Dammit. Screwed up when I edited for formatting and deleted the part about the idiocy of pot prohibition. Here's the short version:

Criminalization of pot is bad. The powers that be criminalize it and vehemently try to keep it out of society. But it's so prolific that nearly everyone knows numerous people who have tried it with no ill effects, completely contradicting the TV Commercials, which makes it's hard for many people (especially kids) to believe that the other things they say are bad for them really are.

You aren't a drug dealer, you're a pot seller.
To you, pot seems like what everyone is doing because you are accepting of pot users. But, do you think someone you know is going to tell you they do something like go home every night and shoot heroin when you use names like "Junk Box" to refer to those people?

I had the same experience. I sold pot to zero out my pot budget. Everyone I associated with had a cavalier attitude towards pot use but looked down upon those who did "hard" drugs. Those who used pot weren't shy about admitting it so it seemed like that's all anyone was doing to me too.
But then we got the opportunity to get extra credit in HS for community service. I chose one that was just setting out doughnuts and making coffee for a couple hours on Tuesday nights. It turned out to be meetings for The Fifth Chapter Motorcycle Club (and being it was a small town, they also hosted Narcanon members). It was a great experience with great people so I kept doing it for about 5 years before I moved from the area.

In there I saw hundreds of people who were doing coke, crack and meth daily for years. Many were people I knew (small town) and would never have suspected was a junkie. And I know for every person I saw in there getting treatment, there was likely 10 more in the community doing it who weren't.

Just because you like to think of yourself as an expert, you aren't one. Neither am I. But I spent a lot of time around people who were and know I wouldn't ever want to be an expert on that world. But through them, I got a glimpse of the real world and it's not pretty.
Which is why I have such a huge problem with the criminalization of drugs. It's designed to stop people from using them but it fails miserably at that. In return for nothing, it creates a black market exploited by violent criminals, it glamorizes them to youth (just about everyone who was in treatment started when they were young and did it because they were told NOT to) and the worst thing to me is that it adds a stigma that prevents those in the real world who have seen the bad side from sharing their experiences.

I've never done any drug besides pot and the reason is that I was exposed to the realities of other drugs. No one believes someone brought in by the school or cops to make speeches or people on TV Commercials. But when you see a 350 lb wall of muscle, who is someone you know from your community, sitting on his Harley laughing as he shows you the places he's been stabbed and then is in tears 20 minutes later telling the group how Heroin made him it's bitch, you figure out that it's not a question of being strong enough to handle it; It's being smart enough never to start.

While I'm behind the idea of (some) decriminalization, this particular case isn't nonsense or even a problem. Anaya, even after he discovered and knew the customer was using the compartment for smuggling contraband (no reasonable person would think $800k in cash crammed into a secret compartment was legal), agreed to fix their secret compartment and install another for them. That's why he was convicted.

While I don't like the drug prohibition laws themselves, a law that makes it illegal to knowingly assist criminals in the commission of a crime is perfectly reasonable and it's enforcement in this case was completely justifiable.

If the lossless file was the same size, price and obtained with the same convenience then sure, I'd take the lossless file. But lossless files tend to cost more, are usually slightly harder to obtain, always take up far more space per file and I can't tell the difference between them and the 256k files I can very conveniently get for $0.99-1.29 on Amazon or iTunes and don't have to spend time to convert it for for the iPod or the car.

Considering all that, why would I choose lossless? The only benefit it gives is that it would sate my ego knowing I had "the best" while having several quantifiable disadvantages.

Nurses, secretaries, hairdressers, fashion designers, make-up artists, etc.
A straight guy in those professions will get plenty of ridicule and torment.

It was two guys having a slightly of color conversation. That doesn't just happen at conventions. And anyone who thinks off color talk is limited to guys is delusional. Women engage in it at least as much as men do. And they often do it more freely because there's far less chance of there being any repercussions as those with the power to handle it are often are middle class white males concerned that attempting to take any action against a woman will end up causing them to be labeled as sexist in retribution (yes, I've seen it happen).

These guys just happened to get overheard by an oversensitive sexist who decided to use what she overheard to defame 2 people for some Twitter attention. She simply found out that the internet isn't burdened by the white or male guilt that allows people to get away with such over dramatic behavior in the real world.

There's several sites (Ex. MP3 or Not and Noise Addicts) that have tests where you can find out if you can hear the difference between two different quality sound files on your equipment.

Generally, Lossless audio is like expensive wine or water. Ego drives people to find a difference much more than them actually being able to tell a difference.
If you take boxed wine or tap water and put it in a fancy, expensive looking bottle then have people compare them; there's a few experts and connoisseurs who can reliably tell they're the same but most people will say the liquid from the expensive bottle is superior.
Lossless audio has the same placebo effect. Tell people it's lossless and put it in a 100MB file and they'll be certain it sounds better than a 12MB compressed file. But there's really only a relative few people who can actually hear any difference.

All of the "Richard Castle" novels released thus far have made the Top 10 of the NYT Best Seller list. There's even a movie adaptation of one of the books in the works.

Plus, remember Game of Thrones is licensed IP. What rights HBO gets to sell, and how much of the money they get to keep if they do, depends on their licensing agreement with George R. R. Martin.

Refusing to violate the terms of service of another company by using deceptive marketing is quite different than refusing to endorse his company's products at all.

I wish I could have been horrified. But I was too busy being one of the 53% who were working so we could pay taxes and use the remainder to pay for food, housing and health care.

Even if they can't write code themselves they likely still understand that much of what they do is easier, or only possible because of people who code. Why would their endorsement of having more schools have coding classes and having more kids take those courses be less credible than that of a programmer?

They aren't trying to get kids to become "incredible coders". They're simply trying to get people interested in simply learning how to code at all. Which makes people like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates perfect examples. They weren't incredible coders. They were just people who had exceptional ideas whose ability to code allowed them to make those ideas a reality. The same way Slash knowing how to play guitar let him turn his musical ideas into reality or knowing how to write let Stephen King turn his ideas into reality.

People don't have to be able to do something exceptionally well to do something exceptional with what they know how to do.

On the flip side of that, we actually do have a loser provision in the Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure. Rule 39.
The most frequent beneficiary of that rule in the last few years has been Westboro Baptist Church. They've used it to make people who sued them for protesting their kids' funeral pay them tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees. Yeah, great system.

That's already a pretty big business in "loser pays" countries. In Germany about half the Adult Population has legal insurance.
Wouldn't work very well for patent trolls though. Insuring a patent troll for legal fees would be like selling life insurance at a terminal cancer ward.

Aaaaaand the link to the text of the bill in the EFF article is dead. Here's a currently live one

Probably because the article links to some Lexis Nexus paywall site rather than say, the EFF Article that not only links to the full text of the bill but also has a handy link to Congressional contact info.

It's easy to be cynical. On our end it seems like Congress has it's head up it's ass. But I've actually talked to several Congressmen and from their end, it's the American people who have their heads stuck in their ass because none of them get involved beyond maybe going to a polling place every few years.

Many of them do keep to the idea their job is to represent their constituents (other than the nutbags like Barton and Akin). Some will even go so far as to vote contrary to their own beliefs or loyalties if enough people within their district ask it of them.
The problem is that most of the time the only ones who give a crap about any pending legislation are those with a vested interest in the outcome. When those are the only constituents who voice an opinion, they're the ones get represented.

So if people get involved and actually voice their support for this one, it could turn out like SOPA and PIPA which many people thought would pass regardless of how bad they were or how many people told the internet they hated them.