It wouldn't be that obvious. What would happen is dome government department would need to get a message out so they will purchade a lot of premium advertising space at thr new premium rates.

The public would never know.

Exactly. If you want to regard yourself as an engineer, you have to start by accepting you are working to serve the interests of the client, not your career. I've seen so many problems occur because programmers want to have a certain technology on their resume. And the sad thing is that it works to get them through the HR filter. If HR is told to look for experience with a particular technology, it doesn't seem to matter whether the candidate's experience with that technology is failure.

Bottom 1/2 of the garage fridge is frozen water.
Always plenty of foodstuffs around
Propane and charcoal grills to cook on
In the event of actually having to bug out, one of the laptops and the main USB secondary drive that normally lives attached to the house HTPC/server. In addition to a few things in cloud storage.

Anything else...home owners insurance.

Whatever his motivations, it doesn't change the fact that your original assertion (and the specific point that was replied to), i.e. "I thought people were allowed to have their own beliefs in this country without others attacking them for it." was wrong, and demonstrated a fundamental misunderstanding of even the basic principle of free speech, let alone the specific details of the US constitution's version of it.

It always surprises me (*) how so many of the Americans who bleat on about "free speech" et al don't even understand the basics of either the principle or the US implementation of it, thinking- as you do- that one is free to express one's own opinion, yet somehow protected from others' right to respond to it (i.e. *their* free speech). Or- the other common misconception- that the constitutional right to protection from *government* interference in free speech is actually the right to free speech in any private place or forum.

(*) It doesn't, really- but it ought to.

In what sense was your argument supposed to be "rhetorical"?

A word of advice- posting your comment as a single wall of text like that makes it very tiring to read and digest, and thus a lot less likely to get read. Try using paragraphs, and it might come across more credibly, rather than appearing as a train-of-thought comment.

You evidently felt that you "understood" it enough to judge Scotland "proving itself stupid" for wanting independence.

You come across as someone who lacks experience, someone who is thinking out the abstract principles, but applies them to a real-world situation that you don't understand the important details of at all.

Regarding WW2; yes, that is generally considered one of the better times of the British state. If Scotland had been independent then, I would hope that it would fight together with England (and the rest of the UK), and there are aspects of defence where I feel that the proposed independent Scotland may be relying too much on the efforts of others.

Still, the comments I made regarding the reasons for wanting Scottish independence were just a small proportion of the total I could have posted- in other words, there were many more reasons, but I did not have more time to add to a post that was already very long at that point.

Part of the population of the US wants to ban guns, so some states are taking baby steps to pass laws that will make it easier. Total registration is the first step in the future plan. These states keep saying they need a federal/state registry to check for criminals, when all we really need is an 800 number for people to call in before private sales, a simple yes/no if the person is allowed guns. Only a ban list is kept, and never a total registration list. Thus no private sales to criminals, and we keep our historical idea of a ban on government confiscation.

(Except NY, they are chipping away rights faster than California, how would you like to be a store owner with riots like Ferguson and have only allowed a few bullets in a magazine due to bad laws...)

For the kids, the brainwashing has started. Its Doctors asking kids if their parents have guns at home or Teachers trying brainwash kids that guns are bad, and if you mention guns, its a suspension.

This is about forcing political change with the children. Also why people want to stop all religious actions, mandatory LGBT studies at k to 6, rules on cakes at school functions, ban student stores, ban the pledge of allegiance, mandatory feminism classes, etc.

It's about control.

SO you would go into a Laundromat and leave your clothes there unattended and popping in and out every so often to change machines?

Here is the deal, or at least how we like to do it in the US. We generally have a set of clothes not fit for every day social interaction but covers everything enough not to be indecent. We put those on and spend a day or a portion of the day doing laundry. But we don't just throw it in a basket and call it done, we fold things, hang things up, match pairs of socks and so on. Most of this can be done in the time it takes for the next load to be finish so you put in 5 hours, have about 4 loads done start to finish and then do whatever.

It seems like that in Europe, you would have to find something to do in between loads and that 5 hours would end up being 10 or more if you didn't have multiple machines.

It doesn't matter where you are. the point was the two are different and not the same- not where you are located at.

But if I have to go to that level of explanation, I do not think it is be possible to ever use logic or reality to change your mind. I guess we are done here.

As long as we are pretending fan fiction is close to workable reality, we might as well also inject the claim that it could have been avoided long before G.W. Bush was president if President Clinton would have supported the Kurds when they attempted to overthrow Saddam back in the mid 90's.

Of course a lot can be said about other actions if they had been taken. For instance, President Clinton also had the opportunity to take out Bin Laden before 9/11 but chose not to for probably good reasons (too many civilian casualties would have incurred)

Hind sight is always better then the fog of reality in real time I guess. It's fun to look back and think what if something was done differently but if seems to be a mighty powerful word. If the dog didn't stop to shit, he would have caught the rabbit. If the rabbit didn't stop to shit, the dog would have never caught him. How true either of those statements could be is just a guess, but if we knew, it still wouldn't be as real as what really happened.

To play devil's advocate in "I'm New Around Here"'s defefence, it was the user "Third Position" who posted the racist link in his sig, and the comment from "I'm New" himself wasn't (necessarily) condoning the views expressed.

What he *was* clearly doing was defending Third Position's "right" to express his opinion without being attacked for it. Which is, of course, stupid and ignorant, because no-one has such a "right" under the freedom of speech in the US constitution (which I assume is what "I'm New" has misunderstood when he referred to what was "allowed" in "this country"), despite many thinking it does. Freedom of speech obviously cuts both ways, otherwise it's not true freedom of speech. (Anyone making such a deal about it should have realised this already.)

But that misunderstanding doesn't *necessarily* mean he's a racist... just stupid and ignorant.

The implication in your reply being that he mocked and attacked you because he disagreed with you?

Either that's a strawman or you really weren't paying attention.

The paragraph you replied to was mocking you not because he disagreed with you on a matter of opinion, but because your belief that "people were allowed to have their own beliefs in this country without others attacking them for it" was *factually wrong* (and by implication showed that you really don't understand what "freedom of speech" does and doesn't get you.). End of story.

Well gee, Sparky. Why don't you tell us what pseudoenlighted country you live in. So that we may delve into some random idiotic episode that happens in your hinterland and make fun of it.

Everywhere has some stupid crap going on.

I'm no fan of taxes, especially income tax, but still see it as a means to an end. I pay taxes, Microsoft should too. If I don't pay taxes, I can go to jail. Microsoft gets a free pass due to loopholes and tax shelters. This needs to end.

I do not disagree with your sentiment, I just perceive Obama's dilemma as being such that he will loose face whichever way he goes so I think he is going to pick whatever is most favorable to him according to the people he cares to impress.

Otherwise, who is going to pay him $2mil a speech or give his daughters a cushy job so his future is secure......It's like drawing a line in the sand and having Russia bail them out when it appears that not only was it crossed, but they were pissing all over your sand castle while doing it.

I'm reminded of an old asterix and obelix cartoon where in one of the scenes, asterix is in a roman tower and obelix outside and they try to go to each other pummeling the Romans along the way just to realize they switched places and have to do it again. Near the end, a roman soldier cries out, maybe if we are quiet, they won't see us or something like that.