Blade Runner is a Frankensteinian tale about creation revolting against its creator, questioning the meaning of death, whereas Do Androids ... is about empathy as an essential human quality in a world where everything is artificial. Much of the novel is about Deckard's desire to buy a pet, required for spiritual fulfilment according to the religion of Mercerism. Death is as unimportant to the book as Mercerism is to the film.

That's only true if you're surrounded by arseholes.

Eh, it's not like Blade Runner was a faithful adaptation either. For one, its theme is completely different from the book. Still, it's one of the best SF movies and one of the best adaptations ever.

One small point, it you really do all of this you will stick out like a sore thumb because you will be relatively easy to find in a sea of unencrypted data. Police have actually caught offnders like that. Better yet, the NSA, unlike the cops has compromised most VPN and SHTTP service providers so you will be one of a rather small number of people whose signals traffic they can't decrypt which narrows things down even more. You can usen couriers but you had better be damn smart about how and whewe from they do their transmitting because pattern analysis can still narrow down your location. If one of them uses the same internet cafe too often the next thing you know a van is permanantly parked outside your house to be followed by Virginia farmboys in ninja commando outfits smashing through your doors and windows.

Yeah, it'll be excellent for independent 'writers' who get picked up only by random chance, when it's 'free' anyway, and detrimental to the likes who know how to spell Stephen King's name.

I'm willing to bet the NSA has prior art on this.

What are you talking about? Nothing is "exactly" as bad as "we" always said they would. There is nothing "right".. (rightness?? seriously?)

Surely you gest..

The MS antitrust case was nearly 14 years ago and people here still pretend it was yesterday.

Yes. All those faults, and still the best science fiction serials ever. Doesn't that say a lot for the potential of the genre?

I've always considered SMB to be a steaming pile of crap for reasons that have nothing to do with security and this incident just adds another steaming shovel full of manure to that pile. The best protection agains SMB worms is not to use crap like SMB but pick something more secure instead, that is to say if such an animal even exists. In that case you can either try to find a vendor who offers a similar product and does a better job of testing and patching it than Microsoft does or go with an Open Source alternative which gives you the option of hiring a third party to test and patch it to your satisfaction. Mind you even if SMB is a pain to use the problem does not necessarily have to be with Microsoft. The problem could actually be with your systems department being lazy and negligent about patching their SMB software and the problem could also be with lax, amateurish or even non existent security policies or if you do have a proper security policy the problem could be a complete failure to enforce it. In that case you really only have one alternative and that is to light a fire under your people, fire them if they put up a fight and hire some proper sysadmins and a security chief with the same attitude toward instilling professionalism and security awareness in your employees and a marine drill sergeant has toward making proper soldiers out of every batch of teenage drama queens he is handed by the recruitment office.

Out of interest: how old are you?

Plus he has nothing to loose by pissing off the Republicans who aren't going to approve a single bill his administration pushes anyway even if they had to do it to save their lives. Hell, half of those people don't even believe he was born in the USA. Of course Obama is going to veto all the most important stuff the Tea party and the Republican want to do so basically everything is exactly like the Tea-baggers and Republicans like it. Congress will be in complete and utter gridlock for at least another two years, four if you get a Democratic president (read: Hilary Clinton, which will have every Republican/Tea-bagger reaching for his vampire killing kit). Every time I despair over the state of politics in my own country I take a look at the US congress and the way your Republicans and Democrats are behaving like a bunch of petulent kindergarteners to remind me that things could be a lot worse. Compared to the lot of morons you guys have managed to vote into office my lot looks like a panel of Nobel prize winners.

Let's not forget either that Constantine's personally approved proper religious authorities didn't just clamp down on Christians that didn't agree with them they embarked on a campaign of destroying, pillaging, desecrating, vandalising pagan temples, tombs and monuments as well as raping and murdering adherents of these religions who weren't willing to see the light and accept the state approved flavour of Christianity (i.e. the same basic package heretic Christians were treated to). Examples of Christian intolerance and willingness to subject minority religions and secular groups to extreme persecutions and violence (which is a base insult to everything Christ preached) are legion.

You can find examples of such violence and intolerance beginning at the moment Christianity became dominant enough to be able to afford committing such atrocities and they continue until today with one of the latest, worst and most frequently forgotten being the mass murder of Moslems in Bosnia by Christian Croats and Serbs. It pisses me off every time Christian fanatics in my community try to portray Christianity as the religion of love charity and peace while Islam is the religion of war and hate, yet whenever I bring up the subject of Bosnia and what was done there in the name of Christianity they are unwilling to even discuss the issue. The obvious conclusion is that Christianity is not an inherently violent religion any more than Islam is even if some of it's adherents have found clever ways to user these religions to rationalise acts of violence and downright inhuman criminal acts like blowing yourself up on a bus, sawing peoples heads off on camera, torching places of worship or setting up a concentration camp camp where the local Christian perverts can get their rocks off raping moslem women. I don't really see the difference between the way the Serbs behaved with their rape campaigns in Bosnia and the way ISIS is doing by selling Yazidi women in markets in Syria like cattle at an auction.

The CO2 from kegged beer will have less C14 as the carbon will be from fossil sources. This makes all the difference in the world.

(Maybe not.)