I can't tell what's a troll and what's not these days.

Are you talking about how Apple should have been more creative and not stolen the trademark from Apple records (by first swearing not to enter the music industry and then entering the industry)? or about iPood, something fairly creative and COMPLETELY outside the iPod's industry?

The problem that you seem to be missing is that morals are subjective. Your morals may not apply to me. For instance, if I feel it is morally wrong for you to discuss football because I feel that football and it's "Us vs them" mentality has destroyed American politics, do I have the right to find you and stop you (or punish you) for violating my morals?

The fact that everyone doesn't automatically recognize this fact instantly is what scares the GP (and me).

In fact, I'm reluctant to hit submit because it's hard to believe it's not a troll, but it was written with a sincere sounding naivety so I'll give it a go :)

Actually, a good compromise might be instead of "Purple Elephants make for a rough Work Day" (Which would break nearly every password field in the world), use the nearly as secure "PEmfarWD". You probably have to throw in a number to make some of the stupider password validators happy, but that should be just as easy to remember, and nearly as hard to crack (The reduced length hurts a little, but 8 completely random letters is nearly impossible unless you can iterate over them progmatically.

If you want it to be more secure, come up with a longer phrase. Include numbers...

ETomwhE9b!

Every Tree outside my window has Exactly 9 branches!

Pirates generally only steal if the cost + inconvenience of buying beats the inconvenience of stealing.

I buy a lot more game on Steam because I don't have to deal with the DAMN CDs. If manufactures would sell a good game for $15 and not require the CD to be in the drive, I'd have been buying them all along instead of piarating them (I haven't pirated for years now, I just gave up on computer games.) I buy them on my iPhone all the time though.

If someone finds the work of finding the ripped game, risking the viruses and not having the updates worth more than the $10 to download it on steam, I say let them have it--I'd encourage them to steal it rather than go without--it would probably STILL increase profits in the long run (exposure to friends, playing as a group and the guy will probably purchase it when he has the money).

In the case of newspaper article comments I'm not sure a real name is a bad idea.

I've seen (and left) a few in a local paper that were terribly insensitive--not always wrong, exactly, but when your grandma drives into a car and everyone is killed--the local paper, read by the family, might not be the best place to debate the merits of/problems associated with DWO.

I've seen articles about parental negligence, a 20 year old drowning because he didn't wear his life jacket, etc. with some very insensitive finger pointing.

I'm not saying the debate is wrong, but when you lose your kid to some thing like this, you don't need to read about how stupid he was not wearing a life vest--it needs to be debated but not right there (Plus, trust me, all those who knew the kid will be wearing life vests in the future).

So having a real name associated won't (and shouldn't) stop people from posting their opinions, but it might help them remember that they are communicating with real human beings with feelings and not throwing a comment into some abstract internet debate.

Kids will pretty much live up to what you expect of them--many do pretty impressive things before 15--possibly more than most of us will do in a liftime, and can be quite contemplative and thoughtful even at 8.

Of course, if you expect your 8 year old to sit in the corner staring at a bug, you're quite likely to get just that.

Boycotts don't work when the percentage of the "Purchasing" population that cares significantly outweighs the percentage that cares. No matter how hard you protest, you will never get to every idiot out there.

I think it would be interesting to create a 401K/IRA fund where tech workers can invest into the fund, the fund buys up significant percentage of the stock in a given company, changes it's policies and then backs down slowly to attack another company.

As a group, the investors could target specific problem companies to go after and vote for policies they want implemented. If their policies are workable, they may even increase the rate of growth of their investments.

In the same way, employees paid bonuses in stock could pull their stock to enable at least partial control over the company they work for (although it is pretty rare for companies to hand out voting stock to employees, probably for just this reason).

Your post doesn't seem very well thought out.

At 30mph someone could travel the 2 miles between his bus-stop and office in an amount of time that makes it not double his commute time--and get additional exercise, whereas that may take a prohibitive amount of time if he has to walk.

My commute turns from 25 minutes by car to 55 by MAX light rail--a large part of the difference is walking the 1/2 mile between the max station and my destination 4 times a day.

When I ride my bike it's much faster, but I don't want to deal with the extra mess when it's raining and walking with an umbrella is too slow, so I drive at least 1/3 of the year. I'd enjoy walking/rideing more, but there are limits to how much time/mess I'll commit to it.

How would a moving sidewalk hurt?

Remove the financial incentive by declaring that becoming energy independent is a good idea anyway, and that using "Limited" resources such as coal and oil, at the very least, is taking it from our children and should be minimized wherever possible. Also, point out that developing new energy sources such as solar and wind will create many more jobs than cutting back on limited resources will cost.

We could even decide that the jobs related to the limited resources ARE going away regardless, it's just a matter of time (by definition) and that we can either slowly ween the work force off now or face (at some point in the future) having all those jobs forcefully terminate at the same time (Our children will be jobless instead of us).

Oh, finally, is there really something wrong with leaving a decent amount of oil in the earth just in case we find something amazingly useful for it--something more important than driving an SUV 3 blocks to the store?

Now, once you've based your politics on this very logical approach, how many arguments against global warming go away simply because there isn't any financial reason to keep the argument in the news?

I'm not saying it will change everyones mind at once, but there is no doubt in my mind that within 5 years there would be no public debate on the subject whatsoever.

The title sounded to me like the pirating sites (from Russia) were physically threatening the RIAA executives or something.

Oh well, maybe in time...

3G is about the biggest battery hog you'll get. Disable it and run on edge for a few days to compare (You'll also get better general reception and no dropped calls). If I had to upgrade my first-gen iPhone I'm pretty sure I'd disable 3G except when I was doing large data transfers (which I wouldn't do because of the new metered rates)

Hmph, time to start looking into Android.

A classic case of Good vs Evil (albeit evil dressed in a white suit).

The funny thing is that although most everyone will agree with the above statement, you will probably get a 50/50 split as to which is good and which is evil.

if he went back to his original format. On Sunday night I used to listen from 6 to 10 on KMET.

Back then he wouldn't just play wacky crap--at the time he claimed to have the largest music collection in the world and would play cuts from the 1920's, old jazz, and various bizarre stuff. I remember "My big 10 inch" long before Steven Tyler recorded it.

It also wasn't the same stuff over and over. The top 20 (I think it was 20 or 25 at the time, or was it always top 10?) rotated frequently and once a song got into the top n rotation he would stop playing it on the show to make room for other stuff.

There was a lot of exposure to songs from the 50s and 60s too, stuff that got airplay and was funny but was a little before my time.

When he started putting it in the 1-2 hour format it became shite--he cut out everything that was good and played the same "Funny 5" over and over again.

If he went back to the longer format and started rotating in some variety I'd totally give it another try... Perhaps reducing costs by doing it over the web will allow him to do just that.

Keeping people uninformed is generally bad. If you teach EXACTLY how silly ID is and how to think critically by trying to support/disprove ID in class it could be quite the inoculation for a generation of kids.

If they would just wait for the free market to kick in, this would be solved once and for all!