Also worth noting, the cost of the food stamp program has doubled since Obama took office.

In 2001, it cost us $15 billion. This year, $75 billion.
So yeah, it's getting out of control and it's time to go back to common sense ideas that worked when Clinton agreed with the Republicans that unlimited taxpayer money for able bodied adults is silly.

That bill, which won't pass the senate, largely reinstates the requirements Clinton signed. The biggest one is that if you're 18-50 and have no kids, but want food stamps, you eventually have to do some job training so there's a chance you'll eventually get off food stamps.

> I voted for change in 2008. So did millions of other Americans

Millions of Americans voted for "hope and change". My mother-in-law was one of those millions. The problem is, "hope and change" was a _slogan_. She voted for a slogan. That's entirely understandable, most people are not political scientists, and they have several other things in their life that they care more about than economics, foreign affairs, etc. They aren't researching the candidates voting records because they are busy making dinner for their kids, changing a tire, or enjoying some hobby.

When I ask my mother-in-law opinion on any issue, she's most often against the position Senator Obama voted for. She actually disagrees with him on most things. She doesn't know that because she works 50 hours a week and has a life, so she doesn't spend time studying the issues. Instead, she votes a slogan. Completely understandable.

While it's completely understandable, it creates big problems. Ideally, everyone would spend 100 hours every four years studying the candidates, after spending 100 hours in each of the off years studying economics, foreign policy, etc. That's not going to happen. Most people are to busy / not interested enough to make a truly informed choice. If you're willing to study from impartial sources, great. If not, please do waste your vote on a third party, or stay home. Uninformed votes based on slogans are not helpful.

  If you don't know what the capital of Iran is AND you don't know what the two major branches of economics are AND you don't know how many trillion the national debt is, you don't know who to vote for. That's okay. If you know two of the three, great, go vote.

Even before prop 30, California had the fourth highest tax burden of the 50 states. The average _state_ tax burden was
$4,934 per person. Their tax _revenue_ dropped like stone because businesses and other money moved to Nevada (second lowest taxes) and Texas (6th lowest taxes).

So, I'll FTFY:

A person may not be stupid, but people are. They'll vote higher taxes and more social services, then you end up with California.

That might eject it too, but Mac keyboards have an Eject key.

Prenda and eleven other assholes file a lot of baseless claims, so yeah we're seeing it in those cases. Prenda isn't common, though. On the day Prenda filed their latest baseless suit, thousands of ordinary Americans sued the guy who ran into them, felled a tree onto their house etc.

Would that be harder than arresting a guy for posting a YouTube video offensive to Mohammed?

I believe it's pretty rare. I'm not a lawyer, I just play one in court. I believe it's just when there's a decent chance you'll be ordered to pay the defendant's costs, and due to using a shell company or some other reason the costs may not be paid as ordered.

Consider this if a bond were required for all suits.
If a bond costs 10% of the face amount, and General Motors can claim they spent $10 million defending a lawsuit related to faulty brakes, that would be an extra $1 million cost before you're allowed to sue if your brakes fail and you're horribly injured. I wouldn't want the victims to have to pay an extra million before they can sue. In every case, the plaintiff is claiming they're a victim of something the plaintiff did, and most often it's true.

And yet, it seems even east Texas is getting tired of seeing these same patent trolls in their courts every week.

That's one reason for the shell companies that patent trolls use. The company that filed suit probably has no money. A ruling that they have to pay the defendant's costs is worthless. That is unless the judge had them put up a bond for that possibility when the case began.

I wouldn't admit to hacking anything in today's USA.
The Obama administration doesn't like people to be smarter than them.

The Constitution clearly states that it's allow, deny. Starting in 1942, many politicians flout their oath to uphold the Constitution and pretend it's allow,deny.

This is true. Windows makes a fine desktop. Microsoft's IDE is quite nice.
Windows is not a server operating system, and printing "server" on the box doesn't make it one.

Repeat after me "the federal government does not have general police power". "The federal government does not have general police power".
See United States v. Dewitt, Employers' Liability Cases, Keller and the 10th amendment, which reads:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

"Find scam doctors" is not one of those delegated powers, which are listed in article 1, section 8.

This part of the filing on page was interesting:
The DEA is not required to obtain a court order based on probable cause to issue a subpoena or to have it enforced.

Fourth amendment, anyone?

Having ANY second programmer look at the code may well find off-by-one or fence post errors and the like.