Fox News = far right CNN = center MSNBC = center-left The nature of the for-profit corporation is antithetical to anything "pretty far left" since the far left is opposed to capitalism.

That's actually a horrible idea. If Social Security is completely privatized, we'll see retirement funding entirely at the mercy of the market. If you are set to retire when the market enters a deep recession, well, you're kinda screwed. Not an expert at managing stocks and other investments (and as the recession has shown, hiring a financial expert may not help)? Then you're screwed. The beauty of Social Security is that it provides a guarantee. It's not exactly stopping you from investing more of your money in the stock market if you wish.

Let's take just one example: gay marriage. Progressives support it, but many conservatives oppose it, arguing something about the "sanctity of marriage." Of course, you can't talk about religious values without alienating everyone who doesn't share your religious views, so you've already started out on a regressive note if you're talking about sanctity. Conservatives devalue the civil rights of gay couples who wish to marry under the same laws that give heterosexual couples the right to marry. Conservatives tend to value "freedom" when it conforms to their ideal of how a person should live. They really have trouble understanding that a traditional, conservative lifestyle doesn't work for everyone.

The novelty-seeking trait is actually associated with substance abuse and addiction among other less positive behavioral tendencies (anger and impulse control issues, recklessness, etc.).

If you drive mail into the "free market," you do realize that rural residences will be among the first casualties. Not profitable, you see.

You're thinking of psychopathy, not Asperger's syndrome.

There is a larger difference between intellectual knowledge that a few people in the world are cruel, brutal, and sadistic and then the visceral experience of seeing the fruits of their evilness. There is a world of a difference between seeing violence in a movie, where we know it's fake, and seeing video of an actual murder. We know the person is really suffering, and we are quite distraught by this. It's our normal human reaction of empathy. It's wrenching.

This kind of stuff sounds like, especially in the doses these workers are seeing it at, would be tough to stomach even for people who aren't hypersensitive. On the other hand, disturbing and violent images of the kind these people see all day everyday will result in emotional issues in probably a majority of people. A sociopath has a callousness of temperament that makes them, in addition to being able to stomach the most extreme imagery, also able to engage in the more directly harmful activity that leads us to call them sociopaths in the first: namely violent crime, robbery, etc. The sociopath, in addition to being "tough," is emotionally lacking where it's needed: the social emotions (empathy, guilt, remorse, shame, compassion, etc.) and the ability to form bonds with others, including family and sexual partners.

For us, Information Technology is a division led by a CIO with further subdivisions for Application Development, Networking and Infrastructure, and User Support. Within in these subdivisions can be further subdivisions (e.g., applications supporting a specific type of business need). Within these are individual departments. Within these departments are semi-formal teams. Application Development, for example, includes departments that actively develop the applications, departments of graphic designers, and departments of Quality Assurance. Yeah, there's a lot of hierarchy where I work.

You've already mentioned the social-networking sites and affiliated social media that are big in the United States: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and MySpace. If someone's going to be on social networking, it's going to be on at least one of them. There is no benefit to belonging to a social network that may be technologically superb and ideologically correct if no one you know or want to connect with uses it. And good luck winning all your friends over to it and then their friends too!

I get the impression the OP meant coarse, uncivil people for sociopath and mentally deranged for psychopath (where OP should have said psychotic or just mentally ill). In psychiatry, sociopathy and psychopathy refer to more or less the same thing, and psychopathy is quite distinct from disorders like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

30-40 hours a day? You do realize there are only 24 hours in a day, right?

I'm surprised only 6% were none'ers. If you're answering the poll at work (heh), you're likely to be in a WiFi-free zone. Well, at least the corporate campus where I work is all ethernet.

I agree. Where I work, we're a JDK 1.4.2_08 shop, and it just feels like a modern-day COBOL. There's been anticipation off and on about moving towards version 1.5.x of the JDK, but it keeps getting pushed back.

Magical thinking is a term from psychology to refer to a kind of illogical but symbolic thinking where interaction with symbols is taken to be equivalent to the real thing.