They did offer compensation. The previous owners refused to accept it because of duress from Uncle Sam.

If it's that easy, then why the hell are you wasting time telling us the secret on slashdot? Get out there and start your own pickup school that actually works and you can make BILLIONS. :)

No. People in that state of mind aren't thinking straight. Depressed, suicidal people aren't as ingenious as you think they are. If Adam Lanza hadn't had easy access to lots of guns, it is not likely that he would instead create some cunning plan to import assault rifles from Russia or something. Instead he would have executed his killing spree with other accessible weapons such as a knife, like a Chinese lunatic recently did. He managed to stab 23 children and one elderly woman, none of which died. Clearly a considerably better outcome than Adam Lanza's mass murder.

Regular sex?

No, the problem is with idiots like you who think that people enjoy living on food stamps. YOU consider yourself to be of good morals so YOU would never abuse the social security system. But everyone else are scumbags leeching on the system and your tax money. Nobody likes begging for aid, it is shit and dehumanising and not something you do unless you have to. People dont get food stamps because it is fun but because they would starve.

That's not how it works. You can not sink a site by pointing lots of outgoing sites to it. You can only sink your own site that way by linking to lots of dubious sites. If you could sink sites the way you propose, I can assure you that there is a whole industry of unscrupulous marketers that would have exploited that technique already. Rankings in high-competition keywords such as poker, gambling and travel are so valuable that it would make sense to spend a small fortune downgrading a competitor a few steps. To remove them completely from the index? Invaluable.

Automation is only making human labour irrelevant as long as it is cheaper. Low labour costs means there is no incentive to invest in automation. Which is why Japan and Sweden has the highest number of industrial robots per capita in the world. Evil unions that drive labour costs through the roof and forces poor companies to automate.

That's right and all that is possible thanks to technology. But what you don't have is more leisure time than the kings had. Likely you have less of it than even the lowly peasants of the day.

Much shorter than yours. Keep in mind that without electricity, it's pointless to work after dark and you can't till fields in freezing weather. Your grandfather would also work with his friends and family, not strangers at the office you happen to share a skillset with. He would also stop working when there was no more chores to do, while when you are done with your work, your boss will just pile on more keeping you busy until your hours is up. He also exercised some control over when to do what work, in what order and how to do it. Stuff that your boss nowadays have control over. Technology has given us a lot, but to wage slavery there is no end in sight.

That's the idea with more technology of course. But in reality, we seem to be experiencing the reverse. Collectively we spend more hours at work today than we did 50 years ago and many more than we did 200 years ago. It may be more cushier jobs sitting in front of a computer for 8-9 hours per day than digging ditches or cutting trees or whatever manual labour they did. Less risk of getting hurt in an accident, higher risk of getting fat and having a heart attack I guess.

Check the video. They did indeed sit on her. It wasn't before she was laying face down to the ground that they tasered her. It looks more like the tasering was used to get her to shutup than to pin her down.

Wrong! He definitely works on Emacs. Just read the mailing list sometime.

Israel is the aggressor here. They have continuously tried to provoke a response from Hamas. They are not stupid, they know that if they murder their leader, then they will retaliate with rocket attacks. That was what broke the cease fire being negotiated with Egypt. Israel does not want to negotiate, doesn't even recognize Hamas or that Palestine exists. If they want peace, then why are they so vehemently against Palestine getting observer status in the UN? Why are they hi-jacking aid ships going to Gaza on international water? Why are they expanding their settlements on the West Bank? You see, it most definitely is a numbers game as your opinions most definitely are shaped by how many dollars each side has to lobby politicians and buy propaganda for. Numbers do mean shit. If you can't by yourself deduce that if Israel manages 1200 kills in a month, Palestine 28 in 10 years, then that means that Israel hardly is an innocent victim. Good luck and continue deluding yourself.

There is something called "proportionality" too. Rocket attacks have taken exactly 28 lives since 2001. Compared to only the Christmas offensive in 2008 that killed over 1200 Palestinians. The planned attack is not because of rocket attacks, it is because there is an election coming up in Israel in about a month. Nothing improves the chances of an incumbent to be reelected as much as a fresh war to show he is tough on the "terrorists."

Developing a Linux distro isn't cheap. Even if they are mostly just assembling free software components, it still costs money to create a reasonably polished user experience. Canonical seem like a decent enough company and have sponsored lots of conferences for example. Back in the day you could request install cd:s from them which they sent you free of charge so that you could give to friends and family. So why not be nice back and let them have some small Amazon affiliate income? If that's what it takes to keep Ubuntu running, it's fine by me.

All operators log text messages so it would be trivial to see if his story checks out or not.