Seriously - asking the Left to be open-minded or tolerant is silly.

The Left has a fascist agenda that they want to jam down people's throats, in the EXACT same sense that the Right does, they've just been far better at packaging it.

"No, no, WE are about freedom and human rights. THEY are about repression. See how clear that is?"

Think I'm joking?

Check with your local Leftist activist friend. They are militantly in favor of the rights of homosexuals. Fair enough, it's a good point. Mention that people against the rights of gays are backwards hicks that should be completely ignored and shunned by anyone with a brain, you'll likely get firm agreement...as long as you're talking about (white) Republicans/Evangelicals.
If you change the context, and mention that conservative Muslims should likewise be completely shunned from consideration because they are even more homophobic, MURDERING gay men for their choices, suddenly culture and context is an exonerating factor.

Back to the OP, though, OSC needs ot understand that the Streisand Effect is at work here. The media is against him, so any attention called to the subject will generate only negative publicity.

He needs to shut up, and understand that the spirit of McCarthy is live and well here in the US, he's just wearing a "YES WE CAN" t-shirt this year, and drives a Prius.

No, I shit on federal government workers (specifically) because largely, in my experience, they suck.

Washington, DC - as a city - is a perfect example of why federal government is too incompetent to manage a single city. They are certainly too incompetent to manage a country - (looks around at the US in 2013) - do I really need to prove it?

This is why our Founding Fathers intuited that a government governs best that governs LEAST. The federal government shouldn't be managing ANYTHING that could be kicked down to the state level.

On top of that (not sure which is chicken and which is egg here) Public workers chose a path that was largely undemanding, unchallenging, and offered them a nice, safe sinecure in exchange for their robotic dronelike service.

Ever deal with a federal agency? With very few exceptions, they're unimaginably top-heavy, slow, unresponsive, uncaring. I can't think of the last time I dealt with a federal drone and thought "this is great service" or "this is an impressive employee". I walk in and see a collection of people clearly protected in their positions, doing just-barely-competent work, and getting along until they can retire on a fat pension.

Well, clearly YOU are racist. Too.

Yes, having the 2nd largest employer in the country be a temp service speaks volumes about the alleged recovery and job market.

The first-largest is Wal Mart, which is pretty much the same, and horrible.
(2.2 million employees, 1.3 mill in the USA)

Yet curiously omitted from the figures?
Total number of US government employees? 2.8 million.
Total local/state employees? 19-some million.
So ~20 million people in this country get their paycheck from the government....that's what, about 7% of the entire electorate owes their income to the gubbermint? One might argue that due to a clear conflict of interest, they perhaps shouldn't get votes.

Some people would say that's even MORE revealing about the US (so called), not to mention the tendentiousness of the reporting on the story that it's NOT EVEN MENTIONED.

I think "creates" doesn't mean what you think it means.

She 'created' this "scent camera" the way I just "had sex with" Nicole Kidman.

This "story" links to an aggregator, that links to a blog where she talks about "wouldn't this be cool?"

She built a model of one with some tubes, a glass bell jar, and a ceramic pot, and then took a picture of it. Either the /. editors are colossally lazy or stupid that this even got posted.

Apparently he's run out of useful stuff.

Next: Snowden reveals that the Sun comes up in the East.

My guess is that American intelligence services, aside from trying to get hold of him, are working overtime to KEEP HIM ALIVE. If he dies for *any* reason (even if it's falling down the stairs or being hit by a meteor), it's going to be blamed by everyone on the US, making that a cheap and easy way to score points.

Nonsense.

Zealots, psychotics, and sociopaths that have nothing to live for are willing to "give their lives for what they believe in". The simple willingness to die for a cause bears NO weight on the moral quality of the cause, nor on the worthiness of the person.

History is littered with nutballs who are willing to give their lives for 'a cause'. Unfortunately, they usually convince others to join them, and invariably some non-nutballs die too.

I know it's all charmingly enthusiastic and romantic to be zealous about a cause but personally I commend American apathy. As we've recently been witness to (repeatedly) the world is FULL of people who are so partisan they are willing to DIE for their local interpretation of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Is that commendable?

We rightly mock the Byzantines for the Nika riots (in which tens of thousands of people were slain in street violence over the span of a week, largely over which color team they supported). We stand aghast at today's news about a Brazilian referee stabbing a player because he wouldn't leave the pitch (and then the crowd QUARTERED him and left his head on a stake in the center of the pitch). They certainly "cared" a lot about something, so much so that they were willing as a consensual group to murder a man. Shall we canonize them for their dedication to their beliefs?

America has been accurately characterized as the 'lifeboat from history'. America is where a Jew and an Arab can live next to each other in peace, not brainwashed from birth to destroy each other because of some argument between scruffy goat-herders hundreds of years ago. America is where a Catholic girl can marry a Muslim guy simply because they love each other, and not be bred into fervent hatred because of the faiths of their families. The ESSENCE of this is - dare I say it - an apathy to the fervently-held beliefs and concepts that their parents and homelands were willing to die and kill for.

Partisans of both extremes like to mock what they call the 'apathetic' center, mainly because we won't (whether the reason is intellectual or mere laziness) join their crazy-train of vituperation, spitting at the "other guys" simply because they're "not us".

Well, I'm sorry - I refuse to buy your motivational screed that I "must" care about this or that. I refuse to give a shit about whatever happens to get you all riled up, simply because you're agitated. I'll cheerfully go about my life, earn a living, and celebrate my "apathy" because that's one of the things that make this country great.

I'd stake my life on it.

Or maybe don't enable them to be any bit more comfortable as homeless people?

Yes, there are some people that life has purely shat upon. If you can cull them out and help them, great, but the fact is that MOST homeless people are there because they made shitty life choices.

While the impulse to help them is genuinely kind, if you make 'being homeless' any less onerous, what are you going to get? MORE HOMELESS.

The point of a luggage tag is severalfold.
1) to tell baggage-handlers where the bag goes quickly and clearly. Current tags are actually a synthetic paper/film product and are incredibly durable. Will the electronic tag be immune to immersion and the sort of (incredibly) rough handling baggage suffers? What about power surges or lightning strikes? Would it be hilarious if a power surge on the plane meant that all the bags arrive at the destination with no codes at all?
2) to identify the bag and owner at the claim end. This is my bigger concern. If the bag is easily re-programmed with a smartphone, how is this secured? Even if it has some sort of paltry code-mechanism (which none of the text I saw describes), smartphones have some pretty hefty processors and could probably brute-force whatever coding is in place. This means that someone could rather easily claim whatever baggage is sitting in the claim area for a while.

IMO this is a solution in search of a problem. Current tags are durable, cheap, and tamper-resistant.

Crocodile tears.

What are the odds that Hong Kong servers are pretty nearly directly connected to Chinese government servers?

I think what the US is doing is reprehensible (if not entirely predictable by anyone with a brain), but please spare me the suggestion that any OTHER country isn't doing the exact same thing if it's within their power.

To wit: Watergate wasn't about what NIXON was doing, it was what they were ALL doing (well, unless you're both nakedly tendentious or almost criminally naive).

My parents seem to already follow their level 1 protocol: PRINT EVERYTHING.

On an even more amusing note, it's good to note that their Terminal Event Protocol has 'ensuring donations' as one of their primary functions, on a level with 'ensuring the permanent preservation of human knowledge' and 'providing a common base of reference for communicating with extraterrestrial species':
"...The datastream will include a specially designed primer, or set of simple scientific principles and data that would be common to all extraterrestrial intelligences, providing a common base of reference to enable those receiving the signal to commence the mammoth task of decoding the encyclopedia. The message will be accompanied by a short video message by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, and images required for the re-creation of fundraiser banners..."

Imagine the surprise when the first message aliens get from Earth is "Please take a moment to view this short message from Jimmy Wales..."

Sure, but then you should ALSO look at the bigger picture: how's American industry doing today? We've shifted to an almost-completely service economy with very little heavy industry, and I blame that largely on the unions (who'd been most successful organizing within heavy industry because of atrocious work conditions).

Face it, there's no simple binary position here, and in fact there are no "good guys": on the one hand, you have rapacious, irresponsible companies who press 'tight financial management' to ridiculous extremes and end up truly exploiting workers. OTOH, you have unions that start generally well, by collectively representing workers to improve conditions and force management to treat them responsibly, but whose leadership grows indolent and corrupt like any monopoly organization and essentially like an incompetent parasite eventually kills the company/industry on which it depends.

Not hard to find. For example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in 2012 that private sector union membership was down to 6.6%, and overall membership was 11.3%, compared to 20.1% as recently as 1983. The 6.6% was the lowest since 1932.

There are plenty of sources cited all over the net. A good place to start is this Wikipedia article.

Unions were good in the 1920s and 1930s. Now, they've priced the American worker out of the global labor market.

There's a reason that union membership is down to historic lows: all they do is take money out of workers' pockets to line the bosses' nests and send money to Democrat politicians.

Really? Have you tried to play online with a Nintendo DSLite lately?

Oh sorry, you mean NO NETWORK AVAILABLE still supports the crappy WEP standard? Thus these devices are basically non-functional unless you
a) deploy a WAP *just* for this device, or
b) turn off your wireless security and change your security to "basically none" because you want to use your handheld.

I'm still driving my car I got the same year.
Automakers adoption of the cutting edge standard at that time - ala the DS Lite - would mean it's nearly useless now.