God was the villain in that story. He created a situation where something nearly harmless was illegal and then pounced when a predator convinced an innocent to take a bite. It was the illegality that harmed Eve, not the apple itself.

It's an allegory for the drug war.

Why did anyone mod you up? When someone abandons a copyrighted property of any sort then it should enter the public domain. If the book, dvd, or whatever goes out of print then you should lose the copyright. If a game is no longer available for purchase or play then you should lose the copyright.

Who gains when the government protects a monopoly on content that you refuse to provide to anyone? How is that promoting the arts in any way?

If you want to keep the copyright then just make it available for purchase. If you care so little about the product then you lose rights to the product. I can't imagine any reasonable argument against this.

People in favor of copyright are always saying that the creators should get paid for their creations. How are they being paid if they stop making it available for sale? The only possible response is that they want to restrict access to the content so that new content has less competition. That's a pretty poor argument for continuing a government enforced monopoly.

He should have removed the passengers who were upset. They were the ones causing the problem. Anyone who is pro-TSA is a problem.

Whether it's desirable or not, that's the way it is. Everyone has a choice between 2 viable platforms and BlackBerry certainly isn't one of them.

If it contains advertising then they're getting paid.

Many of those wars were big losers for us and it wasn't because of a lack of hardware. Libya is how we should always do things. Spend a few bucks on some remote actions, train people, give basic supplies and have Europe do most of the dangerous work.

That's silly. If the US were ever truly really threatened, we'd just use nukes. If one day we find that Russia or whoever was swarming over the US borders the origin country would be turned to glass. MAD pretty much guarantees that no large country will ever attack any other large country (unless the leader is suicidal I guess).

Modern defense spending is about nothing but enriching the right people and conducting politically desirable wars. We are not and will never be in any true danger from another large military. Nukes guarantee that.

Out defense spending should be concentrated on nuke delivery platforms and fighting terrorists. Spending trillions to protect us from countries that MAD already protects us from is just plain stupid and wasteful.

I'll bet it would! Instead of giving $3 million each to 9 people he could have given $50,000 each to 540 physicists. How many physicists are there in the world? The number probably isn't very large if you include only PhDs. A quick google says that there are about 1500 new physics PhDs each year (I don't know if that number is limited to one country). It would have much less personal impact, but probably a greater emotional impact on the entire field to give $1000 each to 27,000 physics PhDs.

Why? Do you just hate old software that works or did it run over your dog?

Just because both parties are equally bad in this area does not mean that both parties are equally terrible. Republicans are proudly bad in all areas. Democrats are merely semi-unintentionally bad in most areas.

> ...why did we need the law?

If you had been paying attention you'd know. The law includes the requirement that insurance providers cannot refuse to cover those with pre-existing conditions. If just that part of the law was passed then everyone in the country would just cancel their insurance until they got sick. Insurance doesn't work when only sick people buy insurance.

You're absolutely right. I complained about how degrading the pat down is on slashdot in the past and some asshole has the gall to say I'm just overly sensitive. Fuck people like that. Apparently it's my problem that I don't like guys slamming their hands into my junk in the name of utterly pointless security theater.

Metal detectors. Bomb sniffing scanners. That's all we need. If anyone were to set up an airline that used just those things I'd pay a 50% premium (perhaps more) on my tickets just to avoid the whole airport security assault. I'd pay more if they actually made the whole airport and flying experience less like a trip through prison and more of a fun experience.

That's really how I feel about airports. It's a trip through prison.

Reverse domain names would be inconvenient to type. Right now I can type "s" in the address bar and slashdot.org will come up. Reverse that and I'd need to type "org.s" to get it to come up. Perhaps browser makers would have done things differently so that "s" would actually bring up "org.slashdot".

What advantage would reversing the order give anyone? My first thought is that it'd allow alphabetical sorting of domains so that all the tlds would be together. I can't think why that'd be useful to anyone though.

The article is about slashing 78% of US employees at IBM. That's not a sign of a healthy company.

Unless you manage the server yourself I'm not sure what all this stuff is. I use XP at home and Win7 at work. It's the same. It's an OS. You run stuff and it runs. The only difference I see is that the gui looks a little different, configuration stuff is in slightly different places and I occasionally accidentally rotate my damn monitor when I hit ctrl+alt+left when I mean to hit ctrl+left.

Nevertheless, the next time I upgrade my home machine I'll go win7 for the 64 bit support. If you don't need more than 4gb of ram then I'd say just stick with XP.