One of those rare times I wish I had mod points... gun violence went down after the ban, as did the murder rate (2-3%, as I recall). The rate of violent crimes went up, though. Does a reduction in murder justify an increase in rapes, assaults, and robberies?

This is pretty much what I've been preaching now for years. Infrastructure that is vital to the public good and that requires the use of a physically limited resource, such as roads or power lines, is already expected to be government owned. Why is radio spectrum not treated the same way at this point?

What does the application developer/publisher refusing to submit to other stores have to do with Google? Is Google restricting that? Unless I missed something, that's not at all what this is about.

You actually read the summary before commenting? You must be new here...

So the "free market" approach so beloved by ultra-conservatives would, in fact, accelerate evolution? Fascinating contradiction of traditional beliefs.

Along with making the entire insurance industry freak out. If you can know, from birth, the statistical likelihood of ending up with a disease, that suddenly does some interesting things to health care premium calculations. Does the requirement that you cannot be denied coverage due to pre-existing conditions have any restriction over individual premiums?

You presume that a majority of the US military would go along with oppressing the citizenry. I actually really quite doubt this.

Uh.. what?

Sure it's a difficult problem, but we need to work on it. We're still taking baby steps, but humanity does need to wake the fuck up and start getting serious about colonizing other planets. If the universe's plethora of flying debris doesn't wipe us out, and if we manage to not kill each other off in a horrible war, and we prevent global climate change from rendering the planet unlivable, we're still faced with an eventual exhaustion of resources at our current rate of growth.

Just because something is hard and complex does not mean we shouldn't be working towards solving it.

Sending and recovering people between the Earth and the Moon isn't the same as another planet - it's a good start, but the logistics are different. It's a bit silly to think we're going to go from sending a few robots here and there to building a colony in one fell swoop. In theory, it could be done - but the thing about a Mars colony is that it will absolutely require long term funding. If all nations abruptly decided to stop funding the ISS today, the astronauts on board could come back down to Earth using the escape shuttle. That's not such a simple prospect for a Mars colony. The nations who have both the political will to stick to something long term and the money are.. what, China? Maybe? The US will only develop that political will if we feel threatened, or start celebrating science and discovery like we do music and movies.

I'd be ecstatic if we have a prime-time awards ceremony watch by millions of Americans some day in which the company that broadcasts it has to send a warning to the award nominees not to dress to provocatively.

Billions of taxpayer dollars are wasted because Congress is full of wankers.

No, actually, the people who have issues with BIOS/firmware updates are in the vast minority. Updates don't remain on a support site for long if the update itself has an issue. The vast majority of "bricks" caused by firmware flashing are either the fault of the person doing it, or the hardware already had a failure somewhere that was exacerbated by the flash.

Considering that IT departments flash hundreds/thousands of systems regularly, the handful of gripes you see on forums are just that - a handful.

Actually, no. Most countries do not have subs quiet enough to sneak up on US shores. Most countries don't even have submarines, and most of those that do are diesel based, not nuclear, hence they're quite loud. A really careful captain, with the most current maps of our sonar bouys and ships, could probably manage to sneak close enough to get a short range missile or two launched, but they would not have the kind of volume that we do. This assumes, of course, that we didn't happen to have a Los Angeles-class sub lurking somewhere that picked them up, and wiped them out before they even knew they were being stalked. Seriously, the US Navy so vastly outclasses everyone else in the world that you can't even begin to make the comparison.

And those sensors will largely be made in the same plants in China that are creating this mess, thus feeding back into their own need to exist. Brilliant!

But you still support them by creating demand. All your games, if new, directly support them--if used, you still support them again with demand.

The US may limit the President to 2 terms, but when Congress is largely composed of career politicians, there is no real motivator for significant change. The US is nowhere near a dictatorship in the traditional sense, but until there are meaningful term limits in place across the board, the country will still be held hostage by "whatever I have to do in order to get re-elected" mentalities.