Actually, it's been shown (and discussed here on Slashdot multiple times) that the heaviest bandwidth users are typically video streaming users on mainstream sites like Youtube, Hulu, and Netflix. These are likely to be pretty casual users, with no idea of how much bandwidth is involved in streaming a full-length movie from Netflix. A casual user with a 10 or 20 gig cap would be quite surprised at hitting their cap after a few movies.

Actually, it takes 2 to 4 drinks to put a person over .08 BAC, depending on a number of factors.

I can chug a tallboy and hit the road legally.

My heavyset boss could knock back 4 shots of whiskey and still be under the legal limit.

Drunk driving is really low hanging fruit. Easy to spot, easy to prosecute. Driving while texting or not using a handsfree device is also illegal in my state, and is also low hanging fruit.

Laws that are easy to enforce are always written first. Laws that require superhuman cops either aren't written, or aren't enforced, even if they would have a beneficial impact..

It's already been said in this thread, but I'll say it again for emphasis.

In most American states, refusing a field sobriety test (electronic or otherwise) results in the immediate suspension of your license. Do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars. You can't appeal and have your license reinstated, the act of refusing the test is enough to revoke your license.

It's far better to take the test and risk blowing >0.08%, and then immediately laywer up.

To be fair, most officers don't use the breathalyser as their first filtering method to investigate suspected DUIs. Typically officers rely on the horizontal gaze nystagmus test, which is a far more accurate method of measuring intoxication levels around the legal maximum. However, that test generates no evidence which you can present in court, other than the sworn testimony of the officer who administered it. So once a DUI suspect has failed the HGN test, the officer will administer a breathalyser, so they have something to submit as evidence.

And I am one of many people who WILL buy from Steam, because I find the benefits far outweigh the idealogical downside of purchasing DRMed software.

I don't need to go to a retail store and buy a physical box. This is huge for me. If I want a game, I can just press a button on a website and have it playing on my computer in a matter of minutes.

If I want to show a friend a game, all I have to do is log in to my Steam account from their computer; all of my games are instantly available to install and play. This is a big one. They'll continue to be able to play my games until I log in back on my PC, and I don't have to tell them my password.

Streamlined, built in auto-updating; it updates my games in the background, so the game is patched and ready to go by the time I want to launch it.

Being able to instantly join a friend's online game by clicking one button in my friends list.

Easy reinstalls in case of disaster, no storing a binder of CD's and keeping track of ugly product keys.

Never having someone else's keygen stumbling onto my product key and blocking me from online play. Fuck yeah no CD keys.

All this in exchange for the risk that if Valve goes out of business, in a worst case scenario I might have to apply a 3rd party crack to my games. Yeah, I think I'll continue taking that risk.

No, no it does not.

The US government has only extended a sizable loan to GM.

Watch less Faux News.

Because even under American style at-will employment, it's still illegal to fire someone in cases of discrimination or retaliation.

This could be considered both, either discrimination on basis of political views, or retaliation for working politically against his corporate overlords.

I live and work in Seattle.

I gave up my car when I went back to college, mainly to save on insurance costs. After college was over, I didn't have any money to re-insure my car, so I kept commuting by bus. And then, I just never stopped.

Practicality & Convenience:

Now, my commute to work is just under 3 miles. It takes 10-20 minutes by car, depending on traffic, and 20 minutes by bus no matter what. Times of day with heavy traffic, the bus moves faster than general traffic, because the city has dedicated lanes in places, dedicated traffic lights in others, and various other advantages designed to keep the bus moving when traffic is gridlocked.

There are several bus routes with stops within a quarter mile of my home. From "my" stop, it's about 5 minutes to a major transit hub, where I can transfer to virtually anywhere. However, "my" buses only run at 30 minute intervals (and are synchronized in their departure times by some perverse coincidence), so I have an average of a 15 minute wait for the bus, each way. Most of the buses I transfer to at the transit hub run with much more reasonable 10 or 15 minute intervals, so I rarely have downtime waiting for a transfer. So time-wise, I don't lose much more than I would looking for parking.

I can read while I ride. Can't do that while I drive. Many of the buses have free wifi; I can post to /. while riding.

The buses run from 5 AM until to 1 AM, leaving me a 4 hour dead-zone. Obviously I can't haul large objects on the bus.

For these inconvenient occasions, I have a couple options. I can call a taxi if I'm in a hurry or the buses aren't running. For hauling things, I can rent a pickup or a van from a nearby U-Haul.
I can always just walk. And I can always (illegally) drive my uninsured car.

Financially:

Insurance on my cheap, heavily depreciated American economy car costs just over $100/mo. That price is for only liability and "uninsured motorist" coverage. I'm sure full coverage with a low deductable on a newer vehicle would be at least twice as much. There's of course gas prices, as well as regular maintenance, which can about double that price, but insurance is really the big cost (for me). I have free street parking at home, but monthly parking around most workplaces can run upwards of $100.

A monthly bus pass, on the other hand, costs $63 a month. That buys me unlimited rides anywhere in the city. On the occasions when I leave the city, I pay a highly reduced rate, usually $.50, but it can be a full dollar or more if I cross a county line. Obviously, that's not part of my daily commute.

Taxis for special trips are affordable, at a rate of $2 + 2.50/mile. For extended downtown errands, it's often cheaper to call a cab than it would be to pay for garage parking, with a car. And if I'm running late and miss my bus to work, it's only a $10 cab fare to get me there. So I can ride a taxi to work several times a month, and still come out on top versus a car.

Renting a pickup, or van, or even a box truck only costs $19.95 plus $0.70/mile. Well worth it on the very rare occasions that it is necessary; I don't have to register, insure, and store a pickup truck just for making dump runs or buying furniture. Most furniture and appliance stores offer free or highly discounted delivery, anyway.

As for these people complaining that transit doesn't work for them, because their service is lousy:
That's not a problem with transit in general, that's a problem with your local government. Get your government to fund and implement a reasonable, modern transit system, and you will find it practical and useful.

Unless you're one of the people with a 1-hour by car freeway commute. Jesus Christ, you seriously give up 2 hours of your day every day for nothing? Damn. I couldn't stand a fraction of that. ANY commute option for you is going to suck; you made that lifestyle choice already. Lobby your local government to implement express inter-city bus routes or something. Or just move to a reasonable distance from your workplace.

I don't know what backwards, limited-service municipality you live in, but here in Seattle, they send you a bus ticket with your jury duty notice, and give you more for every day of the your service.

It would be silly for the government to require you under penalty of law to serve as a juror, but not provide you a way to get there.

The US taxes corporate profits, not revenue. Companies with small profits pay equally small taxes. So any companies in the US who "can't afford" to pay taxes are not going to pay much at all.

Companies operating in the red pay no corporate taxes at all; we already don't get any taxes from companies that are being bailed out. Companies running with a thin profit margin pay significantly less tax than those with huge profits.

No US company will be driven out of business by corporate taxes, simply because once they are doing poorly, they don't have to pay them anymore.

Easy, legal way for US companies to avoid paying taxes: Invest 100% of their profits in R&D. Boom, now they have a 0% tax rate.

Increasing executive pay or shareholder dividends works too.

Any company bitching about how corporate taxes keep them from being "competitive" obviously isn't spending enough money on their products. All you have to to is quickly reinvest your profits in research or expansion, and you suddenly have no taxable profits.

And besides, all you free-market idealists, I thought competition was supposed to keep profits tiny, anyway!

A: My country's defense department is incredibly well financed and equipped. They can just build a server farm of extremely high power and high bandwidth, and all sorts of varied and ever-changing IP addresses that would be far better, and that they would have much more control over. DoD doesn't need a botnet of worm-riddled, broadband connected civilian computers.

B: Using civilian resources for military reasons is generally considered to be unwise. Mostly because it makes your civilian infrastructure a higher priority military target. Also because you would reveal too much about your activities to a smart person who is carefully observing one of your bots.

Unless you're talking about intelligence gathering through the machines, but then the government would be faced with the enormous task of identifying the users of all 180,000 machines. Which is technically possible, but a task significantly harder than building the botnet in the first place. It would probably be easier and more efficient to just install a trojan of their own design on a specific target, rather than sifting through an existing botnet.

Because that would be highly illegal. Just as illegal as creating the botnet in the first place. You can't just make modifications to 180,000 computers without their owners knowledge or consent.

Some governmental agency should man up and do it, though. Researchers have been hijacking botnets to study them for a while now, they almost have it down to a science. Someone in Homeland Security should just grow some balls and hire a team of professionals to hijack and destroy botnets.

Ford has serious stockpiles of cash and is in no danger of going out of business any time soon, especially with the strength of their European sales.

You must be thinking of GM and Chrysler.

Yeah, that's right. Even if they're on a private LAN, or firewalled to hell, all the workstations are using legitimate public IPs. And back in the olden days, when most of these companies bought their blocks, if you needed more IPs than a class B there was no other option. Remember, NAT was still a long ways from being trivial to implement back then.

And it's not just workstations. I imagine for Ford, all their assembly robots have their own IP addresses. You'd need a few thousand IPs per factory. Similar situation at Halliburton, I bet there's thousands of network connected controllers in a single chemical plant.

Sure you can say "they don't need them", but so what. They've been purchased. You can't just take back their address space.

Car analogy: That's like telling a soccer mom that because doesn't NEED her mammoth Hummer H2 to go buy a gallon of milk, that you are going to repossess it and give her a Chevy Aveo5 instead.
Sure, it might be wasteful, but it's their legal right to own and use what they have purchased.

I'm sure once we're out of IPv4 addresses, some of these companies with old class A allocations will start selling off chunks of them for a tidy profit. But until that day, they've been purchased and allocated, and are not coming back.

Neither of which are illegal under Swedish law. Under Swedish law, the ONLY people breaking the law are those downloading and uploading the pirated content. Citizens of Sweden are free to index and publish sources of illegal items (in this case, illegally shared files). Law enforcement is just as free to prosecute the provider of the illegal items (or files), but absolutely not the messenger.

To reiterate: under current Swedish law, the way to enforce copyright law is to prosecute users who are downloading/uploading copyrighted content, and NOT the operator of the tracker, who has not trafficked in any copyrighted content at all. Unless you can copyright an SHA1 hash, now (Maybe you could consider it a derivative work? That would be a frightening world).

  This may be different in your country; I know it is different in mine. However, the guilty verdict this judge gave represented a drastic change in the way the Swedish judiciary interprets the existing law, one which runs counter to all prior decisions.

As an aside, a technical correction to your statement. A bittorrent tracker does not track file chunks. It does not monitor or arrange file transfers in any meaningful way. All it does is provide a list of IP addresses and ports of bittorrent clients who are trading in a particular torrent. Arranging transfers and piece swaps is entirely between the clients. Often a bittorrent client only checks in with the tracker a few times an hour, to get an updated list of IPs.

You're right, this is hardly the first instance of an actor aging out of a role.

T-1000, like Data, should not age.