"Freedom from censorship" is "freedom of expression". "Freedom from discrimination" is "equal rights under the law". "Freedom from murder" - well, again, since you presumably have a right to life and liberty, yes, murdering you abridges that right. But it's not a "freedom from".

Rights are better stated in the affirmative. If you talk about all the things you should be protected against (since that's somewhat limitless), it's difficult to enumerate all of them. Stating an affirmative right ("freedom of expression" or "freedom of religion") makes it clear that there are few, if any exceptions, unless it tramples on someone else's affirmatively stated rights.

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If you have more than one window open in a single app, There's no easy way to switch between them.

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My experieince with MacOSX in general is that if you do things the way Steve Jobs thinks you should be doing things, everything works fine. But if you stray from that path, everything becomes unnecessarily difficult. The Apple slogan shouldn't be "think different" it should be "think like steve jobs".

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Collecting the oil appears to be necessary. If you set up a collection rig, you only need to stifle the pressure from the oil you don't collect. If you try to block it entirely, you need to block *all* the pressure. The latest attempt to cap the well failed due to pressure and buoyancy created by the well and its byproducts, even though it allowed some of the oil through for collection. Do you think an identical cap that tried to block it completely would be more successful? I'm not a fan of BP, but I don't think they're trying less plausible solutions solely to save themselves the cost of drilling a new well. Given the payouts the U.S. will likely extract to cover damages (legislation to raise the cap is already in progress, and their public promise to make good is hard to renege on), they're better off capping as fast as possible and drilling anew.

11 tons is not going to do much to a wellhead other than pry enlarge it. Two things a nuke has going for it are size and temperature, neither one of which is extent in known conventional explosives. Which is not to say the government does not have stuff out there that could do this, but they would pry rather use a nuke itself than the magic crap they use to detonate it.

if i want to find pirates, i would get a regular isp-account, fire up my bittorent client, like any normal pirate, and then collect ips. I do not see, how peerblock could help you there, because i do not differ in behaviour from other pirates.

But international boffins analysing the RHIC gold-buster results have now discovered a an anti-deuterium nucleus containing an antiproton, an antineutron - and, gobsmackingly - an "anti-strange" quark.

A Faraday Box would make this a non-issue. The problem is what else do you use that you'd be blocking? You would lose cell service inside your home. For Radio and TV (if you even care about antiquated communication, but then there's HD) you may be able to wire antennas to the exterior, but you'd have to check with the complex's association bi-laws --which likely to enforce a "clean" look.

In the UK we have the NHS. Lots of people moan about it. It's not perfect. But if you're ill, for the most part, people are thankful that it is there.

In the US the poor 20% of the population have nothing.

The US is the home of free speech and a bastion of many personal freedoms, but it is also a place where survival of the fittest takes priority. If you're doing well for youself, then great. Not everyone is.

Take a step back and start thinking about what other people need for a change. Having a government mandated healthcare system to cater for the bottom fifth of society (which private healthcare would otherwise ignore) ain't so bad an idea.

You are right, how could I forget. I really love Smalltalk the language, but I'm less keen on the whole "modify the image" thing. I'm sure it would have been a lot more successful if it were file-based.

I might add to this list: Recursion.

design patterns

The thing self-taught programmers really miss is the core of computer science, which is computational theory. A lot of them pick up parts of complexity theory because it is so useful (and some parts are intuitively obvious), but most miss computability theory because you can get through your day without it. On the other hand, it is what Dijkstra is referring to when he says "Computers have nothing to do with computer science." It discusses what kinds of problems can be solved and what kind can never be solved, and what kinds of computers can be used to solve them. Fascinating, I think.