Go talk to some older chemists about the days before strict lab safety. Days gone by were pretty exciting.

The US has accumulated that much waste because it is illegal in the US to reprocess that waste into more uranium pellets. Other countries with active nuclear programs recycle their waste, drastically reducing the volume and half-life of the net waste output.

Yes. Now get off my lawn.

No, there would still be many pirates. Piracy isn't some grand statement against the state of copyright law, it's just a bunch of people who want to be entertained for free.

Those are different circumstances than what is discussed in TFA. The police don't round up 10,000 random people, give them all DNA tests, then charge the people that match with the crime.

You forgot about buying legislation to make your competitors' activities illegal while mandating use of your product.

Mapping for OSM is easy. Set your GPS to record your trail, and record street names and businesses as you drive/walk around. As long as the GPS and whatever device you use for street names have synchronized clocks, the work of matching them up and drawing the streets can be done later.

Then why in the world did you watch every episode?

Maybe once people are used to getting something for free, legitimately or not, you can't get them to pay anything for it. Qualcomm might think $10 is a low price point, but it's still too much if the product represents no value to the customer.

I'd argue the same for hardcore games too, only the hits will be profitable. The difference is in the cost of production. Suppose you can make eight casual games with the person-hours it takes to make one hardcore game. Two things happen: you're more likely to get a hit casual game, and a failed hardcore game is far more expensive.

I don't know the exact numbers, but anyway you look at it casual games will be more profitable and less risky. I doubt market saturation will be a problem. Popular games have a short life span and usually low investment from players, so good, novel games will always rise to the top.

Both are at fault. Kino should give a reasonable error message and suggest a solution when it can't open raw1394 (it might do this, haven't used it for awhile), and Ubuntu should either have the Kino menu entry run it with sudo. Alternatively, either of them could patch Kino to access raw1394 through a privileged, secure intermediary.

This kind of lazy, broken packaging happens a lot in Ubuntu, and probably other distributions too. It's a drawback to using volunteer labor.

You're correct, but do you seriously think the NSA is interested in what's on your hard drive? If they are, it's a good bet that the FBI will seize it before you can destroy it.

I don't understand why cryptography/data destruction discussions end up speculating on the NSA's capabilities. They're irrelevant, because if the US government truly wants information that you have, you've already lost. If you couldn't afford some senators to call off the hunt before it started, you don't have the resources to defend yourself.

Maybe I'm just being cynical, so if you have examples where destroying hard drives has kept someone out of Federal (or secret) prison I'd like to know.

That was the real Shyamalan Twist(tm) of the movie. "I got Mel Gibson and Joaquin Pheonix to star in this steamer, and then I got you to pay me so you could watch it! Surprise!"

It's not just the military. A professor I worked with in college once started getting his entire annual salary on each monthly check. It took him and the department accountant three months of arguing with the university to get it straightened out.

If nothing else, it would make court transcripts more fun to read.