I still don't think the scenario they present is that far fetched, people today regularly get operations that they personally could not possibly afford, but insurance covers it. Vets returning from wherever we're fighting then getting hooked up, most vets are probably not rich by any definition. Then get a few rich backers like David Sarif and scientific advocates like Hugh Darrow and you can frame it as a quality of life issue, or even a productivity issue.
You're right about the super limbs not being too practical or likely, I would also add illegal to that list, no beat cop wants to face off against Robocop. But I wonder if even slightly stronger limbs might pose problems of their own? Say you have one of your legs replaced with a cybernetic limb, if that one is stronger than your other meat leg, I wonder if you might not end up favoring that one and that screws up you normal gait, generating a whole bunch of new problems.
The kid in the video we see getting abused seems to only have a cyber leg, I'm not sure how much good a single leg is going to be in a fight, or flight for that matter especially if you are hugely outnumbered. Adam is a different story of course, he was clearly built for combat and infiltration.
The cynic in me would readily agree with the scenario where the wealthy wind up with everything but that sounds almost too perfect and cliche. So I think there's room for other possible futures.

Let's ignore for the moment what led to this current mess within the Eurozone. You point out, correctly, that Greece is too poor to service its debt. And yes, for the German government to do whatever is required to get back their loans is to be expected. However, Greece was incapable of servicing its debt five years ago. Yet the subsequent programs, all supported or even demanded by the German government, reduced Greece's ability to pay back at least portions of its debt. At the end of the day, goods and services are what it's all about. And by dismantling the Greek economy, nevermind the Greek society, they actively undermined what they publicly claimed to be working for: a self-reliant Greek economy, capable of financing the needs of Greece. And capable of paying back what is owed.

The question inescapably poses itself: was it done intentionally or are they blinded by ideology?

One doesn't have to be as far left as I am to see that it didn't work, doesn't work, and never could have worked. Even the likes of Krugman and Stiglitz are perfectly clear about it.

Varoufakis, as you note, has been just as clear about this at least since late 2010, when he published the first draft of his Modest Proposal with Stuart Holland. There was a very good discussion about it in Austin in 10/2013 under the topic "Can the Eurozone be saved?" Participants included Varoufakis, Tsipras, Flassbeck, Holland and Galbraith, amongst others. I submitted a short clip back then.

His argument that Germany won't see a dime when Greece is shoved off a cliff, as correct as it is, never had any bite to begin with. The German government, and large parts of parliament, are operating in a parallel universe, economically. Over here, mercantilism is the road to success. Monetarism works. Surplus good, deficit bad. Saving good, spending bad. Everyone should have a current account surplus.

It's horseshit by the gallons, and it's the official economic policy of the largest economy in the EU.

And we're not even getting into the political aspects of it. Throwing a member of the EU into debt bondage, suspending its democracy to please the gods of the market... that's a travesty and a half. Yet it's also inevitable if they insist on going down the road of neoliberalism.

Worst of all, Greece is just the canary in the coal mine, as Varoufakis likes to point out. Greece had plenty of issues before they joined the EZ, but when they chose to adapt the same currency as a much larger economy hell bent on competitiveness, which is the favorite euphemism for Germany's beggar-thy-neighbour policies, they were doomed to be crushed. The rest of the PIIGS are next in line, unless this whole mess explodes beforehand. Maybe Rajoy's Franco-esque repression techniques fail, maybe le Pen wins in 2017, who knows. Maybe Schäuble finds the 100k of bribes that he conveniently forgot about back in the '90s and chokes on them.

Last but not least, 208 billion Euros – that's the projected current account surplus of Germany this year. That's 208 billion Euros of debt foreign economies have to accumulate, so that the German public and private sector can run a combined surplus of €208b. That's the elephant in the room. Systematic undercutting of the inflation target through suppression of unit labour costs and a dysfunctional focus on exports.

So much of progressivism is masked racism. Minorities struggle against many forces that aim to keep them down, and none are as pernicious and challenging to overcome than those posing as defenses of "civil rights."

*canada

Also, in that pose, he needs a flying V guitar...

http://samuraicore.deviantart.com/art/Epic-Pose-171247052

Ex Machina -- have you seen that one?

If not, give it a shot. Best AI-themed movie I've seen in quite some time.

Messed with my head though, big time. It poses the sort of questions that lurk in the back of your head, only to emerge again at night, when you least want your brain to run on all cylinders, if you know what I mean.

The robots were in some ways some of the most reasonable ones I've seen in movies. The balancing when moving in the way shown here would pose definite problems, but they had a variety of locomotions (I liked the fastest rotating one the best) and the joints between the pieces at least looked like they'd be fairly easy to make very solid and robust. Though the fittings between the pieces looked pretty tight, so basically if you got a rock stuck in there... Yeah... Some issues.

Other than that overall the movie was a very meh experience, and I was so disappointed by some of the physics (mostly the basic one, particularly the airlock explosion somehow causing the craft/station to de-orbit... How exactly?) that I almost wrote it off at that point. Luckily the ending kinda pulled it together again so it wasn't on the whole unpleasant, even though they hammered it in way too much.

Enoch does it again...posts a totally irrelevant video. Why? Because if there were a case against Darren Wilson, the feds would have made it. He had a whole platoon of FBI agents trying to make a case against Wilson and they couldn't do it, simply because all the evidence backed Wilson's account. There was no 'hands up, don't shoot'. All total bullshit.

But enoch sounds like he was there, he knows everything about what happened.

If you want to make a case for removing that prosecutor, that's fine. She screwed up. Every rookie cop since Tenn v. Garner knows that you can't shoot a fleeing felon simply because they are fleeing.

However, FYI, you can shoot a fleeing felon if in your judgment the person poses a threat to other people and that threat is immediate.

Most of the posters here, I think, would prefer to watch a video of the proceedings a week later, than make a studied response, mostly based on their hatred of authority and misunderstanding of law and law enforcement.

Yeah, I do talk about it a lot, I like talking about them - rarely do them. The moment has to be just right and just like Doug Stanhope says about DMT - there's hardly a "right" place/time to do it, it's just that amazing.

You should check out a new study about the topic: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/290461.php

"In fact, on a number of factors, the study found a correlation between use of psychedelic drugs and decreased risk for mental health problems."

Remember, just because you ingested a random drug and had a bad experience doesn't mean that many in the tryptamine family pose any health threats - which has been proven many times that they do not. I mean who knows maybe you smoked a shit load of PCP. No one should ever take something that they haven't tested on low doses, know exactly what it is that they are taking and then follow the set & setting rules. Otherwise, obviously - yeah there is potential that you could be doing something harmful to yourself - so don't do it.

How fucking broken does the police force need to be for this to happen to an elderly, skinny man? HOW FUCKING BROKEN?!

The police are not there to give out punishment. They are there to bring the guilty before the courts. They have certain powers to issue tickets, but beyond that it is not their place to decide if someone is to be punished or not. That's the court's job.

Even if they had watched the guy do something illegal, if they have hold of him and he is no threat to them there is no reason, at all, for them to use any force beyond what is necessary to get him before the courts. None. This guy was no threat at all physically. Even if he was swearing and abusive, even if he called the officer's mother a whore, or his kids fucking retards it doesn't matter. The police should be above that. They should record it, make sure there's evidence of it and bring him, safely and with as little force as necessary before a judge.

At what point did America hand over the rule of law to the police? At what point did they make it OK for the police to dole out physical punishment? Even if the guy had done something illegal they can't just choose to hurt him.

The fact that not only had they not seen him doing anything wrong, and the call to them didn't allege any crime, just a suspicious person, and that person turned out to be a skinny Indian granddad who had done nothing wrong and posed no threat at all and the TRAINING OFFICER felt it was OK for him to throw the man to the ground shows the system is completely and utterly broken.

I hope this guy gets the book thrown at him. I hope his life is fucked. I hope this piece of shit goes to prison and gets his fucking ring torn to fucking shreds.

But most of all I hope that that isn't seen as and end to it. I hope that cases like this will lead to real reform of the police service in America because it fucking needs it. I've heard the 'few bad apples' bullshit and it's bollox. This guy did an appalling thing, right out in the open. He clearly believes that it's OK and that he won't get in trouble for it. We can all speculate as to what would happen with this case if there hadn't been video footage of it, and you can believe they'd still be prosecuting if you like. Good for you, you fucking idiot.

All police need to be held to account all the time. they need to be wearing cameras, and there needs to be strong sanctions against those officers who's cameras just happen to have been left off, or keep breaking or whatever else they come up with.

A German shill posed as a BBC reporter.

Smug superiority in the BBC reporter. She took sides and it is not with GREECE Shameful.

Not the entire rest, actually. Just the pro-austerity forces currently running the show (Germany, Finland, Netherlands, Austria, etc). Syriza have strong support in Spain (Podemos), France and Italy, the three major countries on the receiving end of austerity.

If Varoufakis' analysis of the situation in Europe is correct, almost everything the troika (ECB, IMF, European Commission) has done since the beginning of the crisis was counterproductive and the underlying economic theories were wrong, plain and simple.

It would be an open challenge to conservative ideology in European governments and to a sort of market fundamentalism that has been the overwhelming drive behind most major policies enacted over the last two decades, particularly in the last seven years.

Can't have that. The Emperor is not naked. Greece is not bankrupt, austerity leads to growth and deflation poses no risk.

25% unemployment, 50+% youth unemployment, GDP down by 25%, poverty through the roof, dumpster diving on the richest continent on the planet -- whatever led to this (hint: austerity) needs a special place on the wall of things never to be done again.

Yet they want to implement it in France and Italy as well, which is why the conflict with Greece is actually a high stakes game about the future of the entire Eurozone.

Like I said, my own views are heavily biased against austerity for a multitude of reasons. And to see my own government forcing it upon significant parts of the continent makes me sick.

Why would they POSE for a VIDEO?

That's a really tired analogy.

She didn't "leave the doors and windows open". The house was locked.

What you're saying is "don't give your partners a key to your house, they might go nuts later and steal your shit".

There's no middle ground here. She did nothing wrong. NOTHING.

Yeah, she could have "prevented the crime" by not posing for the photos. But she shouldn't have to. If two people want to share intimate photos of each other, it's no-one else's damn business.

Put it this way. Let's say she and her partner decided to have a consensual threesome or do whatever other non-traditional intimate acts society doesn't consider "normal". Should she not do that? After all, her partner might later decide to tell everyone she's a "slut" or a "freak" or whatever. At what point do you start telling people what they should do with their partner?

No, there is a world of difference between having a responsibility for your plight and choosing how you respond.

The correct response to being assaulted, robbed, or otherwise offended against, is never to bow down to what your attackers want. You can apply this logic to all kinds of situations.

Don't want cat calls? Don't wear a sexy outfit.
Don't want to be gay bashed? Don't go into the rural south.
Didn't want to be shot? Shouldn't have published those cartoons.

FUCK

THAT

SHIT

But funnily enough, no-one ever tells a white guy that if he didn't want to be car-jacked, he shouldn't be driving that corvette.

It's pretty fucking awful that the assholes who stole the photos manage to be both puritan and lecherous at the same time. Telling the woman she's a slut for posing naked whilst masturbating to the images. It's the height of hypocrisy.

And meanwhile, you have a bunch of guys telling her what she should or shouldn't do in the privacy of her own home.

I'd like to think there's more substance to this than saying "Look at these equations, maybe the universe is an equation!" Because we've all done that... and what does that mean anyway? In a way, it poses far far more questions than it addresses. If it even addresses anything.

Call reality 'an equation' if you like, but what does that change, and how does that benefit us? Name it whatever you'd like, you're not going to get any information that way.

Maybe i'm a bit skeptical of sensationalism by television.