See, that's what would take care of the gambling problem, couple that with dismantling the FDIC and all of a sudden you have people who actually would be worried about their banks and financial institutions and start evaluating risks and rewards based on real market signals.

1. Yeah, because Joe Average Worker really has time to monitor "real market signals" on the bank into which he deposits his paycheck once a week. We can't all be John Galt like you, so brilliant you can single-handedly be an expert in every kind of transaction you will ever engage in and have no reason to fear ever being defrauded.
2. It's funny because the FDIC was created when the exact opposite of what you appear to think will happen happened.

If you were in a foreign country and your image appeared on tv as the main suspect of an act of terror, would you hand yourself in of hide?

I think the campus security guard, the Mercedes owner who was carjacked and forced to withdraw cash at gunpoint, and the cops who were attacked with automatic weapons and explosives that the "possibly innocent suspect" just happened by pure chance to have on him, might disagree with the characterization of Dzhokhar's actions as a scared boy trying to hide.

Well the security guard won't I suppose, but that's because he's kind of dead. Which doesn't exactly go in the "wrongly accused and just trying to hide" column either.

Option 1: Police/govt over-react, nothing bad happens: Grumbling about over reaction
Option 2: Police/govt over-react, something bad still happens: Grumbling that still not enough was done
Option 3: Police/govt under-react, nothing bad happens: No problem
Option 4: Police/govt under-react, another attack happens: Everyone "responsible" as good as burnt alive at stake

In light of the potential outcome of option 4 (which based on what these psychopaths did before and during capture was altogether probable) risk-averse structures, like governments, will choose to over-react every time.

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=astounding+stories+of+super+science

Yep, sometimes oldies are goodies.

That's only the best commercially available. Since we're talking about what are currently lab fantasies here, why not consider triple-junction cells which have acheived efficiencies north of 50% (and which will never be commercially viable outside of cost-is-no-object because they're as insanely expensive to make as you might imagine)?

I succeeded in installing Gentoo and XCFE on a now 16 year old SGI Indy (one 150MHz MIPS R5K, 160MB 60ns ram, Fast SCSI HDD, framebuffer-only Linux graphics driver). It's not snappy by any means, and it makes it very obvious which programs "do it right" and which ones rely on hardware to cover up bad algorithms. Yet none the less, it boots right up, I can login and start the GUI no problem, I can play music back and do ssh consoles, IRC (with a gui client no less) and even browse the web with a WebKit browser.

Can't imagine what even kde 3.5 would do to the poor thing, let alone kde 4 or gnome 3. Kde 3 might actually have been borderline usable... When my desktop had 256M ram, kde 3 started grinding the hard drive after about 6-7 tabs and 3-4 konsoles were opened.

You do realize that biological agents do something that chemicals don't, right?

Spill any chemical you want - that's all there is and all I have to do to escape it is not go where it's laying. Weaponized anthrax? Smallpox? Pandemic flu? Yeah, good luck escaping that shit by staying away from the place of the initial outbreak.

Adobe: "Hey, let's write a computer program for editing pictures. It'll be like a darkroom in your computer... let's call it... photo - shop!
Marketers: "I can work with this!"
GNU: "Hey, let's write a computer program for editing pictures. Let's give it a name which means "person who is crippled!"
Marketers: "Please tell me this is a joke."

This would be a more convincing Both Sides Are Equally Bad if both sides were even remotely equally bad.

"His platform of peace and ending wars has turned into more wars."

Oh really? Please, yell me about all these wars that Obama's started based on lies that are now bleeding our treasury dry.

and a "falling" unemployment number caused by 9,400,000 people leaving the work force since he took office and more each month.

1. Ever heard of the baby boomers? They're starting to retire, so of course some people are leaving the labor force. 2. Turns out some people will give up when 30 years of GOP economic policy has left us staring down the abyss of Depression. Yet routinely since spring 2009, monthly job reports have come with a "jobs created but not enough due to people rejoining the labor force" label attached.

Except for the fact that the dark ages were far better than this so-called enlightened era of mass murder, human trafficking, torture-that-is-not-torture, unlimited power for the powerful without responsibility (corporatism)...

Trying to cover just how much wrong you stuffed into that single sentence would be a task akin to cleaning the Agean Stables. That you say such a thing while you sit on your well-fed ass, in your warm home, taking access to all the 100% clean and safe water and food you could ever want for granted, wearing machine-woven cloth, sitting in front of a machine so incredible it would've been literally indistinguishable from magic 100 years ago (let alone 1000), leads to one of two conclusions:

Either you are a spoiled whinging twit posessed of an ignorance of history as stunning as your lack of perspective, or you are so stupid it's amazing that you remember how to breathe.

First you admit taxes were raised considerably during WWII and remained far higher than they are today for decades, then agree that after the conclusion of WWII the US became a superpower. Guess how the government paid for becoming a superpower, and doing all the things a government does? Go ahead, guess.

Watching people who aren't 7-figure-income rich or richer defend GOP economic ideas is baffling.

Where in God's name does this idea that taxes used to be lower come from? Unless you're within sight of your 100th birthday, you've never worked during a time when taxes were appreciably lower than they are now.

Now, the fact that wages for about 90% of the population have been flat for decades while productivity (i.e. the amount of things created that you spend your money on) has nearly doubled in that frame may have to do with the perception of increasing tax rates, but to suggest that actual rates are higher now is absurd.

If they can control meteors and fly them into earth at will, we should give them the money. I mean really, let's be realistic here.

it was thicker, and sparklier than any I've seen,

... Is this about a meteor or the porn version of Twilight?