I've often thought that a lot of the problem with "the government is killing American citizens" is actually a problem with citizenship, not with killing Americans. Generally these American citizens are the children of non-citizens who only spent a limited amount of time in the USA and much of their time they spent growing up was in a society radically different from the US.

Maybe the solution to "killing American citizens" is to not let these people become citizens in the first place? (The first thing that comes to mind is forcing them to choose a country at age 21 if they have dual citizenship, but I'm sure someone could poke holes in that idea.)

Who would work for a company if merely by being a janitor you risk jail time if one of the CEOs gets involved in a stock-dumping scheme.

Limiting liability is the main purpose of having corporations. What you suggest is equivalent to just abolishing corporations.

By your reasoning, locking someone up in jail is just kidnapping.

That's because diets aren't supposed to be temporary.

How does that work? To lose weight from a diet, you need to consumne fewer calories than you use. To stay at the same weight once you've lost enough weight, you need to consume the same amount of calories that you use. These aren't the same thing.

An overweight person would need to make some change to his eating habits, but that change wouldn't consist of making the diet permanent--if he did, he'd just keep losing weight down to nothingness (or at least down to where his body just uses fewer calories because it's thin, which would not be the same as his target weight).

The US has inner cities with high crime rates that skew the average, Not only are these inner cities majority black, which makes these statistics very politically incorrect, they also have the strictest gun laws in the country.

If you don't live in one of those places (whatever your skin color), you don't really need to worry about the "high USA crime rate", And we don't have universal health care outside them any more than we do in them, either.

Steve Jobs had a type of pancreatic cancer that is far more curable than the average variety. If he had gotten medical treatment immediately instead of using alternative medicine, there's a good chance he would have lived. Two minutes Googling would have brought up this information.

It's funny how it sounds like a hipster to say "oh, and savage tribes don't even need iPhones" (or Xbox, or Star Trek, or other things like that). But rephrase it as "they don't have Plato, or Shakespeare, or Dickens" and suddenly it takes on a very different tinge, even though Shakespeare's plays were the lowbrow popular culture of their day.

This is just a mountain made out of a molehill by leftists who are fans of the government of Cuba and don't like when Western governments try to undermine it. I have news for them: doing things like this is the intelligence agencies' *job*. They're supposed to spy; that's why they're called spy agencies, and Cuba couldn't be a more deserving target.

If Cuba doesn't do such things itself, it's only because of lack of budget in these post-Soviet days, not lcak of scruples. (Remember when Cuba used to send "advisors" to Africa?)

(Would I like it if Cuba did that here? No, of course not. But I wouldn't like it if Cuba dropped bombs on us either, yet I'm not foolish enough to say that it's immoral to drop bombs on another country.)

Perhaps nerds see Wil Wheaton as an example of someone acting in a socially awkward manner. Playing the role of a universally hated character is pretty much as socially awkward as you can possibly be when you're someone in the national media, after all.

Reeasing things in dribs and drabs has benefits, though. It probably keeps the public's interest more than releasing the whole thing as a lump; even if public interest is down because of exhaustion, it's probably not as far down as it would be if nothing had been released in a year.

The other reason is that it makes it harder for the government to lie. If you release a document, the government can't lie and deny it because they don't know that maybe tomorrow you'll release a document that could expose the lie. If you release the whole thing in a lump, they could just carefully tailor the lie to match the existing releases.

"Nothing in this section shall be construed to supercede State or local health regulations." I wonder what the state regulations are.

"All parties agreed there's nothing wrong with the peanut butter from a health and safety issue" isn't legally binding on anyone who might later decide to sue the company. At best it might make lawsuits harder depending on what the exact liability rules are. Furthermore, even if they win the lawsuit, fighting one will cost money and bad publicity, especially when the newspapers can use the spin "it's from a plant that was condemned for salmonella poisoning, how irresponsible can this megacorp be?"

If they give away the peanut butter, they stand to lose quite a bit with nothing to gain except a little good publicity (said good publicity going down the toilet if anyone actually sues).

In this context, arbitrarily modding down a post and then being modded up to +5 insightful becomes insightful in the process, because it's a demonstration of how easy it is to abuse a reputation system, and the article is about--wait--reputation systems.

In short: Whoosh.

Of course movie studios don't want their own DVD sales being undermined, but they already allow Netflix to "compete" with the studios own DVD sales by offering physical DVDs for rent, so why wouldn't they allow them to offer virtual DVDs for rent in exactly the same way?

Bennett is apparently clueless enough not to have heard of first-sale.

Studios don't "allow" Netflix to compete by offering physical DVDs for rent. The law allows Netflix to do that and the studios cannot legally stop them (that's how first sale works). The law does not allow Netflix to offer "virtual DVDs".

I remember when Bennett first came here as a teenager. He seemed relatively clued-in for a teenager. Unfortunately, as he got older, his clue level didn't go up and is below par for an adult.

The interviewer who is worth working for is the one willing to give him a job in which he can earn money to eat and pay rent.