I used to filled with moral outrage about the stupidity of people like McCarthy, but over time I've come to accept their stupidity as both inevitable and self-limiting. After all, if they and their minions are dumb enough to let their kids die of a preventable illness, their dimwitted bloodlines come to a screeching halt, which is a good thing for the species in the long run.

I think one thing that gets overlooked in the race to "think of the children" is that the children are simply little bundles of more of the same DNA that started the mess in the first place.

Natural selection is not a gentle process, but it beats a planet overpopulated with idiots.

I know someone who makes his own guns...old fashioned flintlocks, which he creates from little more than a piece of wood and a metal rod using hand-powered tools. It is not a trivial process, but a serious craft. It takes him weeks to make one, and he charges thousands of dollars for them. I have no idea how they perform, but I imagine they are still technologically dated and largely inaccurate.

I don't think anyone is going to start banging out handguns by the truckload without a significant education on the topic and heavy personal investment. Most criminals are far too lazy to make that sort of commitment for a deferred result. That's why they steal stuff. Someone willing to take the time to learn to use a drill press and other tools necessary for metal work would be more likely to get a job in a machine shop than start their own arms factory.

So what happens when we eventually achieve this automated capitalist utopia that runs so efficiently that it only requires a handful of programmers to keep it running? It seems to me it doesn't really matter how low priced a service is if everyone who needs it is unemployed.

Free market cheerleaders make several baseless assumptions in situations like this. One is that the benevolent corporation will pass its savings on to 'the consumer'. This seems unlikely, since energy companies are monopolies in everything but name, so there is no competition to drive their prices lower. The other is that wonderful new job opportunities will open up to absorb the displaced meter readers. Even if you overlook the obvious life disruption caused by a cast-off union worker looking for a job in the high-paying food service or custodial industries, the present state of employment in this country does not suggest this is true. We've been automating everything for the past several decades, and the result? Our local grocery store used to have ten cashiers. Now they have two. I did not hire eight maids. I can only assume they went on to star in their own reality show.

It amazes me that the whole idea of labor-saving devices does not bear closer scrutiny in a society where the only viable means of economic survival for the majority of people is their labor.

Automation freed the slaves from their labors. Where are they now? All happily employed in the new jobs this created? No. Factories began automating decades ago. What replaced the high-paying factory jobs? Would you like fries with that?

Human resources aren't being wasted doing jobs that can be automated. They are being wasted by corporate bean counters who would love nothing better than to replace every pesky union worker with an uncomplaining robot. They are being wasted by a social system that wants unemployed people to miraculously retrain for whatever the next hot job is when they cannot even meet their own survival needs, let alone pay astronomical tuitions. They are being wasted by a society that has grown to value commerce over compassion.

Overall, I agree with your sentiment...I think screenwriting HAS suffered as censorship has relaxed. But given a choice between spending a million dollars blowing up a perfectly good helicopter or paying an aspiring actress two hundred bucks to take her top off, I think the European film industry made the right call. And we can all breathe easier knowing that obsessive fans seeking to emulate their favorite movie scene will be flashing their boobs instead of showering unsuspecting people with helicopter parts.

This is the sort of statement that makes me feel old. While ID4 is an undeniably silly movie, it is still eye-popping popcorn fare, if you are willing to turn your brain off for two hours. And isn't that the whole point of movies? I feel saddened that today's audiences have become so spoiled by the sophistication of modern FX that it is nearly impossible to wow them at all. I think, perhaps, effects have become TOO good....the audience is no longer participating in the requisite suspension of disbelief, expecting the filmmaker to do all the work for them. I think many vintage films still look amazing, and I am more than happy to overlook the Zipper of the Black Lagoon or Godzilla's rubber suit, or the strings holding the Moonbase Alpha Eagles aloft because I WANT to be amazed and I'm willing to go along with whatever visual conceit is thrown at me to achieve that goal. At some point, I think, you simply have to turn off your filter and say,' OK, giant spider, I'll buy that', and see where it takes you.

Otherwise, you simply become that jaded amateur movie critic who no one enjoys watching movies with. Worse, you deny yourself the enjoyment of decades of films with less than perfect visual effects.

It's not useless. It's biomass. It will return to the earth, as food and fertilizer. Once the overpriced casket rots, anyway.

I agree with you that the military budget isn't the only villain when it comes to out of control spending.

But your assertion that the military budget has been decreasing for the past fifty years (except for post 9/11) is not a convincing argument. "Post-9/11" means the past decade, during which the budget has increased a LOT. A good portion of military spending has not even been recorded in official budget figures, because it was in the form of emergency funding rammed through congress to support the war on terror. Our intelligence budget alone has tripled in the past three years, thanks to the additional fiscal drag of new organizations like the DHS.

Prior to 9/11, the Cold War saw our military spending ramped up so high that just trying to keep up with it bankrupted the Soviet Union.

All of which is irrelevant, because your argument is based on the assumption that spending only slightly less on defense than we were during a global war is somehow acceptable.

Military spending is vital, but it is largely non-productive. The military consumes vast quantities of resources and, under ideal conditions, does very little. When it is busy, it can bankrupt whole nations, or plunge them into political chaos. Unrestrained military activity has preceded the fall of almost every government in history.

It will likely do so again.

Any ad that annoys the viewer so much that they either dismiss the website or install technical solutions to block all ads is not an effective ad. It's like a virus that kills the host before it can spread to another host. That is why diseases evolve to be less lethal over time, and not more lethal. If advertisers want to employ TRUE viral marketing, they should advertise with more restraint.

Just a little reminder that those annoying artists are one reason the entire internet doesn't still look like it did in 1990, when the most expressive visual statement programmers could muster was the BLINK tag.

Did you include the energy cost of the manufacturing and disposal of the batteries that will power your e-reader? How many batteries and e-readers do you expect to consume during the lifespan of a typical book?

Gates has, indeed, restructured many parts of the military along more sensible lines, but he cancelled the wrong fighter jet. The JSF is soaking up resources (including an obvious pork-barrel contract for a second and entirely redundant engine) and will, like every other multi-service-designed aircraft before it, prove to be remarkably mediocre and much more expensive than planned. The F-22 was already airworthy and proven and superior in every way to any air superiority fighter in the world, and as soon as the program began to reach a point where economies of scale payed off, it was cancelled in favor of a plane with half the capability whose unit cost is already higher than the plane it was intended to be a low-cost alternative to.

Anyone who thinks air superiority fighters are unneeded is encouraged to try and locate an intact Stuka anywhere in the world. I'll save you the time...there are exactly three. The rest are in the bottom of the English Channel or rusting in some Russian farmer's field, because the best bomb truck in the world isn't worth crap if you can't keep control of the air.

It saddens me that so many people think that by enshrining a human activity as 'business' automatically excuses unethical behavior. Business is a human activity, and no human activity should be exempt from human virtue. If morality is optional, then it is largely meaningless, and I might as well shoot you and take your money.

My son is autistic. An ipad with this software would probably have been very useful for him when he was younger, and possibly even now...but only if it was built with mll-spec indestructibility. Special needs kids tend to have severe behavioral problems, and violent tantrums are not unusual. They need to be either tougher or cheaper.

And despite what many people seem to think, five hundred bucks for a gadget, and another 200 bucks for software, is not a trivial amount of money for a family with special needs kids. Having a special needs child almost automatically consigns many families to a single earner lifestyle, assuming their marriages even survive the experience. It always angered me that the 'poster families' the media chooses for its talk shows about special needs cases are almost always photogenic white collar folks whose biggest sacrifice is the extra money they have to spend to let specialists raise their children. If you visit a local meeting of whatever autism or other handicap support organization is in your community, I guarantee this is NOT what you will see. You will meet families struggling to keep their homes and their sanity in the face of impossible demands on their time, health and budget.

This idea is a step in the right direction, but the cottage industry that churns out all these developmental aids need to wake up to the true economics of their prospective customers.

Unfortunately, the essence of the free market is a society where everyone thinks 'fuck you'.