Right... because left-wingers (*coughSovietscough*) are never authoritarian.

It would be a joke if they used Sharepoint instead...

This is some twisted logic.. Of course he wouldn't do so much if he weren't so rich! He would be incapable of doing so. While Microsoft's business practices are deserving of scrutiny, I fear most of the vitriol aimed at Microsoft and Gates is motivated by envy, or "tall poppy syndrome," or some variant. In the final analysis, the man is a successful business person who's earned his money, and can do with it as he pleases.

"Steal" nothing. Most employment contracts involve signing over the rights to intellectual property created on the company time to your employer. This makes sense: the company has to cover its ass if it's going to make these bits of IP into sellable products. It wouldn't do if they start producing a widget using an employee's invention, only to have that employee leave the company, and promptly try to charge the company loads of money for it when this former employee created the technology using the company's resources.

Actually, it's the other way around.

It's impossible for news to be unbiased. Even the process of choosing which stories are news entails a bias on the part of editorial, particularly if they opt to not give much coverage to a particular political issue or protest in favor of another.

Yeah. It's like they fail to take into account that "everybody" can't watch all of the channels aimed at "everybody" (though this is mitigated somewhat by DVR and cable/internet on-demand content), so they are in effect diluting their viewership when they might actually maintain higher viewship by catering to sci-fi fans. That's not mathematically guaranteed: it depends on what their current audience numbers are, and how many new viewers they can peel off with their format change, but mainstream audience does not automatically equal more viewership.

You can't get a nuclear power plant built in California, and that's "deregulated?" California may have deregulated some areas to increase competition in the utilities sector, but the glut of environmental regulations is making it nigh impossible to supply the state's electrical needs. It's the law of supply and demand.

I'm not saying there shouldn't be taxes at all. But it's a grave matter to take people's property from them without their explicit consent. If the government is going to take money in taxes, it had better be for it's constitutionally mandated functions: military defense, law enforcement, etc. Health care, welfare, and the like are not called for in the U.S. Constitution. The American taxpayer shouldn't be paying for services that could be provided more efficiently by the private sector.

I'd have to disagree, at least on a macro scale. The basis of socialism is the redistrubtion of wealth/resources "from each according to his ability, to each according to their need." Who acts as the referee? What happens to people who don't get with the program? What incentive is there to work if the fruits of your labor may be forcibly taken from you to give to someone who's not as talented or hard-working? Private property ownership is a fundamental human right. Socialism rejects the idea by virtue of arbitrarily deciding who "needs" someone else's property. Just because a country implements an "imperfect" version of socialism only makes it less oppressive. I'll take the free market any day.

Whereas government-instituted socialism is totally unethical, becuase it requires taking from those who produce the fruits of their labors, and giving to those according to their ability, whether they produce or not. A government that employs socialism, by definition must deny or trample all over an individual's right to their own property (i.e. money and assets). There's the implicit threat of force (e.g. fines and/or imprisonment) if one fails to hand over a large percentage of what they've [i]earned[/i] to the government to redistribute to those who did not. To me, that's the very definition of theft.

Playing devil's advocate for the moment, Capcom did choose what imagery was shown in that 3 minutes. It's an advertisement for a game: it's whole job is to impell the viewer to react, preferably (for Capcom) to purchase the game. They are partly responsible if the reaction to the trailer is different.

Your analogy is flawed. There's no guarantee that life on other planets is that similar to ours. While the laws of physics and chemistry are the same, the conditions aren't exactly identical. Their life could be as different from us as a waffle iron is from the Walkman in your example. My example is also lacking, but my overall point is that life does have to fit our neat little template. It's argument from lack of imagination.

Monsanto are a company out to make money : They do not like being regulated, they do not like being restricted, like most companies it does not matter if their products actually work or are actually beneficial as long as they sell....

And their products will cease to sell if there's no benefit to using them over some cheaper and/or more reliable alternative. Why are some people on /. so adverse to letting the free market separate the wheat from the chaff?