They are not accusing him of hijacking the meeting. They are accusing him of spinning (or lying about) what happened in the meeting. I accept that Obama doesn't care much about the rights of the citizens, but he needs to understand that pervasive surveillance is also bad for business. When these companies move their data centers abroad, the jobs go with them. More and more people just don't want to do business with American tech companies. This is just as stupid as the encryption embargo that destroyed thousands of American jobs back in the 1990s.

In my opinion, yes. Everyone should make time in their life to improve the world in some way.

1. I spend several hours a week teaching Scratch programming to 3rd-6th graders.
2. I volunteer as a math tutor at my son's elementary school for two hours per week.
3. I am a member of the "Ten Gallon Club" at the Red Cross blood center (80 one pint donations).
4. I have written several free educational apps for iPads and Android Tablets, and plan to write many more.
5. My wife and I funded a scholarship for two Naxi girls to attend a university.

Last time I was in NYC, I didn't see a single one. I am NOT talking about timers on crosswalks (those are common in America). I mean a big countdown timer above the street, next to the traffic light, and visible to approaching traffic for about 200-300 meters. I have seen those in a number of countries, and they seem to improve the flow of traffic a lot. They not only count down to a red light, but once red, they countdown to green. So if you want to check your map or tune the radio while stopped at a traffic light, you know exactly how much time you have.

Except that what the workers do quantitatively changes when it is advantageous to do so. Unionized workers, that are both more expensive and less reliable, make the robots more economically attractive as an alternative.

No they don't. One or two seconds of "all red" causes a permanent reduction in accidents. This is not a hypothetical new proposal, where we have to guess how drivers will react. It has been done for decades in many cities.

Another way to reduce accidents is to have a count-down timer next to the light. I have never seen these in America, but they are common in some other countries. The countdown commonly starts 30 seconds prior, while the light is still green, giving drivers plenty of time to either slow down or speed up enough to make the light with time to spare.

It is difficult to locate a mortar position with sound. Mortars aren't that loud when they fire, and they can fire from deep defilade. Also, sound propagates slowly enough to give them critical seconds to "shoot and scoot". Even with radar, we would fire our 155s not only on their firing position, but also on likely routes of egress. The Iraqis had mortars mounted in the back of BMPs so they could move as quickly as possible after launching a volley, as well as having some armor to protect them from shrapnel while they were moving.

This is know as counter-battery radar. It has been around for at least a few decades. I was in the Marines during the 1991 Iraq War (the one that made sense), and we had counter-battery radar then. When an Iraqi mortar fired, our 155mm howitzers would back-trace the trajectory and return fire before the mortar round even impacted.

I think pot should be legal, but I know many pot smokers and my observation is that it makes them apathetic and stupid. There is scientific evidence to back this up. I believe that every person should live up to their potential, and work to make the world better. You aren't going to do that if you are intentionally making yourself stupider.

As an actual user of LED lights, I have noticed NONE of these problems. The base of the light contains a reflector, so less light is absorbed by the fixture, but that just seems like good design. I might notice the "weird" spectrum if I used some specialized instrument, but to my eyes, the light looks normal.

I think your ideas of "current" LED bulb tech, are not current. You might want to look at a modern bulb.

You might want to look up Carnot Efficiency. More than half the energy in the fuel is dumped into the heat sink by your power company. About another 5% is lost in transmission. If you want heat, you should burn fuel in your furnace, not at a power company. Using electricity for heat is very wasteful.

Huh? How does clicking a link take more time than driving to Home Depot?

What failure mode do you foresee? Have you ever seen an LED "burn out"? They are solid state electronics. The solder could fail, but that seems unlikely since it barely gets warm. Besides, cheap PbSn solder is more reliable than the expensive RoHS stuff.

The same people that benefit from less coal mining, fracking, and global warming.

Get a clue. You can buy good 10w (60w equiv) LED light bulbs for $4 a pop on eBay. I bought a batch of 10 from this guy. They come on instantly, are very bright, and contain no mercury. Even after an hour, they are barely warm. Unlike CFLs, they work in the cold, so you can use them for a porch/garage. They are made of impact resistant plastic. While installing one, I accidentally dropped it 8 feet onto a concrete floor. It bounced, but didn't break. So far, I have had zero failures. Since the seller has a 99.4% approval rate, my guess is most other customers are happy as well.

Sequential code may be inadequate for advanced programming, but it certainly isn't "outdated". As a professional programmer, 90% of my code is purely sequential. Even parallel code has sequential blocks, and parallel programming skills can only be built on a solid foundation of basic understanding of sequential processing. Arithmetic skills are not enough to do calculus, but that doesn't mean arithmetic is "outdated".

I teach Scratch to 3rd-6th graders in an after school program. It is an event driven language, so they have to deal with parallelism and race conditions at some point. But they don't learn that until they have a solid foundation first.

Just because you think something should be legal, doesn't mean you are "ok with it". I think that abortion, adultery, prostitution, violent pornography, and smoking pot are all morally wrong, but I don't think any of them should be illegal. They should be discouraged by moral persuasion, not law enforcement.

Liberals are not "for" killing unborn humans. They are for someone other than politicians making the decision. I see no hypocrisy in being both pro-choice and anti-death-penalty: In both cases, I am opposed to government officials having life and death power over the citizenry.