Fuck evolution and fuck nature. I don't give a shit how species development works or if it will continue to work at all. Intelligence has made evolution obsolete. If you think it's so important, then feel free to line yourself up to die.

The new Opera is just a butchered Chrome with less features. Please don't use crappy knock-offs made by sellouts.

You refuse to pay what the asker wants and download it without paying anyway, and somehow the RIAA is the glutton. Riiiiiiight~

So what you want is instant gratification because you are unable to wait patiently for six months. Okay, fair enough.

Why is it wrong to for them to make a profit? I understand and sympathize with the criticisms of the entertainment industries which constantly pushing for harsher laws, but the other major side of this fight expects it to be a charity. I don't see (very many) people seriously demanding car companies start selling cars at cost.

I don't know about these `artists' of which you speak, but I personally have never gotten any nutrition or shelter from the bubbly feeling I get when I do something nice on the internet.

Scientists that give their work away for free are almost invariably funded by the government. May I assume that you have no objection to supporting movie studios by taxes? Of course, to match this completely, the government should also have some say in what gets funded, just as with scientific research.

Have you ever heard of something called `insurance'? You should look it up, it's pretty nifty.

Stockholders do not manage the company. They vote for the board of directors, which manages the rest. Only in special circumstances, like an offer to privatize the company, do the votes have any direct effect.

Should citizen voters be liable for prison time if they elect a senator who turns out to be corrupt?

Ah, so it is; looks like I won't be putting my /. profile and excellent karma on my resume after all.... I got so caught up getting my <s and my >s right on the first try that I completely forgot that it wasn't the same as a regular closing tag. I've also decided to learn HTML past the XHTML that I picked up long ago. To anyone who was looking at my post for insight into the inner workings of web technologies: please forgive me -- I have failed you.

Yeah, I realized that after I hit submit. I wrote the first scenario after the second, then realized that `contractor' would be ambiguous and changed it to `carpenter' without thinking about it. It was wrong.

I am sorry.

Also, I was forced to use non-compliant markup (<br> rather than </br>) because SlashCode is shit, I forgot to use `TeX Quotes', and I left out an example of a shitty contractor that I had been planning on including.

I apologize for this as well.

I'm not saying to write unfair contracts, just one that says "contractor will work with the client to implement X in exchange for Y$ per hour". Then, when they hire a consultant that gives them a 5000 page report detailing why they'll get 1000% better performance if they prefix all their classes with the client companies name, don't argue with them; just do it. If you were a carpenter and the homeowners changed their minds from White #001042051 to White #001042052, you wouldn't argue back that the difference is physically imperceivable to the human eye, you'd add a molecule of black to ten gallons of white and charge for it.

I'm not arguing that you should be out to do a shitty job and suck money from customers, just that if they want to piss money away, let them piss some on you.

Terrible advice. There is always money in confusion as long as you write the contract properly, which should always be the case.