This is one of the things I try to get across to so many people, but most just don't realize what a security threat their reminders are. I generally tell everyone "unless you have to put your credit card in, never use your real name." Anymore usually confuses them and they start defending their actions.

Avoiding names and dates etc will keep the majority of people out of your things. Of course, someone who has experience and knowledge of gaining access to unauthorized systems will of course still be able to do so, but the random kid won't be able to.

The MS-DOS mouse driver works in tons and tons of applications from that period. And even today. I still use an elderly version of Ghost to back up systems and create bootable 'restore' CD's. The boot image is a DOS variant and loads the Microsoft Mouse driver to run the Ghost client.

Oooh! Scarrry communists!

Yes, given their record, some 120 million killed outside of war over the course of the 20th century, I would say that people had damn good reason to be afraid.

They're teaching children to read in Nicaragua

Now that we're talking about post-1980 events with you issuing a nice, pleasant whitewash of Sandinista terror, I'd also like to point out that the Sandinistas were also enslaving the populace, silencing newspapers, kidnapping said children from their families to "educate" them, expanding the secret police, creating neighborhood spy networks, forcibly relocating, torturing and murdering Indians for being Indian (because all Indians were supposedly "CIA agents" or somesuch), etc.

and kicking out our corporations in El Salvador! Quick, someone rape and kill some nuns! For freedom!

People in El Salvador were fighting against the imposition of an alien political ideology and economic system responsible for the deaths of millions and millions, against the clear will of the vast majority of Salvadorans, by those who were armed, funded by, and in the service of the Soviet Union.

Notice how after the USSR fell, these wars in Latin America ended, and democracy was restored. That should tell you who caused these wars, and who was keeping them going.

Is it different from overthrowing a democracy in Iran in 1953 and installing the Shah?

I notice that you're attempting to redirect the conversation, but I'll continue answering your "points".

Mosaddegh came to power after his predecessor was murdered for opposing Mosaddegh's policies. Once in power, Mosaddegh continued to rule without holding elections, as required by the Iranian constitution at the time.

Or funding coups throughout central and south America and in fact, all over the world?

At least three of those examples during the Cold War are pure bullshit, Chile 1973, Argentina 1976 and Turkey 1980 (the only source apparently being Noam Chomsky, and hence, a very high probability that this is a lie). The ones after the Cold War are all bullshit.

Is it different from hand-picking Saddam Hussein to rule the Ba'ath Party,

Bullshit.

In 1963, Saddam Hussein was an obscure student radical that nobody had heard of. He wasn't a rising star in the Baath party until around the 1968 coup, and didn't come to rule over Iraq until 1979.

support his rise to power, removing him from the State Sponsors of Terror in order to arm him with chemical weapons, and then claim America had nothing to do with it when he stops following orders?

Yes, the US did lift export restrictions against Iraq so US companies could sell him dual-use items that he probably used to develop chemical weapons. Many other countries did the same. It was the US, however, that eventually overthrew him.

You're a fucking liar. Again.

All you've shown me is evidence that the Ford administration was guilty of knowing about the invasion beforehand, and not "caring" enough about it. Indonesia has been on and off of US sanctions lists for decades, and weapons sold to Indonesia after the invasion were sold with the stipulation that they not be used in East Timor.

You're an apologist for depraved violence as long as the person holding the gun is wrapped in an American flag and saying some nice words that you don't really comprehend.

Let's compare the "depraved violence" directly committed by America's government throughout the 20th century (the vast majority being in response to real totalitarian threats) with the massive amounts of terror, slavery and mass-murder directly committed by America's enemies against innocent, disarmed people during the same time.

The only difference between you and a soviet apparatchik is that you were born in America, and we're killing scapegoated Arabs and "communists" and adjacent innocents in foreign lands instead of dissenters within our own borders.

Communists were never scapegoated. They really were out to kill and enslave us, as was proven every time and everywhere they came to power. Post Cold War, our enemies are not Arabs, but rather, the followers of militant Islam, whose members include every ethnic and racial group on the face of the Earth.

And what makes you even worse is that you aren't forced to support these actions.

Well, except for taxes.

You volunteer to support the injustice, you willingly kneel at the feet of your leaders and praise them for their willingness to destroy other nations in exchange for the paltry conveniences you enjoy, and you pretend it's for the freedoms you choose to desecrate with your ignorance.

I've only been stating facts about the conflicts that occurred during the Cold War. You see this as "support" only because I'm not brutally condemning America and Americans, for if people like you had your way, people like me would either be dead, or in slave-labor camps.

When content is available for free, someone will take it and make money with it.

Here we have a bunch of text often with inaccuracies, distortions and lies. But it is a lot of text. That should be worth something, right? So we have a company taking that because it is free to take and making money from it.

This should be the first guidepost for those that would like to remove copyright protection from things. They will be picked up by companies like this and sold. So if your music is free to download and do whatever with. expect to find someone selling CDs of it somewhere. Might just be at a flea market, might be on Amazon or WalMart.

Is it right? Well, the door WAS left open. If you wanted to retain control you wouldn't have used a Creative Commons license now would you? So without that control, someone is going to make money with it. Maybe not a lot of money and maybe not very ethically, but it will happen. And there is nothing that can be done about it.

Think they will make a lot of money from this? I doubt it. But just wait until the blogs of someone that licenses them with Creative Commons start showing up on Amazon as their "Collected Writings". Going to happen sooner or later.

So Java has gone from immature, constantly changing and buggy to stable, reliable and fast? I can see how that would be a problem for somebody that wants to attract unexperienced scriptkiddies to a programming language.

My point is that science is a variation of what is called "Byzantine game theory". Mixed in with the earnest scientists are scientists who for whatever reason aren't generating earnest science. The proper Byzantine game has players who are deliberately deceptive. I use the term more loosely. Those defecting scientists could be, as my example implies, deliberately falsifying data. Or they could merely be heavily biased (which I think is the current problem, key parts of the science like past estimates of temperature are owned by heavily biased sources).

Then there is the problem of heavy dependency. For example, it doesn't make much sense to speak of thousands of papers concluding that the Earth is the warmest its ever been (as some have done) in hundreds of thousands of years, when the fact is that these estimates apparently come from four sources, the CRU, in the US NASA's GISS and the NOAA, and as I gather, some group in Japan. That apparently is it, no matter how many papers are published on the matter.

Two of those groups, the CRU and the GISS had in the recent past leaders who demonstrated heavy bias (Phil Jones who used to be head of the CRU and James Hensen who is current head of the GISS) and recently issued papers with a very aggressive take on climate (a CRU paper in the Fall of last year claimed a 6C rise in temperature by the end of this century, the GISS issued a paper that claims (less than three months into 2010) that 2010 will be "nearly certain" to be the warmest year since the GISS started collecting data.

This dependency is insidious. For example, while I was reading up on how the "hockey stick" was corrected (a paper by Michael Mann and Phil Jones around 2000, CRU-sourced research), I noticed in the previous link two things. First, the original people (plus some other authors) are claiming that their original work worked in a 2005 paper. The "independent confirmation" cited there however turns out to use the 2005 paper. So we have a hidden dependence on the same people who came up with the hockey stick mistake in the first place. This doesn't mean any of the work is incorrect or that the link above is the definitive study of corrections to the original Mann and Jones work. But it is a warning sign in my view. The science is not as sound as it should be and it is confusing serious scientists in the field.

No. If you make the file available and possibly upload it to thousands of people, then you have to pay more for the songs. It isn't fines either, it's you paying for damages, big difference. If you're only downloading the song there is no reason to charge you with such high damages and that's why you never see RIAA/MPAA go after people who have only downloaded something (in addition to it being legally more complicated).

That's one way to read it. The other way is that these 1 in 40 suck as bad as normal people texting, even when they're not.

Please be so kind as to add a vacuum gauge to the Guardian Angel, so I can at least tell in advance how much it's sucking on any given day...

I would say fighting global cooling is much better than fighting global warming.

Thirty years is really only enough for very short term fluctuations, anyway. It's like measuring the changes in weather throughout a day vs throughout the week or month or year, or several years. It's about the shortest span you can go, and you should expect there to be a lot of variation both high and low.

We are currently in the middle of a climate "summer" if you will, given a few thousand years (hopefully not less than that, but it won't matter anyway for anybody alive today) it will be climate "wintertime", which will suck royally.

Small fluctuations over a short period of time won't have any affect on what will ultimately happen in the long run. The whole climate change debate depends heavily on how long your time-line is, because if you take a wide enough view the current trends are absolutely meaningless, one way or the other. If you take a short-term view, the current trends are absolutely frightening.

So, using the legal system to go after people who are misusing their copyrighted works is abusing the legal system? What are they supposed to do? Give up making money at something they enjoy? I never had a problem with the **AA suing people in court over their IP being misappropriated. My contention was with their "accounting" practices in estimating piracy and it's effects, and the monetary "damages" they were claiming.