Why is this a story?

Because they know 'welfare moms' are basically a myth. People like that do exist, but it is extremely rare (as in much smaller than a minority), even among people who are forced to live off of welfare because the circumstances of their life were not as ideal as that of others. I work with disadvantaged children, and I meet lot of people that tea-baggers and mean-spirited conservatives would instantly describe as 'welfare mothers' because they are poor, and may even live off welfare. But among them, I have never met one who seemed to think welfare was something they wanted out of life, and when you have 3 children with severe disabilities due to birth defects or post-natal factors (like an auto accident), you hardly have time to take care of your children, much less hold down gainful employment in one of the coldest and most professionally unforgiving nations in the world. Welfare isn't the source of any problems, it is a symptom of a much bigger problem. It's not that a person having disadvantages is owed anything by anyone who didn't contribute to those problems, it's that being big boys and girls means that we have to use a metric that involves more than our own comfort as standard. Basically, people who think the biggest waste of tax-money is social welfare need to grow up, because the logic behind their reasons for that is typically something found on a pre-school playground more so than in a college level class.

I don't think any style book used in natural science has very clear provisions on how you would include such a thing. Most authors are so intimidated by the process of getting published, that they do not want to risk including content that may get it rejected (it is hard to argue the scientific merit of a photograph, it usually involves a lot of metadata that wouldn't be available to a field biologist post-hoc). I often drop some of my best sentences in an article, simply because they have a slight chance of being misinterpreted as off-topic or unscientific. Unfortunately journals are not in any way meant to be entertaining, which makes research boring but easier to carry out because of the distilled nature of the information.

Churchill may have said it, but he was quoting George Bernard Shaw, who was known for making similar types of quips and was significantly older than Churchill, allthough their lifespans somewhat overlapped.

Not to invalidate your point, I just thought I would clarify.

Well put.

"The American and British are two people separated by a common language"

-George Bernard Shaw

Obviously, the only reason this hasn't happened yet is because laws have kept stoned drivers off the roads for years. Once it's legal than that means driving while intoxicated will become legal, right? Laws stop crime, right?

I am not some Randian Tea-bagger, but it is safe to say that legality of one's actions rarely factors into the decision making process of a criminal. I doubt legalization of marijuana would suddenly change the laws regarding proper and lawful operation of a moving vehicle in any way. However letting someone grow marijuana in their back yard for consumption in their own home is probably better for public safety than a bunch of paranoid, gun-toting and stoned drug-dealers driving around between their clients houses to make deliveries. Also, marijuana is a serious boom on the delivery industry, which is telling on many levels. In other words, assuming that legalized marijuana would have any effect other than diminishing the level of intoxicated people on the road is at best fallacious, and at worse flies in the face of common sense.

And for all the libertarians out there, even if you agree with me on this point, I still think you are a fool, child, or both. But we just happen to agree on this issue. The Tea-Bag 'movement' needs to crawl back into Ron Paul's lower orifices where they fermented from.The attitude of the typical Randian Objectivist can make Chairman Mao look like a teddy bear. Plus, there are already many great Randian-Objectivist nations already on the map, like the C.A.R., Nigeria, Seychelles, Somalia, and many more, just take your pick! All of these places don't bother with public projects and things that get in the way of making a profit like the police and public schools. If your house catches fire, hey guess what? The government will be so uninterested in your personal affairs, you won't have to even make the decision as to whether to ask the government for help putting it out, because you simply won't have that option. Doesn't that sound just like the eternal paradise filled with candy canes and s'mores that libertarians promise us through indiscriminate slashing of government nuisances-to-freedom like the FDA. Won't a world where half your children die of preventable diseases be so much better, nothing gets in the way of a strong bottom line like children. Sounds like a Randian* paradise to me!

*If you are among the majority of tea-baggers who have never picked up a book that didn't have a picture of Glenn Beck dressed like a Nazi on the cover. Randian Objectivism is the base philosophy of your 'movement' that rejects all governmental (and in many ways, personal) altruism that was concocted by the very bitter (her wealthy family had its wealth redistributed by Bolsheviks when she was a child) Ayn Rand. I am not directly referring to Ron Paul's son Rand Paul, even though he is certainly a major practitioner of it.

I think you have hit the hammer on the nail with that. Maybe such a thing is so rare now that it's novelty is valued.

I wouldn't be surprised if that is what happened, but it did at some point return results. Do you think that if indexing is off it would still have a search box? I am not asking rhetorically, I am just curious, hehe, I have tuned windows 7 out for the most part so I am not very familiar with it beyond just using it on a day to day level.

I once actually turned the indexing off on my SSD MB-Air to 'save' read/write cycles on it because I thought the constant defragmentation would wear it out too fast (It turns out that this doesn't improve its life all that much, and I am not sure why) and the search got pretty worthless, as well as being the only time my computer has given me Apple's gray screen of death. This may be because I did it with a command line, when I should have just used the checkbox in the info screen for the drive, hehe. Once I turned it back on, all the problems were solved. Whether it is in Apple or MS, Viva le Indexing!

She was using it, and it yielded no results within a reasonable time frame. Once she did get results they were entirely confined to the local folder she was in, when we tried to search the entire system, it basically locked down the whole system until she cancelled or closed the window it was in. My friend puts it really well, he says that he trusts the 'working' spinning wheel on a mac. Sometimes something you are doing can take a minute to process for any variety of reasons (such as something being processor/resource intensive), but the spinning wheel always means it's working, but it's not done. But the hourglass on the windows machine can often be a precursor to a crash, and it often doesn't indicate that something is going to be completed as much as indicated what you may already know, which is that your computer is freezing up.

I just think that people seem to spend more time learning how to work around MS software's limitations than actually making use of the computers its installed on. I am not using this to make a point about brand loyalty, I genuinely mean it when I say that I don't understand how anyone gets anything done on a Windows box. It just seems like the computer is constantly about to crash, and it often does. Simply not having to deal with a 100 ms delay on everything you do on your computer makes a big difference, and I see latent user interfaces on windows boxes constantly. People get so accustomed to that pause between a click and the intended action on Windows computers that they don't notice how much of a problem it is. It basically adds up to a significant portion of your time being spent waiting for a machine that can read millions of characters off of magnetic media in one second to finish doing the necessary calculations to display the word you just typed on the screen. It just seems like Microsoft could have tackled word-processing by now, given the hardware we have these days.

MS also seems to downgrade it's software from that of it's peers somehow. Macs allow you to scroll a window which isn't at the fore-front (something very useful windows definitely does not have as far as I can tell). So if you two finger scroll a window that is being partially obscured by another window, the scrolling occurs without the target window having to be brought to the forefront. Every piece of software I have ever used on my mac (including free beta software downloaded from some random project) can use this feature, with the exception of Microsoft Office. Seriously, I didn't believe it when I noticed it, but it is entirely the case. I am not a proponent of conspiracy theories, but it seems so ridiculous that it is almost surely intentional. In all my criticism of MS, I don't think they are that incompetent.

My computing experience is so pleasant (I have literally stopped screaming at my computer) since I switched over. It's really a completely different and worthwhile way to get things done. Our society spends entirely too much time on computers not to be more demanding of quality in their software. I think the reason most people think it is so difficult to learn how to use a computer is because it is difficult use them once you do learn. But it doesn't have to be, because I am currently typing this on an example of a computer that doesn't have these problems.

Apple could easily change it's slogan to "They actually work." or "Our computers don't have that problem." and not be the least bit intellectually dishonest in doing so.

No one turned anything off, these professors had nothing to do with installing the OS they were using, and they are not really the types of people who are going to dig around in system settings. Also, my point was not that Microsoft hasn't attempted to have indexed searching, I am saying it doesn't work very well. Actually, it works so poorly, my professor gave up before it could finish. This is a sharp contrast to the search feature on OS X 10.6 that finishes (literally) before you can utter the phrase "this is taking too long". If my search took longer than 2 or 3 seconds, I would assume something was severely wrong* with my computer.

*Like a W7 partition lurking somewhere on it.

You may be right, but it only makes that situation more ridiculous. The thing that blows my mind is the fact that it cannot faithfully reproduce documents between two systems with the exact same version of MS Office installed, the fact that office needs additional plugins just to understand older versions of it's own highly proprietary format is an absurd technical problem. Whatever the cause for this may be, it's simply unacceptable for a product that costs so much and is regarded as standard. In the past standards came into existence because they worked, MS uses a business model that penetrates markets, but not through the merit of their software as much as the quality of their contract lawyers. Apple is certainly a very annoying company on many levels, but at least their success is driven (however, not entirely based) on the quality of what they produce. I really cannot stress how headache free my computer is, and (without having to reinstall my OS every 6 months and operate it with impeccable vigilance) my computer works exactly as well as the day I purchased it. There is a lot to be said for the POSIX style of organizing an OS, it's really quite elegant.

A good example of this is when I watched a professor I work with try to find a day old document on her W7 (installed within the last few weeks) computer. The search in the file manager was so amazingly slow we had to give up and find another way to locate it. Compare this experience to what I have to do on my own computer to find a file. The search includes the actual content of the file (which you can turn off very easily if it is getting in the way of finding your results) as well as any file names. This, in itself, is not anything to write home about, except that the whole process from hitting enter to getting the last result seems to happen instantaneously, as in, it has taken less than 1 second at most since I have gotten the machine. This is because my computer does all the indexing ahead of time when I am not using it, so that I don't have to wait on it when I need it. I am really not exaggerating when I say that most work takes me about a half to quarter as long on my mac than it would on any other system I have used thus far in my life.

I personally couldn't care less which computer people choose to use. But if the world 'runs' on Microsoft, the world is a sucker of the lowest order. It's really absurd how short MS products fall of the bar set by the rest of the industry.

Maybe they can work on it after they decide on a standard for .docx, because I can't seem to get two copies (of the same version of word) to reliably display the same file in the same way on two different machines. I wish what I saw on the screen matched what people would see when they get it. I would personally use LaTex and .rtf formats for everything, but 'the world runs on windows' and when I send an .rtf to one of my bosses, they are so overwhelmed by the cascade of prompts and dialog boxes needed to tell Word that you want to use to open an .rtf, they usually just tell me that their 'computer can't read it' (seriously). User ineptness aside, I really don't understand how the world runs on windows. Most projects where I am forced to use Microsoft products because that is the only thing the recipient uses take 5 to 10 times as long as they need to. Despite it's excessive features, Word (and other MS Office products) seem utterly incapable of making small aesthetic changes to a document without throwing the rest of it in complete formatting chaos. As someone who witnesses and experiences this problem, I would estimate my academic department/ university would easily double if not triple it's productivity if we would start using more appropriate software for what we need to do with it. This would not outright exclude software like office, but it would certainly require us to use microsoft software as a tool rather than a standard. It's very amazing how many more problems a Windows user experiences on a daily basis.

I have stopped screaming at my computer since I started using a mac (with the exception of using office). Let me also say that I am no technological slouch, and my issues with Office are not a byproduct of my lack of understand like it can be with others. To put it another way, I actually run 4 operating systems on my computer (VMware versions of windows on a mac seem to work better than natively installed copies of windows on the same system, no joke, I was even able to register the machine to a Microsoft Active Directory to use an institutional copy of SPSS). When I got my current mac I installed windows on it in a dual boot with a mac partition (using a utility supplied by apple with the OS). I had purchased the Mac for the hardware (a MacBook Air) rather than the OS. I started out using windows for everything, but over several months I had naturally (not consciously) switched over entirely to the mac side. My point in all this, is that Windows is like an abusive boyfriend (I ripped this simile off of a post from a different thread, but it's more than perfect), you don't really understand how dysfunctional it is until to get out of the relationship and find a less destructive partner. It's hard to like Microsoft products, trust me, I tried. I really am not saying this as an Apple fanboi (because I am definitely not one). I am saying this as person who researches the efficacy of information technology in educational settings. In case you are curious about what I am figuring out (if you haven't already) is that technology tends to be selected for all the wrong reasons, and tends to fall so short of the mark, that no one ever uses it. I see classrooms with >$10k Smartboard installations that are completely unusable and collecting dust rapidly because there is a very poorly manufactured and barely functional Windows machine at the heart of it. When I was in 7th grade, my school system blew $15k a classroom into devices like laser disc players and Windows 3.11 boxes with token ring networks (which were obsolete before they were taken out of the box) by the time I graduated 5 years later, I had witnessed one actual use of anything but the television, and that was by a teacher who was responding to a student's challenge him on whether the laserdisc machines actually worked!

Randian Objectivist did not put Obama in office.

and

I am saying they weren't condemning Bush, because they didn't (unless you count the last year of his presidency, which really doesn't count because he was already in office at that point). Even if they did before then, most of them voted for Bush both times anyway and I don't count buyers remorse as political vigilance, people need to make good decisions before they elect people into public office. You are exhibiting the exact type of delusional thought I see in almost every political conversation I have with t-bags. There is a lot of unsubstantiated negation, and most arguments are based anecdotal evidence instead of actually trying to defend the basis of your world view. T-baggers hate republicans because they are not callous enough for their taste, also republicans at least understand their own world view enough to defend it properly. However, (and this a classic logical fallacy that libertarians looooove to commit) is that somehow a common enemy makes two groups alike in thought. WRONG! I don't have anything in common with libertarians, I am a special education teacher, libertarians don't believe in my profession, and if you disagree with that, go back to your Rand books, because without altruism public education doesn't even begin to make sense, especially when the student may not be up to the Randian ideal of being self-made and self-reliant. Everyone accepts charity at some point in their life (everyone), it's absurd to deny it to others. It's like T-bags never learned the golden rule.

It's nice to think that everyone should support all the charitable needs of the world independent of government intervention, but people don't now and they wouldn't if it was like that. And people's lack of charitibility has nothing to do with their taxes being high, it has everything to do with the selfishness of the human condition. Libertarians/T-baggers/Randians don't understand the importance of social programs and how much they indirectly benefit from them because they are children, which was my original point.

Kohlberg, stage 2, look it up (I know this is the last thing a libertarian would ever do with their time, political rallies with no clear point take a lot of planning)