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Comment Re:Seems strange to admit publicly. (Score 1) 107

No primary source suggests that the effect would be partisan—that's editorializing by Daring Fireball writer John Gruber. The GOP letter, which is somewhat internal to the RNC fundraising effort, simply provides an estimate of their own lost revenue.

If you're an unknown sender, you go into the bin. Simple as.

Comment Re:Problems with printing fire arms (Score 2) 100

For what it's worth, simply painting a normal gun to look like a toy has been attempted before, too. But I agree that conversions like this must be pretty spooky if you're in law enforcement. Still, toy gun form factors needn't be the only gimmick; consider the chaos a briefcase gun could unleash without scrutiny. The sky is the limit for designing concealed weapons if one is sufficiently imaginative and determined.

Comment Re:I don't like the phrase 'Conspiracy Theory' (Score 1) 159

Nope, conspiracies don't ever happen.

The 9/11 hijackers did not plan their actions in advance. Just by sheer coincidence, 19 people just happened to be taking those four plane flights. And by coincidence (no coordination) they all got the same spontaneous idea at the same time, an idea they had never spoken about before: let's hijack the plane and crash it.

Crazy people babble on about "evidence" like people taking flight lessons, sharing vehicles, etc. but we know those things cannot possibly be true, because conspiracies are not real.

If you have a hypothesis of x and then find lots of supporting evidence for x and it becomes the prevailing explanation, that creates a theory of x, but there's one exception: when x is a conspiracy. Conspiracies are a special case, because they don't really happen.

Comment Re: You keep using that word. I don't think it mea (Score 5, Informative) 95

"Penultimate" isn't a synonym for "ultimate"—it means the thing before the ultimate. Likewise we have penumbra for the blurry edge of a shadow (umbra). This results in some truly special words like "antepenult," meaning "the thing before the thing before the final thing," commonly used when discussing where the stress/accent falls in a Greek or Latin word.

"Invaluable" does indeed mean "not able to be valued" when analyzed morphologically, but the standard usage of it is indicating something is beyond value, i.e. infinitely or inestimably valuable. A value of zero is still a value, after all.

"Inflammable" however actually means "able to be inflamed," as in "put in flame" or "set on fire." The confusion comes from assimilation of the Latin preposition "in" (which we have as "in" or "on") instead of the more typical prefix "in-" (which demarcates negation.) You don't have to look very far for other words where "in" doesn't mean "not": indicate, inherit, imply, investigate, indict, involve...

Comment Does it matter? (Score 4, Insightful) 43

Regardless of whatever budget Congress sets, the majority party has already been clear that they have no intent to enforce it. If the president uses the NASA money for something else, or even just puts it into his own personal pocket, we can be confident that he won't be impeached, and if impeached, he won't be convicted.

The only thing that matters is the total budget. The president is free to spend that total however he wishes. This isn't the law as written, but it's the law defacto. If voters have a problem with that (do they?) they can choose a different party to be the majority.

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