Ok, there have been a few pitiful attempts, but you might as well include somebody throwing their shoe at GWB as an assassination attempt as laughable as some of these are.

Pfft. The Secret Service is antiquated for protecting the president. Maybe useful for protecting the family, but Presidents have known for awhile that the best way to not get assassinated is to have a total buffoon as the Vice President. I mean what crazy Liberal would shoot GWB knowing that Dick Cheney would take over? No one is going to shoot Obama and end up with crazy uncle Biden in the oval office! You can go back probably till Reagan and it holds true. And how many assassination attempts have been made on recent presidents? Zero.

There is always a possibility that the job and the employer are great and not trying to gouge you while in a vulnerable position. Or that their HR department is so incompetent they didn't bother to ask if you were currently employed and just assumed you were.

Yep, and if you are applying for jobs while unemployed, be prepared for zero negotiating room. The employer knows your option is to take it or continue eating into savings if you have it. You are almost better off taking the job and continuing to look.

Unless they invent a bullshit "disciplinary" reason for the firing in which case you are out your job and the termination allowance you thought you were entitled to. Are you a white male? Good luck fighting that one out with a lawyer...

Ahh but you forget that Google is filled with white males. No amount of lawyers can successfully sue claiming discrimination against this group. Ask me how I know... Here's a hint. An employer can fire a white male for any made up reason with no evidence even against their own policies and with a good performance review. A law group might send a letter but if the company ignores the letter, they won't take it to trial.

[Citation Needed] Considering close to 1/4 of the price of gas in most places in the US is ALREADY taxes, that would be a hard number to back up. Or are you comparing the price here to the even higher taxed fuel in other countries and calling that a "subsidy"?

I agree and to sell it politically I recommend we call it "reprocessing fuel for use in geothermal power plants."

They say the new DNA outperforms the standard DNA in evolving to meet the researcher's criteria. That means it changes more easily. In other words, it's less stable.

In most situations, what we want is stability. Nature needs some ability to mutate and evolve, but considering that the wrong mutations result in cancer and death, too high of a mutation rate leads to failure. I suspect this is particularly true in long-lived larger organisms.

Han Solo being chased by Minions? Oh wait, Minions is Universal...

Soundrels would also make an excellent movie... Alas, Star Wars will never be in the public domain in our lifetimes in order to make the movies on our own.

Adding a backdoor that is secure is very easy to implement. The government just needs to publish a public key. You then encrypt your private key using that public key and include it with whatever you encrypted. This would be much like the lock box on a house that holds the front-door key that only real estate agents showing the house are supposed to be able to access. And there's no reason it would be limited to just one. Opening a connection to a server in Turkey? Better include lock boxes for both your own government and the Turkish authorities.

The only big hole is the security of the government's private key (or more likely, keys).

The tricky part is that this government lock box has to be added to the common protocols. And how many different protocols would have to be updated? TLS, ssh, PGP, etc. What are the odds of introducing flaws that allow for new attack vectors when introducing the back door? For example, could you trick a victim's computer into thinking it needed to include the lock box for some jurisdiction that you control?

Now while the technical side of this could be made to work, as a public policy, it's a horrible idea. Let's not just say it can't be done and forget about it. We need to fight this as bad policy.

I owe you absolutely nothing and unless I am buying something from you or you are buying something from me I have no interest in you. If you want want government to stealcfrom me to subsidise you somehow and then call me a 'sociopath' or a 'moron' for not accepting that, then you are not only a thief, but some kind of a sick psycho thief.

One has to do more than your average bear to build a business from the ground up, how is that a surprise in any way? If it were easy, everybody would be doing it and it wouldn't be discussed here right now. I started up my own businesses but always self funded / got a client for the product. To do that I put 10 years of savings and years of work on the line, that is not an easy thing to do. But if I were unwilling to do it myself, how could I ever expect somebody else to do it on my behalf?

This ruling doesn't just cover Java and really Java has nothing to do with this. This is about the entire field of computing but probably even worse. Do you want to build a house? So are you going to make doors rectangular shaped passages with opening/closing covers? You are violating something there.

This actually proves my point on copyrights (and patents for that matter). Government should not be given any authority to provide any sort of protection for any of it.