I picked "loved ones, data, possessions" only with the understanding that my dogs count as "loved ones". My laptop PC and RAID array are loved ones also...gotta be able to watch my pr0n after the disaster ;-)

Actually he sounds more like a Libertarian. He sounds too intelligent to be a Peebagger.

Google will have to have employees spend many hours of labor doing this. Of course they should expect to be paid for it by the content owners. Only a group of idiots like the RIAA would expect them to do it for free.

You might also add that there are a number of companies who do precisely this same thing...charge for a service that one could do themselves for free...for Linux. For instance, Redhat and IBM just to name a couple. Where's the uproar about that?

Fuck yeah they should cut them off, and they should have started doing it years ago. In my mind, the fact that most ISPs don't do this makes them as much to blame for the situation as the people who create and run botnets.

How I feel about this depends on the files and companies/creators involved.

If its an open source project or an independent film done on the cheap or something like that, yeah, I'd be all for it.

But if its a commercial enterprise who's goal is to simply "make money" and they have the bucks to do it themselves, like Microsoft, IBM, Apple, or even, in this case, Warcraft, my first thought is "The cheap bastards want to leach my spare bandwidth?!". In my opinion, that does not reflect well on the company.

I'd love to have more choice. Especially in the last election. I voted for Obama mainly because of Palin. Had the Republican party selected someone with a brain for the number 2 position, I would have voted for McCain instead.

And I was fully aware of third party candidates. Over the years I've voted for some, just as I know I will be this coming November. But I'm equally aware that in the present system of elections in America, the proverbial "snowball in hell" has a better chance at existence than there is of a third party candidate becoming President. The last three Presidential elections have been so close between the Dumbocrats and Rebubakins that voting third party is merely throwing your vote to the wind. If you want real change, the system is going to have to change, not just the voters.

People unrealistically expecting third party candidates to win for President is what gave us that fuckup Bush for 8 years. Especially in his first term. Tell me, was everyone voting their conscience worth 8 years of that idiot?

"Dr. Ann De Wees Allen is a blathering idiot" would be more correct. She'll probably get her own talk show and then run for President in 2012.

No, you're not the only one. I use Mandriva extensively, even paying for it plus donating piles of bandwidth (on a real server, not something in a closet in my house) to the project, and for one simple reason. It works. It works correctly. Every time. And it does it right out of the box.

I've never been able to get everyone's darling Ubuntu to install on any hardware I own *even once* without banging on it. Same goes for Suse and Fedora. And I don't have bleeding edge hardware. My feeling is that (unlike a lot of other people, and I know this) I've never had to hammer on Windows or OS X to make them install correctly, therefore I don't feel I should have to hammer on Linux either.

The one shortcoming of Mandriva of late, in my opinion, has been the instability of the company(ies) behind it. I will be watching developments as they unfold. But if I had to select right this minute, I'd probably go with the fork.

And this is why I refuse to believe any of the popular conspiracy theories about our government. The United States government can't keep secrets secret.

They're right...Wikileaks isn't journalism. But then neither is what passes for "newspapers" these days. Real journalism died in the 90s. Now its just regurgitated AP releases.

SCOTUS ruled several years ago (and I'm too lazy to get a link to the ruling right now) that law enforcement could not use things like infrared and thermal imaging of a house to detect pot-growing operations without a warrant. Their ruling was something to the effect of "If a person can't see it from the street without using fancy equipment, it needs a warrant".

This is obviously different technology, but I fail to see how this would be any different in the eyes of SCOTUS and that ruling.

You are a flaming asshole. Please to go fuck yourself.