If you were white. If you weren't, then the 14th Amendment didn't really mean that much for you and thus neither did most of the rest of the Constitution. Nor did it mean much if you were otherwise "unfit," as the history of sterilization of the mentally retarded from that era shows.

It was a time period of conservative judicial activism known as the Lochner era in which laws establishing minimum wage or safe work conditions were struck down as unconstitutional under the dubious theory of "freedom of contract."

It was also a time period in which labor-leaders and other leftists were kept under surveillance by J. Edgar Hoover, who was prepared to round them up at a moment's notice. After all, this was a time period in which union members paid in blood for their views and the government turned a blind eye to private union-busting operations like the American Protective League and the Pinkerton Agency, who ran sabotage and intimidation against people exercising their rights, or just openly sanctioned killing striking workers.

Most of my views of American democracy were informed as a child by what we believed this nation should be. Very little of it was informed by what it actually was, then and now. I think most of us are the same.

There's an entire category of these on the Wikipedia. One of them isn't too far from where my parents live. It's a great way for handling variable demand when most of your nearby plants run a constant baseload.

Not yet, but they're working really, really hard on it, so if you give them just a little more patience, I'm sure they'll get there eventually under the current leadership. Chin up!

Really, the only inconsistency was favoring democratically elected officials that don't like us in the first place. Pretty much the sum of all US foreign policy in the post-WW2 era is "find the biggest strongman that will play nice with us and put in charge of the rabble that doesn't." The history of the Middle East and South America during the Cold War is pretty much this story cloned and stamped over and over again.

In this situation, I'm not really sure what the best policy is. As much as I dislike realpolitik and prefer letting democracies elect people who don't like us over the strongman policy, Syria has turned into a huge clusterf--k that is probably about to boil over into a decades-long sectarian Shia-Sunni conflict, and if this will ensure a more stable transition in Egypt, then I guess I'm going to have to grudgingly accept it. If it doesn't, though, I can't even summon up the feeling that I'll be able to say, "I told you so."

I feel absolutely nauseated to consider the notion that letting the military run things may result in more freedom than letting popularly elected President do it, but we've got decades of Turkish politics to weigh in as evidence on that. I just don't know. Maybe once the trolls get sorted out in this thread, we'll get some good discussion from people closer to the ground on this. I guess I'll cross my fingers and hope.

What self-respecting nerd isn't interested in international politics?

Or would you prefer to limit us to just "News for Tech Consumers, Matters about Stuff."

I don't. I just remember when I was more ignorant of history.

Oh sure, that will work for very low densities of information, but what about something the size of the Wikipedia? That article states that the Wikipedia has over 2.4 billion words across over 4 million articles. The article has a nice visual image of what would happen if you took all that information and printed it into 1000 page encyclopedia volumes (each containing 8 million characters). It totals over 1800 print volumes.

Now, where are you going to find that much stone writing surface in one place, and how are you going to economically carve it in a reasonable lifetime, and how are you going to arrange it in a fashion that it's human readable/explorable?

Even reproducing something immensely valuable for a recovering industrial society like Machinery's Handbook in stonework would take an immense amount of space, time, and money to do. Just something as simple as the Georgia Guidestones cost about $225,000 to do.

No, try again when you come up with something practical.

A 286? Luxury!
I used to use AppleWorks on an Apple II GS running a 65C816 chip, and that's the system that convinced me that programming was a fun hobby.

You know, and the whole murder / bodytheft thing.

I guess you could try to find a matching service, but given all the factors involved, I doubt you're going to have an easy time finding someone who wants to swap bodies with you who has the same tissue type, same skin color, compatible build, equitable age & health, etc.

Brain meats decay and age too. Unless you're operating off of some bizarre ship of Theseus theory of identity.

Maybe he'll actually be able to raise the standards of ethics and customer relations at Zynga. After all, starting so much closer to their level than the average executive will make it easier for the business culture there to relate to him.

My own freaking mother did this once in a theater and talked for 2-3 minutes. My father and I were appalled. IT was embarrassing, and she didn't really understand that what she did was wrong at first.

Not all of us have tunnel vision, and cell phone screens are bright. Someone texting out of the corner of your eye can be very distracting even if you can't see the screen and only see the glow, especially in stadium-style theaters where multiple rows are easily visible. Plus, even phones on vibrate make distracting noise when text after text comes in.

Oh, I wouldn't, but then again I'd mostly be up in arms about why some jerk decided to reach into my pocket and grab my silenced cell phone from out of my front pocket in the first place. Bad touch! Bad touch!

Any web developer worth his pay should already be coding with graceful degradation in mind. CSS and Javascript should fail gracefully on less capable (or deliberately secured) browsers. Failure to do so may leave people with very minimal browsers, like the deafblind, unable to use a site. It also shuts out people with older browsers, and the days of "This site best viewed in Internet Explorer 6 at a resolution of 1440 x 800" are best left buried and gone.

Your anecdote does not trump statistics. Inter-generational income mobility is the standard measure, and in the US roughly 40% of people born to the top or bottom 20% will stay in that bracket. A country with true mobility would have a 20% chance of staying in any 20% bracket, and countries like Denmark and Norway come pretty close to that.

The US ranks behind France, Canada, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark in income mobility. (And those are just countries I have stats for. The UK was the only country worse than the US in the numbers I've seen for developed nations.) The US is less "the land of opportunity" than much of Europe.

That said, your experience with part of the problem being cultural seems spot on. Not all the barriers in the US are imposed from the outside of people, and there is some rather rank class envy that our inequality has helped foster that turns to excuse-making. Those attitudes do nothing to help people any more than any other form of resentment.