That's silly. If the US were ever truly really threatened, we'd just use nukes. If one day we find that Russia or whoever was swarming over the US borders the origin country would be turned to glass. MAD pretty much guarantees that no large country will ever attack any other large country (unless the leader is suicidal I guess).

Modern defense spending is about nothing but enriching the right people and conducting politically desirable wars. We are not and will never be in any true danger from another large military. Nukes guarantee that.

Out defense spending should be concentrated on nuke delivery platforms and fighting terrorists. Spending trillions to protect us from countries that MAD already protects us from is just plain stupid and wasteful.

I'll bet it would! Instead of giving $3 million each to 9 people he could have given $50,000 each to 540 physicists. How many physicists are there in the world? The number probably isn't very large if you include only PhDs. A quick google says that there are about 1500 new physics PhDs each year (I don't know if that number is limited to one country). It would have much less personal impact, but probably a greater emotional impact on the entire field to give $1000 each to 27,000 physics PhDs.

Why? Do you just hate old software that works or did it run over your dog?

Just because both parties are equally bad in this area does not mean that both parties are equally terrible. Republicans are proudly bad in all areas. Democrats are merely semi-unintentionally bad in most areas.

> ...why did we need the law?

If you had been paying attention you'd know. The law includes the requirement that insurance providers cannot refuse to cover those with pre-existing conditions. If just that part of the law was passed then everyone in the country would just cancel their insurance until they got sick. Insurance doesn't work when only sick people buy insurance.

You're absolutely right. I complained about how degrading the pat down is on slashdot in the past and some asshole has the gall to say I'm just overly sensitive. Fuck people like that. Apparently it's my problem that I don't like guys slamming their hands into my junk in the name of utterly pointless security theater.

Metal detectors. Bomb sniffing scanners. That's all we need. If anyone were to set up an airline that used just those things I'd pay a 50% premium (perhaps more) on my tickets just to avoid the whole airport security assault. I'd pay more if they actually made the whole airport and flying experience less like a trip through prison and more of a fun experience.

That's really how I feel about airports. It's a trip through prison.

Reverse domain names would be inconvenient to type. Right now I can type "s" in the address bar and slashdot.org will come up. Reverse that and I'd need to type "org.s" to get it to come up. Perhaps browser makers would have done things differently so that "s" would actually bring up "org.slashdot".

What advantage would reversing the order give anyone? My first thought is that it'd allow alphabetical sorting of domains so that all the tlds would be together. I can't think why that'd be useful to anyone though.

The article is about slashing 78% of US employees at IBM. That's not a sign of a healthy company.

Unless you manage the server yourself I'm not sure what all this stuff is. I use XP at home and Win7 at work. It's the same. It's an OS. You run stuff and it runs. The only difference I see is that the gui looks a little different, configuration stuff is in slightly different places and I occasionally accidentally rotate my damn monitor when I hit ctrl+alt+left when I mean to hit ctrl+left.

Nevertheless, the next time I upgrade my home machine I'll go win7 for the 64 bit support. If you don't need more than 4gb of ram then I'd say just stick with XP.

So my personal space doesn't matter? I'm overly sensitive because I feel violated when another man slides his hands over me and slaps my groin several times? (Seriously, in my first rape, one slap of the groin wasn't enough. He had to go up my legs then slap it then go up my legs from behind and slap it twice more.)

What would you call it? Am I allowed to use the word "assault" or do my feelings of violation just not matter at all?

I'll make sure to ask you next time I have an emotional reaction to find out if I'm allowed to feel badly about it or not. I mean, I wouldn't want to have any feelings that are disallowed.

The enemy (the TSA and their traitorous allies) are perfectly happy to call us all terrorist lovers for objecting to pat downs and scans. Please don't make their life easier by trying to be reasonable toward them.

It is rape. It is a serious violation of my personal space and it serves no useful purpose other than to scare people into being scanned. Just because they aren't shoving a broomstick up my ass doesn't mean it's not rape.

For my part, I won't fly more than once a year. I've laid down the law with my wife that any vacation we take must be within a reasonable driving distance. Two rapes a year (one each way) at xmas when I go see my parents is more than enough.

Either they're dangerous or they're not. If they're dangerous then the planes need to be fixed to prevent terrorists from using this to cause problems. If they're not then stop adding one more pointless annoyance to plane travel which is already one of the least enjoyable activities that people undergo voluntarily.

Furthermore, if low em is ok, but badly shielded devices are a problem then the solution is simple. Have em sensors around the plane. If any of the sensors detects excessive em, the stewardess will come over with a hand detector and find the jackass with the bad device. You could probably set that up on each plane for less than the cost of a few plane tickets.

The proper solution is not to berate people for wanting to be able to pass the time using the devices they always use to pass the time. Plane travel fucking sucks. There's no reason to make it one bit worse than it needs to be.

The wikipedia page on his religious views is pretty explicit on these points. He gave some interesting quotes, but ultimately he didn't believe in a personal god and called himself an agnostic. That actually makes him a Deist, which is fine.

Believing in a god that created the universe doesn't hurt anything. It's a harmless belief. However, it is not scientific to believe that god regularly changes the rules of the universe in order to help or hurt individual people or groups. It's not testable, repeatable, or falsifiable. Believing in something like that is the opposite of being scientific.

To be fair, I'm pretty sure that people can compartmentalize. A person can have strict scientific beliefs when working on their car's engine or when writing code or designing electronics and then still believe nonsense about things they have no personal control over.

It's fine to believe religious nonsense about biology just so long as you aren't a doctor, biologist, or voter.

You're trying to define innovate to mean the same thing as invent. That's not what it means. It means "Make changes in something established, esp. by introducing new methods, ideas, or products.". It's hard to argue that Apple doesn't do this. They find markets where there's room for improvement in the products and then release a product which is better is some way.

It's better to use some other leader that rose to power as a result of massive fraud which can be used as a comparison rather than Hitler. Using Hitler invariably invites people to spout off about Godwin even if the comparison is perfectly apt with regard to the illegal electioneering.

There are plenty: Putin, Bush Jr 2000, many middle east leaders, Kim Jung Il, etc.