The amazing thing is, if we allowed ocean drilling much closer to shore we wouldn't have these problems. One, the depth would not be so great that the pressure created these methane and ice / sludge pockets. Two, a leak, if one were to occur, would be much easier to contain. You could actually send someone down to fix the problem if it were close enough to the shore. You are not sending someone down under 5000 feet of water... So, ironically, it is the wacko environmentalists that are to blame for this situation. Their answer? Either don't drill at all, or if you do, drill even further out, where the problems are even greater. Yea, that makes a lot of sense...

I think you are confusing the effort by some states to require companies to collect the use tax, and the requirement to pay the use tax in the first place. As far as I know, it is pretty clear that individual citizens are required to pay use taxes for items they purchase out of state. It has generally been up to the individual citizen to report and pay the use tax. States have recently attempted to get companies to collect and pay the use tax for citizens, because there is so much fraud when it comes to the use tax (people just don't voluntarily pay it, when is the last time you did, or know anyone who did?). I may be mistaken. My understanding is that a use tax would be unconstitutional. States are not supposed to have import/export taxes for trade with other states. That is what the inter-state commerce clause is all about, not the twisted definition that the SCOTUS dreamed up many years ago. Rather, it is to make trade "regular" (occurring normally and without impediment of additional taxes or levies imposed by states).

I refuse to continue reading any article that uses the term Interweb

Yes, but you convienantly left out that the testimony that I linked to was in May, 2006, well after 1971 and 1979. The guy testifying is the:

Henry Salvatori Professor of Law & Community Service Chapman University School of Law Director, The Claremont Institute Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence

You have it wrong. It's not being shoved to the right, it is being shoved more towards total government, rather than anarchy. This type of information can be used for ill by either the left or the right. The radical left may, in fact, want more data than the right. I could see them wanting a full genome in an effort to take care of the people by discovering who has what predisposition to what ailments, and beginning proactive treatment. As far as the right, I see the extremist on that end wanting pretty much was asked for here, a way to positively identify each citizen to be able to link them to crimes and such. Of course they could also use it to frame someone pretty easily (it's easy to get people's DNA, just take one garbage bag and you'd have enough to plant in any crime scene).

So the window is being shoved, but it's not being shoved left or right, it's being shoved towards a more totalitarian government.

See this:

Testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, contending that Section 798 of the Espionage Act, prohibiting the publication of classified information regarding U.S. communications capabilities, can constitutionally be applied to the media, for several reasons: 1) A majority of the Justices in the Pentagon Papers case recognized that prior restraints on publication of highly sensitive, classified information regarding ongoing military and communications operations would be permissible; 2) The prospect of post-publication liability for violating the Espionage Act was also recognized by a majority of the Justices; and 3) The Freedom of Press Clause of the First Amendment is equally applicable to citizens and the institutional media.

Link

Proxies are supposed to embed the actual IP address of the end-client in the HTTP headers, so that load balancing can work properly. While there may be some that don't, most transparent proxies do. You do know that there are ISPs that have transparent proxies to cache the data and reduce their Internet exchange bandwidth, right? That's what happened in that story where people were getting into each others Facebook accounts on their cell phones - the cell phone company proxy was screwed up.

I agree. A lot of people throw around the word right too, well, liberally. There are very few rights in this world. The right to view content without ads is non-existent. If there were such a right, and the people creating content didn't want to, or couldn't afford to, what would you do? Would you force them to create content? Would you enslave them, making them toil away at creating content for no pay? Of course not.

At the same time, the content creators have no right to ad revenue. If people don't want to view their sites with ads, then you can't force them to. Well, I suppose you can turn your web pages into one large dynamically created JPEG per page, with the ads embedded. But you can't force people to view your web site at all, let alone force them to run intrusive JavaScript and untrusted code from third party ad servers.

The content providers certainly have a right to say what they want, and to try and find an alternate business model that works for them. The content viewers, or consumers, have the right to choose what content they consume, or whether to consume any at all.

If the model that the providers use is not acceptable to the consumers, then the providers will just have to find something else to do, and the consumers will have to find a different provider. That's called the free market, which doesn't have anything to do with whether the content is free or not.

Actually, it is my understanding that the law removes special exemptions that certain people had that allowed them to basically work for one company full-time, for very long periods, but still claim they were a contractor. You can't have it both ways. Either you are a contractor and do a bunch of short term jobs for a bunch of different companies, or you are a permanent employee of one company. See the other Slashdot article. It's just a scam.

The parent is marked 5: Funny, but honestly this is the first thing I thought of. If he is a night-guard, he should be doing his job and paying attention to whatever he is supposed to be guarding. It may be a plain looking warehouse door, and nothing exciting. They are not paying him for exciting work, nor are they paying him to read books and do other work while on the job. They are paying him to pay attention to what he is supposed to be guarding, and to be ready if he must take action. Personally, it kind of ticks me off that people with a "boring" job like that are getting paid, however small the pay is, while not doing their job. If I had his fingerprints I'd report him and have them dock his pay.

I'm no expert on this, but I suppose you can look at it like this. A "real" contractor is not just doing work for a company 9-5 for long periods of time (many months or years). Part of what a "real" contract has to do, by definition, is invest some capital into the whole self-owned business. They have to do a certain amount of sales work. They don't get paid for that. When they land a contract, the business is getting paid to do a specific job. They take their "salary" out of the price for that contract, and the rest goes to cover the business costs (home-office, work computers, sales, etc). It can reasonably be viewed that any leftover dollars after paying for the business is viewed as capital gains over what it cost to fund the business itself. I think that is reasonable. Now, I work for a large engineering consulting company. It is not a one-man show for me, but the concepts are the same. Some may argue that it does take one-man show independently owned consultants many months or years to work on large projects, but I agree with other comments that the only honest jobs that take that long are huge jobs that a larger consulting company would engage in, not a lone engineer / programmer. One guy working at a company for two years doing 9-5 work, whether programming or some other consulting work, is I believe just a way for both the business and "consultant" to cheat the system. If a company were to hire many one-man consulting firms to fill a need for a "team" of independent consultants over the long term, it becomes even more transparent that they are just trying to cheat the system. I think the guy was nuts, and was by definition a terrorist.

If the students are that irresponsible (synonyms: reckless, careless, negligent, foolish, rash, immature), then they probably should not get paid when they can't comply with the requirements of the job. If that means they need to waste a hour to get back to the dorm room to retrieve their badge, or pay a fee to reprocess them for a lost badge, then I would think the problem would take care of itself after a few occasions.

if you were to stick your hand into the space through which information is being "teleported" the perfectly ordinary classical carrier particles would burn a hole through it.

I'm going to have a bit of fun with this by taking what you wrote literally.

So basically, if we were to do a lot of these information transfers we would create something like a beam. Mount it on a sword and you have a vibro-sword. Or a "quantum scalpel!"

Do you know there's a blizzard in Washington, D.C. right now?

Umm, there was a recent report (google it) that most PUBLIC school kids prefer socializing on the web (facebook, etc), texting, chat, MMO, etc. I don't think your daughter is abnormal in that respect at all. She is abnormal in that she sounds way above the average public school kids in academic achievement.