Apparently the Firefox team is working on this right now.

Stop working for those who underpay and you end up unemployed, like the other 85,000 engineers. Ideas based on "if everyone does X" never work, because there's always some guy who will work for the crappy pay. You know, that guy who has a family to support and is just happy to have a job "in such tough economic times". Side note, when do you think economic times will stop being tough? Never again I'd wager. Tough times force people into line, who wants to risk losing their job by standing up for what's right?

But say enough engineers become unemployed due to demanding better pay, what do you think will happen? The President will make an announcement about how universities need to churn out more engineers, because clearly there's a shortage. The only way you may have a chance is if you're incredibly good at what you do, say the upper 10th percentile in your field.

I hate to be so cynical, but nothing is going to change. If you're not happy with the conditions in the US, then consider moving to another country. It's a better alternative than making your own life miserable trying to fight the status quo when the status quo has become so deeply entrenched.

What it boils down to is the simple idea that copyright as it stands is too big to fail. Much like certain banks were deemed too big to fail when their shoddy business practices landed them in a world of financial trouble. If you ask me "to big to fail" is just another way of saying "it's broken". We let it run out of control for too long and now we're in a real bind. I don't see any way out but to let it fail and suck up the consequences, otherwise it's just going to get more and more ridiculous until it eventually collapses anyway, possibly dragging other good things down with it (like the internet as we know it today).

It's such a shame that SOE owns the Planetside IP. The first 6 months of that game were incredibly fun, one of the best online games I'd ever played. You could log in at any time, jump into a big battle, play for an hour and then log off again. No real grinding, no excessive travel times, no waiting for things to happen, it was great for people who wanted the unique kind of fun an MMO brings without spending ages to get it. Then slowly but surely they ran it into the ground. It should have been a great success, considering how popular FPS games became shortly after its release. Instead it fizzled away, mostly due to lack of marketing and some absolutely terrible expansions that seemed like they weren't play tested at all.

Now Planetside 2 is in the works, and while I desperately want it to be good it's still in SOE's hands. "Hopes... deleted."

We won't enter the "modern" nuclear age until we're actually allowed to build modern nuclear plants. Last time I checked the vast majority of reactors running today are old Mark I and Mark II designs from 20-50 years ago.

Take it one step further. With Bittorrent you're rarely in a position to transfer the entire file to one person, especially on popular torrents like newly released movies. What you're really doing is uploading small chunks of the film to different people, something that everyone here has no trouble understanding but seems to be a hopelessly complicated concept for much of the older generation.

Now the question is, what does copyright apply to? The entire film or all the little bits that make up the film? I don't think any sane person could claim it's the latter, because practically that would make every sequence of bits someone's intellectual property. Even if we couple that idea with a context how do we legally define the context? The name of the file those bits are a part of? And what happens if I encrypt or compress those bits? What if I mix them with bits from other sources? There's just no way to make this definition work. So if I'm not distributing the film in its entirety, if I'm not even distributing large parts of it to the same people, then I think you could argue that distributing it over Bittorrent doesn't violate any IP laws.

Lets say I have a counterfeit bag, some expensive designer one. If I sell that bag to someone, or even give it to someone, I've distributed counterfeit goods. But if I cut that bag up into hundreds of little pieces of fabric, then distribute those pieces to hundreds of different people, have I broken a law? What if I do this 10 times with 10 bags, over thousands of people, have I distributed 10 bags to people? I don't think so. Even if you could reassemble those pieces into an original bag I still haven't given a bag to any one person.

Even the law itself defines infringement to be "any secondary transmission by a cable system that embodies a performance or a display of a work which is actionable as an act of infringement". How can anyone claim a small segment of the billions of bits that make up a movie embodies it? Without the rest of it, they're nothing. Even if you argue that a person could extract a single frame from them, then a simple encryption pass would turn them into truly random noise. At least, until you have the whole file to decrypt.

Sure it's all technicalities, but isn't that what law is?

Look at it from their perspective, 'good friends and allies' don't launch covert military operations into your country without at least informing you first. Maybe the US had good reasons not to, but it's not very fair to pull something like this then turn around and point fingers when the operation doesn't go quite as planned.

Maybe it really does have something to do with a breach of the dev network, if such a thing even exists. If they throw PSN back online without properly patching this hole they're just opening it up to a fresh attack.

It's not even a ruling, it's a 'suggestion' from a government consumer rights watchdog that has no legal power by itself. Courts in Finland will take it into consideration, but nothing's been legally decided yet.

I've never been a fan of earbuds. Bass is almost non-existent, I could never find a pair that were comfortable and you get noise leaking in both directions. Then I tried the pair of IEM's that came with a Sony Ericsson years back and haven't looked back since. Since then I've gone through 4 pairs (my only remaining complaint, small things like earbuds just don't last the way cans do) and they've all been great. Noise from outside is all but gone, very little noise leaks to the outside, they're comfortable and the seal created by the rubber tops provides some pretty strong bass. Almost like a miniature subwoofer enclosure for your ear canal, doesn't take much volume at all to get a balanced range of sound.

Because of the durability issue I can't justify to myself spending over $60 on a pair, even though there are $350 IEMs out there, and really combined with a Cowon J3 a $40 pair from somewhere like Xears (ok, a little shameless plug for a guy I've bought 2 pairs from so far) sound pretty damn good. Not quite as good as a nice pair of cans, but for me personally the extra convenience makes up for that.

Anyway, give them a shot, you might be surprised.

I do think death is being overused, especially the kind mentioned in TFA where the presumably dead character makes an inevitable return with some half backed story about how he survived. Case in point, SGU when Rush was left on the planet. SGU when the team on the planet was left behind. SGU when Telford was left behind on the alien ship. SGU when... well you get the picture.

But more than anything I hate the sheer amount of garbage on TV these days. 5 different shows about pawn shops is 5 too many. Well, at least having nothing interesting on TV has given me a new appreciation for spending my free time on other things. I guess that's worth something...

Reprocess it and use it again. In fact there are reactor designs that breed Pu-239 from depleted uranium as part of their normal operations. That Pu-239 is separated on site and simply put back into the reactor, meaning the reactor as a whole produces more nuclear fuel than it uses. The extra fuel is simply put into non-breeder reactors at the same plant.

See all of these stereotypical problems have been solved years ago. The only things keeping us from putting those solutions into practice is public perception and cost. I'd love to see all these old first generation nuclear plants dismantled and replaced with generation III or IV designs, but no, we've decided to stick with coal and wait for that magical solution that's always "less than 10 years away".

So how many terrorists have these cameras caught?

Once they perfect railguns too they can start selling off the obsolete weapons to some developing countries. Makes a great excuse for another preemptive war; keep that military budget humming along!

Pick up the gun.
I don't want to mister, you'll shoot me.
...pick up the gun.
I.. I don't want no trouble mister...
Pick it up...
BANG BANG BANG
You all saw it, he had a gun.

Wind and solar provide variable power. Which is fine so long as you have sources of continuous power running in the background. There's really only a few possibilities for this backbone; fossil fuels, hydro, geothermal and nuclear. Hydro and geothermal are very location-sensitive, fossil fuels are running out and create a lot of pollution, nuclear is expensive. But you gotta pick one, so which will it be?

Thanks to public perception, we're still picking fossil fuels, but one day relatively soon nuclear will become the cheaper option. It's inevitable that the price of fossil fuels will continue to rise as supply dwindles and demand grows. Eventually we'll have to make the switch to another continuous source of power, maybe fusion will show up in time, but somehow I doubt it.