This legislation was prompted by reports that Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza was a gamer.

Lanza was also a vegan, yet you don't see politicians clamoring for investigation on the potential mental health effects of veganism (B12 deficiency which is common among vegans can lead to mental disorders).

Lanza was on Prozac, yet you don't see politicians asking for investigation on the potential mental effects of Ritalin, Zoloft, Prozac and assorted powerful drugs.

Why this fixation on guns ? Why never investigate any other trail of evidence ?

It makes more sense to think in turn of accumulated deltaV instead of mere velocity, so you can take the potential energy from Sun's gravity into account. At the moment the fastest spacecraft ever made by Man reached 70 km/s and even that was by expending potential energy instead of building it up.

The solar escape velocity from low earth orbit is 30.9 km/s, this is how much velocity you need to turn into potential energy (altitude from the Earth then from Sun) to get out of here - the amount of velocity you need to build up right from the start, just to barely get started on the journey. So basically, your actual travel speed to your destination system will pretty much be your spacecraft's total acceleration potential halved (the other half of it being needed to decelerate once there, unless you're reasonably sure you can perform an aerocapture at the destination planet - so far this has never succeeded) minus those 30.9 km/s. You could also take into consideration the differential between the two systems but that's above my competence.

To travel those 12 light years, or roughly 10 kms, in, let's say, a millenia, you need that travel speed to be close to 3200 km/s, which is a couple orders of magnitude above our current technical ability. Even if you forgo any capacity to brake at the destination and opt for a single high-speed fly-by instead, even with the current highest-ISP engines we can build (likely a DS4G ion thruster: 21400 seconds ISP), you will need your spacecraft to start with an amount of fuel almost 10 million times its own final weight... including the ion thruster's own weight and the tankage for storign that fuel, of course. Staging can help you trim this down, but only by so much.

And even if you overcome this, your probe will most probably just end up feeding a pa'anuri somewhere en route anyway ;)

The funny thing is, pretty much every other sentient species in this corner of the galaxy already knows about us - Earth is known as "the planet of children" among them.

On a more serious level, I think that fear of attracting attention is very misguided. Civilisations capable of mass interstellar travel automatically have much better opportunities to pursue, especially given the crazy logistics involved, than to go torment younger single-planet civs.

If you really want to know, try it directly yourself by playing KSP ;)

I myself am a firm proponent of the Buzz Aldrin Standard of enforcing both freedom of speech AND common decency along: sometimes a punch on the nose *is* the proper answer.

Freedom is impossible to seperate from responsibility. If you want the freedom to not be vaccinated, accept the full libability for any outbreak of disease you may cause.

Piss off the doctors and medical industry, and either the docs will retire early, change career path, while disincentivizing the young from entering the field.

See France for an illustration. French doctors and nurses were on strike in mid-november over government's price controls. At the same time we have what many call "medical deserts", zones where actual medical care is far away and in short supply. But, hey, at least it's the gubn'mint paying in our place... in exchange for a third of our salary.

Assuming the person arrested is not guilty, it could just be a false positive match. DNA tests are not 100% precise, in fact I read they are 99.7% precise only, resulting in approximately 1-in-300 errors, so in any wide-ranging tests with thousands of different DNAs all coming from the same area (meaning most of them had a lot of common ancestors across them) it was almost bound to happen. Imagine the uproar if TWO 100% matches had been found (and I do not mean homozygote twins) !

Note that roughly 1 in 10-15 person has more than one set of DNA, through chimerism - rare - or plain mosaicism - which is much more common than usually thought: that's part of how you can get "surprising" results of >10% paternity tests turning out negative in countries where those tests are sold over the counter. There are documented cases of botched criminal cases due to this, the most famous being Linda "I'm my own twin" Fairchild's.

And if he IS guilty then it may be one way to work up doubt into a future jury, using precisely those arguments. So, it's not necessarily idiotic.

how does an agency exist/expand/get funding without demonstrating any results whatsoever?

That's because you fail to understand what the real objectives of this agency are, and what results are actually evaluated.

If an agency has its funding consistently increased, if its antics and public failures are conveniently dismissed or stamped out, and if many ambitious, politically-influent people fight and rush to get a high-responsibility mandate in this agency, then it means it is very successful in providing the results that whoever is funding it, was hoping it'd produce.

Consider that the very act of spending taxpayers' money could in itself very well be the intended result sought after. Providing high-paying, low-effort job opportunities for politicaly-introduced young party cadre members, is another obvious one.

nope

Yup, you got it right in a single typo.

A single, super-intelligent person doesn't need other people, so by virtue they have no interest in petty things and can be better leaders.

Ruling over other people's lives is one of the most petty thing one can spend time doing, which is why there can be no good leader, ever. Life is nonsensical, obsessing over others' lives is nonsense squared.

Also, it's painfully obvious you're not a parent if you think you can lord it over your kid any way you think fit. A parent can have over his or her kids nowhere near the slightest approximation of the power even a small city mayor holds over his or her fellow citizens. Kids will seize authority over themselves from you bit by bit without question or notice as soon as they deem themselves ready for it - yes, whether they really are or not - and starting as early as a few months of age.

In a proper democratic system, all votes should be given equal weight.

Democracy has little to do with elections.

Election is a monarchic or rather an aristocratic process, historically it is the method by which peers of the realm select one among themselves to rule as king. The ancient greeks who defined the very word 'democracy' held no election for public offices, they only had elections for the top military mandates and IIRC Socrates explicitly lambasted elections as being aristocratic in nature. Compare that to the fact that all the main european monarchic dynasties of the middle-age started with an election: Pepin the short was elected king of the Franks, establishing the Carolingian dynasty that assumed the rule of the Holy Roman Empire, Hughes Capet was elected king of France and founded the long Capetian dynasty of french kings. Conrad of Franconia was elected king and basically established the kingdom of Germany, Arnulf of Carinthia was elected king of eastern Francia (which covered pretty much the whole of eastern Europe), etc. In most of eastern Europe, kings succceeded each other through election, for centuries. Even the title of emperor of the Holy Germanic Empire was attributed through election (with quite the same campaigning, mudslinging and corruption going on as in nowaday's elections).

Democracy stands for 'the people themselves manage the institutions and hold the final authority', whereas an election means pretty much the opposite, as it's a method for choosing one person to manage institutions himself and hold that public power and authority over everyone else.

Like most of your contemporaries you have no clear idea of what democracy actually looks and feels like, my guess is you most probably aren't familiar with concepts such a emergence and legal polycentrism, or their foremost place in the history of civilisation.

Lack of debris ? Moreso lack of research on your part. Debris photos are easy to find, and many parts were clearly identifiable and were all consistent.

Trickle down has been proven not to work.

Oh it works perfectly with trickling down the taxes to the general population.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon warned that 'when some people use this freedom of expression to provoke or humiliate some others' values and beliefs, then this cannot be protected.'

Not only can freedom to provoke and humiliate others' values and beliefs be protected, I'll raise it one notch and affirm it *must* be protected, for the sake of mankind's mind health.

I'm constantly amazed to see so many "famous" or "influent" people devise that being famous or influent implies, somehow, that they more than anyone else should not tread onto other people's convictions, offend or openly criticize the many widespread values and beliefs held all over the world. Quite the opposite, I would have thought the more people lend an ear to you, the higher your moral duty to voice out your mind and dish out demolition of common reality-walls, for the sake of human thought.

At every level of being, opinions and decisions are formed through constant dissent, even down to the individual neuron's level, war of words and contradicting thoughts stamping each other out, fighting again and again with reason, passion, humor, eck even contempt or guilt, all this for a flimsy supremacy: this is how our minds work. Dissent is our natural mode of operation. And as a corollary, political correctness, by suppressing initiative and blunting internal dissent so as not to confront other people's own thoughts is a double mistake: it throws a wrench into your own gears of thinking, and leaves your fellow humans wading in what you earnestly believe is wrong - not a nice thing to do, when you think about it. This is what mankind has been doing so intently as of late, and it needs to stop (bashing itself on the mind so hard).