It is perfectly reasonable to require a person to pass a two-month long gun training, gun skill test with a theoretical exam and a psychiatric examination to be able to buy a gun. It would also be perfectly reasonable to require a person to belong to a gun club with regular dues, training and re-testing schedules in order to buy ammo. And it is also perfectly reasonable not to sell to civilians extended capacity clips, fully automatic weapons, sniper rifles and high power weapons or armor piercing or anti-personnel munition.

USA second amendment talks about 'a well regulated millitia', so it is perfectly reasonable to assume that every person with a gun is or must be a member of millitia and that the constitution demands of the government to regulate him, including striping him of this status, if he proves to be unregulatable (as in unstable, insane or just a lousy shot).

Well, you cann't 'force' people to by healthcare, but it is perfectly legal to make a new tax of 5k$ per year and then exempt everyone with a valid health insurance policy from that tax.

So, can anyone explain to me why do the carriers actually sell these devices without signing a contract with the person? That would full eliminate this situation - sure, you can buy a thousand cheap phones, unlock them and sell them on, but you will still have to pay monthly fees on the thousand 2 year contracts or pay the ETF.

Actually it is not illegal to distribute classified information if you are a media organization. Only the person that actually had the access and who did the distribution to the journalists can be considered as doing illegal actions. And even then such claim must first be proven in court.

Hey, Amazon! You front page is offensive to me and all other people in the world who hate Christmass shopping season. Take it down, now!

So, if USA growls loudly at BBC, it will also 'become a political faction' and can be cut off from the Internet by all USA ISPs?

Also see http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/12/the-nobel-peace-prize-for-2011.html

Sure, you can do that if you have 5-10 commits per day. However, Linus merges on *average* around 100 change sets to the Linux kernel trunk every day and has been doing that for a long time now. You can not expect to keep both that speed and also keep the trunk 100% stable all the time.

Creating feature trunks from known-to-be-stable points is a much easier approach for everyone involved.

You just need government regulation that forces anyone that has a cable laid to your house to lease full access to that cable to any company that you hire for a low fixed cost that is barely above the maintenance cost for that cable.

But, naturally, republicans would block all such 'government takeovers of the Internet' and 60% of the sheeple will follow them.

Nice! We in Latvia still have to live with 500 Mbit both ways for 100$ (this includes phone service and cable TV with on-demand functionality and all available channels) or 200 Mbit both ways for 35$ :)

Or make a law requiring every bank to allow anyone create an account in that bank and get a debit card with the bank, regardless of their credit score or any other factors.

It might be shocking to you, but human lives have a value. They have a comparative value (2 human lives are worth more than 1) and in some cases human lives even have monetary value (like when insurance companies estimate if they can afford covering that expensive threatment option). So if there is an action with two possible outcomes where if you do A then 1 person dies and if you do B then 10 persons die, then you'd be a retard or a sadistic psychopath to do B.

In this case it would be pertty trivial to create a tiny jammiong device and locate it in the roof of the car, right next to the head of the driver and calibrate it so that it would make it very hard to have a cell phone conversation within 20-30 cm of the device and SMS within 50 cm. Also make it automatically disengage as soon as airbags are deployed or when the car is still.

That would save millions of lives every year. And you still will be able to call 911, because in 99% of the cases when that is needed in the car, you are not driving anywhere.

Sure it is possible: after the voter has voted, he gets a receipt with a random number X on it, after the elections there is a tally sheet with a list of votes which basically says 'number X voted for candidate A'. From that tally anyone can count how many votes A got and check that their own vote was counted correctly. For plausible deniability after his vote, the voter can ask the ballot machine to print another hash receipt - a random hash receipt that would show up on the tally as voting for the candidate B (that the voter was payed to vote for) so that he can show that receipt to briber. Naturally before starting an election there would need to be a pool of hashes for all candidates - a set of fake initial votes, equal for all candidates so that there is a set of hashes to choose from if the first voter asks for a fake hash printout.

Let's see:
* disabled people of all kinds,
* sick, old and just tired people who want to vote from home instead of driving for half an hour and then standing in line for an hour
* travelers who want to vote from wherever in the world they are
* young people who don't like boring old voting stuff

In almost all of these cases in the US e-voting favors Democrats - young, educated, lazy, traveling. That is the reason there is a subversive trend to undermine it by creating very, very badly misdesigned e-voting machines.

Now if your country does not have that problem, you might be like Estonia - every citizen gets an ID card with a proper PGP-ish electronic signature in it and he can vote on a web site using that signature either in a voting booth or at home and later verify his vote with a hash on a tally. And that has been fully working for two elections already with no problems.

Serious research still needs much faster supercomputers than we have now. All kinds of science - from artificial intelligence to weather modeling to astrophysics to genetic research to nuclear simulations. Access to a powerful supercomputer is a major boon for academia in the country.