I pay taxes on my profit on Apple shares/dividends, does that blow your mind?

I actually get a heap of stuff in return for paying taxes too, roads, education, emergency services, water, electricity supply, security, aquaducts. i.e. a decent civilization. Apple supposedly wants to be home based in that decent civilization and yet doesn't want to contribute to its upkeep like the rest of us.

No. That's simply wrong.
Cops MAY need to use more force than they are met with, they certainly do NOT need to escalate to violence every time they take someone into custody (as your post suggests)...if they did, why didn't they beat up and/or shoot the Governor of Texas?!?
There's a huge range of action they can take between doing nothing and using overwhelming deadly force. Cops that think they should use the maximum amount of force possible, to 'protect themselves' should not be cops, those are cowardly bullies with immunity and guns.
If the proper thing is to use the most force possible, why are cops given pepper spray, tasers, batons, hand to hand combat training, radios, Kevlar gloves, etc. ? In this instance, ANY of those could have been tried before shooting someone retreating, surrendering, and far enough away for any of them to be tried.
From my viewpoint, this was likely more about the cop being pissed he was ignored when he told them to stop than any fear he had of two youths that were leaving the scene, and about them 'respecting his authoratah'. That's not an acceptable reason to shoot a person....even if they're black.
For you, as a cop, to claim you should always be MORE violent than your suspect means YOU are the violent criminal (or at best, an advocate for being violently criminal)...so perhaps a cop needs to come to your home based on an anonymous tip and shoot you in the head?!?...why would you say not?...you're armed and angry and advocating deadly violence!
Cops are supposed to DE-escalate violent situations, not aggravate and escalate them. It's not just sad but frightening to hear you, a self professed long term cop, to say the exact opposite. Once again I'll ask, where are you located. If you are representative of the police there, I truly want to avoid your stomping grounds.
To me, your stance means I should meet officers with deadly force, because if they decide they 'fear' me, they'll use deadly force on me without hesitation, so killing them first is always self defense. I don't think you thought it through to conclusion saying they should always be MORE violent.

I was a little disappointed he didn't really slide into home base, but it was still a great video and nice landing.

Home base- where the fog cleared and clarity set in. I would move back in a heartbeat.

Unclear to me why so much hatred. Seems that if they're losing money due to a poorly-conceived pricing structure and increasing licensing costs, they have the choice of A) changing their pricing structure (a.k.a. raising prices and losing lots of customers) or B) continually losing profits until they have to shut down.

Don't get me wrong. I dropped their DVD service as a result of the price increase and am not happy about it, but their adjustment seems less about greed and more about staying in business and continuing to mold the future of home-based entertainment.

Since I had no "home base" video to work with or enough information, I posted a video that includes ALL clips I could find of the Edmonton,Canada meteor/meteorite. Hope that is what you were posting.

One afternoon in summer 2005, I was practicing drill in full dress with the Ceremonial Guard in Ottawa on a soccer pitch at Carleton University campus (CG's home base) when the Snowbirds gave us a low pass directly overhead, then came back and did it again. It was clear they knew we'd be there at that time and chose to give us a salute. A great moment.

Bottled-water drinker here. She makes a convincing argument, but in her push to convince me, it seems like she contradicted herself. First she says that most tap water is cleaner than bottled water. Then later on she says that lots of tap water is polluted. Well, which is it?

The smart move is to buy a home-based reverse osmosis system for a few hundred bucks so you can control the quality of your tap water yourself.

As a viewer to the site - I don't need to follow through to the video host site but I can if I feel the need to.
That is what brought me here to start with, I don't even know how I found it in the first place. I liked that all the great videos could be found in one place.

Now that I am more than just a "Viewer" and have become a "Poster" as well, Videosift has sent me off into video sites I never had need of before looking for the gems. So now it does both. It sends me to the other sites and encourages me to watch videos on other popular sites as well as see their ads (great for them) and still brings me back as a landing pad or home base.

I may go to LiveLink, I may go to Youtube, or Break or wherever... but the Sift seems to be my home.
So after reading the term "Girl Births Martian Child" on another video site, I am very likely to "Take the Martian Child to my Leader" here on the sift!

That makes me so sad about Red Robin. Being a University of Washington alum, this was my home-base for Red Robin visits.

I just took my wife back there 10 years post-college for us to reminisce our college experience. The view is amazing and the service was exceptional.

I have great memories in that place. None of the other chain-style Red Robin's capture the spirit that this one has.

It's a shame that they're doing this (closing it).

The problem with decentralizing power generation is that there really -are- economies of scale here. Large generating plants have significantly better efficiencies in all our current technologies. Centralized plants also offer a cheaper avenue for cleaning the results, whether that means CO2 scrubbing, filtering soot, or handling nuclear waste products. Perhaps fuel cells can change that...perhaps not. But in my mind, efficiency is more important than decentralization simply for the sake of decentralization.

People will support electric cars when electric cars are available that have a reasonable range, can be conveniently and quickly recharged, and have a reasonable price tag. That's likely to be quite a while, given our current battery technology. The question of where the electricity is generated has nothing to do with it.

>> ^MaxWilder:
I'm ecstatic about anything that moves away from fossil fuels toward home-based decentralization. When people start feeling like they are making their own electricity, they will be more likely to support electric cars. Anything to reduce the value of oil will make this a much better world.
Of course I would love to see less CO2 as well, but I'll take any steps in that direction as a giant leap forward.

I'm ecstatic about anything that moves away from fossil fuels toward home-based decentralization. When people start feeling like they are making their own electricity, they will be more likely to support electric cars. Anything to reduce the value of oil will make this a much better world.

Of course I would love to see less CO2 as well, but I'll take any steps in that direction as a giant leap forward.

The idea that banning guns to make the country safer is NOT laughable when you have a civil society that enjoys its freedoms and doesn't have guerilla forces as part of a rebellion. The reason those people exist is basically to "Fight the Man" and last time I checked, the U.S.A. doesn't exactly have that problem.

Hi Shepppard! Thanks for completely ignoring the factual basis of my post. Here it is for you AGAIN, stated more simply for you:

1: Firearms have been smuggled into prisons. They can be smuggled into a country. If they are illegal then by definition the only private citizens that can get their hands on them are criminals.

(hurp hurp, it's the old "if guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns" bit.)

2: Weapons are assembled in the middle of nowhere (jungle camps, Pakistani villages, etc) and do not require extremely specialized machinery to make. Even if they could not be manufactured openly, and even if they could not be smuggled in, criminals would still have no trouble manufacturing firearms and ammunition. To put a stop to this, you'd have to ban or regulate a lot of tools and materials that have many constructive uses.

This is why it's vital that private citizens retain the right to carry firearms. Because you can't stop them from getting them.

Private citizens require firearms to make sure they can defend themselves against criminals? Seriously? you don't think people carry guns when they break into peoples houses? That's just naive.

Where did you get the idea that most break-ins are committed by people packing heat? I don't doubt it happens that some do have guns, but from all the break-in cases I've heard, the usual burlger/rapist is armed with something that's less obviously a weapon (and not as expensive as a gun), like a heavy pipe, wrench, or a knife.

If you're that worried that someone's gonna break into your house, sleep next to a bat. If neither side has a gun, it's basically which ever one has the bigger melee weapon wins, and last time I checked, if you're breaking into someones house, you don't take a claymore, They draw a knife, you pick up the bat. Problem solved.

Well, I guess we'll all have to yield to your vast experience and/or research in the field of "home defense melee combat".

1: Failing that, saner people will realize that someone breaking into your house is going to have the advantage of surprise and will probably be stronger than you (as an expert in this field I'm surprised you didn't mention strength as a deciding factor in melee combat). Making you SOL.

It's much less of a problem if you have a gun though. You might be terrible at baseball bat fencing after being woken up midway through your sleep cycle and fighting someone on nocturnal sleep cycle, but that is less of an issue with a gun, nor do guns care how strong you are.

2. If he brings friends, then you're almost certainly SOL.

A gun solves the issue of being outnumbered nicely, since fights end sooner it's less likely you'll end up fighting two people at the same instant, and makes you more or less immune to being immobilized by one while the other attacks (because you can kill them before they get that close).

Last but not least this has nothing to do with someone "breaking into our house". The chances of someone being a victim of any kind of robbery are very low, and in any case it's not robbery that's the problem.

This has to do with your personal safety wherever you are. If there was a way to tell a burglar from a rapist or murderer, I'd be all for letting them take whatever they want and letting the police sort things out, or not. Even if I don't get my stuff back, it's not worth killing someone over. Unfortunately, the only way to tell ahead of time is let them rape or murder you.

In addition to all the other terrible flaws with your "baseball bat" idea, it's utterly useless when you're anywhere other than at home or home base. Last I checked, people also get mugged, and you'll get funny looks carrying a baseball bat around, in addition to it being completely ineffective against a decent mugger/rapist/murder/gang, which again will have the advantage of surprise.

Again, this has nothing to do with my personal worries. The chances that any of this happens to anyone are very low, but should it happen you're completely utterly fucked without a gun.

I contend that passing a law forbidding private citizens from carrying firearms leads to situations where one person can kill many, with the many helpless. This is unconscionable.

oh, and as for your "Extra lols", Really? Do you think that the secret service doesn't care that there's loaded firearms at a rally for the president?
are you THAT naive? your country has a bit of a track record for assassinations and attempted assassinations. If there's ANY person carrying a weapon at a rally, you can bet your ass they're being watched like a hawk.

Yeah, except if you read the article you'd know the secret service wasn't worried because
A) the rallies took place well away from where the president was and they of course had that area secured (no firearms are allowed in a federal venue). As for our track record for assassinations, I can't recall one that had the assassin carrying openly while loudly demonstrating. Assassins like to keep a low profile, but I guess you wouldn't know that since you majored in "home defense melee combat" and not "underhanded techniques of murder for hire".

"There's a reason that the police force was invented, and contrary to common belief, no, it was not to go around tazing people."

Not relevant, even if true.

The police can't protect you unless they're aware that you're in danger, and they're near enough to help. Those two facts mean there would have be many, many more police to make them an effective means of self defense. As it is, they are not an effective means for the defense of your person.

Fun fact: retired police officers and military love carrying and owning firearms. I wonder why?

Really, your post shows that you're about as in touch with reality as the right wing idiots that watch fox news.

It's almost utterly useless to try and argue with people like this because logic doesn't come into it. You can through everything at them...:
* the definition of 'marriage' as they say it is not some set in stone thing.
* How does a couple of gay people getting married affect them AT ALL?
* How can you try and suggest that male/female marriage is any sort of bedrock with the current levels of divorce

And as MaxWilder says, it's not the man/woman marriage that forms good, well rounded offspring, it's a stable, loving family of any description. As long as there are parents (or one) who give the children love, respect, support, guidance, an open ear, a stable, known home base to feel secure in... then you're going to end up with good kids. Raise them in a male/female family that either breaks up or daily demonstrates lack of respect or time or love and you're going to get shit kids.

Same can go with a gay family too... not trying to suggest that all gay families are instantly perfect, but it's not some defining thing: mother/father = good family.

I think there's a lot more to do with people, of any type of coupling, not taking marriage seriously enough, not actually thinking whether they really do want to spend the rest of their life with this person, and many times (seen it myself with friends), the belief that being marriage will change things for the better. Plus, back in the day there were probably just as many, if not more, bad marriages, but people stuck with them due to the shame of divorce... so instead of breaking up and being happier, you had a couple who hated each other staying together 'for appearances'... which leads to kids getting the wrong idea of how people should treat each other.

Is it just me, or does Sarah Palin know more about economics than Obama, Biden, McCain, and most people posting here?

from issues2000.org:
Firm believer in free market capitalism. (Nov 2006)
Encourage small business growth by reducing business taxes. (Nov 2006)
Health care must be market-and business-driven. (Jan 2008)
Doctors should manage health care, not bureaucracies. (Jan 2008)
More affordable health care via competition. (Nov 2006)
Home-based assistance more cost-effective than institutions. (Nov 2006)
Eliminate taxes that inhibit business. (Jan 2008)
No income tax; no taking the people's dividends. (Oct 2006)

I will praise jesus on sundays if she gives me a free-market. I think her sheltered, backwards, small-minded values have kept her in a vacuum, safe from the perverse notion of equality of outcome which has infected contemporary American philosophy.