By that reasoning ithe subject of the game doesn't have to be war. If the kids play Fruit Ninja the dad should take them to a poverty-striken third world country that is having a food shortage, so they no longer want to trivialize the act of destroying food. As you said, starvation is something that Westerners are normally shielded from. "You're teaching people that life cannot be compared to the boom and splat of video games".

Yet it would be obviously ludicrous to do that.

I think that every American should have to take a trip to the war zone to see what our tax dollars go to supporting.

First of all, that reasoning has nothing to do with whether anyone played war in a video game, but the dad took the kids to the war zone *specifically* because of the video game. I'm pretty sure that if the kid was playing Phoenix Wright, the father wouldn't take the kid to a real court room to show him how video games don't accurately describe the justice system.

Second, our tax dollars go to lots of things. Our tax dollars support courts, firefighters, police, farm subsidies, NPR, and a whole lot of other things, but nobody says "every American should take a trip to National Public Radio to see what our tax dollars go to support". It's a double standard which is supposedly because our tax dollars support it but never gets said of anything else which our tax dollars support.

The company that refuses to hire you because you stole a candy bar 10 years ago isn't going to give you a rejection letter saying so. They'll make up some BS excuse. There's no way to prove that the company did this short of doing a statistical analysis on hundreds of companyes and determining that people who stole a candy bar 10 years ago have some reduced chance of getting jobs, and even then you're not going to be able to prove any single company did it when that company has too few applicants who stole candy bars to calculate meaningful statistics. So no, you can't just boycott the company.

Besides, it may not be possible to boycott a company for something like this since it would get lost in the noise--which is worse, a company rejecting one job applicant unfairly, or a company overcharging millions of people some small amount? The first is worse if you're the one individual, the second is worse if you average out the one person affected really bad and the many other unaffected people. Boycotts would be based on the average badness of the company, so the first category is not subject to useful boycotts.

Should we still put stock in the Big Bang?

Betteridge's Law applies to actual headlines, not to sentences which people write up trying to sound like headlines that no article is really using.

According to http://www.scotusblog.com/stat... the Supreme Court recently affirmed 27% of lower court decisions and reversed 73%. This means that if you guess that the Supreme Court reverses the lower court every time, you'll be 73% accurate. 70% accuracy is ridiculously low if you can get 73% accuracy *without* taking into consideration the records of each justice or any other kind of details.

The problem is specific to open source because of the motivations of open source developers. People write documentation when they are paid to do so, but people don't generally write documentation for fun, nor do they write documentation when they need to modify a program in order to get something done.

Whoosh.

"Why do you hate freedom" is a phrase which, at least on Slashdot, is used only ironically. It means "this is the kind of thing which is pushed on the basis that everyone who hates it hates freedom". It doesn't mean that the person writing those words himself makes that claim.

In its latest bid to kill more people, more efficiently, and at less cost, the army is...

You *do* know what the purpose of an army is, right?

What other choices would you prefer? The army shouldn't kill people? The army should kill people inefficiently?

By that reasoning if the restaurant supply reclamation company instead found equipment contaminated with bacteria, and sold the equipment, and people got sick and died from it, they likewise wouldn't have any responsibility. Equipment that poses a threat to people because it spreads private data is not really all that different from equipment that poses a threat because it spreads disease.

(Which is not to say that it's legally the same, of course.)

Microsoft takes advantage of network effects, Windows is more useful if lots of other people have Windows, because if lots of other people have Windows, most of the available software will be for Windows, so you'll need to buy Windows in order to be able to use it. Books don't work that way.

That one was hiring people with low scores, not people with high scores. Hiring people with low scores won't be seen as discriminating against blacks (who on the average get lower scores), so would be permitted.

even though Superman should be public domain, DC Comics has denied the request.

You do realize that a logo is a trademark issue, not copyright, and trademarks don't expire as long as they are in use?

Hardware can use more electricity depending on how much you use it, but there are physicall limits as to how much more. Your TV isn't going to triple your electricity usage unless your usage pattern is such that you can expect that even before plugging in the TV. You certainly aren't going to find one TV tripling your electricity usage and a second TV not doing so solely because the first TV has a manufacturing defect.

George Bush was elected long enough ago that the Internet was much less influential back then.

He also is a high level politician connected to a large money-making machine. There are two categories of people who aren't affected much by out of context information on the Internet (or in the media): people with nothing to lose, and people who are so rich and powerful that even the Internet can't damage them that much.

Using a naked picture of someone to illustrate the claim that they were naked is probably fair use, especially if other fair use factors also apply (which they probably do), such as non-commercial use and no effect on the market for the naked picture.