It should probably be cut down though if you want to see it on slashdot. This is supposed to be a summary. Not the whole story pasted.

These are different things measured. This result, while amazingly exciting and a triumph is nowhere close to net energy returned. It is a long road to fusion energy production, but ultimately I think it is worthwhile.

Dammit! Until I read this, I had been proud of the inch-long cockroach corpse that had been lying on the ground near my desk for months. Biggest damn roach I'd ever seen in San Francisco, and I squashed it running right across the carpet. Only it didn't take much damage, other than dying; there it lay, legs folded up in death, antenna and all. But just now I turned around and it's GONE! Some bastard has stolen my gigantic dead cockroach, and I want answers.

Once again, a denialist conflates seasonal *sea* ice with permanent *land* ice.

Freedom of conscience doesn't mean freedom from consequences, as much as we'd wish it so.

First of all, we should be thinking median income rather than average. On average, you and I and Bill Gates never have to work another day in our lives.

The median household income in the US is about $29,000. Suppose you're a family of four with that median income, and you live in a relatively cheap urban neighborhood. You're probably paying $1400/month (average in Mattapan, Boston's cheapest neighborhood) in rent and $1000/mo (average for US family of four). That leaves you a grand total of $16/month for things like clothing and transportation. So you economize. You live in the worst slum in the worst neighborhood and save $200/mo there. You cut down on your food purchases and save maybe another $200. You deduct utilities, clothing, transport, and the conclusion is that the "average" American is living pretty close to paycheck to paycheck.

Of course the average federal employee is doing considerably better, with a median salary of $74,000. But going with out pay for a month would be a major hardship for a lot of those workers who fall beneath the median line -- the janitors, groundskeepers and maintenance guys at the bottom of the pay scale. A lot of these guys are "non-essential", and if the shutdown goes for more than a few weeks they'll be hurting.

The Democrat-controlled Senate and White House are voting down and threatening to veto these budgets, and thus the partial government "shutdown".

The next step to re-open government is for the Republican Speaker to bring a continuing resolution bill to the floor of the Republican House, so the ball is in the Republican court.

Your post conflates a continuing resolution with budgeting. A continuing resolution authorizes the government to continue under the old budget (that's why it's called "continuing") while a new budget is worked out. Using a continuing resolution to enact budget changes defeats the purpose. The Senate is not constitutionally required to rubber stamp the House's budget; the House and Senate have to negotiate a compromise. While they're working out their differences it is customary to pass a continuing resolution.

What's going on here is that the House is attempting to coerce the Senate into rubber stamping its budget priorities -- priorities the Republicans don't have the votes to carry in the Senate.

In my business experience, there's never been a lawyer who could write a contract that will make a business deal entirely safe. The first and most important thing in any business deal is to have trustworthy partners. Most of that lawyer-ese stuff in contracts is a safety net, provisions against a future day when the deal goes sour and fingers are pointed. That stuff is important, but no contract can completely protect you from a business partner who's acting in bad faith. It so happens that the House is technically within its rights to withhold a continuing resolution but they're abusing a technical feature of how the government keeps running during budget negotiations to do an end run around those negotiations. They're acting in bad faith.

The mean annual surface air temperature of the Antarctic interior is -57C. Surface melt refreezes rather promptly. But ice is great insulation, and geothermal energy comes up from the Earth to melt the bottom of the ice sheet. This meltwater flows in streams and rivers across the world's largest continent until it becomes the world's largest rivers, inevitably finding the sea. This should be obvious.

On the plus side, when Obama conjures Satan from the pit and takes dominion over Earth with his Dark Fourth Reich from his skull-bedecked throne in Kenya, my demon-possessed body will be able to rise, come back, and admit I was wrong.

The POS might make it easier to itemize people's bills if people hadn't got drunk during the course of the meal and decided to debate and ask questions about everything on their bill only to decide, "Yeah, you're right, my mistake." How many times would you want to go through that a night if you were a waiter?

Also, the POS doesn't make it any easier for a waiter to have to ring up five separate credit cards for a single table. In addition, splitting the bill among five people means the tip (which is the all-important part of a waiter's wages in the US, because it accounts for the majority of his/her earnings) is divided among five people, all of whom are more likely to leave a cheap tip because the other people at the table won't know what they're leaving.

No they're not. Not in America. It depends on state and even municipality, but in many (most?) places, waitstaff are exempt from minimum wage laws. I repeat: exempt from minimum wage laws. They are legally expected to get most of their wages from tips. And I maintain that the more you split up the check between more people, the more work you make for the server (so what you're saying is "they get paid, but I deserve a bargain"), while at the same time you have less incentive to compensate the server fairly (because nobody else knows what you're paying).

That may be because they wait until they get away from the table and do their grumbling to other servers, because if they grumbled in front of the customers and the customers complained they would quickly get fired. But call me crazy.

It's pretty standard practice in the Bay Area. Any more than six people and they'll probably add the gratuity to the bill automatically, too.

Er... have you been reading the news haven't you? OK, I'll explain.

It's never been about saving money. The GOP wants to repeal the Affordable Care Act, but doesn't have the votes in the Senate to do it, much less override the veto that would inevitably provoke.

So plan B was to take funding for implementing ACA out of the budget. But they don't have the votes to do that either.

Now when you are arguing over the budget, you still have to keep things running; soldiers and air traffic controllers have to be paid. But the president doesn't have the constitutional power to spend money; he has to spend what Congress tells him to spend, neither more nor less (a lot of Americans don't seem to understand this). He has a lot of influence over the budget, but ultimately Congress has the power of the purse.

So what Congress does when it can't resolve its budget differences on time is pass something called a "continuing resolution". It pretty much says "continue on as you were under the last budget for so many days or until we hash this out." Congress is behind on its budget work so, it's time for a continuing resolution.

What the House Republicans tried to do was slip the budget stuff they didn't have the votes to pass into the continuing resolution. When the Senate stripped that stuff out and sent the CR back to the House, the Republican leadership refused to bring the CR to a vote until their demands were met. Those demands have been a moving target, running from a long laundry list of priorities (including stuff like the Keystone pipeline), to anything that will allow them to claim victory. Boehner has also floated a cut of a certain size to yet-to-be-named budget items as a condition, but this was precisely the gambit that was tried in 2011. Those cuts never materialized, triggering the sequestration cuts across the board this year, including defense. That's not very credible. So the only way the House Republicans come out of this with something that looks like a victory would be to get ACA de-funded, which is not going to happen.

The House Republicans are technically within their rights not to bring an continuing resolution to the floor, but they're using it to undermine the Constitution. They don't have the votes to get what they want, nor have they anything offer in exchange that will persuade anyone else to vote with them, so they're trying to *compel* the Senate to vote the way they want by shutting down the government.

Honestly, it feels like final years of the Roman Republic, when wealthy, ambitious men competed to carve power bases for themselves out of what had been offices of service to the Republic. Crassus Boehner, anyone?

I agree with you. They should be back at their jobs, and being paid on payday as usual (you do know that essential employees aren't getting paid). But that's not going to happen until one side or another cracks under the political pressure. Already the US Chamber of Commerce is wading in with promises of primary support to Republicans who vote for a clean CR.

The Kin was a special case. Weird politics combined with stupid decisions caused it to be delayed a lot; it would have been a decent product had it shipped on time. Basically, if MS had let the "Danger" guys just do their thing... the previous Danger product, the Hiptop, was a big success.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/02/life-and-death-of-microsoft-kin-the-inside-story/

On the other hand, the MS tablet products prior to the iPad worked as designed, but the design wasn't all that great. They thought Windows compatibility was the most important thing, when actually battery life, thin and light hardware, and GUI user experience were all more important. The iPad was the first non-sucky tablet, and it didn't matter that you had to buy all-new apps for it.

I disagree. It's lot quicker and easier to glance at my watch than it is to dig my smartphone out of my pocket and wake up the screen. For that matter living in New England, when it's winter I've got to figure out which pocket the phone's in.

What having a phone with you means is that it's no longer *compulsory* to have a watch for telling time. A watch is still a heck of a lot more convenient than a phone. I think that a phone companion watch that did caller id and notified me of incoming messages and upcoming appointments would be awesome, provided that it could go a couple days between charges. The Samsung device, I think, is a bit over an overreach; it tries to do too much and does some of it not so well.

I do agree that people aren't wearing watches as much as they used to. My daughter carries a pocket watch. One day at school she popped it open to check the time, and a girl asked, "What's that?"

"A pocket watch," daughter answers.

"What does it do?" the girl asks.

Your mistake here is thinking I am trying to alter the behavior of the company. We all know there is nothing we can do about that.