Didn't the latest crazed gunman have almost no Internet presence at all? If this is just an excuse to more closely monitor people online, it's a pretty transparent one.

I see nothing wrong with developers targeting a stable and popular distribution. Linux is Linux, and once it runs on Ubuntu, any who are interested can make it run on other distos.

After all, a common reason developers used to give for not developing for Linux was the vast number of competing distros they'd have to deal with (tweaking their program such that it was able to run on each one, and each one had a different set of default libraries, configurations, media locations, etc...). That argument has all but disappeared now that Ubuntu has emerged as the "common face of Linux",

Probably because the OP does not have anywhere near enough time to spare setting up and maintaining a custom domain name and SMTP account for every relative.

Yep, I think it's a real shame, even though I voted for Obama. Hopefully one day the Republican party will come back to its senses and pick an actual Republican as its presidential candidate, instead of the batch of crazed neocons we've been getting from them for over two decades.

"Four potential policy solutions are proposed: statutory damage reform, expansion of fair use, punishing false copyright claims, and limiting copyright terms."

YES. That one alone would go a long ways towards leveling the playing field between individuals and huge corporations.

...but then come the medical bills.

Huh. I typically expect new versions of programs to add functionality, not arbitrarily remove it. Or is it considered common practice now before updating to go over a checklist of every feature of every app you use, to make sure it hasn't disappeared?

Do you check to make sure each update to the iPhone still lets you make calls?

... in his socks.

The ONLY reason I got into watching (American) football was because my MythTV setup allowed me to skip the commercials. Without commercials and delays, football is exciting. With commercials, plus the tedious announcers and the multitude of delays between every down, the game just drags on way too long.

ESPN should be frightened, because I doubt this is limited to a single sport: It's simply not worth watching a sport on TV anymore without the ability to skip the commercials and the boring bits.

Well, yes, that too. The bigger reason a human would never feel a thing when crossing the event horizon is that the neurons in his brain that were closer to the black hole would be unable to send signals to the neurons further away.

I've been using VirtualBox over several versions of Ubuntu (I'm currently using 12.04), and I've never noticed any problems.

I really dislike ladder-style multiplayer: you're always playing to win and advance to more difficult opponents, and after a point that just stops being fun. Whereas, when playing with my friends, we can do fun stuff like "everybody build up for 10 minutes, then our armies face off in the middle of the map".

Similarly, when I played Halo 2 on XBox Live against strangers, I became too experienced. After a while, I was so much better than my friends that playing the game with them stopped being fun for anyone.

I'd add "and talk to Valve about how Team Fortress 2 is doing if you're still not sure", but I don't think the folks at Valve would be able to hear you. Not over the sound of all that money pouring in.

Not even the Universe will live forever. Consider what living forever actually means in that context: you have a relatively brief period of activity here on Earth and (eventually) in space, followed by an infinite amount of time floating through an infinitely large, absolute-zero temperature, absolutely dark and empty void.
And if an infinity trapped in the ultimate sensory deprivation chamber weren't enough, odds are good that at some earlier point you will have fallen into a black hole, and experienced what being crushed by a gravitational singularity for 15 trillion years feels like.

Not to mention, neutrinos created won't have any specific frequency like with radio and other wireless communications. That means no easy way to filter out everyone else's noise to get your signal. If neutrino communication actually works, it'll be interesting to see what happens when the level of communications hits the "fifty wireless routers in an apartment building" point.