While I don't disagree on the smell, Gates is richer than God, and the first thing I thought on seeing this was that if I had that kind of money I might spend a bit of it on wigged-out ideas, just in case. It's like me throwing a panhandler a buck just 'cause I can.

How is filling Sony's coffers patriotic?

So these types of threats are being taken seriously.

What was that about surrendering essential freedoms to gain temporary security?

You have negative freedom, that is freedom from interference and limits on your behavior

And that's the only freedom there can be...

Then you have positive freedom, the freedom to participate in society and to prosper.

You are confused. The freedoms to participate in society and to prosper are the same as those from interference and limits. One does not have a right to prosperity and/or happiness, but only to a pursuit of them — America's founding fathers noted this right in the Declaration of Independence (before the war was won and the Constitution written).

In Europe that kind of thing would clash with a person's freedom to have a private life, i.e. to privately grieve for their loved on at the funeral.

This makes no sense — you can not have a right to privacy in a public place. Those crazy Democrats "thanking god" for dead American soldiers may be an extreme case, but if you devise a law to shut them up, will it not also apply to weddings and birthdays, which are bound to take place on the same block, where other folks are grieving?

We also see the right to a private life

I fail to see, how you can demand privacy while in public — and that includes your making connections to other people's servers.

US company's desire to profile everyone and use their personal data for commercial gain, which Europeans consider to be a massive loss of freedom but Americans consider to be a corporation exercising its free speech rights.

No, actually, one's right to record and remember whatever he has once observed has nothing to do with free speech. I, once again, fail to see, how you can possibly demand somebody forgets about you without opening yourself up to the same demands from others. Do you want your ex- to be able to force you to undergo a memory-alteration procedure — to make you forget, how she looks naked?

I do, actually. Well, they're more partners than customers, since we give them our code and they sell it. But, yes, I have a lot of meetings with outside parties. We convince about half of them to join our Hangouts from their laptops, the others we add to the meeting via phone. Outside of meetings, we communicate entirely via e-mail. Voicemail is still irrelevant.

At IBM, my role was entirely customer-facing. Voicemail was still fairly rare, though teleconferences were the norm. Most communication was, again, via e-mail or face to face.

On the one hand you're talking about war profiteering, and on the other hand I think you're talking about a government-run helicopter operation, which typically is provided free of charge. I honestly do not understand your analogy here. I'm not suggesting that the army should charge people to airlift them out of disasters. I'm saying that private individuals who have no duty to respond to disasters be allowed to charge for doing so, which results in more assistance being provided rather than less.

Everybody is desperate. Without money we starve, freeze, and so on. The solution to that is basic income so that we can all afford to live, not to create shortages by pricing things below market value. There shouldn't be desperate people in the first place, and with taxes there is no reason we can't afford to take care of everybody.

They can just send a letter. Last time I checked you didn't need a plan to do that.

1) The /. article is titled: "How Target's Mobile App Uses Location Tech To Track You" (highlight mine).
Yet the article and the conclusion is that this app doesn't track you because of hyper sensitivity to privacy, even though their experience and most surveyed users WANT that feature. So, clickbait headline or didn't you even RTFA yourselves?

2) "I have an aversion to shopping in general, and large-format retail in particular. While I think I have a strong sense of direction most of the time, put me inside of a big box store with its scores of aisles and the sometimes impenetrable logic of its layout, and I get turned around and frustrated right quick. I tend to avoid this kind of shopping, opting instead for the convenience of online purchases or smaller bricks-and-mortar stores that Iâ(TM)m familiar with or that offer a more curated experience." OK, we know you're a condescending douche, got it. We understand that you don't go to these sorts of places, probably because you're tragically hip. Editors at Xconomy: asleep at the switch? Maybe cull out this sort of patronizing crap from reviews?

The problem with this is that US states are not allowed to interfere with interstate commerce, control immigration, etc. So, your model really only works if you have a very liberal mindset of anybody can possess anything they want to possess (no controls on drugs, guns, etc), and no significant amount of socialism.

If you want to ban all guns in your state, then you'll need border controls to prevent the flow of guns from states where they aren't completely banned. If you want to have strong worker protection laws in the manufacturing sector, then you need to be able to charge tariffs on goods produced elsewhere that did not have to comply with those laws. If you want to have basic income, then you need to be able to place tariffs on good produced in places that don't have basic income, and heavily tax anybody who wants to leave your state. All of these sorts of things are prohibited by the US constitution, which is why all these kinds of issues tend to become federal issues.

The same sort of logic is the reason why there aren't a lot of new painkillers. That and tort issues.

Painkillers save zero lives per year (directly - maybe you could make a hand-waving argument about suicide prevention or something like that). Even the most common and safest ones have some risk of serious side-effects, including death. Thus, looking at it in a simplistic manner, painkillers are almost never of medical benefit.

Now, when you get to quality of life then obviously painkillers make a lot of sense. The problem is that when one person in 10 million takes your pill and dies, and you get sued, you can't point to the millions of people who are happier as a result of taking your fancy pill and use that to justify the occasional death. The result is that people developing painkillers tend to abandon them early in development if there are any issues.

The result is that we have a rather poor selection of painkillers to choose from.