Well if this gives you any clue, I took a full-sesh of Ecktachrome slides of an ex-grilfriend's 4-wisdom-tooth oral surgery while she was under with her mouth cranked-open wide enough for an no-girths-turned-away frat party....

...from the source material in question;

Matthew 5:38-40
New International Version (NIV)
Eye for Eye

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well.

...and...

Matthew 22:36-40
New International Version (NIV)

“Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”


...so, it may be cherry picking, but those are the cherries they were specifically directed to pick.

He certainly talked the talk, didn't he...

Then again, all this reminds me of the good old days (pre '68) when the Allied forces were still reading most of our (as in "German citizens'") mail and listening in to innumerable telephone calls, all by hand. Ahhh, those were the days...

To have all your communications analyzed and stored automatically by a bunch of algorithms running on a virtual machine in some remote basement is so awfully technocratic, don't you think? Desperatly needs a human touch.

On a more serious note: we've been fighting tooth and nail for almost a decade to get rid of telecom data retention over here, and to see the clandestine mirror image of it laid bare for all to see is... rejuvenating.

The Man will pay us a visit later this month. It'll be interesting to see if any of our officials have the balls to tell Obama how his NSA puts even the Stasi to shame, where surveillance is concerned.

Years ago, I worked in tech support call center. One day the bosses came by and gave everyone a YoYo with the company name on it. 2 broken monitors and one dude losing a front tooth. They banned them and never gave us anything else......

The key bit here being "with intent to render such bank bill, draft, note,
or other evidence of debt unfit to be reissued"

That's not the intent of putting a glittery tooth on it, it just makes it more interesting for the kid.

I pulled a tooth that way once.

Yep, or Race to Witch Mountain or The Tooth Fairy...the first two we saw. After that, I went back to some of the Scorpion King flicks. The Tooth Fairy is particularly amusing...the Rock in a pink tutu is worth the price of admission all by itself.

Defining the term is to me a largely semantic issue. The way I see it, most atheists are also agnostics, and most agnostics are atheists. The dictionary definition I would say is that atheists answer in the negative to questions like "Do you believe in God/That Jesus was the sun of god/that god created the universe/that Muhammed talked to god/other religious claims"

No, I do not believe in any of those things. Thus I am an atheist.

I am also an agnostic, because I can never be sure of anything. There might be tooth fairy for all I know.

Someone who calls themselves "agnostic" and avoids the term atheist, well, I cant speak for them, but I suppose they almost believe in god or something, or think its 50/50 or think that it is impossible to make up your mind.

To me, personally, It seems silly and non-descriptive for my view to use the term agnostic, since I'm agnostic about everything. I have no faith in any religious claim. so non-theistic, or a-theistic is a better fit to describe my view.

I don't believe anyone, any council, or any government, has the right to watch me, for any reason, whether I'm doing anything wrong, picking my nose, scratching myself inappropriately or whatever.

Those people watching me are people the same as me, with no greater purpose or rights. I am against public surveillance in any form.

I don't care about arguments regarding money, catching criminals or loiterers, or what ever trumped up reasons authority or the people can come up with.

It's NONE of their dam business what I do as I walk down the street, sit on the curb or lean against a post. I don't need someone in an office somewhere going through my existence with a fine tooth comb monitoring me. I don't want to end up on surveillance tapes somewhere, archived and forgotten about just so one day they can be discovered and used for some other purpose.

If someday, I'm arrested for spitting my gum on the ground, (not that I chew gum or would spit it on the ground), but I don't want every facet of my life being dissected just so they can piece together and use past footage to create some trumped up footage that portrays me as less than I am.

This is a complete invasion of my personal rights as a human being and an individual. I truly believe this is an overstep of authority by a hierarchy that has been put in place to serve ME and the people who pay the taxes to fund levels of government.

The panel shows just feel very long in the tooth to me. Merlin and Sherlock are bloody awful in my opinion, the kind of ultra-safe shows that are getting commissioned.
Probably doesn't help that my writer friend who's written stuff many times better failed to get a show onto Channel 4. He's bitter about it and so am i on his behalf!

Honestly the top-rated show on Xmas here was that dross Miranda. Check out the clips, it's worse than dog mess.

@Quadrophonic

I'll just add that despite what the media hypes you to believe, far more people die from guns due to suicides than homicides in the U.S. (close to double).

Source: CDC 2009 Injuries Statistics (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr60/nvsr60_03.pdf)

Not that the Sandy Hook shooting wasn't awful--as a parent of a 2-year old and as an uncle with a first-grader nephew, what happened makes me literally sick to my stomach.

I think the problem is the knee-jerk reaction most NRA supporters have when legislation about guns is put on the table... they seem to think legislation about guns = ban all guns and fight tooth and nail to block any legislation from happening. It'll be interesting to see how it plays out this time though... public opinion in the wake of the school shooting seems to be turning, even among gun-rights supporters.

Federal mafia-funded government schools are an expensive racket. No competition means no need for failing schools to adopt successful schools' strategies.

If government schools weren't merely a dispensary for propaganda, fiberals wouldn't be fighting tooth and nail to keep Black kids in failing schools.

Imagine asking her if she has a tooth ache. She would probably stab you with a fork.

@radx No problem on the short comment, I do the exact same thing

I find your question hard to address directly because it is a series of things I find kind of complexly contradictory. IE, market forces causing undesirable things, and the lack of market forces because of centralization causing undesirable things. Not to say you are believing in contradictions, but rather it is a complex set of issues that have to be addressed, In that, I was thinking all day how to address these, and decided on an a round about way, talking about neither, but rather the history and evolution as to why it is viewed the way you see it, and if those things are necessarily bad. This might be a bit long in the tooth, and I apologize up front for that.

Firstly, reactors are the second invention of nuclear. While a reactor type creation were the first demonstration of fission by humans (turns out there are natural fission reactors: Oklo in Gabon, Africa ), the first objective was, of course, weapons. Most of the early tech that was researched was aimed at "how to make a bomb, and fast". As a result, after the war was all said and done, those pieces of technology could most quickly be transitioned to reactor tech, even if more qualified pieces of technology were better suited. As a result, nearly all of Americas 104 (or so) reactors are based on light water pressure vessels, the result of mostly Admiral Rickover's decision to use them in the nuclear navy. This technological lock in made the big players bigger in the nuclear field, as they didn't have to do any heavy lifting on R&D, just sell lucrative fuel contracts.

This had some very toxic effects on the overall development of reactor technology. As a result of this lock-in, the NRC is predisposed to only approving technology the resembles 50 year old reactor technology. Most of the fleet is very old, and all might as well be called Rickover Reactors. Reactors which use solid fuel rods, control rods, water under pressure, ect, are approved; even though there are some other very good candidates for reactor R&D and deployment, it simply is beyond the NRCs desire to make those kinds of changes. These barriers to entry can't be understated, only the very rich could ever afford to attempt to approve a new reactor technology, like mutli-billionaire, and still might not get approved it it smells funny (thorium, what the hell is thorium!)! The result is current reactors use mostly the same innards but have larger requirements. Those requirements also change without notice and they are required to comply with more hast than any industry. So if you built a reactor to code, and the wire mesh standards changed mid construction, you have to comply, so tear down the wall and start over unless you can figure out some way to comply. This has had a multiplication effect on costs and construction times. So many times, complications can arise not because it was "over engineered", but that they have had to go super ad-hawk to make it all work due to changes mid construction. Frankly, it is pretty amazing what they have done with reactor technology to stretch it out this long. Even with the setbacks you mention, these rube goldbergian devices still manage to compete with coal in terms of its cost per Kwh, and blow away things like solar and wind on the carbon free front.

As to reactor size LWRs had to be big in the day because of various reasons, mostly licencing. Currently, there are no real ways to do small reactors because all licencing and regulatory framework assumes it is a 1GW power station. All the huge fees and regulatory framework established by these well engineered at the time, but now ancient marvels. So you need an evacuation plan that is X miles wide ( I think it is 10), even if your reactor is fractionally as large. In other words, there is nothing technically keeping reactors large. I actually would like to see them go more modular, self regulating, and at the point of need. This would simplify transmission greatly and build in a redundancy into the system. It would also potentially open up a huge market to a variety of different small, modular reactors. Currently, though, this is a pipe dream...but a dream well worth having and pushing for.

Also, reactors in the west are pretty safe, if you look at deaths per KWH, even figuring in the worst estimates of Chernobyl, nuclear is one of the best (Chernobyl isn't a western reactor). Even so, safety ratcheting in nuclear safety happens all the time, driving costs and complexity on very old systems up and up with only nominal gains. For instance, there are no computer control systems in a reactor. Each and every gauge is a specific type that is mandated by NRC edict or similar ones abroad (usually very archaic) . This creates a potential for counterfeiter parts and other actions considered foul by many. These edicts do little for safety, most safety comes from proper reactor design, and skillful operation of the plant managers. With plants so expensive, and general costs of power still very competitive, Managers would never want to damage the money output of nuclear reactors. They would very much like to make plant operations a combination of safe, smooth, and affordable. When one of those edges out the other, it tends to find abuses in the real world. If something gets to needlessly costly, managers start looking around for alternatives. Like the DHS, much of nuclear safety is nuclear safety theater...so to a certain extent, some of the abuses don't account for any real significant increase in risk. This isn't always the case, but it has to be evaluated case by case, and for the layperson, this isn't usually something that will be done.

This combination of unwillingness to invest in new reactor technology, higher demands from reactors in general, and a single minded focus on safety, (several NRC chairmen have been decidedly anti-nuclear, that is like having the internet czar hate broadband) have stilted true growth in nuclear technology. For instance, cars are not 100% safe. It is likely you will know someone that will die in a car wreak in the course of your life. This, however, doesn't cause cars to escalate that drastically in safety features or costs to implement features to drop the death rate to 0. Even though in the US, 10s of thousands die each year in cars, you will not see well meaning people call for arresting foam injection or titanium platted unobtanium body frames, mainly because safety isn't the only point of a car. A car, or a plane, or anything really, has a complicated set of benefits and defects that we have to make hard choices on...choices that don't necessarily have a correct answer. There is a benefit curve where excessive costs don't actually improve safety that much more. If everyone in the USA had to spend 10K more on a car for form injection systems that saved 100 lives in the course of a year, is that worth it? I don't have an answer there as a matter of fact, only opinion. And as the same matter of opinion on reactors, most of their cost, complication, and centralization have to do with the special way in which we treat reactors, not the technology itself. If there was a better regulatory framework, you would see (as we kind of are slowly in the industry despite these things) cheaper, easier to fabricate reactors which are safer by default. Designs that start on a fresh sheet of paper, with the latest and greatest in computer modeling (most current reactors were designed before computer simulations on the internals or externals was even a thing) and materials science. I am routing for the molten salt, thorium reactors, but there are a bunch of other generation4 reactors that are just begging to be built.

Right now, getting the NRC to approve a new reactor design takes millions of dollars, ensuring the big boy will stay around for awhile longer yet. And the regularly framework also ensures whatever reactor gets built, it is big, and that it will use solid fuel, and water coolant, and specific dials and gauges...ect. It would be like the FCC saying the exact innards of what a cellphone should be, it would be kind of maddening to cellphone manufacturers..and you most likely wouldn't have an iPhone in the way we have it today. NRC needs to change for any of the problems you mentioned to be resolved. That is a big obstacle, I am not going to lie, it is unlikely to change anytime soon. But I think the promise of carbon free energy with reliable base-load abilities can't be ignored in this green minded future we want to create.

Any rate, thanks for your feedback, hopefully, that wasn't overkill

Seems pretty plain to me. Joss didn't say vote for Obama, he's just having some fun with Romney. Free country, he's allowed to have an opinion and if that turns off a few of his fans, then I don't think he's going to lose sleep over it. He wrote the fucking Avengers script! I think he'll survive somehow.

That said, the election system in this country sucks, and changing it is going to require a monumental effort on the part of a hell of a lot of people. Congress will fight tooth and nail to preserve the status quo, because it serves them best. Until we get a system that isn't designed to result in a 2-party system, we will always have this situation of choosing between Asshole #1 and Asshole #2.

It's kind of sad that the one thing that Congress will show true bipartisan support on is saving their own asses.