if I won the powerball tomorrow, I doubt I'd even go back in to collect the few personal things I keep at my desk.

Maybe you need to look into getting a different job.

I was thinking about this type of response, commonly given when someone says they don't love their job, when I was reading another article where 'college grads with degree in X can't find work'. There the common advice was "maybe you should have gotten a degree in something more practical."

BP, to its credit, has accepted responsibility even though its almost certainly not to blame.

Just like the companies whose foreign factories run sweatshops and use child labor aren't to blame? If it's BP's well, they have a responsibility to ensure the other companies they hire operate in a responsible fashion, even it it entails having a full time BP employee stay on the rig to inspect and monitor what's going on.

Since when is gun registration violating innocent until proven guilty?
Is it the same way as driver and vehicle licensing violates it?
That is... not at all?

Driving is a privilege that can be revoked, registration to allow the authorities to verify that you're still worthy of the privilege makes sense. Gun ownership is a right. The only benefit of registration is so that police can identify suspects if a particular type of weapon is used in a crime. There's your presumption of guilt.

why turn off the microphone just because you aren't making a call? Just continuously record everything in the vicinity

They'd never do that, because then they'd have to upgrade their networks... ;)

Ok. This new "law" would simply create a new black market for thieves. Increasing their profit streams. Now instead of a walmart tracphone. you buy a "clean" prepaid phone from vito that is registered to a 14 year old cheerleader in the hamptons. Honestly, are out lawmakers simply a bunch of retarded old idiots? Did they not think of this?

Whether it's a smart thing to do or not has nothing to do with it. They just want a 10 second soundbyte to look 'tough on crime' during the next election, or for opponents to say incumbents are 'soft on crime' if the incumbent is intelligent enough to vote against it.

We look at beastiality taboos as protecting animals... some of whom we will wind up killing and eating. This doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

It makes perfect sense to me - I want to be sure that someone guy's hot dog hasn't been in my hot dog.

And then the tabloid industry will file lawsuits to try and stop the loss of celebrities for their weekly rags, and the MPAA will be complaining about using lawsuits to support a dying business model.

Slysoft update's the ripping program at least once every two weeks, so you know many bugs are being worked out with ripping DVDs and BD disks

I'd be careful with the updates. With the history of so many 'upgrades' reducing functionality, I wouldn't be surprised if one day the update is going to disable the ability to copy DVDs.

but the fact that no one cares about your identity OR your porn collection

If that's true, why is there malware out there to steal it?