But she's not in office now. The level of zeal in pursuing an out-of-office governor turned vice presidential candidate fits in perfectly with my observations that the mainstream media in this country is biased against those to the right of the US political spectrum.

No kidding. Joe Biden would be this decade's Dan Quayle if he were a Republican. They'd be showing the bit where he asked the guy in the wheelchair to stand up over and over on the Daily Show. You'd see constant mention of his quote that "J-O-B-S, JOBS!" is a three letter word.

It's funny how the press seems to give him a pass. Such a mystery of the universe.

CO2 elevations raise the heat retention of the atmosphere. They don't "weaken" the atmosphere. If the solar cycle decreases the amount of energy stored in the atmosphere and that's offset by the CO2 retention, it could be beneficial to life on Earth.

Please stick to logic and science. Don't use climate change as the bogeyman that's out to get us no matter what we do, like some kind of Jason from Friday the 13th.

Because the police have an extraordinarily strong lobby and our elected representatives aren't interested in protecting our individual liberties.

A video recording is different because it completely shatters the long-held power that the police had of being believed. I'll never forget learning that simple truth in college when a police officer wrongly accused a friend of mine and I of doing something completely fabricated. We had our description of the actual events, the cop had some made-up story. Guess who the judge believed?

Cops have had the protection of belief for way too long. They've abused that power and even with pervasive video, they will continue to abuse that power.

Fortunately, for cases when it is available, video is the great equalizer. Cops don't like to have equal footing with citizens. They want to be right. They want to be believed. They want to have all the power.

Well, lawyers commonly charge their clients per printed page, faxes sent, etc. They make lots of money off doing things archaically.

By that logic, wouldn't it be okay for me to warn a drug dealer that a cop was coming up the street in the interest of getting him to stop selling drugs?

I could see where the police would argue that getting a ticket is a much greater deterrent against future speeding than just having headlights flashed at you.

RTFA?

That's a pretty big domain.

Apart from the linguistic abnormalities of Jeopardy, you'd think that adding more domains would mostly be a matter of adding data, storage space, and processing power.

Actually, the beauty of Watson's performance on Jeopardy was its ability to determine the domain of a question from the esoterically-phrased answers.

Wow, previous post moderated to the basement as flamebait. That's a rather chilling effect to place on a discussion.

Anyhow... you took a drive-by swipe at people who want the government to be less dominant in their lives. I took a contrarian position. Seems rather hypocritical for you to jump into an ad hominem (in your subject line, no less) and accuse me of pigeon-holing an issue. Yeah, I was generalizing... unfairly? That's debatable, but a pretty long discussion.

Then a bunch of the rest of your argument was a straw man. I chose my words about capitalism carefully and you chose to interpret them in some a different way. I didn't say that capitalism is always right or that you should never act against it. I just said that going against it often has unintended negative consequences. I don't see a need to defend a position I didn't take.

Then there's another straw man supposing that I'm looking for a greater degree of truth in labeling (carbon offsets? Really?) than I even want in regulation of the thing itself. Apparently, you missed the words in bold: all I really ask to be mandated by government in this kind of case is truth in labeling. We were talking about red dye on the peel of an orange, I think you should recall.

What ever happened to taking the arguments given rather than making up the ones you'd prefer to debate?

Why is it that slashdot is all about crowd sourcing things and peer-to-peer distributing the load until it comes to government? Then, suddenly, there's all kind of trust and faith in consolidation of power, authority, (re)distribution of resources, etc..

The fact that there are stores that openly and proudly sells uncolored produce tells me that many consumers know the difference and make a strong choice based upon those differences.

As a person who believes that going against capitalism often has unintended negative consequences, all I really ask to be mandated by government in this kind of case is truth in labeling.

Creativity/innovation vs copying is almost as useful as a semantic argument. Everything is just an evolution from previous ideas. It's impossible to say who really invented what, so it's useless to debate.

What Apple excels at is the ability to push evolution forward a little faster within highly polished products. You mentioned Sandisk's offerings... never again will I buy another Sandisk product after having to endure that buggy Sansa View piece of crap that I made the mistake of purchasing years ago. In contrast, I've had dozens of Apple products in my life, and I've never really regretted purchasing a single one of them - well, that Newton never really lived up to its promise, but that was pre-Jobs-return.

All of my Apple products have been high quality, sleek, powerful, were cutting edge when I purchased them, easy to use, and stylish. Microsoft just doesn't know how to consistently do all of those things at once.

Apparently from the few companies that do perform as well as Apple, doing so much of it right isn't easy.