If you believe in the science that brings you modern medicine to begin with, then more knowledge is always better.

It's not the science I object to; it's the politics. The Vioxx study, subsequent FDA action, and subsequent lawsuits resulted in nearly every COX-2 inhibitor being taken off and kept off the market, despite the tiny magnitude of the risks. Given that, I think it's better to not seek out knowledge of such small risks rather than risk that kind of overreaction.

Presuming you mean a tactile keyboard, it's faster because it's easier for your fingers to find the keys. My "evidence" is simply personal experience with trying out several different types of keyboards, and seeing which was quickest. That's certainly not proof, but it's exactly what the guy in the article has.

By "right people" he means people that need the supplies rather than jackshits that will horde everything and try to sell it to starving people for everything they have left.

I don't think I would want to use it for regular daily tasks.

You'll find the same advantages in day to day use, as you observe as a media centre: efficiency, reliability, freedom from malware, nagware, and crapware, freedom from "progressive Windows dementia", and availability of many useful packages.

Don't take my word for it, try it. I use Linux for my day to day work and it "just works." Take the Windows brakes off and you'll immediately get twice as much value from your PC.

"Good luck with that - I'll just use your patented time machine to go back in time and patent it before you! "

That was a bad move. I was waiting for you because I had the first Time Machine, and now the cops are going to have to wait for someone else to invent one so they can play Timecop, because I'm not inventing it again and taking the chance that they'll put me in jail for torturing you to death!

Right, but you can't yell threats or potentially damaging things like "FIRE!" in a crowded theater.

So really what it comes down to is whether the spam itself is constitutionally protected or not. It may fall under the harmful speech listed above.

Now as far as marketing goes, they make a hell of a lot of false claims, and they are legally liable for that.

...or not.

I sincerely hope that this wasn't someone's doctorate thesis.

There are too many such "learned" individuals out there who are incapable original thought. I wonder if this has always been the case...

An echo of the Great Lisbon Earthquake.  Once again the question arises if  God is good and omnipotent.  Pat Robertson is convinced God is (good and omnipotent) and therefore there must be a sin preceding the event.

There are definitely plenty of paid coders on the kernel. But are they counting the kernel hackers that companies have chosen to sponsor as paid or as volunteer? Does a grass roots volunteer kernel hacker stop counting once a company sponsors him to be able to contribute full time?

I was watching the TV earlier today, and there was footage of Hilary Clinton in Haiti. This is not to demean the lady - I quite like her - but I got to wondering how much bread, surgical spirit, blankets or whatever they could have been flying in instead.

This exists already. There are a couple of providers that offer that. Just be prepared for some eye watering costs when you go to the doctor a few times. And just pray that you don't need a specialist. I can afford it because I make significantly more than the average American. If I would make what I did 8 years ago, that health plan wouldn't be a plan, it'd be a big, fat reason to only go to the emergency room if I can't take the pain, or don't want to cripple myself for life. Guess who actually ends up paying anyway? Correct, the tax payer in that state.

Here's the justification for hurting you by taxing you to support a public option: you're already paying for it, and private corporations will only get on board if regulation is so tight that it amounts to direct government control anyway. Might as well streamline the process and take out the middle man.

As for the current bills, I hear ya. They suck, uniformly. Lastly, public options can be structured in such a way that pay-outs to smokers are minimized. After all, it's already being done by regular insurances. The big advantage of the public option is that in theory, you and I get to have input on what constitutes a rip-off by voting for the politicians who will ultimately vote on the bills. That's in theory, of course.

The FBI would like you to know that you are currently not being investigated. How you managed to get a +3, Insightful with that kind of post, however, calls for an investigation.

You casually dismissed three vulnerabilities that could lead to arbitrary code execution, two of which live in OSX system libraries. I'm not too sure you're being objective. The other possibility: you are talking straight out your ass.

I guess my question is which is it?

The other guys were the ones who passed the bank bailout. Obama wasn't in office yet when that happened.

Because a rainbow table that included Password1 would have to store 13,537,086,546,263,552 ((26+26+10)^9) passwords, and assuming the developers were braindead and used 128-bit MD5 hashes with no salt, you'd have 1,732,747,077,921,734,656 (128*(26+26+10)^9) bits of hashes to store. That's two hundred thousand terabytes of data.

Now I understand that there are some time/memory tradeoffs that allow you to use much smaller tables and spend much more time, but even so, even the 8 character upper and lower case alphanumeric table from Project Rainbowcrack is 80GB and takes hours to crack.

So yeah, Password1 is actually not that bad. There are a lot worse! I'm a fan of pass-phrases myself.