Ah, but all people should be equally valued in the eyes of the law. That's the point. Laws should not favor the rich over the poor, or one ethnicity over another. While one person may be born into wealth, and their possession of it, therefore a given, another person born into poverty should not be barred from obtaining wealth through hard work and careful planning. When laws exist that effectively preclude the poor from gaining wealth, we now have inequality in the law, and that is what the article describes.

A quick couple of searches doesn't seem to immediately turn up a definition for "countant", but a Count is in charge of a County.

Age of Consent in the US is established at the State level. It ranges from 16 to 18, but I believe that 18 is the most common.

What really got me in to Google was how light their search page was. It had one, small graphic, and the rest was just a precise bit of HTML. In those days, the best I could do was a 26.4Kbps dial-up connection, which made Google an outstanding choice over Yahoo! and Dogpile, which had been frustrating me with all the crap that was necessary to load before the page was useful. It really made a huge difference, and I'm thinking that's more significantly responsible for their initial success than even the quality of their search results.

Because the telcos all have their own bottomless pit full of money, and uprooting their entire infrastructure should really just be a drop in the bucket to them.

If the telcos are to be forced to replace their infrastructure, then they should be subsidized for doing so. At the same time, there should be no subsidies of that sort that should be coming from our government until our politicians can get their shit together and get our treasury into a manageable state. In the mean time, it is reasonable for telcos to charge a fee to customers who want them to install fiber to their homes.

If all DRM were implemented the way it is implemented with Steam, then we wouldn't be having such heated arguments about DRM.

Strictly speaking, sound waves are not made of atoms, but of energy passing through atoms.

This politician's point isn't about making children read his favorite books because they're his favorites. He wants children and teenagers to read Science Fiction because it makes science and math interesting, which in turn, turns more of our youth to those fields of study. I seldom agree with politicians, but this guy is absolutely right-- if we want to improve ourselves as a species, we need to get our youth interested in these subjects. Getting them to read Science Fiction is one good approach.

Our population grows at an exponential rate. Strictly speaking, we're not overpopulated now, but in a few generations we will be. We probably won't run out of room before food production can no longer keep up. We may find a more efficient way to produce food that can keep up, but the fact is that this will only slow down the problem. When we do run out of room (or approach that point, anyway), illness will spread quite readily, the end result being plagues, regardless of our collective hygiene. We could solve this by having regularly scheduled mass death events every few hundred years, such as nuclear wars, or maybe we can get playful with it and do some kind of gladiatorial games. Perhaps better yet, is to just get a large portion of our population to colonize new worlds. That's perhaps the only practical solution that doesn't directly involve people dieing.

This solution doesn't address the environment. This is not meant to be a solution for the environment. This is a solution for human kind. There's no reason why we can't continue to develop environmentally friendly technologies while working toward colonizing other worlds. In fact, I'd say the goals are quite compatible, as technologies which require fewer resources will contribute nicely to founding new civilizations.

Steam for Linux isn't really about bringing games to existing Linux users. This is preparation for their Steambox hardware. They're creating a market for viable game development on Linux, so that when they release the Steambox, developers won't be hesitant to develop for it. By using Linux, they don't have to provide Windows licenses for every device, thereby keeping the cost of the device down.

So you see, the existing Linux userbase really isn't an important factor in this, though that it does exist and they are interested in games, certainly furthers their goals.

The Wii sold 99 million units (making it quite easily the most popular of the generation), and was the least powerful unit of the generation. The PlayStation 3 sold 70 million units (making it arguably the least popular of the generation, though the Xbox 360's tendency toward hardware failure may very well make up for the 5 million unit difference between it and the PS3), and was the most powerful unit of the generation. Modern video game graphics are well beyond the point where we need to be desperately concerned with the limit of simultaneous colors or polygons. Nintendo is just the only one whose marketing department acknowledges this.

If you could make a thing go away by making it illegal, why would you need to ban guns?

Game Informer is still being pushed pretty heavily by GameStop.

If you need a spreadsheet, then use a Spreadsheet format. If you need a Presentation, then consider a format appropriate for that task. RTFs are for text documents that require formatting, and this injudicious mingling of datatypes is exactly what's wrong with Microsoft Office document formats.