I don't think even adbusters would argue entirely against profit ... they're anti-excessive profit, anti-corporation, anti-marketing, etc. but even they recognize we can't all go back to subsitence farming. The ability to profit, and subsequently trade those profits to other people for things you can't produce yourself, is necessary for any viable economic system.

While I agree in part with what you wrote the reality is none of the value of those inventions would have been realized without profit. Hell, if someone hadn't made a profit and donated it to Mendel's monastary he would have died in the street instead of inventing genetics.

Wish I had mod points; that joke is rapidly getting old, but I still thought it was funny here.

There's an overwhelming (>95%) scientific consensus on global warming based on hundreds if not thousands of studies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveys_of_scientists%27_views_on_climate_change).

In contrast, this was a single, poorly done, study.

That paper should never have made it out, so something must be seriously wrong at that lab. Kudos to them for addressing the problem and not trying to sweep it under the rug.

Really, citing wikipedia = troll mod? If your opinion on global warming is so fragile that you need to mod anyone who disagrees with you, maybe it's time to revisit that opionion ...

The overwhelming majority of climate scientists (95+%) agree that climate change is both real and man-made:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

So you can listen to the one outlier instead of almost every climate scientist on the planet if you want, but that's essentially the same as putting your fingers in your ears.

This! My wife went to Mexico recently so I called them to find out what terrible charges she would incur. It turns out text messages are completely free, phone calls are like 20 cents a minute, and data usage ... was either free or similarly cheap, can't remember which.

F**k AT&T.

I'm not saying this isn't ridiculous, but is it really Slashdot-worthy news? AT&T has been screwing its customers over on roaming charges since cell phones were invented, and even extreme cases like this one are a dime a dozen.

Sucks for the OP but it doesn't seem news-worthy to me.

>>No, it doesn't. What the heck would I do with that information? Go pre-emptively shoot people I think might be dangerous?

Not take him up on his offer to babysit?

Your kid has a right not to get molested right? The ability to enforce that right goes down significantly if you can't find out about people in your neighborhood who have molested kids in the past (especially given that child molesters have the highest recidivism rate of any major criminal group).

Just because we haven't done a great job of enforcing that right in the past doesn't mean that privacy rights magically trump it.

No one here is crying about "boo hoo Google has to obey some law and spend some money". We all know Google has more than enough money to cover the costs of this decision, and we understand corporations should follow the law.

The issue is that by making up a new "right", and creating a new legal standard without any legislation to smooth the rough edges, the European court effectively just took away rights from others, like the right of parents to find out their neighbor is a child molester. Because they made a ruling, and not a well thought out law, Google will just blindly respond and deny the rest of us important information.

But how do they get "the right context" without knowing what to read?

Sorry, I should have clarified: I meant in a more systematic way, not just a one-shot Snowden deal.

Does it really matter who we vote for, as far as the NSA is concerned? Any "electable" candidate will just let the NSA keep doing what they're doing.

Even if someone like Al Franken got elected president by some miracle (which is not going to happen) he still couldn't do much unless people also elected a whole bunch of Al Frankens/Rand Pauls to Congress. And that just isn't going to happen (there's a reason why those two are such outliers).

Ultimately the only way we'll ever end NSA malfeseanse (or CIA malfeseanse for that matter) is if we can somehow expose what they do. Without that, we'll change politcians but they'll stay the same.