I'm truly surprised govt hasn't figured this out yet. Hire Hooters girls and Chippendales guys for pat down duty and there'd be no more complaints. "But what about the gay complaint?" you ask? That's easy. Have the booth agent watch passengers' eyes. They'll invariably be undressing Ms tits or Mr buff. Then pair up the appropriate groper. "What about children?" you ask? That's easy too. Match the groper to the parent/guardian. If little Susie cries, Dad won't file a complaint because his eyes are glued to Ms Tits' tits. If little Jimmy cries, Mom won't complain because she's fantasizing about Mr Buff's package, etc, etc. And with such agents strip searches become unnecessary, because everyone but the guilty would gladly volunteer to be stripped down, most eager to have his/her cavities gently violated by such a groper.

Govt always fails because they let political correctness and other moronic concerns get in the way of practical solutions.

This is factually incorrect. A *smart* guy would have played this like "deep throat" and remained in the shadows for 40 years, completely anonymous. A smart guy would not have sought the lime light. A smart guy would not have been forced to flee his home and live under the thumb of the quasi dictator of a hostile foreign country, whose language he doesn't speak, whose culture he doesn't understand. A smart guy would not have sacrificed having control over his own life and future. Snowden is definitely not a smart guy.

Snowden was motivated by the attention lavished upon Julian Assange. Snowden was motivated by the "James Bond" factor. Snowden was motivated by his chance at 15 minutes of fame. Snowden was NOT motivated by a sense of patriotic duty to reveal truths about questionable NSA espionage tactics. This was simply a convenient means to an end. Snowden sought notoriety, and saw this as his only chance in life at achieving it. The opportunity presented itself, so he took it. Period. Snowden is not a hero. Snowden is an opportunist.

10 million words wasted on a non-story out of Omaha, which BTW is 70 miles from my keyboard.

The purpose of this bill is helping to figure out how to grow corn, and thus sustain the state's economy, in the face of "cyclical" weather events such as this year's drought. It has nothing to do with the left vs right "global warming" nonsense. People are motivated first and foremost by their wallets. Nebraska's wallet is filled by corn sales. The liberals (very few Democrats) in the Unicameral wanted a study about "humans ruining the climate". The conservatives, all the Rebublicans and most of the Democrats, simply want to keep the corn industry healthy. Which is why the word "cyclical" was added, to keep the study on point. This story didn't come out of California folks, where the liberals want to shut down all power plants but still demand their lights stay on. This is Nebraska, filled with conservative farmers. Most Democrats in Nebraska are conservatives, not liberals. This is one of the "fly over" states filled with "bumpkins", remember?

They don't give a rip about climate change. They just want to keep the corn growing. Again, a non-story ginned up by the "man is destroying the earth" religion of the far left environmentalist whackos.

You are either very young, a liberal, a female, have lived a very sheltered life, or of all of the above. Criminal sentencing has always had one goal, and only one goal: punishment, period. There is never "justice" for victims or their survivors. The "justice system", or "law", has never protected the innocent, removed economic incentive, nor rehabilitated violent offenders, or we'd have eliminated criminal acts already, there would be no police forces, etc. The only solution with violent offenders is to sentenece them to death. And the fallacy of the death penalty argument is this:

A death sentence and a life sentence are both a death sentence, with only one difference: latency to outcome.

Make no mistake. Opponents of the death penalty have no compassion for those who deserve it. This isn't about compassion or the punishment fitting the crime, or the innocent being mistakenly executed. It's about guilt. They are members of society. Society is the executioner, in their minds. They simply go bonkers knowing that they "had a hand" in the execution, have blood on their hands. Fighting the death penalty is about avoiding liberal guilt. Period. If not, they'd fight life sentences as well, because they are, after all, death sentences. The difference is that spineless liberals don't "feel" guilt when a murderer dies of "natural causes" at age 70/80/90 something, alone in a prison cell. There are no cameras around, no protests. No "attention". Thus, no feelings of guilt.

I'm going to pay you a visit, bind you, your mother, sister, girlfriend, wife, daughter(s), etc. I'm going to bind your head and tape your eyelids open so you see everything. Hear everything. Then I'm going to rape them one by one with a piece of 1" dia x 1' steel rebar in the vagina and anus. Then, while still concious, I will cut off her nipples and then disembowel her with a rusty dull box cutter. Whether she's dead now or still conscious, I'll then slowly saw her head off with a hack saw and place it on a pike in front of you, her dead eyes starinng into yours, her blood dripping on your feet. This, while you and the remaining women are forced to witness the terror in her eyes and her screams before her lights go out. You, struggle helplessly, but are unable to stop it, unable to save them. You are forced to watch me torture, mutilate, and behead all of the women you love. I call the police, and stick a post-it to your forehead with my name, address, etc, and walk out the door, forcing you to survery and relive the carnege before authorities arrive.

Going into my trial, you plead with the prosecutor to spare my life, because the death penalty is wrong, that it's only about a sadistic desire for vengeance...

Like "civilized" Europe you mean? Like Norway? Anders Behring indiscriminantly kills 77 and injures 319-- gets 21 years. Is this a "civilized" sentence?

Violent video games have made me want to go on a rampage and kill dozens of unarmed civilians indiscriminantly with an assault rifle. I think I'll immigrate to Norway, light up a youth retreat, then retire to 3 hots and a cot for two decades, thanks to Norway's "civility". I'll be out in time to move back to the States and collect my Social Secuity and Medicare benefits. Actually, being an entrepreneurial American, I'd setup "Norwegian Safari, LLC" and sell travel and in-country weapon acquisition arrangements to other Americans who'd like to take advantage of the "mass murder loophole" that exists in Europe. We dare not do it here because we'd get executed like Tim McVeigh, or more likely, killed in the act like Charles Whitman. But hay, it's open season in Europe.

On the contrary. Science is bringing us ever closer to seeing 'God' in full glory. At some point we will have a single equation, or series of equiations, which describe and predict the process of every phenomenon in the universe, at the smallest and largest scales. At that point, we will truly have discovered, and understand, what "God" is. This is the one true God, and it does exist. It simply is not the God humankind has invented throughout the centuries to comfort its ignorance and inability to explain phenomenon it does not understand.

The God people have invented is a just and righteous God, a moral God. Nothing could be further from the truth. The one true God not only causes earthquakes and hurricanes on Earth, the Taliban and US jets, that kill human beings by the millions, but the one true God also vaporizes entire solar systems when it causes stars to collapse on themselves then explode into supernovae. The one true God even causes entire galaxies to collide, likely causing the extinction of trillions of life forms.

The one true God is the only real enemy of mankind on Earth. If mankind doesn't realize this, stop fighting amongst itself, and use these warring resources to figure out how to fight and win against the one true God, it is doomed, as God will cause earth to be vaporized in about 4 billion years. Yes, God will kill every living thing on this little blue planet, including all the Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddists, etc, etc. So when people sayd they are killing in God's name, I guess they're simply trying to get a head start on the big job ahead...

Are you sure they're physical caps, not virtual, or ethereal caps?

The "wasted material" will be due to measurement mistakes.

You are clearly clueless. Before you can speak intelligently about a subject you must educate yourself on that subject. For you to actually understand the magnitude of such a conversion you must first spend a week as an apprentice at an architectural firm in the US, then spend a week with a construction crew as they build a new house. Then you will spend a week working at a lumber yard. After all of that, then you can come back and comment intelligently in this thread.

You mean in the same vein that every product I buy in the US that's made in China has a instructions in 6 languages? No cost there...

It never ceases to amaze me how liberals think they have the answers to all of the world's ills which are always caused by those pesky Americans, and the Amercicans should have to pay to fix other people's problems. Such a conversion would not benefit any future generations of US citizens. So you just want us to convert to SI to makes things easier for everyone else. Do you work at the UN by chance?

Election cycles are 2/4/ 6 years. Not...gonna...work.

To what end? So foreign visitors are less confused when driving on or roads? Or to drive up small town ticket revenue until people become acclimated to kph? Both are great ideas... /rolls eyees

Converting the official measurement system simply for the sake of converting, to be like everyone else, is not a valid case for conversion, especially in the country with the world's largest economy. There has never been a piece of framing lumber, iron, or plumbing pipe sold in the US labeled with metric dimensions. The total cost in actual dollars, education, retraining, wasted material, etc, to convert these industries alone would likely equal the GDP of all but the top 20 coutries in the world. The amount of lumber wasted, thus more trees cut down, during this conversion period would surely put Greenpeace squarely against such a thing. Note: construction workers and plumbers are your high school classmates who got Ds in basic math. The first house constructed after such a conversion to SI will have to be rebuilt at least 3 times before it's done right, if then. Would you want to buy this house? Would you want to buy any house built during this transition phase? How about occupy the 100th floor of a high rise built during this transition? Commute over a bridge build during this transition? Recall the Minneapolis collapse? And those engineering mistakes were made using the well known and understood English system.

The US industries currently using SI do so because it makes sense and increases the bottom line: aerospace, automobiles, electronics, etc. These industries have significant exchange of engineering documents/data/people with overseas partners and contractors who only use SI. The building materials industry in the US has no such relationships so there is no advantage to doing this, only needless cost. There are other industries who would have zeo advantage here.

This is why the White House has taken the position it has. One of the great things about America is choice. Keep an eye on what happens with Obamacare, the single largest forced conversion of an industry in US history. Then think about those problems in relation to such a mandated conversion to SI.

Civil war is citizen against citizen. This will not occur.. What will occur will be a revolution, which is citizens against the government, assuming ignornat citizens continue to use the ballot box as they have for many decades. Thankfully the framers of our Constitution realized the fledgling Democratic Replublic they'd just created could very well fail for the very reasons monarchies in Europe were failing--corruptoin, greed, power consolidation, unfair taxation, unjust imprisonment, tyrrany, etc. Thus they amended the Constitution for the 2nd time, making sure citizens had sufficient firepower to overthrow the new govt should it become necessary. It may shock some here to learn that the sole purpose of the 2nd amendment is to guarantee the ability of the citizens to overthrow the government. The 2nd amendment has nothing to do with hunting, sport shooting, self defense, etc, as some politicians have led you to believe in the modern era. The 2nd amendment is a hedge created by the framers, a safety net, enabling the citizens to take down and replace the government should it become corrupt to the point that the ballot box no longer functions. This is the genesis of the modern saying "soap box, ballot box, ammo box--use in that order". This is precisely what the framers had in mind.

The media reporting of this outage as occurring on May 7 is flat wrong. They're off by 4 days. Centurylink's network outage began at ~12:25 CST May 3 and ended at ~01:00 CST May 4. Following are the entries from my mail server log that show the start, end, and duration of the outage. Note the flurry of queued deliveries occurring after IP routing was restored at 01:02 May 4. You can clearly see there are no client connections between 12:20 CST May 3 and 01:02 CST May 4, about 12.5 hours. I called the DSL support line once at about 13:30 May 3 after performing local troubleshooting and eliminating local equipment as the cause. I received "all circuits are busy, please try again later." Receiving that message when calling a telco is like walking into a grocery store and finding the shelves empty. I instantly realized the severity of the outage, and gave myself the afternoon of May 3 off, knowing it wouldn't be fixed for many hours.

BTW, how does one go about modifying the headline? It needs to inform readers that the outage date/time in the referenced articles is wrong by 3 days.

May 3 12:15:04 greer postfix/smtpd[24985]: connect from unknown[199.15.233.160]
May 3 12:15:04 greer postfix/smtpd[24985]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[199.15.233.160]: 450 4.7.1 Client host rejected: cannot find your reverse hostname, [199.15.233.160]; from= to= proto=ESMTP helo=
May 3 12:15:04 greer postfix/smtpd[24985]: disconnect from unknown[199.15.233.160]
May 3 12:17:01 greer postfix/anvil[24898]: statistics: max connection rate 2/60s for (smtp:59.55.253.97) at May 3 12:09:06
May 3 12:17:01 greer postfix/anvil[24898]: statistics: max connection count 1 for (smtp:168.100.1.7) at May 3 12:08:13
May 3 12:17:01 greer postfix/anvil[24898]: statistics: max cache size 2 at May 3 12:08:41
May 3 12:17:52 greer postfix/smtpd[25008]: connect from rheocrat.us-deals-atlanta.com[91.90.205.207]
May 3 12:17:52 greer postfix/smtpd[25008]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from rheocrat.us-deals-atlanta.com[91.90.205.207]: 554 5.7.1 : Client host rejected: Mail not accepted from Ukraine; from= to= proto=ESMTP helo=
May 3 12:18:09 greer postfix/smtpd[25008]: disconnect from rheocrat.us-deals-atlanta.com[91.90.205.207]
May 3 12:20:30 greer postfix/smtpd[25013]: connect from unknown[173.232.112.158]
May 3 12:20:31 greer postfix/smtpd[25013]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[173.232.112.158]: 450 4.7.1 Client host rejected: cannot find your reverse hostname, [173.232.112.158]; from= to= proto=ESMTP helo=
May 3 12:20:31 greer postfix/smtpd[25013]: disconnect from unknown[173.232.112.158]
May 3 12:23:51 greer postfix/anvil[24898]: statistics: max connection rate 1/60s for (smtp:91.90.205.207) at May 3 12:17:52
May 3 12:23:51 greer postfix/anvil[24898]: statistics: max connection count 1 for (smtp:91.90.205.207) at May 3 12:17:52
May 3 12:23:51 greer postfix/anvil[24898]: statistics: max cache size 1 at May 3 12:17:52
May 4 01:02:00 greer postfix/smtpd[26610]: connect from mail88.us2.rsgsv.net[72.26.195.88]
May 4 01:02:00 greer postfix/smtpd[26610]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from mail88.us2.rsgsv.net[72.26.195.88]: 554 5.7.1 : Client host rejected: Access denied; from= to= proto=ESMTP helo=
May 4 01:02:00 greer postfix/smtpd[26610]: disconnect from mail88.us2.rsgsv.net[72.26.195.88]
May 4 01:02:26 greer postfix/smtpd[26614]: connect from oss.sgi.com[192.48.182.195]
May 4 01:02:26 greer postfix/smtpd[26610]: connect from oss.sgi.com[192.48.182.195]
May 4 01:02:26 greer postfix/smtpd[26614]: F174E6C1B3: client=oss.sgi.com[192.48.182.195]
May 4 01:02:27 greer postfix/cleanup[26615]: F174E6C1B3: message-id=
May 4 01:02:27 greer postfix/qmgr[15493]: F174E6C1B3: from=, size=6358, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
May 4 01:02:27 greer postfix/smtpd[26614]: disconnect from oss.sgi.com[192.48.182.195]
May 4 01:02:27 greer postfix/smtpd[26610]: 172866C1B8: client=oss.sgi.com[192.48.182.195]
May 4 01:02:27 greer spamd[23679]: spamd: connection from localhost [127.0.0.1] at port 59450
May 4 01:02:27 greer spamd[23679]: spamd: setuid to nobody succeeded
May 4 01:02:27 greer postfix/cleanup[26615]: 172866C1B8: message-id=
May 4 01:02:27 greer spamd[23679]: spamd: processing message for nobody:65534
May 4 01:02:27 greer postfix/qmgr[15493]: 172866C1B8: from=, size=42427, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
May 4 01:02:27 greer postfix/smtpd[26610]: disconnect from oss.sgi.com[192.48.182.195]
May 4 01:02:29 greer spamd[23679]: spamd: clean message (0.8/4.2) for nobody:65534 in 2.7 seconds, 6202 bytes.
May 4 01:02:29 greer spamd[23679]: spamd: result: . 0 - BAYES_50 scantime=2.7,size=6202,user=nobody,uid=65534,required_score=4.2,rhost=localhost,raddr=127.0.0.1,rport=59450,mid=,bayes=0.500029,autolearn=disabled
May 4 01:03:06 greer postfix/smtpd[26614]: connect from smtp.hesketh.com[199.255.11.26]
May 4 01:03:07 greer postfix/smtpd[26614]: 0C2B06C1B9: client=smtp.hesketh.com[199.255.11.26]
May 4 01:03:07 greer postfix/cleanup[26616]: 0C2B06C1B9: message-id=
May 4 01:03:07 greer postfix/qmgr[15493]: 0C2B06C1B9: from=, size=4713, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
May 4 01:03:07 greer postfix/smtpd[26614]: 7DA976C1BA: client=smtp.hesketh.com[199.255.11.26]
May 4 01:03:08 greer postfix/cleanup[26615]: 7DA976C1BA: message-id=
May 4 01:03:08 greer postfix/qmgr[15493]: 7DA976C1BA: from=, size=2798, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
May 4 01:03:08 greer postfix/smtpd[26614]: 48A176C457: client=smtp.hesketh.com[199.255.11.26]
May 4 01:03:08 greer postfix/cleanup[26616]: 48A176C457: message-id=
May 4 01:03:08 greer postfix/qmgr[15493]: 48A176C457: from=, size=2920, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
May 4 01:03:08 greer postfix/smtpd[26614]: A44896C458: client=smtp.hesketh.com[199.255.11.26]
May 4 01:03:08 greer postfix/cleanup[26615]: A44896C458: message-id=
May 4 01:03:08 greer postfix/qmgr[15493]: A44896C458: from=, size=2926, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
May 4 01:03:09 greer postfix/smtpd[26614]: 155F56C459: client=smtp.hesketh.com[199.255.11.26]
May 4 01:03:09 greer postfix/cleanup[26616]: 155F56C459: message-id=
May 4 01:03:09 greer postfix/qmgr[15493]: 155F56C459: from=, size=3006, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
May 4 01:03:09 greer postfix/smtpd[26614]: 6FF3A6C45A: client=smtp.hesketh.com[199.255.11.26]
May 4 01:03:09 greer postfix/cleanup[26615]: 6FF3A6C45A: message-id=
May 4 01:03:09 greer postfix/qmgr[15493]: 6FF3A6C45A: from=, size=3324, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
May 4 01:03:09 greer postfix/smtpd[26614]: E2E076C45B: client=smtp.hesketh.com[199.255.11.26]
May 4 01:03:10 greer postfix/cleanup[26616]: E2E076C45B: message-id=
May 4 01:03:10 greer postfix/qmgr[15493]: E2E076C45B: from=, size=3638, nrcpt=1 (queue active)

TFA mentions nothing of Schmidt requesting police protection for anything.

No, this is not the same under current laws. Which is exactly the type of legislation Schmidt is talking about. And even in locales where aircraft hovering over one's propery might be covered by local trespass ordnances, one has no privacy protection under the law against video cameras shooting him/her while hovering over the neighbor's house, or hovering a half mile away above public property, such as a roadway, park, etc.

And yes, it's apparent you are indeed a crackpot.

I think you misunderstand the issue. He's not asking the govt "to spend your money". He's asking Washington to write laws establsighing the boundaries of legal use of civilian drones. If you have a problem with your money being spent to write laws, which is the Constitutional duty of the Congress, then you need a successful revolution and replacement of the US Constitution. That's a separate topic entirely and unrelated to the issue at hand.