I believe these were some of the older crops before they were rendered sterile. It has happened though. GM-crop companies (Monsato, I believe) have sued farmers under the DMCA for using the produced seeds of plants which Monsato sold seeds for. There was a case where a farmer was sued even though the neighboring farmer used such plants and pollen from those plants got carried over. Here's a recent one: http://nelsonfarm.net/issue.htm

There are athletic sports where an average career lasts for about 3 years (American Football) with skills that do not transfer on later in life.

How is ~55 million votes out of a ~280 million population, 50.1%? Does not compute. Population as of 4/1/2000 (http://www.census.gov/main/www/cen2000.html), Voting numbers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_2000 and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_2004). Also, feel free to correct numbers on Wikipedia, aparently, they are wrong with 48.3% for Kerry.

I am pretty sure most things we do (short of actually building a bomb to blow ourselves up along with the planet) will not bother the planet at all. It has been here for over 4 billion years. It has seen dinosaurs come and go. I am sure we will be long gone before the planet becomes sick or dead in some way.

Does he mean things like motoblur?

Except when you are paid to create a work of art, your work is considered "commissioned." Therefore, you are the author, but the copyright is with the company. At least in USA.

My professional title is "application administrator." If you have java code running on a java app server, I support it. Problem is, over my 2.5 year experience in this position, there are a lot of "OutOfMemory" issues that occur. There are also a lot of issues related to lazily configured hibernate causing database performance issues. And of course, the fixall comes from Windows ... "just restart it." Only very few Java developers could actually support the infrastructure they code for, that includes database, messaging and ESB backends.

If I had a shotgun to point at some developers, there would be an extreme shortage of developers.

After the Epic scam, any news of anyone releasing any game for Linux is to be taken with a grain* of salt.

* grain the size of the Moon.

Mostly because everyone thinks they got the silver bullet.

Except Sega had this tech and knew the problems in 1980s.

beta has been out for some time. :)

NS2 was announced a long time ago.

NET act? AFAIK, according to DMCA, non-profit copyright infringement is a civil offense.

To follow along similar path. Who is our government protecting us against?

the same shit happens. Disagree with the government, you end up in jail/raided/etc. ... WTF? At least Soviet Union had a law about disagreeing with the government, so at least you'd get a day in court.

Scantron ...

When I was in high school (and junior high school). We took these multiple guess tests (as my physics teacher called them), which used a #2 pencil and were checked using a machine the size of an HP Laserjet 1020 (6" by 6" by 12" thereabout). Why not use the similar technology? Or just give a big screen (24" with all the pictures of the candidates) with a touch screen element and let voters poke the candidate they like. Then give them a review screen at the end with names. ??? profit?