You know, in this fucked up world the poor worker could still get a lecture from his manager for doing the right thing because "it could have been a prank" and "we could have been held responsible if anything happened".

There is no such thing as a Pizza Hut where the staff reads the stuff you write in the extra line.

Does this mean I'll be able to run gedit on my Ubuntu phone? I can hardly contain my excitement.

Somewhere in there is a Farside cartoon waiting to happen.

Why Was Linux the Kernel That Succeeded?

Why was the grammatical badly?

Do they make you guys demonstrate any proficiency in the English language at all?

So, you put 10,000 lawyers and politicians into a hermetically sealed bag ... you launch that bag into space.

Once you've done that, get back to me and I'll tell you the rest.

First, we have to find the alien reactor...

Because, in all honesty, you can probably assume that the "trade deal" is heavily skewed to protect corporate interests, and will not benefit anybody else.

Essentially these treaties are heavily influenced (if not actually written) by corporate demands.

It's secret because if people knew the government was essentially acting as lackeys for the copyright cartels and the like, people might disagree with it.

It really can't be a good "treaty" if you have secret terms with each of the countries you're trying to get do sign on.

They just don't want their peers to know how much they're getting screwed by globalization.

Mark my words, the only ones who will benefit from this will be multinational corporations. And it will probably extend copyright in a few more countries.

That a week ago KSP went out of Beta?

Time to check whether the base mods have been updated yet.

I am not impressed by the media narrative.

You will have to do better than that.

That's why I specifically picked media outlets from the "free market" Right. So how about the Wold Health Organization?

How about the Kaiser Foundation? They know a little about health care.

Have you ever wondered why you don't see people from Denmark or Germany or Sweden or Singapore flying over to the US for the superior health care? In fact, you know those stories about all the tens of thousands of Canadians running to the US for health care? It turned out to not be true.

For that matter, have you ever wondered why you don't see those populations fighting to flee their Socialist hellholes and coming to the US as political refugees?

I already know what Tim Cook wants to do with my DNA.

What can I say?

I say "Sorry...but NO".

I mean, it is bad enough I gave them a CC number way back when to connect to the iTunes store (even though I've NEVER bought a song through them, nor an app)....but that's quite enough information on me.

I don't plan to give any DNA to anyone for the foreseeable future.

Both the government and private companies have WAY too much information on me to begin with...I'm not voluntarily going to give them more, especially on this level.

You just reminded me that I haven't purchased music since about 1998, so for me, there's no monopoly to worry about. And with Songza, Spotify, Pandora and radio streaming + tools to convert streams to mp3, it doesn't seem likely that I will for the next ten years or so.

Well, I do remember back in the OLD days, sitting with the radio on the stereo and un-pausing the cassette recorder to try to record songs that were played on the radio.

I got over that real quick....

But what you say is fine enough I guess if you're just gonna use that to listen in the car on on a mobile player, but what about your home stereo..you know, something you put some money into for better fidelity sound, don't you want a lossy format for that?

I tend to buy my music on CDs that I really like and rip it to lossy mp3's for my poor listening environments (car, gym)...but keep the good stuff for the living room stereo for quality listening.

I have seen sites that sell very high lossless formats online and I'm thinking of checking out those for new purchases of replacing CD's lost to Katrina and time....

HD Tracks sells 96/24 tracks in AIFF and FLAC for a very reasonable price.

I don't buy that much music these days, due to my perceived lack of quality of performance and style, but when I do find something I like, it is something to keep. I don't think of music as disposable as many of the youth today seem to do....

Sure, until insurance companies and governments start demanding access to it.

You don't need to be much of a conspiracy nut to realize the potential for privacy invasion and abuse of this data is absolutely staggering.

There simply are way too few legal controls on how this stuff is used to safely make it as commonplace as that.

Essentially, corporations and the government will have massive databases of the DNA of pretty much everybody ... and it will be used to deny you service, in criminal proceedings because they can demand it, and who knows what else.

DNA samples on an iPhone is a hell of a way to get the fully distopian future and Big Brother .. because you can bet your ass that secret warrants will be used to force companies to hand this stuff over and then have it collated into one big giant database.

I don't care if it's Apple, Microsoft, Google, or anybody else ... this is a creepy idea which will have enormous implications to society.

Someone hand me my shotgun. It's been a while since a good skeet shooting.