It is unacceptable that Iceland need to take up large part of European legislation through a business agreement without getting representatives or audience.

Those crazy Icelandic nutcases!

This question really has jack shit to do with physics. You're looking for whatever laptop best fits a bunch of preferences that nobody else will ever guess (seriously, this is going to be the most important stuff) plus with the requirement that it also be good for editing and compiling C++. The latter can be done with damn near anything. So that leaves people to only debate .. all the usual stuff we have been talking about for the last 30 years. Your entire question is really just this: what's the best laptop?

Next, we shall Kirk vs Picard vs Sheridan. You might also want to Ask Slashdot which political party's candidates you should vote for.

In regards to your first point, the system would have to be based on the offender's net worth rather than their income in the US, due to all of the tricks that the rich have paid to create in the tax code.

He was talking about hiding it. When things are hidden, tax loopholes are irrelevant because tax law isn't applied to the money in question anyway. If you can hide income then you can probably also hide the accumulated assets.

And as for loopholes, was the idea really based on income, or was it just taxable net?

Speeder: "Your honor, I have dependents and pay mortgage interest, so my fine should have exemptions and a deductible applied before you calculate my fine."

Judge: "?!"

Speeder: "Furthermore, a lot of my income is from gains, so I should be fined at a lower rate than people who have jobs."

Judge: "Wow. You think I'm with the IRS."

I thought Kim Stanley Robinson was dead. No really, I thought I read something a few years ago (maybe even here on Slashdot) that he had died and remember thinking "shit, he'll never get to see Mars."

Obviously, I'm remembering this wrong, and he's alive. Good. I'm glad. I really liked the Mars series, especially the first book.

So.. uh.. I wonder who that was, who died and I got mixed up with KSR. Whoever you are, you will be .. remembered? Oops.

If you're a shop owner, then presumably your goods are actually for sale, so you're willing to accept money in exchange for goods which don't suddenly explode and retroactively bind me to a previously-unknown contract after I step out of the store. Few people would be interested in stealing your goods, because they can simply hand you money for them.

I was talking about a very different scenario than anything you will ever face involving shopkeepers: DRM, i.e. a form of fraud. That situation presumes you intend harm to others, so yes, shooting all would-be-customers as they walk into your "store" (if I may use that term very loosely) just might blend into that context seamlessly.

There needs to be more-than-ten years of imprisonment for using DRM. One work sold with DRM makes multiple people need to pirate it in order to watch it. If you sell a DRMed work that results in six people pirating it, then you get 60 years.

That would probably deter the crime of DRM, and once you do that, you eliminate the chief motive for piracy.

Just deal with both sides of the problem, and you might have a pretty good solution. The only remaining problem is that the constants are messed up and have a clipping problem on one side. If a million people pirate Game of Thrones, you can't really imprison the responsible HBO exec for ten million years. So make his sentence, say, 50 years, and then imprison each pirate for 50/10M years.

Obviously there are few things better than a good old friend's wife puking, but what would you have thought of the movie, had she not been there?

The first time that an attack takes place in which it turns out that we had a lead and we couldn't follow up on it, the public's going to demand answers.

Public, I already have your answer. You problem is that back around 1789 you moved to America. If you wanted the needs of a police state to come before your freedom, you could have lived pretty much anywhere else. And you still have a lot of options, if you're simply convinced that America is a bad idea.

Why not good old fashioned MP3 which is playable anywhere on anything?

I was going to say, "because not everyone has permission to use MP3," but then I realized I first played an MP3 about 19 years ago. The patents just can't have too much longer to go, assuming they haven't already expired.

Wikipedia says that star is 17-23 light years away. If it passed nearby only 70000 years ago, then that means it must be moving at nearly at about 1/3000 to 1/4000 the speed of light. So, like, about ten times faster than the Space Shuttle or five times faster than V'ger.

Forget ion drives; let's build star-hooks.

In my country there are zero bears (outside a zoo) and zero bear incidents.

Do the people in your country always stay in your country, or do they sometimes travel abroad? (BTW, you made me google "how often do zoo escapes happen?" and while I didn't really get a useful number, it happens often enough that the event type already has a "ten weirdest.")

I think you have nonzero bear risk. In fact, I just happen to know that you, personally, are going to be killed and eaten by one within the next seven minutes.

(Oh wait, or is that seven iceage cycles? Excuse me, I need to go double-check my units. BRB.)

the lottery ticket often has net value for its worth as entertainment. It's fun thinking about what you'd do if you suddenly had $200M.

Have you ever thought about stealing the lottery's entertainment? I can get your $2 entertainment for $0.

It's not like the daydream police have the resources to check everyone's tickets. The chances they'll pull you over, are a one in 175 million!