One thing I'm not as fond of about Motorola's Android strategy is their penchant for marketing 6 underpowered crap Android handsets for every Droid X.

Sure, this may appease the marketers and the cheapskate crowd, but Moto doesn't have to sell both Pintos and Cadillacs, if you get my drift.

I wouldn't be surprised at all if the rationalization went thus:
"If my kid dies to disease, at least I won't have to deal with him getting out of control because of autism."

It's a horrifying idea to think about, but there are parents who discover that actual parenting is insanely hard compared to whatever they thought it was like in their mind's eye, so much so that some want to give away the kids and return to relative freedom-- never mind that they're quite literally chucking the baby out with the bathwater.

It's almost as if we ought to consider requiring licenses for those who create children without considering the costs to themselves, their children, and their communities. (It won't fly, of course, so the best course of option is probably education...)

That's the nature of conspiracy theory and propaganda-- people readily believe things that are either shocking or that fit into their worldview, and resist un-believing such things because they don't like the idea that this new comfortable information could possibly be false.

If the locals don't charge him, the US attorney might-- assaulting a MoC may well be a federal crime (but IANAL). If this guy does not get convicted, it will be a disaster for justice.

They had this exact problem with Texas City-- they didn't do maintenance on the systems, so a subsystem overfilled with volatile hydrocarbons with no alarms going off at all-- and when one alert sounded at the monitoring area, they ignored it. They didn't invest the (relatively) small cost of installing a flare (to burn off excess), so the excess hydrocarbons spilled out into the open. Cost-cutting and an incredibly cavalier approach to maintenance from the London management generated a fucking fuel-air bomb in Texas.

This is one instance where the Brit management, when they changed to Hayward, should have told their investors to "fuck off-- er, give us a few years" and spend the necessary money to get their facilities up to snuff, or decommission the facilities that are too costly to maintain. Alas, profit motive proved more powerful than basic empathy or responsibility.

Unfortunately, while the barkers on the right (and to some extent the left, as they tend to exaggerate the right's messages as they beat it down) must bear responsibility, in all likelihood they will hide behind the cloak of "I'm an Entertainer, nyah! *raspberries*".

If anything, a culture of unbridled selfishness may be far more responsible than any partisan zeal.

True, and I think that would be fairly trivial should it come to that stage, because they were able to convince a judge that there is probable cause to arrest the person with the cell phone. Unless they're incredibly sloppy policemen, they should have no problem getting a search warrant for stuff stored in the arrestee's name in a datacenter.

Not necessarily-- they could tell their clients "Hey, we've got this new BitTorrent technology to make content distribution faster and more reliable", and charge a premium for the service contract.

I've heard rumours that he was involved in funding for Al Quaeda back in the 90's. Not saying that he did of course, but it's interesting that he hasn't denied it so far.

That puts the statutory rape allegation into a very interesting context...

Not to mention a deflationary spiral (one that's probably fatal) and sovereign debt default if the CFL candidate moves too quickly to dismantle the Fed. Other than that (and the general predilection of libertarians to rip out laws and regulations they don't fully understand), things should be just peachy if a CFL candidate gets elected.

The simple fact is that the editors very likely do not verify many articles.

Unfortunately, there are no moderators in the submission process (to my knowledge, at least), only editors.

It is, however, a damn good way to get a good old-fashioned ideological brawl on this site and thus draw some more hits before 2010 ends.

The same can be said about a lot of Presidents, including greats like Abraham Lincoln. For that matter, some of our worst Presidents were also the most experienced-- Nixon and W Bush come to mind.

You can post "the truth" all you want, but without context, even "the truth" is highly misleading. Moreover, you and AC have conflated "knowledge and responsibility" with "experience".

What the OP probably meant was that Palin demonstrated none of the temperament that one would expect in the leader of a big nation (intellectual curiosity, good judgment), whereas Obama showed that he was far ahead of his GOP rivals in this area. Did you hear Obama call his opponents "fascists" after Palin called him a "socialist", for example?

1. If the government got out of regulating copyright (it does a pretty crummy job of it at the moment), what makes you think the music industry wouldn't use their legal goons aggressively in this fashion?
2. What competition? The music industry is a gaggle of cartels, each making damned sure that the consumer pays only them in their respective markets.
3. By telling the government to get out of copyright, you're chucking the baby out with the bathwater. Suppose an indie artist makes a cool and popular song? What's going to happen is that an RIAA artist will proceed to steal it and make his label very wealthy. Of course, I would not be surprised in the slightest if this happens anyway, but by putting the government out of the picture, the indie now has near-zero recourse.

If the answer is not more laws, fewer laws doesn't seem to be very sensible either. What must happen is that better law, without the undue influence of interested parties, should replace what we have and be enforced consistently. That's a far cry from what we see in governments today, many of which are set up to extract power and wealth from their respective countries.

You: *hand wave* You do not wish to see my papers.
iPad: I, uh... I don't wish to see your papers.
You: These aren't the Droids you're looking for.
iPad: These aren't the Droids I'm looking for.
You: Move along.
iPad: Move along.

Have you ever tried to read The Tale of Genji in its original form (hiragana)? It may be because it's written in centuries-old Japanese, but it's a bitch to read even when translated to the modern equivalent. Try parsing a modern Japanese article from kanji/kana to all-hiragana and you'll start to see parsing issues because now you can't distinguish words from particles. For that matter, fire up your IME and put in a commonly-used word, like seishiki or kenshou-- you'll see several possible distinct words in kanji, so right there you've got another problem.

I take it you haven't lived very much in Japan-- if you try to change the society there to excise kanji from the language, I guarantee you that nothing will change for generations, even if the government mandates it; the best you'll see is a few puzzled looks, and at worst you'll be treated like a lunatic. There's simply too much invested in kanji, and the creative use of kanji is only increasing. Take, for example, Bleach-- the word bankai as written in the manga exists nowhere else in Japanese, cannot be understood without the context of the manga or the accompanying kanji, and represents a newly invented word that is starting to see common use. Heck, many manga are pairing kanji with unusual or ironic readings to enrich the meaning of the dialogue. One can call that abuse of kanji, or artistic discretion, but either way, killing off kanji would force the manga writers to abandon that route of expression or ignore the mandate. Guess which one they'll pick?

I submit that (1) your conclusion is flawed because human language (context-sensitive) is inherently poorly-compatible with machine language (context-free), (2) you are imposing an unrealistic expectation on a language that is far more complex than its syllabary, and (3) the half-assed "script reform" that was done because of a stupid panic attack when typewriters (and American occupation) were introduced is far more responsible for the mess than any traditionalist influences in that culture.

Now, the apparent inability of the Japanese to learn proper English decades after its educational ministry imposed a requirement from primary school is another can of whup-ass that both of us would doubtless love to dish out to the language council... Even though it's a fully-operational part of the world society, they are still way too insular in this respect.