Bullshit. The reason is because the senate has 6 year terms. Obama was elected because the republicans put up a poor candidates against him. I mean seriously, mccain the maveric who campained with "you will never know what i"l do" and "47 percent of you don't mater" romney would have lost to al gore given the chance.

You are making shit excuses.

I was under the impresion that back pay for shutdowns were part of the federal employes union contract. I was told it was put in back in the 80s after a shutdown.

If that is the case, then only contractors are in question.

Lol.. thats complete bullshit. It cost yhem nothing to leave the site as it was...

Maybe they think the people are stupid enough to not know any better

Oh, you thought any of that was going to stop? You're adorable.

No, the only things that are going to stop are the ones Republicans don't like.

This might as well be how Blackberry, Nokia, and Palm blew it. And I'm probably leaving off a few companies.

IMO it all comes down to arrogance about your own platform. In Nokia's case that was Symbian.

Low light means you want the largest sensor well size you can (ie biggest individual-sized pixel), and a wide aperture lens. A few P&S cameras have both, but you're better off with an actual DSLR.

In terms of a body: the Panasonic GH2 is pretty popular among videographers for quality and controls; there are a bunch of firmware hacks out for it. If you don't mind not having video, you can pick up a used Canon 40D for peanuts, and it's a fantastic camera, and close to your price range.

In terms of lenses, you'll want the widest aperture lens you can afford. The simple/cheap way to do this is a fixed (prime) lens; figure out what focal length you need (for non-photographers, the "mm" in "100mm lens", aka "zoom factor".) Canon and Nikon both, for example, sell a 50mm f/1.8 lens that costs about $50-60. Even with the crop factor, might not be quite enough for your purposes, however.

A few days ago I saw an interesting comment about alternative fuels that re-cast the issue for me.

Namely: they're a distraction. By focusing on the "greenness" of the fuel for cars, be it gas, ethanol, hydrogen, CNG, electricity...we ignore the problem of operation space and storage space (not to mention, the inefficiency, energy-wise, of moving 2 tons of metal just to move one person.) As population grows, we don't have space for everyone to bop around by themselves in their car, nor do we have the space to put them when they're not in use. Bloomberg figured this out a couple of years ago, for example, and hence his strong push of cycle infrastructure in NYC, to great result.

Sure, more cars = not a problem in the middle of Nebraska. But in any metropolitan area, traffic is an enormous burden, and we cannot just throw more pavement at the problem. It's well known that adding lanes doesn't add capacity. We also don't have room for all these cars to park, at least not without paving every square inch in sight.

We need to get people out of their cars. That means higher gas taxes (which haven't been adjusted in decades), car-sharing systems, legal protection for pedestrians and cyclists, and infrastructure spending on pedestrian walkways, cycleways, usable long distance/regional/local public transit (and ending the insistence that public transit pay for itself, something "private" road/infrastructure users aren't expected to do). For example: it is *idiotic* that you cannot take luggage or a bicycle with you on the entire Amtrak northeast corridor.

Funding alternative fuels is fine, but don't do it if you won't fund alternative transportation infrastructure as well. Imagine what $2BN (what Obama wants to spend on "alternative fuels") can buy in terms of cycling and pedestrian infrastructure.

Dogs are mostly interested in being good pack animals and pleasing the alpha. When your handler is pleased by getting to search vehicles/bags/etc...

I'm almost completely convinced that police dogs are merely a slight sophistication of "Hey look, *smash*, your taillight is out."

Do rats have such social capabilities?

Lasers have traditionally been left out of battle as an arm because the way they melt to kill instead of killing. Imagine an enemy who first goes blind then has his skin melt off while his blood starts boiling and if he is lucky, finally death. Now with something like this, that migt happen quicker than it would take for a bullet to kill but that might have been spread over 5, 10 minutes or more

  But i think if it would be used that it still wouldn't be a killing device as much as a tool to destroy whatever the cover the enemy was hiding behind. Imagine an ambush, you are pinned down with the enemy well protected and you can cut that protection away making them retreat or being exposed. If they die in the process, well war is hell i guess.

The damn spellcheck on this phone doesn't work in the sladhdot box

Uh. No. Horses will do two three;

- Drive you much closer to financial ruin, a much more common and harder to deal with disaster than zombies

- Will get you in associating with actual, real life crazy people.

- Give you a false sense of security when using them in an emergency, because they are skittish and noisy, and greatly increase the need to scavenge water, food, and time for maintenance over walking, biking or driving. Plus, "that guy on the horse" will be easy to follow and you are advertising half a ton of fresh meat for them to take from you.

Horses are a poor choice in most places.

He brought an alternative timeline in the New Star Trek (two spok's and all that) which means it doesn't have to stick to the original or be loyal to mythology around it.

I have only seen the original too. But I saw where it was setting up the ability run off in any direction it wanted to. From what other people have told me, the other movie has taken advantage of that. Imagine a prequil that can ignore the future that has already happened. But it gets pretty stupid in the process. A better critique can be found here with a lot of spoiler information and a jackass who doesn't like the movie at all it seems.

http://io9.com/star-trek-into-darkness-the-spoiler-faq-508927844

I know it was sarcasm. Couldn't you sense my rhetorical BS in attempting to deal with it? Feel free to look that up too.

First off, I wasn't actually likening Canada and Norway to hellholes. That's called sarcasm, and I don't have a lot of time to go into detail about it here, so feel free to look it up yourself. Suffice it to say, the point of this sarcasm of mine is that Canada and Norway are actually very far from communist dictatorships.

And what has that to do with my points about Canada and Norway actually providing the services instead of forcing it's citizens to purchase something from a third party? My original point was about what the tea party is pissed over. Your sarcasm couldn't even hit an apples to apples analogy.

As for the second amendment, I'd like to remind you that this is a discussion about health care, not gun rights. I actually quite like the second amendment. I think it's an excellent idea, and quite frankly, lack of access to health care kills a lot more people than private individuals with assault rifles do.

Actually, this is a discussion about the tea party within a topic about healthcare. I think I brought the second amendment up when I schooled the AC who posted BS about the tea party. You simply provided an easy example of illustrating it.

I do believe that government provided health care would be better than relying on private entities as the ACA does, but at this point the ACA is better than nothing. Hopefully we can change that some time in the future.

The ACA is worse then what we previously had. People who had insurance are loosing their coverage or facing steep increases in costs for it. Some employers are refusing to cover spouses now if they work- even of their plan is cheaper or better. People are getting their hours cut in order for the company to get under the requirement to provide coverage (30 hours a week average or more requires coverage). If it hasn't happened already, a large amount of businesses announced they planned to do so. Instead of having 500 full time jobs, we are seeing 700 part time jobs. Union workers are having to take lesser coverage plans or face stiff penalties for their so called Cadillac coverage. Medical devices, you know, the crap that saves you life and allows you to get out of the hospital and live at home now have massive taxes on them driving the cost of health care up. How is that better?

About the only things I can see better about the ACA being law verses it not is the preexisting condition clauses (which I think could be worked a little better), federal minimums on certain types of plans so those plans are available in every state regardless of the state's laws, and the elimination of lifetime caps on coverage payouts. Other then that, it is a disaster hurting more then anything. All of those can be done, including the expansion of medicaid which I didn't list because some states refused to implement it, without the other crap. In fact, I have a few ideas that could completely remove the negative crap about this law without going to a strictly government or single payer institution.

I hope you know that we are in the shape we are with healthcare because government got involved in the first place right? They created the HMO's in an attempt to control the costs of Medicare and screwed it all up in the process.

I don't think this sensor works in the traditional sense that you are familiar with. It is inferring information about a wave from the wave itself as it passes through the air. It actually looks at the medium the wave travels through itself and how the waves interact with it's surroundings not what the waves represent or the information it carries. Think of it more like your surround sound system when you connect a mic in the middle of the sitting area and the speaker timing is adjusted so the sound is centered around that location. Except in this case, it can derive information about the location of the speakers.

Now how this thing supposedly works is not by hearing the sound itself, but measuring the wave itself as it passes through the air. It has two elements on a sensor and three sets of the sensors in one sensor. Both elements of each sensor is heated and when the wave passes, one cools more then the other and the voltage resistance either increases or drops. This allows precise measurements of the wave and it's form which is then be processed with the other two sensors back to what originally created it. There is also a sound pressure transducer on the sensor that picks up the wave itself. So the one complete sensor actually analyses the sound wave from 4 points of information relatively close and can recreate the entire wave form in a 3 d representation which should infer the point of origin without needing separate sensors to triangulate from.

Think about how a wave flows through the water as you toss a rock into it. Not only does it have height hirer then the surrounding water, but it also radiates out in an arc or circle from where the rock landed. If you look close to the impact, you can see the entire wave and have a pretty accurate idea of the impact sight. If you look further away, you only see parts of the arc of the wave. You can still find the impact site by drawing 90 degree angles from the arc of the wave and where they cross like the spokes on a bicycle wheel, should be the center of origin. That's what this thing does but with a much smaller portion of the wave. It can recreate the entire wave and determine information from it. Or that seems to be the claim.

In this case, if you can determine enough information about a single section of a wave with enough precision to recreate the entire wave in 3d, you can work the arc of the wave and pinpoint where it originated from. If you filter all the waves to a single one specific type or specific like types, you can process those into the sounds that created the waves originally. You can likely do so to a degree better then normal hearing will allow too- as long as the wave from the sound can reach the sensor.

Now what I think might be frightening about this is that if I understand it correctly, all the information about all the waves can be stored and processed later with knowing where the sensor specifically was and all the conversations could possibly be decoded in the future with the locations of the conversations being pinpointed. What this might mean is, with enough time, the information can be synced with surveillance video that is impossible to pick up all conversations but you can single out on a specific person in the video by referencing their location and listen to the conversation of that location in the room. In other words, someone could use these and not only pick up all the conversations, but store video alongside them so later they can be put with a face or actions of people. Suppose you are at a protest and you tell everyone the cops are on their way, block the streets or stop blocking the streets. All the witnesses don't remember who said what, but not only can they hear it from the sensor, because of the abilities to pinpoint the locations they could locate person and see them from rather crappy videos of the event.

The moderator probably doesn't know what Brazilian waxing is and couldn't put the joke together properly.

Here is a NSFW link explaining it a bit. I'm serious, there are naked women on the page to explain the differences in styles so even though it is wikipedia, you are warned.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bikini_waxing