It's not that surprising really. The US government holds command over a lot of wealth and power, and so over centuries it's not surprising it was slowly overtaken by a clique of people who want to hold onto that power.

The US government has now evolved into something a bit separate from the people within it or their desires. It thinks for itself, makes it's own decisions, and really is only one group of elite men wearing one of two badges. It is too big to control, too entrenched to change.

I'd wager many European countries had to learn lessons about government getting that out of control the hard way over thousands of years.

Why are we talking about artificial brains and 3D printers? The greatest breakthroughs will not simply be perfecting things we know about today, but things we are not even contemplating yet.

We're talking objects built on already advanced science knowledge, but there's still an entire realm of science with very little understanding. There's an entire fundamental force we know very, very little about. Think of the types of machines, and how magical they would look to us today, we could have if we could manipulate gravity?

Just as things from today would appear magic to those from 1863, so would things 150 years from now.

If I had to wager my guess, I would say the big breakthrough in science in the next 150 years would be mastering and manipulating the force of gravity. Once we figure that out, there will be many gadgets and machines which would appear magical skipping past 150 years of advancement in the technology.

It has struck me as odd, that now we know how the NSA operates, no one has started using this against them. Why not have programs which send random, encrypted, suspicious content to other random points overseas?

I'm sure a few people working together could get enough servers in enough various countries and have them generate enough of what they would have found suspicious, to effectively drown out any useful data from their system?

Nonsense - these are digital files we're talking here. They are not physical goods with manufacture and shipping costs. How they accounted for it, allocate cost, and spend that revenue is a different story, but any business selling millions of copies of files for $10 apiece is raking it in.

It appears they have successfully convinced a lot of people they're not making enough money.

Cash flow is where depreciation helps, and that itself is typically most important for a company at the end of the day.

You spend a lot of capital, but your expenses are classified differently. A bitcoin farmer would spend a lot of money on his computer gear in the first year, but his balance sheet wouldn't change. If he buys $10k in equipment, he now has $10k less cash but a $10k "asset".

The expenses to run the gear (power, etc) are different - they are true operating expenses, paid with cash and show up on an income statement as an expense.

Depreciation shows up the same as those expenses, but the beauty is that it's a non-cash expense. The point is to match costs with revenue, so that the reported profit is correct. Otherwise he would spend $10k this year, then next year could report great profit because he basically used "free" gear - from an accounting perspective.

And the real beauty of a non-cash expense, to put it bluntly, is you get to report less profit that you have to pay tax on, and thus get to keep more of your cash.

Because very few companies are in the business of running an entire country. This is why you pay taxes - outsourcing the work to the government. I guarantee it's cheaper..

No, you can hate Microsoft all you want, but this isn't grounded in reality.

Microsoft's meat and potatoes is the enterprise market. Very few large companies pay per desktop for Windows, they negotiate master agreements with Microsoft to provide a certain set of software, and these are very lucrative contracts. Some companies I've worked for would pay a small fortune in SQL Server licensing. Sorry, what's Apple's enterprise RDMS product again?

Never mind their consultants, and there's an army of them, bill at rates that make the "small computing market" almost irrelevant.

I have a better reason: updates.

I have a PS3, but I don't game anywhere like I used to in my younger days. In fact, the only game I still regularly play is Rock Band (I play instruments), and the urge strikes me every few months. Every time I fire that thing up, I figure I'll check the online store to see if any good new songs are out, and then I remember..

Oh yeah! Not only do I need to download the latest game patch, I also need the system update to be able to access the store! Screw it - I used to do it but these two combined take over 20 minutes and by then I'm disinterested. Sony's lost a lot of money on what would otherwise be impulse purchases at that point of a few dollars each time.

Now I just leave it disconnected, because every game I have, every time I pop it in, ask to download and install an update - it's ridiculous. Some don't even give you an option to say no and just play the dame game.

You are truly hurting yourself by not attending school if you are brilliant. The only human trait that would make such a claim is arrogance, not intelligence. There is always a way to create better thought processes through university. Learning is a life-long process, and only those who stop get stuck.

I found work to be more intense (and valuable) "learning", but I wouldn't by any means write off the benefit of university. Or insult those that go there.

Are you sure? The last glacial maximum was between 19-25000 years ago (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Glacial_Maximum) during which time vast portions of North America and Europe were covered in ice sheets.

19,000 years is a pretty short period of time in the grand scheme of things. To think the location I'm currently living was underneath a kilometer of ice less than 20,000 years ago, and no there are no glaciers anywhere close, the logical conclusion is the earth has been warming up for a lot longer than just the time since the industrial age. In fact, from what I understand about earth's history, we've been a majorly tropical planet for most of the time and ice cover is somewhat rare.

There's no doubt we have some effect on the changing climate (in regards to temperature via the greenhouse effect), but to say that is the mechanism causing the earth to warm seems like a huge jump from basic logic.

I'm curious, has any of these petitions resulted in anything besides a form letter response from a head of some department, as obviously the task of writing a response but doing nothing rolled down 4 levels of bureaucracy?

What was the point of this site anyway? What good is a petition of there's no action or even a vote as a result of it?

Easy. Musicians only get paid when they are working (performing), not for recordings of them working.

Now, the line gets a little fuzzier when dealing with commercial purposes, which is what copyright was designed for and absolutely where it should be applied. For example, if using a musician's works to draw people to your business/event, they should absolutely be compensated for it. It's also much easier to enforce (since commercial endeavours need to be in the public eye to attract customers) than private copying.

For non-commercial purposes though, private copying (i.e. enjoying art) should be encouraged. I also think this is the one spot torrent sites should be asked to pay for (as much as I love 'em). They deserve income for the value they provide in aggregating results and searching, but really are making money (advertising) off other people's works, which is a commercial endeavour. The people downloading however are doing nothing wrong.

So, if it's so easy to get a site taken down with SOPA, and this law unfortunately gets passed, would it not be very easy to launch a counter-offensive against the media companies themselves?

Some sort of coordinated launch of complaints which could render any profit generating portions of the media websites inaccessible?

I live in Edmonton, and actually kinda like the new law. I take transit downtown but also drive pretty heavily.

I can't recall the number of times I've almost been hit trying to cross the street downtown by someone on a cell phone. Something I've noticed through observation is that a driver's peripheral vision is really affected when talking on a phone - perhaps some study found the same conclusion. This makes using them in high population areas, ie. areas with crosswalks, very dangerous.

When driving, you should devote your full attention to it, if not for respect of the lives of those around you. I think we've shown it's irresponsible enough to warrant a fine, as is the case here. I wouldn't really call anything with fines under three figures and no jail time "draconian".