It is important to distinguish between the form factor of the iPad, and the iPad itself. The former may well be extremely useful in education. But the iPad is not, as it is not indented to be an educational tool. It is not even intended to be a tool that is useful to the end user, other than by accident. It is a spy box, designed from the ground up to be both addictive and manipulative, with the purpose of ruining the end users' privacy and then scamming them.

This is a problem with smoking, not with tobacco.

A great list. To add, there ain't nothing wrong with tobacco that ain't also wrong with alcohol. Just like any other toxic and extremely addictive drug, it should be 100% legal, but regulated tightly: tax it as much as the market will bear, forbid all ads, mandate plain brandless packaging.

Almost everyone needs anonymity, at least some of the time. The more people use Tor (without cheating), the more robust is the network, so your uppity attitude is completely out of place. Tor is for lulz as much as it is for freedom fighting.

But most likely, one part of the NSA wrote the malware, another part found out about it, and then both the malware and an attempt to stop it failed due to their utter incompetence.

Actually, his first sentence makes a cognitive leap from observing an involuntary visceral reaction to the Valve branding, to concluding that it is now time for some new underwear. An average slashdot moderator is not in the habit of thinking this far ahead.

gnasher719 gave a nice answer, and I just want to add more. For statistical purposes, a true and fair RNG printing a string of zeroes and ones would at the very least print a normal number, and to test for that, one would have to count the frequencies of substrings of every length, in every base, which of course can be done, but may get expensive if one wants a lot of confidence.

What gnasher719 calls cryptographical randomness cannot be tested in practice, but in theory, one can run the countable set of all computer programs in parallel, and see whether they can predict the digits of the RNG sequence with probability better than 1/2. Of course, this is completely intractable in the foreseeable future, with or without functional quantum computers.

IANAL, but I think if one doesn't sign for it, and there are no witnesses to receiving, then saying "I don't recall getting any playstations" should provide a solid defense.

A lot of Web sites are simply broken. I routinely see commercial Web sites that display a blank page even after I "temporarily allow all this page" several times, so as to unblock everything (Firefox haters?). For my money, any Web site that could easily provide its functions without JavaScript, but doesn't, is broken. The ones that don't care to fail gracefully are even more broken. And then there are Web sites that are completely FUBAR, no matter how you look at them. Welcome to the Web :)

What does this even mean? Is that a statement about science or related to science? It's gotta be, since biology is a natural science. So cite your references, or stop spreading lies.

IMHO, an antithesist is someone arguing pro and con at the same time. Nagarjuna, from what I've read, is a pretty famous example.

If by "lifting" you mean stealing, then you are not talking about anything resembling the patent law.

This is irrelevant to my argument, as I am saying that technology has no impact on patentability. It does, of course, affect the patent.

Yeah they do. How? With an algorithm that takes this and gives you that. In short, with a computer. Any software that can do the same is, well, functionally the same. It is entirely consistent that we cannot write around patents, and so the problem is with their very existence. They just do more harm when it comes to software, since the latter is almost always built on top of the older software, and even a "simple" by today's standards program can have thousands of patentable algorithms in it. The kind of harm they do is the same, though, regardless of the technology involved: innovation is taxed or prevented, monopolies distort the free market, and our freedom of expression is abridged.

I'd expect this much if anything. SCOTUS cannot fix the software patents. It is not even clear what a "software patent" is. IANAL, but the way I understand the patent law, there is absolutely no difference. If you have a gizmo that does A, B, and C, then you can patent it, and how exactly it meets these claims in terms of technology is irrelevant. The patent law itself is oppressive: it infringes on our right to free expression, while providing no discernible benefit to the public. Only the lawmakers can fix this clusterfuck, and they can do so trivially, by gradually shrinking the protection term, giving the manufacturers some time to adapt. But they, of course, lack the will to do so, since they respect the opinions of plutocrats way more than those of the general public.

RMS also advocates a way to get to the same goal in discrete steps, by making patents unenforceable in certain fields (like the medical field or the general purpose computing field). The precedents exist: the surgeons are allowed to ignore patents while curing people. This is much better than defining "software patents" within the law, since any such definition will probably be circumvented by technological means. Rent-seekers could simply inject enough non-software payload into a device and patent it anyway.

No, this is not enough. Not if you want an optimal level of privacy and security. If the software is open-source but non-free, then you can fix it all you want, but you cannot share your fix with others. So this is as good as closed source for almost everyone, including you, since you cannot fix all the bugs by yourself.