"...true face of capitalism..." in a neat suit. You should see it get down and dirty ;-)

Yep, precisely. So much for convergence...

In 1996, 35 people were shot dead and 21 were seriously injured by a lone gunman in the tourist village of Port Arthur, Tasmania (Australia).

The response by both State and Federal Governments was to introduce some of the toughest gun control laws in the world. Gun crime fell significantly and has stayed low ever since.

Yes, criminals still get guns, yes, the odd "archival" firearm turns up in a crime, but overall, Australia is a safer place to live now because guns are tightly restricted to police, military, sports shooting clubs and limited rural applications.

The snivel libertarians will say, "Guns don't kill people, people kill people," but people with guns kill people more effectively than any other way and we're safer without them.

It's just the media being all "phnrr phnrr, hee, he's on a *dating* site, snicker, he must be weird. My current wife and I met online, did the long distance thing for 18 months, then I moved to her city and we got married 6 months later. She's as sane as you can get and fun with it. My ex and I met through friends (supposedly the "normal way") and she turned out to be an utter nutter. So what is the right way to meet people? The way that works, if he beats the rape rap, good luck to him, I can tell him online dating works.

Exactly, but that won't stop a planet full of petrol addicted monkeys from driving headlong to civilisation's peak oil fuelled destruction.

The drivers are addicted to petrol. Traffic engineers are addicted to petrol. Governments are addicted to petrol votes and petrol excise. Of course, while the frog boils slowly, no effort will be made to escape from the water pot.

The same numpties who rule that Australian Govt services and web sites shall only support Windows and MSIE, so when you have a Mac at home you HAVE to run a Bootcamp partition simply to run the most recent version of MSIE in order to register for certain government services.

It stems from agreements signed by John Howard and Bill Gates in the late 90s.

"The Atlantic ocean is such a dangerous place, Mr Columbus! There's the Sargasso Sea, storms that rage for weeks, even months and quite possibly sea monsters! You'd be mad to try to reach the East Indies by sailing that way, sir!"

So, because there are spammers, we must not try to improve the internet? Perhaps, people working on these sorts of projects might actually have some idea about how to make spamming via the service harder. Perhaps most people aren't actually as seriously affected by spam than the worst case scenario so are willing to make cool stuff anyway.

One man's spam is another's window on a bargain or something interesting to read.

The result of the first human not trying something because of the risks would have led to us still living in caves.

Lets remember a market where Apple were insignificant. We only have to go back to 1997. The evil empire then was Microsoft. They were going to own all the information and make us bow before their encyclopedic might. Recently Google was the "threat", and now Apple are going to eat our babies.<br><br>

Now, far be it for me to be an apologist for capitalism, but companies rise, and companies fall. Academics publish papers on the threat to freedom posed by Bell, by Microsoft, by Google, by Apple and probably Facebook next. The threat is never one particular company, the threat is a lack of regulation born of ideology that big companies shouldn't have to be bound by any legal accountability.<br><br>

There is a social contract. We pass laws to ensure it's protected. Some countries pass too many, some pass too few. Currently the USA is south of the Goldilocks region.

Your mum's cake is MINE! :-)

Exactly why I don't friend up colleagues unless they're actually in my social circle and trusted. As much as I hate Facebook, because my kids use it and most of my friends use it, I have no choice but to be on it, too. That sid, it's a useful tool, and although I'd prefer to use another, more responsible service, I don't lose sleep over privacy. If there are those who would want to use my "information" against me, they can get that all sorts of way, they don't need Facebook, nor does it make it any easier for them. We make it easy for our personal info to be stolen, not the tool we chose. It's like blaming the hammer for your blackened thumbnail.

It's debunkable by considering early carbon mic hearing aids, therapeutic heat packs, you name it.

> but I still prefer the configurability of my desktop Linux systems<br><br>

You still have that, it's called Terminal and it's located in Applications/Utilies/

A rasher of bacon contains enough oil to fry an egg and a couple of rashers of bacon, and tastes better than a brazil nut :-)

Regulation is as important for safety (and prevention of this kind of theft) as competition is important for encouraging better pricing and services. Only a complete wanker would believe you can completely deregulate reticulated infrastructures. It's not the socialists who are unrealistic loonie anachists, it's clearly the capaitalists.

Yes, exactly, arbitrary numerological worship based on an arbitrary interpretation of an arbitrary calendrical system, is hardly the sort of scientific rigor you'd expect from nerds and boffins on /. It's as crap as saying the world will end in 2012 based on the end of a calendar - a calendar calculated by hand which the priest probably couldn't be arsed working out beyond 2012, considering they were doing it with fingers and knotted string.