You apparently failed to read beyond the part you emphasized, as the next words show how silly this whole affair is: "as is enjoyed by foreign governments." All your quote says is, INTERPOL is to be treated the same as every foreign government that has an embassy in the US. There is literally nothing to get excited about here.

You make this claim, that terrorists don't attack because they are deterred by the idea of security, with no evidence. Here's some very good evidence why your theory is bunk: there are literally millions of highly visible targets in this country with no security. Anybody who wanted to could attack them trivially, compared to the relative difficulty of attacking an airplane. And yet, nobody does. There have been a handful of attempts over the past decade (most of them prompted or at least significantly helped by FBI informers), but nothing really successful (unless you consider Fort Hood, which clearly is a separate issue). If there really were all of these potential terrorists in the US, why would they just give up after deciding airlines are too hard? Why aren't they attacking all our undefended targets instead?

Well, there is also the fact that despite decades of work nobody has been able to come up with a polynomial time solution to an NP problem.

As a violinist with a ~$5000 instrument, I can confidently say there is a world of difference even between a $5000 instrument and a $10,000 instrument. However, it's important to note that tonal quality is only one, and not necessarily the most weighted, factor in pricing a violin. Others are age, the fame of the maker, the construction of the instrument, and the condition, all of which possibly imply good tonal quality, but don't necessarily ensure it.

In other words, there are huge divergences in quality in violins, and good violins tend to cost a lot of money (hundreds of thousands of dollars). However, inside particular price ranges (say, $20,000-30,000) the more expensive instrument may not necessarily be the better.

This is just horrible.

While I have great sympathy for the plight of teachers, in this matter it is their fault if things go badly. All the board has done is introduce loopholes through which bad teachers can push malarkey on their students. They have not mandated that ID or creationism be taught (if they did it would be struck down immediately by the courts) and instead are taking the more insidious route of enabling teachers to do it for them.

The point being, if you refuse to teach bad science, the Texas board of education is not forcing you to do so.

There's a name for what you're describing: artificial selection. It has nothing to do with "intelligent design," which is the claim that all life on earth was created (more or less in its present form) by some unknowable entity. Artificial selection is part of evolutionary theory and you would find no competent evolutionary biologist who would deny its existence.

It's amazing how adept the media companies are at shooting themselves in the feet. They've come a long way with sites like hulu such that it is now more convenient to watch shows legally than illegally. If they change that by acceding to the cable companies' demands, the only result will be more piracy and less revenue. Cable companies are going to have to realize at some point that their primary function of providing access to a lot of content that most of their customers aren't interested in isn't going to last much longer, and that they are going to become just another pipe into the home. Attempts like this to forestall the inevitable are going to fail in the long run.

You're ignoring one of the most important jobs of newspapers: investigative reporting. While blogs and news aggregators like Digg and Slashdot do provide a useful service, they don't generate much news. Digg and slashdot primarily link to traditional news sources and would be bereft of content were such organizations to disappear. For an example of the importance of this role, just look at the past few years. If it were not for the investigations carried out by major newspapers (in particular the NY Times and the Washington Post) we would not know about the NSA wiretaps, the Guantanamo abuses, or the role of the Bush Administration in falsifying pre-war intellegence, just to name a few.

In order for a democracy to truly function, a strong, independent press is necessary (look at Russia for a "democracy" where this element is missing). It's hard to see blogs and TV news stations taking over that role from newspapers any time soon.