That might improve their individual willingness to compromise, but not necessarily. Many of them are convinced that if they compromise, they'd lose their seats. Besides, since all of the other guys have been given an incentive to compromise, it means that maybe you can get away without changing anything. Prisoner's dilemma.

And if they did play chicken with it and lose, the newly-elected House would be essentially identical to the old one. Republicans would be replaced with more Republicans, and Democrats with more Democrats. A few marginal seats would switch both ways but it wouldn't really shift any of the battle lines.

When you find some of those, let's start a country together. Meanwhile, I'm stuck in this one with a vast number of people who have absolutely no conception of what government does and very firm opinions about how it should do it.

Even if we had that here, it wouldn't help. 90% or more of the seats are completely safe: if we had a new election we'd just send back most of the same people. If you forbid the individuals from being reelected, somebody from the same party holding the same position would be elected instead.

The Congress as a whole has a very high disapproval, but most people have a high (or at least, high-enough) approval of their own individual Congressman. The problem is all those other unreasonable people; we must stand firm against them by never compromising.

You are "dumb". You have nothing to say about the line of work I'm in. I am also "dumb". I have nothing to add about the line of work you're in. I don't see you as being in an ivory tower, I'm just the one who knows that I've nothing of value to add to your industry/science/line of work. Unless we work in the same fields, or related fields, in which case, I have plenty of other means of being exposed to your work, and addressing and debating any problems I may have with it. Scientists are not in ivory towers, and they don't think they're in one. All that said, there's a reason why they have offices and aren't doing work on whiteboards on the corner of the street.

If you really think a town hall meeting is a productive forum to work on highly specialized fields of domain knowledge, I'm not really sure what to say to that.

Since the vast majority of scientific advances don't necessarily originate from one place, person, or time but often many at once, I find the idea that we're relying on lightening to strike in a comment board in order to achieve some important scientific advance rather naive and laughable.

Slashdot closes comments on old stories. So you could make it a thing to try to get your last post in under the wire...

Not that anybody would care. A first post at least potentially has some visibility (though it's usually downvoted to the point of invisibility for most people). Nobody is ever likely to notice your "last post" and become envious; it's not much of a game.

What does the verb "snap" mean in this context? "Any application can be snapped to a game"? It makes it sound as if something is being done to it, but I get the impression that it's just being passed through (and so the only thing being "snapped" is the video sockets being snapped together).

Is there some technical or colloquial definition that I'm missing here?

That's what most Americans don't get. "Liberals" in the US would be conservatives in most other countries. We are so far at the bottom of the "socialist" rating scale that we might as well be eliminated as an anomaly.

But Democrats don't sell themselves as wanting completely free and unregulated markets. That's not to say they are hypocrites about other things but in this case it is more about Republicans.

So basically you are saying that they provide a dumbed down experience for people who can't handle more than one button. That's basically what they've been doing for the last 15 years. Turns out playing to the lowest common denominator is a good business.

Getting on Slashdot.

And amazingly they all have a Cuban accent - "you got some 'splaining to do!"

Well one could debate on the Nag Hammadi gospels. I could easily claim that John didn't write the Gospel of John or any of the others really. It's more likely that those Gospels didn't fit in with what the church was pushing.

I am not a fan of Paul. He can defend himself but I think he was a fraud. His view just differs from Jesus in too many ways. I believe Christianity should just be the Gospels - ALL of the Gospels - and nothing else. When you do that you end the debate on a lot of hateful topics - including homosexuality.

The Newspapers aren't supposedly handed down by God and considered by its readers to be flawless. The Gospels were originally written in Greek, translated by hand into Latin, and then only after the start of Protestantism did it start to be translated into local languages. That means for the English translation most people read was based on 1500 years of potential mistranslations and transcription errors. It's like playing the "phone game" over 1500 years and expecting the words to still mean something.

Also, to start, Mark and Luke were not disciples or direct witnesses. Their Gospels are just hearsay handed down a generation or two later. John's gospel is the most dramatically different he writes as if he was a witness but there is some doubt that was the case. Matthew supposedly was a direct witness but if he actually was literate (which wasn't all that common back then) he probably would have written in Aramaic - which means yet another level of translation.

Then you have all the Gnostic Gospels that the church decided didn't properly suit their purposes and did their best to destroy and exterminate anybody who preached from them. Same goes for the Apocrypha.

Over half of the rest of the new testament is the writings of the Apostle Paul (some of which have been historically validated). Paul was a PR machine. He was a prolific writer and marketer for the version of Christianity he was selling. His teachings, however, are dramatically different from the teachings of Jesus and he is the main reason the Christian church has drifted so far from what the original message of Jesus was.

Here - Bill Nye can help you with that.

And here is a list of contradictions. http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/jim_meritt/bible-contradictions.html

You obviously haven't read much of it if you didn't realize it contradicts itself. The Gospels don't even agree on details and most of the stories of Jesus you hear around Christmas and Easter are actually picking and choosing from the different Gospels to make a somewhat coherent fable.