That's not as relevant as you'd like to believe. We cannot choose to follow an outdated law in lieu of the newer, more onerous one and still be considered "law abiding". If the law is going to be broken, why follow an arbitrary restriction?

That's not even getting into the greater point, which is that copyright is a favor, a boon granted to creators which they can leverage for some profit, and in exchange the public domain is enriched. Perpetual extension of copyright essentially eliminates the public's gain in that social contract. As there's simply no moral requirement to adhere to a bargain that's completely one-sided, there's nothing wrong with telling the publishers/jailors of our common culture the bargain is invalid and reverting to the natural state of information exchange. In fact, the only ethical course of action at this point is to refuse to obey the law. Because the legislators are all in the back pockets of the copyright industry, the only hope for change is in forcing a collapse of the system. Meekly obeying the law and hoping legislators someday decide the change the law isn't going to work.

That's not irony. That's just the nature of SCSI vs IDE. SCSI put the controller in the device because it's only a generic device interface, and since the device already has to be fairly complex and expensive to handle all its own I/O, it might as well do the dirty work error/defect tracking too. By contrast, IDE put it all on the IDE card/chip because it was designed to be solely an inexpensive data storage interface with all the work done in software by the OS. This makes it impossible to have a tailor-made fault detection system.

I'd pay money for a phone like that! Google should totally make a phone!

If you go to the range and fire more than 50 rounds through your pistol, and/or do it more than once every couple months, you have more training than they do. Police "training" is generally laughably minimal. There's usually more of them, though, so you're still screwed.

This is nothing new. California did something similar with hybrids. When hybrids like the first generation Prius came out, California allowed their owners to apply for a special sticker which allowed them to drive in High Occupancy Vehicle lanes with only one person in the car. Now, this is already fucking asinine, as the purpose of HOV lanes was never to reduce fuel consumption, but rather to reduce traffic. A high efficiency vehicle is still just another single-occupant car clogging up the freeway. No matter, the California legislature is full of idiots, so this is not surprising. What made it especially offensive was that they made it a "pilot program", limited to the first 15,000 applicants. This very obviously means that only the wealthy would be getting them, as they were the only ones with the money to be able to afford a first generation Prius at the high prices they started at. The worst part is that it probably wasn't even intentional. Their stupidity and feel-good foolishness just naturally leads to handouts for their rich, commie-lib friends.

of cough something can be done, of cough!

George Bernard Shaw is not an authority on reason. This quote from him is a glib platitude.

FWIW, both civil and criminal operate under "innocent until proven guilty". The difference you're thinking of is the difference in what constitutes "proven guilty". The burden of proof in civil is "preponderance of the evidence" and criminal is "beyond a reasonable doubt".

Sorry, but there's no such rule for the court of public opinion. It exists as part of due process in criminal and civil courts because the courts have the power to deprive you of life, liberty, and property. A few thousand people on Slashdot are under no obligation to follow such restrictive rules.

Same here... because we actually don't get a tax break. We're both employed and have our own insurance, and since a married couple is essentially treated as a single entity, we took a significant tax hit. Instead of paying as two separate people making $50K each with one deduction, we now pay as one person with two deductions making $100K. The tax paid on post-tax benefits would be chickenfeed in comparison.

Yes, technically constitution is a subset of law, and while saying sticking to the law has some technical accuracy, it is overly vague and implies that the mere fact of being law gives something weight. It is more accurate to say the court rules on the constitutionality of law. Claiming that the constitution is part of the law is engaging in weasel-wording to justify a patently stupid comment.

No, because we're talking about the Supreme Court and Dred Scott was a Supreme Court decision. It's a relevant example of where the Supreme Court made a bad decision.

Are you really that dense? Courts decide on matters of law, not philosophy. There's no law that says corporations have to make their shareholders money. That's why investment is risky.

Actually, if you're going to argue that point, you have to quit using notion of a "partial sociopath". Sociopath is someone whose empathy fails to reach a certain minimum threshold. You can't be "a little bit sociopathic". You either meet the criteria, or you do not. Stick to "empathy" or a situational lack thereof.