A relevant Orwell reference... on the internet? Dear god, what is slashdot coming to!

isn't e-ink for e-readers and OLED for replacing LCD displays?

If you have bigger pick up trucks, then you need less of them to carry a set amount of goods and so there is less traffic on a road.

Don't they require power too? It's all very well keeping your server up in the event of a power failure but unless you keep your routers (and the routers all the way to the backbone) up, what's the point?

The intention was to have no standing military and limited policing, these might be noble goals but in 2009 on earth they are simply not feasible, so holding text written assuming these would be true as sacred is ignoring reality.

I wouldn't take Eisenhower's words any more sacredly than the Founding Fathers, we're not living in 1959 any more than we are living in 1788.

How about the fact that they have tanks, planes, uavs, missiles and complex tactical training that a civilian population doesn't. Sure you might get lucky and take out a key figure from a bookshop, but if you think your rifle is going to help in a civil war in 2009 you have another thing coming.

It is also filled with genocides by unarmed people, arming both sides doesn't make the problem go away.

Why? Why would you be any better of with all of those handled at a state/local level? In some cases you have more possibility for fraud, others lose out on benefits of the economy of scale and in the worst case scenarios you have races to the bottom that make legislation ineffective, so why is the Federal government doing something, inherently worse than the state/local government doing it?

I didn't say we should not concern ourselves with their warning, just that we shouldn't hold them sacred! Some dead white guy advice might still hold, some may not, following it as sacred is no better than following the teachings of jesus.

Jobs - 200 years ago there were slaves.
Jobs - 200 years ago there was no protection for workers against their bosses, no minimum wage, no unions, nothing.
Jobs - 200 years ago there was the potential of work for everybody, soon (if not now) there will be so much technology replacing cannon fodder that there will be permanent unemployment
Education - 200 years ago, education for all was not even an option
Healthcare - 200 years ago, people got sick they died. On the whole there was no expensive medicine that could help them if they could afford it.
Food/Shelter - 200 years ago, the technology didn't exist to make it feasible to provide shelter/food for everybody it does now (or will soon)

We do not live in the same world we did 200 years ago, it's not even the same as 50 years ago, ideologies from such times are not applicable today!

I last failed chemistry 1 year ago and we're still fucked! The only solution is to grow plastics (like we grow biofuels), but that comes with significant downsides because farming is harder than drilling and well we need food too. IMO long term the solution is factory farming (they are starting to research this in Japan), but that requires a lot of energy.

Thorium Fluoride

insightful my ass! Nuclear power for civilian purposes produces enough energy for France, in fact it produces enough excess that they can run CERN with no negative effect on the environment. The only thing keeping it down are the lobbiests for coal/oil, big woop obsolete jobs are obsolete, while that sucks for the people who work in the coal industry it's just the way it is.

Pull the other one, he'll being made an example of because he embarrassed the US military! That's assuming the US can even be trusted to give him a trial and not send him of to a military court.

That is like saying, having your balls ripped of using a blunt knife is somewhat painful! The US allowed known IRA terrorists and fundraisers to stick around, but at the first opportunity we hand over some computer hacker, fuck that!

Tell the victim's families, to ask the FBI what the fuck was going on and why they charged a single, blatant scapegoat and tampered with evidence, dickwad

Perhaps, i think you underestimate the desire to avoid having a standing army AS a method of preventing a tyrannical government. Even ignoring that, the effectiveness of individuals resisting a well organised, well trained and well equipped army, which has tanks, planes and battleships is not the same as it was in the 18th century when they did not have such technology, so blindly following laws written for the 18th century is still pointless.

If it's such good advice then why does it matter who said it?

The desire to have no standing army (and even opposition to a full time police force) contributed largely to support of the 2nd amendment, this is no longer relevant. I'm not saying i'm for/against gun control just that the 2nd amendment was written in completely different circumstances. Concepts such as, social security, workers rights, a standing army, a full time police force, universal education, an agency to control use of highways, etc, were all unneeded back in the 18th century but clearly need government involvement in the 21st.

To cling to the founding fathers as gods is to ignore 200 years of rational debate, history is the past and applies no more to the present as examples from other countries.