Here in Lexington, Kentucky, I see more bikes every year. The city has been steadily adding bike lanes to every road in the downtown/university area. Local businesses are getting together to install bike hitching posts in the restaurant-and-bar districts around campus, and even Wal-Mart has started installing bike racks. Critical Mass rides happen several times a year, and there's more people every time.

Some places in the US maybe losing their bike culture, but not all of them.

Oh, we don't have a helmet law, either. I don't think there should be one. That doesn't make you any less of an idiot if you don't wear a helmet.

As a cyclist, I agree 100% with everything you said about unsafe riders, but this particular thing wouldn't be a problem if businesses would provide proper bicycle racks for their customers. Half the point of a bicycle is that you shouldn't have to park three blocks away from your destination. It's ridiculous that large businesses will buy up acres of land for parking lots and refuse to spend a few hundred dollars on a bike rack.

It's not black and white. There was always going to be a counter-reaction, but these guys are making it stronger and sooner than it would've been, and handing the bad guys a cheap "think of the children" argument that'll stir up public sympathy way better than copyright moaning ever has.

Couldn't these guys have waited just a few years, until 3D printing is popular and ubiquitous? Instead, they've handed the feds a silver-platter excuse to preemptively regulate the hell of it while it's still a novelty item.

Thanks, assholes. You've destroyed a world-changing technology because you just couldn't wait one more second to own shitty, worthless plastic guns. Great job.

On a philosophical level, guns and bullets are just atoms. If a dude points a gun at you, he's only pointing atoms at your head! If he pulls the trigger, he's just putting some extra atoms in your body. If he was a doctor and you needed a medical implant, you'd pay him to do that! Why the double standard?!?!?!?!?!?

Because context matters, obviously. If the law criminalizes the possession of evidence of a crime, then that law is broken and should be changed. There's a huge bloody leap from there to "child porn should be legal to possess in all circumstances".

Not sure how listening to music prevents one from also looking out the windows.

"Movies looked great on my old TV, but terrible on my new TV. This can only be Hollywood's fault!"

That's an...interesting perspective. Kudos to Aquos' marketing team, though.

I suspect it's no more than the fact that humans get less interested in trying new approaches as we get older.

Seen Flattr? Sign up for a flat monthly payment of your choice, click the Flattr button on sites you like, at the end of the month your payment is divided equally among all the sites you Flattred. It's a fantastic idea and makes it easy for folks to decide how much they can budget for website payments. I really wish it'd actually take off.

Optical images. Scanning electron microscopes (what I assume you meant by "atomic scopes") are not optical.

Fast and cheap to buy a completely custom action figure? Yeah, I don't think they have those at Toys'R'Us.

One-step articulated toys have been my standard example of "really impressive shit 3D printing could someday do" for years. I just hope that Harvard's fucking patents don't prevent anyone else from doing it better and more affordably.

How the hell does a dude who makes ~$2/day have an Android phone?

That would be relevant if it wasn't mainly being referenced in Ask Slashdot threads.

Bleach also kills kids who swallow it. Should we ban bleach? Are people who sell bleach child-killing assholes?