Wow - you leave your sense of humor at home today, or are you still pissed about the way Measure 92 went down? ;)

1) He said most, not all.

2) It's beyond-belief true for Microsoft exams. Unless you think like a MSFT marketing manager (and not, you know, an actual sysadmin), the MCSE tests will be impossible to pass. I've gotten near-perfect scores on those things simply by suspending disbelief and thinking like a Redmond Marketing droid.

3) I actually agree with you about the Cisco tests - or at least concerning the older ones (not sure about more recent ones, as I haven't had to touch one in years), since they did probe the protocols pretty deeply.

All of them. A *real* woman wouldn't be mindlessly chasing her prince charming... she'd be building a tyrannical empire on her own power, maybe displaying the severed head of Prince Charming on a pike next to her throne built of skulls, and have a horde of male slaves who would...

Aw Crap - I've been playing too many MMORPGs again.

Damn - where are mod points where you need them?

Now if that scientists had looked dead into the camera and said "Yeah, it's a nice shirt a ladyfriend of mine designed, and I wore it as a favor to her. Don't like it? Get the sand outta yer vag and shut the fuck up", I think I would have fell out of my chair in trying to get up and cheer... and so would most other men.

Yeah - it basically means that male humans aren't generally hung up on that kind of 'OMG impossible body-image expectations for boys to reach!!111!' bullshit.

A private entity cannot enforce anything upon the populace, nor can they promulgate laws based on their ratings.

Government has a very limited range of things that they do as well or better than the public at large (war/defense, money, basic law enforcement, etc) - governmental action beyond that range invariably becomes incompetent, expensive, dangerous, or worse.

Never give government more power than the worst-case scenario you would be willing to live under.

The law grandfathers existing shoreline development (whatever existed as of 1967).

Also, "right behind" high-tide is a misnomer. Anything new can only be built on land higher than 16' (altitude) above sea level at low-tide, which is much farther back than the mere high-tide mark (which averages around 8'), so unless you're building on a cliff-edge, or a mountainside or suchlike, you're not really going to get a beach view out of your new property...

The state also reserves the right to regulate such land further as needed.

To be fair, McDonald's doesn't really count as food.

Seriously? The old self-loathing OMG-I-hate-my-country-because-we're-all-so-fat! trope? What are you, a sophomore in his first PoliSci class?

Lookit - you're dead-wrong in that this is somehow just an American thing: Europe and many parts of Asia(!) are seeing a large rise in obesity as well.

This isn't a national thing, it's a side-effect caused by an overall rising standard of living within any given culture. The short version: If you're not forced to skip meals and not forced to sweat your ass off just to put food on the table, you're going to have a surfeit of calories, and neither your metabolism or hunger mechanism got the memo.

Now if you're that worried about folks whose physiological evolution hasn't caught up to relative prosperity, then crash the global economy and drive civilization back into the dark ages. Otherwise, dude, grow up already... this is much simpler (and at the same time more complex) than you think.

It's no more abusive than effectively shutting up an overly-noisy diner in a restaurant (minus using actual violence to do so, that is).

Nice try, but I mentioned one other example as well - fact is though, most people use BT in a coffeeshop or such specifically to hide their IP addy (or at least avoid having their ISP get the notice, whereupon their home internet would get shut off.) There's only one real reason why someone would actively want to not have their home IP addy tied to the activity. You're kidding yourself if you think otherwise.

A pickup truck can be used as a mode of transportation, or it can be used to mow down pedestrians. Your point?

Perhaps, though you should be aware that most BT client devs are emphatically not going to incorporate such a thing into their apps - they have a hard enough time justifying their products as legal devices (to a largely ignorant public) as it is. Anything that gives the RI/MPAA ammunition to lobby against such apps is something they actively avoid providing.

Here's a better idea: how about if you're going to use BT on a network that you don't pay the bills for, you first learn enough about it to configure the thing to be polite on the network? That way business owners and frustrated laptop users won't be tempted to start using this little tool.

As odd as this is going to sound, I disagree. A simple blanket statement that makes no allowance for corner cases? I'm going to need something more than that to be convinced.

Let me explain...

In this particular instance, the "wrong" of hogging bandwidth is far, far greater than the "wrong" of blasting the hogs into oblivion. Even though privately-owned and run, one should expect at least some sense of common courtesy when using a resource like wifi. If you want to download pr0n and/or ripped movies, for heaven's sake do it at home and pay for the pipe. There are very few legitimate reasons to run multi-GB BitTorrents at full-bore in a coffee shop, and I promise you that there are simply not that many people who desperately need an emergency .iso download of CentOS or Ubuntu away from home.

Certainly, the guy could get a hotspot (as suggested), but that's like telling the guy to go buy his own property if they want a quiet park to sit in when a small group in the public park has a constant loud party going on. Also, hotspots don't always work as advertised - I lost count of the times I've had to duck into a rural/small-town MickeyD's or coffee shop because the stupid employer-issued hotspot/3g/4g device didn't have enough bars to get a decent connection.

Maybe I sound like a dick for cheering this guy on, but think this through for a moment - if coffee shop owners start getting slammed with MPAA/RIAA C&D orders, if their costs skyrocket, and if they generally figure the wifi to be more trouble than it's worth, then eventually the "free" wifi will become metered, will be QoS'd down to practically nothing, or worse. None of us want that. I like knowing that if my normal connectivity goes tits-up, I can duck into a coffee shop, buy a cup of joe, and use their wifi to do what needs done until I can get connected normally again.

It's abusers of the system that eventually become the reason why we can't have nice things, so this little "wrong" is a pretty nice way to keep bigger "wrong"s to a minimum, no?

Wait - who is this "we" you keep referring to? Okay, he was speaking of Mars, but still...

I'm still wondering how they intend to get around transplant rejection problems.

Now if they could convert adult stem cells into insulin factories, then that bit is obviated - you take the stem cells off of the patient him/herself, convert then, then put them into the pancreas...

Agreed with the AC, actually.

If the guy indeed has a paper trail of good-to-excellent reviews and promotions, then suddenly got fired after the employer willingly admits the reason was over some petty vengeance from Comcast, then the guy can indeed sue the employer initially. All it would take is a subpoena of the alleged Comcast email/recording, and once Comcast fails to produce a valid (as in independently verifiable) version of either, suddenly he can go after Comcast for perpetrating all kinds of fraudulent stuff (and TBH, so can the employer).

A lot of these vendors are locked into their own technologies.

I had interviewed at Epic once (didn't feel like moving to Wisconsin... sorry) and realized that they used M for most of what they did... not much interconnectivity there.