Yes, I read what I type. And no, it is not an insult. I love dogs. Do not be so angry and self-entitled to speak for all dog owners, because you are certainly not speaking for me. The commonality is that cockroaches and dogs are both alive. And that in both cases, there is nothing for the person to win in doing these things.

It is not just that, you need a clear purpose too. If you just do this kind of things as a hobby interest, you are doing harm for free. Nothing is gained. Respectfully, I think that you saying "go live in a cave and eat sand" is an extreme reaction to the parent's post. He has a good point.

Exactly right. Thank you. I cannot believe some some of the people on this thread. Doing mindless "experiments" with anything living is fundamentally wrong - there is nothing a common person will gain from purchasing that product and using it for electrocuting insects. This is not different than a 5 year old stabbing a dog to see what happens.

If you want to know how neurons work, hit the library, or better, take a class at your local college. Torturing living things just because you can is cruel, mindless, and will not likely give you any serious insight.

Of course he did. That was the whole point of this IPO: they wanted to cash out before it burst. The money to be made out of it was already made by the original owners, at expense of the investors. There was not a single reason to believe FB was priced fairly and not overvalued, and no clear indication on how FB could make enough money in the future to justify a 100B valuation. After the market experiences in the last 15 years, I cannot believe how many bought into the hype of this.

I think investing in Facebook does not make any sense. I am the only one? For what I can tell they do not have a clear way of making money other than getting $ from people interested on speculating about their future (all I have hear so far about how they will make money is completely unsupported by any reality check), and it will be increasingly difficult for them to grow their user base or to get money from their current user base. Since their business model is not clear, as it is not clear why do they need the money now, the only reason I can see they did an IPO is to cash out. My guess is that the money to be made by FB has already been made by the original owners, and it will be loss for investors from here on. I would not touch their stock with a stick.

How about applying the same sort of treatment to companies that resort to similar manipulations to obtain tax benefits? That should have been evident years ago... seems to me that congress has a biased agenda here.

The issue is that patent trolls have money (after all, they are in the business of making money, regardless of who it comes from), but small companies not so much (they are in the business of developing technology). If we are serious about innovation, patents do not really have a place in certain areas (software, etc). Then a large company cannot bully you into bankruptcy unless they have a better product than yours. But the system as it is is unbalanced, rigged towards the heavy players. I think that even if you are for patents, there is a case to make for a better distribution of IP - as it is right now, large companies hold most of the IP (as the patent and patent/copyright protection mechanisms are expensive), and that makes for a very flat technological landscape compared to what would be possible if medium and small companies owned a larger share of it.

Well, whatever the reasons of Oracle, Google, and Sun, if this ends up in language and core libraries having copyrightable APIs, they will have ruined it for everybody, and will cause the US to become a bad place to do software development, other than for the large companies who can leverage their own IP portfolios against each other. It could be a terrible thing for the little shops.

Because Linux still is way behind on the desktop, and even when many things have been fixed over the years, the other OS's available have also matured, and right now a Linux desktop is harder and more time consuming to manage than OSX by any metrics. For the average user, unless you need something specific that only Linux supports (i.e. specific hardware), or unless you are a geek type and enjoy upgrading kernels and recompiling device drivers by hand every couple of months, the Linux desktop experience is still frustrating. Disclaimer: I use Linux on my desktop every day.

That is part of the issue. We would be much better off without 'guards'. People already know what to do in case of an emergency in an airplane these days. Stop wasting money in the TSA.

Right. And what is next? Do we stop using Internet because the NSA reads your emails? How about closing the TSA and firing the members of congress that support measures that threaten individual liberties instead?

TSA's "proper procedures" are not only not proper, but abusive, ineffective, and used to keep our own US citizens in a state of fear and uncertainty. I fail to see a difference between the TSA "procedures" and what a police state will do to their own people. But what is even more worrisome, is how easy most people go along with all this nonsense.

My impression is that Java will eventually relegated purely to in-house software, for large companies that are heavily invested in Oracle. Most of the goodness of Java comes from the Java API's, and these are on a legal battle. Most OS's are already not including the platform by default. At the end, for independent software companies, and specially for small shops, it feels too risky to invest one's time in learning or keeping up with a language that is controlled by a suing-happy company. As much as I despise Microsoft's ways of polluting languages (remember J++?), I think they are orders of magnitude more trustworthy than Oracle.

I think your idea is correct. We tend, however, to be biased to only understand people that is as mediocre as we are, and end up making poor choices when picking our political leaders. This is not just my opinion, it has been studied by scientists at Cornell. Google "democracy chooses mediocre leaders" to get the articles. So the leaders are there, but the average citizen is too stupid to make a good choice. And the average politician profits from this.