I suspect, based upon their previous legal challenges that the management of iiNet actually think that what is occurring here is wrong and they're putting their money into what they believe which isn't something that you often see in the corporate world.

It also makes them a more attractive choice for an ISP to potential customers. Copyright industry is pretty much an extortion racket at this point, extracting "settlements" from random people.

No it doesn't. When I was a child (ostensibly an "intelligent agency") I was known to bang rocks together but it certainly didn't make them tools - not in any meaningful sense of the word. For something to be a tool it has to have a functional purpose.

Quite correct. However I've had the same doubts being discussed here regarding whether certain rocks really were used as tools or not. I'm not an expert so I don't pretend to know the answer but I've seen "tools" in museums which made me wonder if the people who collected them really knew what they were doing. Call it skepticism even though I don't really know what I'm talking about on the subject. I tend to be skeptical about things by default until I understand them.

NYC is not necessarily reflective of the rest of the country. Very little there resembles how things work east of the Hudson River. Where I live wealthier folks tend to commute farther on average. I am GM for a manufacturing company and I live the farthest away of anyone at the company because frankly the plant is not in the nicest part of town. The lower paid employees tend to live the closest to the factory.

Well, with electronic toll-paying that could work, but it would still shift the burden from low MPG to high MPG cars.

The great thing about a gas tax is that it's a simple way to kill two birds with one stone: encouraging higher mileage and paying for infrastructure. The problem is that not everyone agrees that both birds are important. Two-birders think that high mileage vehicles should be discouraged because of externalized costs -- pollution mainly, but also space required in parking lots, greater risk to other road users etc. One-birders don't care about externalities but understand that the roads and bridges need to be repaired. Zero-birders are just idiots.

I'm a two-birder myself, so raising the gas tax is a no-brainer. I'd also issue everyone a flat rebate per driver, because in fact I'm a three-birder: I'm concerned about the effect of a regressive tax on the working poor who have no options but to drive to their jobs.

But I'm also a realist. There are a lot of one-birders out there and the roads need repair. It's also politically easier in one-birder territory to sell something as a fee rather than as a tax, even though from my perspective that's an irrelevant difference if you're raising the same revenue either way.

However, "Thou shall not kill" is definitely wrong. The Hebrew word is "murder", not "kill". There isn't any ambiguity on that one.

I wonder if religious memes are selected for because a religion forces its followers to excersize their mind thinking up ways to get around the religion's commandments?

I think it's a trend that will grow as more and more people realize that both Republicans and Democrats have utter contempt for civil rights and personal choice.

Democrats believe in personal choice, and that the state should decide what options are made available.
Republicans believe in personal choice, and that businessmen and corporations should decide what options are made available.
Libertarians believe in personal choice, and that good options will be available for free.

Frankly, these are all rather unrealistic. Does anyone have better ideas?

Well, they're already opting to have damaged natural joints like hips and knees replaced. That's a case of upgrading from natural to artificial to gain function. As the performance of artificial limbs increase, it might become an increasingly commonplace treatment for older people, just like knee or hip replacement.

If we project that trend forward for twenty or thirty years I wouldn't be surprised at all to see artificial legs that outperform natural legs for the purposes of walking or even running. But I don't think people with normal abilities will be trading in their limbs just to be able walk a little longer, run a little faster, or carry more weight. That won't happen until the replacement is subjectively indistinguishable from the real thing; until you can feel the grass under your toes.

I'm comfortable predicting locomotion parity in the next fifty years, but I wouldn't care to speculate on when we'll see sensory parity.

How much more would you like them to pay?

The rich need to pay whatever it takes to stop the national debt from growing, both budgetary and in the form of infrastructure maintenance and investment deficit, because nobody else can. If they won't, then the nation will deteriorate and ultimately collapse, clearing the way for another nation to try its luck with history in turn. Perhaps it can inspire some actual loyalty outside of speeches.

Also, the 1% paying 39% of all income taxes when you're getting 34% of all income isn't exactly oppressive, at least not towards them.

I have no problem with going after people who steal trade secrets, anything more than I have a problem with going after people who steal nuclear secrets. The only thing is that the FBI has a long history of racist paranoia about Chinese scientists, from Quan Xuesen in the early 50s to Wen Ho Lee in the 90s.

Rhwew may well of a legitimate case against these guys and if they do I hope they nail the bastards. But I'm not jumping to any conclusions based on FBI say-so.

You're the one worried about passwords that can be broken in 25 years; that's a non-issue. The issue is security that works well enough for long enough and is workable for the users. Impressive sounding, inflated requirements means something else has to give: price, performance, or usability.

I've heard about Seiki but they don't currently make a >60" TV, I cannot find one anywhere to actually look at in person, and it's a little hard to tell if it is any good. I'm not brand loyal but a company I've barely heard of making oddly inexpensive TVs does tend to raise red flags.

From across a room? The monitor I'm using to type this on is 24" and you couldn't pay me to use it as a TV in my living room. I'm sitting about 12-15 feet away most of the time - sometimes further. My current TV is about 36" and it's barely usable at times. I have good eyesight but 23" would be impossible to enjoy.

Well, once you've cracked the VPN traffic the password is almost a secondary concern, isn't it?

This is the wrong way to think about security, e.g. for a hypothetical world where users adhere to anything you demand of them no matter how intrusive or onerous that is. In reality if you decide that usability and convenience aren't factors in your planning then that's actually an oversight which will come back to bite you on the ass someday. The only thing you can say for that approach of wishing usability away is that when disaster comes you'll be able to point the finger of blame at the users -- even though their non-adherence is a predictable result of your poor understanding of system requirements.

Originally Susan Richards' powers were turning invisible and creating a force shield around herself. This wasn't for doing cool things, it was for staying safely out of the way while the boys did the fighting. By the mid 70s when I was buying comic books her purely defensive powers were upgraded to being able to produce a shower of spherical force bubbles, which on the offensive force scale was about one step up the awesomeness scale from telekinetically throwing couch pillows.

I don't think the reason for this change was to throw a sop to feminists, or because fans were demanding strong female characters. In either case she'd have got a more impressive upgrade. I think it was simply upgraded storytelling. A character that can basically hide and shield herself is not as versatile as a character than can do useful things. So this kind of incremental upgrading naturally gave her more of a swiss-army knife skillset.

As for modern superheroines having multiple, I have not much to add, other than an observation. This multiple super-power thing kind of mirrors what we expect women to be like today. We expect them to be able to multitask, to juggle several very different roles on our teams. Versatility has become a cultural expectation for women, so it might not be coincidental that female superheroes get more of toolkit rather than one very big hammer.