This is not true in my experience. Often times people have been making a perfectly viable living doing a certain thing, and then excessive regulation pushes them out of the market so the big players can take over. Larger players are the ones with the lobbyists to help define the red tape, and the money/lawyers to spend on navigating it.

Go try to harvest oysters or clams in a Florida harvesting area. The startup capital is a bucket and some mud-boots. The regulatory hoops you much jump through to get that shellfish harvesting certificate are insane. The direct costs paid to the State are only a couple hundred dollars, but you have the cost of inspections (for the "washing facility", aka a sink), the cost of training, the cost of the government mandated tags that denote the area, condition, and purpose of the shellfish (different requirements for raw, on the half-shell oysters vs the ones for cooking vs ones for freezing vs ones for personal consumption), then the cost of yearly assessments. These costs can easily add up to dozens of thousands of dollars, and are considerably higher than the startup costs.

With all due respect, people that say things like that don't seem to have any experience doing something that is regulated, and therefore talk out of their ass.

He didn't assault a federal officer, I did. 18 U.S.C. 111.

I say let the drug companies advertise all they want, buy the doctors whatever swag they want, and buy them all the vacations they want, but there needs to be oversight to make sure those expenditures do not influence the doctor's diagnosis or treatment in any way. I want the pharmaceutical companies to have freedom of speech like every other company in the country (excepting tobacco and a tiny few others), but when it comes to the actual prescribing of the drugs, that needs to come down to cold-hard facts on efficacy and side-effects. It wouldn't take long with serious oversight for the doctors that are gaming the system to get caught prescribing anti-depressants to house-wives to stay skinny (welbutrin), or viagra to frat-boys. Once that problem is taken care of, the swag and fancy vacations won't have any utility, and the pharmaceutical companies will see the value approach 0, and will stop. Regardless of where you come down on free-speech, the pill-mill issue needs to be resolved for this to work.

Brad

I would rather be crazy than correct in this regard, but unfortunately I'm right. There are special laws that prohibit using force to preserve your rights against government or government agents. Treason comes to mind, also assaulting a federal (or state) officer. The government may be populated by people like me and you, but those people hold powers that you & I don't hold. The power to levy taxes, the power to close businesses, the power to imprison people. I can't build a jail and start populating it with people that I have found to be in violation of laws, only government and government agents can do that.

Go punch a guy in the face at a gas station...you will get 30 days in jail for assault. Then, go to a local IRS office and punch an agent in the face..in five years when you get out of prison you can tell me about how he's just a person like anyone else.

The difference you seem to forget is that the police not only has a literal gun, he has the figurative "force of the law" behind him when he's doing the violating. If the beggar starts to use force to keep you from your freedom of movement, you can use force to stop him. If you use force against the "gubmint", you lose...every time. This is the point you missed.

I have as much power as the drunken beggar or the store detective, but I don't have as much as the officer. If you want to dig a little deeper, the constitution lays it out pretty clearly. "Congress shall make no law" or similar language is found throughout the bill of rights (and the same concept is implied to the infinite other implicit rights not enumerated). It doesn't say that your mom or your priest or boss will keep you from saying certain things, just that congress won't keep you from saying certain things.

This is one of the most cohesive, insightful comments I've read on slashdot in quite a while. Huzzah to you. I would take your categorization a bit further and say that we can apply it to all sorts of mediums, groups, efforts, etc..

Going off-topic, but bear with me.

My HOA has 87 homes. Of those 87, there are 8-10 of us that reliably go to the monthly board meetings (of which I am treasurer), and *maybe* 15-20 will show up at the annual meeting were we discuss important issues such as repaving the road ways, where to keep our money, what the budget should be, whether or not to hire an outside management firm, the status of our covenants and restrictions, and so on. The VAST majority won't even return absentee ballots when we send them with a self-addressed stamped envelope. All they have to do is sign and return. We tallied up the results last night, 16 households returned votes. 16 out of 87 returned votes. 16! These same people will complain to an email address if the grass isn't cut, or if their neighbor doesn't pick up their trashcan on time, but they can't be bothered to come listen to what is important at the annual meeting. We're talking about 2-3 hours, ONCE A FREAGGIN' YEAR! I mean c'mon, skip that episode of American Idol and do something productive.

Like I said, I haven't read any truly useful posts in a long time here on /., so I just wanted to take a minute and thank you. If I had mod points I would've used those instead.

The Raspberry Pi hardware doesn't do the same things as the OLPC does. The Raspberry doesn't include an form of input or output as part of the reference hardware. So, at that point we are basically selling a computing core, ram, and some storage for $25. If the students need monitors, mice & keyboards at each location, they may as well just carry around a USB thumb stick with a custom LiveOS and put the Pi or other processing core at the work station. That sounds a LOT like my son's middle school.

shed its high cost assets

I think you mean its high cost liabilities, not assets. And ironically, one of the largest liabilities it shed was healthcare & pensions for union workers.

I wish I had mod points. You did a fine job of expressing my thoughts on the parent. The free-market isn't at risk of defaulting on its debt. When you really break it down, only 1/3 of our Government is at risk for defaulting on its debt, the Executive branch (yes, the Obama Administration). Whether or not the debt problem was created or inherited is an entirely separate discussion, but the point still remains that in an entirely free-market society (Libertarian Utopia) there would be so many fewer issues with a smallish Government defaulting. The problem is caused by, and amplified by the size of our Federal government.

I would appreciate an invitation. jamesbradleyharris(at)gmail(dot)com

Thanks, J. Brad Harris

The USPTO is a self-funded entity. http://www.inventorsdigest.com/archives/5543

Previously the Treasury was taking some of the money from fees collected by the USPTO to pay for other things, but this year it stopped.

Restorative justice systems are becoming more and more common in American schools, especially charter schools where the ultimate goal is a fully-capable, well-educated adult. http://www.realjustice.org/articles.html?articleId=441 While this isn't necessarily representative of an entire society, I would say that some urban school districts suffer from many of the same conditions that you see in society that result in incarceration. Just my .02. J. Brad Harris

I'd say that trying to blame Anonymous for a "carefully planned, very professional, highly sophisticated" attack is at best a stretch with no evidence, and at worst a purposeful misdirection for shoddy security mechanisms.

If I was a betting man, I'd say that this spin will result in more of Anonymous' attention being directed at Sony.

Sony, if you wanna feel what its like when 3,400,000 anonymous users really want to hurt you at the same time.....just keep poking the bear.

Get a Windows Mobile smartphone on Verizon, and download the application called WMWifiRouter. The latest version comes with a one time flat fee, but the older versions where free as in beer, and can still be found on various forums by searching for WMWifiRouter. This turns your WM phone into a WiFi hotpot (sort of) and you can easily connect through that. Verizon has no idea if the data requests are originating from your phone or from some other device, they shouldn't care anyway. One caveat to mention, the Hotspot is an Ad-Hoc network, which shouldn't be an issue for a laptop or netbook, but may not work for an iPhone, I'm not sure. I've been doing this for 3+ years on Verizon and I've never had a problem. Also, just FYI, Windows Mobile phone have an application called Internet Connection Sharing that will share the 3G over USB or Bluetooth, and that is built in to the O/S. Verizon will hide the icon in the start menu on phones they sell, but the application is still there, you just need to look for it on the phone.


Brad

Most people are suggesting you run notepad as administrator, which works fine. Another alternative is to save the edited file to your desktop, then drag it back into the proper folder (%sysroot%\system32\drivers\etc\). Then explorer will invoke the UAC prompt and do the update (overwrite) for you.