Where in the constitution is the federal government granted the authority to restrict to whom and how much corporations can give money?

The federal government has laws against bribery of federal judges, inspectors, law enforcement agents, the list goes on and on. Those laws are not remotely controversial, and constitutional challenges to them would be laughed out of court. Why should Senators/Reps get special dispensation to accept bribes, or corporations special dispensation to bribe them, when it's prohibited for every other type of federal official with no trouble at all?

Absolutely agreed. I've told my boss on several occasions that client requests would violate our audit requirements if we fulfill them. I just approach it very calmly, pointing out what we would be doing and what that would breach. He's been nothing but appreciative of that, even when it's led to the necessity of a difficult conversation with the client. In other cases, I've been able to find ways to get the client what they want without causing a violation.

Accidentally making such a request without understanding its full implications is one thing. It's likely the person asking the original question here had nothing more than a clueless marketing department who have no idea astroturfing is prohibited by almost every site/app host out there, and hopefully, cluing them in will be all that's needed to put an end to it. On the other hand, if they're so ethically challenged that they'd persist or try to go under the radar even knowing that, it's time to blow the whistle.

The media wants a circus.

That, at least, should not be news to anyone.

Even Obama had to give his opinion. "If I had a son he'd look like Trayon (sic)". Please Mr. President throw more gasoline on the fire. This is before Obama knew of the facts of the case.

I don't know how Obama would have to "know the facts of the case" to state that if he had a son, his son would be black. I think he could pretty safely say that at any point whatsoever. Racism is still a real problem in America, and I'm sure it is an issue Obama has had to consider personally. Let's give you a moment to consider why that might be.

This event is exposing the worst of this country. A perfect storm of all that is wrong with where we are today. The media being anything but objective.

The media has been anything but objective for a very long time now. Glad you caught on. We'd do well to bring back the Fairness Doctrine, require that news reporting actually be factually accurate, and amend the Constitution to definitively state that corporations are not people and therefore have no inherent human rights. Guess what the chances of any of those are?

The politics doing nothing but making everything racial and partisan.

To be quite honest, that's been happening since Obama's election. I've seen a tremendous increase in blatant, open racism, as well as the subtler types, ever since he became a serious candidate, let alone won. Whatever you think of him (and I don't have a particularly high opinion of him on a lot of things), we should judge him on the merits of his policies and actions, not anything else. But the "anyone but Obama" rhetoric is sure showing what the real trouble is here, when even someone as crazy as Santorum could ever be under serious consideration. Anyone who thinks Santorum is a better choice than...really, anyone...has something else going on besides evaluating a candidate on their merits and platform.

Having been in the beta since November or so, all I can tell you is that you're visiting the wrong websites. I've bought 0 items at an auction house, and sold just as many. Maybe this means I won't end up with the top 10% of gear, but that's fine by me.

The story is there, the gameplay is there. Tristram is once again in trouble. Decard Cain is still old. The button mash fast "sweet got a rare" fun is still present.

If you're convinced you won't buy it, or have a moral obligation not to due to the DRM, fine. I found it to be a nice continuation of the series and will be plopping down my $.

For the climate change denialists, I wonder which one of these you think isn't so?

• Burning a hydrocarbon generates CO2 and H2O. This is basic chemistry.
• CO2 in a planet's atmosphere causes it to become warmer by trapping heat. This is basic planetary science.
• We burn a whole lot of hydrocarbons. That's basic reality.

So tell me, those of you who deny climate change? The exact extent of it requires complex models, but the fact of it only requires basic chemistry, basic planetary science, and a basic look around you. Which of those do you deny?

I guess I didn't have that experience. My wife does like to text, but likes to talk face to face, as well. We do like to ping back and forth with one another while we're both working, when something particularly interesting/insane happens at one of our jobs. But we've also always liked to sit down and talk with one another, and still do.

That doesn't seem to me to be an isolated experience, either. I go up to brunch every Sunday with a group of developers I've worked with in the past and some I still do at present, because we enjoy the face-to-face conversation, especially since some of them no longer work with us and it's the only chance we get to see them.

That being said, I think the use of technology to communicate is part of what's included in that slippery term "normal" now. If a coworker needs me to look over a block of code that's acting up, the easiest thing is to IM or email it, even if they're sitting just across the office. And often, sending back my responses will be most easily done the same way. It's just another tool available to us, and like any tool, it's not the best one for every job, but it should be used when it is. Teaching kids how to determine that should be part of any parent's priorities, and should be part of a school curriculum as well. There are times when there's no substitute for a face-to-face meetup.

A "theist" believes there is a God. Adding the 'a' prefix makes it the opposite. An "atheist", then, believes there is no God.

Actually, that's not correct. An atheist does not necessarily believe there is no god (though that's one possibility), an atheist does not believe there is a god. That may seem to be saying the same thing two ways, but it's not.

I reject the claims of gods in the same way I reject claims of the Loch Ness Monster or UFOs: It's an extraordinary claim without corresponding extraordinary proof. That does mean I'm an atheist, since I do not believe in any gods, but it's always possible someone will come along and prove me wrong, just as it's possible someday someone will find convincing evidence for Nessie or extraterrestrials visiting Earth. If that were to happen on any of the three, I'd change my mind. Personally, the extraterrestrials are the only one I foresee any reasonable likelihood of that happening for, but in all those cases, I do not believe the claims until and unless they are demonstrated to be true.

That's not a positive claim or belief, it's just the rejection of unproven and extraordinary claims. We all do that all the time. When Prince Somescammer of Nigeria emails me desperately needing my help fleeing the country, and is willing to reward me handsomely if I'll just give him a bit up front, I cannot, with 100% certainty, say the claim is untrue (99.999...% with a lot of 9s, perhaps, but it's conceivable). That aside, lacking evidence that it is, and the claim being astonishing and extraordinary, I reject it. And princes are, at the very least, known and proven to exist.

"Crazy people made up crazy story"? How on earth does that warrant being posted as news? Is the next article going to be about a guy who believe he telepathically communicates with aliens?

Doesn't this show one more reason we need to get rid of software patents?

There are a limited number of ways to make a usable smartphone interface, especially when competing with an already-established method. Of course they're going to be similar. There are a limited number of ways to make a handheld device that comfortably fits in the hand and pocket. Of course they're going to look similar.

Didn't we used to require "non-obviousness" as a requirement for a patent? Aren't these things obvious?

No, it's not a matter of intentions. All the companies listed above (hard drive manufacturers) and many others (computer manufacturers, broadband ISPs, component manufacturers, encryption providers, etc.), directly or indirectly benefit from piracy, because to a significant portion of their users, that's a main or sole reason for using their product/service. That does not mean they are responsible for the actions of their users, any more than the telephone company can be sued under anti-telemarketing laws even though they very well know some users are violating them.

Also, your naming bit fails to make sense. The site was called "MegaUpload". "Mega" is a very common prefix, and "Upload" is exactly what the site allowed its users to do. I fail to see how that connotes illegal activity. Nor do I see how the internal emails matter-I'm sure any site that allows user uploads discusses internally the likelihood that some of those are copyright violations and what to do about them. I imagine you'd find similar emails at Flickr or Youtube, and I know you'd find discussions of that sort on Wikipedia. It's an inevitability of running a user-generated content site.

Faking compliance with DMCA requests, on the other hand, is likely to land you in trouble-and is the only thing you list that should land you in trouble. I haven't seen anything about that though, could you please provide your source for that?

It could look like what you say. Or we could see more open source games, or more online ones, or free/ad-supported, or any combination thereof, or things no one's even thought of yet. (Think how much different the world looks in 2011 than we imagined it would in 2001, let alone 1991!)

I can't tell you exactly what the new era will look like. If I were that good, I'd be awfully rich. I can tell you, however, that it will not look like the "pay per copy" model of the last century. That paradigm died the moment we developed and mass-marketed machines capable of making billions of copies at near-zero marginal cost.

What I seem to continually see here is the argument from consequences fallacy. "Well if this were true, then XYZ bad thing would happen..."! Even if it's correct that the death of the pay-per-copy model is bad (I'm not convinced it is, but for the sake of argument), that wouldn't change whether or not it's true. Even draconian laws and draconian technical measures haven't made the slightest dent, so I don't know what more proof of truth we'd need. Its death will be lingering, certainly, but the arrow's already through the heart.

Most likely, at least part of the new model will look like most everyone else's job-continued pay depends on continued work. If you want to make money as a musician, tour. If you want to make money as a programmer, develop custom software for people who want it or fix bugs for people who are willing to pay you to. I've got no problem with that-I'm not still getting paid for what I did yesterday, either.

No it's not.

There used to be a pretty decent trade in going up the side of a mountain, bringing down a block of ice, and selling chunks out of it. Then along came freezers, and everyone could make a "copy" of that ice chunk right in their own home. Now ice hauling is no longer a viable business model. Times change, technology disrupts, and sometimes something that was once lucrative becomes superfluous or worthless.

The selling copies model is dead, and it's only thrashing at all through enforced monopoly (an enforced monopoly over thoughts and numbers, no less). That's not going to work, with a machine designed to make copies in every living room. You are correct that asking nicely for a donation often does, and I often give one. But it's tough to demand money for something people can easily do themselves. If a chef develops a delicious recipe, but it's relatively easy to cook, a lot of people will cook it rather than going to the restaurant. Those who do go to the restaurant will see some benefit in paying that premium (added convenience, the atmosphere, what have you). And no, it makes no difference that in this case the cooking only takes a button press-if anything, that means less reason to go to the restaurant.

When you develop something that's not actually scarce, don't be surprised if you don't make a ton of money from it. Ideas spread easily, especially now that we've got a global network designed to do exactly that. We're well into a new paradigm here, and if the lumbering old giants want to ignore that-well, we all know what happens when you fail to adapt.

Sure is a good thing those nice Germans didn't target any civilians.

Oh, wait, we're back in the real world here! The sad part is, I'm not even entirely sure you're trolling. The Americans didn't have entirely clean hands in the whole affair. Very few countries have fought a major war without doing some things they've later come to regret, one good reason not to have the damn things. And the internment camps were a travesty, but they pale beside Auschwitz or Birkenau. The majority of Japanese-Americans who were put into internment camps did, at least, come out of them alive, and weren't sent there with the deliberate purpose of mass slaughter.

That doesn't by any means make it right. But it's nothing like the Holocaust.

Not while I'm drinking coffee, damn you! You owe me a keyboard!