Okay, so let's limit this to what you two agree on.

"There are tons of crappy cops, yes."

"and they have power over you."

Based on those two alone, I personally would agree that "Thus, you must be on your guard against bad cops, and you must assume that any cop interaction will go wrong" is a prudent course of action.

Oh, and as a bonus: "They have not taken responsibility as a group and purged their ranks of bad cops" [citation]

I agree that there are a lot of cops that are just trying to do their job. There are also a lot of them who don't mean any harm but still really enjoy the power that comes with the job. The biggest way I have found to tell the difference between good and bad cops is that if you have to deal with a cop, odds are they are one of the bad ones, as the good ones tend to leave normal people alone and/or give them some slack. If you know a cop personally, they are more likely to seem to be a normal person, partially because you don't see them at work, but partially because there isn't the selection bias of being one you have to deal with.

I agree, Ivanova is not a good example of a regular woman. I'll give grandparent that Doctor Crusher is, but Ivanova is another example of the ultra-tough female, just like Tasha Yar on TNG.

Fortunately we got Wesley Crusher on TNG rather than the originally planned Leslie Crusher. That would have left the first season of TNG with an ultra-tough female, and ultra-smart kid female, and every admiral being either female or black. Honestly, TNG was ridiculous in how "equal" women were portrayed, particularly considering that the top three officers (Picard, Riker, and Data) were male.

No.

Yes, I can get a start menu replacement, but I shouldn't have to, and how long before programs stop adding a start menu item by default? This isn't a solution.

As far as booting into the desktop, I REALLY don't care. This is a single click of difference.

I have used Windows 8, and it just keeps kicking you in the shins all over the place. Even if I WANTED some of the things they are doing, they did them in such a bad way that the implementation becomes a problem and ruins them. The worst example of this is the charms bar. I can go to the hot corner and activate it, but then when I try to move my mouse pointer down to one of the icons (in the MIDDLE OF THE SCREEN) it keeps disappearing. Why? Because if I move my mouse off of the narrow window when going halfway across the screen to get to the icon I want to push, it disappears. This is a horrendous implementation of what might be an okay idea.

So, is the quality of older computers delaying new PC purchases? Absolutely. However, if I was in the market for a new PC but didn't absolutely have to have one, I would be explicitly delaying my purchase until Windows 9 came out. My guess is that Windows 8 will be remembered like Windows Vista, a bad implementation of a new idea that required a sequel to actually get right. The worst part is that most of the problems in Vista (driver issues) were fixed naturally by time. The problems in Windows 8 will actually require Microsoft making changes to the OS.

I basically agree, but what I would do is:

1.) Put something like this on its own page during the install:

This software was created by ****. If you did not purchase a license then you are using the software illegally. If you did not purchase a license, please visit ****.com (link) and purchase a copy.

2.) Of course, also include a reasonable EULA that you make them agree to. This lets you prosecute egregious offenders.

3.) And finally, if you have an easy way to tell pirated versions from non-pirated, re-display the install page periodically (for instance, when installing updates.) This (and this alone) is a reasonable reason to have an install key. It isn't to activate the software (you don't even have to require a call home to use the key), it is to tell if a bunch of people are re-using the same key, and to encourage them to purchase a legal copy. By simply using this to display a purchase encouraging page, you aren't even really inconveniencing users who somehow are detected as having pirated versions in error.

My take on the Kagan/Alito concurring opinion was basically "Either Congress or the court (not sure which) screwed up before, but that's no excuse for screwing things up more here."

It seems to me that Kagan/Alito really didn't want first sale outside the US to permit import, but that was no excuse for making first sale not apply AFTER the item was legally imported into the US, which is what ruling the other way would effectively do. More or less, they wanted to vacate "Quality King" and even invited Congress to do so through legislation.

My advice is to keep your S2, which is, in my opinion, the best phone ever made.

It had good battery life, was the right size (both screen size and thickness), had an awesome non-pentile AMOLED screen and a fast processor.

The only really compelling thing you get with a new phone is LTE, which isn't a big deal if you're on AT&T or particularly T-Mobile and have good HSPA+ coverage.

I hate that I had to trade my S2 for an S3 when I switched carriers. I like the resolution, but the phone is just too big. I can't understand why I should want a 5-inch phone like the S4.

While in many ways I think the fight has advantages to being fought at the state level, there is one area where I disagree.

Under US law, marriage is a contract. Under the commerce clause, the Federal government has the exclusive power to regulate interstate commerce.

The Federal courts SHOULD come out and say that a contract entered into in one state MUST be honored in another state. This is generally accepted practice, but for some reason marriage contracts are treated specially, and this anomaly should be rectified.

Without this kind of contract law protection, traveling from state to state becomes legally risky, which is not what the founders intended in creating a single nation.

There's a lot here, so let's break it down.

Suppose someone who disagrees with an organization I am a member of decides to:

1.) Sue the organization
Can't stop this, the judiciary should ensure that my organization prevails against a frivolous lawsuit and recovers its costs.

2.) Picket the organization
Go right ahead. Don't block the door or actually threaten or harm anyone.

3.) Launch a media campaign
Go right ahead.

4.) Publish the membership list.
This gets a little tricky. Do I have a right to privacy in who I support or not? What about support with my dollars? Do certain orgnaizations have special status in this area? Should they? Where did these opponents get the membership list?

5.) Attack my web site.
This is illegal. The government should prosecute as such. It is, however, a private decision to do so.

Of the 5 items you note, only one of them (publishing membership lists) represents an appropriate use of government prior restraint. In two other cases (lawsuit and web site attack) it is sufficient for the government's role to be after the actions of those who disagree with me.

In the remaining two, I fully support others right to publicly disagree with me or an organization I support.

Also, NONE of these is affected by whether or not the organization I support's views reflect either what is legal or popular in current society.

I had a Barton 2500+ that I replaced a few years ago due to speed issues. This was primarily due to not being able to play 1080p video. There was pretty much nothing else that I needed the machine to do performance-wise that it couldn't.

PCI-Express was introduced around 2004 or 2005, so it may be that a PCI Express machine from 2006 would be able to play 1080p video, in which case I would agree with you. However, I doubt it could play 1080p on a 2006 processor.

I will note is that after upgrading I realized that I saved enough on power when I bought the new motherboard/CPU/memory that the new system paid for itself in power consumption in less than 2 years (Those old machines didn't power down like modern ones do), so I was probably shortsighted in not upgrading that machine earlier.

This is what Tesla engineers told him. He tried it. It didn't.

My take on all of this is actually pretty straightforward:

1.) The car DID lose charge overnight it cold weather. That seems clear, as Musk doesn't seem to be refuting this claim. I don't consider this a scathing knock against electric cars, but would be a perfectly reasonable complaint for Broder to put in the article.
2.) Broder claims (not corroborated, but I tend to believe him) that Tesla engineers told him that #1 had actually not happened, and that it was safe to make the 61-mile trip leg with only an hour of low-power charging.
3.) After the hour of charging the car stated that it only had 32 miles of range.
4.) Broder attempted the trip.
5.) He didn't make it.

My takeaway from this:

1.) Broder's tone for his review is far too scathing for what actually happened.
2.) I don't understand why Broder didn't charge the car overnight during his stay at the hotel. This is what most people owning an electric car would have done, and was a strange choice. Then again, it did allow him to report on the overnight charge loss, which is valuable information to a consumer.
3.) Broder's experience DOES NOT represent what a normal consumer would do in his situation. If I needed to go 60 miles to the next charging station, you better bet that I would make DAMN SURE that I had at least 60 miles of reported range on the battery. If the reported range had dropped overnight, then I would plug in on low power and wait for the range to be at least 60. I might complain about the time this took, but would NOT listen to Tesla engineers when they said that the gauge was lying to me. I might report that Tesla engineers told me that it was lying, but that a normal consumer would not have a team of engineers backing them up in everyday driving.
4.) Tesla needs to get control over the mouths of their engineers who deal with the media. In both the Top Gear and the NYT cases, it was statements from their engineers that got them in the most trouble. The 55 mile Top Gear statement was straight from an engineer, and the attempt to make a 61-mile trip with 32 miles of range displayed on the gauge was also the result of advice from a Tesla engineer. The Tesla engineers should just be saying: The estimated range is there for a reason, use it. They should otherwise keep their mouth shut.

Hold on... grandparent talking about Lightroom.

Lightroom is $150 or so normally, and you can get it on sale for half that. It's Photoshop that costs $700. That was grandparent's point. Lightroom is good, and for a (compared to Photoshop) reasonable price.

CS2 is Photoshop, which costs a ridiculous amount of money, as you and great-grandparent were referring to.

What you really want is:

"This person agreed to pay you $1 to receive this message. Do you wish to:

1.) Make them pay, and report this message as spam.
2.) Make them pay, and ignore the message.
3.) Make them pay, and respond to the message.
4.) Not make them pay, but ignore the message.
5.) Not make them pay, and respond to the message."

Options 3 and 4 would probably be optional, but would still be useful. If the message is simply ignored, I'm not sure if #2 or #4 should be the default. I can see arguments for each.

The idea is that if the message is legitimate, the receiver will probably NOT make the sender pay. However, real spammers will be paying every time.

I saw this yesterday, and was shocked. This is effectively stealing all users' photos that have been uploaded thus far, and a pretty sleazy thing to do even for new users. If I was an instagram user, my first action after seeing this would be to delete my account. There is almost nothing instagram could offer me that would be worth giving them this kind of free control over all of my photos.

The privacy implications for photos containing people is even more staggering. I doubt most people on instagram have current model releases for their photographs, so using these commercially could get any number of people sued, but based on the instagram policy, it very well could be the user who took them initially, then "gave instagram permission to use them commercially."

I would expect this policy to change, but if it doesn't by January 5 or so, I would suggest all instagram users delete their accounts. Also, if it doesn't change by then, watch out for Facebook's terms to change to something similar.

I've thought about it, and I think Windows RT and the restrictions are all about Office, and really nothing else.

Microsoft sees OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice taking market share from the real linchpin of the Windows monopoly, Office. The reason is simply that it's cheaper. So, they find a way to preserve their Office monopoly by making a version of Windows that will only run Office. In order to compete with a regular PC with OpenOffice.org, they make the hardware cheaper, thus squeezing the hardware margins, but leaving their software margins largely intact. Now the consumer can get a machine that does everything they really want (Office and Internet) for cheap, and it supports Microsoft Office formats "perfectly." Because of API restrictions, users can't get OpenOffice.org to run on these new, cheap computers even if they wanted to. (Not that they would want to, as "real" Microsoft Office is included "for free.")

Windows RT is about monopoly maintenance for the Office monopoly, plain and simple.

What this smells like to me is a re-trying of Omega S.A. v. Costco Wholesale Corp., probably where justice Kagan will not recuse herself.

At issue in the earlier case was whether or not Costco had the right to IMPORT the watches, NOT whether or not he had the right to sell them. If a similar decision occurs here, the lack of first sale doctrine would prevent Kirtsaeng from importing the items in the first place, not so much from reselling them. It most certainly would NOT prevent FIRST SALE from applying to items that you purchased in the US, even if made elsewhere, as those items would presumably have been imported legally.

My guess is that if Kagan is the deciding vote on this one, it will go better for consumers, but only time will tell.