but completely useless gas turbine engine.

CMEs always drastically affect long-distance radio communications, especially in modes that rely on upper atmospheric characteristics (skip and ducting). It's not subtle at all. Anyone who woks with radio in a technical capacity has to cope with it. It's just that most commercial services are designed and operated in ways that keep end users from having to deal with these effects.

Not really. Our problem is that we burn stuff that was buried underground for ever and ever, and we dug it up. Burning stuff that just recently grew is just fine. Growing algae (or any plant, for that matter) removes CO2 from the environment and collects the carbon in the plant tissue. Burning it simply releases the same amount of CO2 that was consumed by growing the plant. It's "carbon neutral" in hippie parlance.

Are you sure about that? No current battery technology suitable for use in an electric vehicle can withstand complete discharge without ruining the battery. Discharging deeply enough to eliminate the risk of fire would also destroy the battery, I would think. Is there a reliable source that says otherwise?

This may or may not be a misleading statement. There's inadequate context and specificity in the article. "Energy" here could refer to the total amount of ionizing radiation energy delivered to a person in the scanner, in which case these portal scanners could be considered extremely dangerous, since a typical CT is already a substantial and potentially dangerous radiation dose. Alternatively, the word "energy" may refer to the energy of the individual x-ray photons. In other words, if a typical CT uses 100keV x-rays and these scanners use 300keV. That is probably what was meant. It's clinically meaningless. Within reasonable ranges of several tens of keV to several MeV, only the total absorbed dose really matters health-wise, not the energies of the individual particles.

With that said, I still don't condone this type of intrusive inspection - even at the border.

That's not really extensible to most of those examples. When you loan money or invest in something, you're actively "working" the entire time that your money is out of your hands. If I loan you $1000, I'm "loaning" for the entire period of time that I don't have my $1000.

That is never a valid reason! Are you serious? Preventing the owner of a device, who paid money for it and has exclusive ownership of it, from reverse engineering it is the exact same unethical behavior that we (geeks) have been battling for the past 15 years on every platform from gaming systems to routers to phones. If I buy it, I damn well better not be paying for technological measures that are intended to prevent me from figuring out how it works and doing what I want with it. Hardware is not licensed. It is sold.

Right. Let me guess: you were a bloody good "Doctor" too, but you never got an MD, DO, DDS, DVM, OD, PhD, EdD, PsyD, PharmD? Give us all a break. Some people on here actually have advanced degrees, and actually are professionals. By all means, contribute your opinion as a lay person - but don't try to finagle your way into ranks you don't belong to. Your lack of legal knowledge clearly indicates that you do not work in the field.