you need serious lightning, for serious money.

The first part may be true, the second part does not follow (if serious == a lot). There is no law that states that more money equals better quality. It is human perception that makes you assume that. If the most talented director sells his services for 10$/hour, does that make his work worse? Or if some crook charges 500$/hour, does that make him more talented?
The amount of effort/knowledge you have to put into lighting with digital is a lot less, because you can get direct feedback from what is being recorded. And with more sensitive recording equipment, you need less light in an absolute sense, so you need less expensive lights too.
But in the end it is not the equipment that makes the film interesting, that is only a diversion for us geeks with less then stellar soft skills. The acting and the script contribute a lot more then the equipment.

of course, it is not violence when it is a proper and deserved punishment. The problem is your 'god' that was disobeyed and 'punished' them, was in fact not their god. How would you feel if your god condemned you to death? Others, you can maybe accept, but yourself, that is not your god and not 'true'.What you are doing is trying to cleanse yourself from some atrocities in your holy book. You could ask yourself, if you have to make such illogical excursions to justify the place you give your holy book, is it really your holy book?
Not that it matters much, no discussion on the internet will sway you from your beliefs, you just love to reiterate and reconfirm them, otherwise you would not be discussing it.

But just because some technology is becoming available does not mean that it already must be being used for smuggling. Drugs cartels are limited in numbers and employ a limited number of people. Somebody up high in the hierarchy must make a decision first, and to make a positive decision for it, he has to know about it and be able to find the right people for it that can make the concept a reality. Even then, it has to compete with other methods, like attaching external cargo to the underside of containerships. Even smuggling is a business.

That 2 cents must be in elbonian zlotys or such, as you advocate a straight windows solution on Slashdot. You could at least try to put some OpenGL over ip on Ubuntu servers and clients in the mix. D-

dear AC. I am amazed by your insights, you truly must be one of those hyper productive programmers that is some order of magnitude more productive than his peers. How else can you do yourself what you advise other here? So you come here visiting with your own built webbrowser. Firefox just did not have some features you needed and putting them in an extension would be heresy. Better to built your own. Same goes for your house, your car, or your language. I pity the fools that do not understand you because they choose to ignore your superior language. What do you mean they had different requirements and built their own? Akkadjoembah!

Size does not matter in this case, as the costs are proportional to the area you want to connect. Larger countries also have more money to spend. The central infrastructure be it water, gas, electricity or broadband is not the bottleneck, the last mile to the (private) customers is. Most previous networks (for water, gas or electricity) have been built by public entities in Europe, so it is a proven concept that works. The alternative (capitalist private companies build the network) also have a known outcome, as that is what the situation with broadband in the states is now.

So true. Because contractors are expensive, money people think that less is better. To get something done on time, little or no time will be spent on testing/review. Ugly hacks will always continue to 'work' which is what the client pays for.

Quality of advice is not measured by the worst piece, but but the quality of the advice you take to heart. So who cares that someone recommended java for kernel programming? If only the best is good enough, you get nowhere fast. accepting different opinions and using your own head gives you better ideas, because you can discard the bad ones. The OP came here for good ideas...

You just overlooked one small issue: voter turnout is already a problem in most democracies, as it is somewhat boring to vote for things your are not that interested in. If there were more elections, you would have to vote each week. Nobody is going to keep doing that, as most people do not see it as their job, and it is a process with very little positive feedback. So only the zealots and paid shills will remain, thus making your country run by big money and zealots with a nutty agenda. Not unlike the US is run now, actually.

Osama Bin-Laden is a Saudi. From a high class Saudi family apparently. Iraq/Saddam Hoessein never supported al-qaida.

Indeed it is. They had to make up some exotic conditions to claim their first. They probably think it is better because it is from New Zealand. Nationalism is an illnes everyone can succumb to, it seems.

(In the US those reasons generally involve money, while in Germany they involve blood; this should come as a surprise to nobody.)

*Citation needed. (In other words, nice way to let you bigotry shine through boy)

On a smaller scale, something embarrassing like erectile dysfunction is a simple fact too. But if you happened to have it, you would still not appreciate it very much if someone posted that fact to wikipedia.

Their sentence was handed out by a German judge and did not include being haunted for the rest of their lives. They are convicted murderers, but they also are human beings. If you think that last fact means nothing for you, then you are saying you have no respect for human beings.
It is easy to respect the rights of someone you agree with. You show your civility in how you respect the rights of those you disagree with.

Dubious claims that sound scientific, but not made in a scientific journal, not peer reviewed and making 1st grade biology errors in the title, and you still think there is some truth in that article?
'Species' is a fundamental term in biology. For instance evolution depends on the definition of a species. If they would have truly created a new species of plant (utilising a different nice and unable to interbreed) then that would be news. Making a cultivar and planting that on a factory grounds is just not that.