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Oh f*cking christ let's not go down that road... Reading about this a bit more, it sounds like ^^^ came out after being elected, as opposed to Polis who's running for his freshmen term in Congress as openly gay. I don't know about the rest of the district, but there's a certain degree of resentment about his voting record in Boulder. That said, all that resentment aside you can certainly expect the people around here to support him as Senator. Whatever resentment there was towards Udall is vested several dozen times upon Schaffer. Most people here are extremely bitter about Allard and Republicans in general. The 2nd District is heavily Democratic. I don't even know who the Republican candidate is, nor does it really matter. The election itself is a bit of a dog and pony show as a Republican doesn't stand a snowball's chance in hell of getting elected here.

Perhaps I should've said comparatively little substance. That said, here's a little perspective: 440,000 Americans die from cigarette smoking every year, despite the fact that many of the most potent carcinogens in cigarettes are preventable. That's the equivalent of 160 9/11s every single year. 1.67 9/11s worth of Americans have died in Iraq since 9/11. I don't mean to downplay the lives that were lost in 9/11. Thousands of innocent civilians needlessly lost their lives. But at this point the whole thing is so ridiculously overblown that we've lost focus of things that really matter.

Jared Polis is the Democratic nominee for Congressman for Colorado's 2nd congressional district, which just so happens to be the one I live in. He's amassed quite the personal fortune in the local startup community and runs a local startup incubator called TechStars. He's also openly gay. I think he's a pretty interesting individual and pretty much a shoe-in, given his constituency and the present political climate. Hopefully he'll be received well in Congress, provided he wins.

RAM is where every program that's running on your computer (including the operating system kernel) lives

That's a bit of a strawman, considering no one was arguing that America is a religious state... until now! America is a religious state.

And how do you prevent a middle man who's of age from redistributing to minors? That's generally how it works... it's not as if existing penalties for selling to minors aren't severe enough. I always get carded when going to a new liquor store.

That's pretty silly. Have you tried informing them that it's more dangerous to drive a car than to live near a nuclear reactor?

First I start with sriracha, then I add... more sriracha... My coworker made some awesome habanero peach sauce she called "peach napalm"... that stuff was the bomb

America sure has a love/hate relationship with alcohol. It's quite bizarre to go to countries like Japan where you can buy beer out of a vending machine on practically any street corner. That said: there's retarded advocacy groups who think America's problems with alcohol can be solved by raising the drinking age or lowering the BAC at which you're legally considered intoxicated. Both of these are completely stupid moves with no merit. The drinking age should be 18. Period. College age students are going to drink, and they can either do so at their leisure, or binge drink because the opportunity presents itself and they can't do so at their leisure. Also: people are going to drink and hop in their car. Is it really reasonable to pull over someone who's had one or two glasses of wine? Are they really the problem? I've literally witnessed students drinking themselves nearly to death. One of the members of my class in college drank herself to death. This is really, really stupid. Beyond that, I'm morally opposed to the way the present drinking age was establish. The federal government literally blackmailed all of the state governments into raising the drinking age. That sort of shit should be illegal.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080819/ap_en_ce/people_keith_obama;_ylt=An7txlypEiZepe1.laSBRZRxFb8C This Southern Democrat says Obama is the man for him. Wow. This after "Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue?" (title modified to include Harvard serial comma) The times they are a'changin?

Oh jesus... finally watched this shit (and not in its entirety) My head hurts...

I'm not a proponent of tapping it (I mean, normally I'm a proponent of tapping all sorts of things, but...), however on the pantheon of "things that will actually accomplish lowering oil prices" it's certainly far, far above offshore drilling.

I prefer the South Park / Daily Show approach of making as much light of 9/11 as possible. As far as national tragedies go it's pretty much a ton of hype and very little substance. I can understand the rationale for Obama and McCain avoiding it. Possibly a little something called "political correctness"...

Oh no! Groups! Asking for things! As I understand it there's a fairly large vocal group asking for Bush to be impeached, but that's accomplished squat. Remind me about that when it's national law...

I'm a bit taken aback by Gore's statement. He's effectively arguing that the oil crisis, economic crisis, and environmental crisis are intrinsically linked. Given that, would it be unreasonable for a Laissez Faire advocate to argue that the market will eventually solve the problem? Oddly enough, I'd almost agree that it's not too unsound to sit around waiting for the market to solve the problem. At the very least it's a defensible policy position. I'm rather surprised Penn & Teller didn't try to argue that on their episode on global warming...

Penrose attempts to apply Godel's Incompleteness Theorem to the problem in consciousness in a completely unfounded manner. As I'm not a mathematician, I'll defer that argument to Solomon Feferman: http://math.stanford.edu/~feferman/papers/penrose.pdf Furthermore, I think Penrose is really missing the big picture in regard to Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, a picture spelled out quite well by Hofstadter. Godel's Incompleteness Theorem is fundamentally rooted in self-referentiality. It requires a statement in the logical notation of Principia Mathematica (PM) be encoded as a number (a so-called Godel number). Furthermore, it requires that Godel Number be self-reflexive, i.e. there exists a Godel Number which codifies a statement in PM which refers to its own Godel Number representing the same statement in PM (ad infinitum). Godel never finds such a number, he merely proves it exists. However his proof relies on a self-referential system. Godel numbers, while being numbers, refer to statements in PM, and by codifying a statement into a number, a statement in PM can refer to itself. Penrose's proofs completely omit the self-referential aspect of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, and focus on consciousness as a self-contained, non-self-referential system. This is foolish. Above all else, consciousness is self-referential. And again, I'll defer to Hofstadter to make that argument. Again, our brains aren't formal logic systems! If you're looking for a mathematical system to compare our brains to, they're Bayesian classifiers (Jeff Hawkins argues this point about the neocortical column extensively in his book On Intelligence, from a neurophysiological point of view). Our brains reduce problems to sets of probabilities. We don't prove anything in our own heads. Instead, we use the power of Bayesian inference to come to conclusions. This means we can "solve" problems that formal logic systems can't, because our solutions are probabilistic, not formal proofs. You're misusing "qualia". Qualia are perceived qualities. They're much more closely synonymous with noumena. The sensory inputs are nociceptic: they merely represent data coming from our senses and are not directly perceived. Perception occurs at a much higher level, namely after the sense data has been processed both by the various sense areas of the brain and the lower levels of the cerebral cortex. I'm most certainly a materialist, although in some regards you could think of me as a monist. I fall into a school known as "emergent materialism" or "epiphenominalism". I don't believe consciousness and brain activity are synonymous. I do believe there's a direct mapping between brain activity and the contents of consciousness. That said I do believe our reactions are derived through a combination of sense data and memory. There's a symbolic abstraction between the two. The physical states involve electrical and chemical signals moving between systems, and changes in physical structure. Consciousness occurs at a level of symbols being exchanged between systems, which can fundamentally be mapped to the underlying structures. You could say the same about a microprocessor. It has no notion of electrons entering a complex structure of silicon and germanium substrate which forms an ALU. It understands that 1 + 1 = 2. No? Again, why does the substrate matter, so long as the symbolic systems it implements remain the same. Penrose claims to be a monist. However, he is certainly quite unfamiliar with Kant... [sheepish] I tried reading Kant as a primary source and gave up after reading part of his Prolegomena because I could not understand his terminology and reference points like someone in his own time could [/sheepish] I wouldn't recommend reading Kant directly. You might find this more palatable: http://books.google.com/books?id=fLKXJitd7FsC&pg=PA161&lpg=PA161

That broaches the question of why they would carry medication they don't intend to sell. If you're a fundie pharmacist who doesn't like the idea Preven, don't stock it. Simple as that.

Would nuclear reactors fall under this bill? It depends what "clean coal" technology you're talking about. Technologies like IGCC: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Gasification_Combined_Cycle ...produce substantially less CO2 than simple coalfire plants and have a much higher efficiency. They work by first converting coal to a gas, then both burning the gas and using the waste heat of the process which synthesizes the gas to turn turbines. The resulting waste comes in the form of slag, water, and CO2, but at levels substantially less than simply burning the coal.

How would you feel if a doctor refused to perform a procedure because a patient was black, but was perfectly willing to perform the same procedure on white people? I certainly think doctors should have the right to unilaterally refuse to perform certain procedures. However, when they start discriminating about what procedures they perform on the basis of things like gender, race, or sexual orientation, I have to draw the line.

Well then, call me paranoid for being worried about the safety of nuclear weapons during a military coup. I mean... suppose the coup fails? What happens if there's a public uprising against the military? Forgive me, but I have the utmost concern for the safety and security of nuclear weapons. Regarding Russian weapons: they were manufactured by a superpower. They're protected by access codes, and short of extracting the implosion lens and building your own control circuitry for the detonation, which is one of the most difficult aspects of constructing a nuclear weapon in the first place, they aren't going to be detonated except by someone who knows those codes. I don't know what safeguards are in place preventing the detonation of Pakistani nukes (or for that matter the design: are they using an implosion lens, or are they simple "gun" designs?), but I seriously doubt they have the same protections as Russian nukes.

I think the question is: would they offer the same service to straight patients but refuse it to lesbians? If so, I really have little sympathy for the doctors. They're selectively providing care based on a patient's sexual orientation.

According to the DOE "access to the Pacific, Atlantic, and eastern Gulf regions would not have a significant impact on domestic crude oil and natural gas production or prices before 2030" I don't have a source, but I think we can expect the Strategic Petroleum Reserve will have an effect before that.

Indeed, thanks!

I can think of a much better example than Carter...

Civil war in a country with nuclear weapons is a bad time no matter how you slice it...